Supreme Court Protects Torturers, Rejects Lawsuit

SF GATE

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid Monday by five former U.S. captives to revive their lawsuit accusing a Bay Area flight-planning company of arranging for the CIA to send them to countries where they were tortured.

The men said in their suit that they had been tortured in overseas prisons as terrorism suspects. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the suit dismissed in September, agreeing with the Obama administration that the case could threaten national security.

On Monday, the high court denied a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union asking it to intervene on the grounds that the government had misused the "state secrets" privilege to deny justice to torture victims.

"The Supreme Court has refused once again to give justice to torture victims and to restore our nation's reputation as a guardian of human rights and the rule of law," ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said.

The Obama administration has said it tries to limit state-secrets claims in court cases by requiring a Justice Department committee and Attorney General Eric Holder to agree to each one.

But the ACLU, in its Supreme Court filing, said presidents have increasingly used overblown national security claims to shield "a broad range of official misconduct ... from judicial review."

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Is Obama's Social Security Number Part of a Manufactured Fake Identity?

Susan Daniels is a licensed private investigator who has researched the use of the social security number currently being used by Barack Hussein Obama which she has determined was issued in the state of Connecticut, where Obama has neither lived nor worked.  Daniels has stated that the number had originally been assigned to a man from Connecticut born in 1890.

Daniels is president of Susan Daniels & Associates, which is located in Ohio and was incorporated in 1995. Prior to opening her own company, Daniels worked as a private investigator for Friedrick Investigations in Lakewood, OH, including in the areas of medical malpractice, background investigations, and litigation support.  She was also employed as a “stringer” (correspondent) for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for 17 years, covering  Board of Health meetings, trials, local county commissioners’ meetings, and performing public records research.

Author Jack Cashill has consulted with Susan Daniels on the issue of Obama’s social security number and has written a book, Deconstructing Obama, which presents Cashill’s evidence that Obama did not write his own autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Cashill believes that Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and acquaintance of Obama, actually wrote the book.

Ayers became a “Distinguished Professor of Education” at the University of Illinois but has been described as an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” who had bombed the Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.  Ayers and his later wife, Bernardine Dohrn, had built bombs which accidentally killed Ayers’s girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton, in 1970.  The Weather Underground had planned unsuccessfully to bomb Ft. Dix, a U.S. Army base in New Jersey and has been accused by one writer of treason.

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Was Fukushima a China Syndrome?

The China Syndrome refers to a scenario in which a molten nuclear reactor core could could fission its way through its containment vessel, melt through the basement of the power plant and down into the earth. While a molten reactor core wouldn't burn "all the way through to China" it could enter the soil and water table and cause huge contamination in the crops and drinking water around the power plant. It's a nightmare scenario,the stuff of movies. And it might just have happened at Fukushima.

Last week, plant operator Tepco sent engineers in to recalibrate water level gauges in reactor number 1. They made an alarming discovery: virtually all the fuel in the core had melted down. That means that the zirconium alloy tubes that hold the uranium fuel and the fuel itself lies in a clump---either at the bottom of the pressure vessel, or in the basement below or possibly even outside the containment building. Engineers don't know for sure, though current temperature readings suggest that fission inside the reactor core has definitely ceased for good (i.e. there will be no further melting).

Anecdotal evidence doesn't bode well for how far the fuel melted: Tepco has been pumping thousands of tons of water onto reactor 1 to try to cool it—yet the water level in the containment vessel is too low to run an emergency cooling system. That means the water is escaping somewhere on a course cut by molten fuel--probably into the basement of the reactor building, though it's also possible it melted through everything into the earth.

Many experts say a full-blown China syndrome is unlikely in large part because the fuel from the type of reactors at Fukushima is designed in such a way that it probably won't sustain "recriticality" once meltdown occurs.

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POLICE STATE: Supreme Court gives police a new entryway into homes

LA TIMES

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday gave police more leeway to break into residences in search of illegal drugs.

The justices in an 8-1 decision said officers who loudly knock on a door and then hear sounds suggesting evidence is being destroyed may break down the door and enter without a search warrant.

