There are no laws anymore, no democracy, no press, no rights, and no countries, just a bunch of powerful fat guys who want to control the world. That's why we are screwed. Just my opinion... Is that not the true progeny of globalisation?...A new soft world totalitarianism without rights or representation...and with perpetual war?
Showing posts with label obama administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obama administration. Show all posts
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
U.S. to offer legal backing for "targeted killing": source
From Reuters.
(Reuters) - The Obama administration on Monday plans to outline how U.S. laws empower the government to kill Americans overseas who engage in terrorism against their home country, a source familiar with the matter said, months after a drone strike killed a U.S.-born cleric who plotted attacks from Yemen...
"At bottom, the administration is asserting the unreviewable authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said in a statement.
U.S. officials have linked Awlaki to several plots against the United States, including the 2009 Christmas Day attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a U.S. commercial airliner as it arrived in Detroit from Amsterdam with a bomb hidden in his underwear.
When the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison, authorities said that Awlaki himself approved and directed the plot from Yemen.
It is important to also note here, the example they use, the christmas/underwear bomber, was witnessed by a fellow passenger to have been let on the plane on purpose by some kind of agent, as well as Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy admitted to letting the bomber fly. So the very example they use for the necessity of assassinating individuals is a fraudulent one.
(Reuters) - The Obama administration on Monday plans to outline how U.S. laws empower the government to kill Americans overseas who engage in terrorism against their home country, a source familiar with the matter said, months after a drone strike killed a U.S.-born cleric who plotted attacks from Yemen...
"At bottom, the administration is asserting the unreviewable authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said in a statement.
U.S. officials have linked Awlaki to several plots against the United States, including the 2009 Christmas Day attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a U.S. commercial airliner as it arrived in Detroit from Amsterdam with a bomb hidden in his underwear.
When the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison, authorities said that Awlaki himself approved and directed the plot from Yemen.
It is important to also note here, the example they use, the christmas/underwear bomber, was witnessed by a fellow passenger to have been let on the plane on purpose by some kind of agent, as well as Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy admitted to letting the bomber fly. So the very example they use for the necessity of assassinating individuals is a fraudulent one.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
U.S. Challenged to Explain Accusations of Iran Plot in the Face of Skepticism
From The New York Times.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday sought to reconcile what it said was solid evidence of an Iranian plot to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States with a wave of puzzlement and skepticism from some foreign leaders and outside experts.
Senior American officials themselves were struggling to explain why the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, would orchestrate such a risky attack in so amateurish a manner.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday sought to reconcile what it said was solid evidence of an Iranian plot to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States with a wave of puzzlement and skepticism from some foreign leaders and outside experts.
Senior American officials themselves were struggling to explain why the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, would orchestrate such a risky attack in so amateurish a manner.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Secret panel can put Americans on "kill list'
From Reuters
(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month....
...The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.
But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.
(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month....
...The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.
But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
America must brace itself for turbulence
From The Financial Times.
By Peter Orszag
America is experiencing the hard slog of recovering from the financial crisis. Prospects have turned more positive over the past two months. But a year ago growth was picking up too – and then it stalled, at about the same time Greece’s fiscal problems infected the global economy. The question now is whether a home-grown fiscal crisis could derail this year’s rebound.
Some analysts have reached dramatic conclusions, suggesting the near-certainty of hundreds of billions of dollars in government defaults within the US over the next 12 months. Such predictions will undoubtedly turn out to be substantially overblown. Yet the rejection of one extreme is not the affirmation of the other. International investors would be wise to pay close attention to fiscal trends within the US...
...The bottom line is that there may well be US public debt tremors this year, both during federal debate over raising the debt ceiling and with at least a limited number of crises in local and city governments. The bigger problem, though, lies beyond 2011, as the unsustainability of the federal government’s fiscal trajectory becomes increasingly clear. I hope it does not ultimately require a crisis to restore fiscal sustainability at the federal level, but I fear it will.
The writer is a vice-chairman of global banking at Citigroup and former director of the US Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama
Read Article in Full.
By Peter Orszag
America is experiencing the hard slog of recovering from the financial crisis. Prospects have turned more positive over the past two months. But a year ago growth was picking up too – and then it stalled, at about the same time Greece’s fiscal problems infected the global economy. The question now is whether a home-grown fiscal crisis could derail this year’s rebound.
Some analysts have reached dramatic conclusions, suggesting the near-certainty of hundreds of billions of dollars in government defaults within the US over the next 12 months. Such predictions will undoubtedly turn out to be substantially overblown. Yet the rejection of one extreme is not the affirmation of the other. International investors would be wise to pay close attention to fiscal trends within the US...
...The bottom line is that there may well be US public debt tremors this year, both during federal debate over raising the debt ceiling and with at least a limited number of crises in local and city governments. The bigger problem, though, lies beyond 2011, as the unsustainability of the federal government’s fiscal trajectory becomes increasingly clear. I hope it does not ultimately require a crisis to restore fiscal sustainability at the federal level, but I fear it will.
The writer is a vice-chairman of global banking at Citigroup and former director of the US Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama
Read Article in Full.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
The government might look at all our emails? They do that already.
A bill to allow the government to spy on emails and social networking websites? This is nonsense. Of course the government already listens in to our phone conversations and looks at our emails already. As for the social networking sites, anyone that has a facebook or other social network page knows that the information on it could be used against them. I can even vouch that Myspace was already used against me personally in one instance.
