In the wake of COINTELPRO and the Watergate scandal, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas sent a letter to a group of young lawyers at the Washington State Bar Association. "As nightfall does not come all at once," he wrote, "neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."[1]

The recent dramatic expansion of intelligence collection at the federal, state and local level raises profound civil liberties concerns regarding freedoms and protections we have long taken for granted. If people generally appear unaware of "change in the air," a large part of the reason is the unparalleled resort to secrecy used by the government to keep its actions from public scrutiny. According to the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, "Drastic Measures Required," under President Obama (who had vowed to create "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" when he first took office), there were no fewer than 76,795,945 decisions made to classify information in 2010 - eight times the number made in 2001.

There are layers of secrecy that cannot even be penetrated by most members of Congress. In the recent debate over the re-authorization of three sections of the USA Patriot Act with sunset provisions, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who is a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, declared in the Senate in May 2011 that there was a secret interpretation of Patriot Act powers that he could not even tell them about without disclosing classified information. [2] "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry," said Wyden. The determination of the Obama administration to imitate its predecessor and maintain a wall of secrecy around anything that could be connected (however tenuously) with "national security" is evident in the zeal with which it has pursued whistleblowers and its use of the state secrets privilege in judicial proceedings, including in the recent court challenge to the FBI use of the informant Craig Monteilh to spy on mosques in Orange County, California.

A French businessman says President Nicholas Sarkozy and Interior Minister Claude Gueant must acknowledge their roles in the kickbacks on the arms deal and illegal funding.

In an interview with French financial newspaper La Tribune published on Saturday, French millionaire arms broker Ziad Takieddine said that he was commissioned by Gueant, Sarkozy's former presidential election campaign head, to conclude arms contracts with former Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"I remember telling Gueant: You know me more than anyone else. Each of my acts amount to an official mission," Takieddine stated.

"I went to see Gaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria only on the request and authorization from the president," the Franco-Lebanese businessman added.

The remarks come as Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam had said in March that Libya would publicize all the bank details relating to Sarkozy's campaign funding in 2007.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's allies came out fighting on Friday as a graft scandal threatened to derail his re-election bid, but their panicked response drew more fire from his opponents.

This week two of Sarkozy's closest associates, including the best man at his 2008 wedding, were arrested and charged by police investigating alleged kickbacks on an arms deal and illegal campaign finance contributions.

The money was allegedly kicked back to former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur's failed 1995 presidential campaign by middlemen in a contract to supply French submarines to Pakistan.

Sarkozy was the campaign's spokesman at the time of the alleged payments, but angrily insists he had nothing to do with funding. Government stalwarts leapt to his defence, but the response has been muddled.

Three allies of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Friday found themselves the focus of an expanding investigation into a 17-year-old case involving suspected corruption in the sale of submarines to Pakistan.

The inquiry has gathered momentum at a difficult time for Mr. Sarkozy, only seven months before he is to seek re-election.

The case, known here as "the Karachi Affair," centers on kickbacks that investigators suspect were paid to secure the sale of three submarines to Pakistan in 1994 and then used to help finance the presidential campaign of former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in 1995.

On Thursday, the police arrested one of Mr. Sarkozy's allies, Nicolas Bazire, who was a witness at his wedding to Carla Bruni in 2008 and was also Mr. Balladur's campaign chief in 1995. Mr. Bazire was accused of complicity in the misuse of public money.

The aristocratic wife of a former aide to President Nicolas Sarkozy has publicly accused her estranged husband of making frequent trips abroad in the 1990s to collect "bags of cash" for illegal political funds.

In her first public comments on a deepening political scandal, Princess Hélène of Yugoslavia, 50, also said she had been threatened by her husband with losing custody of her children and "ending in an asylum" if she spoke too freely to independent investigators.

