© Steve Bell

Campaigners had hoped for ruling showing housing benefit regulations unlawfully discriminated against disabled adults in social housing

The government's "bedroom tax" does not unlawfully discriminate against disabled adults in social housing, the High Court has ruled.

Ten families had brought the case for judicial review, where lawyers argued that the cut in benefit for unoccupied bedrooms in social housing breached human rights.

But campaigners said they welcomed court criticism that the Government has been aware since May last year that the law must be changed to provide for disabled children but failed to act early to make the necessary regulations.

Lord Justice Laws said that the current state of affairs "cannot be allowed to continue".

He added that the Government should alter the regulations "very speedily" to take into account the additional needs of disabled children.

Security Forum participants expressed total confidence in American empire, but could not contain their panic at the mention of Snowden.

Seated on a stool before an audience packed with spooks, lawmakers, lawyers and mercenaries, CNN's Wolf Blitzer introduced recently retired CENTCOM chief General James Mattis. "I've worked with him and I've worked with his predecessors," Blitzer said of Mattis. "I know how hard it is to run an operation like this."

Reminding the crowd that CENTCOM is "really, really important," Blitzer urged them to celebrate Mattis: "Let's give the general a round of applause."

Following the gales of cheering that resounded from the room, Mattis, the gruff 40-year Marine veteran who once volunteered his opinion that "it's fun to shoot some people," outlined the challenge ahead. The "war on terror" that began on 9/11 has no discernable end, he said, likening it to the "the constant skirmishing between [the US cavalry] and the Indians" during the genocidal Indian Wars of the 19th century.

"The skirmishing will go on likely for a generation," Mattis declared.

Mattis' remarks, made beside a cable news personality who acted more like a sidekick than a journalist, set the tone for the entire 2013 Aspen Security Forum this July. A project of the Aspen Institute, the Security Forum brought together the key figures behind America's vast national security state, from military chieftains like Mattis to embattled National Security Agency Chief General Keith Alexander to top FBI and CIA officials, along with the bookish functionaries attempting to establish legal groundwork for expanding the war on terror.

I wish to summarize again the first striking similarity between 11/22/63 and of 9/11/01: the dubious detective work on those two days. Less than fifteen minutes after the President's assassination, the height and weight of Kennedy's alleged killer was posted.¹ Before the last of the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11, the FBI told Richard Clarke that they had a list of alleged hijackers.²

In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, Inspector Sawyer of the Dallas police put out on the police radio network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer - "About 30, 5'10", 165 pounds."³ As noted, this height and weight exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald's FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.⁴

The announced height and weight were however different from Oswald's actual measurements, as recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest: 5'9 1/2", 131 pounds.⁵ More importantly, there is no credible source for the posted measurements from any witness in Dallas. (The witness said to have spotted him, Howard Brennan, failed to identify Oswald in a line-up.)⁶ This leaves the possibility that the measurements were taken from existing files on Oswald, rather than from any observations in Dallas on November 22. If so, someone with access to those files may have already designated Oswald as the culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime.

A similar situation pertains to the alleged hijackers on 9/11. For example, shortly afterwards men in Saudi Arabia complained that "the hijackers' 'personal details'" released by the FBI -- "including name, place, date of birth and occupation -- matched their own."⁷ One of them, Saeed al-Ghamdi, claimed further that an alleged photograph shown on CNN (of an alleged Flight 93 hijacker with the same name) was in fact a photograph of himself. He speculated "that CNN had probably got the picture from the Flight Safety flying school he attended in Florida."⁸

Alfred McCoy's important new article deserves to mobilize Congress for a serious revaluation of America's ill-considered military venture in Afghanistan. The answer to the question he poses in his title - "Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State? - is amply shown by his impressive essay to be a resounding "No!" . . . not until there is fundamental change in the goals and strategies both of Washington and of Kabul.

He amply documents that

• the Afghan state of Hamid Karzai is a corrupt narco-state, to which Afghans are forced to pay bribes each year $2.5 billion, a quarter of the nation's economy;
• the Afghan economy is a narco-economy: in 2007 Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.
• military options for dealing with the problem are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive: McCoy argues that the best hope lies in reconstructing the Afghan countryside until food crops become a viable alternative to opium, a process that could take ten or fifteen years, or longer. (I shall argue later for an interim solution: licensing Afghanistan with the International Narcotics Board to sell its opium legally.)

