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Daily Archives: April 10, 2010
George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.
Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.
He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”
He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.
He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”
Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.
He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.
Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.
A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson’s assertions were completely untrue.
The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.
There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece
Fighter jets chase UFO down the M5.
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Expert Nick Pope, who probed UFO sightings for the MoD, said: “This is one of the best videos I’ve seen. It could be a new drone – that might explain the military jets.
“But you don’t normally test-fly secret projects in daylight. Alternatively, this could be the real thing – a UFO in our airspace and military aircraft scrambled to intercept, probably due to it being tracked on radar.”
Dr. Mercola Interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield
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In this interview, Dr. Andrew Wakefield shares his personal and professional insights into a number of topics, from the gut-brain connection so often seen in autistic children, to the safety of a number of childhood vaccines.
But most importantly, he sets the record straight on the harsh criticism he’s endured as the author of one of the most controversial vaccine-causing-autism studies ever done.
In addition to his hotly contested MMR study, published in the journal Lancet in 1998, he has published about 130-140 peer-reviewed papers looking at the mechanism and cause of inflammatory bowel disease, and has extensively investigated the brain-bowel connection in the context of children with developmental disorders such as autism.
Bank con exposed on MSNBC!
This is huge news. Federal reserve lends credit at 2 procent to the banks. The bank cons lends us money for 6%. The bank has no money to back it up. It is our money they bring throught the federal reserve back into circulation. Money from us , paid with our taxes brought back into the system with rent of 6 procent to make the bankers and federal cons richer . A very simple trick . People know you now how these cons use our taxes, our hard working money to get them richer. Spread this message please. We are NOT sheople for the rich.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Etna one of the worlds most active volcanoes is at it again!
Recently there’s been great speculation over Etna’s undersea sister volcano the Marsili and the possibility of her creating devastating tsunamis. Marsili, Europe’s largest undersea volcano lays quiet (as far as we know) this evening, while her sister Etna puts on the show.
No earth tremors have been reported, but I can assure you, Etna, for the moment, is up to something. And it’s mighty beautiful.
It’s hard to say what the clouds are covering at the moment, they rolled into place like stage curtains just after she began her show, but, you can bet I’ll be here front and center waiting for when the curtains fall back to reveal her in all her glory once again.
Weatherman spills the beans on chemtrails
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/979376909
“It’s just military chaff… Only aluminium particles you’re breathing… Oh it’s to only as a military experiment to thwart the radar… Go back to sleep. Keep your window open.”
Russian Scientists Create Superheavy Element 117
Editor’s Note: Additional material was added to this story at 5 p.m. on April 6, 2010.
Physicists have reported synthesizing element 117, the latest achievement in their quest to create “superheavy” elements in the laboratory. A paper describing the discovery has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.
A team led by Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, reports smashing together calcium-48 — an isotope with 20 protons and 28 neutrons — and berkelium-249, which has 97 protons and 152 neutrons. The collisions spit out either three or four neutrons, creating two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons.
Sigurd Hofmann, a nuclear physicist at the GSI research center in Darmstadt, Germany, calls the new work on element 117 “convincing.”
Most elements heavier than uranium, which has 92 protons, do not exist stably in nature and must be made artificially in the laboratory.
The Russians collaborated with U.S. researchers, including from Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the berkelium target was made. Berkelium, with atomic number 97, is another of the rare artificially produced elements; the Russian team was able to obtain just 22 milligrams of it from Oak Ridge.
The researchers briefly spotted signs of element 117 during two runs of collisions lasting 70 days each. In their paper, the researchers report observing the heavier isotope of element 117 decay with a half-life of 78 milliseconds; they measured the lighter one’s half-life at 14 milliseconds.
The new element, which has yet to be named, slips into a place on the periodic table between elements 116 and 118, both of which have already been discovered. Such superheavy elements are usually very radioactive and decay away almost instantly. But many researchers think it is possible that even heavier elements may occupy an “island of stability” in which superheavy atoms stick around for a while.
The new work supports that view. Analyses of the new element’s radioactive decay, Oganessian’s team writes in the new paper, “represent an experimental verification for the existence of the predicted ‘Island of Stability’ for super-heavy elements.”
Hofmann says that one of the most interesting things about the new work is the different products that result when the two element 117 isotopes decay. The isotope with 177 neutrons decays down to dubnium (atomic number 105), whereas the isotope with 176 neutrons decays down to roentgenium (atomic number 111). Comparing the two chains, Hofmann says, will help researchers better understand the characteristics of superheavy elements.
Element 117 is tentatively known as ununseptium. After its existence is confirmed, it will receive a permanent name, suggested by the discoverers, from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry – a process that can take some time. In February 2010, the IUPAC finally granted the name copernicium to element 112, which was first produced by Hofmann’s group in 1996.
Vatican criticises Avatar
Ecology is not a religion, warns the Holy See
James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, may be breaking box-office records, but the Vatican is not impressed — or amused. The Holy See’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has called it “bland” and “facile”, while its radio station claimed that the 3-D spectacular was “a wink towards the pseudo-doctrines which have made ecology the religion of the millennium . . . Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship.”
The comment comes just days after the Pope publicly criticised world leaders for failing to agree a treaty at the Copenhagen climate summit. “To cultivate peace, one must protect creation,” he said. But he has also warned before against “a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man’s salvation in nature alone, understood in purely naturalistic terms”.
I agree with the Pope that “being green” has gone way beyond a general duty to take reasonable care of our environment. For many, it now has a moral authority that allows them to feel no qualms about aggressively berating others for flying off somewhere warm on holiday, for driving a large car, or for buying non-locally produced fruit, let alone committing an act as heinous as eating shark’s fin soup — never mind that it is a dish whose popularity dates back to the days of the Ming Dynasty (though I’ve always found it pretty tasteless, myself).
Most green fanatics would argue ferociously that they base their views on science and the facts, but the force with which they communicate these views puts their zeal beyond mere reason. It is another example of the void left when religion is removed from society being filled by a certainty just as powerful as any belief in God. As I wrote in the NS nearly two years ago:
How else to explain the new religions that we have created for ourselves? A religion of science, whose priests make proclamations imbued with a certainty that their empirical branch of learning cannot justify; a religion of rights which, however much we may instinctively agree with it, has no more coherent proof than that it is “self-evident”; and now, perhaps, a religion of ecology whose ministers thunder as self-righteously as any 17th-century Puritan preacher.
Not that greenies would ever admit to their views being anything akin to a faith, though, so the Pope’s ideas of pantheism and neo-paganism will not be publicly embraced, even if the accusation is valid. That may be a shame — as most of the pagans, pantheists and animists I’ve come across are considerably more relaxed and less sententious than those greens who give the impression that they won’t be satisfied until all the advances of the past two centuries have been wiped out by environmental doom.
As a recent IPPR report found, that kind of attitude is beginning to backfire quite disastrously with a public fed up with being lectured all the time. Perhaps they should remember the words of G K Chesterton? “It is always the secure who are humble.”