Gangster Government

In public he was the lean and ruthless face of American military outsourcing in Iraq. Erik Prince, as founder of the Blackwater security company, packed a mobile phone on one hip and a handgun on the other as he flew in and out of the world’s troublespots co-ordinating protection teams for American VIPs — and handling the backlash when his employees were accused of shooting dead 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad crossroads in 2007.

In private, he was a CIA operative, with his own file as a “vetted asset” at the agency’s headquarters, and a mission to build “a unilateral, unattributable capability” to hunt down and kill al-Qaeda militants for the US Government wherever they could be found.

These claims, made by Mr Prince and supported by others who knew of his activities, form part of a potentially explosive investigation into the life of America’s best-known mercenary.

Mr Prince, aside from his work in Iraq, set up America’s closest forward operating base to the Pakistani border in Afghanistan, and helped to train a CIA assassination team that hunted an alleged senior al-Qaeda financier in Germany, and included A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani nuclear scientist, on its list of targets, according to Vanity Fair magazine.

Mr Prince is a billionaire and former member of the US Navy Seal special forces, who avoided publicity during his long and lucrative period as a favoured security contractor for the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA. Between 2001 and 2009 his company won government contracts worth an estimated $1.5 billion (£900 million) and built a private air force of Black Hawk helicopters and troop-ferrying aircraft based at a 7,000-acre facility in North Carolina. 

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Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike? Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets? And what about Germany — a country where fear of atomkraft is so great that the last government opposed all civilian nuclear power? Germany's air force couldn't possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?

It is Europe's dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those — Britain and France — who have built their own weapons. Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them. The Federation of American Scientists believes that there are some 200 B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs scattered across these four countries. Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are technically owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation's air force in times of conflict. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear war. (See pictures of the worst nuclear disasters of all time.)

These weapons are more than an anachronism or historical oddity. They are a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — the 1968 agreement governing nuclear weapons that acts as one of the linchpins of global security by providing a legal restraint on the nuclear ambitions of rogue states. Because "nuclear burden-sharing," as the dispersion of B61s in Europe is called, was set up before the NPT came into force, it is technically legal. But as signatories to the NPT, the four European countries and the U.S. have pledged "not to receive the transfer ... of nuclear weapons or control over such weapons directly, or indirectly." That, of course, is precisely what the long-standing NATO arrangement entails.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943799,00.html#ixzz0YicVQFSi

The fight over climate science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding the release of the same kind of information that landed a leading British center in hot water over charges that it skewed its data.

Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data dating as far back as the 1930s.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed its data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for the hottest years, with 1934 listed as slightly cooler.

Mr. Horner, a noted skeptic of global warming and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism," wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he's given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he'll sue to compel the information's release.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/nasa-embroiled-in-climate-dispute/

"They shoot Russians," the young paratrooper told me. It was cold. We had come across his unit, the Soviet 105th Airborne Division, near Charikar, north of Kabul, and he was holding out a bandaged hand. Blood seeped through, staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was just a teenager with fair hair and blue eyes. Beside us a Soviet transport lorry, its rear section blown to pieces by a mine – yes, an "improvised explosive device", though we didn't call it that yet – lay upended in a ditch. In pain, the young man raised his hand to the mountain-tops where a Soviet helicopter was circling. Could I ever have imagined that Messers Bush and Blair would have landed us in the same sepulchre of armies almost three decades later? Or that a young black American president would do exactly what the Russians did all those years ago?

Within weeks, we would see the Soviet Army securing Kabul and the largest cities of Afghanistan, abandoning the vast areas of mountain and desert to the "terrorists", insisting that they could support a secular, uncorrupt government in the capital and give security to the people. By the spring of 1980, I was watching the Soviet military stage a "surge". Sound familiar? The Russians announced new training for the Afghan army. Sound familiar? Only 60 per cent of the force was following orders at the time. Yes, it does sound familiar.

Victor Sebestyen, who has researched a book about the fall of the Soviet empire, has written at length of those frozen days after the Russian army stormed into Afghanistan just after Christmas of 1979. He quotes General Sergei Akhromeyev, commander of the Soviet armed forces, addressing the Soviet Politburo in 1986. "There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another.

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Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled "National Security Decision Making."

This speech occured on Oct 21,2009 at American U. in DC.

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Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Senate Democratic leaders, battling Republicans who want to block Medicare spending cuts, face an even bigger headache: overcoming concern among members of their own party about the program’s future funding.