Residents who "attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame" when police burst in, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

In a lone dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she feared the ruling in a Kentucky case will give police an easy way to ignore the 4th Amendment. "Police officers may not knock, listen and then break the door down," she said, without violating the 4th Amendment.

In the past, the court has said police usually may not enter a home unless they have a search warrant or the permission of the owner. As Alito said, "The 4th Amendment has drawn a firm line at the entrance to the house."

One exception to that rule involves an emergency, such as screams coming from a house. Police may also pursue a fleeing suspect who enters a residence.

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Globalists’ Secret Weapon Exposed: Tech Kill Chips

As the world is distracted by the royal nuptials and Obama’s ever changing soap opera surrounding CIA asset Osama bin Laden’s death, the technocrats are rolling out the next phase of their global control grid. The foundations of this plan were laid out in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and have been updated each subsequent year.

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Trailer: Webster Tarpley & Elite’s plan for global extermination

This is the trailer for the upcoming PrisonPlanet.tv exclusive interview with Dr. Webster Tarpley. In this interview, Dr. Tarpley reviews the writings of John P. Holdren, the current White House science advisor. This interview conclusively exposes scientific elite’s true agenda, world-wide genocide and the formation of a global government to rule.

U.S. College Education Isn’t Worth Price: Survey

BLOOMBERG

Higher education fails to provide students “good value” for the money they and their families spend, more than half of U.S. adults said in a survey.

The debate over higher education’s value “has been triggered not just by rising costs but also by hard economic times,” according to a report released yesterday by the Washington-based Pew Research Center. The organization, an independent research group funded by Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, surveyed 2,142 adults, aged 18 and older, from March 15 through March 29.

The survey follows a call by President Barack Obama for the U.S. to achieve the highest college graduation rate in the world by 2020. The U.S. now ranks 12th among 36 developed nations, according to a report last year by the College Board.

In the poll, 75 percent of U.S. adults said college was unaffordable for most Americans, and almost half said that student loans had made it harder to pay other bills.

At the same time, 86 percent of college graduates said that it had been a good investment for them personally. College graduates said they earned an average $20,000 a year more because of their degrees, a figure that closely matches U.S. Census Bureau data, the survey found.

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Treasury to tap pensions to help fund government

WASHINGTON POST

The Obama administration will begin to tap federal retiree programs to help fund operations after the government loses its ability Monday to borrow more money from the public, adding urgency to efforts in Washington to fashion a compromise over the debt.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has warned for months that the government would soon hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a legal limit on how much it can borrow. With the government poised to reach that limit Monday, Geithner is undertaking special measures in an effort to postpone the day when he will no longer have enough funds to pay all of the government’s bills.

Geithner, who has already suspended a program that helps state and local government manage their finances, will begin to borrow from retirement funds for federal workers. The measure won’t have an impact on retirees because the Treasury is legally required to reimburse the program.

The maneuver buys Geithner only a few months of time. If Congress does not vote by Aug. 2 to raise the debt limit, Geithner says the government is likely to default on some of its obligations, which he says would cause enormous economic harm and the suspension of government services, including the disbursal of Social Security funds.

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Fukushima: Evacuations begin

FUKUSHIMA (Kyodo) -- Residents in Kawamata and Iitate began leaving their homes Sunday after their living areas were included in an evacuation radius the government widened last month around the radiation-leaking Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Kawamata Mayor Michio Furukawa met with some 50 residents in the first group of evacuees, including babies and toddlers, telling them, "I know you are worried but we will overcome difficulties together."

The government designated Kawamata and Iitate on April 22 as part of the area from which residents would be required to leave in roughly one month's time, as cumulative radiation exposure is expected to exceed the yardstick of 20 millisieverts during the course of a year.

Masahiro Kanno, a 34-year-old Kawamata resident with two sons aged 5 and 8, was unhappy with the evacuation order. "It sounds strange that the government first said we have nothing to worry but suddenly told us to leave," he said.

The government set the additional no-entry area outside the original evacuation zone in the 20-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi complex crippled by the March 11 mega earthquake and tsunami waves.

