The Department of Homeland Security is positioning itself to assume immense domestic law-enforcement and surveillance powers. From patrolling the traffic on the Internet to consolidating local police power, DHS is accumulating all the unconstitutional authority necessary for a proper Stasi-like secret police force.

A recent story published by California Watch reported that DHS inked a new $443 million deal with über-defense contractor General Atomics to purchase 14 additional Predator drones. If (when) the new craft are delivered to DHS, there would be 24 drones in the agency's fleet.

As we have chronicled, Predator is the preferred model of unmanned aerial vehicle of the U.S. military for prosecuting its death-by-drone program in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere overseas. What doesn't receive nearly as much press is the domestic deployment of these remote control armed spy planes.

DHS is particularly fond of this brand of drone, having spent over $250 million since 2006 on building its Predator fleet. Reportedly, DHS is using the devices to patrol the porous border separating the United States from Mexico.

This new exclusive, exorbitant deal with General Atomics is curious in light of the scathing report on DHS waste issued in June by the Inspector General. As reported by Huffington Post: "The Homeland Security inspector general's office in a June audit recommended that Customs and Border Protection stop buying the drones until officials figure out a budget plan for the program and how to get the most use out of the unmanned aircraft, which are frequently grounded by inclement weather."

Washington - An Army general will face court-martial on a series of sexual misconduct charges, including forcible sodomy, in connection with several illicit affairs, and could receive life in prison if convicted, the Army said Tuesday.

Included in the allegations against Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair are that he carried on affairs with and mistreated subordinate officers and later tried to impede the investigation of some of the offenses by deleting nude photos and other emails.

The case is the latest in a series of missteps by military leaders: At least five current and former generals at the rank of one-star or higher have been reprimanded or investigated for possible misconduct in recent months.

The five pages of allegations involved Sinclair's conduct with five women who were not his wife.

A 27-year Army veteran who served five combat tours, Sinclair is charged with eight crimes, including one count of forcible sodomy; two counts of wrongful sexual conduct; six counts of inappropriate sexual relationships, and eight counts of violating regulations. The charges involve activities when he was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany and at Fort Bragg, N.C., and they include violating what's known as General Order No. 1 - possessing alcohol in a war zone.

The massacre of 20 children and 7 adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday was one more in a long line of atrocious mass murders committed in the USA. By now, four days later, an official version of events has more or less solidified to explain the chain of events. The familiar 'lone gunman' narrative has once more stoked the hot-button issue of gun control and left the general population as clueless as ever as to why people suddenly 'go postal' and target the most vulnerable members of society.

On closer inspection, however, there is clearly more to many of these mass shootings than meets the eye. Very often the earliest reports present information that directly contradicts key foundations of the final 'official' analysis of events. Granted, confusion is natural when a story breaks, but some of the initial reports conflict so completely with the lone gunman narrative that I'm going to compile them here and then try to put this tragedy in a more objective context. In his speech at the Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama quoted the following biblical passage:

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

~ 2 Corinthians 4:18

The traumatised Newtown community deserves the facts without the spin. Everyone touched by this brutal event deserves to know what really happened, so let's fix our eyes on what remains unseen...

As you probably know, a lot of conspiracy web sites and '2nd amendment' types in the USA are up in arms (literally?) right now about what they suspect is a covert attempt by the US government (or some section thereof) to rob them of their right to own guns.

The plot, according to the hard-line conspiracy theorists, is that the recent massacre in Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut was in some way 'staged' and was, essentially, a means to an end, the end being that the massacre provides plausible just cause for the government, congress, etc., to table legislation to abolish, or at least water down, the 2nd amendment right to bear arms.

Why would the government want to disarm the US population? Well, it's pretty obvious! The only thing stopping the US government from implementing an overt police state in the USA is the 100 million Americans that own guns. That's the theory anyway. Of course, probably very few gun lovers in the US are hardened conspiracy theorists who think that the government was behind the Sandy Hook school massacre, but you can bet that most of them are conspiratorially-minded enough to believe that the government may try to use the massacre to rob them of their favorite piece of cold hard steel.

My take on the Sandy Hook massacre is that there are enough surpassingly strange and as yet unexplained aspects of the shooting for me to, at the very least, question the veracity of the official 'lone nut' story. At the same time however, my take on the gun lovers' conspiracy theory is that it is bunk. That is to say, if the Sandy Hook massacre was some kind of government psy-op, it had nothing to do with any attempt to take guns out of American society so that the government could implement an overt police state. The reasons are as elementary as the classes that were being given to those beautiful children just before they were slaughtered.

Nothing is more vital than enabling true transparency and adversarial journalism, and preventing further assaults on them

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the steps taken by the US government to pressure large corporations to choke off the finances and other means of support for WikiLeaks in retaliation for the group's exposure of substantial government deceit, wrongdoing and illegality. Because WikiLeaks has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, I wrote: "that the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode." At the end of that column, I disclosed that I had been involved in discussions "regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments."

That group has now been formed and, this morning, was formally launched. Its name is Freedom of the Press Foundation. Its website is here and its Twitter account, which will be quite active, is @FreedomOfPress.

