The Ruthless Truth blog

by Rannie Amiri

Global Research, March 4, 2010

“He [Vanunu] has written letters to us this year and last year also, where he stated explicitly that he did not want to be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. The reason he gave was that Simon Peres had received the Nobel Peace Prize, and Peres he alleged was the father of the Israeli atomic bomb and he did not want to be associated with Peres in any way.” – Geir Lundestad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, 24 February 2010.

For the first time in the history of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a preemptive request to withdraw a nomination—by the nominee—was made.

It was revealed last week that in a letter to the Committee, Mordechai Vanunu had asked for his candidacy to be rescinded. It was unusual enough for Geir Lundestad to acknowledge that a nomination had even been received, let alone publicly disclose Vanunu’s request. But for Vanunu—a man who should have been awarded the Peace Prize long ago—it was in full keeping with the dignity, integrity and uncompromising nature of one to whom the world owes a great debt.

Mordechai Vanunu – more than just a whistleblower

Vanunu worked as a technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev Desert from 1976-1985. In a 1986 interview with The Sunday Times, he courageously exposed, for the first time, his country’s clandestine nuclear activity. A week prior to the interview’s publication, he was lured by a Mossad agent from London to Rome, where he was apprehended and whisked off to Israel. In secret proceedings, Vanunu stood trial for treason, was swiftly convicted, and sentenced to 18 years behind bars. He spent more than 11 of them in solitary confinement.

Vanunu was released from Ashkelon’s Shikma prison in April 2004, unapologetic and unrepentant. “I am proud and happy to do what I did,” he said.

As for enduring nearly two decades of incarceration?

“I said to the Shabak [Shin Bet], the Mossad, ‘you didn’t succeed to break me, you didn’t succeed to make me crazy.’”

Conditions of his parole prohibited him from speaking with journalists, supporters, or non-Israelis of any kind. He was restricted from travelling within the country and barred altogether from leaving it.

In 2007, Vanunu was found to be in violation of his parole, in part for attempting to travel from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and it landed him in jail for another three months. Being a convert to Christianity and an advocate for Palestinian rights did not help his case, but only served to increase the scorn heaped upon him by his countrymen.

Although the term “whistleblower” is usually appended to Vanunu’s name, the description is weak and understated. He was more like the “siren” that alerted the world to Israel’s undeclared nuclear bombs and the introduction of weapons of mass destruction to the Middle East.

Shimon Peres – architect of Israel’s nuclear weapons program

In 1953, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion appointed a young Shimon Peres to become Director-General of the Ministry of Defense. Acting in this capacity, Peres helped draw up the 1956 Protocol of Sèvers (in the run-up to the British, French and Israeli attack on Suez). Those meetings led him to enlist France’s help in constructing the Negev Nuclear Research Center.

Peres’ critical involvement in developing Israel’s nuclear capability was detailed in “Shimon Peres – The Biography” by historian Michael Ben-Zohar. According to Reuters, “The book divulges new details of how Peres served as a behind-the-scenes architect of Israel’s military might, securing weapons secretly and buying an atomic reactor from France.”

It was specifically because Peres had pioneered Israel’s nuclear weapons program that Vanunu asked his name be taken off the list of Nobel candidates. He wanted no association with the alleged “dove,” who as foreign minister was the recipient of the 1994 Peace Prize along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Shimon Peres – apologist for a massacre

It was during Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” campaign in Lebanon that the April 1996 Qana massacre took place. At a United Nations compound near the village of Qana, 800 Lebanese civilians had sought refuge from the fighting. Showing utter disregard for both the U.N. and the civilians they sheltered, the compound was shelled by the Israelis, killing 106 innocents and injuring more than 100.

Israel first said Hezbollah positions and not the U.N compound was their target (although they were aware of its exact coordinates). They later said the facility was inadvertently hit due to “incorrect targeting based on erroneous data” and the use of outdates maps (the ever-shifting explanations offered by the Israelis for a deliberate strike of a U.N. facility would later be repeated in the 2008-2009 Gaza War).

It was then Prime Minister Peres who finally justified the attack by blaming Hezbollah for it, using the tired, discredited, and oft-repeated “human shield” excuse (yet another tool used again by the Israel Defense Forces to rationalize the massacre of civilians in the Gaza War).

