CAIRO — As Egyptians turned their anger on symbols of the state late last month, torching police stations along with the headquarters of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party, they reserved a special hatred for a garish building with black tinted windows in an upscale neighborhood, setting fire to it three times.
Phi Beta Iota: Americans are slow to anger, but we see the day coming when Connnecticut mansions begin to burn….the preconditions for revolution in the USA are virtually all present.
(Reuters) – Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday.
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Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned.
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“I'm surprised he (Bush) would even consider visiting a country that has ratified the torture convention and which takes its responsibilities seriously,” said Brody.
“I think George Bush's world is a very small place at the moment,” he said. “He may enjoy some kind of impunity in the United States, but other countries will not treat him so indulgently.”
Phi Beta Iota: A very long article (8 sections), this is worth a full reading because it documents both the atrocities that occur in prisons to people who are weak or not part of a gang, and the complete lack of integrity among the prison officials, the state officials, and the US Department of Justice officials, all over the course of decades. In combination with the prison-industrial industry and the out-sourcing of slavery for profit, one can conclude that crimes against humanity in US prison are both routine, and sanctioned by officials, many of whom are themselves criminal.
Laurel Adams February 6th 2011
Center for Public Integrity
EXTRACT: The GAO singled out the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as agencies with risky contractor oversight. The GAO also said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services failed to review contractor rates and identified $90 million in questionable costs.
Phi Beta Iota: Government–and society–are comprehensive design problems–advanced intelligence (decision-support). The US Government is archaic in its design, and lacks integrity (holistic accurate feed-back loops) at all levels across all mission areas. It is a useful challenge for 2012 and beyond.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.
Still, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to some in the Army and the FBI, and that makes this incident all the more tragic. Our Senate committee's 14-month investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”
The deaths at Fort Hood could and should have been prevented. The Defense Department's failure to acknowledge the threat of violent Islamist extremism within its ranks, coupled with organizational and communication flaws in the FBI's counterterrorism operations, contributed to the tragedy.
Computer hackers have repeatedly breached the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York but did not penetrate the part of the system that handles trades, according to several law enforcement officials.
One of central causes of the financial meltdown was the lack of transparency in the complex derivatives, like bundled mortgages and credit default swaps. Advocates of global warming would have us to believe that they can construct a transparent carbon emissions trading scheme that will provide market incentives to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
At the center of this trading scheme is the idea of a carbon credit, which is a generic term for any tradable certificate or permit representing the right to emit one ton of carbon or carbon dioxide equivalent. Think of a carbon credit as property in a free market economy — Ayn Rand, meet Global Warming.
