Doug Casey Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator

L: Doug, we've been hearing a lot about this image of the president shooting a shotgun circulating on the Internet. In the wake of the Connecticut massacre and multiple other shootings that have occupied the headlines of late, it's quite striking. There have been so many murders involving guns in the news lately, it's starting to look like a bloody wave of copycat activity. Or maybe, as the Greater Depression deepens, more and more people are just going to go nuts, making this a taste of things to come... What do you think?

Doug: Either of those things could be true. Both may well be; but the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about is that so many of these murderers - the vast majority, actually - turn out to be under some form of psychiatric care and on meds. What's really needed is a deep and thorough review of psychological and psychiatric practices in the US, with strict examination of the correlation between various medications and subsequent violent behavior.

Popular drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Ritalin, and literally hundreds of others have very serious side effects. Shrinks are in the custom of prescribing them as an answer to the moral problems that everyone has to confront. These drugs don't resolve moral dilemmas; they disguise them and confuse the issue. I find it interesting that random mass murders were never an issue up until the last 20 years or so - roughly coincidental with a substantial portion of the US population, especially kids, being put on meds for all kinds of imaginary psychological disorders... things that used to be considered just part of life. I suggest readers look into the views of Peter Breggin, M.D., an old friend of mine who's done an immense amount of work in the area for years.

L: We need more laws regulating shrinks, not guns?

Doug: I'm not in favor of laws regulating either, but yes, people are confusing the means of violence with the cause of violence. We need to have an honest and unbiased look at what makes people turn murderous. If we don't, the massacres will continue, just using different weapons.

The financial world was shocked this month by a demand from Germany's Bundesbank to repatriate a large portion of its gold reserves held abroad. By 2020, Germany wants 50% of its total gold reserves back in Frankfurt - including 300 tons from the Federal Reserve. The Bundesbank's announcement comes just three months after the Fed refused to submit to an audit of its holdings on Germany's behalf. One cannot help but wonder if the refusal triggered the demand.

Either way, Germany appears to be waking up to a reality for which central banks around the world have been preparing: the dollar is no longer the world's safe-haven asset and the US government is no longer a trustworthy banker for foreign nations. It looks like their fears are well-grounded, given the Fed's seeming inability to return what is legally Germany's gold in a timely manner. Germany is a developed and powerful nation with the second largest gold reserves in the world. If they can't rely on Washington to keep its promises, who can?

Hacker breached AOL account of ex-president's sister, other victims

The apparent hack of several e-mail accounts has exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The photos and e-mails were uploaded yesterday to an online account that appears to have been hacked for the purpose of hosting the material.

In e-mail exchanges with the person who claimed responsibility for the hack, the individual claimed to have swiped "a lot of stuff," including "interesting mails" about George H.W. Bush's recent hospitalization, "Bush 43," and other Bush family members.

Included in the hacked material is a confidential October 2012 list of home addresses, cell phone numbers, and e-mails for dozens of Bush family members, including both former presidents, their siblings, and their children. The posted photos and e-mails contain a watermark with the hacker's online alias, "Guccifer."

Correspondence obtained by the hacker indicates that at least six separate e-mail accounts have been compromised, including the AOL account of Dorothy Bush Koch, daughter of George H.W. Bush and sister of George W. Bush. Other breached accounts belong to Willard Heminway, 79, an old friend of the 41st president who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut; CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, a longtime Bush family friend; former first lady Barbara Bush's brother; and George H.W. Bush's sister-in-law.

Al Madrigal of The Daily Show mocked an anti-Islam conservative activist on Thursday night amid a report on the M1 Abrams tank.

More than 100 members of Congress have called on the Pentagon to build 300 more of the massive tanks at a cost of $3 billion. But the Army has said it has no need for them.

"Well, we need more tanks for the simple reason that we may have to use them," conservative author Alan Caruba explained.

Retired Major General Paul Eaton disagreed emphatically. He noted the U.S. military already had 3,000 tanks "sitting in a boneyard near Reno," causing Madrigal to wonder if Nevada had ever been attacked.

The Senate of North Dakota approved a measure on Thursday that would outlaw abortion by defining a fetus as a person.