A subsequent U.N. investigation concluded it was unlikely that the shelling of the Qana compound was due to gross technical or procedural errors. An investigation conducted by Amnesty International found that the attack was “intentional and is condemned.” Human Rights Watch’s report similarly stated, “We have declared this a massacre that was intentional using very highly accurate missiles and explosives.”

What the Nobel Committee and Vanunu should do

As the person who exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program, Vanunu’s conscientious, principled position of requesting his name be removed from consideration for the same Peace Prize won by the man who fathered it, is admirable.

The Nobel Committee should not only continue to consider Vanunu however, but award its Peace Prize to him, if for no other reason than to redeem itself as a body recognizing deeds, not hopes.

An ignominious spotlight would then shine on Israel for preventing Vanunu from traveling to Norway to accept it, although he would still likely decline the Prize. If permitted to hold a press conference, it would give Vanunu the opportunity to tell the world of Peres’ shameful role in introducing nuclear weapons to the Middle East, to talk of the massacre at Qana that occurred under his leadership, to speak about the war crimes committed in Gaza and of Israel’s brutal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

It is time once again for the Siren to sound.

Rannie Amiri is an independent Middle East commentator. He may be reached at rbamiri@yahoo.com.

Rannie Amiri is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Rannie Amiri

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17923

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The Jerusalem Post
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:47 EST

Wiesel speaks of petition against Ahmadinejad, signed by 50 Nobel laureates.
Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor Eli Wiesel, 81, spoke out against both the Iranian regime and the Goldstone Report on Tuesday, in an interview with Army Radio.
The prolific author and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate has put together a petition denouncing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, signed by about 50 other Nobel prize winners, which will run as a full page advertisement in newspapers such as The New York Times.
"We’re sure that the president of Iran, the world’s No. 1 Holocaust denier, plans to destroy and annihilate the Jewish state, and bring disaster to the entire world," he said. "We plan to distribute the petition… so that it reaches as many people as possible."
Ahmadinejad is "dangerous because he openly claims that he wants to annihilate the State of Israel, to exterminate another six million Jews," Wiesel said.
"I wouldn’t cry if I heard that Ahmadinejad was assassinated," he quipped, calling the Iranian president "a pathological danger to world peace."
Wiesel also leveled fierce criticism at the Goldstone Report, which accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
"One thing is clear to me, that document was unnecessary," he said.
Of the report’s main author, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, Wiesel said, "That man has a good name, and I’ve known him for years… He should have refused to head the committee, because of the anti-Israel mandate under which it was established."
"I can’t believe that Israeli soldiers murdered people or shot children. It just can’t be, and Goldstone certainly should have thought twice before taking a role in such a body," Wiesel said.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/202846-I-Can-t-Believe-that-Israeli-Soldiers-Murdered-People-or-Shot-Children-

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

by Murray Polner

Global Research, February 8, 2010

History News Network

Murray Polner is the author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and is co-editor, with Thomas E. Woods Jr., of We Who Dared Say No to War.
Suddenly and surprisingly, we have a Bush-like Obama Doctrine. To the applause of liberal hawks and formerly critical neocons, the president declared in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that the U.S. will continue to wage war—though naturally, only “just” war—anywhere and against anyone it chooses in a never-ending struggle against the forces of evil. His antiwar supporters can take seats on the sidelines. It’s all reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and the prescient George Ball, and afterward Ball and Lyndon Johnson. In the early ’60s, JFK—reluctantly, we are told by his admirers—decided to send 16,000 “trainers” to Vietnam to teach the South Vietnamese how to play soldier and to stop the Communists from sweeping over Southeast Asia. Vast quantities of money and assorted advisers were shipped without accountability to the corrupt gang of thugs running and ruining that country.

Ball, the one dissenter in Kennedy’s entourage, pleaded with JFK to recall France’s devastating defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and throughout Indochina. “Within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again,” he warned the liberal icon in the White House. But JFK thought he knew better, caustically answering, “George, you’re crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.” Ball would also press Lyndon Johnson to stand down in Vietnam before he destroyed his presidency, domestic agenda, and more importantly the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers and their families, not to mention a few million Southeast Asians. But LBJ wasn’t going to be the first president to lose a war and be blasted by pugnacious home-front warriors. Failing to stop the North Vietnamese would sooner or later have us fighting them on Waikiki Beach, or so the Cold War line went. Ever since then, we have continued to hear about regional menaces that supposedly, if left unchecked, will threaten vital U.S. interests or even Americans at home. Ronald Reagan employed that rationale in defending the proxy war in Central America waged by U.S.-backed Contras. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton extended the tradition of intervention, sending troops to theaters of combat as far-flung as Panama, Kuwait, and the Balkans, while the second Bush launched invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have all been war presidents.

