Psy-Ops on Senators Just Another Example of Military Illegally Manipulating Information

By: Jim White
FireDogLake
February 24, 2011

Building on the success of his “The Runaway General” article that led to President Obama firing Stanley McChrystal, Michael Hastings returns to the pages of Rolling Stone with “Another Runaway General“, where he exposes information operations, or Psy-Ops, on dignitaries including US Senators as they visited Afghanistan on “fact-finding” trips. What should not be missed when contemplating the illegal and immoral aspects of this information operation directed against the citizens of the country and high level government officials is that it is just one more instance in an ongoing pattern of information manipulation and outright deception on the part of the military in recent years...

Click Title for full article and links

12 Months After

The Effects of Citizens United on Elections and the Integrity of the Legislative Process

January 18, 2011 - The U.S. Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, scuttled the longstanding American tradition of prohibiting overt corporate spending to influence elections in its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.

On the one-year anniversary of the decision, this report offers an assessment of its impact. We provide a brief history of the legal restrictions on corporate involvement in elections and the events that led to the Citizens United v. FEC decision. We document the dramatic increase in outside spending in the 2010 elections and assess the enhancement of power that corporate lobbyists now enjoy. Finally, we discuss a comprehensive package of legislative and constitutional reforms that can be pursued at the federal, state and local levels to mitigate the damage caused by Citizens United v. FEC—or to reverse it altogether.

Click Title Above to peruse

Google Teams Up with CIA to Fund "Recorded Future" Startup Monitoring Websites, Blogs & Twitter Accounts

DemocracyNow!
July 30, 2010

Investors at the CIA and Google are backing a company called "Recorded Future" that monitors tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts in real time in order to find patterns, events and relationships that may predict the future. The news comes amidst Google’s so-called "Wi-Spy" scandal, that refers to revelations that Google’s Street View cars operating in some thirty countries snooped on private Wi-Fi networks over the last three years...

click Title for full story

Souter’s Challenge to Scalia

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Truthdig
June 3, 2010

...Souter is right to say that “the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we also want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.”

Click Title for full article

Denied Entry: Israel Blocks Noam Chomsky from Entering West Bank to Deliver Speech

DemocracyNow!
May 17, 2010

On Sunday afternoon, Noam Chomsky was stopped by Israeli border guards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing from Jordan. After over three hours of questioning, Chomsky’s passport was stamped with "Denied Entry." He was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and was scheduled to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. No reason was initially given for the decision, but the Interior Ministry later told Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that officials were now trying to get clearance from the Israel Defense Forces. Noam Chomsky joins us now from Amman, Jordan...

click Title for interview

Court Orders Documentary Filmmaker to Hand Ecuador Footage to Chevron

Democracy Now!
May 10, 2010

Last week a federal court in Manhattan ordered a documentary filmmaker to hand over to Chevron hundreds of hours of footage. Joseph Berlinger’s award-winning film, Crude: The Real Price of Oil, chronicles the struggle of indigenous Ecuadorians against ChevronTexaco’s oil contamination of their land. It focuses on the seventeen-year legal battle between Chevron and 30,000 Ecuadorians who say their land, rivers, wells, livestock and bodies were poisoned by decades of reckless oil drilling in the rainforest. Chevron has sought Berlinger’s outtakes to help defend itself against an Ecuadorian lawsuit seeking $27 billion in environmental damages...

click Title for full story

Jailed Whistleblower: US Lawmakers Held Offshore UBS Accounts

DemocracyNow!
April 16, 2010

Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez discusses his interview with UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld one day after Birkenfield's Tax Day clemency request to President Obama. Birkenfeld is serving a forty-month sentence despite playing a key role in exposing the biggest tax evasion scheme in US history...

Click on Title for full story