Princess Hélène, the great-grand-daughter of the last king of Italy, has become one of the key figures in the so-called "Karachi affair" since her husband, Thierry Gaubert, and Nicolas Bazire, another close associate of Mr Sarkozy, were arrested last week and formally accused of handling kick-backs on multibillion-dollar arms contracts.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy's bid to be re-elected to office for a second term has been dealt a severe blow by an ever-widening arms deal scandal. Three of Sarkozy's close aides are already under investigation for their parts in a sordid story of kickbacks, failed presidential campaigns and fatal bomb blasts in Pakistan. The French sure do turn up in arms deal sagas rather frequently eh?

Known in France as L'affaire Karachi, or less lyrically in English, "The Karachi affair", it has enraptured French media in recent weeks. It is, after all, the most explosive corruption investigation in recent French history and poses a significant threat against the President himself. The scandal dates all the way back to 1995 when France sold Pakistan three submarines. It is alleged that the commissions "earned" by the French officials who secured the deal, theoretically helped fund the presidential campaign of former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. Sarkozy was the finance minister at the time and a spokesman for Balladur. French prosecutors are also investigating an additional case which alleges that the failure of French officials to pay "kickbacks" to their Pakistani counterparts who had helped to secure the deal, resulted in a bomb attack on a bus in Karachi in 2002 in which 15 people, including 11 French submarine engineers, died.

Last Sunday's Senatorial elections in France were a gripping and telling sign of the public opinion of President Sarkozy's policies and the definite desire for a change of government. Never before, since the founding of France's Fifth Republic in 1958, has the control of the Senate gone to the Left Wing Socialist Party. Clearly, it is high time for the Sarkozy administration, which leans towards the Center Right, to read between the lines.

There are several facets on the political, economical and social levels of the implication of what the election results indicate about public discontentment with Sarkozy and his policies.

To begin with, it seems that here is a president who, rather than bring social unity and coherence in a country whose population is one-fifth of ethnic origin, appears to create more of an ethnic divide. This is particularly true of the Sarkozy relationship with the Muslim population in France, of whom there are 6 million and with whom Sarkozy has not only never tried to establish ties but rather isolated and alienated them. The recent ban on veils and prayers on the street is a potent example.

Granted France is a secular country, but those issues are very far from being what ails France today and what very well may cause the president his re-election. What is striking here is that with all of France's profound woes, why these issues even come up in Parliamentary discussions. While veils and prayers being held on the street may be an eyesore to some, they pose absolutely no threat or danger to French society.

Israel, working with deeply-embedded intelligence moles in the United States, including within the U.S. government and "off-the-books" intelligence front companies, has been pilfering spent U.S. nuclear fuel from American nuclear arms caches at a phenomenal rate over the last several years. U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have confirmed that much of the nuclear fuel has been shipped to Israel and other locations via the port of Houston.

The illegal smuggling of spent highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium fuel from U.S. nuclear weapons facilities is the same outbound Houston shipping pipeline used by Bush-influenced Carlyle Group and the firm's front companies in Spain and France to ship precursor nerve gas chemicals to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, according to one Pentagon intelligence source.

The nuclear smuggling is a major back story to a September 8 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report titled "Nuclear Nonproliferation: U.S. Agencies Have Limited Ability to Account for, Monitor, and Evaluate the Security of U.S. Nuclear Material Overseas." The most serious finding in the GAO report states:

Berlin- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has foiled Palestinian-Israeli negotiations when he approved building 1100 housing units in East Jerusalem.

She said, following a phone call with Netanyahu described by her as "very difficult," that "I am unable to believe anything Netanyahu says."

Haaretz newspaper described the crisis between Merkel and Netanyahu as unprecedented, due to the Israeli intransigence in continuing settlement activities.

It added that the US administration scolded the Israeli ambassador in Washington, considering settlement activities as endangering the resumption of negotiations and American efforts to achieve peace.

Israeli sources said Germany may stop supporting Israel against establishing a Palestinian state.

Washington -- Some 17 months after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Gulf Coast lawmakers in the U.S. House remain unable to agree on a bill to send spill fines to the affected areas.

While aides to two Gulf Coast representatives said last month that House lawmakers were on the verge of a breakthrough agreement, no accord has yet been announced and the members are now keeping tight-lipped.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars in environmental and economic recovery money, which Gulf states won't see unless Congress acts.