But Barack Obama was going to be different, or so my fellow antiwar liberals— and a few antiwar conservatives— hoped. He was to herald the end of that uncompromising and unilateral era of preventive war. The hundreds of thousands who joyously greeted the president- elect in Grant Park or the 1.5 million at his inauguration were ecstatic with anticipation. Left-wing pundits wrote excitedly about FDR’s One Hundred Days and projected great plans onto the new Man From Illinois. In countless articles, Republicans were declared brain dead, and the Bush- Cheney policies that got us into Iraq, Afghanistan, and the torture business were buried.

One year after those celebrations, it’s the neocons cheering, seeing in Obama’s policies a vindication of the late administration. Who would have dreamed that following Obama’s West Point speech announcing 30,000 more troops destined for Afghanistan, William Kristol would laud Obama in the pages of the Washington Post, writing, “the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s,” and praise the Democratic president for having “embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power”? War makes strange bedfellows. Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s under secretary of defense for policy, has been invited to speak about the president’s hopes for a new Afghanistan on a panel led by Frederick W. Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute, the heart of neoconservatism.

Why did Obama buy what the hawks sold him? What if he had leveled with the nation and acknowledged that, however obnoxious and cruel the Taliban may be, they pose no danger to the United States? What if he had vowed that we would not dispatch tens of thousands of additional troops to a civil war in an agrarian, impoverished, largely illiterate country divided by tribal loyalties?

It was not to be. Instead, as New York Times columnist David Brooks stated approvingly, “With his two surges, Obama will more than double the number of American troops in Afghanistan.” Charles Krauthammer was direct and sharp: “most supporters of the Afghanistan war were satisfied. They got the policy; the liberals got the speech”—and no say in the construction of that policy.

After West Point and Oslo, neocons saw Obama as a more coherent Bush, an electrifying orator who had dazzled antiwar Democrats and independents and then promptly dumped them. When the New York Times printed a photo of the men and women who helped Obama reach his decision to escalate, not one dove was present.

Were there no alternatives? In this huge country, could he not find a handful of realists, whether Left or Right, to supply some workable ideas for eliminating third and fourth tours for our overextended troops and the resulting suicides, amputations, epidemics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and legions of weeping relatives at gravesides?

Hold on, Obama’s loyal liberal defenders counter, shuddering at the memory of Bush. Why blame him for the miserable decisions he has to make based on impossible situations he did not create? They would prefer not to explain why they and their allies in the think tanks and Congress have so little influence.

Granted, some of Obama’s base reacted negatively. In December, MoveOn .org sent its millions of members a scorching email denouncing Obama’s troop escalation for “deepen[ing] our involvement in a quagmire.” Anti-Vietnam War rebel Tom Hayden removed the Obama sticker from his car. United for Peace and Justice, the main organizer of mass peace rallies around the country, announced, “It’s Obama’s War, and We Will Stop it.” The widely read liberal TomDispatch.com dubbed its former champion the “Commanded-in- Chief” for giving way to the hardball pressures exerted by the generals. Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive, founded by the fabled anti-militarist Robert M. LaFollette Sr. in 1909, compared Bush and Obama’s rhetoric and wrote an article called “Obama Steals Bush’s Speechwriters.”

But these protests notwithstanding, we remain—and will throughout Obama’s presidency—an empire of military colonization, the goal for decades of neoconservatives and assorted liberal hawks. In anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s wonderfully evocative words, “The U.S. is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup.” American forces are stationed at approximately 1,000 military bases in 120 countries at a cost topping $100 billion annually. Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Indian Ocean midway between Africa and Indonesia, is apparently so essential a base that 5,000 locals were thrown out of their homes so the U.S. could have yet another top-secret facility from which to conduct its perpetual wars.

