Obama Reverses on 9/11 Trials

Editor's note: I'm so tired of the lies and deception. Obama never intended to try these cases in a civilian court room! The US would have lost every case! For example, Abu Zubaydah fingered KSM yet both men were waterboarded. Whatever they said would have been thrown out due to the torture they endured. And, let's not forget that Zubaydah is insane. How could he finger anyone? Ditto for KSM --- Did you know KSM actually confessed to killing Jesus? 9/11 was an inside job and the US is sealing its own fate by continuing to perpetuate a colossal fraud on the entire world.

The Obama administration Monday abandoned its effort to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on trial in civilian courts, saying the accused terrorists will instead face military trials at Guantanamo Bay, in the prison President Barack Obama had promised would be closed more than a year ago.

The move, announced by Attorney General Eric Holder on the same day that Mr. Obama formally launched his bid for re-election, marked a significant reversal on an issue that has vexed two successive administrations.

Mr. Holder blamed politics for the continued delay in bringing the defendants to justice.

"We were prepared to bring a powerful case against the 9/11 defendants in federal court," he said, visibly frustrated and striking a defiant tone. "Unfortunately, members of Congress have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantanamo detainees to trial in the United States."

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Fukushima radioactivity hit 7.5m times legal limit

The radioactivity of saltwater near the Fukushima nuclear power plant reached 7.5m times the legal limit last weekend but has since declined, its operator reported on Tuesday as Japan made a rare appeal for Russian help to cope with the contaminated waste.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) insisted that iodine, caesium and other radionuclides were being diluted to safe levels in the Pacific, but the firm's inability to stem the leak has prompted concern among fishermen, seafood consumers and neighbouring countries.

The data was taken from an area closer to the intake pipe of the cracked No 2 reactor than previous lower readings further out to sea. Publication was held back for several days at the insistence of nuclear safety authorities who wanted Tepco to check its numbers after an earlier botched release.

The latest figures show levels of radioactive iodine fell from 7.5m times the legal standard on Saturday to 5m times on Monday. Monitoring stations located several hundred metres off the coast also showed contamination has fallen to about 1,000 times the standard, compared with 4,000 last week.

Tepco said even the large amounts would have "no immediate impact" on the environment, though the chief government spokesman, Yukio Edano, has previously warned a prolonged leak could have a huge effect on marine life.

In the latest attempt to stem the radioactive flow, workers will inject "water glass" or sodium silicate on the floor of the cracked pit.

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IMF Says US Must Raise All Taxes, Cut All Entitlements By 35% To Contain Future Budget

In what is either a delayed April Fool's report, or its latest exercise in rhetoric the IMF asks the humorous question: "An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?" The obvious answer is naturally the Fed.

The unobvious answer, according to the IMF, is the impossible: a slashing all of USSA's entitlement benefits by a whopping 35% combined with a hike in all tax rates. From the IMF: "This paper updates existing measures of the U.S. fiscal gap to include federal laws up to and including the mid-December 2010 federal fiscal stimulus.

It then applies the methodology of generational accounting to establish how the burden of adjustment required to attain fiscal sustainability is shared across generations. We find that the U.S. fiscal and generational imbalances are large under plausible parametric assumptions, and, while not much affected by the financial crisis, they have not improved much by the passing of the Final Healthcare Legislation. We find that, under our baseline scenario, a full elimination of the fiscal and generational imbalances would require all taxes to go up and all transfers to be cut immediately and permanently by 35 percent.

A delay in the adjustment makes it more costly." Such drama: have these people really not heard of the Fed. What is rather shocking is that Larry Kotlikoff, who has made it all too clear the US is bankrupt, was used as a consultant: "We are extremely grateful to Lawrence Kotlikoff who acted as a consultant providing unique inspiration, guidance and supervision." Are massively dissenting voices now credible sources of information? What next: Fed white paper citing Zero Hedge?

