Wednesday, December 31, 2008

10 Things That Wont Survive The Recession

The government says we’ve been in a recession for the past year. Experts say it’ll be at least another year before it’s over. And everybody says it’s the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.Nice sound bite. What does that mean?Who knows? We can be sure that this downturn will differ totally from the Depression, [...]

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[Source: vote tags: Tracking the Vote

FOR PALESTINE

http://uruknet.info/?p=m50082&hd=&size=1&l=e



For Palestine
umkahlil



A Palestinian boy watche...


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[Source: WAR ON YOU FORUMS

The Other Side of Deep Throat: He Bugged My Friends!

NEW YORK Journalists and many others (rightly) lionizing the late W. Mark Felt, the former FBI official, for his contribution as “Deep Throat” in helping to bring down Richard Nixon, should not overlook the fact that Felt was one of the architects of the bureau’s notorious COINTELPRO domestic spying-and-burglary campaign.

He was convicted in 1980 of authorizing nine illegal entries in New Jersey in 1972 and 1973 — the very period during which he was famously meeting Bob Woodward in a parking garage. Only a pardon, courtesy of Ronald Reagan, kept him out of jail for a long term.

So the man knew a thing or two about illegal break-ins. COINTELPRO was George W. Bush’s domestic spying programs on steroids. And that’s where I come in.

I’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that I was once on, ahem, fairly intimate terms with Felt.

Back in the bad old/good old days of the early 1970s, a fellow named Stew Albert used to write, off and on, for a rather legendary magazine that I helped edit in New York City, before I went straight, called Crawdaddy. (We had plenty of other contributors, including Joseph Heller, P.J. O’Rourke, John Lennon , Tom Waits, Richard Price, William Burroughs, and Tony Kornheiser, to name a few.) Stew was a proudly left-wing guy, but from the fun-loving ex-Yippie side of the antiwar spectrum (he helped found the Yippies), as opposed to the violent Weatherman sector. By 1973, he had a bad heart, and was pretty much retired from the high-stress forms of political activity.

Stew had both the good and bad fortune to live in an isolated area of the Catskills, sharing a humble cabin on a hilltop near Hurley, N.Y., with his wife Judy Gumbo (as she was known, and also a well-known politico). Occasionally I spent a weekend with them there, or stopped by on the way to somewhere else.

In those days, at least one famous left-wing fugitive seemed to be on the loose at all times, ranging from Patty Hearst to Abbie Hoffman. Given their location, and backgrounds, Stew and Judy were, at least on paper — or in the fertile minds of Mark Felt’s FBI agents — plausible candidates to, perhaps, shelter at least one of the runaways. So they’d joke about their phone being tapped, or spotting spooks hiding behind trees in the woods, or expecting to find a listening device installed somewhere in their house.

Well, as we used to say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t watching you. Turns out all of those fears were justified, and then some, thanks to Mr. Deep Throat and the program he helped organize.

Our fears first spiked when someone broke into the Crawdaddy office on lower Fifth Avenue one night. The intruder busted the gate protecting our rear entrance, and opened a few drawers, but nothing of true value or embarrassment was missing. You might say, in the parlance of the time, that we were only “Felt up.” Unfortunately, we had very little to hide, beyond Bruce Springsteen’s home phone number.

Then, I got a call from Stew on a Sunday morning, Dec. 11, 1975. He had come out to his old car, parked in front of a friend’s house in Greenwich Village and noticed the band of grime on his rear bumper was brushed away in one spot. Investigating, he reached under the bumper — and found a crude homing device, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a cute little antenna sticking out. He had no idea how long it had been there or who, exactly, had been following them.

I rushed to the scene. Naturally, Crawdaddy editor, Peter Knobler, called a photographer, and we published a story about the episode the following month, which drew national attention. Pardon my French, but I recall that we called the story, “Bug Up My Ass!”
No related posts.

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[Source: War On You

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Cheney's Legacy Shoot one Guy, Torture the Next

Author's note: The statements Cheney made this week during an interview with the Washington Times about his role in approving the waterboarding of three Guantanamo detainees and the so-called "enhanced interrogation" of 33 prisoners was, disturbingly, not covered at all by the mainstream media.

Also published at my web magazine, The Public Record.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.

“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said about the waterboarding, a practice of simulated drowning done by strapping a person to a board, covering the face with a cloth and then pouring water over it, a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition. The victim feels as if he is drowning.

Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al Nashiri. “That's it, those three guys,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times.

Other detainees at secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to harsh treatment, including being stripped naked, forced into painful stress positions, placed in extremes of heat or cold and prevented from sleeping – actions that international human rights organizations, and previously the U.S. government, have denounced as torture and illegal abuse.

“I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney said of what he called the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainees. “I thought the [administration’s] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were sound. I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to do. And I think it produced the desired result.”

Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.

“Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately. They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.”

Other experts, including some military and intelligence interrogators, have disputed Cheney’s claims of success in extracting reliable information through waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Much of the confessed information turned out to be dubious or incorrect.

The First Case

Zubaydah was the first “war on terror” detainee to be subjected to the Bush administration’s waterboarding, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

However, according to author Ron Suskind who interviewed CIA and other insiders, Abu Zubaydah was not the "high-value detainee" that the Bush administration had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine.

Nevertheless, Suskind said President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

Abu Zubaydah's captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind wrote.

But Bush did not want to "lose face" because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, according to Suskind.

WARONYOU

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

America's carmakers: A splash in the tank

George Bush bails out America's carmakers temporarily—now they are Barack Obama's problem

IN THE run up to George Bush’s announcement on Friday December 19th that he would bail out Detroit’s beleaguered carmakers rumours abounded that perhaps something more drastic was in the offing. Maybe the president would insist on an orderly transition into chapter-11 bankruptcy protection for Chrysler and General Motors—Ford, though also in dire trouble, is in slightly better shape. In the event he elected to do the minimum required to keep the cash-guzzlers on the road. Allowing the American car industry to collapse at the end of his presidency would have amounted to a bail-out for Barack Obama, the president-elect.

A bail-out bill that had swept through the House of Representatives failed to pass in the Senate on December 11th. So Mr Bush instead has had to raid the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP), set up to bail-out Wall Street's banks and other financial institutions. GM and Chrysler will get $13.4 billion in emergency loans with another $4 billion to come in February. Without the cash the pair might have collapsed by the end of the year. The terms of the loan could allow the government to become big shareholders. ...



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[Source: The Economist: News analysis - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]

Friday, December 19, 2008

Country Without Mercy

The Unfortunate, the Innocent and the Wrongly Convicted By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The Christmas season is a time to remember the unfortunate, among whom are those who have been wrongly convicted. In the United States, the country with the largest prison population in the world, the number of wrongly convicted is very large.Hardly any felony [...]

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[Source: War On You

The Wholesale Sedation of Americas Youth

In 1950, approximately 7,500 children in the United States were diagnosed with mental disorders. That number is at least eight million today, and most receive some form of medication.Is this progress or child abuse?ANDREW M. WEISSAndrew Weiss holds a PhD in school-clinical psychology from Hofstra University. He served on the faculty of Iona College and [...]

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[Source: War On You