Far from being a consensus-seeking peacenik, Obama would not even sign the Landmine Ban Treaty, which Bush also refused to endorse, thus leaving the U.S. the only NATO nation unwilling to participate. Said Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division, “they have simply decided to allow the Pentagon to dictate terms.” A shocked Bill Moyers pointed out that 5,000 people died from mine explosions in 2008, noting the disconnect between Obama’s refusal to enlist the support of the government he leads and the Oslo speech in which he maintained, “I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do and isolates and weakens those who don’t.”

In another instance of history repeating, the first Obama defense budget has been virtually the same as Bush’s military appropriations. Obama has reduced spending on Cold War weapons such as the F-22 fighter, but he reportedly plans to ask Congress for an extra $33 billion for the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. To his credit, the president is trying to negotiate a new nuclear-arms reduction pact with Russia and close a few of the CIA’s clandestine prisons. But in many other vital areas of defense and national security, like warrantless wiretaps and renewal of much of the Patriot Act, he persists in activities that violate fundamental freedoms. He has also refused to hold anyone from the Bush-Cheney era accountable.

There’s more: his administration has just signed an accord with Colombia granting the U.S. a ten-year right to use seven of its bases, including the centerpiece of the agreement, Palanquero AFB. Take heed, any leftist South American government that dares defy Uncle Sam. At the same time, Obama blinked at the coup d’état in Honduras. “They really thought he was different,” said Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Latin America’s opinion of Obama. “But those hopes were dashed over the course of the summer.”

So what happened?

Barack Obama happened. More eloquence than substance happened. More time-honored political caution than audacity or hope. Liberal and conservative Cold Warriors as key advisers. A reluctance to cross wartime profiteers. A recognition by his poll-counters that, with future elections in mind, it was best to govern from some ill-defined center, acting tough abroad to keep the neocons off his back while throwing an occasional bone to his left.

That strategy may buy him a second term as fruitless as his first—or it could render him indistinguishable from his deservedly maligned predecessor and cost him re-election in 2012. The Left howls now, but from the very start, Obama signaled his lack of interest in McGovernite ideas of change in foreign policy. There was a time when he talked about pressing Israel to dismantle its settlements. But thus far he has been cowed by Netanyahu and his American backers, betraying any hope for a genuinely independent Palestinian state. There was that stirring speech in Cairo and then silence. There was talk about closing Guantanamo but no mention of the much larger Bagram prison in Afghanistan.

The sad truth is everything we are seeing we have already seen. Despite presidents who come and go, permanent war is a hallowed American institution. Start if you will with the War of 1812, the invasion of Mexico, and the carnage of a Civil War. Move to the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their property, the killing, torture, and prison camps in the Philippines, then the blood-drenched 20th century. The 21st likewise dawns red. It never changes. Doves protest, hawks rule, ordinary people pay the penalty. All wars are “just.”

As surely as the bloodletting persists, so does the opposition. The old chestnut that liberals have always stood for peace and conservatives for war is historically false. In fact, our past is rich with anti-militarist heroes of surprisingly varied political colors. Daniel Webster opposed the War Hawks and the draft they proposed in 1812. Abolitionist Theodore Parker denounced the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 “to protest against this most infamous war.” Henry Van Dyke, a Presbyterian minister and ardent foe of the annexation of the Philippines, told his congregation in 1898, “If we enter the course of foreign conquest, the day is not far distant when we must spend in annual preparation for wars more than the $180,000,000 that we now spend every year in the education of our children for peace.” Socialist and labor leader Eugene Debs received a ten-year prison sentence for daring to tell potential draftees in 1918 that it was “the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses.” Against U.S. entry into World War I, Republican Sen. George Norris of Nebraska asked, “To whom does this war bring prosperity? Not to the soldier … not to the brokenhearted widow … not to the mother who weeps at the death of her baby boy … . War brings no prosperity to the great mass of common and patriotic citizens … .War brings prosperity to the stock gambler on Wall Street.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the only member of Congress in 2001 who voted against George W. Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan, warned her colleagues to be “careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Conservative Russell Kirk laid out a post-World War II program for conservatives by reminding them, “A handful of individuals, some of them quite unused to moral responsibilities on such a scale, made it their business to extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; we must make it our business to curtail the possibility of such snap decisions.”

