Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.

By Cory Doctorow 03 Nov 2009

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says that: *ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. *ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. *

The whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright. *Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose... Read all

Martial Law Declared In Ukraine Over Mystery Epidemic

Arrest of objectors ordered as President says "We must change the entire system of government in Ukraine"

Steve Watson Infowars.net -Thursday, Nov 5, 2009

Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko has all but declared martial law in the country as he announced yesterday that the National Security and Defense Council will become the supreme ruling authority in the wake of a mystery epidemic sweeping the country.

Quote of the day

"To understand why the GDP numbers could be so good when the economy all around looks so bad, it is necessary to understand a few pertinent details of the GDP calculation. It is necessary to see just what meat and meat by-products go into this economic sausage. For one thing, GDP includes government spending...but does not SUBTRACT any of the borrowing the government does to fund its spending. And obviously, government spending is in no way a reflection of private sector economic activity." http://www.dailyreckoning.com/

Puppet Uribe gives Colombia to the US plus total immunity for troops.

All the better to manage their cocaine distribution and squash outbreaks of democracy and independence on the South American continent:

In July, Colombia's defense, interior and foreign relations ministers gave a press conference confirming that the United States was negotiating an agreement to establish U.S. military presence at seven military bases in Colombia.

Immediately following the announcement, backlash erupted throughout the region and South American leaders voiced their concern to both the Uribe Administration in Colombia and the Obama Administration in the United States. In response to much of the criticism and concern, Colombian President Uribe said he would make the final text of the agreement public as soon as it was available.

After the agreement was signed last Friday, the Colombian State Council "found that the agreement gives the US the power to decide what operations will occur, gives immunity to US troops, allows access to bases beyond the 7 bases named in the agreement, and defers the most important questions about military operations to future 'operational agreements.'"

Yesterday, the Uribe government finally published the full text of the agreement. Below are excerpts from the text covering many of the Colombian State Council's concerns. The entire agreement can be read in English here and in Spanish here (PDF). Read all

USAF: ‘Overwhelm Enemy [Brains] w/ Bioscience

By Katie Drummond November 4, 2009

The Air Force is looking to harness advances in bio-science so they can “degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive abilities.” It’s all part of a $49 million dollar bio-research effort unveiled last month by the Air Force Research Lab’s “Human Effectiveness Directorate,” and it’s the latest in a series of out-there military ideas to mess with adversaries’ heads.

For years, armed forces and intelligence community researchers have toyed with ways of manipulating minds. During the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with acid, weed, and dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments.

In the 1970s and 80s, a small group of special operations soldiers at Ft. Bragg supposedly tried to teach themselves how to kill with psychic power - the basis for the upcoming movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. In 1994, one Air Force researcher proposed spraying enemies with “strong aphrodisiacs [which] caused homosexual behavior.”

Last year, the National Research Council and Defense Intelligence Agency pushed for pharma-based tactics to weaken enemy forces. This new Air Force project looks to do just that - and boost the cognitive abilities of U.S. troops at the same time. One component of the research effort, called Biobehavioral Performance, is looking for military specimens who are already resistant to physical or mental stressors. By analyzing the biochemical brain pathways of troops who are cool under pressure, the Air Force wants an “external stimulant” that can act as a synthetic version of optimal cognitive stress response and keep airmen operating at top level.

Resisting stress is good, but destroying your enemy with stress is even better. “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities,” the Air Force call for proposals notes. No further details are given. Researchers will just have to be creative, if they want to look for ways to turn military foes insane in the membrane.

ALSO:
Vets Sue CIA Over Mind Control Tests
Defense Spooks: Let’s Control Enemy Minds
Total Recall: Pentagon Looks to ‘Optimize’ Troops’ Minds
Top Pentagon Scientists Fear Brain-Modified Foes
Report: Nonlethal Weapons Could Target Brain, Mimic Schizophrenia …
The Gay Bomb Lives!
Pentagon Explores ‘Human Fear’ Chemicals; Scare-Sensors …
Spooks’ “Behavorial Drug” Experiments Exposed (Updated) http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009...ive-abilities/

£4,350 Per Family to Bail Out Britain’s Banks

The Chancellor confirmed that the Government would pump an extra £25.5 billion into Royal Bank of Scotland, and declared that it was the only way to keep the business alive.

Taxpayers have poured a total of £53.5 billion into RBS, including the £20 billion part-nationalisation last year and another £8 billion that was set aside as insurance against further trouble in the future.In total, the Government has put £74 billion of taxpayers’ money into the banks, including RBS, Lloyds and HBOS, since the start of the financial crisis last year.' Read more...

G20 Meet To Finalize Dumping Of Dollar?

