From The Consortium News
By Jason Leopold

The Obama administration asserted a legal argument that a federal judge called the Jon Stewart “Daily Show exemption,” as the Justice Department continued a court fight to protect ex-Vice President Dick Cheney from disclosures about his role in the leak of a CIA officer’s identity six years ago.

At a federal court hearing Tuesday, Jeffrey Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that the transcript of Cheney’s 2004 interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA leak should remain secret for as long as 10 more years.

Last month, Smith cited the possibility that the transcript’s release might discourage future vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigations because their words could become “fodder for The Daily Show.”

When Smith revived that argument on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan said, “You’re getting back to the Daily Show exemption. You’re not going back there, are you?”

A skeptical Sullivan asked Smith, “How do you distinguish the political fray from the public’s right to know what the government is up to?”

Smith said he was simply arguing that high-level officials like Cheney would be unwilling to speak to criminal investigators if there was a chance that what they said privately would become public. “Presidents don’t really have to cooperate if they really don’t want to,” Smith said.

Read more Cheney

From In These Times
By James Thindwa

The Republican Party’s recent passion for “democracy” in the Middle East has been on full display. Republican leaders have called for unqualified support for Iranian demonstrators, condemned the Iranian regime and castigated President Obama for not speaking out more forcefully.

Beating the drums for democracy can be inspiring, but, in international affairs, the credibility of the messenger is as important as the message itself.

Setting aside their foolish demands for direct U.S. intervention in Iranian elections, Republican leaders are the wrong messengers for democracy—especially in the Middle East. Their post-9/11 disdain for Arabs and Islam, complicity in the illegal war in Iraq, and profound disregard for Palestinian rights makes them ill-suited to champion democracy in the region. Another disqualifying offense is that Republicans have all but declared war on democracy at home.

Throughout the Bush era, the GOP freely indulged its leaders’ anti-democratic impulses. Unfazed by constitutional constraints, the party leaders rammed the Patriot Act through a cowed and compliant Congress. Now, as they call for more street protests in Tehran, Republicans seem oblivious to the restrictions that law has imposed on American protesters.

The Patriot Act’s “disruptor” crime category gives the Secret Service wide latitude to charge protesters for “disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics.” It also empowers the Secret Service to charge people with “breaching security” and for “entering a restricted area,” which is “where the President or other personnel are protected by the Secret Service [when they are] or will be temporarily visiting.”

Read more GOP

From The Public Record
By Thomas D. Williams

Despite years of ongoing, critical public health controversies in Colombia and Ecuador over the US-assisted aerial herbicide spraying of coca and poppy crops while trying to reduce illegal cocaine and heroin production, US State Department officials are pursuing that very same spraying strategy.

In fact, last year, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s administration temporarily cast aside the latest of several State Department exhortations to begin massive herbal spraying operations on poppy crops producing heroin there.

Colombian aerosol dusting of a mix of Roundup Ultra, Cosmo-Flux and other plant-penetrating agents began seven years ago. (In 2006 alone, the United Nations reported the spraying of approximately 172,025 hectares of coca crops, producing cocaine. That equals a bit over 664 square miles.)

In the meantime, untold thousands of Colombians and Ecuadorians have become sick from the blended chemical spray. Studies have shown the environmental dangers of inhalation and skin and eye saturation of the floating mist. And critically valuable maize, yucca and plantains have been destroyed in large swaths of the fertile country.

For years, DynCorp International of Fort Worth, Texas, has had the lucrative US multimillion-dollar annual contract for Colombian aerial spraying operations.

The company is being sued in Washington, DC, and US District Court by a class of 3,000 Ecuadorians who claim spray blown over the border from Colombia has sickened them.

Read more Spraying

From Global Research
By F. William Engdahl

The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has just signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. Moreover, the $7 billion US Government fast-track program to rush vaccines onto the market in time for the Autumn flu season is being done without even normal safety testing. Is there another agenda at work in the official WHO hysteria campaign to declare so-called H1N1 virus—which has yet to be rigorously scientifically isolated, characterized and photographed with an electron microscope—the scientifically accepted procedure—a global “pandemic” threat?

