The CIA repeatedly misled Congress and the Justice Department in their investigations of the 2001 shoot-down of a Peruvian plane carrying U.S. missionaries, according to findings of an internal CIA probe released today by congressional officials.

Keith Olberman discusses the revelations from author Ron Suskind.
These involve on the record officials stating that Bush knew that
there were no WMDs in Iraq and wanted forged documents to make
the case for war.

In late 2006, two American soldiers from Fort Carson died in Iraq. The army said the privates were killed by enemy action. But in October of this year, Salon revealed that the two men had in fact been killed by friendly tank fire.

A Guantanamo Bay detainee who was tortured by military interrogators is again being charged with war crimes by Pentagon prosecutors, six months after those charges were dropped because of the coercive techniques used to obtain information were likely to be revealed at his trial.

Senator James Inhofe has revealed that Henry Paulson was behind the threats of martial law and a new great depression prior to the passage of the bailout bill, having made such warnings during a conference call on September 19th, around two weeks before the legislation was eventually approved by both the Senate and Congress.

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, plan to take their civil lawsuit against Bush administration officials to the Supreme Court after a federal circuit court refused to rehear the case on Monday.

"Al-Zawahri says in an audio message, which appeared on militant Web sites Wednesday, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X. He calls Obama a "house negro."

Barack Obama is being given ominous advice from leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to brace himself for an early assault from terrorists.

“Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.”

Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In a talk to the Atlantic Council this week CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden is alive. I'll take his word for it.

Prosecutors say Siddiqui, a U.S.-trained neuroscientist, while detained for questioning in Afghanistan, grabbed a U.S. warrant officer's rifle and fired it at the interrogation team, which included two FBI agents. The warrant officer then shot her with his pistol.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has told a Milan court trying U.S. and Italian spies for a suspected CIA kidnap that details on ties between the two countries' secret services must remain secret.

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin to be at large in order to justify its military expansionism.

I'm pleased to see Barak Obama hit the ground running after his election on the 4th. The US needs change.

I'd like to see him announce the death of Osama bin Laden as one of his first official duties. Bin Laden often better known as bin Forgotten died in December of 2001. There is nothing I am saying that is news to anyone who has actually spent any time thinking.

Using "triggerfish" technology, mobile phones are tricked into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers and other data by posing as a cellular phone tower. Until now, it's been believed that such technology could only be successfully employed with the help of the telecoms themselves, because the specific location of the phone couldn't be traced with enough accuracy.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates suggested that there was "some sense of an increased level of [Iranian] supply of weapons and support to these groups." And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung was told by military officials that the "plentiful, high quality weaponry" the militia was then using in Basra was "recently manufactured in Iran."

AUDIO:http://www.apfn.net/CC25/L001I081115-mcclellan.MP3

There may be no concrete evidence of a specific plot in the offing, but political leaders and intelligence officials in both the US and Britain are warning President-elect Barack Obama that his fledgling administration may be an appealing target for a ’spectacular’ attack by al-Qaeda, as it struggles to handle a wartime transition of power.

Britain's Home Office said Abu Qatada, once described as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's representative in Europe, had an "extensive network of contacts" that could help him evade authorities and the terror suspect's escape would be hugely embarrassing.

The head of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says Al Qaeda remains the single greatest threat to the United States.

The FBI informant who infiltrated a band of alleged South Jersey terrorists complained in September 2006 that one suspect "was gonna have a problem with me" because he kept refusing to plan, train or arrange meetings to discuss an attack.

The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.

Remember, even prior to its passage, I called the bailout the greatest looting operation of our time. I did so because the language of the Bailout Act, as originally proposed by the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, er, I mean the Treasury Secretary, requested three things: unitary power, no review, and no limits.
Frankly, it was the most plainly-worded document of theft that I had ever seen, and probably ever will see, in my life (because it was too blatant and such mistakes are rarely made again).

To my Son,

Now that you are a senior and will soon be off to college, there is something I hope you will examine before you make any career decisions. I call it "the Outfit," and to most a job there would be the ultimate in success and career achievement…fixed for life. But it has one drawback, for some there is a moral problem. I think you are smart enough to decide and to learn from the Outfit successes.

Barack Obama seeks a new era of bipartisanship, but he should take heed of what happened to the last Democrat in the White House – Bill Clinton – in 1993 when he sought to appease Republicans by shelving pending investigations into Reagan-Bush-I-era wrongdoing and hoped for some reciprocity.

The old film offers a fantasy version of the Nazis' treatment of German Jews. It shows a happy village of re-located Jews with people walking about and looking pleasant and doing pleasant things. In particular, there is a scene of Jews carrying huge watering cans, happily sprinkling large, lush gardens. Well, the film is inferior in quality to the 2008 film from Israel , three-quarters of a century later, but one could be excused for thinking that someone in Israel got his or her inspiration from Dr. Goebbels' film.

