The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Sometimes there are good things to report. Part 7 is the one to reflect on.
FBI Mission Afghanistan
Part 1: Our Role in a War Zone | Video
Part 2: Major Crimes Task Force | Video
Part 3: Contract Corruption
Part 4: Biometrics, a Measure of Progress
Part 5: Pamir Air Crash | Video
Part 6: Analysts in the War Zone
Part 7: An Early Presence, IED Task Force
See Also:
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, just published, is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books). Watch a Timothy MacBain TomCast video of him discussing the American way of war by clicking here.
Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Campaign for Liberty, 05/31/2011
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden's killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it?
WAR POWERS ACT
By GEORGE F. WILL
Miami Herald, 05.30.11
The U.S. intervention in Libya’s civil war, intervention that began with a surplus of confusion about capabilities and a shortage of candor about objectives, is now taking a toll on the rule of law. In a bipartisan cascade of hypocrisies, a liberal president, with the collaborative silence of most congressional conservatives, is traducing the War Powers Resolution.
Veterans Court Seeks Alternate Justice System in Philadelphia
truthout, Sunday 29 May 2011
by: John Grant, This Can't Be Happening
John Fleming is a 58-year-old African American born and raised in Philadelphia who served in the Army from 1969 to 1972 maintaining nuclear weapons in silos in Germany.
It was 10:45 AM on Friday outside Courtroom 1006 in Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center. Fleming had been “caught with an illegal substance.” Instead of taking his chances in the regular court system in Philadelphia, he had volunteered to participate in Philadelphia’s Veterans Court.
From Cynthia McKinney
Anatomy of a Murder: How NATO Killed Qaddafi Family Members
28 May 2011
How many times must a parent bury a child?
Well, in the case of Muammar Qaddafi it's not only twice: once for his daughter, murdered by the United States bombing on his home in 1986, and again on 30 April 2011 when his youngest son, Saif al Arab, but yet again for three young children, grandbabies of Muammar Qaddafi killed along with Saif at the family home.
Now, I watched Cindy Sheehan as she bared her soul before us in her grief; I cried when Cindy cried. Now, how must Qaddafi and his wife feel? And the people of Libya, parents of all the nation's children gone too soon. I don't even want to imagine.
All my mother could say in astonishment was, “They killed the babies, they killed his grandbabies.”
The news reports, however, didn't last more than one half of a news cycle because on 1 May, at a hastily assembled press conference, President Obama announced the murder of Osama bin Laden.
Well, I haven't forgotten my empathy for Cindy Sheehan; I haven't forgotten my concern for the children of Iraq that Madeleine Albright said were OK to kill by U.S. sanctions if U.S. geopolitical goals were achieved. I care about the children of Palestine who throw stones at Israeli soldiers and get laser-guided bullets to their brains in return. I care about the people of North Africa and West Asia who are ready to risk their lives for freedom. In fact, I care about all of the children–from Appalachia to the Cancer Alley, from New York City to San Diego, and everywhere in-between.
On 22 May 2011, I had the opportunity to visit the residence of the Qaddafi family, bombed to smithereens by NATO. For a leader, the house seemed small in comparison, say, to the former Clinton family home in Chappaqua or the Obama family home. It was a small whitewashed suburban type house in a typical residential area in metropolitan Tripoli. It was surrounded by dozens of other family homes.
I spoke with a neighbor who described how three separate smart bombs hit the home and exploded, another one not exploding. According to the BBC, the NATO military operations chief stated that a “command and control center” had been hit. That is a lie. As anyone who visits the home can see, this home had nothing to do with NATO's war. The strike against this home had everything to do with NATO adopting a policy of targeted assassination and extra-judicial killing–clearly illegal.
Continue reading “NATO — and Pilot/Command — War Crimes in Libya”
Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door
Amy Fine Collins, Photo by Larry Fink
Vanity Fair, 24 May 2011
EXTRACT:
Natalie, the gems girl, says, “Prostitution and pimping—it’s never going to stop. Tricks—they should start from there. If no one’s buying girls, then the pimps can’t make money.” That, in fact, is exactly the theory behind the Sex Purchase Law in Sweden. As of 1999, johns are punished by up to six months’ imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent. In contrast, Europol studies show, nations such as Holland and Australia, where prostitution has been legalized, have become lucrative, low-risk magnets for international sex-slave drivers and organized crime.
Superb detailed eight-screen story….
Review: Nobodies–Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says
WIRED, May 25, 2011
You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
Phi Beta Iota: Further to our comment on Part I, we strongly believe the time has come to discontinue funding for the US Intelligence Community as a whole, beginning with the National Security Agency (NSA), which is in our view the most mis-managed and corrupt (as well as grotesquely expensive for lack of any reasonable return) part of the US Government. The fact that they are abusive of the Constitution and devoid of any common sense at all is the other half of their crime against humanity. An honest President actually interested in the public interest would create an Open Source Agency, and then on the basis of sound decision-support shareable with the public and Congress, cut the secret world as well as the defense and homeland security worlds by 20% each year for each of five years, restoring 10% each year to new initiatives that pass all common sense tests for need, relevance, and affordability. All it takes is INTEGRITY.