(Mainichi Japan) May 15, 2011

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110515p2g00m0dm013000c.html

What International Law Says about the Killing of Bin Laden

Editor's Note: Two things are for sure, we know UBL didn't put the nanothermite in the towers and we know the US couldn't care less about international law!

Terrorists, even Osama bin Laden, are humans. As such, they have rights; human rights. Among these rights are the right to life, the right to humane treatment and the right to a fair trial. Fundamental human rights remain valid even in a state of emergency; they are impervious to such exceptions.

In peacetime, the right to life can only be limited in extraordinary circumstances, in particular by reason of self defense. If it is true that Osama bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot, self defense in response to an unlawful attack on the part of entering US Special Forces can be ruled out. Clearly, such an operation takes place under extreme pressure and it is conceivable that the Special Forces acted on the mistaken belief that they were under attack by bin Laden or his people -- criminal lawyers call this "putative self defense" -- but this would not make the killing lawful. It would only cast light on the mental state of the troops in question, and thus their culpability. 

Yet, these soldiers are especially trained for such an operation, they are the elite of the elite. If we cannot demand restraint in the use of force from them, then we can't demand it from anybody -- not from the ordinary policeman in the street nor from the citizen defending his life or home. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that they shot bin Laden out of fear or by mistake. Rather they knew perfectly well what they were doing and killed him wantonly and willingly.

Why Are Al-Qaida Criminals Treated Differently?

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US Government is Behind the Baluchi Insurrection

In the shadow of the “Bin Laden” media circus and increasingly aggressive rhetoric between Washington and Islamabad, the corporate-financier funded NGOs that fomented the “Arab Spring” are now cultivating a united Baluchi front ahead of a proposed US-funded Baluchistan insurrection.

As early as 2006, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace identified Pakistan’s Baluchistan province as a potential point of leverage against Islamabad and an opportunity to assert foreign intervention.

In a 2006 report by the corporate-financier funded think tank titled, “Pakistan: The Resurgence of Baluch Nationalism,” violence starting as early as 2004-2005 is described. According to the report, 20% of Pakistan’s mineral and energy resources reside in the sparsely populated province.

On page 4 of the report, the prospect of using the Baluchi rebels against both Islamabad and Tehran is proposed. In Seymour Hersh’s 2008 article, “Preparing the Battlefield,” US support of Baluchi groups operating against Tehran is reported as already a reality. In Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?” the subject of arming and sending Baluchi insurgents against Tehran is also discussed at great depth.

The 2006 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report makes special note of the fact that above all, the Baluchistan province serves as a transit zone for a potential Iranian-India-Turkmenistan natural gas pipeline as well as a port, Gwadar, that serves as a logistical hub for Afghanistan, Central Asia’s landlocked nations as well as a port for the Chinese.

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US drone attacks must stop - Pakistan

THE AUSTRALIAN

PAKISTAN'S parliament has demanded an end to US drone strikes on its territory and called for an independent probe into the raid by US troops that killed Osama bin Laden to ensure there is no repeat.

The strongly worded message came after a joint sitting of parliament lasting more than 10 hours, during which MPs debated the "situation arising from unilateral US action in Abbottabad'' which targeted bin Laden.

Pakistan's intelligence chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha, chief of military operations and deputy chief of air staff, briefed the MPs in Islamabad.

Describing the continued drone strikes as "unacceptable'', parliament said in a resolution: "Such drone attacks must be stopped forthwith, failing which the government will be constrained to consider taking (the) necessary steps, including withdrawal of (the) transit facility allowed to NATO.''

Most supplies and equipment required by foreign troops in Afghanistan are shipped through the main northwestern border crossing, which comes under frequent militant attacks.

US strikes doubled last year, with more than 100 drone operations killing over 670 people, according to an Agence France-Presse tally, and the CIA has said the covert programme has severely disrupted al-Qaeda's leadership.

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Greek debt restructuring would do 'massive harm'

In comments designed to boost confidence in financial markets, Jurgen Stark, executive board member at the European Central Bank, said speculation that Greece is insolvent was a "false assumption".

