Adrian Salbuchi - Obama's Total War Doctrine: Intense and Constant Psychological Warfare. "Total War" against All Countries

President Obama promised change, but there's little of it in his war policies, which are harsher than those of George W. Bush. US drone bombings often target not just "terrorists" but all "military-age males in a strike zone as combatants." "Unless there is explicit posthumous intelligence proving otherwise", that is. As an extensive recent report in The New York Times explains, for all practical purposes Obama is applying what can best be described as a Total War Doctrine, bringing government, military and media propaganda PsyWar under one strategy.

The concept of "Total War" - war involving not just the military but all civilians irrespective of age or sex, together with the entire infrastructure of a country - became a horrible reality during the 20th century, driven for the most part by steering scientific discoveries and technological progress towards unlimited use in warfare. Total War is very much alive today and is being spearheaded by the United States and its Allies. This is being abetted on all fronts by US, European and global mainstream media that willingly oblige. 

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31265

Expert Panel Reports False Accounts of US Political and Military Leaders on 9/11

New evidence shows that the September 11th activities of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were falsely reported by official sources.

The 20-member 9/11 Consensus Panel analyzed evidence from press reports, FOIA requests, and archived 9/11 Commission file documents to produce eight new studies, released today.

The international Panel also discovered that four massive aerial practice exercises traditionally held in October were in full operation on 9/11. The largest, Global Guardian, held annually by NORAD and the US Strategic and Space Commands, had originally been scheduled for October 22-31but was moved, along with Vigilant Guardian, to early September.

Although senior officials claimed  no one could have predicted using hijacked planes as weapons, the military had been practicing similar exercises on 9/11 itself -- and for years before it.

The Panel, discovering widespread reports of confusion and delays in the defense response, looked into who was overseeing the air defenses after the second Tower was hit at 9:03 AM.

Read More:

http://uspolitics.einnews.com/pr_news/99336647/expert-panel-reports-false-accounts-of-u-s-political-and-military-leaders-on-9-11

Robert Reich - How to Avoid the Austerity Trap But Still Deal With the Budget Deficit

We now know austerity economics is bad for weak economies facing large budget deficits. Much of Europe is in recession because of budget cuts demanded by Germany. And as Europe’s economies shrink, their debts become proportionally larger, making a bad situation worse.

The way to avoid this austerity trap is to get growth and jobs back first, and only then tackle budget deficits. 

The U.S. hasn’t yet fallen into the trap, but it could soon. Last week the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warned we’ll be in recession early next year if the Bush tax cuts end as scheduled on January 1, and if more than $100 billion is automatically cut from federal spending, as required by Congress’s failure last August to reach a budget deal. 

Predictably, Capitol Hill is deadlocked. Democrats refuse to extend the Bush tax cuts for high earners and Republicans refuse to delay the budget cuts. 

If recent history is any guide, a deal will be struck at the last moment – during a lame-duck Congress, some time in late December. And it will only be to remove the January 1 trigger. Keep everything as it is, the Bush tax cuts as well as current spending, and kick the can down the road into 2013 and beyond. 

Which means no plan for reducing the budget deficit. 

Read More:

http://robertreich.org/post/23939473049

Richard Norton-Taylor - Bush and Blair's pre-Iraq conversation must be disclosed, tribunal rules

Extracts of a phone conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush a few days before the invasion of Iraq must be disclosed, a tribunal has ruled.

The Foreign Office lost an appeal against an order by the information commissioner, Christopher Graham, to disclose records of the conversation between the two leaders on 12 March 2003. Graham's order was made in response to a freedom of informationrequest by Stephen Plowden, a private individual who demanded disclosure of the entire record of the conversation.

"Accountability for the decision to take military action against another country is paramount," Graham had said in his original order.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/21/bush-blair-pre-iraq-conversation

Kuala Lumpur - Bush And Associates Found Guilty Of Torture

The five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered a guilty verdict against former United States President George W. Bush and his associates at the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing that had started on Monday. 

