By Paul Stott | Few terrorist attacks have had such contrary explanations as the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
Sunday evening at 9pm the BBC2’s Conspiracy Files enters the fray, examining some of the claims and counter claims.
One interesting question is whether the programme will feature either of Britain’s two best known [...]
Human Rights Watch | This Wednesday, unless the UK foreign secretary takes rapid action, Britain’s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for [...]
By Michael Cambray | It seems that most people are finally awakening to the fact that it is not a good idea to blindly accept the manipulating lies with which we are daily brainwashed, particularly by the communications media. It is totally acceptable and sensible nowadays to be cynical and critical of any source of [...]
By David Gutierrez | For the first time, a branch of the U.S. government has admitted that the common industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA) may pose a health risk.
BPA is a crucial ingredient in the hard, clear polycarbonate plastic found in water and baby bottles. It is also used to make liners for food and infant [...]
By PATRICK COCKBURN | The United States is moving towards ending its military control of Iraq by agreeing to withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns by June next year and from the rest of Iraq by 2011, according Iraqi and American negotiators.
The withdrawal of US troops to bases outside the cities, towns and [...]
By Andrew Brown | HUNDREDS of people across Merseyside have been under surveillance by local authorities using powers under so-called “terror laws”, according to details released under the Freedom of Information Act.
An investigation has revealed that organisations ranging from local councils, including Sefton, to Merseytravel have used the powers created by the Government under the Regulation [...]
By Richard Tyler | A London court has ruled that the British government must disclose information that could support the claim that torture was used to extract confessions from Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who has been held in Guantánamo Bay since September 2004.
The ruling by the Judicial Review—a special court that considers the [...]
By Allan Woods | OTTAWA–Canadian soldiers could get training from a U.S. company closely linked to Blackwater USA, a private security firm implicated in the killings of hundreds of Iraqi civilians, if the Department of National Defence has its way.
The military gave notice this week of its intention to award an $850,000 contract for advanced [...]
From the Blog of Kev:
I will refuse to comply with any compulsary ID card scheme. but only if 1,000 other UK people will do the same. Deadline to pledge 31st December 2008, pledge creator Ken Hall
In light of the government’s proven incapability to guarantee the security of personal data and the risk to individual liberty, [...]
By Robert Scheer | Just great! Nuclear-armed Pakistan is falling apart, Iran’s nuclear program is unchecked and congressional legislation on cooperation with the Russians on controlling nuclear proliferation is now dead in the water. Horrid news except for Sen. John McCain, who thrills to a repeat of the danger lines of the Cold War, and now [...]
By Glenn Greenwald | Writing in a New York Times blog yesterday, Clinton pollster Mark Penn hails the selection of Joe Biden as “a smart and successful choice” and says this:
From Al Gore on, the role of the vice president seems to have fundamentally changed. It used to be where the winner parked the loser or [...]
The Pentagon: Some-Things-Never-Change Department
Tomgram | What a difference four and a half years makes. When I first penned “The Wild Weapons of DARPA,” in March 2004, I was a new TomDispatch writer; the war in Iraq was not yet a year old; the war in Afghanistan had been bubbling for less than two and a half [...]
By George Monbiot | In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export [...]
By Noah Shachtman | Iraq’s government and Sunni militias appear to be headed for a showdown. One of the things that just might keep a full-blown insurgency from erupting again, a leading expert in the region says, is a set of databases of fingerprints and irises, built by the U.S. military — and fed with [...]
Fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for.
By Laurence W. Britt | The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the [...]
For the Wall Street Journal’s editors, fear of a bigger government outweighs the fear of a warmer planet.
“Iraq has turned into something like a no man’s land,” one refugee says. “It no longer belongs to its people.”
By Stephen Lendman - RINF | For the West, everything changed but stayed the same, hard-wired and in place. Things just lay dormant in the shadows during the Yeltsin years, certain to reemerge once a more resolute Russian leader took over. If not Vladimir Putin, someone else little different.
Russia is back, proud and reassertive, and [...]
London Progressive Journal | Buzzwords abound in the rhetoric of politicians and never more so than when the talk is of public sector reform. Of the current phrases spewing forth ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ are two of the favourites but whose choice and whose empowerment? And while MP’s try to frame these words as synonyms of ‘public [...]
Open Democracy | In a key intervention in the 42 days debate last month, the former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller stated: “arguments can be made to justify any time of detention, just as in other countries, although mercifully not here, they can be made to justify any method of interrogation.”
That remark elided key questions about [...]
By Nick Juliano | New documents from within the Bush administration and US intelligence community during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq reveal that the White House began assembling a case for war before it had compiled the intel that ostensibly formed the basis of that case.
A new report on the documents from George [...]
NY Times | There is apparently no limit to the Bush administration’s desire to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of national security. According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing [...]
By Rep. Ron Paul | We’ve heard how the value of the dollar affects gas prices – and indeed the price of everything. I was pleased that my request for a hearing on such was granted by the Financial Services committee and we were able to hear some very informative testimony. Certainly domestic policies, regarding [...]
ABC | The United States has launched a strongly-worded attack on China’s human rights record just hours before the Closing Ceremony of the Olympics.
In a written statement from its ambassador to China, the United States has attacked China’s human rights performance during the Olympic Games.
The statement also called for the immediate release of eight American [...]
The eldest son and heir apparent of two times former Bangladeshi premier Khaleda Zia was partially paralysed when tortured in custody, doctors said Sunday.
Tareque Rahman was strung up blindfolded in a dark room, then dropped down and struck against a wall, fracturing two bones in his back, a doctor who treated him quoted from his [...]
The Government was under pressure today to abandon its ID card plans after one of the main firms involved in the project lost thousands of criminals’ personal details.
The names, addresses and expected release dates of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales were on a computer memory stick lost by Home Office external contractor PA [...]
The Guardian | MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian.
The sophisticated analysis, based on hundreds of case studies by the security service, says there is no single pathway to violent extremism.
It [...]
(IPS) | If John McCain is elected the next U.S. president, wounded veterans could be in for a world of hurt.
On the campaign trail, the Republican’s presumptive nominee has talked of a new mission for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and argued that veterans with non-combat medical problems should be given vouchers to receive [...]
By George Monbiot |
If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz’s article, published yesterday on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site(1). It is a fine example of the identity politics that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which [...]
The Pentagon’s intelligence arm is adding more polygraph studios and relying on outside contractors for the first time to conduct lie detection tests in an attempt to screen its 5,700 prospective and current employees every year.
The stepped-up effort by the Defense Intelligence Agency is part of a growing emphasis on counterintelligence, detecting and thwarting would-be [...]
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