When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with a Terrorist group or state sponsor of Terror - as it often does - it at least usually has the tact to first remove them from its formal terrorist list (as the U.S. did when it wanted to support Saddam in 1982 and work with Libya in 2006), or it just keeps them off the list altogether despite what former Council on Foreign Relations writer Lionel Beehner described as "mounds of evidence that [they] at one time or another abetted terrorists" (as it has done with close U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, along with the El Salvadoran death squads and Nicaraguan contras armed and funded in the 1980s by the Reagan administration). But according to a new, multi-sourced report from The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the U.S. did not even bother going through those motions when, during the Bush years, it trained the Iranian dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) at a secretive Department of Energy site in Nevada:

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. . . . The M.E.K.'s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration's fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

A document advising the Bush administration against torture has resurfaced, despite his best efforts to hide it

In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo opposing the Bush administration's torture practices (though he employed the infamous obfuscation of "enhanced interrogation techniques"). The White House tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but one survived in the State Department's bowels and was declassified yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive.

The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and the Constitution's prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA's use of "waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement." Zelikow further wrote in the memo that "we are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even when the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants." According to the memo, the techniques are legally prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest to justify them, since they should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and "shock the conscience."

The current French presidential election campaign was rudely interrupted at its very start by a series of murders in and around the southwestern city of Toulouse. On March 11, a paratrooper was shot dead by a mysterious motorcyclist in Toulouse. Four days later, in the nearby garrison town of Montauban, two more paratroopers were shot dead in similar circumstances. Then, four days after that, early in the morning of March 21 in a residential neighborhood of Toulouse, a helmeted gunman approached a Jewish school and coolly shot dead a rabbi and three children at point blank range before driving off on his motorcycle.

Since the targeted paratroopers were reported to be of North African extraction, the first wave of reaction focused on the assumption that the gunman was a far right racist, comparable to the Norwegian mass murderer Ander Behring Breivik. Commentators and politicians rushed to blame rightwing campaign rhetoric for "stirring up hatred". Bernard Henry Lévy recycled his perpetual accusation that France is inherently anti-Semitic, writing: "So there you have it, France is a country where in 2012, in the third largest city, one can shoot at a Jewish school and kill several innocent children at point blank range." The insinuation that France as a whole was somehow guilty was echoed on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, which predicted that the political debate around the shooting was likely to continue as "soul-searching about the nature of France".

The reactions necessarily shifted drastically after it was reported that the lone killer had been identified as a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian extraction, Mohamed Merah. Rather than a neo-Nazi racist, the killer presented himself as an Al Qaeda fighter. As police surrounded his apartment in Toulouse, he reportedly claimed by telephone that he had killed the paratroopers for having fought in Afghanistan and murdered Jewish children to "avenge Palestinian children".

What do you do when an entire nation begins to lose the capacity to think rationally? Many Americans spend a great deal of time criticizing the government, and there is certainly a lot to complain about, but it is not just the government that is the problem. All over America, people appear to be going insane. It is almost as if we have been cursed with stupidity. Sadly, this applies from the very top of our society all the way down to the very bottom. A lot of us find ourselves asking the following question much more frequently these days: "How could they be so stupid?"

Unfortunately, we are witnessing a complete collapse of common sense all over America. Many people seem to believe that if we could just get Obama out of office or if we could just reform our economic system that our problems as a nation would be solved, but that is simply not true. Our problems run much deeper than that. The societal decay that is plaguing our country is very deep and it is everywhere. We are a nation that is full of people that do not care about others and that just want to do what is right in their own eyes.

We hold ourselves out to the rest of the world as "the greatest nation on earth" and an example that everyone else should follow, and yet our own house is rotting all around us. The words "crazy", "insane" and "deluded" are not nearly strong enough to describe our frame of mind as a country. America has become a sad, delusional old man that can't even think straight anymore. The evidence of our mental illness is everywhere.

The following are 20 signs that we are witnessing the complete collapse of common sense in America....

"Our leaders do not control the tides of history -- they are just surfing them. They are doing their best to keep on top of them. They do not make the tides -- the tides of history come from a million different vectors: our advancing technology, our advancing worldview. These are the things that actually make a difference to the flow of history, and our leaders try to sit on top of it, and perhaps try to give the impression that they are controlling it, but history's history. Time and tide -- they don't pay much attention to any human leader." - Alan Moore. This is quote is from Professor Sean Carney's essay, "The Tides of History: Alan Moore's Historiographic Vision."

Although 9/11 truth is still a red line in mainstream Western political discourse, the boundaries of discussion about the attacks are harder to enforce in the global alternative media, whose positive influence on public debate is rapidly expanding.