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Bradley Manning case: British moral authority 'at risk'

British diplomats will express with officials in Washington for a second time MPs' concerns about the treatment of a US soldier charged with leaking thousands of sensitive cables to WikiLeaks, the government has confirmed.

Foreign Office minister Henry Bellingham said staff at the British embassy in Washington would discuss Bradley Manning's detention with the US state department.

Bellingham made the promise after Labour MP Ann Clwyd raised the matter in parliament on Monday night.

Clwyd said Manning, who is charged with downloading 250,000 sensitive cables and passing them to WikiLeaks, had been stripped at night and held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.

His treatment at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia made it more difficult for the US and Britain to campaign against human rights abuses in other countries, she said.

Clwyd, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on human rights, said that the UK's credibility was at risk in "places where human rights are not nearly so well observed."

She called on the government to offer practical support to the British relatives of Manning.

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GMA: Jesse Ventura Talking about WTC 7, 9/11, Gulf of Tonkin, + More

Obama Defends Mandatory Participation in Health-Care Program as Constitutional in Appellate Brief

Editor's note: The mandatory insurance probably won't reduce bankruptcies (as the banksters hope) but it will make private insurance companies a lot more money! It's brilliant for the insurance companies!

The Obama administration filed a brief in federal appeals court defending its health-care law as a valid exercise of congressional power.

The Obama Administration made its filing April 1 in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta in support of the health-care measure, which a federal judge in Pensacola, Florida, struck down in January.

U.S. District Judge C. Roger Vinson ruled in favor of 26 states that had opposed the law, finding the entire legislation invalid. He said the law’s provision requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance coverage exceeded Congress’s power to regulate commerce.

“The minimum coverage provision is a valid exercise of Congress’s commerce power,” the U.S. said in its filing.

Oral arguments in the appeal are scheduled to be heard June 8. The appeals court has denied the states’ request for a full-panel review of Vinson’s decision. A randomly selected three-judge panel will hear the arguments.

States led by Florida sued the Obama Administration the day the president signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010. They charged that it was unconstitutional to require people to purchase health insurance.

Obama won rulings on the law in federal courts in Detroit and Lynchburg, Virginia.

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Presidential Statements

In politics, there are lies, damn lies and presidential statements. Nine days after taking the United States into another immoral, unnecessary, and unconstitutional war based on lies and distortions, President Obama continued to compound and expand the deceit. Everything about this action has been a lie, from the claims used to justify the action, to the bogus U.N. resolution crafted to give it an air of legality, to the implementation of the phony "no-fly zone."

It should now be clear to anyone that the United States has intervened in a Libyan civil war on the side of the rebels. Just a day after President Obama said this action was not about removing Muammar Gadhafi from power by force, Secretary of State Clinton said the United States and our allies were considering arming the rebels, an action which would be a violation of the U.N. resolution that supposedly authorized this attack.

Obama claimed, without presenting any evidence, that we had to act in order to prevent the "slaughter of civilians" and incredibly declared that to do otherwise would be a "betrayal of who we are." Launching a massive attack on a sovereign nation which has not attacked or threatened us is the real and the greatest betrayal of who we are. It is a despicable act of aggression and an outright act of war.

Once again, the United States military is engaging in a policy to "destroy the village in order to save it." What is unclear is exactly who are we saving it from. Obama said he "refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action." But, he’s apparently perfectly content to be responsible for images of the mangled bodies of innocents killed by the "collateral damage" of American bombs, missiles and aircraft, and the body-bags filled with brave American soldiers.

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Libya and the Obama Cult

It seems like only yesterday that I wrote the following: 

"We are already half way down the slippery slope of Libya’s internal turmoil, and we’re in so deep at this point that I cannot see our way out for quite some time. The President is reported to have told congressional leaders that the intervention should last "days, not weeks," and this is the biggest lie of all, a lie the President is apparently telling himself as well as us. We now own Libya’s insurrection: its fate belongs to us, and we’ll be wearing that albatross around our necks for quite some time to come."

