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Alarmed US urges calm as Mideast uprisings grow


The Associated Press
Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:18 UTC
tunisian protester
© Agence France-Presse/Joseph Eid
The Obama administration on Wednesday sharply warned Bahrain against violent crackdowns on anti-government demonstrators as unrest worsened around the Middle East.

The warning came as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Egyptians to hold true to the ideals of their revolution while she toured Cairo's Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the peaceful uprising that toppled Egypt's longtime autocratic leader last month.

Carrying a message similar to that which she delivered in Egypt earlier in the day, Clinton arrived late Wednesday in Tunisia, where protesters demanding democratic freedoms inspired reformers around the Arab world. They succeeded in ousting their authoritarian ruler in January.

Clinton was to hold meetings with Tunisia's transitional leaders on Thursday, encourage civic leaders to press ahead with calls for change and pledge U.S. support for greater political, economic and social openness.

Clinton's democracy cheerleading tour to Egypt and Tunisia came as the situation in Bahrain deteriorated with soldiers and riot police expelling hundreds of protesters from a square in Bahrain's capital, using tear gas and armored vehicles. At least five people were killed Wednesday as clashes flared across the kingdom, according to witnesses and officials.

Bahrain, a strategic ally of the United States because it hosts the Navy's 5th Fleet, has sought and received hundreds of reinforcements for its security forces from neighbors like Saudi Arabia, raising fears of an escalation in violence and descent into the near civil war that is embroiling Libya. Forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi have pressed ahead with assaults on opposition-held towns.
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Blackbox

US Military Using Psychological Warfare on Americans

Paul J. Balles
Redress Information & Analysis
Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:22 UTC
movie slate/brain graphic
© n/a
Paul J. Balles looks at how the US armed forces are now using psychological warfare not only to influence foreign foes, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in within the USA itself.

One big story of the last few weeks has the US military playing "mind games" with civilian leaders in order to get greater support for the war in Afghanistan.

Sometimes these mind games have been called brainwashing. Another name for them is psyops or psychological operations.

According to the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, "Psychological operations are planned propaganda operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals."
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Eye 2

Veterans Today Exclusive: Raymond Davis Release, the Inside Story

Raja Mujtaba
Veterans Today
Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:15 UTC
"Family kidnapped, forced to sign pardon letter'" - Pakistan in shock
"Pakistan's government has sold out the pride of the nation" Imran Khan

CIA contractor Raymond Davis was released by Punjab officials after a reported deal was negotiated with the families of the two men he was accused of murdering. Davis was scheduled to be indicted for murder charges today. Security forces picked up the families last night.



A payment estimated a $2 million was made to secure the release. The families are still in police custody. Davis is now at an undisclosed location, rumored to be Bagram Air Force Base in Kabul.
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Magic Hat

'Blood Money' Frees CIA Contractor In Pakistan


Associated Press
Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:20 UTC
Raymond Davis
© n/a
Contractor Had Been Detained On Suspicion Of Murder

An American CIA contractor detained on suspicion of murder was released on Wednesday after families of the two Pakistanis he killed were given "blood money" and the case was dropped, Pakistani officials said.

The killings and detention of Raymond Allen Davis had strained ties between Pakistan and the United States and added to anti-America sentiment.

Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah said Davis was charged with murder Wednesday but then immediately pardoned by the families of the victims in exchange for compensation or "blood money", as is permitted under Pakistani law. Davis was arrested on Jan. 27 after killing two Pakistanis in what he said was self-defense.

Chaudhry Mushtaq, superintendent at Kot Lakhpat jail, said Davis left the jail with U.S. consulate officials after the hearing.
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Display

Judge OKs feds' access to WikiLeakers Twitter info

Dan Goodin
The Register
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 04:30 UTC
Rebuffs constitutional challenges

A federal judge in Virginia has given investigators access to the Twitter records of four WikiLeaks associates, including the email addresses associated with the accounts and the IP addresses used to access them.

Friday's decision by US Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan, rejected arguments by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that the request for records violated federal law and Free Speech and Privacy rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. She also denied the groups' request to unseal investigators' application seeking the data from Twitter.

"The Twitter Order does not demand the contents of any communication, and thus constitutes only a request for records under §2703(c)," Buchanan wrote, referring to a provision of the 1994 Stored Communications Act that permits the prosecutors to obtain contact details, IP addresses and other information related to records stored online. "The Twitter Order does not demand the contents of any communication, and thus constitutes only a request for records under §2703(c)."
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Heart - Black

UK: NHS reforms: will family doctors become accountants?

