previous  ...11121314151617181920...  next  · entire list

The Secret Downing Street Memo
2005-05-01, London Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

"This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record."

Apocalypse Soon (By Former US Sect. of Defense Robert MacNamara)
2005-05-00, Foreign Policy Magazine May/June 2005 Issue
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2829

It is time...for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Much of the current US nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years. On any given day...the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes' deliberation by the president and his advisors. After leaving the Defense Department, I became president of the World Bank. During my 13-year tenure, from 1968 to 1981, I was prohibited...from commenting publicly on issues of US national security. [Afterwards] I decided to go public with some information that I knew would be controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality into these increasingly unreal discussions about ... nuclear weapons. To launch weapons against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do so against a nonnuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensible. The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons.

The Coming Wars (by Seymour M. Hersch)
2005-01-24, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/050124fa_fact

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign." The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ -- it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs” -- the regional American military commanders-in-chief.

Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month
2005-01-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2129-2005Jan11.html

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley. Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring. The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The ISG [Iraq Study Group] has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons hunt. Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.

Note: To understand how such major secrecy and deception happens, click here.

Navy's use of sonar suspected in near-stranding of whales
2004-12-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/13/MNGOEAB3HJ1.DTL

The United States is facing increasing international pressure to place limitations on the use of military sonar ... that has been linked to mass strandings of whales. The European Union Parliament -- the most prominent of four international bodies that have taken up the matter in recent months -- called in October for its member states to develop a moratorium on all types of military sonars, which use powerful sound to locate objects such as submarines. According to studies cited by the EU and the other world bodies, noise can interfere with the survival of the ocean creatures that depend on sound to navigate, find food, locate mates, avoid predators and communicate with one another. At high decibel levels, noise can kill. The U.S. Navy is the biggest user of midfrequency active sonar in the world -- and government officials have been loath to require permits to regulate its use. In more than a dozen instances dating back to the 1960s, however, whales have stranded themselves on the beaches and sometimes died at the time of naval training exercises miles away using midfrequency active sonar. An unprecedented stranding of 16 beaked and minke whales in the Bahamas in 2000 brought worldwide attention to military sonar. A NOAA investigation concluded that a Navy testing maneuver using midfrequency sonar -- by far the most commonly used type of sonar -- was the likely cause. Necropsies found signs of brain hemorrhaging, which is consistent with injury from sound.

Note: To contact your political and media representatives encouraging a ban dangerous sonar use, click here. For more on this important matter, click here.

Uncovering an Israeli jail that specializes in nightmares
2004-06-16, Newsweek
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251751

What [Israeli historian Gad] Kroizer had discovered and later footnoted in an academic paper ... was the location of an ultrasecret jail where Israel has held Arabs in total seclusion for years, barred visits by the Red Cross and allegedly tortured inmates. Known as 1391, the facility is used as an interrogation center by a storied unit of Israel's military intelligence, whose members-all Arabic speakers-are trained to wring confessions from the toughest militants. Some of the methods are reminiscent of Abu Ghraib: nudity as a humiliation tactic, compromising photographs, sleep deprivation. In a few cases, at least, interrogators at 1391 appear to have gone beyond Israel's own hair-splitting distinction between torture and what a state commission referred to in 1987 as "moderate physical pressure." But the nightmare for those in 1391 is the isolation and the fear that no one knows where you are. The location of the compound is so hush-hush that a court this year banned a visit by an Israeli legislator. Prisoners describe being hooded everywhere at the facility except in their cells. Hassan Rawajbeh ... a member of the nearly disbanded Palestinian Preventive Security force ... was picked up by soldiers in Nablus 18 months ago. He was hooded, handcuffed and thrown on the floor of a van. When the hood was removed, he was in a tiny, windowless cell. The chamber contained no toilet, only a bucket in the corner, which ... his jailers would empty once every few weeks. A low buzzing droned constantly. For nearly four months, Rawajbeh saw no one but his interrogators, who kept him naked for days at a time and prevented him from going to the bathroom.