The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" -- 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop -- as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.

The triple bombing during Baghdad's morning rush hour may have come as a surprise to many in the outside world, who now have the idea that Iraq is on the path to stability.

Top government officials are refusing to provide details on a secretive deal it made to manage billions in assets from an earlier bailout.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has been pressing top officials for months to provide details on a deal the Federal Reserve made for a private firm to manage $30 billion in financial assets from the collapsed investment bank Bear Stearns, as part of an arrangement to facilitate J.P. Morgan Chase's purchase of the bank in March.

"It's possible. There's no way of predicting that. It's a possibility, but it's by no means a certainty," former Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

A leading expert on Auschwitz on Sunday denigrated the importance of the finding of plans for the construction of the extermination camp, which was reported this weekend in the German tabloid Bild. He said the documents have been known to scholars for many years and that they were not plans to build the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but rather earlier plans for the building of a forced labor camp.

A defense attorney in the Fort Dix terrorism case this morning sought to portray the government's key witness as motivated solely by money.

Mahmoud Omar, 39, who recorded over 200 conversations with the five men accused of plotting to kill U.S. military personnel at the South Jersey Army base, has been paid $240,000 for helping build the government's case.

The FBI is appealing an order that allows a Utah attorney to conduct taped depositions of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and a death-row inmate.

The U.S. military has conducted nearly a dozen secret operations against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Syria, Pakistan and other countries since 2004, The New York Times reported Sunday night.

"Australian PM Kevin Rudd - “Nuke strike would make 9/11 insignificant” and other weird warnings"

"Over the last 72 hours there has been a strange melange of cryptic messages leaked from world political leaders about what could be in store for America over the next few months.

These predictions of impending doom come from England, France, Australia and the United States.

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

"Australian PM Kevin Rudd - “Nuke strike would make 9/11 insignificant” and other weird warnings"

"Over the last 72 hours there has been a strange melange of cryptic messages leaked from world political leaders about what could be in store for America over the next few months.

These predictions of impending doom come from England, France, Australia and the United States.

Why was Saddam hanged BEFORE the conclusion of the trial,. . . because he had issued orders NOT to use gas? These are the translations made by the US Military, and which the UN had access to only AFTER 29 December 2006 after Saddam had been hanged. Tony Blair knew and George Bush knew about this, as these translations were made by the RCLO Office US Military.

On a night like no other when America’s open and democratic virtues were put on worldwide display, an ill-advised policy within the Department of Defense proclaimed to servicemembers and the news media alike: “No you can’t.” What a servicemember and a journalist couldn’t do, the policy drafters ordered, was engage in conversation on a military base as the returns from a momentous election rolled in.

OSAMA bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will "outdo by far" September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.

The FBI tracked about 108,000 potential terrorism threats or suspicious incidents from mid-2004 to November 2007, but most were found groundless, a Justice Department review found on Friday.

The department’s office of inspector general gave the figure in an audit of the FBI’s terrorism case-tracking system, called Guardian, launched in 2002 after the September 11 attacks.

EMMANUEL "Toto" Constant, chief of a CIA-backed Haitian death squad that massacred, tortured and terrorized thousands of his compatriots, and whose accomplices later collaborated with another agent — the U.S. proconsul for Cuba, Caleb McCarry — has just been sentenced in New York to 30 years in prison.

Scott Ritter was the WMD inspector for the UN and US while they were looking for them in Iraq. He discusses Israel's influence on foreign policy in the US.

FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV.

A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm.

Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists.

His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming.

Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.

Undercover police officers posing as protesters staged a fight with a police commander during the Democratic convention, and it was so convincing they were pepper-sprayed by a deputy who wasn't in on the ruse, a civil liberties group says.

A bucket containing a white powder labeled anthrax was found in the basement of an El Cerrito business Thursday, triggering a two-hour shutdown of a portion of one of the city's busiest thoroughfares.

Identical letters sent to three Pennsylvania county courthouses this week mentioned anthrax but did not contain the poisonous substance.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says it has received a package that appears to be part of an anthrax hoax.

An FBI informant in the case of five men accused of planning to attack soldiers on an Army installation in New Jersey testified Thursday that he talked up the attack in order to win the confidence of an alleged plotter.

No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.

Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing, was in court for the hearing and afterwards said he was "disappointed" a decision had not been reached.

"It seems he has not got very long to live and therefore the decision needs to be made as urgently as possible," said Dr Swire.

"Personally, I don't think the verdict against him was ever justified and I remain convinced he was wrongly convicted," he added.

The FBI is appealing an order that allows a Utah attorney to conduct taped depositions of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and a death-row inmate.

Salt Lake City lawyer Jesse Trentadue believes that the two inmates have valuable information about his brother's death in a federal prison - and about the FBI's alleged withholding of many of the relevant documents requested in his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit.