The villagers who rushed to the road, cutting through rocky fields in central Yemen, found the dead strewn around a burning sport utility vehicle. The bodies were dusted with white powder - flour and sugar, the witnesses said - that the victims were bringing home from market when the aircraft attacked. A torched woman clutched her daughter in a lifeless embrace. Four severed heads littered the pavement.

"The bodies were charred like coal. I could not recognize the faces," said Ahmed al-Sabooli, 22, a farmer whose parents and 10-year-old sister were among the dead. "Then I recognized my mother because she was still holding my sister in her lap. That is when I cried."

Quoting unnamed Yemeni officials, local and international media initially described the victims of the Sept. 2 airstrike in al-Bayda governorate as al Qaida militants. After relatives of the victims threatened to bring the charred bodies to the president, Yemen's official news agency issued a brief statement admitting the awful truth: The strike was an "accident" that killed 12 civilians. Three were children.

Nearly four months later, that terse admission remains the only official word on the botched attack. A Washington Post article, published on Dec. 24, reports that "U.S. officials in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it was a Defense Department aircraft, either a drone or a fixed-wing airplane, that fired" on the vehicle. But the people of al-Bayda still have received no official word as to who was responsible for the deaths - the United States, which in the past year has accelerated its covert targeted-killing program against Yemeni-based al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula; or the Yemeni government, whose new president, Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi, was installed with Washington's help.

At a July 20 press conference Aurora police Chief Dan Oates said investigators were confident that James Holmes acted alone in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history by casualties and that authorities were "not looking for any other suspects."

But doubters are citing official evidence to question that Holmes was the only shooter, or a shooter at all.

The argument of the skeptics can be split into three categories: the discovery of Holmes, the real-time testimony on police radio transmissions and the extra evidence at the scene.

The discovery of Holmes

During the press conference, Oates said that Holmes was "apprehended outside his White Hyundai parked in the back of the theater" and that he "surrendered without any significant incident."

According to police radio transmissions (at 6:15), an officer found "a suspect in a gas mask" and another officer asked "Is that the dude in the white car you're by?" After a few transmissions, an officer asks (at 6:49) "That white car in the rear of the lot - is that a suspect?" The response is "Yes! We've got rifles, gas mask, he's detained right now, I've got an open door going into the theater."

Skeptics cite this exchange as evidence that Holmes was found in his locked car with a gas mask on and heavily drugged - not outside the car as Oates said - which would have forced first responders to break the passenger side window and get a white stretcher board in preparation to transport him.

Nineteen dead, according to officials, as killer smashes truck laden with explosives into Baluchistan bus bound for Iran

A suicide bomber driving a vehicle packed with explosives rammed into a bus carrying Shia Muslim pilgrims in south-west Pakistan on Sunday, killing 19 people, a government official and witnesses said.

Earlier on Sunday, 21 tribal policemen believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban were found shot dead in Pakistan's troubled north-west tribal region, government officials said.

Pakistan has experienced a spike in killings over the last year by radical Sunni Muslims targeting Shias who they consider heretics. The violence has been especially pronounced in Baluchistan province, where the latest attack occurred.

In addition to the 19 people killed in the bombing in Baluchistan's Mastung district, 25 others were wounded, many of them critically, said Tufail Ahmed, a local political official. The blast completely destroyed the bus that was hit and damaged a second bus carrying Shias that was close by.

France's Constitutional Council on Saturday rejected a 75 percent upper income tax rate to be introduced in 2013 in a setback to Socialist President Francois Hollande's push to make the rich contribute more to cutting the public deficit.

Paris - The Council ruled that the planned 75 percent tax on annual income above 1 million euros ($1.32 million) - a flagship measure of Hollande's election campaign - was unfair in the way it would be applied to different households.

Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the government would redraft the upper tax rate proposal to answer the Council's concerns and resubmit it in a new budget law, meaning Saturday's decision could only amount to a temporary political blow.

While the tax plan was largely symbolic and would only have affected a few thousand people, it has infuriated high earners in France, prompting some such as actor Gerard Depardieu to flee abroad. The message it sent also shocked entrepreneurs and foreign investors, who accuse Hollande of being anti-business.

Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said the rejection of the 75 percent tax and other minor measures could cut up to 500 million euros in forecast tax revenues but would not hurt efforts to slash the public deficit to below a European Union ceiling of 3 percent of economic output next year.

