Andrew McLemore | RawStory.com

If the Patriot Act hadn’t been approved for another year, Sunday would have looked much different.

Sunday could have meant the government was no longer given permission to wiretap the phones of Americans and seize their records and property.

But since the bill was approved by Congressional Democrats earlier this week and signed into law by President Obama on Saturday, this Sunday is just another Sunday for Americans living with the Patriot Act.

To be fair, many Democrats asked for additional protections for the privacy rights of American citizens.

But Republicans said that would detract from the ability of the country’s intelligence agencies to track down terrorists. Lacking a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to pass the bill with the extra provisions, Democrats left them out.

Democratic Rep. Jane Harman opposed the House’s approval of the extension, citing abuses during the administration of President George W. Bush.

“While I strongly support using the most robust tools possible to go after terrorists, Congress must revise and narrow — not extend — Bush era policies,” Harman said.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com had the following to say of the overwhelming support of the law’s extension:

One of the strangest prongs of conventional Beltway wisdom is the lament that there is not enough  bipartisanship.  The opposite is true:  many of the most damaging acts inflicted on the country by Washington are enacted on a fully bipartisan basis — the most destructive political act of this generation, the invasion of Iraq, was fully bipartisan, as were most of the post-9/11 civil liberties abuses and other Bush-era initiatives– and, at least in certain areas, the harmonious joining together of Republicans and Democrats continues unabated.

Most publications and politicians expected Obama to sign the Patriot Act.

Helen Thomas | CommonDreams.org 

President Barack Obama does have a foreign policy. It’s called war.

The President has not defined any real difference between his hawkish approach to international issues and that of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush.

Where’s the change we can believe in?

Bush left a legacy of two wars, neither of which was ever fully explained or justified. Obama has merely picked up the sword that Bush left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the struggle against terrorism, one might say, “Who cares?”

One group that cares consists of Americans who follow the rules and think we should honor all the treaties we have promoted and signed over the years.

The President gave short shrift to foreign policy in his State of the Union address, mentioning neither the lives lost nor the cost of the global hostilities that the U.S. has involved itself in. He also didn’t mention U.S. policies in the Middle East, though those are the root cause of many of our problems.

While U.S. special envoy George Mitchell has a hopeful outlook for the resumption of the stalemated talks between the Israelis and Palestinians after a year of trying, Obama seems to have temporarily thrown in the towel.

Obama said he was keeping his promise to leave Iraq by the end of August.

Meanwhile, frequent suicide bombings continue in that beleaguered country.

Afghanistan is a different story. U.S. forces there are involved in manhunts of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders. But the cost in civilian life is heavy when drones are used and whole families have been wiped out to get one suspected leader.

The U.S. seems to have convinced the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan that it’s their war too. The Washington Post said the loss of Hakimullah Mehsud has dealt a fatal blow to his followers.

The U.S. military web has spread to Yemen, where American intelligence teams have joined Yemeni troops in planning missions against al-Qaida elements. Scores have been killed there.

Then there’s the ramped-up U.S. saber-rattling toward Iran.

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Daniel Tencer | RawStory.com

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein’s article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that “our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources.”

By “crippled epistemology” Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public — the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government “enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.”

Download a PDF of the article here.

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gMelvin A Goodman | Truthout.org 

The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.

With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA’s most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency’s chief apologist.

So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the “smartest man he had ever met.”

Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.

Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk,” in response to the president’s demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam-dunk” briefing to the president in January 2003.

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Kurt Nimmo | InfoWars.com

Read the entire executive order here (in PDF format).

Obama has issued another executive order, this time establishing a so-called “Council of Governors.”
The order, signed on January 11, further diminishes the sovereignty of the states and builds on a framework for possible martial law. The executive order was completely ignored by the corporate media.

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1822 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-181), and in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments to protect our Nation and its people and property,” the order reads.

The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security.
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Michael McAuliff | NYDailyNews.com

Angry Sept. 11 responders say President Obama has offered sympathy but no support for their appeal to champion their cause in Congress.

A group of 9/11 widows and rescue workers recently wrote Obama, asking his help to pass a bill that would fund care for ailing responders over the next 30 years.

Obama wrote back Tuesday, the Daily News has learned, saying he understands their plight and values their heroism.

“The individuals suffering health ailments from Sept. 11 and its aftermath deserve proper medical attention,” the President wrote. “You served selflessly, and your concerns are of great importance to our country. I remain committed to supporting the heroes of Sept. 11.”

But he left out whether he’d get behind the bill.

“It’s a nice letter, and I will put it in my scrapbook,” said former construction worker John Feal, who lost half a foot at Ground Zero. “But it’s no more than a souvenir unless he supports that bill.”
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RethinkAfghanistan.com

Sign the petition to tell Congress we cannot afford a war that does not make us safer.

Jason Leopold | truthout.org

After months of deliberations, President Barack Obama finally outlined his revised strategy for the Afghanistan war in a nationally televised address Tuesday night. The commander-in-chief repeatedly invoked 9/11, attempting to justify his plan to escalate the eight-year-old war, which calls for the rapid deployment of 30,000 additional US troops to the region by next summer.