The current official panic campaign over alleged Swine Flu danger is rapidly taking on the dimensions of a George Orwell science fiction novel. The document signed by Sebelius grants immunity to those making a swine flu vaccine, under the provisions of a 2006 law for public health emergencies.

Not so sage SAGE

That is once the WHO in Geneva, on recommendation of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group on Immunizations, declared H1N1 to be Phase 6 or Pandemic, automatic emergency health response programs could be activated even in countries such as Germany where reported outbreaks of even “suspected” H1N1 can be counted to date on the fingers of slightly more than one hand.

The WHO’s SAGE is also worth scrutiny. Its Chairman since 2005 has been the UK Director of Immunization at the British Department of Health, Dr David Salisbury. In the 1980’s Salisbury reportedly drew major fire for backing a massive vaccination of children with a multiple MMR vaccine manufactured by the predecessor company of GlaxoSmithKline. That vaccine was pulled off the market in Japan after significant numbers of children developed adverse reactions to the vaccine and the Japanese government was forced to pay significant compensation to the victims. In Sweden the MMR vaccine of GlaxoSmithKline was removed after scientists linked it to outbreaks of Crohn’s disease. Apparently that had little impact on WHO SAGE chairman Salisbury.

Read more Immunity

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

On February 24, Barack Obama told a joint session of Congress that “we must….address the crushing cost of health care….caus(ing) a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds. By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes. In (each of) the last eight years….one million….Americans have lost their health insurance….Given these facts, we can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold….health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.”

Behind the facade of reform, Obama and leading Democrats ruled universal, single-payer coverage off the table before debate even began. Instead they’ve focused on taxing more, rationing care, placing profits above human need, disdaining vital change, shifting the cost burden to individuals and requiring everyone to be insured; imposing fines up to $1000 for non-compliance, and making a broken system even worse.

On June 10, Physicians for a National Health Program advisor Walter Tsou told the House Education and Labor Committee:

“Attempting to reconcile the dual imperatives of universal coverage and cost control through alternative methods besides single payer is an exercise in futility. When some congressional leaders declare that single payer is off the table, they are in effect saying that insurers will be protected, leaving the pain to patients, taxpayers and health care providers.”

At the same hearing, the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee co-president Geri Jenkins said:

“The current system rations care based on an ability to pay. Right now we are the only nation on earth that barters human life for money.” Read the rest of this entry »

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Very soon, Congressional leaders are expected to announce the creation of a new commission to investigate the real causes of America’s crippling financial disaster. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that this investigative panel will be modeled on the legendary “Pecora Commission,” which held a series of hearings on Capitol Hill in 1933 that arraigned the nation’s biggest bankers and stock swindlers before an angry and suffering people. Named for Ferdinand Pecora, the cigar-chomping New York prosecutor who oversaw the proceedings, those confrontations mobilized public support for the financial reforms of the New Deal – which curbed the excesses of Wall Street’s overclass until they were overturned a decade ago.

But unless the Speaker and her colleagues summon much greater courage than they have displayed to date, any comparisons to the Pecora investigation will only highlight the failure of the Democrats to live up to their heritage. The way to begin to understand that incipient disappointment is with a short history lesson, and the way to start that lesson is to note that the Pecora “commission” was not really a commission at all, in the sense that we have come to understand that term – meaning an excuse for politicians to avoid their responsibilities by palming them off on a group of unelected appointees.

No, the Pecora commission was nothing like that. The so-called commission was in fact the Senate Banking and Currency Committee itself, which under Republican leadership had undertaken a desultory investigation of the 1929 Crash and the onset of the Great Depression that had dragged on for a year or so without much progress. That changed with the election of 1932, which sent Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House and gave control of the United States Senate, including the Banking Committee, to the Democrats. In January 1933, Pecora had been appointed to write up the weak and incomplete findings of his three predecessors – but the Senate Democrats, with the encouragement of the new president, encouraged him to continue and extend the committee’s investigation.

Read more Toothless

From TruthDig
By Robert Scheer

Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?

Well, because that was the plan, as devised by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Remember that Lehman Brothers, Goldman’s competitor, was allowed to go bankrupt. The Paulson crowd wouldn’t let Lehman change its status to that of a bank holding company and thus qualify for federal funds; soon afterward, Goldman was granted just such a deal, worth a quick $10 billion. Much is now made of Goldman paying back part of its bailout money, but forgotten is the $12.9 billion that Goldman got as its cut of the $180 billion AIG payoff. That is money that will not be paid back.