An Israeli security video recently leaked to the media shows that a Palestinian teenager who was killed at a checkpoint on December 12th was actually walking away from soldiers when he was shot in the back. The video shows absolutely no indication of the boy carrying any object that could be mistaken for a gun, as the Israeli military originally claimed.
After originally releasing an edited version of the security footage on December 17th, some journalists tried to get the Israeli military to release a full, unedited copy of the video. An unedited version was leaked by Israeli channel 10 television on Wednesday December 26th, which includes 19 seconds that was edited out - including the final (probably fatal) of the three shots fired at Mohammed Abu Salaymeh, which hit him in the back when he was already doubled over from the impact of the first two shots.

Abu Salaymeh, 17, was a student at the circus school in Hebron, and was killed while on his way to get his birthday cake. He was killed on his 17th birthday. In a statement issued the day after Mohammed's death, the Palestinian Circus School (PCS) issued a statement saying,

"Mohammed Salaymeh, 17 years old, our beloved student at the Palestinian Circus School since one and a half years, was brutally killed by the Israeli army in Hebron yesterday. Rest in Peace, dear Mohammed. You will always stay in our hearts. Today we can only be sad, and be close to the family in our thoughts and prayers."

Anatomy of an air attack gone wrong

Sanaa, Yemen - The villagers who rushed to the road, cutting through rocky fields in central Yemen, found the dead strewn around a burning sport utility vehicle. The bodies were dusted with white powder -- flour and sugar, the witnesses said -- that the victims were bringing home from market when the aircraft attacked. A torched woman clutched her daughter in a lifeless embrace. Four severed heads littered the pavement. "The bodies were charred like coal. I could not recognize the faces," said Ahmed al-Sabooli, 22, a farmer whose parents and 10-year-old sister were among the dead. "Then I recognized my mother because she was still holding my sister in her lap. That is when I cried."

Quoting unnamed Yemeni officials, local and international media initially described the victims of the Sept. 2 airstrike in al-Bayda governorate as al Qaeda militants. After relatives of the victims threatened to bring the charred bodies to the president, Yemen's official news agency issued a brief statement admitting the awful truth: The strike was an "accident" that killed 12 civilians. Three were children.

In the Western world truth no longer has any meaning. In its place stands agenda.

Agenda is all important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world and the American people. 9/11 was the "new Pearl Harbor" that the neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.

President George W. Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neil, said that prior to 9/11 the first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.

9/11 was initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq. Washington's mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9/11. The George W. Bush regime's invasion of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Every military person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a country half way around the world ready in three weeks.

The Orwellian "PATRIOT Act" is another example of planning prior to the event. This vast police state measure could not possibly have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. The bill was already written, sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity. Why? Who wrote it? Why has there been no media investigation of the advanced preparation of this police state legislation?

We've written several times before about domestic spying being performed by the government agencies, most of which is performed under the protective guise of "national security" as part of the "War on Terror." The end result tends to be diminished rights rather than something more positive, like "terrorists caught."

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has been looking into the CIA's involvement in domestic surveillance, something the CIA is definitely not supposed to be doing.

Beginning in 2011, a series of investigative articles by the Associated Press ("AP") revealed that the New York Police Department ("NYPD") conducted extensive surveillance of Muslims and persons of Arab descent in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The NYPD's activities included photographing members of the Muslim community as they entered mosques, infiltrating Muslim student groups, and monitoring Muslim stores and businesses. According to the AP, the "police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes." The AP also reported, "many of these operations were built with help from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after 9/11."

This looks like the CIA is at the very least heavily involved with domestic surveillance, if not actually doing the surveillance itself. The "investigations" themselves are questionable enough even without the possibility of a departmental "misstep" by the CIA, generally consisting of paid informants infiltrating the Muslim community and amassing as much information as possible when not attempting to bait community members into saying something inflammatory.

Eight retired army officers were charged on Friday with the murder of a popular songwriter and theater director, Víctor Jara, who was tortured and killed days after the 1973 military coup in a stadium that had been turned into a detention center.

Judge Miguel Vásquez charged two of the former officers, Pedro Barrientos and Hugo Sánchez, with committing the murder and six others as accomplices. Mr. Sánchez, a lieutenant colonel, was second in command at the stadium. Mr. Barrientos, a lieutenant from a Tejas Verdes army unit, currently lives in Deltona, a city southwest of Daytona Beach, Fla., and was interrogated by the F.B.I. earlier this year at the request of a Chilean court. Attempts to reach Mr. Barrientos for comment were unsuccessful; his two listed telephone numbers had been disconnected.

Judge Vásquez issued an international arrest warrant against Mr. Barrientos through Interpol Santiago and ordered the arrest of the other seven, who were in Chile. Those charged as accomplices are Roberto Souper, Raúl Jofré, Edwin Dimter, Nelson Hasse, Luis Bethke and Jorge Smith.

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall - so mystifying at the time - was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves - was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document - reproduced here in an easily searchable format - shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI - and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire - by whom? Where? - now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).