Drug-War Assassinations

by Jacob G. Hornberger
October 30, 2009 - The U.S. government has now extended its assassination program to the drug war. According to the New York Times, the Pentagon now has an assassination list for suspected drug dealers in Afghanistan. No arrests. No hearings. No attorneys. No judges. No trials. Just kill them. Great! So now the occupation of Afghanistan has expanded not only to CIA drone assassinations but also now to Pentagon’s drug-war assassinations...
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Be Prepared for the Worst

Ron Paul - Forbes October 31, 2009
The large-scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly.

Any number of pundits claim that we have now passed the worst of the recession. Green shoots of recovery are supposedly popping up all around the country, and the economy is expected to resume growing soon at an annual rate of 3% to 4%. Many of these are the same people who insisted that the economy would continue growing last year, even while it was clear that we were already in the beginning stages of a recession.

A false recovery is under way. I am reminded of the outlook in 1930, when the experts were certain that the worst of the Depression was over and that recovery was just around the corner. The economy and stock market seemed to be recovering, and there was optimism that the recession, like many of those before it, would be over in a year or less. Instead, the interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt caused the Depression to worsen, and the Dow Jones industrial average did not recover to 1929 levels until 1954. I fear that our stimulus and bailout programs have already done too much to prevent the economy from recovering in a natural manner and will result in yet another asset bubble.

Anytime the central bank intervenes to pump trillions of dollars into the financial system, a bubble is created that must eventually deflate. We have seen the results of Alan Greenspan’s excessively low interest rates: the housing bubble, the explosion of subprime loans and the subsequent collapse of the bubble, which took down numerous financial institutions. Rather than allow the market to correct itself and clear away the worst excesses of the boom period, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury colluded to put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars. Those banks and financial institutions that took on the largest risks and performed worst were rewarded with billions in taxpayer dollars, allowing them to survive and compete with their better-managed peers.
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One Hundred Years of funny money and other disasters

On the causal relation between fiat money and warfare state: An Address
by Antal E. Fekete, October 28, 2009

The year 2009 will most likely expire without commemorating the centenary of a most momentous event in history that figures prominently as the main cause of the Great Financial Crisis of the century.

This event was the so-called legal tender legislation in 1909. The bank notes of both the Banque de France and the Reichsbank of Germany were made legal tender by law, first in France and then, a very short time later, also in Imperial Germany.

The rest of the world followed suit. In this way all roadblocks were removed in the way of financing the coming world war through credits and monetizing the resulting debt through the issuance of bank notes.

One unintended effect was that all efforts to avert the war and the concomitant great bloodshed and destruction of property through better diplomacy were short-circuited. The war parties in both countries had won a great victory. The cause of peace suffered a decisive defeat. Read all

Sacked – For Telling The Truth About Drugs

The Government's drugs tsar was forced to resign last night for stating his view that cannabis, ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol.

The Home Secretary Alan Johnson asked Professor David Nutt to resign as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), saying he had "lost confidence" in his ability to give impartial advice.' Read more...

Stupid CIA Coup in Honduras Fails

Source: Americas MexicoBlog

Last night, Oct. 29, Honduras' de facto regime finally agreed to allow Congress to vote to "restore full executive power prior to June 28".
Conceding to international and national pressure, the Honduran coup appears to be facing its final days.

June 28 was the date when the Armed Forces kidnapped the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, and forcibly exiled him to Costa Rica. If the agreement brokered this week holds, the Honduran resistance movement will have turned the ugly precedent of a modern-day military coup d'etat into an example of the strength of nonviolent grassroots resistance.

The Victory
The points of the agreement are the same ones that the de facto regime has rejected since talks began in San Jose, Costa Rica. By last week, there was supposedly agreement on all points except the reinstatement of Zelaya.Although the decision to restore Zelaya to power must receive a non-binding opinion from the Supreme Court and then be approved in Congress, it appears to be a done deal. Zelaya's team reportedly had the support of members from the UD Party, 20 members of the Liberal Party and more recently the support of the National Party to revoke the decree that was issued to justify his removal from office. That decree was originally accompanied by a forged letter of resignation that was immediately denounced.

President Zelaya expressed "satisfaction" at the agreement. Zelaya's negotiating team had agreed long before on the terms of the revised San Jose Accords, and negotiations were hung up on the coup's refusal to allow reinstatement of the president. The terms are:

• Creation of a government of national reconciliation that includes cabinet members from both sides
• Suspension of any possible vote on holding a Constitutional Assembly until after Jan. 27, when Zelaya's term ends
• A general amnesty for political crimes was rejected by both sides
• Command of the Armed Forces to be placed under the Electoral Tribunal during the month prior to the elections.
• Restitution of Zelaya to the presidency
• Creation of a Verification Commission to follow up on the accords, consisting of two members of the OAS, and one member each from the constitutional government and the coup regime
• Creation of a Truth Commission to begin work in 2010
• Revoke sanctions against Honduras following the accords

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War crimes arrest awaiting Olmert's UK visit

30 Oct 2009 Former Israeli premier Ehud Olmert would probably face arrest on war crime charges if he visited Britain, a leading British newspapers has quoted a lawyer as saying. "Neither Olmert nor Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister during the Cast Lead offensive, and a member of Israel's war cabinet, would enjoy immunity from prosecution for alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions," the Middle East editor of The Guardian, Ian Black, quoted Daniel Machover as saying. Read all

9yr-old boy tortured, says former Guantanamo detainee

'I was interrogated hundreds of times by the FBI, CIA and even MI5, beaten, and subjected to continuous torture, sexual degradation, forced drugging and religious persecution.'
30 Oct 2009 A British Muslim detained for three years at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison manned by the United States, revealed that the youngest detainee he knew of was a nine-year-old boy who was also tortured like the rest.

Ruhal Ahmed’s story was among more accounts of atrocities committed against the detainees at Guantanamo, told before an open commission hearing which began Friday on the sidelines of an international conference to criminalise war.

The testimonies before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission Hearings will be submitted to a tribunal in conjunction with the Criminalise War Conference and War Crimes Tribunal 2009 spearheaded by former Malaysian prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Dr Mahathir said that the tribunal’s decision would be forwarded to the United Nations for further action.
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Update: FBI documents reveal secret CIA prisoners ‘manacled to the ceiling’