The global 9/11 truth and justice movement is not going away because it is based in reality and history. One of these days, it will become politically safe for mainstream organizations, journalists, and politicians to demand a new international investigation into the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is one of the organizations that is leading the charge in educating the global public about the scientific evidence behind the 9/11 truth and accountability movement. Its founder Richard Gage is currently on a lecture tour in Canada. He was recently interviewed by Victoria Handysides of Canada's Here Magazine. Here is an excerpt from her article called, "Truther disputes 9-11 attack":

Press reports and comments by top intelligence officials suggest that Mohamed Merah, the alleged gunman who killed seven people including three Jewish schoolchildren in a nine-day shooting spree in Toulouse, was a French intelligence asset.

These revelations raise questions about French intelligence's failure to stop Merah, and whether this failure was dictated by political considerations. The investigation of Merah was led by the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI), run by Bernard Squarcini - a close associate of incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, previously running far behind Socialist Party (PS) candidate François Hollande in next month's presidential elections, has benefited from massive media coverage after the attacks and now is catching up to Hollande in polls.

In a March 23 Le Monde interview, Squarcini had confirmed that Merah had traveled extensively in the Middle East, even though his legal earnings were roughly at the minimum wage: "He spent time with his brother in Cairo after having traveled in the Near East: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Israel. ... Then he went to Afghanistan via Tajikistan. He took unusual routes and did not appear on our radars, nor those of French, American, or local foreign intelligence services."

Squarcini apparently aimed to bolster the official explanation for Merah's ability to escape police: he was an undetectable "self-radicalized lone wolf." This story is being shattered by revelations that French intelligence agencies were apparently in close contact with Merah, trying to develop him as an informant inside Islamist networks.

With few exceptions the news that will shape public discourse is subject to a de facto censorial process of powerful government and corporate elites beyond accountability to the public. It is here that Sigmund Freud's notion of repression is especially helpful for assessing the decrepit state of media and public discourse in the United States. In Freud's view, one's collective life experiences are registered in the subconscious, with those particularly disturbing or socially impermissible experiences being involuntarily suppressed, only later to emerge as neuroses. Whereas suppression is conscious and voluntary, repression takes place apart from individual volition.

With opinion polls indicating at least half of the public distrusting the official account of September 11th, the foremost basis for the "war on terror", no public event has been more repressed in public consciousness via the mass media than 9/11. The enduring usefulness of Freud's theory is suggested in repeated manifestations of the repressed episode to haunt the public mind for which a surrogate reality has been crafted.

"From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation." - Professor Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. This quote is from Prof. McCoy's interview with Democracy Now on February 17, 2006.

"Our brain is domineering when it comes to coping with reality. We sometimes see things not as they really are, sometimes invent categories that do not exist and sometimes fail to see things that are really there. There are people who have never seen or heard of an aircraft and will not be able to imagine it and a real airplane overhead will be distorted in their minds, creating alternative realities.

To recognize that what we call reality is only a consensus reality (only what we have agreed to call reality) is to recognize that we can perceive only what we can conceive. Captain Cook's ship was invisible to the Tahitians because they could not conceive of such a vessel. Joseph Pearce explains this best: "Man's mind mirrors a universe that mirrors man's mind."" - Bharati Sarkar, "Consciousness - Our third eye."

"Remember: those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps are necessary to maintain the status quo. It is obvious that they cannot completely control the propagation of the information. So, how do they "keep secrets?" They don't. Everything is right out there in the public domain. Anybody who wants to can do the research we have done and come to the realizations we have in this process. BUT, not everyone is able to withstand the OTHER weapon of Mass Control: the fear of being labeled a "suspected or potential supporter" in a world where the Grand Inquisitor has total control over life and death." - Laura Knight-Jadczyk, "Mass Mind Control?"

Before the CIA and NSA decided it was a good idea to invade your home without your knowledge to spy on you with advanced appliances, smart phones, computers, and other electronics, they invaded your mind to manipulate your understanding of reality and history, especially of epochal events like the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks.

It is disturbing to know that the CIA has been inside the public mind for half a century, and is now using its unthinkable technological capabilities to invade private homes to document and categorize each individual's behavioural patterns, lifestyle choices, information preferences, and daily habits.

Of course, state surveillance spooks cannot track and data-mine every space of information in this vast social ocean that we call the virtual world. But, that problem can be managed because the sharks of the state don't need to be aware of the entire environment to strike fear in the fishes and other creatures. Just the fact that sharks are buzzing around is enough to make any thinking fish freeze and adapt his thoughts, views, opinions, and patterns in order to placate the sharks' appetite for domination and total control.

Michel Collon, investigative reporter, in Libya shows what "collateral damage". really means...

The French president has caused an outcry after dozens of infant school children were forced to chant 'Long Live Sarkozy!' when he visited their school.

Parents complained about the youngsters being used as 'propaganda tools' after they were made to treat Nicolas Sarkozy as a hero, waving Tricolour flags and constantly shouting his name.

Some were even kissed by Mr Sarkozy, who is hugely unpopular and widely expected to lose the presidential election being held in France in the Spring.