Updated: CNN Video Addendum to “Witch” Crusade Mutilates and Murders Children in Nigeria

Addendum (11/22/2009):  Here is a video from CNN in which a witch hunt and trial occurs in India.

Jason Pitzl-Waters has brought up an important subject that current afflicts many children in Nigeria.

CIA memo details procedures for breaking detainees

From an article Nick MacFie editted for Reuters:

A Democracy…

Here is a followup to last year’s post.

A democracy should not give credence to the military ambition of the corporate interests

A democracy would not advocate the burning of books

A democracy could not seriously consider chaining the accused after freeing their ancestors from the same bondage

A democracy does not actively conspire to murder its citizens especially without a trial

A democracy will not abrogate the promised privacy of its citizens by sending tax paid spies to infiltrate and misinform them

A democracy can not conduct medical experiments targeting any group whether it’s based on ethnicity or belief system or otherwise

A democracy may not conduct experiments that alter the mental faculties of its citizens especially in the development of weapons

A democracy definitely must not conduct clandestine military operations to set up dummy governments on foreign soil and most definitely not with the unknowing dollars of its tay paying citizens

A democracy is not supposed to fund and train the above activities under the auspices of philanthropy

A democracy which does not sell or even advocate the retail of dangerous substances such as narcotics should never do so on foreign soil especially to barter for weapons

A democracy would never use a tax paid military to attack its civilians especially minors, pets, and pregnant women with unannounced lethal force

A democracy could never use a tax paid military to attack its citizens who non-violently exercise their right to speech with deadly force

A democracy can never control and block media from informing the news to its citizens especially news of its tampering of evidence in cases of their wrong doing

A democracy may never ever detain its citizens exercising their free speech peacefully without trial by jury especially in hazardous inhumane insanitary environs

A democracy must never betray those who defend its freedom and compromise national security especially as a petty act of revenge

From the Huffington Post: You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy

Doug Rushkoff wrote an insightful piece recently for arthur:

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)

Read more.

Innauguration Day 11:30AM EST and Media Coverage

Turned on the TV to watch the Colbert Report after realizing that Obama isn’t making his speech yet.  I voted for Barack Obama so Sarah Palin, whom I personally do not agree with on 99% of life issues, does not enter the White House.  The media coverage has been interesting this week.

- On Monday Night RAW, video footage was shown of GW Bush receiving a WWE World Heavyweight Belt replica sent by Vince.  Jerry “the King” Lawler dead pan said, “You might not agree with the President, but he is the Champion of Truth.”  My gods, some people in the rest of this nation…

- On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart made mention of Martin Luther King III’s appearence at the Innauguration festival yesterday in D.C.  He also made fun of Dr. King’s son’s weight not less than three times, and had three bouts of the giggles pertaining to it.

- At 10:33 AM, just about I flipped thought the channels to watch the coverage.  The first channel I flipped to was CNN where Tara Hill and another self-admitted Conservative, extolled Barack Obama’s virtues and compared him to Ronald Reagen?  They put over Regaenomics and asked for Obama to follow that example.  Good grief.

- Then flipping to the CW, owned by Warner Brothers and Westinghouse jointly, reporters were trying to sell Obama dog collars.  No promising…

- And finally on CBS, they did a historical piece on William Henry Harrisson, the 9th President of the United States.  He died after catching pneumonia on Innauguration Day, less than a month in office.  The correspondent for CBS, who was supposedly a descendant of Harrison thus warned Barack that his reign could be a short one.  OK…

- On a related note, yesterday Rachel Maddow, who is still “sappy,” brought a professor in Race Relations to her show, and she said this si just the beginning: 150 plus years after the abrogation from slavery, there is finally an African-American President of the United States.  But there are still much racial tension int he United States, she added, and hopefully Barack Oabama will help address some of these during his Presidency.

So Barack Obama will be President in an hour or so.  I do not know how I feel yet.  I will have to wait and see.  Will this be a new stage set in history?  I hope so…

YuleTide: The Twelve Deities of Solstice #11 – BALUMAIN, Protector of the Kalash

In the Chitral district of Pakistan, overshadowed by the Hindu Kush mountain range, live the Kalash. Kalash’s polytheistic indigenous religion is the one of the last of the original Indo-European religions. Although it is related to the other two survivors, Hinduism (which some would call a misnomer as its various branches traditionally thought themselves to be separate from the rest) and Zoroastrianism, this religion has its distinct Gods, tales, rites, and rituals.  The Kalasha religion has only approximately3,000 adherents left in the world .

