From The BBC News

Iranian riot police are reported to have arrested a number of pro-reform protesters in Tehran after demonstrations turned violent.

Police clashed with hundreds of people marching despite a ban on public gatherings since the disputed election in June, Reuters news agency said.

The re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked widespread protests and allegations of vote-rigging.

Defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi has continued to contest the result.

Mr Mousavi has issued statements opposing the election result, saying detention of protesters would not end opposition.

Power protest

The latest reports of clashes in the streets came as pro-reform supporters planned to stage a new form of protest.

Activists are being urged to turn off lights and domestic appliances at 2055 local time (1625 GMT).

Five minutes later, at 2100, they then plan to switch on appliances that consume large amounts of electricity, such as irons, toasters and microwave ovens.

Read more Iran Protests

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 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 »

From The Guardian UK
By Chris McGreal

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 of 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.

A former intelligence official said the plan was hatched in the cauldron of the September 11 attacks when officials were pushing various forms of unilateral action and some settled on the Israelis as an example.

“One of the most sensitive areas has been what we do in friendly countries that don’t want to cooperate or maybe we don’t have enough confidence to entrust them with information. If you have an al-Qaida guy wandering around certain bits of the world we might decide that we need to deal with that ourselves, directly, without making a lot of noise,” he said. “There was a plan to deal with that. It was much talked about in the CIA and the military had its own operation.”

Read more Assassinations

From Harpers
By Scott Horton

Often enough, commentators talk about the prospect that some foreign prosecutors will open criminal cases against Americans involved in some of the Bush Administration’s criminal enterprises, such as the operation of the torture black sites. But such cases are not speculative. They are already pending, and the most advanced of them is now coming close to the conclusion of the trial phase. In Milan, Italian prosecutors are pursuing kidnapping and assault charges against 26 American officials—CIA officers, diplomats, and a military attaché—in connection with the seizure and torture of a radical Islamic cleric known as Abu Omar. According to some observers, the case will conclude by the end of the summer.

Now Robert Seldon Lady, the former Milan station chief of the CIA and a key defendant in the case, has surfaced with an extended interview in Il Giornale, an Italian newspaper.

According to a translation by the Associated Press, Lady has set up a defense that sounds remarkably familiar: he was just following orders.

”I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors,” Lady was quoted as saying by Il Giornale. “It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair. I find consolation in reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was at war with terrorism, and that I could not discuss the orders I received,” he was quoted as saying. “I have worked in intelligence for 25 years, and almost none of my activities in these 25 years were legal in the country in which I was carrying them out.”

Read more Orders

From NY Times
By Paul Krugman

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Read more Planet

From Information Clearing House
By Johann Hari

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

Here’s the story of how it happened – and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru’s right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country’s swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon’s trees: “There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle.”

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia’s plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn’t bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: “My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests.” The company denies liability, saying they are “aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts”.

Read more Amazon

From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes.

An earlier report, by John Hendren in The Los Angeles Times indicted other torture killings. And Human Rights First says nearly 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hendren reported that one Manadel Jamadi died “of blunt-force injuries” complicated by “compromised respiration” at Abu Ghraib prison “while he was with Navy SEALs and other special operations troops.” Another victim, Abdul Jaleel, died while gagged and shackled to a cell door with his hands over his head.” Yet another prisoner, Maj. Gen. Abid Mowhosh, former commander of Iraq’s air defenses, “died of asphyxiation due to smothering and chest compression” in Qaim, Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »