Warsaw - Poland's former prime minister Leszek Miller on Thursday denied a fresh report alleging EU and NATO member Poland had hosted secret jails for terror suspects operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
'Once again I refute that there were secret prisons in Poland,' Miller said Thursday, quoted by the Polish PAP news agency. 'Tony Blair never spoke with me about this because there was nothing to talk about,' he ... (more)
NEW YORK -- A holiday shopping trip to New York City turned into a nightmare for a Pennsylvania woman and her 3-year-old daughter.
The woman, 28-year-old Margarita Santiago, said she was arrested Dec. 8 by police who thought she was someone else. Her 3-year-old daughter was placed in the city's child welfare agency.
It took a day for police to realize they had the wrong woman. However, it took her two more days to get her daughter back.
A strange culture of emergency has taken over this country, and the slightest provocation triggers it. It could be an expected terrorist or just an old-fashioned weather warning. The officials are quick to swing into action, and tell you what to do.The problem is that these demands are often based on nothing other than government plans that are not in your best interest. It behooves all of us to think carefully about genuine preparedness, which might often involve bucking the system and telling ... (more)
Tony Blair was thrust back into the centre of the cash-for-honours saga last night with the disclosure that detectives removed some of his papers from Downing Street about potential nominees for peerages.
Bioscience tycoon Sir Christopher Evans' loan of £1 million is being repaid by LabourThe Daily Telegraph can disclose that some of the documents seized by police also referred to Labour Party donors. Others related to conversations between Jonathan Powell, the Downing Stre... (more)
Live British news coverage on September 11 appears to suggest WTC officials already understood the dynamics of the first tower's collapse and could predict, with som... (more)
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has finally joined the urgent campaign to get Washington to care for the responders who helped New Yorkers after the Sept. 11 attacks," read the New York Times editorial page on March 2. Funny to hear the folks on 43rd Street chide the mayor for his late entrance when the paper just got its own thinking straight on the matter. After faulting the mayor for once being skeptical of ground zero illnesses, the editorial high-fived its own foundation fo... (more)
e Strait of Hormuz. Each day, tankers carrying 16 million barrels of oil worth $800 million pass through these boxes. If oil is the blood supply of the industrial economy, the Strait of Hormuz is the jugular. In any conflict between the US and Iran, control of those shipping lanes will instantly become the focus of the entire conflict. The main job of the US Navy ... (more)
It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.
You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.
By all accounts, that's what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wen... (more)
Britain may have more CCTV cameras per head than anywhere else in the world but when it comes to electronic surveillance the country is way behind Italy, the Netherlands and even Sweden.
Official figures have revealed UK law enforcement agencies and other government bodies made 439,000 requests to monitor telephones and email addresses in a 15 month period between 2005 and 2006, leading to comments that Britain led the world in spying on its citizens.
<... (more)
Legislation designed to halt the advance of toll roads in the state of Texas is likely to become law. This week, 25 of the 31 members of the state Senate added their names as co-sponsors of a measure imposing a moratorium on new toll road construction. In the House, 53 of 150 members have signed on to the effort thus far.
Specifically, the measure forbids any new agreements giving private companies the power to collect tolls on new roads or to sell existing roads to tolling compan... (more)
Dr Munthir al-Kewther was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1965. He has studied Islamic and Western philosophy at various Western and Iraqi universities. Kewther completed his PhD in Islamic philosophy at Iraq's Kufa University in 1995.
Kewther is currently dean of the faculty of media and journalism at al-Huraa University in the Netherlands. He has an extensive background as a television presenter and broadcaster. From 2001-06 he was a newsreader and program presenter at Al-Mustaqillah T... (more)
Key House Democrats plan to insist the Pentagon shut down the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and are contemplating the relocation of many of the 385 or so remaining terrorist suspects to military brigs along the East Coast -- including Quantico, Va., and Charleston, S.C.
"It sets us back in the war on terrorism to be maintaining Guantanamo," said Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), who's heading an investigation of the facility for the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. ... (more)
Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post editorial page and George W. Bush’s presidency have a lot in common – most notably an arrogance of power so extreme that they believe their very words can alter reality.