In the original Terminator movie, Reese - the heroic resistance character sent to our present from a horrific future in which machines tyrannize humanity - displays a bar code embedded on his arm to convince Sarah Conner he's not nuts and that his story is all-too-real. The bar code, of course, is used to scan people instead of groceries.

Creepy sci-fi in 1984, when the first Terminator movie came out.

An even creepier reality this 2012 - a time when men use machines to tyrannize man.

In Virginia - my home state, but by no means the only state looking into this - lawmakers are "studying" the idea of bar-coding license plates and possibly even embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into them so that every car - and thus, every driver - can be more readily kept track of.

Ostensibly, for mere revenue collection.
The Virginia soviet - er, DMV - issued a report (see here) about a week ago bemoaning the loss of toll fees resulting from cars being able to slip through the revenue gantlet, particularly along the I-95 corridor near Richmond, where automated toll machines are supposed to snap pictures of toll both scofflaws and send them a piece of payin' paper in the mail. It is insufferable that anyone escape paying "their fair share" to use roads they've already paid more than their fair share to use via motor fuels taxes and all the countless other taxes each of us is already forced to pay.

But toll-skippers are small fry - just a convenient excuse to bar code and chip our cars. And thus, us. The DMV soviet's study estimates that, at most, $70,474.73 is lost each year to toll non-payers. Chump change - for an entity that disposes of $85 billion annually (see here). Seventy thousand? It's amazing they even noticed it. Probably, that amount of other people's money is spent on lawmakers' mini-bar incidentals in a month.

Remember the 20 children who died in Newtown, Connecticut.

Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments.

Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006.

Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year.

A fascinating new ruling unwittingly illustrates the separate system of 'justice' invented for Muslims in the US after 9/11

Valuable revelations are often found in unlikely places. Such is the case with a fascinating ruling released last week by the New York Court of Appeals, that state's highest court, in the criminal case of People v. Edgar Morales. The facts of the case are quite simple, but the implications of the ruling are profound.

The defendant, Morales, was a member of a Bronx street gang known as the "St. James Boys" (SJB). In August, 2002, Morales and fellow gang members went to a party, saw someone from a rival gang which they believed responsible for a friend's death, and told him to leave. When he refused, they planned to attack him after the party. When the party ended, Morales shot at the rival gang member and his cohorts, severely wounding one of them but also accidentally shooting and killing a 10-year-old girl who was a bystander.

Prosecutors were not content to charge Morales with murder and related crimes. Instead, they charged him with crimes of "terrorism" under an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. When enacting the law, the legislature stated that it is designed to ensure that terrorists "are prosecuted and punished in state courts with appropriate severity". Under the law, this newly created "terrorism" crime is committed whenever one acts with the "intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population", but the law contains no definition of that term.

At trial, Morales vehemently argued that what he was accused of doing could not possibly be "terrorism", but the prosecutors insisted - and the trial court agreed - that his violence "furthered the [gang]'s objective to intimidate or coerce other Mexican-American gangs in the Bronx and, as a result of those activities, the [gang] intended to intimidate and coerce the entire Mexican-American community." The jury found him guilty on all counts, including the "terrorism" charges, and the Court of Appeals set out to determine whether the terrorism charges were validly applied to this violence.

The United States is often considered a world leader when it comes to deploying the latest biometric security and surveillance technologies. But it could have an unlikely new competitor: Ecuador.

According to Russian company the Speech Technology Center, the small Latin American country has successfully completed installation of "the world's first biometric identification platform, at a nation-wide level, that combines voice and face identification capabilities."

As I reported back in September, Speech Technology Center operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States. The company's controversial technology enables authorities to build a massive database containing several million "voiceprints" of known criminals, suspects, or persons of interest.

When authorities want to ID speakers on an intercepted call, the recording is entered into the database, which provides a match with what SpeechPro claims is about 97 percent accuracy. The system that the firm says it has provided to Ecuador also allows authorities to accumulate a large image database of suspects, with a facial recognition tool that supplements the so-called "VoiceGrid." While facial recognition technology in the past has lacked accuracy, SpeechPro says it has invented algorithms which "deliver reliable results even when facial characteristics have undergone physical changes."

Why is the church still such a force in our society when most of us disregard its clerics' teachings?

A few months ago, Suffolk police stopped me for driving over 30mph. My excuse that East Anglia was so flat it was impossible not to break the limit did not wash, and they sent me on a speed awareness course. Very good it was too. After surveying the human cost of bad driving, I resolved never to speed again. Unfortunately, the instructor was over-fond of his own voice and his lecture went on for hours. "I hope he winds up soon," I whispered to the woman next to me. "I am meant to be speaking to the National Secular Society."

She was a little astonished and a little amused. "A National Secular Society? Why does Britain need a National Secular Society? Surely the secularists have won?"

It can feel that way. The number of people who say they have no religion jumped from 15% in the 2001 census to 25% in 2011. If the remaining 75% were believers, this leap in free-thinking would be significant but not sensational. But those who say they are religious are not faithful to their creeds, or not in any sense that the believers of the past would have recognised. Church attendance is in constant decline. Every year that passes sees congregations become smaller and greyer. As striking as the fall in religious observance is the public's near total disregard for the teachings of the clerics and prelates, who could once claim to be society's moral guides.