By Raja, on July 24th, 2014 The Intercept, By Jeremy Scahill & Ryan Devereaux, July 23
The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings.
The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.
Continue reading The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist
By Synoia, on July 23rd, 2014 GLENN GREENWALD: American media officials are incredibly subservient to American political officials. That’s been—you know, American media figures are. But when it comes to Israeli political officials, it’s virtually cringe-inducing to watch how accommodating and deferential and submissive they become.
There’s a fundamental problem in our world today: neither our governments nor our press are doing their jobs. Both groups seem to be working for someone else, because governments are either trying to conceal their motives (hence their love for secrecy) or they try to obfuscate by presenting a false motive for their actions.
The press is worse than useless, because they go along with the desire of the politicians to hide their motives and conceal their bad behavior from the people. The press behaves more like a cheering section than “the fourth estate,” whose job is to inform the people. As the old champions die off or retire, they are not being replaced. The news media are more concerned with entertaining their audience than they are with informing them. Poor show, as the Brits would say! Shame on you!
Continue reading One Dimensional Press – One Dimensional Policy
By nymole, on July 23rd, 2014 AP -FLORENCE, Ariz. — A condemned Arizona inmate gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half during his execution Wednesday before he died in an episode sure to add to the scrutiny surrounding the death penalty in the U.S.
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s office said Joseph Rudolph Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m., one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started.
Wood’s lawyers had filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court while the execution was underway, demanding that it be stopped. The appeal said Wood was “gasping and snorting for more than an hour.”
Word that Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the appeal came about a half hour after Wood’s death.
By Actor 212, on July 23rd, 2014 
Read this story and tell me where the logical fallacies comes in.
Done? OK, let’s get to work: Continue reading Compassion in Action
By Raja, on July 21st, 2014 Reuters, By Jon Herskovitz, July 21
Austin, TX – Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Monday he planned to send 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the Mexican border to boost security during an influx of illegal immigration by children, a move that could increase pressure on President Barack Obama.
Perry, seen as a possible Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race, said the guard troops were needed because the flood of children crossing from Mexico had pushed federal border protection to its limits.
“The price of inaction is too high for Texas to pay,” Perry told a news conference.
The governor’s announcement came just days before Obama plans to meet with the leaders of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador on Friday to discuss cooperation dealing with the flow of child migrants from Central America.
By nymole, on July 21st, 2014 You remember, the UN, created to respond to international crises, before the holder of the office of the Secretary General had to be hand-picked by the US (Goodbye, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, for sure), and the misuse of the veto by East and West and..and… 
Even the near-appearance of a UN session, such as Colin Powell’s charts and pointers. is gone.
Now we have:
MH17: UN resolution on ensuring crash site access set for Monday
Russia will support final version in security council vote if no one is blamed, according to reports in Australian newspaper
Continue reading Where is the UN in all of this mayhem?
By Raja, on July 20th, 2014 Militant jihadist group kills dozens of Syrian troops and workers in its largest attack yet on the regime
Reuters, July 19
Jihadists have killed 270 Syrian regime fighters, civilian security guards and employees since seizing a gas field in Homs province, a monitoring group said Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described Thursday’s takeover of the Shaar field as “the biggest” anti-regime operation by the Islamic State (IS) since it emerged in the Syrian conflict last year.
The watchdog, updating an earlier toll of 115, said it had documented “the death of 270 people killed in the fighting or executed” since Thursday.
“A large majority of the men killed were executed at gunpoint after being taken prisoner following the takeover of the camp,” said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.
By William Boardman, on July 19th, 2014 Reader Supported News
Hobart & William Smith Colleges does a Steubenville
Two weeks after the fall term started, an unknown number of male students, apparently including members of the undefeated football team at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Hobart), raped an 18-tear-old freshman girl who’d had too much to drink. Hobart’s response was to re-rape the child bureaucratically by ignoring evidence and finding the alleged rapists not guilty. It was a sham of an administrative adjudication that failed to meet even a shadow of fairness, competence, or even intellectual plausibility. Hobart stands by its dishonest decision. Case closed.
