The use of private contractors allows the US to evade responsibility for violations of international humanitarian legislation, a top Russian diplomat for human rights and democracy said.

The comment came from Foreign Ministry Commissioner Konstantin Dolgov as the US Justice Department halted an investigation into the attempted bribing of Iraqi police officials by employees of the Blackwater security company (re-branded as 'Academi' in late 2011).

Blackwater attempted to pay $1 million in bribes for new contracts in Iraq, and also to block an investigation into the 2007 murder of 17 Iraqi civilians, including several children, by Blackwater operatives, a statement published on the Russian Foreign Ministry's website said.

Israel's high court ruled on Wednesday that the largest unauthorized Jewish settler outpost on occupied West Bank territory must be evacuated by next Tuesday.
The court rejected an appeal by the settlers to delay the evacuation of Migron, a hilltop settlement of about 50 families, which a separate ruling a year ago decided was built on privately-owned Palestinian land.

The Migron settlement was one of dozens built more than a decade ago without Israeli government authorization on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War but which Palestinians claim for a hoped-for independent state.

The court had delayed several deadlines set for evacuating the settlement in the past year, after last-minute appeals, and has now dismissed the latest request.

In their latest appeal, settlers had sought a delay in moving out, saying temporary homes for them elsewhere in the West Bank were not ready. Others maintained they had purchased the land in question.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) posted a broad agency announcement [PDF] recently, calling on contractors to submit concept papers detailing technological demonstrations of 'cyberspace warfare operations' (CWO) capabilities.

The Air Force is looking to obtain CWO capabilities falling into a number of categories including: 'cyberspace warfare attack' and 'cyberspace warfare support.'

The broad agency announcement defines 'cyberspace warfare attack' capabilities as those which would give them the ability to "destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, corrupt, or usurp the adversaries [sic] ability to use the cyberspace domain for his advantage."

Cyberspace warfare support capabilities, the document claims, would include actions deployed by operational commanders in order to, intercept, identify, and locate sources of access and vulnerability for threat recognition, targeting, and planning, both immediately and for future operations. This also includes the providing of information required for the immediate decisions involving CWOs and data used to produce intelligence or provide targeting for an electronic attack.

In addition to those listed above, the Air Force is seeking 'situational awareness capabilities that give an operator near real-time effectiveness feedback in a form that is readily observed by the operator.' This would address the 'mapping of networks (both data and voice),' 'access to cyberspace domain, information, networks, systems, or devices,' 'denial of service on cyberspace resources, current/future operating systems, and network devices,' and 'Data manipulation.'

The draft of the final statement of the Palestine Committee of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) ministerial meeting in Tehran underlined the necessity for finding a fair and sustainable solution to the crisis in the Palestinian territories, an Iranian NAM official said Wednesday.

"The draft document of the statement of the Palestine Committee underscores the Palestinians' critical situation and asks for finding a fair, comprehensive and sustainable solution" to the Palestinian issue, member of the NAM's Secretariat Mahmoud Abdollahi told FNA on Wednesday.

"NAM has always put the Palestinian issue on its agenda on the sidelines of its high-level meetings within the framework of the Palestine Committee," he added.

His remarks came after Palestinian Authority (PA) Envoy to the UN Riyadh Mansour called on the participants at the NAM summit to pay special attention to the issue of Palestine, especially after the recent uprisings in the Middle-East.

Four US soldiers plotted to assassinate Barack Obama and overthrow the government, a court has heard.

One, private Michael Burnett, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and gang charges in the killings last December of former soldier Michael Roark and his girlfriend, 17-year-old Tiffany York.

Burnett said that Roark, who had just left the army, knew of the militia group's plans and was killed because he was "a loose end."

Prosecutor Isabel Pauley said the group bought $87,000 (£55,000) of guns and bomb-making materials and plotted to take over Fort Stewart, bomb targets in Savannah and Washington state, as well as assassinate the president.

Source: The Associated Press

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formed in 1961 during the Cold War, is a group of 120 states and 17 observer states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. The NAM held its opening 2012 session yesterday under the new chairmanship of Iran, which succeeded Egypt as the Chair.

Significantly, an Associated Press story in the Washington Post headlined, "Iran opens nonaligned summit with calls for nuclear arms ban", reported that "Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi opened the gathering by noting commitment to a previous goal from the nonaligned group, known as NAM, to remove the world's nuclear arsenals within 13 years. 'We believe that the timetable for ultimate removal of nuclear weapons by 2025, which was proposed by NAM, will only be realized if we follow it up decisively,' he told delegates."

