Jessica Lynch : Why She Had to Set the Record Straight About Government’s False Story

About 9 years ago, enemy fighters in Iraq captured then-19-year-old former Private First Class Jessica Lynch in a deadly ambush on the truck that she was driving. Eleven soldiers died in the attack, including one of Lynch’s closest friends.

Later, Special Forces rescued Lynch from an Iraqi hospital and initial government reports portrayed her as a hero who went down fighting, claims which Lynch denied, saying that she didn’t shoot a single round in the attack.

Today, Lynch joined Shepard Smith to talk about being in captivity, how she got the strength to call out the government on the false story presented about her, and whether, in the end, the Iraq War was worth it.

Of the attack, Lynch said she woke up about three hours after the ambush and knew immediately that something was wrong. She said, “I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn’t in the right place.”

Lynch said it would have been really easy for her to go along with government reports that she went down fighting because she was the only soldier in her Humvee to survive, but “that’s not who I am, that’s not how I was raised.” She went onto say, “I felt that I had to because I knew that those weren’t the accurate stories, and I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

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Big Brother in India

Gray wants Occupy protesters removed from McPherson Square

Mayor Vincent C. Gray called on the National Park Service today to remove protesters from McPherson Square to “allow for elimination of the rat infestation, clean up, and restoration” of the downtown park.

In a letter to Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis, Gray suggests moving the McPherson protesters, who have camped in the park since October, to a separate encampment at Freedom Plaza.

Because both sites are on Park Service land, Gray does not have the authority to directly order an eviction. But today’s demand is Gray’s most dramatic pronoucement yet on the ongoing protests.

His letter was accompanied by a memorandum from the city’s health director reporting that both encampments are at risk for outbreaks of “communicable disease, hypothermia or food borne illness.”

Mohammed N. Akhter reported that the city “must now reassess and take steps to protect the health and safety of the demonstrators, as well as District residents and visitors.” The memo followed several dozen visits to the encampments.

The McPherson Square site, Akhter said, “has some serious concerns that should be addressed immediately.” The problems include an ongoing risk of hypothermia, fire threats from the use of candles and propane heaters, inadequate food sanitation and a rodent infestation that is “clearly visible even during daylight hours.”

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Iran and the Terrorism game

In the few venues which yesterday denounced as “Terrorism” the ongoing assassinations of Iranian scientists, there was intense backlash against the invocation of that term. That always happens whenever “Terrorism” is applied to acts likely undertaken by Israel, the U.S. or its allies — rather than its traditional use: violence by Muslims against the U.S. and its allies — because accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos (even when the acts in question involve not only assassinations but also explosions which kill numerous victims whose identities could not have been known in advance). But the case of these scientist assassinations particularly highlights how meaningless and manipulated this term is.

The prime argument against calling these scientists killings “Terrorism” is that targeted killings — as opposed to indiscriminate ones — cannot qualify. After Andrew Sullivan wrote a post entitled “The Terrorism We Support” and rhetorically asked: “is not the group or nation responsible for the murder of civilians in another country terrorists?”, and then separately criticized the NYT for failing to describe these killings as Terrorism, numerous readers objected to the use of this term on the ground that a targeted killing cannot be Terrorism. Similarly, after I noted yesterday that Kevin Drum had denounced as “Terrorism” a right-wing blogger’s 2007 suggestion that Iran’s scientists be murdered and asked if he still applies that term to whoever is actually doing it now, he wrote a post (either coincidentally on his own or in response) strongly implying that this is Terrorism; thereafter, commenter after commenter at Mother Jones vehemently disagreed, on the same ground, with Drum’s suggestion that this is Terrorism (many agreed the term did apply).

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The Fed has at its disposal mostly put money in the hands of the affluent

WASH POST

In the most difficult economy in a generation, middle-income and poor Americans are hurting the worst. Congress is tied in knots, barely able to pass even the most basic measures to help.

That has put pressure on the one arm of government with the power and the flexibility to try to boost ordinary Americans’ fortunes: the Federal Reserve. But the limited policies the Fed has at its disposal mostly put money in the hands of the affluent, at least through their direct effects. The affluent, in turn, are less likely than most to spend that money in the wider economy.

That may be a key reason that a series of dramatic steps by the central bank has not done more to raise living standards for American workers.