Anti-militarism is very much an American tradition, but it has never been a majority position. Who now reads Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago newspaperman who invented the brogish bartender Mr. Dooley speaking to his customer, Mr. Hennessey, while deriding American excesses and the national passion for imperial expansion? He wondered why many leaders and everyday Americans passively embraced, without much knowledge, our devotion to world hegemony—specifically in his time, the decision to invade and occupy the Philippines. “’Tis not more than two months,” he told his pro-annexation readers, “ye larned whether they were islands or canned goods.”

Yet just as certain as opposition to foreign adventuring arises, again it goes unheeded. As we begin President Obama’s second year in office, of this we can be certain: in global affairs, but for a few crumbs here and there, antiwar views will rarely be welcomed by this White House. And when these marginalized voters complain, all the president’s men will remind them that they were told Afghanistan was a “necessary war” and “national security” is everything. I can imagine Obama’s advisers confidently telling him that however many troops he ships to these and future wars, however much money he spends on military hardware, his anguished allies have no place else to go. Plus ça change.

Global Research Articles by Murray Polner

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17484

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

by Domenico Losurdo*

The time when Obama spoke of a G2 relationship between the United States and China to rule the world is behind us. In the space of a few days, the Obama administration proliferated its provocations against China: arms sales to the separatist region of Taiwan, the announcement by the Director of National Intelligence of an imminent cyberwar against China, compounded by the announcement that the chief of Tibetan separatists will be received by the White House. In this article, Professor Domenico Losurdo takes a new look at the desire of the United States to dismantle China.

---

6 February 2010
Tools

Print
Send
All the versions of this article:

français
italiano
Countries
United States
China
Themes
USA: Obama Administration

The news is now official. The Dalai Lama will soon be received by president Obama at the White House. The meeting between these two soul mates was inevitale: twenty years apart (1989 and 2009), they both received the Nobel Peace Prize, and both received this distinction ad maiorem Dei gloriam [1], or, to be more precise, for the greatest glory of the “nation elected” by God. 1989 was the year when the USA won the Cold war and were on the point of dismantling the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and also – they hoped – China. Under such circumstanches, the peace champion crown could have gone to none other than the conniving monk who already for thirty years – encouraged and financed by the CIA – had been fighting to dispossess China of one quarter of its territory (Greater Tibet).

By 2009, the situation had radically changed: the leaders of Beijing had managed to avert the tragedy that others wanted to inflict on their country. Instead of being thrown back to its dark decades of oppression, humiliation and often condemned to mass death by starvation, back to the "China Crucified" that historians have spoken of, a fifth of the world’s population had experienced an extraordinary surge, whereas the decline and discredit stalking the only remaining super power, which in 1989 still believed it had the world in its hands, were clearly and relentlessly emerging. In the circumstances prevailing in 2009, the Nobel Peace prize came to glorify the person who – thanks to his eloquence and ability to project himself as a man of change coming from the bottom of the social ladder – had been chosen to bring new luster to the United States empire.

In fact, the real significance of the Obama presidency is there for everyone to see. There is not a single region in the world where US militarism and war policies have not intensified. A fleet was sent to the Arab-Persian Gulf, equipped to neutralize a possible Iranian response to the wild bombardments frantically being prepared by Israel, also thanks to the weapons provided by Washington. In Latin America, after having encouraged or promoted the coup d’etat in Honduras, Obama is installing seven military bases in Colombia, re-establishing the presence of the Fourth Fleet, and taking advantage of the humanitarian emergency in Haiti (the severity of which is a consequence of the neocolonial domination that the United States have exerted there for two centuries) to massively occupy the country: with a deployment of troops which also serves as a serious warning to countries in Latin-America. In Africa, under the pretext of fighting “terrorism”, the USA is vigorously reinforcing their military structure: its actual purpose is to obstruct as much as possible the supply of energy and raw materials needed by China, with a view to strangling it at the appropriate moment. In Europe even, Obama has sought the expansion of NATO to the East, and is intent on undermining Russia; any concessions are merely formal and only aim at isolating China to the extent possible, it being the only country which is likely to challenge Washington’s planetary hegemony.

Indeed, it is in Asia that the aggressive character of the new United States presidency emerges in all its starkness. It is not only the fact that the war in Afghanistan has expanded into Pakistan, resorting to drones (and their train of “collateral damage) far more massively than at the time of the Bush junior administration. But it’s developments in Taiwan that are of particular relevance. The situation was clearly improving: the contacts and exchanges between continental China and the island had started again and were developing; relations between the Chinese Communist party and the Kuomindang were restored. With the new weapons sale to Taiwan, Obama intends to achieve a very precise goal: if it is not possible to dismantle this Asian giant, it should at least be prevented from reunifying peacefully.

