Kabul - The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.

As the United States has unsuccessfully pursued a peace deal with the Taliban, the "strategic release" program has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces where military power has reached its limits.

But the releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence - and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.

Military prosecutors ordered the detention of 300 protesters on accusations of attacking troops and disrupting public order during violent clashes outside Egypt's Defence Ministry, a prosecution official said Saturday.

The Friday clashes were some of the worst near the headquarters of the country's ruling generals, and come just three weeks before Egyptians are to head to the polls to vote in a landmark presidential election to see who will head Egypt after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year.

Influential American Congressman Dana Rohrabacher has told Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani that his country is a failed state.

"It is becoming increasingly clear to Members of the US Congress that Pakistan is a failed state and no amount of US aid money will ever change that," Mr Rohrabacher wrote in a letter to Gilani.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan has publicly acknowledged the Obama administration's use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in countries with which the United States is not at war. But Brennan didn't tell the whole truth about the CIA drone strikes. Brennan claimed that "the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists." What Brennan didn't say was that the CIA has launched drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen without knowing who would be killed, against people who are not on any list of "suspected terrorists."

Retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard was arrested in Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in New York City last Tuesday night as he participated in the May 1 Occupy demonstrations. He and 15 other military veterans were taken into custody after they linked arms to hold the plaza against a police attempt to clear it. There were protesters behind them who, perhaps because of confusion, perhaps because of miscommunication or perhaps they were unwilling to risk arrest, melted into the urban landscape. But those in the thin line from Veterans for Peace, of which the bishop is a member, stood their ground. They were handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon and taken to jail.

It was Packard's second arrest as part of the Occupy protests. Last Dec. 17 he was arrested when he leapt over a fence in his flowing bishop's robe to spearhead an attempt to occupy a vacant lot owned by Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. The December action by the Occupy movement was a response to the New York City Police Department's storming and eradication of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. Packard will appear in court in June to face the trespassing charge that resulted. Now, because of this second arrest, he faces the possibility of three months in jail.

In contrast to its inept response to the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, Nicolas Sarkozy's government was out in front in its response to Libya -- condemning the Qaddafi regime, recognizing the rebel government, and pushing for a no-fly zone. The Qaddafis' response? We want our money back

Gaddafi's son was then asked that as France was the first country to recognise the Interim Transitional National Council in Benghazi, what was his opinion of President Sarkozy.

Saif al-Islam: "Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign. We funded it and we have all the details and are ready to reveal everything. The first thing we want this clown to do is to give the money back to the Libyan people. He was given assistance so that he could help them. But he's disappointed us: give us back our money. We have all the bank details and documents for the transfer operations and we will make everything public soon."

An effective foot soldier in the subjugation of the masses was the Rockefeller-funded Alfred C. Kinsey, the co-author of the highly influential Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, and other volumes. One technique of eugenics (selective breeding) and control is the destruction of traditional morality, and Kinsey may have accomplished more in that respect than any other man this century.

Kinsey studied at the Bussey Institution at Harvard in the 1920s (at the time a hotbed of eugenics research), then moved on to teach at Indiana University, where his work in cultural deconstruction would ultimately succeed in decimating American sexual mores, help to fragment the family, and would leave the population far more vulnerable to reproductive, cultural, familial, and mind programming.

Kinsey, always portrayed in the press as a wholesome "leave it to Beaver" style family man, was "one of the scholarly eugenicists of pre-World War II", according to biographer James Jones. Kinsey recommended that a portion of the "lower classes" be sterilized to foster a more robust gene pool.

Among his intimates was Dr. Ewen Cameron, the infamous CIA-funded mind control doctor.

Another of Kinsey's influences was Dr. Herrmann Muller, one of his colleagues at Indiana University. Muller, who had begun receiving Rockefeller funding from the National Research Council in 1925, received a Guggenheim grant in 1932 to pursue his work in the genetics department of the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Brain Research Institute in Berlin.

Muller studied under Ernst Rudin, who was to become the head of the Nazi Racial Hygiene Society. One of the benefits of Rudin's policy for the extermination of hereditary undesirables in Germany was that it provided a continual harvesting of fresh brains for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

With instant news coming at us continuously on cable and online, there may well be Americans who are unaware of the strong reaction to Barack Obama's signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012. The law impelled Kenneth Roth, the executive director of the respected Human Rights Watch, to declare:

"President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention (imprisonment) without trial in U.S. law" ("U.S.: Refusal to Veto Detainee Bill a Historic Tragedy for Rights," hrw.org, Dec. 15, 2011).

This includes U.S. citizens.

Just as ignited is Judge Andrew Napolitano, the senior judicial analyst at Fox News, who, irrespective of his ultimate employer, is TV's most compellingly informed protector of the Constitution. He warns:

"Essentially, this legislation would enable the president to divert from the criminal justice system, and thus to divert from the protections of the Constitution, any person he pleases" ("Can Congress Steal Your Constitutional Freedoms?" townhall.com, Dec. 1, 2011).

As if he were our king.

Sounds like typical election year bombast, doesn't it? But as I reported last week, the president, without going to court, can cage a U.S. citizen only "suspected of association" with our terrorist enemies ("Congress, Obama Codify Indefinite Detention," Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom Foundation, fff.org, Dec. 27, 2011).

To this day, military repression permeates the US. But as history has shown, resistance will always follow.

Again and again, we learn that war abroad will find a way home.

On 30 April 1970, Richard Nixon announced the US invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation the US had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving 120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each. But in the common doublespeak of war, the president claimed: "This is not an invasion of Cambodia ... once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw".

Nixon's aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the US opposing the war: "we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home", he intoned. The next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: "you see these bums ... blowing up the campuses ... burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue ... you name it, get rid of the war, there'll be another one".

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of black students formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of black student unions. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the war-mongers, and themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 national guardsmen amassed on the Kent State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed students - four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official presidential commission on campus unrest later found, "a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth".

In series of nationwide protests, leftist and Islamist activists call to cut ties with Israel, burning Israeli flags and chanting 'death, death to Israel.'

Thousands of Jordanians took to the streets on Friday demanding an end to the country's 18-year-old Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel.

In a series of nationwide protests, leftist and Islamist activists urged Amman to cut ties with Israel, burning Israeli flags and chanting "death, death to Israel" and "the people want an end to Wadi Araba."

Protesters rallied in seven cities across the country, urging authorities to expel the Israeli ambassador from Amman, chanting "no to a Zionist embassy on our land."

Protest organizers, including the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and youth movements, said the demonstrations came as a direct response to King Abdullah's recent nomination of Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh, who served as a key figure in the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace process.