"I would warn against underestimating the massive harmful effects a debt restructuring would cause for the country involved and for the eurozone as a whole," Mr Stark said, according to Reuters reports.

Global equity markets have been hit this week on fears that Greece could fail to meet debt repayments terms and be forced to call for a second bail-out.

Mr Stark said such a restructuring could lead to contagion. "It is very well conceivable that the risks for financial market stability could spread to other European countries," he said. "The idea that one could then solve a fiscal crisis through a simple debt reduction [from a restructuring] is consequently an illusion."

The ECB executive, who heads up the Bank's economics department, said it would take time for Greece's new economic realities to find support, but warned that a second bail-out would put necessary reforms at risk.

"In the case of Ireland and Portugal there is broad support and accountability. I expect this will soon be the case in Greece as well," he said.

Worries over Greece's troubles pushed UK and US markets lower. The FTSE closed down 19.09 at 5925.87, while in the US the Dow Jones fell 100.17 to 12595.75.

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Court: No right to resist illegal cop entry into home

INDIANAPOLIS | Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry.

"We believe ... a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence," David said. "We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest."

David said a person arrested following an unlawful entry by police still can be released on bail and has plenty of opportunities to protest the illegal entry through the court system. 

The court's decision stems from a Vanderburgh County case in which police were called to investigate a husband and wife arguing outside their apartment.

When the couple went back inside their apartment, the husband told police they were not needed and blocked the doorway so they could not enter. When an officer entered anyway, the husband shoved the officer against a wall. A second officer then used a stun gun on the husband and arrested him.

Professor Ivan Bodensteiner, of Valparaiso University School of Law, said the court's decision is consistent with the idea of preventing violence.

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Bill Clinton Muses About Creating Internet Agency to Combat Falsehoods

EDITOR'S NOTE: I guess Bill feels that we should only believe what is fed to us by the MSM (i.e. Weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq, 911 was an OBL job, etc)!!! What a sick joke!!!

If Bill Clinton had his way, there would be an Internet agency created by the U.S. government or United Nations to debunk malicious rumors that originate and spread online.

"I think it would be a legitimate thing to do," Clinton told CNBC in an interview that aired Friday. He was interviewed alongside Mati Kochavi, a cybersecurity entrepreneur.

Clinton added that if such an agency were ever created, it would have to be "totally transparent" about where its funding came from and would have to be independent.

"Let's just say the U.S. did it. It would have to be an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else because people wouldn't think you were just censoring the news and giving a different falsehood out," he said. 

"That is, it would be like, I don't know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors," he said.

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Social Security deficits now ‘permanent’

WASHINGTON TIMES

Social Security will run a permanent yearly deficit when looking at the program’s tax revenues compared to what it must pay out in benefits, the program’s trustees said Friday in a report that found both the outlook for Social Security and Medicare, the two major federal social safety-net programs, have worsened over the last year.

Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund is now slated to run out of money in 2024, or five years earlier than last year’s projection, while Social Security’s trust fund will be exhausted by 2036, a year earlier than the prior projection.

The trustees stressed that exhaustion of the trust funds doesn’t mean the programs will stop paying all benefits. Social Security could fund about three-fourths of benefits past 2036, and Medicare could pay 90 percent of benefits past 2024 under current trends.

The figures come as Congress and President Obama are wrestling over whether to make major changes to the entitlement spending, and Republicans said the new projections should force the debate to turn in their direction.

“Today’s report makes it clearer than ever that doing nothing is not an option. The failure to act means current as well as future beneficiaries, will face significant cuts even sooner than previously estimated,” said three top House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees both programs.

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US: Wag the Dog

BY WAYNE MADSEN

President Obama anxiously kept the media and the world waiting on the evening of May 1 for what later turned out to be his announcement that he ordered a US Navy SEAL team to attack the compound of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Obama claimed that the SEALs had shot and killed Bin Laden in a firefight.