There is a lot of concern that Wikileaks is the 9/11 of the internet which will be used to create a total clampdown. While I believe there are many who will attempt to use Wikileaks in this fashion, could it be that Wikileaks has beaten them to the punch? If the government were going to organize an internet 9/11, wouldn't they do it in a way that it would be more popular, and choose an "enemy" less popular the Assange? I believe Wikileaks to be a genuine counterstrike against the oligarchical tyranny we now face from our shadowy ruling class. Time will reveal more however, as the battle over free speech continues.
There is a lot of concern that Wikileaks is the 9/11 of the internet which will be used to create a total clampdown. While I believe there are many who will attempt to use Wikileaks in this fashion, could it be that Wikileaks has beaten them to the punch? If the government were going to organize an internet 9/11, wouldn't they do it in a way that it would be more popular, and choose an "enemy" less popular the Assange? I believe Wikileaks to be a genuine counterstrike against the oligarchical tyranny we now face from our shadowy ruling class. Time will reveal more however, as the battle over free speech continues.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Sham Obama Administration Supports Right Wing Sham Justice
Yes this is from Pravda. Now American media is a propagandistic media, and Pravda speaks the truth. How times have changed.
Valerie Plame, YES! Wikileaks, NO!
From Pravda.
In my recent article Ward Churchill: The Lie Lives On (Pravda.Ru, 11/29/2010), I discussed the following realities about America's legal "system": it is duplicitous and corrupt; it will go to any extremes to insulate from prosecution, and in many cases civil liability, persons whose crimes facilitate this duplicity and corruption; it has abdicated its responsibility to serve as a "check-and-balance" against the other two branches of government, and has instead been transformed into a weapon exploited by the wealthy, the corporations, and the politically connected to defend their criminality, conceal their corruption and promote their economic interests; and, finally, that the oft-quoted adage "Nobody is above the law" is a lie.
Some critics were quick to dismiss my article as politically motivated hyperbole. But with the recent revelations disclosed by Wikileaks, it appears that this article did not even scratch the surface, because it is now evident that Barack Obama, who entered the White House with optimistic messages of change and hope, is just as complicit in, and manipulative of, the legal "system's" duplicity and corruption as was his predecessor George W. Bush.
For example, as I stated in the aforementioned article, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute former Attorney General John Ashcroft for abusing the "material witness" statute; refused to prosecute Ashcroft's successor (and suspected perjurer) Alberto Gonzales for his role in the politically motivated firing of nine federal prosecutors; refused to prosecute Justice Department authors of the now infamous "torture memos," like John Yoo and Jay Bybee; and, more recently, refused to prosecute former CIA official Jose Rodriquez Jr. for destroying tapes that purportedly showed CIA agents torturing detainees.
Predictably, the official mantra supporting these refusals is that "exhaustive" investigations had been conducted. But now, thanks to Wikileaks, the world has been enlightened to the fact that the Obama administration not only refused to prosecute these individuals itself, it also exerted pressure on the governments of Germany and Spain not to prosecute, or even indict, any of the torturers or war criminals from the Bush dictatorship.
This revelation invariably leads to three inescapable conclusions: these so-called "exhaustive investigations" were a sham; the Obama administration never intended to prosecute such crimes and, in fact, went to inordinate lengths to cover them up; and the American government has the proven capacity to influence the legal systems of other countries.
And now, given the fact that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is facing criminal charges in Sweden, it is also evident that America even has the Swedish government and Interpol in its hip pocket...
Read more...
Valerie Plame, YES! Wikileaks, NO!
From Pravda.
In my recent article Ward Churchill: The Lie Lives On (Pravda.Ru, 11/29/2010), I discussed the following realities about America's legal "system": it is duplicitous and corrupt; it will go to any extremes to insulate from prosecution, and in many cases civil liability, persons whose crimes facilitate this duplicity and corruption; it has abdicated its responsibility to serve as a "check-and-balance" against the other two branches of government, and has instead been transformed into a weapon exploited by the wealthy, the corporations, and the politically connected to defend their criminality, conceal their corruption and promote their economic interests; and, finally, that the oft-quoted adage "Nobody is above the law" is a lie.
Some critics were quick to dismiss my article as politically motivated hyperbole. But with the recent revelations disclosed by Wikileaks, it appears that this article did not even scratch the surface, because it is now evident that Barack Obama, who entered the White House with optimistic messages of change and hope, is just as complicit in, and manipulative of, the legal "system's" duplicity and corruption as was his predecessor George W. Bush.
For example, as I stated in the aforementioned article, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute former Attorney General John Ashcroft for abusing the "material witness" statute; refused to prosecute Ashcroft's successor (and suspected perjurer) Alberto Gonzales for his role in the politically motivated firing of nine federal prosecutors; refused to prosecute Justice Department authors of the now infamous "torture memos," like John Yoo and Jay Bybee; and, more recently, refused to prosecute former CIA official Jose Rodriquez Jr. for destroying tapes that purportedly showed CIA agents torturing detainees.
Predictably, the official mantra supporting these refusals is that "exhaustive" investigations had been conducted. But now, thanks to Wikileaks, the world has been enlightened to the fact that the Obama administration not only refused to prosecute these individuals itself, it also exerted pressure on the governments of Germany and Spain not to prosecute, or even indict, any of the torturers or war criminals from the Bush dictatorship.
This revelation invariably leads to three inescapable conclusions: these so-called "exhaustive investigations" were a sham; the Obama administration never intended to prosecute such crimes and, in fact, went to inordinate lengths to cover them up; and the American government has the proven capacity to influence the legal systems of other countries.
And now, given the fact that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is facing criminal charges in Sweden, it is also evident that America even has the Swedish government and Interpol in its hip pocket...
Read more...
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