Heck, it was only yesterday, come to think of it. The same day someone in the Obama administration leaked the news that the CIA has had its boots on Libyan ground for at least the past three weeks. I can’t say I’m shocked, but some people are: 

"It’s so surreal, so discordant with what the president has told the American people, so fantastically contrary to everything he campaigned on, that I will simply wait for more confirmation than this before commenting further. I simply cannot believe it." 

Believe it, Mary – and get over it. And by "it," I mean devotion to the cult of Obama, the hypnotizing effect of which has blinded his partisans to the reality that they’ve been conned – big time.  

Of course Libya is crawling with CIA, as well as British, French, and Italian spooks, and what they’re gathering is a lot more than "intelligence": they’re out there collecting potential "leaders" among the rebels, choosing up sides, determining who will go on the payroll and who will be quietly sidelined or eliminated.

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Report: BP to restart deepwater drilling in Gulf

BP will restart deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a U.K. newspaper reported on Sunday, a year after one of the petroleum giant's wells exploded and leaked more than 200 million gallons of oil.

In a deal made with American regulators, the company promised to abide by safety requirements that are stricter than guidelines set after the April 11 blast on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers, The Sunday Times reported without citing its sources. The accident, which released almost 5 billion barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, was the largest marine spill in history.

The oil slick produced by the spill, estimated to be more than 130 miles long and 70 miles wide, wreaked havoc along the coastlines of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

Story: Transocean gives safety bonuses despite Gulf spill deaths

BP will start in July but not be allowed to drill exploratory wells. The company has over 20 deepwater fields in the area, according to the newspaper.

Environmental campaigner Greenpeace responded to the report by saying that if true, it was "a poke in the eye not only to the environment but to investors," and a sign that despite management changes at BP little had fundamentally changed at the oil giant since the disaster.

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U.S. Government Under Fire as Radiation Is Found in Milk, Rain

BAY CITIZEN

Radiation from Japan rained on Berkeley during recent storms at levels that exceeded drinking water standards by 181 times and has been detected in multiple milk samples, but the U.S. government has still not published any official data on nuclear fallout here from the Fukushima disaster.

Dangers from radiation that is wafting over the United States from the Fukushima power plant disaster and falling with rain have been downplayed by government officials and others, who say its impacts are so fleeting and minor as to be negligible.

But critics say an absence of federal data on the issue is hampering efforts to develop strategies for preventing radioactive isotopes from accumulating in the nation's food and water supplies.

Three weeks after the Fukushima nuclear power plant began spewing radiation into the world’s air, the U.S. government still has not revealed the amount of iodine-131 or other radioactive elements that have fallen as precipitation or made their way into milk supplies or drinking water.

“The official mantra from a lot of folks in government is, ‘Oh, it’s OK in low levels,’” said Patty Lovera, a Washington-based assistant director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch.

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Engineers fail to seal leak at Japan nuclear plant

Engineers tried to stem a leak of highly radioactive water spilling into the Pacific with a new method Sunday after concrete failed to seal the crack at a Japanese nuclear power plant incapacitated by last month's earthquake-spawned tsunami. A search of site found no other leaks.

The wave has carved a path of destruction up and down the northeastern coast and is believed to have killed 25,000 people. The first deaths at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant itself, though, were confirmed Sunday by the operator. A 21-year-old and a 24-year-old were conducting regular checks at the complex when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit March 11.

"It pains us to have lost these two young workers who were trying to protect the power plant amid the earthquake and tsunami," Tokyo Electric Power Co. Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata said in a statement.

The bodies were not discovered until Wednesday and had to be decontaminated. The announcement was delayed while authorities notified their families, TEPCO spokesman Kazufumi Suzuki said.

Since the tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems and reactors began to dangerously overheat, a series of almost daily problems has led to substantial amounts of radiation leaking into the atmosphere, ground and sea in the world's worst nuclear crisis since the 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union.

