After comments made by a New Yorker journalist about Vice President Dick Cheney’s alleged involvement in a “executive assassination ring” abroad, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called Monday for a formal congressional probe.
Kucinich’s call was concomitant with a letter he sent to House Oversight Chairman Edolphus Towns.
Describing the allegation, Kucinich writes, “Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009″ in which “he stated, ‘Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office… Congress has no oversight of it.’”
NATO, the main overseas arm of the U.S. military-industrial complex, just keeps expanding. Its original raison d’être, the supposedly menacing Soviet bloc, has been dead for twenty years. But like the military-industrial complex itself, NATO is kept alive and growing by entrenched economic interests, institutional inertia and an official mindset resembling paranoia, with think tanks looking around desperately for “threats”.
This behemoth is getting ready to celebrate its 60th birthday in the twin cities of Strasbourg (France) and Kehl (Germany) on the Rhine early in April. A special gift is being offered by France’s increasingly unpopular president, Nicolas Sarkozy: the return of France to NATO’s “integrated command”. This bureaucratic event, whose practical significance remains unclear, provides the chorus of NATOlatrous officials and editorialists something to crow about. See, the silly French have seen the error of their ways and returned to the fold.
Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old Turkish-American, was hired as a translator by the FBI shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 because of her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages. She was fired less than a year later in March 2002 for reporting shoddy work and security breaches to her supervisors that could have prevented those attacks
An academic in France has been sacked by the Ministry of Defence after questioning the official version of events surrounding the 9/11 attacks. He now reportedly plans to sue the government.
Aymeric Chauprade lost his job allegedly over the introduction to his latest book about political crises around the world, and more specifically, that the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. were an orchestrated “American-Israeli conspiracy”. The Defence Minister had strong objections to the material, so Aymeric had to go.
Jean Dominique Merchet, a French journalist, was the first to report on the sacking.
“The Ministry of Defence has reacted too brutally. They have transformed Chauprade into a victim, and not an intellectual opponent – even if what he defends is not good,” Merchet said.
Chauprade explained his firing by the Ministry of Defence as the result of him speaking about a subject that was considered off limits.
The horrendous mortality and morbidity statistics revealed by the paper “The Wounds of Gaza”, just published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet are truly shocking – 1,350 killed (60% children) and 5,450 severely wounded (40% children) in reprisals for zero (0) Israeli deaths from Gaza rockets in the preceding year. This demands International Criminal Court and intra-national prosecutions (e.g. in major Israeli military R & R destination countries Australia, the US, the UK and India) and Sanctions and Boycotts against Apartheid Israel by all decent Australians and indeed all decent people around the world.
The Gaza Strip is a self-governing Apartheid Israeli Concentration Camp ruled by the Hamas Government which won 76 out of 132 seats in the Occupied Palestinian Parliamentary elections held under Israeli guns in 2006 (Fatah won 43 seats) (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas ). The Israelis responded by arresting as many Hamas MPs as they could find, the remainder fleeing to Gaza. In the current Israeli Gaza Massacre, the Israelis are evidently bent on “finishing the job” (they have already destroyed the Gaza Parliament House). The war criminal, pro-Zionist Western backers of Apartheid Israel followed suit by declaring the democratically elected Hamas MPs to be “terrorists” and only dealing with the Fatah.
A strange twist in the Mark Cuban story tonight, one which pushes it a little bit further into our wheelhouse. New York Timesblogger Floyd Norris has published an email allegedly sent on May 05, 2007 to Cuban by Fort Worth SEC lawyer Jeffrey Norris (”no known relation to me”, notes the blogging Norris). In the email, Jeffrey Norris essentially tells on Cuban to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who is CCed, regarding Cuban’s involvement with Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy theory film which appeared online in three different incarnations over three years, becoming an internet sensation.
Addressing Cox, Norris explains that Cuban “participated in distributing the vicious and absurd documentary” and declares that Cuban’s “support for this project is irresponsible and immoral.” Floyd Norris posits that the email may be evidence that Cuban is “the victim of a political hit job because he helped finance a movie that was scathingly critical of President Bush.”
“The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.” – Naomi Klein, “In Praise of a Rocky Transition”
Klein talked about the Wall St. bailout on DemocracyNow! yesterday;
The operator of a leading alternative news and strongly anti-war website has become the target of nefarious thugs apparently in the employ of the U.S. government who have continually harassed him and ordered him to shut down his website.
Tom Feeley, owner and editor of InformationClearingHouse.info, has endured public harassment, home invasions, death threats and threats to his family simply for running a website.
Counterpunch writer Mike Whitney has circulated an e mail describing what happened to Feeley in an attempt to draw attention to the matter.