Who killed Nick Berg?
2004-05-29, Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/28/1085641717320.html

Iraq in flames, Washington an object of disgust. What to do? At this pivotal moment, CNN and Fox News are tipped off to a clip of an American citizen being beheaded. The victim is ... Nick Berg.The vile deed is deemed the work of al-Qaeda. The timing of the video was brilliant for the West. Media pundits judged the crime a deeper evil than the systemic torture of innocent Iraqis. But some people sensed a rat. But if it was not al-Qaeda, who? While this video shows a human body having its head chopped off, it does not necessarily portray an act of murder. A month before the discovery of [his] corpse, Berg had been released from custody. But whose custody? Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt ... claimed he was in the custody of Iraqi police. However, the Iraqi police chief [stated] "the Iraqi police never arrested the slain American". Berg's family are certain his jailers were the US military. His father, Michael, had been told so by the FBI. He has produced an email from a US consular official ... confirming that his son was in the hands of the US. In his final moments on screen Berg is wearing an orange jumpsuit of the kind familiar from Guantanamo Bay. His white chair is identical to those in the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures. During the decapitation, starting at the front of the throat, there is little sign of blood. The scream is wildly out of sync, sounds female, and is obviously dubbed. Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons ... agrees with other experts who find it highly probable that Berg had died before his decapitation. There's something fishy about this video. In the end, the question is: who killed Nick Berg, and why?

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a CNN article raising other serious questions on Berg, click here. For more reliable information on how government can control and manipulate public perception, click here.

The Armageddon Plan
2004-03-01, The Atlantic Monthly
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200403/mann

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was ... a [Republican] congressman. Rumsfeld [was] the head of G. D. Searle & Co.. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. [It] called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession ... in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration [since] September 11, 2001. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role. "One of the awkward questions we faced ... was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." [Cheney's and Rumsfeld's] participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises ... also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades ... even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were ... a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States.

Note: If above link fails, click here. The author, James Mann, is a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. Apparently, Cheney and Rumsfeld don't find Congress to be very important.

U.S. finds lost nuclear bomb
1966-03-18, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/17/BAVV16AMLN.DTL

A hydrogen bomb that went missing for three months in the Mediterranean Sea is back in the hands of the U.S. military after being found the previous day. The bomb had been lost in January when two U.S. military planes, a KC-135 tanker and a B-52 carrying four thermonuclear weapons, collided during midair refueling. Three of the four bombs fell to the ground near Palomares, Spain. While none of them detonated with a nuclear explosion, the high-explosive triggers in two of the bombs went off upon impact and contaminated the area with radioactive material. A fourth bomb plunged into the water off Spain's southeastern coastline. Following the incident, the Spanish government announced it would no longer allow U.S. planes carrying nuclear weapons to fly over its territory. On March 17, the U.S. Navy, using a midget submarine called the Alvin [found] the bomb 2,500 feet underwater, intact and with its parachute still attached.

Note: You can access a Jan. 27, 1966 NY Times article on this incident for a small fee at this link.

No ducking land mine treaty, Mr. President
2009-12-06, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/05/ED451AT7MU.DTL

This country hasn't used land mines in nearly 20 years. It no longer makes the indiscriminate killers nor provides them to allies. Why then is President Obama - off to Oslo this week to collect a Nobel Peace Prize - refusing to sign an international treaty to ban the shrapnel-spewing buried bombs? His refusal is ... shameful. The devices, which maim and kill for years after a conflict ends, caused more than 5,000 casualties last year in the world's poorest places such as Cambodia, Angola and Central America. Obama's stance puts him in line with Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who both ducked a chance to put this country in line with more than 150 nations that have signed the treaty. Other notable non-signers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Cuba. Is this the company we want to keep? Sticking with land mines is a puzzler. The United States has a reported stockpile of 10 million devices, though it hasn't deployed any since the 1991 Gulf War. By signing the agreement, the Pentagon would hardly be giving up a mainstay weapon. It's time for Obama to go in a new direction. He should sign, not equivocate, on a treaty that Washington has avoided for over a decade. Here's a thought while typing up your Peace Prize acceptance speech, Mr. President: It's time to ban land mines.

Note: The refusal to sign the worldwide landmine ban treaty seems to be a puzzler, until you realize the US government is protecting the rights to profit of US arms corporations. For a retired Marine general's analysis of the profiteering that is the principal purpose for war, "War is a Racket,"click here.

Rise in soldier suicides leaves Pentagon looking for answers
2009-11-19, Times of London
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6922396.ece

American soldiers are committing suicide in the greatest numbers since official records began in 1980, with the US Army at a loss to explain the phenomenon since a third of the dead have never been deployed in combat. Suicides in the army alone have passed last year’s record of 140 — 141 in 2009 so far. The upward trend has defied efforts to improve access to appropriate counselling for veterans returning from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure for the first ten months of the year excludes 71 suicides among troops taken off active duty in 2009, and 42 in the US Marine Corps. Roughly a third of this year’s suicides have been by soldiers taking their own lives in war zones, a third by returning soldiers and a third by those based permanently in the US or awaiting deployment overseas. Many military suicides can be traced in part to an inability to process the guilt of having killed in battle.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the horrific effects of modern war on both combatants and civilians, click here. And for the writings of a top general on why this is happening, click here.