Continue reading Rape at College, Then Rape by College
By Raja, on July 19th, 2014 The Intercept, By Glenn Greenwald, July 17
Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately. According to an NBC source upset at his treatment, the executives claimed the decision was motivated by “security concerns” as Israel prepares a ground invasion, a claim repeated to me by an NBC executive. But late yesterday, NBC sent another correspondent, Richard Engel, along with an American producer who has never been to Gaza and speaks no Arabic, into Gaza to cover the ongoing Israeli assault (both Mohyeldin and Engel speak Arabic).
Mohyeldin is an Egyptian-American with extensive experience reporting on that region. He has covered dozens of major Middle East events in the last decade for CNN, NBC and Al Jazeera English, where his reporting on the 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza made him a star of the network. NBC aggressively pursued him to leave Al Jazeera, paying him far more than the standard salary for its on-air correspondents.
[The New York Times’ television reporter just reported on Twitter that NBC has “reversed its decision” and is now sending Mohyeldin back to Gaza as soon as possible].
Democracy Now: Glenn Greenwald: Why Did NBC Pull Veteran Reporter After He Witnessed Israeli Killing of Gaza Kids?
By steeleweed, on July 18th, 2014 Just to get it out of the way…
Word Crimes – Weird Al
Also funny
…Alien Music
…rather spooky
By Raja, on July 18th, 2014
By nymole, on July 18th, 2014 NYT – On Friday, Open Source continues to follow the aftermath of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in rebel-held eastern Ukraine to supplement the latest coverage of New York Times reporters on the ground.
Updates below mix breaking news reports with new information on the investigation into the disaster and the reaction to the tragedy gleaned from social networks.
NYT crowd sourcing or the ultimate blog- whatever. Continuous updates also from the BBC.
The rush to judgment is on…
By nymole, on July 18th, 2014 NYT- U.S. DOWNS IRAN AIRLINER MISTAKEN FOR F-14; 290 REPORTED DEAD; A TRAGEDY, REAGAN SAYS; ACTION IS DEFENDED - July 4, 1988-
United States Navy warship in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger plane today that the Navy said it mistook for a jet fighter, and Iran said all 290 people on board were killed. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., said the missile cruiser Vincennes, while seeking to protect itself from what was thought on the basis of radar readings to be a hostile F-14 jet fighter, downed the plane with a surface-to-air missile.
Continue reading Lest we forget we are part of the glass house…The downing of Flight 655
By Raja, on July 17th, 2014 The Intercept, By Glenn Greenwald, July 14
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.
Continue reading Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
By actor212, on July 17th, 2014  Actual engraving…the chisel adds ten pounds I like to keep that as my private stash, but this, this was too good not to share:
It’s not just that TBOTP [ed. note: Tiger Beat On The Potomac also known as Politico.com] invited the Manson Family of American geopolitics to come together for an exercise in ensemble prevarication. It’s not just that the account of said exercise is written in the kind of cacophonous cutesy-poo necessary to drown out the screams of the innocent dead, and to distract the assembled crowd from the blood that has dripped from the wallet of the celebrity war-criminal leading the public display. And it’s not as though this was a mere interview—a “get” that could help you “win the morning (!).” In that, it might have been marginally excusable. No, this was one of Mike Allen’s little grift-o-rama special events—a “Playbook lunch,” sponsored by that noted mortgage fraud concern Bank Of America. There’s an upcoming TBOTP “event” in L.A. that is sponsored by J.P. Morgan. I know what Mike Allen is, but I am so goddamn tired of haggling about the price. Here’s how TBOTP‘s own account of the event begins.
If I could write like that, I could put away my shitty little blog and become world-famous, and have women dripping off me like rainwater in a monsoon.
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