The Fed has aimed to strengthen growth and lower joblessness by pumping cash into the economy, buying vast amounts of government bonds using newly printed money.

The bond purchases have pushed up the stock market, in which the wealthy are much more heavily invested than the poor and the middle class. The bond purchases also have helped lower mortgage rates, and the affluent are more likely to buy a home — and have bigger homes to refinance — than those of lesser means.

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‘Majority of Gitmo prisoners innocent’

Protests have marked 10 years since the first prisoners were sent to America’s most controversial prison – Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Barack Obama's promise on his first day in office to close it down remains unfulfilled.

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US Marines making lewd jokes while urinating on the bodies of three Afghans

Afghans have condemned the United States after a video shows US marines urinating on Afghan dead bodies on the ground, Press TV reports.

Residents in the southern city of Kandahar as well as in the capital Kabul staged rallies on Thursday to slam the desecration of the corpses, saying the US marines committed crimes.

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Is Mossad Stepping Up Covert Actions Against Iran?

NY TIMES

As arguments flare in Israel and the United States about a possible military strike to set back Iran’s nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to current and former American officials and specialists on Iran.

The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

Iranian officials immediately blamed both Israel and the United States for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base that killed a top general and 16 other people. While American officials deny a role in lethal activities, the United States is believed to engage in other covert efforts against the Iranian nuclear program.

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Secret new assessment says war in Afghanistan is mired in stalemate

LA TIMES

The U.S. intelligence community says in a secret new assessment that the war in Afghanistan is mired in stalemate, and warns that security gains from an increase in American troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. officials.

The sobering judgments, laid out in a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last month and delivered to the White House, appeared at odds with recent optimistic statements by Pentagon officials and have deepened divisions between U.S. intelligence agencies and American military commanders about progress in the decade-old war.

The detailed document, known as an NIE, runs more than 100 pages and represents the consensus view of the CIA and 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies. Similar in tone to an NIE prepared a year ago, it challenges the Pentagon's claim to have achieved lasting security gains in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials who have read or been briefed on its contents.

PHOTOS: A decade of conflict in Afghanistan

In a section looking at future scenarios, the NIE also asserts that the Afghan government in Kabul may not be able to survive as the U.S. steadily pulls out its troops and reduces military and civilian assistance.

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Judy Miller Alert! The New York Times Is Lying About Iran's Nuclear Program

It's deja vu all over again. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is trying to trick America into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and The New York Times is lying about allegations that said country is developing "weapons of mass destruction."

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 ("Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil"), this paragraph appeared:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. [my emphasis]

The claim that there is "a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective" is a lie.

As Washington Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton noted on December 9:

But the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Indeed, if you try now to find the offending paragraph on The New York Times web site, you can't. They took it down. But there is no note, like there is supposed to be, acknowledging that they changed the article, and that there was something wrong with it before. Sneaky, huh?

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Cohan: How Wall Street Turned a Crisis Into a Cartel

BLOOMBERG

Almost 65 years ago, in 1947, the U.S. government sued 17 leading Wall Street investment banks, charging them with effectively colluding in violation of antitrust laws.

In its complaint -- which was front-page news at the time - -- the Justice Department alleged that these firms had created “an integrated, overall conspiracy and combination” starting in 1915 “and in continuous operation thereafter, by which” they developed a system “to eliminate competition and monopolize ‘the cream of the business’ of investment banking.”

The U.S. argued that the top Wall Street investment banks - - including Morgan Stanley (MS) (the lead defendant) and Goldman Sachs -- had created a cartel by which, among other things, it set the prices charged for underwriting securities and for providing mergers-and-acquisitions advice, while boxing out weaker competitors from breaking into the top tier of the business and getting their fair share of the fees.

The government argued that the big firms placed their partners on their clients’ boards of directors, putting them in the best possible position to know when a piece of business was coming down the pike and to make sure that any competitors were given a very hard time should they dare to try to win it.

The government was spot on: The investment-banking business was then a cartel where the biggest and most powerful firms controlled the market and then set the prices for their services, leaving customers with few viable choices for much needed capital, advice or trading counterparties.