(C) Rosetta Kureshi on Flickr

Disinformation: World News – Mystic Canine Suicide

Disinformation: World News – Mystic Canine Suicide

“Conspiracy Theorists in Israel, DARPA’s robotic soldiers of the future, and mysterious dog suicides in Scotland, all on this week’s installment of Disinformation: World News.”

Disinformation: World News – Cast a Vote or Cast a Spell

Raymond and Joe at the Stonehenge of the ATL area~!

Description from Disinfo’s site:

In the first episode of Disinformation: World News, Raymond and Joe report on the results of the recent elections in the United States, including an election exclusive that you won’t find anywhere else! In military news, the capture and imprisonment of “spy pigeons” in the vicinity of Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities has raised eyebrows in intelligence circles throughout the world. Finally, occult expert Austin Gandy returns with a new edition of “The Invisible College.” Cast a vote or cast a spell, this week on Disinformation: World News.

Episode One – Cast a Vote or Cast a Spell

Will closet racism derail Obama?

By Laura Smith-Spark (BBC News)

“Two decades ago, Douglas Wilder watched as a 9% lead in the polls in the race to be Virginia’s governor slipped to just one-tenth of 1% when the ballots were counted.

He still won the election – becoming the first African-American to be elected a US state governor – but the narrowness of his victory led analysts to speculate that he had been a victim of a white hesitancy to vote for a black man.

The theory goes that some white voters tell opinion pollsters they will vote for a black candidate – but then, in the privacy of the polling booth, put their cross against a white candidate’s name.

And the fear among some supporters is that this could happen to Barack Obama on 4 November, when the country votes for its next president.

The phenomenon is known as the Bradley, or Wilder effect.

Tom Bradley was an African-American mayor of Los Angeles who, running for California’s governorship in 1982, saw a sizeable eve-of-polling lead evaporate on election day, giving victory to his white rival, Republican George Deukmejian.

In 1989, the year Wilder became governor of Virginia, David Dinkins was elected the first African-American mayor of New York – but he also saw an 18-point lead in the polls shrink to a winning margin of just two points on the day.

Charles Henry, a California professor who was among the first to research the Bradley effect, says Mr Obama would need a double-digit lead to feel confident of victory.

Other pundits have suggested a six- to nine-point cushion may be sufficient. Mr Obama currently has a lead of about this size, according to most polls.

But Mr Wilder, now mayor of Richmond, Virginia, and a supporter of the Obama campaign, told the BBC News website that he believes racism will not have a major impact this time.

“Will there be some effect? Yes. Are there some people who just cannot bring themselves to vote for an African-American? Yes.”

But, he said: “America has grown, people have grown.”

Controversies over race have cast a shadow over this campaign.

Popular conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has referred to Mr Obama as the “little black man-child” and Fox News has called his wife, Michelle Obama, his “baby-mama”.

One Republican senator described Mr Obama as “uppity”, a word formerly used to describe blacks who had ideas above their station.

Reports of racist jibes among audiences at some recent McCain rallies led John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, to accuse Mr McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” – a charge they deny.”

Read more.

Unfortunately, the overseas Chinese news media, a traditionally ultra conservative group, has done well to sway my parents of “the dangers of voting Obama.”

Did the U.S. Prep Georgia for War with Russia?

Nathan Hodge wrote for Wired:

Georgia and Russia are careening towards war. And the U.S. isn’t exactly a detached observer in the fight. The American military has been training and equipping Georgian troops for years.

The news thus far: Georgia, which has been locked in a drone war over the separatist enclave of Abkhazia, has launched an offensive to reclaim another breakaway territory, South Ossetia. Latest reports indicate that Georgian forces are laying siege to Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. And Russia, which has backed the separatists, is sending in the tanks.