C.I.A. Abuse Cases Detailed in Report on Detainees
2009-08-25, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25detain.html

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named a veteran federal prosecutor on Monday to examine abuse of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency, after the Justice Department released a long-secret report showing interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee’s children. Mr. Holder chose John H. Durham, a prosecutor from Connecticut who has been investigating the C.I.A.’s destruction of interrogation videotapes, to determine whether a full criminal investigation of the conduct of agency employees or contractors was warranted. The attorney general said his decision to order an inquiry was based in part on the recommendation of the Justice Department’s ethics office, which called for a new review of several interrogation cases. He said he was also influenced by a 2004 report by the C.I.A. inspector general at the time, John L. Helgerson, on the agency’s interrogations. The report was released Monday under a court order in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Although large portions of the 109-page report are blacked out, it gives new details about a variety of abuses inside the C.I.A.’s overseas prisons, including suggestions about sexually assaulting members of a detainee’s family, staging mock executions, intimidation with a handgun and power drill, and blowing cigar and cigarette smoke into prisoners’ faces to make them vomit. The inspector general’s review raised broad questions about the legality, political acceptability and effectiveness of the harshest of the C.I.A.’s methods, including some not authorized by the Justice Department and others that were approved, like the near-drowning technique of waterboarding.

Note: And what do you think might have been in the blacked out portions of the report? For lots more on the use of illegal methods by the CIA and US military in their prosecution of the "war on terror," click here.

Americans tiring of war in Afghanistan
2009-08-21, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/20/MNFU19BG53.DTL

The violence-scarred elections in Afghanistan provided a stage for the Taliban to show war-weary Americans and Afghans that it has rebounded and can strike - even after eight years of war. For President Obama's policies, the timing couldn't be worse. With memories of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks dimming, Americans are tiring of the conflict. New polling shows a majority - 51 percent - of those surveyed now believe the war is not worth the fight, an increase of 6 percentage points in a month. Obama's answer to the mounting skepticism is to say that, in a way, the war has just begun. The final push to wipe out [the] Taliban ... is not 8 years old but really got started when he took office and ordered 17,000 more troops into Afghanistan. In short order, he also installed a new commander and persuaded Pakistan to join the United States in what on Thursday he called a pincer movement to squeeze the enemy astride the common border.

Note: As shown over and over again, presidents and politicians of both major political parties in the U.S. support the war machine in order to get the war chest they need to be elected or re-elected. Obama is no exception. For lots more on this, click here.

U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases
2009-05-24, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html

The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials. Pakistan's intelligence and security services captured a Saudi suspect and a Yemeni suspect this year with the help of American intelligence and logistical support, Pakistani officials said. They are still being held by Pakistan, which has shared information from their interrogations with the United States, the official said. The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons. Human rights advocates say that relying on foreign governments to hold and question [captives] could increase the potential for abuse at the hands of foreign interrogators. The fate of many ... whom the Bush administration sent to foreign countries remains uncertain. One suspect, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by the C.I.A. in late 2001 and sent to Libya, was recently reported to have died there in Libyan custody. In the last years of the Bush administration and now on Mr. Obama's watch, the balance has shifted toward leaving all but the most high-level terrorist suspects in foreign rather than American custody.

Note: It appears that the US government is simply avoiding bringing any of its captives under official US control. After the fanfare surrounding the closure of some of its "secret" prisons abroad, the government is moving detainees into prisons run by the governments of foreign countries. Could this be for the purpose of continuing the same torture and indefinite detention that it can no longer carry out in US-controlled prisons? For lots more on the "war on terror" from reliable sources, click here.

Military tribunals not the same as U.S. courts
2009-05-23, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/23/MN9Q17OTTB.DTL

President Obama says his proposed reforms to the military commissions his predecessor established to try suspected terrorists will bring the tribunals "in line with the rule of law." But it isn't the same law that applies in U.S. courts. Pentagon officials appoint the judges and can remove them. Military commanders choose the jurors, who can convict defendants by non-unanimous votes, except in death penalty cases. The military can monitor defense lawyers' conversations with their clients. Prosecutors can also present evidence that would never pass muster in civilian courts. Confessions made under physical or mental pressure could be admissible, despite Obama's disavowal of torture and coercion. There's no ban on evidence from illegal searches. And defendants may be convicted on the basis of hearsay - a second hand report of an out-of-court accusation by another person, perhaps a fellow suspect, whom the defense never gets to see or question. Civil-liberties advocates and legal organizations defending prisoners who may be tried before the commissions say the system is an invitation to abuse and differs little from the tribunals established by President George W. Bush. "The system is designed to ensure the outcome they want ... convictions in every case," said Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who has attended proceedings for prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "This suggests that the much-heralded improvements to the Bush military commission system are largely cosmetic."

