Washington claims the shield is meant to protect against Iran, but Moscow knows its about undermining Russia's military deterrence

Russia's top military officer has threatened to carry out a pre-emptive strike if Washington goes ahead with its plan to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.

The Obama administration has been pushing for a deal to build missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe through the NATO alliance, over the strong objections of the Russians. Washington claims its purpose would be to protect from any Iranian missile threat. But Moscow believes it would undermine their nuclear deterrent.

Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov on Thursday at a international conference attended by U.S. and NATO officials said, "A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens."

The CIA and overseas intelligence partners disrupted an American intelligence al-Qaeda plot to blow up civilian aircraft using an advanced explosive device designed by the terrorist network's affiliate in Yemen, U.S. officials said Monday.

President Obama was made aware of the threat in April, U.S. officials said, and the plot was stopped before any aircraft or passengers could be put in danger. Obama "was assured that the device did not pose a threat to the public," said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

U.S. officials said the FBI is examining the device - modeled on the "underwear bomb" used in an attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 - to determine whether airport security systems would have detected it.

U.S. officials said the CIA and other agencies tracked the plot that they created for about a month before moving to seize the device in recent days in the Middle East outside Yemen, where the bomb was built.

The CIA foiled a plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner this month, senior U.S. officials told NBC News.

Officials said the plot involved a bomb that improved on the one that had been sewn into the underpants of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who failed in a plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009. That device did not detonate.

This bomb had a more refined detonation mechanism and was "totally non-metallic," which officials told NBC News would have made it more difficult to detect by traditional screening processes.


A U.S. counterterrorism official told NBC News there were "refinements on reliability" in particular that made this bomb more sophisticated and more likely to explode.

The Obama Administration drafted a "highly lawyered" memo to shield the president from blame if the mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden failed, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Sean Hannity of Fox News Friday.

According to Mukasey, the memo would have pinned the blame on Navy Admiral William McRaven, who was commander of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the raid.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- The five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks used their weekend war court appearances to stage "peaceful resistance to an unjust system" being used for political reasons, defense lawyers said Sunday - a day after the 9/11accused turned the judge's plans to hold a simple arraignment into a 13-hour marathon of prayer and protest.

"The system is a rigged game to prevent us from doing our jobs," argued criminal defense attorney David Nevin, accusing the prison camp commander of making it impossible to learn from alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed how the CIA waterboarded him 183 times and used other since-outlawed techniques to break him.

Mohammed, his nephew and three other men allegedly trained, advised and financed the 19 hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing 2,976 people. All could get the death penalty, if convicted.

François Hollande's election threw down the gauntlet to Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who has railroaded the eurozone into agreeing a new "fiskalpakt" treaty enshrining Germany's austerity doctrine.

The economic doctrine of austerity, to cut the burden of state spending to free up the economy, has ruled supreme with the support all of Europe's leaders, the European Union and financial markets.

But political leaders were on Sunday night conceding the consensus had been shattered beyond repair.

With Europe's economies plunging further into recession and as unemployment in the eurozone breaks record levels, voters demands for a new approach had finally become to great to ignore.

The popular backlash to EU imposed austerity to the centrist New Democracy and Socialist parties in Greece threatens the existence of the euro itself.

Fresh evidence further proves allegations about ties between Libya's slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi and incumbent French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Press TV reports.

A lawyer for Libya's former Prime Minister Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi confirmed on Thursday that Gaddafi contributed over 50 million euros to Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.

Mahmudi is now reportedly in detention in Tunisia.

Earlier, the leftist French journal Mediapart published documentary evidence about the controversial funding source.

The report said of an agreement signed after an October 6, 2006 meeting attended by Gaddafi's spy chief Abdullah Senussi, the head his African investment fund Bashir Saleh, close Sarkozy associate Brice Hortefeux and arms dealer Ziad Takieddine.

It claimed the 2006 document -- allegedly signed by Gaddafi's former intelligence chief and later foreign minister Moussa Koussa -- were obtained "from the archives of the secret service" through former senior Libyan officials currently in hiding.

MADRID: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is widely expected to be kicked out of office in elections Sunday. If he goes, he'll be in good company: Just about every European country that has been hit by the debt crisis, and held elections since it began, have thrown out their leaders.

Here's a look at countries where political cadavers litter the landscape.

The National Academy of Sciences is casting more doubt on whether the Obama administration's European-based missile defense shield can protect the United States and recommends scrapping key parts of the system.

The academy's assessment could complicate White House efforts to persuade Congress to fund the still-developing program. Though the academy says the plans would protect Europe effectively, some lawmakers already are asking why the U.S., at a time of tight budgets, should spend billions of dollars on a system that provides limited homeland defense.

Mankind Is Being Terminated.

"We have become a plague upon [ourselves and upon] the Earth...Until such a time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." - David M. Graber, Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1989.

"Contemporary history has been plagued by attempts to cure humanity of its schisms. The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution in China were all ideological projects devoted to abolishing contradiction from the human subject and thus reconstituting him as the harmonious posthuman. Whether or not these projects were faithful to Nietzsche's original vision remains a matter of debate, but clearly they drew upon his tropes of human disease and posthuman salvation." - Hadas Elber, "Visions of Humanity between the Posthuman and the Non-Human."

"The conspiracy theory/theorist soubriquet is reflexively feared by professional journalists and academics alike who believe (with some justification) their reputations will be undermined by such thought crimes against the state. Thus, like an instrument that would easily be at home in the most extreme totalitarian regimes, intellectual workers self-discipline themselves as the "conspiracy theory" mechanism determines the trajectory and parameters of public discourse, dissent, and recollection.

Intellectual cowardice is reinforced by a set of circumstances whereby even if alternative accounts questioning the official line are exhaustively researched and documented with credible information and sources, mobilization of the "conspiracy theory" label by state censors and their journalistic accomplices will render the counter-arguments suspect. And, in an on-the-go culture where citizens are heavily reliant for information on headlines and sound-bites versus deliberate analysis, such lines of reasoning are destined for the memory hole." - Prof. James F. Tracy, "State Propaganda, Historical Revisionism, and Perpetuation of the 9/11 Myth."

Freedom, truth, human reason, democracy, free market capitalism, the rule of law, national sovereignty, and the world's diverse civilizations are all under attack. But the real target is mankind. Mankind is under attack.

Oligarchical globalist eugenicists and fascists, who are in league with the totalitarian leaders of radical Environmentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Zionism, are hell-bent on annihilating the majority of the human race through wars, disease, economic collapse, and other means. They are also creating an authoritarian global government based on a new religion, in which man is valueless and the Earth is regarded as sacred and holy.

The sick proponents of human depopulation and global genocide are surprisingly very vocal and upfront about their views and goals. Robert J. Smith, adjunct environmental scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, explained their perverse mindset and radical worldview in a speech he gave in 2005 at the Ninth Annual National Conference on Private Property Rights called, "The Pleistocene Park Project - Removing Civilization from North America." He said:

"Then, almost all of these radical environmental groups support zero population growth and actually even negative population growth. Most of them believe that humans are exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. First we must stabilize and then reduce human population growth. It is six billion now. Probably, you would find the leaders of most of the environmental groups agreeing that the human population of the planet should be reduced to about two billion or even one billion, and some of the hard-core think that we shouldn't have more than about a few hundred million humans on the planet if the planet is going to operate as it should ecologically or whatever. Many very prominent ones are talking about the necessity of having the government eventually come up with licenses to breed, and have written about it in journals that normal people never look at. They talk about two or one child maximum families in the United States."