The next generation of 'intelligent' robots are to be programmed with a code of morals to ensure they do not attack humans.
Scientists have warned scenes straight from science fiction films in which machines turn on men were a real danger unless robots had built-in 'ethics' microchips.
Robots should also be fitted with prominent on-off buttons so humans can disable them in case of 'emergency', scientists said.
Powerful House Democrats have introduced legislation intended to restore the right to habeas corpus.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommitee on Intelligence, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, announced today the presentation of bills that would reverse "problematic parts of the Military Commissions Act," according to a state... (more)
(AP) A White House privacy board is giving its stamp of approval to two of the Bush administration's controversial surveillance programs _ electronic eavesdropping and financial tracking _ and says they do not violate citizens' civil liberties.
Democrats newly in charge of Congress quickly criticized the findings, which they said were questionable given some of the board members' close ties with the Bush administration.
"Their current findings and any additional con... (more)
Well I think its fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, c... (more)
Field McConnell, a pilot for Northwest Airlines, has filed a lawsuit charging that many commercial airliners are rigged with explosives that can be remotely detonated. He refuses to fly until such devices are removed. McConnell's claim is seemingly given credence by none other than Boeing's vice-president, who tacitly admitted the fact in a speech last year.
"The lawsuit, filed last week, claims Boeing Co. and the Air Lin... (more)
The Pentagon's Defense Science Board released a report suggesting a pervasive system to observe and record activity in urban areas and hard-to-monitor settings across the globe -- in other words, they'd like to TiVo the entire plane... (more)
Six fired U.S. attorneys testified on Capitol Hill yesterday that they had separately been the target of complaints, improper telephone calls and thinly veiled threats from a high-ranking Justice Department 8official or members of Congress, both before and after they were abruptly removed from their jobs.
In back-to-back hearings in the Senate and House, former U.S. 8attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico and five other former prosecutors recounted specific instances in which so... (more)
Via Daily Kos Diary, "...David Wetzel, a 79 yr old retired chemist from Decatur IL had been using recycled vegetable oil in his 1985 Volkswagen Golf diesel car for 7 years. This January, " the State of Illinois Dept. of Revenue sent 2 "special agents," Gary May and John Egan to his house. The two agents threatened the couple with felony charges and asked them to post a $2,500 bond!" According to the Herald & Review, w... (more)
The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate, CNET News.com has learned.
That proposal surfaced Wednesday in a private meeting during which U.S. Department of Justice officials, including Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand, tried to convince industry representatives such as AOL and Comcast that d... (more)
YET MORE evidence of the government’s persecution of Arabs and Muslims since September 11 has come to light.
More than five years ago, the Bush administration shut down the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The Feds labeled Holy Land a “specially designated global terrorist” and charged seven former foundation officials, including six U.S. citizens, with funneling money to overseas charities contr... (more)
Are Boeing fitting their aircraft with illegal devices that could enable terrorists to remotely hijack airliners and crash them into high profile targets? In light of what happened on 9/11, Boeing's blanket denial that this practice has taken place is both highly suspicious and a threat to national security.
We called ALPA, the world's largest pilot's union, to ask them if such technology had been installed ... (more)
While Scooter Libby faces sentencing after being convicted of four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, the figureheads of the US and British governments will see out their terms despite voluminous amounts of more damning evidence that proves they have consistently plotted and lied to sell an illegal occupation to their respective populations.
As Editor & Publisher reported, a spokesman for the jury that convicte... (more)
NEW YORK A spokesman for the jury that convicted "Scooter" Lewis of four counts today of perjury and obstruction of justice today in a federal courtroom told reporters immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for Libby and believed he was only the "fall guy."
Denis Collins said that "a number of times" they asked themselves, "what is HE doing here? Where is Rove and all these other guys....I'm not saying we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the thin... (more)
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the mistreatment of Sudanese cameraman Sami Al-Haj of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera by the US authorities at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre after he began a hunger strike on 7 January on completing his fifth year in US custody without trial.
“Al-Haj has been held by the Americans for five years without being charged, in disgraceful conditions and in violation of all international conventions on the treatment of prisoners,&r... (more)
