The US military claimed responsibility for killing scores of insurgents over the weekend as it unleashed its long-awaited offensive against Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO umbrella organization for the US-led occupation, reported the largest body counts in two eastern regions of the country.
Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was aboard the Mavi Marmara when he was killed by Israeli commandos. The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style at point blank range by Israeli commandos.
Meat contaminated by a potentially lethal infection is being sold to consumers -- creating a public health threat that has largely flown under the the radar due to powerful industry interests and lax accountability at the federal agency in charge of ensuring food safety, according to recent studies and a prominent investigative journalist. "It makes salmonella look like a picnic," is how David Kirby, an investigative journalist who has written about MRSA, a life-threatening pathogen, described it in an interview with Consumer Ally. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is an antibiotic-resistant staph infection that kills about 20,000 Americans -- more than the number of people who die from AIDS -- each year.
Is Barack Obama waking up to the agenda of those who produced his political career? Was his “Inner Eisenhower” on display last week in his televised speech to the U.N. General Assembly? Did listeners detect a distraught commander-in-chief seeking to bypass Congress and appeal directly to the international community for help in containing Israel’s expansionist goals? In 1948, the Joint Chiefs cautioned Harry Truman about the “fanatical concepts” of a Jewish-Zionist elite that sought recognition as a legitimate state. U.S. military leaders warned Truman that this elite wanted “military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.”
Haaretz reported this week that a boat carrying Jewish activists from Israel, Germany, the U.S. and Britain set sail on Sunday for Gaza, hoping to breach Israel's blockade there and deliver aid. 9 Jews will participate in this brave mission: amongst them is Rami Elhanan, an Israeli peace activist whose daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997. Elhanan rightly maintained that it was his moral duty to act in support of the Palestinians in Gaza because reconciliation was the surest path to peace. "Those 1.5 million people in Gaza are victims exactly as I am," he said.
Lawrence Davidson argues that by signing student exchange agreements with Israeli universities that practise apartheid, eight US universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Michigan, are lending themselves to the destruction of the very educational virtues they claim to cherish.
Recent raids by federal agents on the homes and offices of peace activists are being viewed by civil libertarians and civil society groups as further proof that the U.S. is morphing into a "surveillance state" where the right to privacy and other constitutional protections are being quietly whittled away.
The United States is undergoing a great redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. President Obama and the Congress have done nothing to alter this trend. Despite the corporate media’s obsession with the alleged differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, this transfer of wealth has increased in both size and speed regardless of the party in power. The number of poor people has steadily increased and their loss of income has made their situation increasingly desperate.
Thanks to an ever growing influx of Ph.D.s from the Ivies and an insatiable demand for an algorithmic trading edge by secretive hedge funds and proprietary trading desks at the largest firms, Wall Street has become part physics lab, part casino, part black hole.
Experts have warned that the move represents an attempt to completely re-structure and centralize the internet under government control:
09/28/10
It was 2017. Clans were governing America. The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable. As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police. The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.
09/26/10
Former US Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) and Richard Gage, AIA, Founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth Discuss Scientific Findings. National Press Club, Washington DC. Senator Gravel notes, "Critically important evidence has come forward after the original government building reports were completed." This press conference will be webcast at AE911Truth.org and hosted concurrently in cities throughout the world.* Following the conference, there will be a mock debate during which public statements made by government investigators and other defenders of the official account will be presented and responded to in multimedia format. "They refuse to debate us in person," says Gage, "so we will let their public statements represent them."
09/23/10
Especially in politics it is of the utmost importance to try to look behind the facade: who makes up the team of the presidential candidate? The future president of the United States of America is for a large part dependent on and being fed by his team of advisors and future cabinet members. Webster Tarpley wrote a book on the men and women behind presidential hopeful Barack Obama. He argues that there is more to Obama than his charismatic appearance and that some of his advisors pose a danger to the US and the world in case Obama might be elected to become the next US president. Whether Tarpleys view is correct for now is a matter of opinion and remains to be seen, but for the public debate it is relevant to take note of his facts and arguments. Therefor DeepJournal interviewed Webster Tarpley on the topic of his recently published book Obama, The Postmodern Coup,The Making of a Manchurian Candidate.