Yet the New York Times, which has been beating the drums for war with Iran, just as it played a disgraceful role in the deceptive reporting during the lead-up to the Iraq War, never mentioned Iran's proposal for nuclear abolition. The Times carried the bland headline on its front page, "At Summit Meeting, Iran Has a Message for the World", and then went on to state, "the message is clear. As Iran plays host to the biggest international conference ...it wants to tell its side of the long standoff with the Western powers which are increasingly convinced that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons", without ever reporting Iran's offer to support the NAM proposal for the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2025.

It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a "target" of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: "I'm tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I'll talk to you."

Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.'s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.

"The decision must have been made in September 2001," Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. "That's when the equipment started coming in." In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything - their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships - to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.

Why A British Gamekeeper Turned Poacher

With President Ronald Reagan's re-election in November 1984, the militant anti-communists in Washington and London decided that the day had finally come for rolling back the Iron Curtain, and bringing down the Soviet Union. With the death of CPSU General Secretary Yuri Andropov, replaced by the caretaker government of chain-smoking Konstantin Chernenko, the Soviet bloc seemed to be reduced to a regime on auto-pilot, only going through the motions of protecting itself while expecting the apparent inevitable - its collapse - what Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government was already well advanced in achieving, and the Republican administration in Washington would now follow. With the policy of détente with Moscow well and truly buried, it was time to do all the dirty work to make it a reality.

Andropov's death seemed an augury of the system's own fate. Head of the KGB since 1967 - thanks to his belief after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution that only force could keep communist systems in power - he directed the suppression of all dissent against the established regimes in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Afghanistan in 1979, and Warsaw in 1981. In these efforts, Andropov was assisted by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of his personal secretariat who later became head of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, and ultimately the chief of the foreign intelligence service itself. According to Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin in The Sword and the Shield, Andropov deliberately destroyed the Prague Spring on the pretext that the CIA and NATO were behind it - what he knew to be untrue. (pp. 256-7) In fact, Mitrokhin was inclined to become a mole for the West because of the fabrications Andropov engaged in justifying the overthrow of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, a so-called "agent of American imperialism." (p. 11) For the Soviet defector, the process was completed when the KGB chief forced the Polish communists to adopt martial law in order to suppress Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, its Polish intelligence counterpart fabricating a film claiming that it was in the pay of the West. (p. 522ff.)

Little wonder that after Andropov took over control from Leonid Brezhnev, he apparently let all his paranoid fears run wild after Reagan rejected his calls for reducing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Euorpe, and for a summit to promote world peace by calling for the adoption of STAR WARS. Then, according to most reports, Moscow "went ape" when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 inadvertently strayed over Soviet air space in the Far East, resulting in its being shot down by a Soviet fighter with the loss of 269 lives, including 61 Americans - what resulted in West Germany approving the deployment of U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles. Kryuchkov, whose KGB had long been issuing instructions to counter alleged Western threats, and which Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky published later in two volumes, now used NATO's routine Able Archer Exercise as an excuse for instituting Operation RYAN (the Russian acronym for nuclear missile attack), calling for fortnightly reports from all residencies of evidence of Western plans for a first strike against the Soviets - what Andrew and Mitrokhin again dismissed as being totally without foundation. (p. 433) According to them, thanks to deliberate efforts by Washington and London, starting in 1984 to reassure Moscow of their peaceful intentions, cooler heads and plans soon prevailed in the Kremlin.

Metropolitan police passes information to authorities in Sweden about killing of Olof Palme in 1986

Eva Rausing, who was found dead in July at the London home she shared with her husband, an heir to the TetraPak fortune, had passed on information about the unsolved 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Swedish prosecutors have revealed.

Scotland Yard confirmed on Tuesday night that it had given information to authorities in Sweden, where investigators are now reported as wanting to question Hans Kristian Rausing as a possible witness about the information his wife claimed to have obtained.

A Swedish author who has written two books on the Palme killing said Mrs Rausing first contacted him in June 2011. She claimed she had learned that Palme had been killed by an entrepreneur who feared the politician was a threat to his business.

At least two people have been killed in an attack carried out by a US assassination drone in Yemen.

The drone targeted a vehicle on a road between the provinces of Marib and Hadhramout on Tuesday.

Reports say a Saudi citizen and a Yemeni tribesman were killed in the air strike.

Yemeni military officials confirmed the attack.

The United States uses drones for combat and espionage missions in several countries including Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Washington claims the unmanned aircraft target militants, but many of the victims turn out to be civilians.

The United Nations says the US drone attacks are targeted killings that flout international law.