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US: White House Casts Doubt Over Anti-Piracy Legislation

Laura MacInnis
Reuters
Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:36 UTC
Obama
White House officials raised concerns on Saturday about online piracy legislation pending in Congress that Google and Facebook have decried as heavy-handed and Hollywood studios and music labels say is needed to save U.S. jobs.

In a blog posting, three advisers to President Barack Obama said they believed the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and other bills could make businesses on the Internet vulnerable to litigation and harm legal activity and free speech.

"Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small," said the officials, including White House cyber-security czar Howard Schmidt.

The House of Representatives' SOPA bill aims to crack down on online sales of pirated American movies, music or other goods by forcing Internet companies to block access to foreign sites offering material that violates U.S. copyright laws.

U.S. advertising networks could also be required to stop online ads and search engines would be barred from directly linking to websites found to be distributing pirated goods.

The search engine Google has repeatedly said the bill goes too far and could hurt investment. Along with other Internet firms such as Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, it has run advertisements in major newspapers urging Washington lawmakers to rethink their approach.
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USA

Ten Reasons the U.S. is no Longer the Land of the Free

Jonathan Turley
Information Clearing House
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:43 UTC
police state graphic
© n/a
Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own - the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don't operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of "free," but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
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Heart - Black

53 Dead in Attack on Iraqi Shi'ites

Edward Yeranian
Voice of America
Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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© The Associated PressSecurity forces and people inspect the scene of a bomb attack on Shi'ite pilgrims, near the southern port city of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, 550 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012.
A "suicide-bomber" handing out food and pastries blew himself up near a security checkpoint outside the mainly Shi'ite Iraqi port city of Basra, killing at least 53 people and wounding at least 137 others.

The attack targeted Shi'ite worshipers who had turned out for Arbaeen, a major religious celebration which commemorates the slaying of Imam Hussein, one of Shi'ite Islam's most revered figures.

Firefighters hosed down the pavement along the road where the bombing took place, as workers removed pieces of food, shoes and clothing from the scene of the explosion. Dozens were killed and wounded in the blast, but government TV showed only the cleanup.

Witnesses initially reported that a policeman blew himself up near a checkpoint, but security officials insisted that the culprit was a food vendor. Ali Maliki, who heads the Basra security commission stressed that stringent safety measures are causing the terrorists to change tactics.
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Fish

US: The Navy Is Depending on Dolphins to Keep the Strait of Hormuz Open

John Hudson
The Atlantic Wire
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
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© US Navy/Brien AhoA bottlenose dolphin belonging to the Navy shows off for the camera while training recently in the Persian Gulf.
If Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy has a backup plan to save one-fifth of the world's daily oil trade: send in the dolphins.

The threat of Iran closing the strait has reached a fever pitch, reports today's New York Times, with U.S. officials warning Iran's supreme leader that such moves would cross a "red line" provoking a U.S. response. Iran could block the strait with any assortment of mines, armed speed boats or anti-ship cruise missiles but according to Michael Connell at the Center for Naval Analysis, "The immediate issue [for the U.S. military] is to get the mines." To solve that problem, the Navy has a solution that isn't heavily-advertised but has a time-tested success rate: mine-detecting dolphins.

"We've got dolphins," said retired Adm. Tim Keating in a Wednesday interview with NPR. Keating commanded the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain during the run-up to the Iraq war. He sounded uncomfortable with elaborating on the Navy's use of the lovable mammals but said in a situation like the standoff in Hormuz, Navy-trained dolphins would come in handy:
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Arrow Down

Sarkozy Braced for Political Impact of Downgrade

Hugh Carnegy and Scheherazade Daneshkhu
The Financial Times
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
sarkozy
The threat of the loss of France's much-vaunted triple A credit rating hung over president Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right government for months, prompting a succession of severe budgetary measures to save it - but ultimately leading ministers to accept it as all but inevitable.

The question now will be to what extent its loss will damage Mr Sarkozy politically with less than 100 days to go until the first round of the presidential election on April 22 and how hard it will hit the country's finely balanced public finances and its banks.

Mr Sarkozy will take some comfort from the fact that Standard & Poor's move inflicted only a one-notch cut in France's rating to AA+, rather than the two-notch downgrade that it had feared.

But S&P assigned a negative outlook implying a possible further downgrade in the next year and there was no escaping the stigma of being knocked out of the elite ranking of top-rating nations.
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War Whore

Best of the Web: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery ... and Fighting Back is "Aggression"

Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:23 UTC
US naval force
© n/a
The US Department of Defense recently promulgated a new "defense" guidance document: "Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense." I use scare quotes because it just doesn't seem quite right to use "defense" to describe a document that - like its predecessors - envisions something like an American Thousand-Year Reich.

The greatest shift in emphasis is in the section "Project power despite Anti-Access/Area Denial Challenges." The "threat" to be countered is that China and Iran "will continue to pursue asymmetric means to counter our power projection capabilities."

That refers to a long-standing phenomenon: What Pentagon analysts call "Assassin's Mace" weapons - cheap, agile weapons that render expensive, high-tech, weapons systems ineffective at a cost several orders of magnitude cheaper than the Pentagon's gold-plated turds. In the context of "area denial," they include cheap anti-ship mines, surface-to-air missiles, and anti-ship missiles like the Sunburn (which some believe could destroy or severely damage aircraft carriers).
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Star of David

False Flag: Mossad Posed as CIA Agents to Recruit Anti-Iran Jihadists

Mark Perry
Foreign Policy
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:17 UTC
Israeli soldiers with flag
© David Silverman/Getty Images
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.

The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah -- a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel's Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel's recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel's ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.
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Chess

US: Justice Department Defends Obama Recess Appointments

Alexander Bolton
The Hill
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:32 UTC
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© Pete Souza/The White HousePresident Obama had the lawful power to consider the Senate to be on a lengthy absence — even though it considered itself to be meeting regularly — when he made a set of highly disputed recess appointments last week, the Justice Department concluded in a legal memorandum disclosed on Thursday.
The Department of Justice offered a defense Thursday for President Obama's controversial decision to make several recess appointments while Congress was holding pro forma sessions.

In a memo, Justice argued the pro forma sessions held every third day in the Senate do not constitute a functioning body that can render advice and consent on the president's nominees. It said the president acted consistently under the law by making the appointments.
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Attention

Marines Inch Toward Charges Over Desecration video

Phil Stewart
Reuters
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:00 UTC
Image
© Gawker.com
The U.S. Marine Corps took a first, formal step on Friday toward possible charges against four Marines who, in a widely circulated video, appear to be urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

It named a lead investigating officer whose job will include deciding what charges, if any, would be brought against the four men, all of whom have been identified, a Marine Corps official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The move came as a top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan ordered troops to "treat the living and the dead with dignity and respect."

"Defiling, desecrating, mocking, photographing or filming for personal use insurgent dead constitutes a grave breach of the (law of armed conflict)," Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, who heads day-to-day Afghan operations, wrote in a letter to troops dated January 12 and seen by Reuters on Friday.
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USA

Obama: "With Or Without Congress, I'm Going To Keep At It"


Real Clear Politics
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:05 UTC
"In the coming weeks we're also going to unveil a new website, Business USA. And this site will be a one-stop shop for small businesses and exporters and will consolidate information that right now is spread across all these various sites so that it's all in one place, and it is easy to search. So, with or without congress, I'm going to keep at it. But it would be a lot easier if Congress helped," President Obama said at the White House today.


"This is an area that should receive bipartisan support, because making our government more responsive and strategic and leaner, it shouldn't be a partisan issue," he said.
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