09/13/10
George Orwell wrote that, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” You have probably heard confusing phrases like the trade deficit, the falling dollar, the national debt, unfunded liabilities and so on, which all sound vague and actuarial and vaguely - well, “not me.” The reality behind these accounting phrases is perfectly monstrous. When someone -- a foreigner, say -- loans money to the American government, what are they getting in return? Well, they are getting promises of interest payments, and eventual repayment of the principal. Where does your government get this money? The government is not a business; it does not generate profits in the free market, so where does it get the money to repay its creditors? Do you see where this is going? Are you beginning to understand that it is not dollars that are being sold, or bonds, or agency debt, or treasuries, or anything like that. Where is your government going to get the money to pay off its creditors? It is not pieces of paper or contracts or computer bits that are being sold. There is only one thing that the government has to sell. Governments have only one asset that they can use as collateral. Your leaders are selling you.
http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/t/22896.aspx
09/02/10
A recent article in the Jerusalem Post reports “The US warned Lebanon that if it did not prevent any recurrence of the border-fire incident that occurred earlier this month, the IDF would destroy the Lebanese Armed Forces within four hours…” The US envoy’s assistant was referring to an Israeli plan for war. There’s just one little problem: Not all wars go according to plan. The last Israel war on Lebanon was a costly disaster for Israel. No doubt it’s a matter of state secrecy in Israel, but their tank losses in Lebanon were BIG. A low figure of 10 is a fairly certain minimum judging from various news reports during the invasion. The high figure might be 50 or maybe even 100. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was meant to create a barren wasteland for several miles north of the Israeli border. The Israelis were systematically destroying private homes along the border. Some Lebanese received phone call warnings from the Israeli army, telling them that their home was about to be destroyed in only a few hours. This appears to be all the humanitarian concern Israel felt obliged to show. (One wonders if people with unlisted numbers were simply killed without warning?) Mounting Israeli tank losses may have accomplished what world condemnation could not.
“The Hope of the World”
08/31/10
Officer ignored warnings that teenager was terrified · Defence says 'confirming the kill' standard practice. An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.The manner of Iman's killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died. After the verdict, Iman's father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable. "They did not charge him with Iman's murder, only with small offences, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times," he said. "This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children."
08/30/10
PAUL: “I had to run up to Langley. So I got up there, went in the meeting. They was two civilians and two colonels – an Air Force colonel and an Army colonel. They sat down there and talked, didn’t say no name or nothing, but they talked about what all was going on in the country and that they had one person that they had to get rid of. Everybody knowed who it was from the way they was talking, all this stuff in Rocksville (Little Rock?), down south and everything. They was talking about Martin Luther King. That was in ’67 in the summer and they wanted me to help them. And I told them that I had a good job, raising a family and didn’t want nothing else to do with it. But they sure approached me and tried to get me to help them.”
QUESTION: “In your mind, do you feel like they were asking you to help with an assassination hit on Martin Luther King?”
PAUL: “Right. That’s exactly what they wanted.”
QUESTION: “Do you have any idea why they wanted to get rid of him?”
PAUL: “ ’Cause there was so much trouble going on with the Blacks.”
QUESTION: “And they thought that would fix it?”
PAUL: “Well, it did.”
08/25/10
The woman went to Sims Elementary School off Springdale Road in East Austin to pick up her grandchildren. She pulled into the school's driveway, where Furrs was directing traffic, Furrs began to show the woman where to wait, and as she did, he began yelling at her. The woman thought he was asking for identification, so she reached for her license. Furrs then dragged her out of her truck. Lorena Sanchez, who was walking with her daughter saw Furrs yank her from her truck so forcibly that Sanchez was able to see the woman's feet. She saw Furrs beat the woman with his baton and drag her on the hot pavement, while the woman was yelling in Spanish that she did not know what she did wrong. Furrs called the woman an ethnic epithet and told her she needed to speak English because she was in America. Another witness said Furrs was yelling slurs at the woman while throwing her around like a rag doll. Sanchez said a few people were trying to take video and photos of the incident, but the constable and other responding officers ordered them not to. Jon Saucedo, a teacher, said he saw the woman on her knees and bleeding from her lip. His statement also said one of her breasts was exposed and that she was crying. Witnesses said the woman begged Furrs to cover her up, and he responded by saying, "I don't care. I like it." Gwendolyn Doyle, a manager at the constables office, said that Furrs was still employed there.
09/29/10
from
William Hughes on
Vimeo.
On Tuesday afternoon, September 28, 2010, a demonstration was staged in front of the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The protest action was in response to recent “FBI raids and Grand Jury subpoenas,” which targeted activists associated with the Antiwar Movement, according to the press release of the organizers. For background, see:
counterpunch.org/jacobs09272010.html and
youtube.com/watch?v=Opd3WuTZzWg&feature=player_embedded (Running Time: 55 Minutes and 47 Seconds)
US slaughter intensifies in Afghanistan 
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