On Saturday, authorities discovered a crack from which radioactive water was spilling into the Pacific — the first time they identified a direct source of sea contamination. The ultimate source of the water is believed to be the reactor cores.

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How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs

On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

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Canadian inspection agency refuses to test milk for radiation

Canadian health agencies have no immediate plans to measure the amount of radiation in milk following Japan's nuclear crisis despite the demands of B.C. dairy farmers who want officials to follow the U.S. and test dairy products.

"There will be no testing of milk," Alice Danjou, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said Friday.

The news came as a disappointment to Robin Smith, executive director of the BC Milk Producers Association, which earlier this week called on the agency to test the milk in an effort to prove to the public the levels are low enough to consume.

Smith raised his concerns after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday it had found traces of radioactive iodine in milk in Spokane, Wash., about 600 kilometres southeast of Vancouver. But the agency stressed that the levels were 5,000 times below those considered dangerous.

"If there is radioactive iodine in the milk we want to know about it," said Smith.

"This is a $400-million-a-year industry -the biggest farm industry in British Columbia -and milk goes to every household, so we're really concerned about that. We don't want people thinking there is something wrong with it when there isn't."

Although negligible amounts of radiation have been found on the West Coast, Health Canada and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission -the bodies responsible for monitoring radiation levels -say the measurements they are seeing "pose absolutely no risk to people, plants or animals in Canada," said Danjou.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Canadian+inspection+agency+refuses+test+milk+radiation/4548777/story.html#ixzz1IOzC4A3k

Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch from the Fed’s “discount window” lending program, according to Fed documents released yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion.

The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record. The disclosures may stoke a reexamination of the risks posed to U.S. taxpayers by the central bank’s role in global financial markets.

“The caricature of the Fed is that it was shoveling money to big New York banks and a bunch of foreigners, and that is not conducive to its long-run reputation,” said Vincent Reinhart, the Fed’s director of monetary affairs from 2001 to 2007.

Commercial Paper

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ATF, DOJ, DHS: Accomplices To Murder?

Alicia Hope

An accomplice is someone who knowingly, voluntarily, and with common interest, participates in the commission of a crime, and can be charged with the same crime(s) for which the accused will be tried; complicity means association in a wrongful act; principal means anyone involved in committing a crime; an accessory before the fact aids, incites, or abets but is not physically present; an accessory after the fact receives, comforts, relieves, or assists a felon to avoid apprehension and conviction.

Complicity is a concept that can be abused by prosecutors. Only a few basic restrictions exist: (1) the law does not recognize accomplices to any misdemeanor or the crime of treason; (2) an accomplice must normally be physically present during commission of the crime, but advice or words of encouragement beforehand as well as providing material assistance afterwards will create a liability; (3) no one can be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice alone; and (4) persons giving post-crime aid are punished less severely than those furnishing precrime aid.

Case law has ruled the following are examples of accomplice actus reus:

(1) acting as a lookout

(2) providing guns, supplies, or instruments of crime (even under color of financial transaction if seller is aware of purpose)

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Entomb? Cement pumps flown in to nuke plant

 Some of the world's largest cement pumps were en route to Japan's stricken nuclear plant on Thursday, initially to help douse areas with water but eventually for cement work — including the possibility of entombing the site as was done in Chernobyl.

Operated via remote control, one of the truck-mounted pumps was already at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site and being used to spray water. Four more will be flown in from Germany and the United States, according to the German-manufacturer Putzmeister. The biggest of the five has an arm that extends well over 200 feet.

"Initially, they will probably pump water," Putzmeister stated. "Later they will be used for any necessary concreting work."

A construction company in Augusta, Ga., was among those redirecting the pumps to Japan. Its owner said he believes building a concrete sarcophagus will follow.

"Our understanding is they are preparing to go to next phase and it will require a lot of concrete," Jerry Ashmore told the Augusta Chronicle.

