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Mp3 audio clip of Scott Horton asking Dr. Ron Paul about his “Take out the CIA” and other comments about the agency. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) discusses his disinterest in political parties, the slippery slope from indefinitely detaining foreign terrorism suspects to designating domestic criminals “enemy combatants,” why the US empire is more likely to end from the dollar’s collapse than a reasoned decision to return to a republic, the diminishing returns from intelligence spending and why reestablishing gold and silver as currency is a good idea. MP3 here. (29:49)
Congressman Ron Paul represents Texas’s 14th district. He is the author of The Revolution: A Manifesto, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship and Freedom Under Siege. His archived columns for Antiwar.com appear at http://original.antiwar.com/paul (CN) – A federal judge in San Francisco has given the green light to an action by Vietnam vets saying the CIA prevented roughly 7,000 human subjects from getting medical care after they were subjected to experiments on mind control, implantation of electronics and the effects of exotic drugs. Federal Judge Claudia Wilken allowed a challenge to the consent forms signed by individual plaintiffs involved in the experiments, to the extent that they required an oath of secrecy. Check out the original source here
In December, President Barack Obama authorized the CIA of increasing its use of unmanned military drones in Pakistan, which has killed hundreds of civilians since its dramatic increase one year ago. Check out the original source here
WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk. Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may… Check out the original source here
CHICAGO — A would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, bent on mass murder. As he walks through a security checkpoint, fidgeting and glancing around, a network of high-tech machines analyzes his body language and reads his mind. Screeners pull him aside. Tragedy is averted. As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year. On Thursday, in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt over Detroit, President Barack Obama called on Homeland Security and the Energy Department to develop better screening technology, warning: "In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary." The ideas that have been offered by security experts for staying one step ahead include highly sophisticated sensors, more intensive interrogations of travelers… Check out the original source here
Mercenarism is almost as old as war; but it has always been looked at askance. Fighting qualities were given to men for the defence of the hearth, so those who put them at the service of strangers for hire have been regarded rather like prostitutes, who do for money what they ought to do for love. The feeling became more pronounced with the rise of the democratic nation-state and its patriotic armed forces, and was given formal recognition in the UK by the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870, which remains in force. However, mercenaries really came into prominence during the turbulence of decolonisation and its aftermath in Africa, where they complicated already difficult situations in the Congo, Biafra and Sudan. A little later they were especially active in the small island republics of the Seychelles, Maldives and Comoros, where they have made and unmade governments almost at will. Some of their leaders, such as "Mad" Mike Hoare, the Belgian Christian Tavernier and the Frenchman… Check out the original source here
When an ad hoc team of 5000 people who assembled in just two hours found 10 weather balloons hidden across the US by the Pentagon's research agency earlier this month, it was just another demonstration of the power of crowdsourcing – solving a task by appealing to a large undefined group of web users to each do a small chunk of it. So far crowdsourcing has been associated with well-meaning altruism, such as the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia or searching for lost aviators. But crowdsourcing of a different flavour has started to emerge. Law enforcement officials in Texas have installed a network of CCTV cameras to monitor key areas along that state's 1900-kilometre-long border with Mexico. To help screen the footage, a website lets anyone log in to watch a live feed from a border camera and report suspicious activity. A similar system called Internet Eyes, which pays online viewers to spot shoplifters from in-store camera feeds, is set to launch in the UK in 2010. Check out the original source here
# 1 Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation Check out the original source here "If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong." ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians–OSHA inspectors, insurance agents, religious workers–in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. Jacqueline Stevens has reported a web-exclusive companion piece on ICE agents' ruse… Check out the original source here |
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