Note: For lots more on the "war on terror" from reliable sources, click here.

'Global War On Terror' Is Given New Name
2009-03-25, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR20090324028...

The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor. In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' " Senior administration officials had been publicly using the phrase "overseas contingency operations" in a war context for roughly a month before the e-mail was sent. The Bush administration adopted the phrase ["Global War on Terror"] soon after the Sept. 11, 2001. But critics abroad and at home, including some within the U.S. military, said the terminology mischaracterized the nature of the enemy and its abilities. Some military officers said, for example, that classifying al-Qaeda and other anti-American militant groups as part of a single movement overstated their strength. Last month, the International Commission of Jurists urged the Obama administration to drop the phrase "war on terror." The commission said the term had given the Bush administration "spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations," including detention practices and interrogation methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as torture.

Army manual raises emphasis on electronic warfare
2009-02-25, Washington Post/Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/25/AR20090225022...

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Army is updating its plans for electronic warfare, calling for more use of high-powered microwaves, lasers and infrared beams to attack enemy targets and control angry crowds. The 112-page manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press ... doesn't offer specifics on new equipment or gadgetry but lays out in broad terms the Army's fear that without new equipment and training, U.S. forces may be at a deadly disadvantage. Army patrols currently rely on specially trained Air Force and Navy members whose electronic expertise helps sniff out improvised explosive devices, which have killed more than 1,700 U.S. troops since the war began. The Army sees the need for a new system more finely tuned to its purposes. The new doctrine directs the Army, which has put a premium on fighting insurgents in Iraq's most populous cities, to use technology that can distinguish enemy threats from common technologies such as radios or cell phones used by civilians or friendly forces. It also calls on the Army to develop and deploy directed-energy weapons, which would produce a concentrated beam of electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles to blind, disrupt or destroy targets. Such technology could be used in a variety of attack modes against enemy equipment, facilities or personnel.

Note: How can anyone claim that our troops, with all of their already sophisticated weapons, may be "at a deadly disadvantage"? For many key reports on the realities of modern warfare, click here.

KBR, Partner in Iraq Contract Sued in Human Trafficking Case
2008-08-28, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/27/AR20080827032...

A Washington law firm filed a lawsuit yesterday against KBR, one of the largest U.S. contractors in Iraq, alleging that the company and its Jordanian subcontractor engaged in the human trafficking of Nepali workers. Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said. As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal. The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on behalf of the workers' families and the survivor, claims that the trafficking scheme was engineered by KBR and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, according to Fryszman. This spring, an administrative law judge at the Department of Labor, which has jurisdiction over cases that involve on the job injuries at overseas military bases, ordered Daoud to pay $1 million to the families of 11 of the victims.

Note: For many more reports on corporate corruption from major media sources, click here.

US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability'
2008-08-12, New Scientist magazine
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14520-us-boasts-of-laser-weapons...

An airborne laser weapon dubbed the "long-range blowtorch" has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF). The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announced the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this summer. Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing ... on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June. As the term suggests, "plausible deniability" is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it. John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear. "The target would never know what hit them," says Pike. "Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike." A laser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night. With no previous examples for comparison, it may be difficult to discern whether damage to a vehicle or person was the result of a laser strike.

Note: For lots more on war and weaponry, click here.

ACLU: U.S. Treasury stymies war court defense attorneys
2008-07-08, Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/597624.html

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to [the] U.S. Navy base [at Guantanamo]. The Treasury division, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, is the same unit that polices American citizens' travel to Cuba. Its authority to license defense costs at the war courts here, called military commissions, comes from anti-terror legislation. ACLU director Anthony Romero accused the Bush administration of foot-dragging, noting civilian defense lawyers were slow to receive security clearances to meet accused terrorists held for years without access to attorneys. "Now the government is stonewalling again by not allowing Americans' private dollars to be paid to American lawyers to defend civil liberties," he said. He called the slow licensing an "obstruction of justice" at a time when "the Bush administration insists on moving ahead with the prosecutions." The program is called the John Adams Project, sponsored by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Under it, attorneys will be paid for travel, expenses, research and copying as well as $250 an hour to defend men ... now facing death penalty prosecutions at the war court. Top criminal defense lawyers typically charge at least $550 an hour.

Note: For important reports on threats to civil liberties from major media sources, click here.

previous

...11121314151617181920...

next

· entire list