Steve Watson - Infowars.net - Wednesday, Nov 4, 2009

Researcher and author Daniel Estulin, best known for his exposé of the ultra secretive Bilderberg Group, says inside sources have informed him that the core focus of the G20 meeting this weekend will be to discuss ditching the Dollar and implementing a global centralized monetary system.

A press release detailing Estulin’s statements says that G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland, will debate actions to sink the U.S. Dollar, thereby crashing the present world financial system.
The instability and chaos resulting out of such a breakdown would act as a pretext to launch a consolidating new economic world order.

“Estulin says that the success or failure of this callous plan hinges on the ability of the US and UK representatives to convince the Russian, the Chinese and other national governments to go along with their scheme.” The release states.
Estulin first reported on this agenda at this year’s Bilderberg conference held in Greece back in May. According to the author, the elite group has termed the move “demand destruction”.

The Bilderberg Group meeting is an annual confab of around 150 of the world’s most influential powerbrokers in government, industry, banking, media, academia and the military-industrial complex. The secretive group operates under “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no details of what is discussed can ever be leaked to the media, despite editors of the world’s biggest newspapers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times, being present at the meeting.

Insiders at the meeting told Estulin that Bilderberg was divided on whether to put into motion, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

According to the researcher, some Bilderberg insiders fear that the fallout from the chaos of a major crash could ultimately result in a loss of control over the world.
Estulin believes this weekend’s G20 meeting, being held on the site of the 1998 Bilderberg conference, will be used to finalize this deliberation.

The motivation for collapsing the US dollar would be to initiate a chain reaction shift away from the nation-state structure of the global economy toward the creation of a “World Company”, Estulin maintains.

This has been a longtime agenda of the corporate and political kingpins that make up the Bilderberg organisation, elites who would profit from replacing the authority of national sovereignty with a ruling corporation like order, headed by international bankers and financiers.

Estulin was also informed by Bilderberg sources back in May that a false notion of recovery would be proffered in order to draw back investment into the system before finally pulling the plug, leaving the world in financial hardship too destructive to recover from without radical action.

Estulin’s sources have been proven highly accurate in the past. The researcher correctly predicted the housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown as a result of what his Bilderberg sources told him they had discussed at their 2006 meeting in Canada and the 2007 conference in Turkey.
Debunkers have denounced Bilderberg as nothing more than a talking shop or golfing retreat for the elite, however, the group’s track record for hosting future Presidents and Prime Ministers long before they have become recognizable names in politics speaks for itself.

Indeed, earlier this year, Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990’s. Bilderberg’s agenda for a European federal superstate and a single currency likely goes back even further. A BBC investigation uncovered documents from the early Bilderberg meetings which confirmed that the European Union was a brainchild of Bilderberg.

Estulin’s sources also informed him in May that Bilderberg would again attempt to push for the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, a key centerpiece of the agenda to fully entrench a federal EU superstate, by forcing the Irish to vote again on the document in September/October. Following an Irish yes vote last month the Treaty now looks set to be enacted imminently.

"War of civilizations"??? It would be a good idea.

We're back in the freaking middle age:

CIA Had People Raped with Broken Bottles, Boiled Alive
Via: Raw Story - November 5th, 2009:

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

More: A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is
Even when government officials purposely subject an innocent person to brutal torture, they enjoy full immunity. By Glenn Greenwald

Italian Judge Convicts 23 CIA Officers for Kidnapping

Italian Officials Complicit in 2003 'Rendition' of Cleric
by Jason Ditz, November 04, 2009

Completing one of Europe's most high profile terror related trials, an Italian judge today convicted 23 Americans, 22 of them confirmed by the prosecutor as CIA agents, to sentences of between five and eight years in prison related to the 2003 kidnapping of a cleric from the streets of Milan.

Fugitive Renditioner Robert Seldon LadyThe longest sentence went to Robert Lady, America's former Milan CIA chief. All the Americans were tried in absentia and are now considered fugitives from justice by the Italian government. The CIA declined comment.

The incident, dubbed the "imam rapito affair" by the Italian press, involves the abduction of Milan's imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian cleric who was in Italy on an asylum passport. The CIA agents kidnapped Nasr off the streets of Milan and shipped him to Egypt.

Once in Egypt, Nasr spent the next several years in and out of prison, where he was tortured repeatedly. An Egyptian judge finally ordered his release in 2007. His only charge during the whole time was membership in a banned organization, though even this was eventually dropped.

Lady has insisted he was acting on the orders of his superiors with respect to the "rendition." Two Italian officials were also convicted today as accomplices to kidnapping, though the Italian government's declaration of "state secrecy" prevented more serious charges and pointed to official complicity in the incident.