So why should we care? Oh, just the prospect of a larger regional war that could drag in Russia – and involve the United States as well. Since early 2002, the U.S. government has given a healthy amount of military aid to Georgia. When I last visited South Ossetia, Georgian troops manned a checkpoint outside Tskhinvali — decked out in surplus U.S. Army uniforms and new body armor.

Read more.

T.S.O.G. – The Creature That Ate the Constitution

by Robert Anton Wilson

How, how, how did we ever get ourselves in a predicament where an Oriental-style despot controls American medicine and most doctors fear to prescribe what they think best for their patients? Why, over 200 years after a war to liberate ourselves from a half-mad king, have we allowed our lives and health to come under the rule of a totally mad Tsar? And has this monstrous tumor destroyed most of the Constitution only “by accident,” or did its creators have that intent all along?

Well, here’s my theory:

Most people think the TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] began its infestation of America with George Bush Sr., when he appointed a Tsar to discombobulate our previously democratic form of government; but Bush had a long C.I.A. career behind him and the C.I.A. had a long, long Tsarist history before they came out in the open with a public and blatant Tsar, a functionary not endowed or permitted by any clause in our Constitution.

Actually, the TSOG began replacing representative democracy in the U.S. way back in 1945, when Gen. Rheinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Chief of Soviet Intelligence, surrendered to the U.S. Army, after first prudently burying several truckloads of “inside information” about the Soviet Union at a secret location.

Gehlen was not only a master spy but a wizard negotiator. Within a week, he was out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army General’s uniform; the U.S. intelligence services, in return, got the info about the Soviets, including access to Gehlen’s agents in the Soviet government — a group of Mystical Tsarists who had infiltrated both the Red Army and the KGB.

You see, their leader and Gehlen’s major “asset,” General Andrei Vlassov, had a fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism, but especially in the “mystical Tsarism” espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II].

Pobedonostsev, popularly called “The Grand Inquisitor” because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people , combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an explosive and nefarious mixture.

“Mystical Tsarism” deserves a whole book in itself. especially since it now rules our own country; but we must be brief here. This holy religion, or superstition — as you will –has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong (2) Reason is “cold” and inhuman, faith is “warm” and human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the Tsar, our “Little Father.” I don’t think any of Pobedonostsev’s crew actually believed in the Tooth Fairy, though.

Besides, Roman Catholics of the old school have similar attitudes, but merely prefer a Pope to do their thinking for them instead of a Tsar, and most of us consider them sane, but just “weird.”

Read more.

The FBI’s plan to “profile” Muslims

Thanks to Ralph Bernardo at Disinfo

By Juan Cole for Salon

It’s unconstitutional, un-American — and it might hurt, rather than help, the FBI’s effort to stop real acts of terror.

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask “open-ended questions” concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person’s travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.

The rumored changes have provoked protests from Muslim American and Arab-American groups. The Council on American Islamic Relations, among the more effective lobbies for Muslim Americans’ civil liberties, immediately denounced the plan, as did James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute. Said Zogby, “There are millions of Americans who, under the reported new parameters, could become subject to arbitrary and subjective ethnic and religious profiling.” Zogby, who noted that the Bush administration’s history with profiling is not reassuring, warned that all Americans would suffer from a weakening of civil liberties.

<a href=”http://judo.salon.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.cgi/www.salonmagazine.com/opinion/content/large.html@Right”><img src=”http://judo.salon.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.cgi/www.salonmagazine.com/opinion/content/large.html@Right” width=”300″ height=”250″ border=”0″ alt=”" /></a>

In fact, Zogby’s statement only begins to touch on the many problems with these proposed rules. The new guidelines would lead to many bogus prosecutions, but they would also prove counterproductive in the effort to disrupt real terror plots. And then there’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s rationale for revising the rules in the first place. “It’s necessary,” he explained in a June news conference, “to put in place regulations that will allow the FBI to transform itself as it is transforming itself into an intelligence-gathering organization.” When did Congress, or we as a nation, have a debate about whether we want to authorize the establishment of a domestic intelligence agency? Indeed, late last month Congress signaled its discomfort with the concept by denying the FBI’s $11 million funding request for its data-mining center.

