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Ten Years After Powell’s U.N. Speech, Old Hands Are Ready for More Blood

When Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, countless journalists in the United States extolled him for a masterful performance -- making the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the speech later became notorious should not obscure how easily truth becomes irrelevant in the process of going to war.

Ten years later -- with Powell’s speech a historic testament of shameless deception leading to vast carnage -- we may not remember the extent of the fervent accolades. At the time, fawning praise was profuse across the USA’s mainline media spectrum, including the nation’s reputedly great newspapers.

The New York Times editorialized that Powell “was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.” The Washington Post was more war-crazed, headlining its editorial “Irrefutable” and declaring that after Powell’s U.N. presentation “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

Ohio prisoner on hunger strike

An Ohio prisoner named Cornelius Harris (also known as Soja) has been on hunger strike at Ohio State Penitentiary since Jan 4th. He is at Correctional Medical Center (CMC) in Columbus. They haven't force fed him, but they warned him his organs may fail if he doesn't come off hunger strike soon.

OSP Warden David Bobby refused to comment on the situation when contacted.

Mr Harris' demands are to be given greater opportunity to "step-down" or reduce his security level and an end to targeted harassment and violence from guards. Specifically, he is looking for more frequent security reviews, recreation time with at least one other prisoner, physical contact with visitors, and more time out of his cell. All these things would allow him to prove that he is not a danger to himself or others and can eventually get off of 5A, the highest security level in Ohio.

In June of 2012 Mr Harris wrote a detailed account of his mistreatment by OSP staff. This account is available at RedBirdPrisonAbolition.org. He is currently facing criminal charges based on some of these incidents. His trial was interrupted because of his medical condition and transfer to CMC.

First city in U.S. passes resolution against drones

Shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday, February 4th, the City Council of Charlottesville, Va., passed what is believed to be the first anti-drone resolution in the country. According to my notes, and verifiable soon on the City Council's website, the resolution reads:

"WHEREAS, the rapid implementation of drone technology throughout the United States poses a serious threat to the privacy and constitutional rights of the American people, including the residents of Charlottesville; and
"WHEREAS, the federal government and the Commonwealth of Virginia have thus far failed to provide reasonable legal restrictions on the use of drones within the United States; and
"WHEREAS, police departments throughout the country have begun implementing drone technology absent any guidance or guidelines from law makers;

Learning our penchant for mass murder: “Do as I say, not as I do!”

Perhaps in your innocent youth you heard a parent or older sibling mumble those words in your direction after you pointed out a mistake they made, an error on their part that fell below the standard you were told to observe?

“Actions speak louder than words” and “We teach by example” are two truisms that have stood the test of time. But that doesn’t make them any easier to practice.

As a nation we mourn with the families and loved ones of those so frightfully killed and wounded in Connecticut last week. But as grief is joined by reflection on how this could happen again, I believe we do those close to the victims as well as ourselves a disservice unless “all options are on the table” as we examine Americans’ predilection for killing en masse.

Ohio’s Jon Husted goes to Washington: No Democratic voter’s right to vote was safe

During the last weekend in January, the National Association of Secretaries of State met in Washington DC with their usual entourage of private partisan voting machine and software salespeople.

NBC political director Chuck Todd blessed the gathering of vote-changers and money-makers – and their system of faith-based voting.

Andrew Kreig, the Executive Director of the Justice Integrity Project, captured the essence of the absurd undemocratic assembly in his article “NBC’s Todd mocks election fraud critics, wins Washington applause.”

Free Press readers are aware that the United States is the only advance industrial democracy that fails to meet minimum standards of transparency in their election process. Private for-profit partisan corporations secretly encode the computers and software used to tabulate our votes.

Todd is a huge fan of so-called push-and-pray voting and told the voting machine vendors and the secretaries of state they contribute to, “That’s just stretching the bounds of reality” to suggest that computers could be programmed to rig an election.