The reason for the delay of Obama's announcement, according to WMR's sources, had nothing to do with national security but to alert Obama's student supporters at George Washington and Howard universities in Washington, DC to marshal a group of Obama fans to gather at Lafayette Park in front of the White House in a "flash mob" to stage a pep rally for Obama after his announcement. The "Wag the Dog"-inspired demonstration was planned by Obama's political adviser David Plouffe.

MS-NBC's dutiful bleating Obama sycophant, Rachel Maddow, showed a flash mob gathered in Lafayette Park shouting "USA! USA!" while she proceeded to lambast Pakistan for providing sanctuary to Bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders. Of course, Maddow was merely parroting the new neocon line that Pakistan must be the next nation to be rendered like a kosher chicken in the Maddow kitchen.

Plouffe, of course, arranged for brand new American flags to be distributed to the college students for the widely-televised "impromptu" demonstration. The new, just unfolded American flags appeared faster than the new Libyan royalist flags showed up in Benghazi, Libya after the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi.

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Tune In: AE911Truth Appears on TVO

Richard Gage, AIA, founder and president of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, will appear on a panel discussion to be broadcast in Canada tomorrow evening, Friday, May 13, 2011, at 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM Eastern time (5:00 PM and 8:00 PM Pacific) on The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Paikin’s show is broadcast on TVO, based in Toronto, Ontario. TVO is widely regarded as the PBS of Canada, with a more intellectual audience than average. By any measure of media exposure, AE911Truth’s appearance on the show is an important step in challenging those few public supporters of the official conspiracy theory of 9/11/01.

However, judge for yourself the intellectual promise of this particular show. TVO’s website advertises it thus:

It’s All a Conspiracy

Birthers. Truthers. People who don’t believe that US President Obama is American-born. People who don’t believe that Osama bin Laden was killed. What is behind the steady rise of conspiracy theorists?

We expect any show introduced this way to do everything it can to downplay, misinterpret, and distract from the key evidence of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers destroyed on 9/11.

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Blair’s Iraq dossier was intended as a case for war, claims official

LONDON—A former British intelligence official says he came under strong pressure to find evidence to back up the government’s case for war in Iraq.

The Iraq Inquiry headed by Sir John Chilcot on Thursday released a letter from Maj. Gen. Michael Laurie in which he disputed testimony by Alistair Campbell, who was then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of communications.

Campbell had told the inquiry that the dossier asserting that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction was an explanation of Blair’s concerns and “not the case for war.”

“I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used,” said Laurie, who was director general of intelligence collection at the Defence Ministry in 2002 and 2003.

The question of whether the dossier presented to Parliament in September 2002 was “sexed up” has been hotly debated in the aftermath of the invasion and the failure to find any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Laurie said a previous draft “was rejected because it did not make a strong enough case. From then until September we were under pressure to find intelligence that could reinforce the case,” Laurie said.

He said intelligence officials had found no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to weapons of mass destruction, and concluded they had been dismantled, buried or removed from Iraq.

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Judge wants FBI to explain possibly missing Oklahoma City bombing videotapes

A Salt Lake attorney's dogged pursuit of videotapes associated with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that he believes the FBI has withheld from the public gained momentum from a federal judge Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups ruled Jesse Trentadue raised enough questions that he wants the government to explain why it hasn't searched all possible databases and evidence rooms where the tapes might be stored. He posed a list of questions he wants the FBI to answer by June 30.

"It's crucial that they don't deny they exist, only that 'we can't find them. Trust us,'" Trentadue said after the hearing.

At issue is whether the FBI adequately responded to Trentadue's Freedom of Information Act request for footage of Timothy McVeigh parking a truckload of explosives at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Specifically, Trentadue is after Murrah Building surveillance tape and dashcam video from the Oklahoma state trooper who stopped McVeigh 90 minutes after the deadly explosion.

"They can't just say we looked and looked really hard and we can't find it," Trentadue told the judge.

But Department of Justice attorney Kathryn Wyer said the FBI conducted a reasonable search of files where the records were likely to be stored and provided him 30 videotapes and 200 documents. She said he has no evidence that there is more, calling it "mere speculation."

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