A former SAS soldier was served with a high court order yesterday preventing him from making fresh disclosures about how hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture.

Ben Griffin could be jailed if he makes further disclosures about how people seized by special forces were allegedly mistreated and ended up in secret prisons in breach of the Geneva conventions and international law. Griffin, 29, left the British army in 2005 after three months in Baghdad, saying he disagreed with the “illegal” tactics of US troops.

He told a press conference hosted by the Stop the War Coalition this week that individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay. He had not witnessed torture himself but added: “I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.”

Referring to the government’s admission that two US rendition flights containing terror suspects had landed at the British territory of Diego Garcia, Griffin said the use of British territory and airspace “pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place”.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/29/military.law

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A Fox affiliate managed to get ahold of the TSA’s raw data on luggage theft on their watch and is reporting that a whopping $31 million worth of valuables disappeared from the aviation system in the past three years. Many of these items went missing from within suitcases, pilfered in transit after the TSA inaugurated its no-locks policy on checked bags. Now that’s security.

A former KCI baggage handler, who asked us not to identify her, said she knows theft happens even in Kansas City. “There was never anybody who said I did that,” said the baggage handler. “But there was always talk. So and so found something in a bag. Shoes were one. Another one was perfumes, really expensive brands.”

She said the best time for luggage to be tampered with is when it’s in the baggage hold area. That’s where it is stored before it’s loaded onto the plane. “You will have one person down there and all they are doing is transferring bags to different carts,” said the former baggage handler. “It only takes one person. So you would just be in a room by yourself.”

She said one way to get away with the crime was to rifle through a bag and then put it on the wrong plane headed to the wrong city. When the luggage is finally located, it would be unclear where the crime took place.

LINK

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When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president last year, some observers questioned whether the senator from Illinois was “black enough” to embody the hopes and aspirations of African Americans.

Now a variation on that theme has emerged: Is Fred Armisen, who is not African American, “black enough” to embody Obama on “Saturday Night Live“?

Debate over that question has been pinging around the Internet since Armisen, a veteran cast member, donned darker makeup to portray the Democratic candidate for the first time Saturday. Armisen played Obama opposite Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton in a sketch satirizing the supposedly cushy treatment his candidacy has received from the media.

“SNL” impresario Lorne Michaels said yesterday by phone that he thought the sketch played so well that the show intends to air another Obama/Clinton debate spoof tomorrow night, with Armisen and Poehler reprising their characters… http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/28/AR2008022803988.html

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg, no longer a potential presidential candidate, said Thursday the candidates are starting to reflect his brand of bipartisanship and that his endorsement is up for grabs.

The billionaire mayor, who is friendly with Republican John McCain as well as Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, finally put to rest more than two years of speculation that he would launch his own independent bid for the White House. He said he had thought “long and hard” about whether to run.

“The candidates that are emerging, I think in all fairness, are showing some hopeful signs of understanding the need for independent leadership,” Bloomberg told reporters. “And I believe that the most productive role I can play is to continue pushing them in that direction.”

Bloomberg spoke after writing an op-ed piece for Thursday’s New York Times that pledged unequivocally that he would not run this year. But the article dangled another juicy tidbit that is sure to keep him in the spotlight as the race chugs on without him: He might throw his support toward one of the campaigns.

Asked at a news conference what a candidate might do to win his endorsement, Bloomberg began by saying “they’re all in contention.”

He said he is looking for the candidate who does not work along party lines, addresses the intricacies of issues and has thought ahead to the legislative process and how to finance specific programs. He said he wants to see them “coming up with things that make some sense to me.”

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American Workers Have a Chance To Be Heard
By JIM WEBB

The most important — and unfortunately the least debated — issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic’s range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much…

A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation’s most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the “rough road of capitalism.” Others claim that it’s the fault of the worker or the public education system.. Still others have gone so far as to argue that these divisions are the natural results of a competitive society. Furthermore, an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the “right genetics” and thus are natural entrants to the “overclass,” while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don’t possess the necessary attributes…

continue reading "Jim Webb: Old-Style American Progressive and Senator-elect"

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Last year, the UK government is said to have outsourced a pre and post election related work to a business processing organisation (BPO) firm in Bangalore.

Now, a republican senator, Frank Morse, in Portland, Oregon, read out a speech on

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George Herbert Walker Bush is a proud father; tears easily come to his eyes when he thinks of his children, all of them, and there is gracious deference in his tone when he talks about the son he calls, with emphasis, “The President.” He is not given to boasting about or bragging on his family; he still hears his mother’s voice warning him to avoid “the Great I Am,” but several times over the past few years the 41st president has mentioned to visitors that the 43rd president has read the Bible in its entirety

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BLITZER: Let’s move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge
issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they
are on the verge of a civil war - if not already a civil war - We see these horrible
bodies showing up. Tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians
apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

BUSH: Yes, you see - you see it on TV, and that’s the power of an enemy that is
willing to kill innocent people. But there’s also an unbelievable will and resiliency
by the Iraqi people … Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people
when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma
because there is - my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.

——————————————–
Crooks & Liars - This is an appalling statement to make. With a civil war full of Iraqi bloodshed and over 20,000
of our men and women killed or wounded since the war started - one would think this might matter more than a
simple pause. Apparently it doesn’t… {{link http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/24/bush-dismisses-bloodshed-in-iraq-as-just-a-comma MORE}}

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“Evidence obtained through Judicial Watch and confirmed by multiple press reports suggest that White House staff had been given doses of the powerful antibiotic Cipro at the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks, one month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill.”…{{link http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/newsletter/2002/0802k.shtml MORE}}

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Democrats.org has a post called “Watch the New DNC Video: Bin Laden Been Missing” that’s worth checking out…

Our new video highlights the Bush Administration’s willingness to use fear and smear tactics to gain political advantage in a tough election year. Specifically, after years of hardly mentioning Osama bin Laden, saying that “he wasn’t that concerned about him,” and closing down the CIA office charged with his capture, President Bush seemed to have a new found interest, citing the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks seventeen different times in a speech this week.

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Kona-born filmmaker David Cunningham admits he was taken aback by the onslaught of criticism directed at his latest project, “The Path to 9/11.”… To Cunningham, political rhetoric and finger-pointing only obscure the lessons offered by the 9/11 Commission Report. “The names are not important,” he said. “It’s the machine that needs to be addressed. We need a massive paradigm shift.”

“The Path to 9/11″ was a major undertaking for the Konawaena High School graduate, whose previous work includes “Beyond Paradise” and “To End All Wars.” Armed with a $40 million budget, Cunningham oversaw a project that would take a year and a half to complete and involved nearly 250 actors, a thousand extras, and 300 different sets in the U.S., Canada and Morocco.

Cunningham said the final product was “double- and triple-checked” by a team of lawyers for Disney, the parent corporation of ABC…{{link http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060909/NEWS01/609100320/1001/NEWS MORE}}

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