He did not expect the pump to return. "It will be too hot to come back," Ashmore said.

A cargo plane is expected to fly the truck and pump from Atlanta next week at a cost of $1.4 million.

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WTO Says U.S. Gave at Least $5.3 Billion Illegal Aid to Boeing

Boeing Co. (BA) received at least $5.3 billion in illegal U.S. subsidies that gave it an unfair advantage over rival Airbus SAS, World Trade Organization judges ruled, backing a European Union complaint.

Judges in Geneva today confirmed previously confidential findings that the U.S. provided aid to Chicago-based Boeing through federal research grants and state support in developing aircraft including the 787 Dreamliner. Airbus parent European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. said the aid to Boeing cost it $45 billion in lost sales and lower prices from 2002 to 2006.

The panel report, which comes nine months after the WTO concluded Airbus had received billions of euros in low-interest government loans from European governments, is the latest ruling in the six-year-old dispute between the world’s two largest commercial planemakers and may encourage the U.S. and the EU to negotiate a settlement.

“This report shows that Boeing has received huge subsidies in the past and continues to receive significant subsidies,” EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said in a statement in Brussels. “These subsidies have resulted in substantial harm to EU interests, causing Airbus to lose sales, depress its aircraft prices and unfairly lose market share to Boeing.”

WTO judges ruled on EU arguments that Boeing benefited from more than $10 billion in unfair assistance from both NASA and the U.S. Defense Department. The EU also claimed illegal aid to Boeing by states including Washington, Kansas and Illinois.

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C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.

While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.

American officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers — including the location of Colonel Qaddafi’s munitions depots and the clusters of government troops inside towns — might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.

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Caesium fallout from Fukushima rivals Chernobyl

Radioactive caesium and iodine has been deposited in northern Japan far from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, at levels that were considered highly contaminated after Chernobyl.

The readings were taken by the Japanese science ministry, MEXT, and reveal high levels of caesium-137 and iodine-131 outside the 30-kilometre evacuation zone, mostly to the north-north-west.

Iodine-131, with a half-life of eight days, should disappear in a matter of weeks. The bigger worry concerns caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years and could pose a health threat for far longer. Just how serious that will be depends on where it lands, and whether remediation measures are possible.

The US Department of Energy has been surveying the area with an airborne gamma radiation detector. It reports that most of the "elevated readings" are within 40 kilometres of the plant, but that "an area of greater radiation extending north-west… may be of interest to public safety officials".

Caesium contamination

An analysis of MEXT's data by New Scientist shows just how elevated the levels are. After the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the most highly contaminated areas were defined as those with over 1490 kilobecquerels (kBq) of caesium per square metre. Produce from soil with 550 kBq/m² was destroyed.

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Tepco Workers Threatened by Heat Bursts; Sea Radiation Rises

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s damaged nuclear plant may be in danger of emitting sudden bursts of heat and radiation, undermining efforts to cool the reactors and contain fallout.

The potential for limited, uncontrolled chain reactions, voiced yesterday by the International Atomic Energy Agency, is among the phenomena that might occur, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo today. The IAEA “emphasized that the nuclear reactors won’t explode,” he said.

Three workers at a separate Japanese plant received high doses of radiation in 1999 from a similar nuclear reaction, known as ‘criticality.’ Two of them died within seven months.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant’s operator, and Japan’s nuclear watchdog, dismissed the threat of renewed nuclear reactions, three weeks after an earthquake and tsunami triggered an automatic shutdown. Tokyo Electric has been spraying water on the reactors since the March 11 disaster in an effort to cool nuclear fuel rods.

“The reactors are stopped, so it’s hard to imagine re- criticality,” occurring, Tsuyoshi Makigami, a spokesman for the utility, told a news conference today.

A partial meltdown of fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the IAEA, said at a press conference in Vienna. This might increase the danger to workers at the site.

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