Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Mini-Me: WIll De-Classified Watergate Archives Document CIA Orders to Murder US Citizens Including Jack Anderson, and CIA Break-Ins Within the USA?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Judge Orders DOJ to Justify Secrecy of Watergate-era Wiretaps

The BLT Blog of Legal Times, November 02, 2012

A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”

Government lawyers oppose the public disclosure of any papers about illegally obtained wiretaps tied to the Watergate scandal. The Justice Department this summer, in response to a demand for those records, argued there's no First Amendment or public right of access to illegally obtained wiretaps. Historical or scholarly interest, the government said, doesn't justify discretionary disclosure.

DOJ lawyers said in their brief to Lamberth that “we are unaware of any court that has unsealed previously undisclosed illegal wiretap content for reasons for historical interest.”

Lamberth's ruling today was issued in a case in which a historian of the presidency of Richard Nixon requested access to court documents that were sealed in the Liddy case in Washington's federal trial court. Liddy was convicted in 1973 on charges that included burglary and conspiracy rooted in the Watergate Hotel break-in.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: WIll De-Classified Watergate Archives Document CIA Orders to Murder US Citizens Including Jack Anderson, and CIA Break-Ins Within the USA?”

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Yoda: Education versus Learning

04 Education
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Learn, you must.

15 Free Learning Sites You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

It can be hard to keep up with the ever-growing list of free educational sites out there, much less distinguish which ones will best meet your needs and help you learn skills you really need without shelling out big bucks.

What Will Higher Education Look Like in 25 Years?

Education experts discuss options like massively open online classes and affordable access to college.

Collective Intelligence: The Mating of Ideas | Collective Intelligence | Big Think

In the video, Ridley uses the example of a pencilto demonstrate how no single individual alone knows how to manufacture one, and that is why our progress is dependent upon collective intelligence.  Watch Ridley and other experts on collective intelligence in the video here.

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Worth a Look: Water Abundance & Resilient Strategies from John Robb

12 Water, Worth A Look
John Robb
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NIGHTWATCH: Syria & Libya Update – US Poor Judgment Faulty Intelligence on Multiple Levels

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military
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Syria-US: US can no longer support the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “visible leader” of opposition forces. US Secretary of State Clinton and other U.S. officials reportedly are fed up with infighting among the SNC leaders and have become convinced that the group does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria. Ms. Clinton said there is a need for an official opposition umbrella which rejects “efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.

Comment: More than 18 months into a rebellion of sorts, this is an astonishing admission of poor judgment and faulty political intelligence on multiple levels. It seems to have taken a year and a half for the US government to appreciate that the Syrian expatriates have no influence over the fighting in Syria. No fighting groups respond to their direction. No fighting groups depend on their dispensation of American funds.

Spokesmen for various Syrian fighting groups have been denouncing the expatriate politicians and the SNC as venal and out of touch for 18 months, openly and sometimes bitterly. The SNC has experienced repeated desertions by its most capable leaders, who also denounced its feckless venality.

The fighting will not stop in Syria because the SNC gets cut off. Even were the Free Syrian Army, which operates in Syria as one of many fighting groups, to lose its funding and supplies, fighting would continue because the rebellion appears to have been hijacked by the jihadists. They do not rely on the West or the US for support, though they will purloin it if given the opportunity.

Libya: Update. On 1 November, about 100 Libyan fighters have circled and occupied the Libyan national assembly to protest the new cabinet lineup.

Comment: Judging from the large number of documents about security in Benghazi that have been leaked or found in Benghazi, the cabinet in Tripoli does not govern Libya beyond parts of Tripoli. The fragmentation of the state actually worsened with the killing of Qadhafi.

If the news and leaked reports may be trusted, Libya has become a political fiction, like Somalia. Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, is an al Qaida base, training location and arms depot for jihadists in Syria and Mali. The rest of Libya is a mélange of competing tribal territories. Libya seems to have devolved as a nation-state – gone backwards.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

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Spanish Dancer: State-Sponsored Drug Crime Type B

07 Health, 09 Justice, 11 Society
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Under the Mask of the War on Drugs

LARS SCHALL – Asia Times (Hong Kong)

The corruption prohibition produces is so much more extensive than most people realize. An unholy alliance between governments and cartels and, like a cancer, is eating us alive from the inside. Here is a taste of reality that explains how so many feed at the narco-trough and why no one who is making this money, be they sheriff, legislator, or mule has any real interest in ending prohibition.

Lars Schall is a German financial journalist.

Oliver Villar is a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, a country where he has lived for most of his life. He was born in Mendoza, Argentina. In 2008 he completed his PhD on the political economy of contemporary Colombia in the context of the cocaine drug trade at the UWS Latin American Research Group (LARG). Whilst completing his PhD, Villar's research interests in political economy, Latin America and the global drug trade followed teaching positions in politics at UWS and Macquarie University.

For the past decade his research has been devoted to the book (co-written with Drew Cottle) Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (Monthly Review Press, 2011). He has published broadly on the Inter-American cocaine drug trade, the US War on Drugs and Terror in Colombia, and US-Colombian relations. This abiding interest extends across economic thought, economic development and the development of social and political relationships between the First World and Third World (in particular between the United States and Latin America) and the impact of neoliberal economic globalization.

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“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” Milton Friedman
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Lars Schall: What has been your main motivation to spend 10 years of your life to the subject of the drug trade?

Continue reading “Spanish Dancer: State-Sponsored Drug Crime Type B”

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