One reason I supported President Obama is because he said we must protect clean air, water and lands. But what good is it to say the right thing unless you act on it?

Since early August, three administration decisions -- on Arctic drilling, the Keystone XL pipeline and the ozone that causes smog -- have all favored dirty industry over public health and a clean environment. Like so many others, I'm beginning to wonder just where the man stands


For months, the Environmental Protection Agency has been poised to issue new ozone rules to reduce the smog that causes asthma attacks and other respiratory ills. We badly need these new standards, which the EPA estimates could prevent 12,000 premature deaths a year.

On Friday, though, the White House put the new rules on ice. The result: these vital protections will be delayed until at least 2013 - conveniently after next year's presidential election.

The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies worked closely with the ousted regime of Moammar Gadhafi, sharing tips and co-operating in handing over terror suspects for interrogation to a regime known to use torture, according to a trove of security documents discovered after the fall of Tripoli.

The revelations provide new details on the West's efforts to turn Libya's mercurial leader from foe to ally and provide an embarrassing example of the U.S. administration's collaboration with authoritarian regimes in the war on terror.

The documents, among tens of thousands found in an External Security building in Tripoli, show an increasingly warm relationship, with CIA agents proposing to set up a permanent Tripoli office, addressing their Libyan counterparts by their first names and giving them advice. In one memo, a British agent even sends Christmas greetings.

The agencies were known to co-operate as the longtime Libyan ruler worked to overcome his pariah status by stopping his quest for weapons of mass destruction and renouncing support for terrorism. But the new details show a more extensive relationship than was previously known, with Western agencies offering lists of questions for specific detainees and apparently the text for a Gadhafi speech.

They also offer a glimpse into the inner workings of the now-defunct CIA program of extraordinary rendition, through which terror suspects were secretly detained, sent to third countries and sometimes underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding.

The documents mention a half dozen names of people targeted for rendition, including Tripoli's new rebel military commander, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj.

Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, which helped find the documents, called the ties between Washington and Gadhafi's regime "A very dark chapter in American intelligence history."

On September 1, dozens of predator states met in Paris to pick apart Libya's bones even though it's breathing, if barely.

We've seen it before, notably in Iraq under Paul Bremer's 100 orders that turned the country into a cutthroat capitalist laboratory. Baghdad was open for business at fire sale prices with US and other Western firms having first dibs on everything.

Emergency powers to relocate terrorism suspects from London to other parts of the country have been prepared, despite a pledge earlier this year that the measure would be scrapped.

The police are understood to be worried at the number of terrorism suspects who could return to the capital ahead of the Olympics.

Last night, the Home Office published draft legislation which will be put before Parliament in "exceptional circumstances."

Turkey has suspended all its military ties with Israel and has expelled Israel's envoy from Ankara over Tel Aviv's refusal to apologize for last year's deadly attack on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Press TV reports.


The Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made the announcement in a press conference on Friday and said, "The time has come for Israel to pay for its stance that sees it above international laws and disregards human conscience."

The Turkish navy will significantly strengthen its presence in the eastern Mediterranean Sea as one of the steps the Turkish government has decided to take following the release of the UN Palmer report on the 2010 Gaza flotilla, Turkish officials told the Hurriyet Daily News.

"The eastern Mediterranean will no longer be a place where Israeli naval forces can freely exercise their bullying practices against civilian vessels," a Turkish official was quoted as saying.

As part of the plan, the Turkish navy will increase its patrols in the eastern Mediterranean and pursue "a more aggressive strategy".

WikiLeaks documents expose Israeli racism, hypocrisy and double standards

The issue of Al-Aqsa [Mosque] will remain in the public conscience and the truth about Israeli transgressions will come to light with or without WikiLeaks. At long last WikiLeaks documents have focused on something other than the defunct "peace process" and Israel's war against Hamas. The latest release of diplomatic cables highlights Israeli concerns about the Islamic movement in the country, its leadership and its influence among Israel's 1.5 million Palestinian citizens. The picture that emerges is one of crass racism, hypocrisy and double standards.

While the overt views of Israeli officials and their American allies are hardly well-kept secrets, the cables shed additional light on their intent and attitudes. According to the record of a meeting with the US ambassador on 31 January 2006, for example, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman advocated the adoption of the Cyprus model to ensure Israel's security and Jewish identity. Thus, just as Greeks and Turks on the island were separated, so too Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs must be kept apart.

Despite the obvious draconian nature of Lieberman's proposal, it did not evoke a word of protest or any sense of apprehension from the ambassador. There was no reference to what the views of the people affected might be or, indeed, that they would even be consulted. The manner in which one-fifth of Israel's population were dismissed as irrelevant suggests that they are regarded as pawns on a political chess board; so much for America and its alleged commitment to democracy around the globe.

As a global protest movement rises and spreads within the US, expect surveillance tactics honed in the "war on terror" to be used in the defense of wealth.

In the aftermath of the riots that rocked London this summer, the Conservative prime minister's first response was to crackdown on social networking.

Despite data collected by call for a the Guardian showing a strong correlation between poverty and rioting, the government denied that its brutal austerity policies contributed to the desperation and rage of its young people. A researcher found that the majority of rioters who have appeared in court come from poor neighborhoods, 41 percent of them from the poorest in the country - and 66 percent from neighborhoods that have gotten poorer between 2007 and 2010.

Of course, we don't have widespread rioting in the US yet. But even at a relatively calm, peaceful protest in San Francisco, Bay Area Rapid Transit shut down cell phone towers in the subway system in order to stymie a mass action planned after another shooting by a BART police officer. (It was the police killing of a young man that kicked off London's riots as well.)

One neoconservative argument against American Muslims is that there is a correlation between mosques and FBI terror investigations. But that may be circular logic since the FBI targets mosques with paid informants trying to detect potential "lone wolves" and lure them into terrorist acts, as Lawrence Davidson observes.

Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other?

Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer?

It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don't believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson's expose entitled "The Informants" published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.
　
Aaronson looked at over 500 terrorism-related cases taken up by the FBI and found that over half of them involved the Bureau's stable of 15,000 informants. Many of these are ex-felons and con men who are often paid well if their efforts result in an arrest and conviction.

So what, you might say. Using informants to obtain information about criminal activity is an old and legitimate tactic. Yes, however, that approach to information gathering is not exactly how the FBI uses all of its informants.

Indeed, the Bureau has a program, misnamed "prevention" which encourages its agents to get creative in the use of informants. How creative? Well, if they can't find any terrorist activity going on, they have their informants instigate some. Where are they doing this? Mainly in our country's Muslim communities.

In a new video, MIT professor Noam Chomsky discusses the nature of U.S imperialism as it compares to campaigns of violence carried out by other nations and groups.

Ultimately he drives the point home, suggesting the U.S. has an "extreme contempt for democracy" at home and around the world, and is not above resorting to violence to protect its interests.

"As long as the dictators back us, it doesn't matter what the population thinks. If there's a campaign of hatred against us among the populations and the dictators are in control, everything's fine. Euphoric headlines."

The interview is part of a series published by Histories of Violence, a "multi-media forum dedicated to exploring the theoretical, empirical and aesthetic dimensions to violence." The full site is planned to launch on Sept. 11, 2011.

This video is from Histories of Violence, published to YouTube on August 31, 2011.

Source: Stephen C. Webster