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Alex Constantine’s Blacklist

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:50:20 +0000

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Rep. Ron Paul on Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton – “Take Out The CIA!”

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:40:23 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

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)

Part 2, Part 3

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

Rep. Ron Paul « Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton

Courthouse News Service

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:51:11 +0000

(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.
At the same time, she dismissed the challenge to the legality of the CIA's human testing program of the 1950s and '60s
But the plaintiffs, Vietnam Veterans of America, may seek a declaration concerning the lawfulness of consent forms provided to the individual plaintiffs, since the extent of their potential injuries was not fully disclosed and the forms required them to take a secrecy oath.
Plaintiffs, who also include the group Swords to Plowshares, allege that the oaths cause ongoing harm

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Ron Paul: CIA runs the U.S. government, military after coup

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:51:11 +0000

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.
Paul stated in his speech, “There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. … And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve.”
The 1988 Libertarian Presidential candidate added that since its inception after World War II, the CIA has done more harm than good and they’re a government unto themselves, “They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators … We need to take out the CIA.”

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How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash – McClatchy

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:51:33 +0000

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…

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Mind-reading systems could change air security :: WRAL.com

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:46:58 +0000

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…

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CAAT Publications – The Privatisation of Violence

admin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:33:00 +0000

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…

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Innovation: The sinister powers of crowdsourcing – New Scientist

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:39:05 +0000

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.

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America’s Secret ICE Castles

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:39:49 +0000

"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…

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ParaPolitical Info

Alex Constantine’s Blacklist

Rep. Ron Paul on Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton – “Take Out The CIA!”

Courthouse News Service

Ron Paul: CIA runs the U.S. government, military after coup

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash – McClatchy

Mind-reading systems could change air security :: WRAL.com

CAAT Publications – The Privatisation of Violence

Innovation: The sinister powers of crowdsourcing – New Scientist

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009 | Project Censored

America’s Secret ICE Castles