Goldman is considered a very smart bank because it was early in reducing its exposure to the mortgage derivatives that in large part caused the meltdown. However, it had done much to expand the market and continued to sell suspect derivatives to unwary buyers as sound investments, even as Goldman divested. The firm still holds $1.85 billion in real estate and lost $499 million in the previous quarter on bad loans, but made up for it by playing the vulture role and issuing high-interest debt to governments and companies made desperate by the recession that the financial gimmicks of the banks brought on in the first place.

And Goldman was not just another bank. Before Paulson ran the Treasury Department, another former Goldman head, Robert Rubin, pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall controls on banking activity. While some now play down the significance of this radical deregulation, not so Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein—at least not back in June 2007, when the markets were still doing well. “If you take an historical perspective,” Blankfein told The New York Times by way of explaining his company’s spectacular success at the time, “we’ve come full circle, because that is exactly what the Rothschilds or J.P. Morgan the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act.”

Read more Striking Gold

From BuzzFlash

Stepping up a campaign for Federal Reserve accountability, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) today questioned whether some of more than $2.2 trillion in secret subsidies went to Goldman Sachs and other bailed-out banks now planning to shower executives with huge bonuses.

Sanders voiced his concern in a letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and during remarks at an Economic Policy Institute conference.

Goldman Sachs yesterday reported that its profits surged on second-quarter income of $3.44 billion. The turnaround came less than a year after reckless investments by Goldman and other Wall Street firms triggered a worldwide recession and drove many rivals out of business.

With the good times rolling again on Wall Street, Goldman repaid its $10 billion taxpayer bailout and now plans to dole out the biggest bonuses in its 140-year history. The investment bank reportedly plans to pay as much as $20 billion this year in bonuses and other compensation, about $700,000 per employee. Goldman is one of 10 big banks that announced plans to return bailout funds so they could evade restrictions on executive compensation and bonuses.

“The question I have is how do we know that right after Goldman and other banks pay back billions to the Treasury, the Federal Reserve doesn’t turn around and provide them with billions more with no strings attached?” Sanders asked. “The answer is that we don’t know. Ben Bernanke refuses to say.”
Read the rest of this entry »

From Information Clearing House
By Digby

Pretty much every news outlet has confirmed that the secret CIA program held from Congress by Dick Cheney concerned targeted assassinations of Al Qaeda members abroad, basically the “executive assassination ring” discussed by Sy Hersh earlier this year.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.

I’d like to know more about that Kenya incident. Put it this way, when 15 year-old kids who committed no crime other than being valuable to an Afghan warlord seeking a bounty ended up at Guantanamo, I can only imagine what the fever dreams of Dick Cheney led to out in the world.

But something’s not right here. Targeted assassinations of heads of state are illegal, President Ford signed that in 1975. But Peter Bergen explains that we have had assassination policies on Al Qaeda since before 9-11 and after.

Read more Secret Programs

From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Why are some members of Congress suddenly upset the CIA lied to them when the Agency has been guilty of innumerable crimes that are far worse?

Is Congress saying, “It’s okay to do what you’re doing, just don’t lie to us about it?” When accused of a crime in the newspapers, Jesse James used to write reporters, “I wasn’t there.” Yet it was not lying that he was hunted down for but bank robbery and murder.

Back in 1967, the CIA’s own Inspector General produced a 133-page internal report that implicated “every living CIA officer who has served as chief of the clandestine service—-Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald—in conspiracies to commit murder,” writes investigative journalist Tim Weiner in his book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”(Anchor Books). That was 40 years ago, and the CIA’s path has been downhill ever since.

Now House Intelligence committee Democrats have revealed CIA Director Leon Panetta’s comments that “top CIA officials have concealed significant actions…and misled” Congress since 2001. Actually, the Agency’s been misleading Congress since President Truman authorized it in 1947. CIA lying isn’t news, it’s tradition. So is murder.

After Truman departed, the CIA often took its orders to “terminate” foreign leaders directly from the White House, as when President Kennedy authorized it to kill Castro. Read the rest of this entry »