No security firms for African refugees: Opportunities and war in Mali

The British security firm G4S is set to rake in massive profits thanks to crises in Mali, Libya and Algeria. Recognized as the world’s biggest security firm, the group’s brand plummeted during the London Olympics last year due to its failure to satisfy conditions of a government contract. But with growing unrest in North and West Africa, G4S is expected to make a speedy recovery.

The January 16th hostage crisis at Algeria’s Ain Amenas gas plant, where 38 hostages were killed, ushered in the return of al-Qaeda not as extremists on the run, but as well-prepared militants with the ability to strike deeply into enemy territories and cause serious damage. For G4S and other security firms, this also translates into growing demands. “The British group (..) is seeing a rise in work ranging from electronic surveillance to protecting travelers,” the company’s regional president for Africa told Reuters. “Demand has been very high across Africa,” Andy Baker said. “The nature of our business is such that in high-risk environments the need for our services increases.”

The original Keystone XL Pipeline proposal would be an environmental disaster!

The Keystone XL Pipeline proposed to move tar sands oil from northern Canada to the Caribbean gulf coast would result in great risk to our fresh water supply. It would not increase the supply of fuel for the U.S. Big oil companies would sell it on the world market at several times the price of U. S. oil. They would make many billions of dollars in profit.

Tar sands oil is heavy. It sinks to the bottom of water. It would contaminate the fresh water in aquifers, and the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The only way to remove it is to rile it to the surface so it can be skimmed. After two years of work, clean up had not been completed of a small spill in the Kalamazoo river.

A Canadian plan is to pipe the heavy tar sands oil to the Pacific coast for sale on the world market. Officials in the provincial government of Alberta object because of the risk to their water supply.

The tar sands oil is a valuable asset which will be harvested.

Controlling Lucifer

The president negotiates our withdrawal from Afghanistan, proclaims mission accomplished — and the wars of the last decade continue winding down to nothing.

We’ll be leaving behind an unstable country with one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates and hundreds of armed insurgent groups. We haven’t rescued or rebuilt the country or accomplished any objective that begins to justify the human and financial cost of this adventure. We just lost.

But we’re the most powerful nation on the planet. How is that possible? And, as Tom Engelhardt asks, “who exactly beat us? Where exactly is the triumphant enemy?”

He goes on, in an essay that ran this week on Common Dreams: “Did we in some bizarre fashion fight ourselves and lose? After all, last year, more American servicemen died from suicide than on the battlefield in Afghanistan; and a startling number of Americans were killed in ‘green on blue’ or ‘insider’ attacks by Afghan ‘allies’ rather than by that fragmented movement we still call the Taliban.”

U.S. blimp crash symbolizes Thailand's failure against Islamists

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When a $10 million U.S.-built surveillance blimp for hunting southern Islamist guerrillas spectacularly crashed during the prime minister's visit, it symbolized another military failure against insurgents who are now assassinating more teachers.

"This war is not over," boasted leaflets distributed in the region allegedly by Muslim rebels during Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's visit on Dec. 13.

"Do not count the teachers' corpses just yet," the leaflets warned.

More than 5,000 people on all sides have been killed in the south during the past nine years, including more than 157 teachers.

The mostly Buddhist teachers are targeted because Islamists reject the government's curriculum which pushes integration with Buddhist-majority Thailand, use of Thai language, a sanitized history of the region's rebellion, and other classes.

The guerrillas recently escalated their assassination of teachers, prompting more than 1,200 southern schools to shut down on Dec. 13-14, to protest the lack of security.

When Truth Tried to Stop War

Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses.

Doing what she could to head off what she considered, correctly, an illegal war of aggression, she printed a copy of the memo and arranged for a friend to give it to the London Observer. "I have always ever followed my conscience," she said, explaining what drove her to take such a large risk.

Those early months of 2003 were among the worst of times – and not just because the U.S. and U.K. leaders were perverting the post-World War II structure that those same nations designed to stop aggressive wars, but because the vast majority of U.S. and U.K. institutions including the major news organizations and the nations' legislatures were failing miserably to provide any meaningful check or balance.

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