The former chief of staff to Secretary of State
Colin Powell pledged Tuesday to testify against former
Vice President Dick Cheney if he is ever tried for war crimes.
Col.
Lawrence Wilkerson told
Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman that he would participate in a trial even if it meant personal repercussions.
“I, unfortunately — and I’ve admitted to this a number of times, publicly and privately — was the person who put together Colin Powell’s presentation at the
United Nations Security Council on 5 February, 2003,” Wilkerson said. “It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it to this day. I regret not having resigned over it.”
In an interview that aired on NBC Monday, Cheney told Jamie Gangel that unlike
President George W. Bush, he did not have a “sickening feeling” when they discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction after the
invasion of Iraq.
“I think we did the right thing,” Cheney said.
The
Bush administration and Israeli government appear to be operating a joint disinformation campaign, whose objective is to establish a media based alternative reality from which to accuse Syria/Iran of developing nuclear weapons with help from North Korea, by using a real event combined with planted stories establishing a defining narrative. This accusation in turn is augmented with stories about Iranian sponsored "Special Groups killing US troops in Iraq" and purported naval incidents the
Persian Gulf, creating self-reinforcing, media based crisis.
The immediate purpose of this disinformation campaign is apparently to help justify the planned US attack on a wide range of Iranian industrial and military targets. And, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the objective is to swiftly inflict substantial damage to the national infrastructure of Iran, followed by an abrupt cessation of attacks and a call for a cease-fire to prevent substantial Iranian retaliation. Again, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the US likely will resist calls for a cessation of the attacks until a significant portion of the Iranian target set has been addressed, then it will accept calls for a cease-fire and demand Iran do the same.
Any subsequent attacks by Iran would probably be characterized by the US as Iranian aggression, further justifying US follow-up attacks on remaining Iranian assets as defensive measures. The transparent duplicity of such US actions and claims is not a problem because US corporate media is prepared to report repeatedly the administration's claims with little or no criticism or mention of alternative assessments. In other words, subjecting its audience to blatant propaganda masquerading as journalism, which is effective as it is because of US corporate media's quantitative monopoly on information provided the public.
As far as can be determined, no credible or even plausible evidence for any of these claims has been presented by the Bush administration, let alone by any independent verification of such claims. Instead, in the pattern similar to the disinformation campaign before the invasion of Iraq, questions about these claims, when raised at all, are ignored or "answered" with repeated or additional claims. Essentially this disinformation campaign, as all such campaigns, is an elaborate set of lies to deceive an enemy, in this case the United States Congress and the American people, in pursuit of Bush administration secret policy objectives for the benefit of a foreign government.
State Department: Identifying Misinformation
In New Memoir, Dick Cheney Tries to Rewrite History
David Addington, Cheney’s general counsel, engaged in a ferocious effort over the next three months to suppress a growing legal rebellion. When lawyers from the NSA asked to see the opinions under dispute, Addington
angrily refused and told them to back off.
Fallout of nuclear 'spin' :
WMD
Jay Rosen has written
an important piece synthesizing his various observations about our broken political press. It comes from a presentation he gave in Australia, where the situation is apparently just as bad:
.....how did we get to the point where it seems entirely natural for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to describe political journalists appearing on its air as “the insiders?” Don’t you think that’s a little strange? I do. Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate…. this is a clue to what’s broken about political coverage in the U.S. and Australia. Here’s how I would summarize it: Things are out of alignment. Journalists are identifying with the wrong people. Therefore the kind of work they are doing is not as useful as we need it to be.
...Rosen identifies three specific areas of concern:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
( I assume that's M Jay from TPM Cafe...who has gone up in the world. He's very active on Twitter. Remember the 'scandal' about military veterans appearing in the media as 'independent experts' ?
You'd think the info posted at 'Mountain Runner WordPress' had been going into the ether. Armstrong has been promoted within the 'Public Diplomacy' section and has gone into hiatus from blogging. )
....
This piece by Ari Berman in
Rolling Stone tells the tale of that project finally coming to fruition.
| Opinion |
|
| Manipulating social networks |
|
In Syria and Iran, among other places, social media users are lulled into a dangerously false sense of security. If there's one thing that net-savvy activists from Tunisia to Bahrain are aware of, it’s that the Internet isn’t always safe. From the constant threat of surveillance to the knowledge that posting the wrong picture on Facebook can get you arrested - or worse - activists have for a long time taken measures to mitigate risks, censoring themselves, using special tools like Tor, or staying off certain networks altogether.