"North Dakota is leading the way for equal rights and protections for all human beings," Jennifer Mason, spokesperson for Personhood USA, said. "After the struggles to pass life-affirming amendments in the Senate in the past four years, we are very pleased that the North Dakota Senate has chosen to protect all living human beings. This is a historic day in North Dakota."

The US prosecuted Omar Khadr in Guantánamo for not being a lawful combatant. Exactly the same applies to the civilian CIA

The disclosure Tuesday evening of the Department of Justice white paper on targeted killing (pdf) has sparked a lot of debate, much of it focused on the Obama administration's extraordinarily broad interpretation of what constitutes an "imminent" threat that justifies lethal force as an act of self-defense. As Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) told reporters during a conference call on Wednesday, "only a team of lawyers could define 'imminent' to mean the exact opposite" of what the word means in the real world.

There are, no doubt, many Americans alive today who should be thankful their healthcare providers did not apply the administration's interpretation of "imminent" to decide if they had crossed over the line of imminent death and said pull the plug.

Some people have acquired power and profits in post-9/11 America by pandering to and perpetuating fear. As has been the case on a range of legal issues - torture, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, kill lists - all it takes is for someone to say "terrorism" and "threat to security" in the same breath for the vast majority of the public to handover its principles. Rather than a serious discussion on the proper law/liberty/security balance, too often the public accepts the false syllogism that whatever it takes to stop "them" from hurting "us" is obviously, as White House spokesman Jay Carney might say, "legal, ethical and wise".

An investigation has been launched into how a hacker managed to access the email accounts of the former US president George HW Bush and members of his family.

A number of Bush family photographs and personal emails were posted online by the hacker, who goes by the name of Guccifer.

According to the Smoking Gun website, the emails - which were sent between 2009 and 2012 - contain details about the state of the former president's health as well as the home addresses, mobile phone numbers and email addresses of dozens of members of the Bush family.

The collective self-censorship over a US drone base in Saudi Arabia is but the latest act of government-subservient 'journalism'

The US media, over the last decade (at least), has repeatedly acted to conceal newsworthy information it obtains about the actions of the US government. In each instance, the self-proclaimed adversarial press corps conceals these facts at the behest of the US government, based on patently absurd claims that reporting them will harm US national security. In each instance, what this media concealment actually accomplishes is enabling the dissemination of significant government falsehoods without challenge, and permitting the continuation of government deceit and even illegality.

One of the most notorious examples was in mid-2004 when the New York Times discovered - thanks to a courageous DOJ whistleblower - that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law. But after George Bush summoned to the Oval Office the paper's publisher (Arthur Sulzberger) and executive editor (Bill Keller) and directed them to conceal what they had learned, the NYT complied by sitting on the story for a-year-and-a-half: until late December, 2005, long after Bush had been safely re-elected. The "national security" excuse for this concealment was patently ludicrous from the start: everyone knew the US government was trying to eavesdrop on al-Qaida communications and this story merely revealed that they were doing so illegally (without warrants) rather than legally (with warrants). By concealing the story for so long, the New York Times helped the Bush administration illegally spy on Americans.

The Washington Post's Dana Priest, in a superb act of journalism, reported in 2005 that the CIA was maintaining a network of secret "black sites" where detainees were interrogated and abused beyond the monitoring scrutiny of human rights groups and even Congress. But the Post purposely concealed the identity of the countries serving as the locale of those secret prisons in order to enable the plainly illegal program to continue without bothersome disruptions: "the Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior US officials."

Moscow is supplying small arms to Mali, director of the Federal Agency for Military-Technical Cooperation Aleksandr Fomin said Friday. "We are supplying assault rifles and grenade launchers," RIA Novosti quoted him as saying. There were reports earlier that Russia could provide transport services to Mali, but the Foreign Ministry said only private companies could provide these during the military operation.

John O. Brennan couldn't even finish introducing his family before he was interrupted four times by protesters at his confirmation hearing Thursday to become the new director of the CIA.

Intelligence committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein halted the hearing and pulled Mr. Brennan from the room until it could be cleared of protesters, who she said were affiliated with Code Pink, the anti-war group.

Mr. Brennan, who is President Obama's homeland security adviser, is one of the chief architects of U.S. policy in the war on terror, and senators said they are eager to question him about the administration's program to use drones to execute American citizens deemed to be part of the war on terror overseas.

"Think about the mothers," cried one female protestor.