Perhaps McCoy's most telling argument is that in Colombia cocaine at its peak represented only about 3 percent of the national economy, yet both the FARC guerillas and the right-wing death squads, both amply funded by drugs, still continue to flourish in that country. To simply eradicate drugs, without first preparing for a substitute Afghan agriculture, would impose intolerable strains on an already ravaged rural society whose only significant income flow at this time derives from opium. One has only to look at the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, after a draconian Taliban-led reduction in Afghan drug production (from 4600 tons to 185 tons) left the country a hollow shell.

Michael Hastings was that rarest of breeds: a mainstream reporter who wasn't afraid to rail against the system, kick back against the establishment, and bite the hand that feeds him. On the morning of June 18, 2013, he died in a fiery car crash. But now details are emerging that he was on the verge of breaking an important new story about the CIA, and believed he was being investigated by the FBI. Now even a former counter-terrorism czar is admitting Hastings' car may have been cyber-hijacked. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we explore the strange details surrounding the untimely death of Michael Hastings.


Show notes and MP3

"A particularly troubling and consistent finding throughout the survey is that Wall Street's future leaders - the young professionals who will one day assume control of the trillions of dollars that the industry manages - have lost their moral compass, accept corporate wrongdoing as a necessary evil and fear reporting this misconduct."

In a shocking new survey commissioned by the Labaton Sucharow law firm, Wall Street insiders say that breaking the law, screwing your clients and covering up crimes is a way of life on Wall Street. The shock is not that cheating is going on.

We all know that.

The shock is that these financiers would actually admit it on a survey. This should tell us that the Wall Street culture is so brazenly corrupt, so confident of not getting caught, so certain that a passive public won't fight back that those surveyed didn't even bother to lie about the fact that they were living, breathing sociopaths.

Here are some of the key findings of this sample of 250 traders, portfolio managers, investment bankers, hedge fund professionals, financial analysts, investment advisors, asset managers and stock brokers.

She's one of thousands of US political prisoners. She's well known. She committed no crimes. She's been brutalized in captivity. Mercy isn't in America's vocabulary. Rogue states operate that way.

Washington's by far the worst. It reportedly agreed to Pakistan's extradition terms. Both sides will swap prisoners.

Previous articles discussed her 2003 abduction, detention, torture, false charges, prosecution, and conviction. More on that below.

On July 20, the Pakistan Observer headlined "US agrees on Aafia's Siddiqui's extradition," saying:

"In a major breakthrough, the US has offered Pakistan to sign prisoner swap agreement for the extradition of Dr Aafia Siddiqi, after which the Pakistani scientist will be allowed to serve the remaining part of her imprisonment in homeland."

Pakistan foreign office spokesman Uman Hameed said terms include other prisoner swaps.

A US attorney is bringing suit in a Federal court against a private foreign-based "security" company for needlessly and brutally killing two Iraqi women back in 2007. This case is directly connected to the lucrative business of "promoting democracy" and "security". Hank Albarelli follows the trail of the U.S. funds going to certain NGOs to "bring stability" to Iraq and exposes the stupefying international web of connections between these groups and the mercenaries whose numbers increase as the juicy privatization business proliferates.

"The contractors don't seem to care about the people they kill. It's just a part of their business. These kinds of incidents occur on a regular basis, but no one seems to be concerned." ~ Paul Wolf, Attorney

It is nearly two hours past noon, a sunny, warm day on October 9, 2007. The creaky old Oldsmobile, containing a driver and three people returning home from church, is lumbering along at about 15 miles per hour. As it begins to cross a busy intersection in the bustling Karada neighborhood of Baghdad, several rounds of copper-jacketed 5.56mm rounds tear into its windshield sending glass everywhere.

"President Obama Has Very Little Moral Authority"

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is backing off his earlier assertion that the Obama administration's NSA monitoring of Internet accounts had prevented five terror attacks in Germany, raising questions about other claims concerning the value of the massive monitoring programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs - which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts - had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week. But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, "It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn't occur." And on Wednesday, he was publically referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA's surveillance programs.

The questions about the programs' value in thwarting attacks in Germany come as some members of the U.S. Congress have told Obama officials that the programs exceeded what Congress authorized when it passed laws that the administration is arguing allowed the collection of vast amounts of information on cellphone and Internet email accounts.