Right on cue, a seasoned veteran of containment and dismemberment policies vis-à-vis China turns up in Washington. Just at the right moment His Holiness re-enters the scene, having sent his blessing to the gun-runner who is sitting in the White House even before setting foot in the United States. But isn’t the Dalai Lama universally acknowledged as a champion on non-violence? In connection with this refined manipulation, I would like, if I may, refer the reader to a chapter in my new book titled "Non-violence: A demystified history", edited by Laterza (Bari-Rome), which will be available in bookstores as of 4 March 2010. For the moment, I shall limit myself to disclosing only one aspect. Books authored or co-authored by ex-CIA agents reveal a truth which should always be kept in mind: non-violence is a screen invented by US intelligence services who are mostly involved in "phycological war".

Thanks to this "screen", His Holiness has been shrouded in a sacred aura while concurrently being involved, since his escape from China in 1959, in promoting an armed rebellion in Tibet, sustained by massive financial means, a powerful organizing and multi-media machine and a huge arsenal provided by the United States; a rebellion which nevertheless failed for lack of support on the part of the Tibetan population. To this day, former CIA operatives write about it is an armed revolt which enabled the USA to accumulate invaluable experience for their wars in Indochina, in other words for colonial wars – and I add – which rank among the most brutal of the Twentieth Century.

Now, the Dalai Lama and Obama are about to meet. It was in the logic of things. This meeting between the two Nobel Prize laureates of deceipt will be rather amicable as should be expected from a meeting between two personalities which are linked by elective affinities. But it does not hold anything good in store for the cause of peace.

== For other related articles, please consult our China country file here.

The Dalai Lama and Obama: a meeting between two Nobel laureates in deceipt [Voltaire]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Defense Contractors Go Offshore to Avoid Payroll Taxes

Setting up foreign subsidiaries allows American defense contractors not only to utilize cheaper labor and more favorable regulations, but also avoid paying taxes that fund key government safety net programs

UN holds secret talks with Taliban commanders

The unnamed UN official said that UN Special Representative Kai Eide had met with senior commanders of the Taliban in Dubai on January 8th, Reuters reported.

And Now… Bin Laden blasts US for climate change!!!

Seriously?

‘Nobel Peace Prize-winner Barack Obama ups spending on nuclear weapons to even more than George Bush’

Paulson: Crazy Putin Pushed China To Dump Fannie Bonds And Crush The U.S. Financial System

Motorist fined for blowing nose

Michael Mancini, a father of two, said he put the handbrake on before wiping his nose but was asked to pull over by officers who were standing nearby.

Official US policy: kill American citizens when President/Fuhrer declares them "terrorists"

This is exactly what the Founding Fathers warned us would happen without citizen vigilance. This is fascism, not a constitutional republic. The US is an Orwellian shadow of its Constitution.

Gates to Donate $10 Billion for Vaccine Research

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $10 billion over the next decade to research new vaccines and bring them to the world’s poorest countries, the Microsoft co-founder and his wife said Friday.

WHO’s Chan: Public’s Obedience to Health Authorities "May Be Fading"

“Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows”

The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Simulated volcanic eruptions to block sun

A geoengineering project to block the sun by simulating volcanic eruptions would be 100 times cheaper than cutting greenhouse gas emissions, climate change scientists said.

Kids Face Felony Sexting Charges

A pair of Indiana middle school students are the latest minors to face felony charges for allegedly "sexting" naked photos to each other

It’s Official: Democrats Succeed In Pushing New Debt Ceiling To $14.3 Trillion

Paging James Cameron: Pentagon Wants 3-D Surveillance

Think Avatar for military spies. Pentagon far-out research arm Darpa wants to turn surveillance into a 3-D experience for troops. It has launched the Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS) Program, and are requesting proposals for prototypes of optical imaging systems that would use “advanced high-resolution 3-D imaging technology.”

Central banks end US dollar emergency swap lines

The Bank of England said Wednesday that it and other major central banks are ending emergency lending arrangements put in place with the U.S. Federal Reserve in the wake of the global credit crisis, citing improvements in financial markets.

BlackListed News

Bookmark It

Hide Sites