A judge is allowing an Army veteran who says he was imprisoned unjustly and tortured by the U.S. military in Iraq to sue former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld personally for damages.

The veteran's identity is withheld in court filings, but he worked for an American contracting company as a translator for the Marines in the volatile Anbar province before being detained for nine months at Camp Cropper, a U.S. military facility near the Baghdad airport dedicated to holding "high-value" detainees.

The government says he was suspected of helping get classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces enter Iraq. But he was never charged with a crime and says he never broke the law.

Lawyers for the man, who is in his 50s, say he was preparing to come home to the United States on annual leave when he was abducted by the U.S. military and held without justification while his family knew nothing about his whereabouts or even whether he was still alive.

The Tamuz uses an advanced electro-optic camera that transmits the image of its target back to operators inside the APC, who then manually drive it toward the target. Tamuz teams work closely with an artillery unit, which operates Hermes 450 reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles that provide the intelligence on the targets that are then attacked by the Tamuz missile.


David Cenciotti also notes the crafty way in which the missile lofts itself high above a battlefield before hurtling down toward an unlucky person, place, or thing:

It initially climbs to an altitude that give its camera a good point of view of the presumed target area; then it moves (slowly) towards the target area (it seems to hover) and, as soon as a positive identification is obtained, it is guided to hit the target.

The non-partisan Institute for Truth in Accounting has identified Hawaii as a "Sinkhole" state because it is one of five states in the worst financial position in the country.

While Hawaii has $19.5 billion worth of assets, only $3.9 billion are available to pay $15.4 billion of bills as they come due. Each taxpayer's financial burden is $25,000.

"State officials say their budgets are balanced but do not include employee pension and healthcare obligations in their calculations," stated Sheila Weinberg, Founder and CEO of the Institute. "Unlike the federal government, states can't 'print money' to cover costs and shore up their financial conditions."

The Institute's newly released "Financial State of the States" Report reviewed each state's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) to offset assets against liabilities. For the first time, a detailed analysis of pension and healthcare liabilities was completed which uncovered the states' actual obligations. From these calculations, the Institute was able to determine the true Taxpayer's Burden for all fifty states.

An Israeli military court convicted an 18-year-old Palestinian on Tuesday for the murder in March of a family of settlers, military sources said.

The young man identified as Hakim Awwad from the Awarta village in the West Bank confessed to the March 11 murder of the family of five in the Itamar settlement, the sources said.

Awwad was also convicted of carrying illegal weapons but it was not clear when a sentence will be handed down, the sources said.

According to the charge sheet, Awwad and his 19-year-old cousin Amjad Awwad acted of their own free will, although the pair are members of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Amjad is also on trial.

On the night of March 11, Ehud and Ruthy Fogel were stabbed to death along with their three children, including a three-month-old baby, in a murder that sparked international condemnation.

Source: Agence France-Presse

So, you're sick and tired of being hassled by Transportation "Security" Administration (TSA) thugs, who fondle your "junk" and force 95-year-old grandmothers to take off their adult diapers?

Well, that's tough - because it's about to get worse.

Since 2006, the TSA has been developing a $1 billion program called "Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques" [.pdf] (SPOT) whose proponents - notably, one Rafi Ron, an Israeli airline security "expert" - claim it enables screeners to detect dangerous passengers via nonverbal signals, including facial expressions. The program is undergoing a test run, starting today [Tuesday] at Boston's Logan airport. So before you wrinkle your nose at that Epsilon-Minus Semi Moron rifling through your suitcase, please be aware that the "micro-expressions" you exhibit can and will be held against you.

As the TSA gropers assaulted Americans at airports, the outraged response of the public was taken up by some conservatives, who promptly declared that we need to organize our air safety campaign along Israeli lines - and now they've gotten their wish. Which just goes to underscore the old aphorism about being careful what you wish for.

German newspaper quotes Israeli intelligence source saying that Iranian nuclear scientist's assassination was Mossad chief Tamir Pardo's first major operation. Report claims Mossad opposed to IAF calls to strike Iran nuke sites.

The assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran last week was the first major operation of Mossad director Tamir Pardo, the Der Spiegel website reported Monday.

The article, which quotes an Israeli intelligence source, surveys the series of assassination attempts involving Iranian scientists in the past 18 months and points to the Mossad as the organization at the forefront of Israel's campaign against an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Pentagon admits $2.3 trillion missing - Rumsfeld calls it "a matter of life and death":

In 1975, during the Church Committee hearings, the existence of a secret assassination weapon came to light. The CIA had developed a poison that caused the victim to have an immediate heart attack. This poison could be frozen into the shape of a dart and then fired at high speed from a pistol. The gun was capable of shooting the icy projectile with enough speed that the dart would go right through the clothes of the target and leave just a tiny red mark. Once in the body the poison would melt and be absorbed into the blood and cause a heart attack! The poison was developed to be undetectable by modern autopsy procedures.

Can you give a person cancer? If cancer in animals can be caused by injecting them with cancer viruses and bacteria, it would certainly be possible to do the same with human beings! In 1931, Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, purposely infects human test subjects in Puerto Rico with cancer cells; 13 of them died. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of the details of his experiment and Rhoads himself gives a written testimony stating he believes that all Puerto Ricans should be killed, he later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Fort Detrick Maryland (origin of the HIV/AIDS virus, the Avian Flu virus and the Swine Flu / A-H1N1 virus), Utah and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.

The answer to the question - Can you give a person cancer - is yes. After nearly 80 years of research and development there is now a way to simulate a real heart attack and to give a healthy person cancer. Both have been used as a means of assassination. Only a very skilled pathologist, who knew exactly what to look for at an autopsy, could distinguish an assassination induced heart attack or cancer from the real thing.

If there is one thing that the office of President Barack Obama demonstrates, it is that democracy does not exist in the United States. This may seem a rather outlandish statement. For many people, the fact that the 44th president is the first black man to preside over the White House - with its American colonial-style architecture - is a tribute to the triumph of US democracy.

But many other more telling facts indicate that Obama is but a figurehead of an unelected government in the US. This unelected power of corporate elites - commercial, financial, military - governs with the same core policies regardless of who is sitting in the White House. Whether these policies are on social, economic or foreign matters, the elected president must obey the direction ordained by the unelected elite. That kind of untrammeled power structure conforms more closely in practice to dictatorship, not democracy.

As Michael Hudson and Ellen Brown reveal in their analyses of the US budget debacle, Obama is pathetically doing the bidding of Wall Street - much like an errand boy [1] [2].

Greater Manchester Police has revealed that an officer had an unencrypted USB device containing detailed information on active operations and personal information on members of the public stolen from his home.

The force said that it has started contacting those affected, but Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan sought to allay any fears that the device held information on police informants.

"I want to make it clear that any suggestion this memory stick contained lists of names of people who 'tipped off' police is inaccurate," he said.

"We know what is on the device because the officer has told us, and so far we have only had to speak to one member of the public whose personal information may have been compromised."

Shewan added that the force is working to ensure that such incidents do not happen again, and that staff are expected to be aware of procedures relating to the handling of personal information.