On the charge of Crime of Torture and War Crimes , the tribunal finds the accused persons former U.S. President George W. Bush and his associates namely Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defence Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defence, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General guilty as charged and convicted as war criminals for Torture and Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment of the Complainant War Crime Victims. 

Earlier in the week, the tribunal heard the testimonies of three witnesses namely Abbas Abid, Moazzam Begg and Jameelah Hameedi. They related the horrific tortures they had faced during their incarceration. The tribunal also heard two other Statutory Declarations of Iraqi citizen Ali Shalal and Rhuhel Ahmed, a British citizen. 

Testimony showed that Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old chief engineer in the Science and Technology Ministry had his fingernails removed by pliers. Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from the wall. Moazzam Begg was beaten and put in solitary confinement. Jameelah was almost nude and humiliated, used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter. All these witnesses have residual injuries till today. 

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/kfcw120512.htm

Tom Engelhardt - The Obama Contradiction

He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized).  No one can stop him or countermand his orders.  He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions.  And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.

He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.  You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.

As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.

How could this be?

Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be

Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past.  In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency.  Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to speak of the U.S. as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” the only “sheriff” on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together?

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175535/

NSA Domestic Spying Continues Under Obama

WASHINGTON - April 25 - On Monday, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower and Government Accountability Project (GAP) client William Binney continued publicly revealing massive domestic surveillance beginning under President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, and continuing rampantly under President Obama.

A senior crypto-mathematician, Binney served at NSA for over forty years, lastly as the Technical Director of the NSA World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting group, made up of thousands of NSA employees charged with analyzing massive volumes of electronic data gathered worldwide. Today, on the day of the annual Ridenhour Prizes that celebrate whistleblowers and truth-telling in the public interest, GAP is lauding Binney for courageously taking a stand and continuing to blow the whistle on NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance.

Binney’s explosive disclosures over the past few weeks include:

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/04/25-3?print

Mark Karlin - Scalia Believes Innocent People Can Be Executed, So He's Not Going to Care About People Dying From Not Having Health Insurance

In 2000, most legal pundits said that Bush v. Gore would never make it the Supreme Court, because voting was a states' right issue. Boy, were they wrong.

In fact, many legal analysts and scholars prognosticate about Supreme Court behavior as if it were of a single mind looking at the Constitution and the law in a serious, scholarly way.

But that perspective of considering the law conscientiously in terms of precedent and the nation's founding legal document forgets one thing: four of the Supreme Court justices are total partisan hacks. Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts are activist right wing judges who decide many major cases for political reasons first - and then find twisted legal justifications for their decisions. Kennedy usually joins with them in major 5-4 decisions that have political impact.

Scalia appears to be the major enforcer of political allegiance to the Federalist Society and the Koch brothers. The man is so dangerously ideological that he even declared, in a dissenting opinion, that there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent an innocent person from being executed. He argued that, "this Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is actually innocent."

Read More:

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13417

Joe Quinn - The 'Kony 2012' Delusion

The people behind this campaign are MASSIVELY misguided. Or it's a CIA-sponsored psy-ops.

Take for example the fact that one of the 12 'policy makers' (US politicians) that they are targeting to help them ensure Kony is arrested is George 'Dubya' Bush. The puppet president who presided over the murder of 1.5 million Iraqi civilians. And we're all meant to believe that people like him are going to care about the plight of Ugandan children? Kony is Bush's ideological brother for god's sake.

Other than their complete ignorance of the fact that the US political elite is populated by the world's worst war criminals, the makers of this video are also massively ignorant of the truth about WHY Uganda, and many other African nations, are subjected to the brutal excesses of war lords and have been for so many decades.

Read More:

http://joequinn.net/2012/03/08/the-kony-2012-delusion/

David Swanson - Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left to Prosecute Bush

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government.  She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals.  She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice.  And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

Holtzman's new book, coauthored with Cynthia Cooper, is called "Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution -- and What We Can Do About It."  Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that Bush would pardon himself and his underlings.  The debate was over exactly how he would do it.  And then he didn't do it at all.

Read More:

http://www.truth-out.org/un-cheating-justice-two-years-left-prosecute-bush/1330872233