Establishing a profile that would aid in identifying suspects is not in and of itself illegal, though the practice generally makes civil libertarians nervous. When looking for drug couriers, Drug Enforcement Agency agents were permitted by the Supreme Court in United States v. Sokolow (1989) to use indicators such as the use of an alias, nervous or evasive behavior, cash payments for tickets, brief trips to major drug-trafficking cities, type of clothing, and the lack of checked luggage. This technique, however, specifically excluded the use of skin color or other racial features in building the profile.

In contrast, using race and ethnicity as the — or even a — primary factor in deciding whom to stop and search, despite being widespread among police forces, is illegal. Just this spring, the Maryland State Police settled out of court with the ACLU and an African-American man after having been sued for the practice of stopping black and Latino men and searching them for drugs. New Jersey police also got into trouble over stopping people on the grounds of race.

More here.

INTELLIGENCE ON NUCLEAR PROGRAM: Ex-Agent Says CIA Ignored Iran Facts and Fired Him

Joby Warrick, staff writer for the Washington Post wrote:

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.

The consensus view on Iran’s nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA’s rationale for censoring the former officer’s lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.

“On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” Krieger said in an interview.

In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, Krieger said.

Read more.

“WTC hero police dog” to be cloned

OWEN MORITZ DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER REPORTED:

James Symington and Trakr were among first search-and-rescue teams to arrive at WTC in 2001. Trakr helped locate last human survivor of attack.

If you’re going to clone a dog, it might as well be a hero dog.

A German shepherd named Trakr, a hero of Ground Zero, will be replicated as a detection dog in a bizarre cloning experiment announced Monday.

Trakr and his master, a retired Canadian police officer named James Symington, were among the first search-and-rescue teams to arrive at Ground Zero.

Braving horrific conditions, the pair helped locate the last human survivor of 9/11 under some 30 feet of unstable debris.

“Once in a lifetime, a dog comes along that not only captures the hearts of all he touches but also plays a private role in history,” Symington wrote in his winning essay in a contest to find the world’s most “cloneworthy dog.”

The canine, now 15, suffers from a degenerative neurological disorder that impairs the use of his back legs. The disorder may be linked to exposure to toxic smoke at Ground Zero, experts say.

The Best Friends Again contest is run by BioArts International, a company that claims to have the sole worldwide license for the cloning of dogs, cats and endangered species.

Read more.

US’ Bday Present to Nelson Mandela: removal from the US terrorism list (after North Korea of course)

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported:

Last weekend he was the guest of honour at a huge concert in London to mark his 90th birthday.

More than 64,000 people packed Hyde Park and millions watched the concert on television around the world.

But last weekend when former South African president Nelson Mandela was soaking in the musical tributes, he was still on the US Government’s terrorism watch list.

The internationally revered former South African president was officially regarded as a threat to US national security because of his long association with the African National Congress.

Even the North Korean Government managed to get itself dropped from the list before Mr Mandela.

In April this year US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had expressed her embarrassment at having to wave in people like the foreign minister of South Africa and former leaders like Nelson Mandela.

That was an embarrassment shared by Amir Woods from the Institute of Policy Studies when she spoke to National Public Radio in the US.

“It is absolutely a travesty that Mandela, that really all of the leaders of South Africa have to get a special pass to be able to travel to the US because of these travel restrictions,” Ms Woods said.

“So the Bush administration has quite rightly moved on North Korea to remove North Korea from that list of terrorists.”

“But all these decades, since the end of the Apartheid era we still have South Africa on, especially the African National Congress including Nelson Mandela, on that list of terrorists.”

Read more.

Olympic Cities Punishes Poor (Oh You Didn’t Know? I bet you thought we were talking just Beijing)

Straight Dot Com reported:

A University of Toronto sociologist claimed in an academic paper that poor people suffer greater housing shortages and lose their civil liberties in cities that host the Olympics. Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, author of two books on the impact of the Olympics, told the Georgia Straight that she will present her paper, “The Olympic (Affordable) Housing Legacy and Social Responsibility”, at a conference in October.

Her paper notes that the vast majority of bid cities in the past two decades””including Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Sydney, Beijing, Toronto, Athens, Turin, New York, and Vancouver””all shared a common problem: a housing and homelessness crisis. Many of them, including Vancouver, listed housing as part of their Olympic-legacy promises.

Read more.