President Barack Obama wants to cut spending on the federal plan for the elderly to fund his health-care overhaul. That includes more than $100 billion from Medicare Advantage, through which the government hires private insurers such as Humana Inc. to deliver enhanced Medicare benefits to 11 million seniors, like reduced co-payments and even gym memberships.

Should Congress scale back the program, “We’re not going to be able to say ‘if you like what you have, you can keep it,’” said Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat. “And that basic commitment that a lot of us around here have made will be called into question.”

Obama is seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings to help finance the overhaul of the health-care system, estimated in the Senate to cost $848 billion. The resistance he’s getting underscores the difficulty of paying for the plan without increasing the budget deficit, a condition Obama set.

It also threatens to stoke opposition from the elderly, many of whom are already skeptical about Obama’s plans, and to reduce earnings for some of the 200 private insurers participating in Medicare Advantage.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month found that 60 percent of seniors said they would be better off if Congress didn’t change the health-care system; 39 percent of those younger than 65 said they prefer the status quo.

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The founder of Blackwater Worldwide acknowledged in an interview published Wednesday that he had helped the CIA with secret programs targeting top al-Qaeda leaders, a role he says was intended to give the agency "unattributable capability" in sensitive missions.

Erik Prince, owner of the military contractor now known as Xe Services, told Vanity Fair magazine that he performed numerous "very risky missions" for the spy agency, some of which were improperly exposed in leaks to the news media.

The magazine, which was granted rare access to Prince and his deputies at the company's facilities in the United States and Afghanistan, said the former Navy SEAL had served a dual role for the CIA as both a contractor and an "asset," or spy, who carried out secret missions as recently as two months ago, when the Obama administration terminated his contract.

Among other, previously undisclosed roles, Prince ran intelligence-gathering operations to coordinate the movement of undercover operatives in "one of the so-called Axis of Evil countries," the magazine said, citing unidentified sources familiar with his activities.

"But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus," Prince said, referring to recent leaks about his company's CIA ties.

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by Cynthia McKinney

President Obama announced both his decision to add 30,000 U.S. troops to the mire in Afghanistan and his desire to see other countries and N.A.T.O. match his surge.  Thanks to U.S. taxpayers, mercenaries will continue to be a part of the foreign presence in Afghanistan.  The Republicans support the President’s move and are expected to reward President Obama with the bulk of their Congressional votes to pass his plan.

However, there is deep disquiet today within the ranks of the President’s own base in the Democratic Party, with independents, and with middle-of-the-roaders called “swing” voters.  In unprecedented numbers, voters in the United States of all previous political persuasions went to the polls and invested their dreams and, most importantly, their votes in the “hope” and “change” promised by the Obama campaign.  But in light of the President’s defense of Bush Administration war crimes and torture in U.S. courts, the transfer of trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars to the wealthy banking elite, continued spying on environmental and peace activists as well as support for the extension of the Patriot Act, and removal of Medicare-for-all (single payer) as a central feature of proposed health care reform, Obama voters are rethinking their support. 

Already, according to a Daily Koss report written by Steve Singiser:  “Two in five Democratic voters either consider themselves unlikely to vote at this point in time, or have already made the firm decision to remove themselves from the 2010 electorate pool. Indeed, Democrats were three times more likely to say that they will ‘definitely not vote’ in 2010 than are Republicans.” By contrast, Republicans are happy today.  Almost giddy with glee as far as I can see. 

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AUSTIN (KXAN) - When Andrea Beleno was expecting her first child, she never dreamed his blood would become the focus of a federal lawsuit.

Neither did the other families who are suing the State of Texas to protect the medical privacy of their children.

Each year, more than 400,000 babies are born in Texas. State law mandates that before newborns leave the hospital, his or her heel will be pricked and five drops of blood are collected.

Two weeks later, their pediatrician collects another five drops of blood. The blood cards are submitted to the Texas Department of State Health Services as part of the Newborn Screening program. One or two drops are used to screen for a list of serious medical conditions.

The parents are not objecting to the screening. They object to what the state is doing with the leftover blood samples.

Beginning in 2002, the State began saving the leftover specimens, unbeknownst to parents and without their consent.

"It made me really mad that nobody asked me if they could keep my sons DNA," said Andrea Beleno.

Her son’s DNA was among millions of banked samples stored at Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health.

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/politics/state_politics/government-taking-newborn-dna-samples-