Obama’s decision to step-up the war effort in Afghanistan comes two weeks before he heads to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking at the US Military Academy at West Point to thousands of uniformed cadets, many of whom will likely be shipped off to Afghanistan when they graduate, Obama appeared somewhat subdued when he began his speech by saying that it is “important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place.

“We did not ask for this fight,” the president continued. “On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of the passengers on board one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.
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AP | RawStory.com 

President Barack Obama announced Tuesday he was dispatching 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, accelerating a risky and expensive war buildup, even as he assured the nation that U.S. forces will begin coming home in July 2011. The first new Marines will join the fight by Christmas.

The escalation — to be completed by next summer — is designed to reverse significant Taliban advances since Obama took office 10 months ago and to fast-track the training of Afghan soldiers and police toward the goal of hastening an eventual U.S. pullout. The size and speed of the troop increase will put a heavy strain on the military, which still maintains a force of more than 100,000 in Iraq and already has 68,000 in Afghanistan.

“The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 the fastest pace possible so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers,” Obama was to say in his Tuesday night prime-time speech. The White House released excerpts in advance.

The increased troops, Obama said, “will increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”

Looking to America’s experience in Iraq, Obama put said a U.S. withdrawal would be executed “responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.”

“We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government and, more importantly, to the Afghan people that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country,” Obama said.

Obama also leaned heavily on NATO allies and other countries to join in escalating the fight.

“We must come together to end this war successfully,” the president said. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility. What’s at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

Obama’s Tuesday evening speech to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., to be broadcast nationally, ends three months of exacting deliberations that won praise from supporters and criticism from opponents. Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Obama was “dithering,” too inexperienced to make a decision on the troop buildup requested in September by commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Senior officials said Obama also would underscore his commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan and scouring corruption out of the government of President Hamid Karzai. Obama has vowed to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida boss Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization.

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Josh Gerstein | Politico.com

Americans who are troubled by the decision to send alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial will feel better about it when he’s put to death, President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.

“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

When Todd asked Obama if he was interfering in the trial process by declaring that Mohammed will be executed, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, insisted that he wasn’t trying to dictate the result.

“What I said was, people will not be offended if that’s the outcome. I’m not pre-judging, I’m not going to be in that courtroom, that’s the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury,” Obama said. “What I’m absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.”
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Jason Ditz | AntiWar.com

Though officials in the Obama Administration have been publicly neutral about the new round of sanctions against Iran moving its may through the House and Senate, the administration is quietly supporting the efforts, despite the deleterious affect they may have on negotiations.

Iran is in the process of negotiating with the P5+1 on a draft deal for third party enrichment of its uranium for medical isotopes. The House and Senate measures would punish corporations that import refined petroleum to Iran in an effort to punish Iran for refusing US demands to abandon its program entirely.

But while there seems to be very little resistance within the US to moving forward with more unilateral sanctions against Iran, the ability to push forward more sanctions in the UN Security Council is very much in doubt, and Russia says such moves are virtually impossible, at least for the time being.

Though America’s own National Intelligence Estimate confirms that this is not the case, the Obama Administration has repeatedly accused Iran of having an active nuclear weapons program, and Congress is eager to act against the illusory threat.

Paul Joseph Watson | InfoWars.com

Fall Of The Republic has exploded onto the Internet as millions of people worldwide take the red pill and discover the antidote to the establishment’s lies about what caused the financial collapse and their agenda to deceptively claim that empowering the very culprits of the crime will solve the problem, as America is frog-marched into a tyrannical system of world government.

The consequence of The Obama Deception receiving tens of millions of views earlier this year manifested in the form of a key contribution to the burgeoning grass roots resistance that has dominated 2009, a nationwide movement against the big government agenda, as the globalists attempt to use their new front man Barack Hussein Obama to rapidly accelerate their new world order.

Now we are calling on you, the Infowarrior, to help us make Fall Of The Republic go viral and in doing do dismantle the contrived perception that only by surrendering to nightmare levels of regulation and centralized control bossed by an ultra-powerful architecture of global governance will we avoid another great depression.

Fall Of The Republic has the potential to outstrip even The Obama Deception in reaching millions more people, and early indications just over a week after the film was released are that this indeed happening. The You Tube version below already has over 300,000 views and this is just one of thousands of different versions that are floating around the web.

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Patrick Martin |wsws.org

In a ceremony Wednesday, US President Barack Obama signed legislation authorizing the largest ever military budget, a gargantuan $680 billion for the Pentagon, including $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Thursday, he signed a spending bill funneling another $44 billion into the Department of Homeland Security, to strengthen the apparatus of state repression within the United States.

The back-to-back bill signings are a clear demonstration that Obama is extending and intensifying the program of militarism and attacks on democratic rights for which the Bush administration was deservedly hated, in the United States and worldwide.

