Daniel Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of Task Force Lightning, an intelligence unit. In 2004-2005, he was mainly assigned to a Tactical Human-Intelligence Team (THT) in Baghdad, Iraq, where he ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, interviewed countless Iraqis ranging from concerned citizens to community leaders and and government officials, and interrogated dozens of insurgents and terrorist suspects.

In 2006-2007, Daniel worked with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) through his former unit in Mosul where he ran the Northern Iraq Intelligence Center. His official role was as a senior analyst for the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and part of Turkey). Daniel suffered greatly from PTSD and had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and several other war-related conditions. On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old. His wife and family have given permission to publish it.

I am sorry that it has come to this.

The fact is, for as long as I can remember my motivation for getting up every day has been so that you would not have to bury me. As things have continued to get worse, it has become clear that this alone is not a sufficient reason to carry on. The fact is, I am not getting better, I am not going to get better, and I will most certainly deteriorate further as time goes on. From a logical standpoint, it is better to simply end things quickly and let any repercussions from that play out in the short term than to drag things out into the long term.

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees asked the judge in the military tribunal on Friday to suspend pretrial hearings as mysterious computer glitches are just the latest technological setbacks to complicate the legal proceedings.

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees asked the military tribunal judge to suspend pretrial hearings as mysterious computer glitches have made their job a 'hot mess' forcing some of them to draft motions with pen and paper.

"We're basically put back in the 19th century," Army Major Jason Wright, who represents the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, said on Friday, as quoted by Reuters. "It takes about five to 10 times what it would normally take to do defense functions."

Defense lawyers for five Guantanamo detainees said email correspondences they sent were never received, investigative records that took years to compile had disappeared and external monitors were unable to access their internet searches. Even the prosecuting and defense teams had been given access to each other's files.

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem issued a report on Thursday stating that "Palestinian citizens, mostly minors, have been subjected to harassment and torture at the hands of Israeli interrogators in an attempt to force them to confess to private security offenses related to throwing stones."

The organization added that since November 2009, it has received dozens of statements made by Palestinian residents of Bethlehem and the Hebron districts, mostly minors, where they spoke about their exposure to extreme violence during interrogation, and either the threat of torture or actual torture itself at Gush Etzion police station.

It is clear from the statements that the investigators asked those minors to confess to the offenses, mostly stone throwing, and in the vast majority of the cases, the investigators had only stopped using violence against them upon their confession to the charges.

The report included a statement made by a 14 year-old minor from the village of Hosan in Bethlehem, in which he said "the interrogator brought me to a room, he grabbed my head and began to hit my head on the wall, and then punched me with his fist, slapped me and kicked me on my leg."

"The pain was a tremendous and I felt that I was unable to stand on my feet. Then the detective offended me verbally in a very vulgar way where he called my mother bad names. He threatened to rape me and commit sexual acts with me if I wouldn't confess to throwing stones."

"I was very scared of his threats because he was too harsh and we were alone in the room, and I remembered what I saw in the news when British and American soldiers raped and photographed naked Iraqi citizens."

B'Tselem said that by July 2013 its researchers had gathered 64 testimonies from throughout the eight Palestinian towns located south of the West Bank. In the statements, Palestinians spoke about the violence perpetrated against them by detectives in Gush Etzion police station, including 56 minors.

The report noted that the interrogations included slapping, punching, kicking and beating using different tools, such as a gun or stick, and some said they had been subjected to sexual threats against them or the women of their families, or "electric shock" torture that would affect their fertility.

A military jury has convicted Army Maj. Nidal Hasan of 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in a November 5, 2009, shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, making it possible for the death penalty to be considered as a possible punishment.

Hasan is charged with 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in the November 5, 2009, shooting rampage at a deployment processing center where prosecutors say he targeted soldiers he was set to deploy with to Afghanistan.

A judge handed the case to the jury, a panel of 13 senior officers, on Thursday afternoon after 12 days of testimony in a court-martial where Hasan was acting as his own attorney.

After nearly three hours of deliberations, the panel asked to rehear the testimony of the police officer who shot Hasan, ending the rampage that left 13 people dead and dozens wounded.

Jurors also asked to see a map marked by the police officer, Mark Todd, indicating where he shot Hasan.

A bomb blast has struck a bus transporting air force personnel to their base in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, killing at least six people, officials say. Several others are reported to have been wounded.

The bus was travelling on the road leading to Sanaa international airport, near the base, an official said. The government is battling al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants who often target the military.

Ameen Saree, an air force officer who rushed to the scene, said a bomb had been planted in the vehicle. "The bomb exploded in the rear part of the bus and six of our colleagues were immediately killed," he told Reuters news agency.

Air force spokesman Col Mahdi al-Aidarous said about 24 officers and soldiers were on the bus, the Associated Press news agency reports.

When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers' secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama's leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world's central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn't be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the Dutch blues and the pay per gaze advertising coming to a pair of glasses near you. Max proposes a scheme of mortgages collateralized by food stamps. In the second half, Max talks to Ann Pettifor of PrimeEconomics.org about the Alice in Wongaland economy in the United Kingdom where people borrow from payday lenders in order to live and, instead of lending to the economy, the economy is lending to banks. They also discuss interest rate apartheid, carry trades and public unrest.

The Rt. Hon. David Cameron
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
10 Downing Street
London SW1A 2AA
Great Britain

Via facsimile: (+44) 2079250918

Dear Prime Minister Cameron,

The Committee to Protect Journalists, an international media freedom organization, calls on you to launch a thorough and transparent investigation into the detention and harassment of David Miranda by the London Metropolitan Police and to ensure that his confiscated equipment and data are returned at once. The use of anti-terror laws to seize journalistic material from Miranda, partner and assistant to Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, is deeply troubling and not in keeping with the U.K's historic commitment to press freedom.

At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.

The destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation

You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.

Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.