Randeep Ramesh
Guardian online
Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:30 UTC
GP consortiums competing for patients will break up the health service, critics say
NHS protesters
© Andy Rain/EPASupporters demonstrate against the government's new health and social care bill.

Among the 50 GPs feted by the prime minister in January at a champagne reception in Downing Street were the leading lights of the National Association of Primary Care, a group of family doctors who many see as the brains behind health secretary Andrew Lansley's plans.

The physicians sipping bubbly at No 10 were part of the first wave of GP shadow consortiums - doctors tasked with reshaping hospital services in the runup to finally being handed the NHS purse strings. Treading the corridors of power that chilly winter evening was Charles Alessi, an executive member of the NAPC, who two weeks earlier had penned a tabloid comment piece backing the radical pro-market plans of the government.

While the association is careful to say it is not aligned to any party, it did come up with the central plank of the health secretary's policy: dissolve England's primary care trusts, which currently commission hospital care on behalf of patients, and instead allow GP practices, essentially private businesses run by doctors, to form consortiums to buy treatments using £80bn of Treasury money. The loss of the primary care trusts will see 24,000 jobs go.
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Sheriff

Bahrain king declares martial law over protests


Associated Press
Tue, 15 Mar 2011 09:45 UTC
Image
© Associated PressThis screen grab taken from Bahrain TV shows troops arriving in Bahrain from Saudi Arabia on Monday, March 14.
Cairo - Bahrain's king declared a three-month state of emergency Tuesday and gave the country's military chief wide authority to battle a Shiite-led protest movement that has threatened the Sunni monarchy and drawn in forces from around the Gulf.

The martial law-style order was read out on Bahrain state TV a day after more than 1,000 Saudi-led troops arrived to help prop up the U.S.-backed regime in the first major cross-border military action to challenge one of the revolts sweeping across the Arab world.

On Tuesday, clashes broke out across the tiny island nation, with a doctor reporting that hundreds of protesters were injured by shotgun blasts and clubs and that one died from a bullet to the head. One of the Saudi soldiers was also shot and killed by a protester, said a security official in Saudi Arabia.

Further underlining the regional implications of the unrest in Bahrain, Shiite power Iran denounced the intervention of foreign troops as "unacceptable" and predicted it would complicate the kingdom's political crisis.

Iran holds no deep political ties to Bahrain's Shiite groups, but some Iranian hard-liners have hailed their efforts over the years for greater rights for their community, which represents a majority of the nation's population. In the month of protests, the Shiite-led opposition is also pressing for political freedoms.
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Nuke

Germany: Nuclear Disaster 'Will Have Political Impact as Great as 9/11'

David Crossland
Spiegel Online International
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© ReutersA combination photo showing an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Monday.
The nuclear disaster in Fukushima makes it hard to ignore the vulnurabilities of the technology. It could spell the end of nuclear power, German commentators argue on Monday. The government in Berlin may now cave in to mounting pressure to suspend its 12-year extension of reactor lifetimes, they say.

The nuclear accident at Japan's Fukushima plant following Friday's earthquake and tsunami has led to anxious questions in Germany about the safety of its own nuclear reactors and is putting the government under intense pressure to rethink its decision to extend plant lifetimes by an average of 12 years.

German media commentators across the political spectrum are saying the accident in a highly developed nation such as Japan is further evidence that nuclear power isn't safe. One commentator in the conservative Die Welt went as far as to liken the global impact of the Fukushima explosions to that of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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Laptop

Franken: They're 'after the Internet'

Mike Zapler
Politico
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:50 UTC
Image
© Associated Press
Austin, Texas - Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.

"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom."

Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."

Receiving a hero's welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.
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Document

P.J. Crowley resigns over Manning remark

Mike Allen & Josh Gerstein
Politico.com
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:17 UTC
Image
© Associated Press photoCrowley’s public criticism angered some at the Pentagon and across the administration.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has resigned after publicly crossing swords with the Pentagon over the treatment of an Army soldier accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military reports and sensitive diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

The chain of events that led to Crowley's exit was set in motion Thursday when Crowley appeared at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology seminar and called the Pentagon's handling of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is detained at the brig at Quantico, "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

Crowley's public criticism angered some at the Pentagon and others across the administration because it put him directly at odds with Defense Department officials who have spent weeks trying to defend Manning's treatment. The soldier is being detained under near-constant lockdown, and he filed a formal complaint about being forced to strip each night at bedtime.

The State spokesman's predicament may have worsened further Friday afternoon, when ABC's Jake Tapper asked Obama during a White House press conference whether he agreed with Crowley.

"With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are," Obama said. "I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well."
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