Each of the bills contained provisions aimed at further restricting democratic rights. The Pentagon budget bill authorizes the use of military tribunals to try prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and others seized illegally, either overseas or within the US, as part of the “war on terror.” It also bars the release of Guantanamo prisoners—even those found completely innocent—into the United States. It prohibits bringing Guantanamo prisoners to trial on US soil without a 45-day advance notice to Congress.

The Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill effectively prohibits the release of photographs taken by US military personnel during torture sessions at US bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. It exempts these photos from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, under which the American Civil Liberties Union and several media outlets have filed suit in federal court. The exemption would apply, not just to the photos sought by the ACLU, but to any photos taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 to which the Pentagon has objections.
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Editorial | NYTimes.com

The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.

We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.

In Britain earlier this month, a two-judge High Court panel rejected arguments made first by the Bush team and now by the Obama team and decided to make public seven redacted paragraphs in American intelligence documents relating to torture allegations by a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British national, says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and at a C.I.A.-run prison outside Kabul before being transferred to Guantánamo. He was freed in February.
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Anne Marie Riha | Whithouse.blogs.foxnews.com

President Obama’s school age daughters have not been vaccinated against the H1N1 flu virus. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says the vaccine is not available to them based on their risk.

The Centers for Disease Control recommend that children ages 6 months through 18 years of age receive a vaccination against the H1N1 flu virus. At this time only children with chronic medical conditions are receiving the vaccination because their immune system is not strong enough to fight off the strain. The CDC also says a regular seasonal flu shot does not protect against the virus.

Move is separate from Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal’s request to increase troop levels

Ewen MacAskil | Guardian.co.uk

President Barack Obama is quietly deploying an extra 13,000 troops to Afghanistan, an unannounced move that is separate from a request by the US commander in the country for even more reinforcements.

The extra 13,000 is part of a gradual shift in priority since Obama became president away from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The White House and the Pentagon both announced earlier this year that the number of US troops in Afghanistan was to be raised by 21,000, bringing the total at present to 62,000, with the aim of 68,000 by the end of the year.

But the Washington Post, based on conversations with Pentagon officials, said that on top of those an extra 13,000 “enablers” are also being deployed. They are mainly engineers, medical staff, intelligence officers and military police. About 3,000 of them are specialists in explosives, being sent to try to combat the growing fatality rate from roadside bombs.

The deployment of such non-combat troops is in line with the professed aim of the new US commander, General Stanley McChrystal, to try to win the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population.

In addition to the deployments under way, McChrystal has also requested an extra 40,000 troops he says are necessary to prevent the country falling into the hands of the Taliban. That request has provoked an intense debate within Washington, with some political advisers in the White House opposed to any further escalation of a war that is already proving unpopular at home.
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* Weaker U.S. dollar is part of global rebalancing

* Certain global currencies will overappreciate (Updates with comments on currencies, emerging markets)

Pav Jordan and Wojtek Dabrowski | Reuters.com

TORONTO, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of bond giant PIMCO, said on Friday the global economic system will not likely reset to where it was before the financial crisis, and a new world order may shift the hierarchy of currencies.

The U.S. dollar will likely depreciate in a global rebalancing, while the euro, yen, Canadian dollar and certain emerging-economy currencies, like the Brazilian real, will gain in value, likely overappreciating, he said.

“A Weaker U.S. dollar is part of the global rebalancing,” El-Erian told economists and analysts in a speech, “Investing in the New Normal”, in Toronto’s financial district.

“Certain countries are going to overappreciate because they are carrying the burden of appreciation for others,” he said, pointing to currencies like China’s that will not gain value.

El-Erian likened the recovery from the global economic crisis to a roomful of people who, deprived of oxygen, collapse. When oxygen is pumped back into the room, victims regain consciousness and get to their feet at different rates, depending on their levels of physical fitness.

Emerging economies that have fared better in the crisis may take up the reins where U.S. consumers left off, he said.

“They have the wallet to be the consumer of first resort for the global economy, and my hope is that they also have the will to be the consumer of first resort.”

The summer rally in equity markets and recent optimism for an economic recovery in the United States and other economies leveled by the crisis may be short-lived, he cautioned, and could peter out if government stimulus and an inventory cycle are not joined by consumer demand.

He said growth potential in the United States and globally would not soon return to pre-crisis levels. One of the consequences will be much stricter regulation, characterized by increased capitalization requirements — and demand for a much higher level of trust from consumers.

Regime changes at corporations will become more commonplace.

Stress will continue on the U.S. labor market, and labor will not be as flexible as in the past.

“When you disrupt the core, the circuit breakers do not work,” El-Erian said.

“We will not reset to where we were before.” (Reporting by Pav Jordan and Wojtek Dabrowski; writing by Jeffrey Hodgson; editing by Rob Wilson)

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“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”

Nobel Peace Prize nominations are due by Feb 1st - two weeks after he took office. The commander-in-chief of a country that has is involved in 3 major wars whose policy was/is to escalate and expand these wars gets a peace prize? Iran?…

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/

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