A handful of international election monitors have touched down in the US to swing by polling places next month when voters cast ballots for the president, but officials in the state of Texas have issued them a warning: you're not welcome.

State Attorney General Greg Abbott has sent a scathing letter to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, threatening to arrest any of the election auditors that have been dispatched to America to ensure that voters won't be disenfranchised, discriminated against or intimidated when they take to the polls on November 6.

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is releasing over 100 classified documents detailing US Department of Defense procedures for running Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and other infamous prisons where terror suspects are detained.

The directives and manuals, which for more than a decade directed the US military's policy for treatment of its detainees, will be released chronologically over the next month, WikiLeaks said in a statement.

The first batch of the documents released is the 2002 Camp Delta - Guantanamo Bay prison - Standing Operating Procedure manuals.

"This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematized human rights abuse in the West with good reason," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said.

Several of the documents slated for publishing "can only be described as 'policies of unaccountability,'" WikiLeaks said in its press release.

Over the past few years, the Obama administration has institutionalized the use of armed drones and developed a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the "disposition matrix."

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the "disposition" of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation's counterterrorism ranks: The United States' conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism - 'disposition matrix' - the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a government can claim

A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign.

The Washington Post has a crucial and disturbing story this morning by Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully institutionalize - to make officially permanent - the most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on terror.

Based on interviews with "current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies", Miller reports that as "the United States' conventional wars are winding down", the Obama administration "expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more than symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the "kill" part). Specifically, "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

Met police commander says inquiry will be 'watershed' moment in investigation of child abuse

Police investigating the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal are dealing with around 300 alleged victims, Scotland Yard has revealed.

Commander Peter Spindler said officers were following more than 400 lines of inquiry linked to the victims, of whom all except two were women.

He said investigators had so far spoken to 130 people who had come forward, and 114 allegations of crime had emerged.

Officers were using a "triage" approach, first making contact with victims by phone to get initial details of their allegations.

He told reporters that most of the allegations were linked to Savile, but some involved others who might have acted with him.

Iran on Thursday condemned Israel's air strike on Sudanese capital city, Khartoum, and called it a clear violation of international laws.

Aggressive action of the Zionist regime warplanes in bombing the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Wednesday is a clear violation of international rules and regulations as well as the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said.

Such an unjustifiable move by the Zionist regime is originated from its brutal nature, he said warning that it would escalate tensions in the region.

He reiterated that the Islamic Republic of Iran, while reminding regional organizations and the bodies supervising the maintenance of international peace and security of their responsibility in this regard, calls on them to adopt an appropriate stand in order to fulfill their great responsibility against the blatant aggression and prevent its repetition in the future.

The spokesman further called on the regional countries to remain vigilant and take firm stands against the Zionist regime's aggression against the Muslim country and a member of the Arab League.

Sudanese Information Minister Ahmed Belal Osman blamed Israel for arms factory fire after four military planes attacked it.

"Four military planes attacked the Yarmouk plant," he told reporters in Khartoum, adding the planes appeared to approach the site from the East.

I recently had a rather interesting conversation with one of those people who, in a way that's hard to come by in America these days, can look you in the eye and treat you like a human being.

How rare, I thought.

I was impressed by how simple, how nice, this man was. Before I realised it, we'd spent nearly an hour talking while the sun set and the dull darkness fell on our dull American street, a street made momentarily more habitable by the genuine kindness of a stranger.

And then, the inevitable occurred. The dreaded question: "So, who are you going to vote for?" I looked away for a moment. "You do vote, don't you?" he pressed.

Being respectful toward a person who had just offered me the simple pleasure of conversation, I gave as real an answer as I thought was suitable. "Nope. I'm pretty burnt out by the whole thing." And surprisingly, he actually acknowledged my answer before, well, you know, 'the lecture'.

How 400 trucks to feed Gaza became just 67

Six and a half years go, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian national elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel's planned response. "The idea," he said, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterisation of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.

Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called "Red Lines" document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defence ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.

The Israeli media have tried to present these chilling discussions, held in secret, in the best light possible. Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to "make sure Gaza didn't starve".

But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition - requiring 170 trucks a day - military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.

God help them if Obama and Romney ever had to participate in a real debate about a real issue at the Oxford Union. They would be massacred.

The "debates" revealed that not only the candidates but also the entire country is completely tuned out to every real problem and dangerous development. For example, you would never know that US citizens can now be imprisoned and executed without due process. All that is required to terminate the liberty and life of an American citizen by his own government is an unaccountable decision somewhere in the executive branch.

No doubt that Americans, if they think of this at all, believe that it will only happen to terrorists who deserve it. But as no evidence or due process is required, how would we know that it only happens to terrorists? Can we really trust a government that has started wars in 7 countries on the basis of falsehoods? If the US government will lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to invade a country, why won't it lie about who is a terrorist?

America needs a debate about how we can be made more safe by removing the Constitutional protection of due process. If the power of government is not limited by the Constitution, are we ruled by Caesar? The Founding Fathers did not think we could trust a caesar with our safety. What has changed that we can now trust a caesar?

If we are under such a terrorist threat that the Constitution has to be suspended or replaced by unaccountable executive action, how come all the alleged terrorist cases are sting operations organized by the FBI? In eleven years there has not been a single case in which the "terrorist" had the initiative!

It was, starting at least in 2007, the goal of the US, Saudis, and Israelis to trigger a region wide sectarian war with which to overrun the governments of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. This was documented in detail in Seymour Hersh's 2007 New Yorker article, "The Redirection" which was covered in depth in, "Syrian War: The Prequel".

A recent bombing in Beirut, Lebanon left high ranking security chief Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan dead. Al-Hassan is described as "anti-Syrian." Before Al-Hassan's death was announced, and literally as bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage caused by the bombing, politicians from Saad Hariri's faction began immediately blaming Syria for the attacks. Hariri himself also laid the blame on Syria, offering no other details or supporting evidence.

Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran have all condemned the bombing and cite it as a provocation to start a greater sectarian war, from which none will benefit. Each in turn suspect Israel and the West, as greater sectarian tension is expected to result, playing into long documented attempts by US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to trigger a sectarian war they hope will be the downfall of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.

Suspicious op-eds in pro-Western "Lebanon Now" insist that Syria is responsible, and again without evidence, concludes that blaming Israel is inappropriate, and that the Wall Street-London militant beachhead is by far a lesser threat to Lebanon than what it calls "the most deadly virus" of President Bashar al-Assad's Syria.