Unfortunately, not only do some activists lack the necessary savvy, but even the best can fall victim to savvier regimes. Back in December, for example, just as the Tunisian uprising began to take root, activists within the country noticed that their Facebook accounts had been compromised. Some reported information missing from their accounts, leading Facebook to investigate and, in the end, re-route users to a secure HTTPS version of the site.
The incident may have prompted Facebook to make the decision to roll out HTTPS to all of its users. By the end of February, users of the site could opt in for increased security; but as two incidents from this week illustrate, their sense of security may have been premature. The latest in a series of events to take advantage of Facebooking dissidents, the two exploits demonstrate a seemingly perpetual cat-and-mouse game between users of social media living under authoritarian regimes and the regimes themselves.
( Ahem. A look under 'Police State' may provide an unwelcome 'reality check' for those living under Demockratic governments. And I'm not the one who continually mis-spells the word. )
|
"China is currently in the process of building as many as 50 to 60 new nuclear plants by 2020; the vast majority will be the CPR-1000, a copy of 60's era Westinghouse technology that can be built cheaply and quickly and with the majority of parts sourced from Chinese manufacturers," says this cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
Drilling in North America is the single greatest threat to our nation’s energy security. Here’s the reality: Protecting the United States’ energy security means keeping our continent’s oil in the ground for when we need it in an emergency. The United States and Canada combined hold less than 5 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Thanks in part to expanded domestic drilling during the Obama administration, we’re depleting those reserves at a high rate. That means we have far less oil to fall back on in the event of true emergency, like an oil embargo or a major war when access to foreign oil supplies becomes difficult or even impossible. If we’re really concerned about security, tar-sands oil should be a last-gap, man-the-barricades option – something we as a society hope we never have to use
( You have to wonder about those reports of undeclared resources in the Beaufort Sea and North Dakota )
"We can't understand that an indigenous government is violating our indigenous rights," said Fernando Vargas, pulling together the complexity - and perplexity - of the government-supported construction of a new highway through an indigenous area and national park in Bolivia.
Vargas is the current leader of the TIPNIS indigenous territory, through which the planned highway will be built, to the dismay of hundreds of indigenous people who are leading a 526km march as a show of opposition.
The march represents a sense of political despair among indigenous communities in Bolivia, and it is considered their final attempt at rejecting the construction of a highway between Trinidad and Cochabamba, to be built through the Isiboro Secure National Park (TIPNIS). Starting with 600 people on August 15, the march has already grown to 1,400, including 125 children.
...requiring sex offenders to register with police may significantly reduce the chances that they will re-offend. However the research also finds that making that same registry information available to the broader public may backfire, leading to higher overall rates of sex crime.
( Forget the emotional content - and my sympathy for offenders - including priests - is scant....though pornography collections don't really resonate with me except as a second-hand phenomenon.
Law should work. Harassment of people who aren't actually actively up to no good breeds resentment, rebellion and violence. My bet, anyway...from seeing such in animals )
From other science news sites
- On The Path Toward A "Star Trek"-Style Sick Bay
- "Plastic Bottle" Solution for Arsenic-Contaminated Water Threatening 100 Million People
We describe intrinsic contamination with Klebsiella pneumoniae occurring during the manufacture of germicidal hand soap, labeled as containing 2% chlorhexidine, used throughout a 350‐bed community medical center. A 3‐year retrospective study failed to find evidence of increased incidence of clinical isolates of this strain.
( I'd love to find medical commentary related to the results of exposing people to bacteria via 'sanitation' )
( I'd say the workers - who presumably have better than usual information resources - discount their danger as minimal and not worrisome ....or they may actually have an aversion. )
In 1920, Dr. RA Penefold, a government chemist in Sydney, Australia, was credited for beginning the human clinical research of the many benefits associated with Tea Tree Oil. His studies determined that Tea Tree Oil had a Rideal-Walker co-efficient of between 11 and 13. This means the oil is 11 to 13 times more powerful than carbolic acid (phenol) for killing bacteria and fungi yet non-caustic to the skin.
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