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My Guantánamo Nightmare

NY Times

ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

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Journal of Business Ethics: PSYCHOPATHS working in corporations have had a major part in causing the economic crisis

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

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Ron Paul surprises party establishment by winning Idaho GOP straw poll in Garden City

Despite a speech from U.S. Sen. Jim Risch backing Mitt Romney, Rep. Ron Paul won Friday’s pay-to-play vote. Paul’s surrogate was Washington state Rep. Matt Shea of Spokane Valley.

How strong a win? The former Libertarian got 43 percent (173 votes) to the former Massachusetts governor’s 34 percent (135). Trailing them were Newt Gingrich with 12 percent (47 votes), Rick Santorum at 10 percent (40) and Jon Huntsman with 1 percent (4). A total of 399 people from across Idaho participated. Rick Perry's campaign asked not to be included on the straw poll ballot.

What’s it mean? It cost $30 to participate, and party officials cautioned against making too much of the result. The poll was a party fundraiser held at the Riverside Hotel in Garden City.
Whoops of joy: Paulies were jubilant. “It feels so good,” said Chris MacCloud of Meridian. “Just a lot of hard work, time and energy.”

New plan for GOP: Idaho Republicans are using a caucus for the first time this year. They also moved up the delegate-selection date from a May primary to the March 6 caucus on Super Tuesday — which features GOP contests in 10 states — in hopes of having a role in picking the nominee. Party officials hope for 15,000 to caucus in Ada and Canyon counties alone.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/01/06/1942935/ron-paul-wins-idaho-gop-straw.html#storylink=latest#storylink=cpy

Police State: A chilling glimpse of a future without free speech

Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans

President Obama just signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law despite startling provisions that will allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens.  It's a travesty, defying basic principles of justice and due process in perhaps the most extreme respect our nation has ever seen.

Thankfully, several lawmakers are keeping up the fight.  Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced legislation to undo these provisions of the NDAA, in the form of the Due Process Guarantee Act.  We need to urge other Senators to support it.

The Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011 amends the Non-Detention Act of 1971 by providing that a Congressional authorization for the use of military force does not authorize the indefinite detention—without charge or trial—of U.S. citizens who are apprehended domestically.

If there's enough of a public outcry, we have a real chance of making this happen: More than 40 senators voted against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA -- and that was before the media and general public caught on to what was happening.  Please urge your Senators to remedy this terrible wrong.

Just fill out the form at right to urge your lawmakers to block the indefinite detention of Americans

Here's Feinstein's press release on her new legislation.

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We The People

NDAA Is A Hoax: You Can't Legalize Tyranny

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NDAA: Chances of Central New York drone flights improve as new law allows six national test sites

Syracuse.com

The Air National Guard’s 174th Fighter Wing is a step closer to gaining federal permission to fly unmanned Reaper drones out of its base at Hancock Field, according to U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.

The National Defense Authorization Act signed into law last week by President Barack Obama allows for the establishment of six national test sites where drones could fly through civil air space.

Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday he pushed for the establishment of six spots, instead of the planned four, to improve the chances that Hancock Field would be included. The 174th Fighter Wing has been trying for almost five years to convince the Federal Aviation Administration to allow flights of the MQ-9 Reaper drones out of Hancock Field.

The FAA bans such unmanned flights because of concerns about the remotely piloted drones flying through civil airspace used by commercial aircraft at Syracuse’s Hancock International Airport.

Schumer said he sent a letter Tuesday to FAA Acting Commissioner Michael Huerta, asking for Hancock to be one of the national test sites.

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CFR: The Failure of the Euro

The euro should now be recognized as an experiment that failed. This failure, which has come after just over a dozen years since the euro was introduced, in 1999, was not an accident or the result of bureaucratic mismanagement but rather the inevitable consequence of imposing a single currency on a very heterogeneous group of countries. The adverse economic consequences of the euro include the sovereign debt crises in several European countries, the fragile condition of major European banks, high levels of unemployment across the eurozone, and the large trade deficits that now plague most eurozone countries.

The political goal of creating a harmonious Europe has also failed. France and Germany have dictated painful austerity measures in Greece and Italy as a condition of their financial help, and Paris and Berlin have clashed over the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) and over how the burden of financial assistance will be shared.

The initial impetus that led to the European Monetary Union and the euro was political, not economic. European politicians reasoned that the use of a common currency would instill in their publics a greater sense of belonging to a European community and that the shift of responsibility for monetary policy from national capitals to a single central bank in Frankfurt would signal a shift of political power.

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