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Wonderful news about Whistleblower Bradley Manning
And yesterday I was given an award,
to Opednews and I, for supporting whistleblowers and the first
amendment. My acceptance speech is in the article below.
rob kall
Support Opednews. Make a tax deductible donation to make OEN Strong.  Daily Headlines
Yesterday Opednews and I were given the Pillar Award, at the Whistleblower Week annual conference in Washington DC.
Bradley
Manning was acquitted on the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, a
charge his defense attorneys had attempted to have dropped. But he has
been convicted on a number of other charges.
A
military judge on Tuesday found Pfc. Bradley Manning not guilty of
aiding the enemy, but convicted him of multiple counts of violating the
Espionage Act. Private Manning had already confessed to being WikiLeaks'
source for the files.
Bill
McKibben spoke to a rally at Sebago Lake, Maine, where there are plans
for a Tar Sands Pipeline. The protest and speech was attended by a
couple of hundred land-lovers who floated in intertubes across a now
serene area framed beautifully by a mountain range. However, if the oil
companies have their way, this beautiful land will become a desert.
The results would be catastrophic to animal, plant and human well being
Global
climate change is a real threat. Many millions of people in the "Deep
South" -- including some farmers! -- know this. Many of them are
actively working to understand and address this threat. I have
personally worked with many of these people, on the issue of climate
change, right there in the "Deep South," as long as 25 years ago.
Australia
is a signatory to the 1951 refugee convention. Rudd's cowboy actions
are not only lawless but weaken international refugee law and the human
rights movements that buttress it. Governments have waged a propaganda
war on refugees, in alliance with a media dominated by Rupert Murdoch.
Vast, sparsely populated Australia demands "protection" from refugees
and asylum seekers.
Water
samples taken at an underground passage below the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power plant contain alarming levels of radiation which are
comparable to those taken immediately after the catastrophe. According
to a statement by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the tested water
contains 2.35 billion becquerels of cesium per liter, and the
radioactive water is now seeping into the sea.
(video)
Amber Lyon speaks at Harvard Law School on the threats the National
Defense Authorization Act poses to journalism worldwide.
By David Fiderer
AEI's FHA Disinformation Campaign Ignores Basic Finance How one discredited "mortgage expert" from the American Enterprise Institute launched an ongoing disinformation campaign to destroy a successful government program that helped stabilize the mortgage markets.
The
day the closing arguments began, the monitoring was taken to a new
level: intimidating. Armed MPs patrolled the media center, looked over
reporters' shoulders, and scolded them if they had a browser open.
During recess, wireless internet is provided for filing purposes, but as
soon as court goes back into session the internet is cut off.
By Andrew Schmookler
The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back: The Spirit of the Slave Power Since Slavery The spirit that made a war over slavery was never repudiated by the South. It came back to create the Jim Crow regime of racial oppression and terror. And now it is back-- animating today's Republican Party, a spirit that moves people to seek the domination and exploitation of others, and covers its doings with a cloak of hypocrisy.
Tutu and Francis in HELL! Then again, if they wind up in hell, surely Bryan Fischer and Pat Robertson will be canonized!
The
Act of Killing is an amazing film that tells the story of murders done
by death squad killers in Indonesia's counter-insurgency massacre of
1965 in a most novel manner. It's also pretty damning for US police
makers at that time who fully supported and aided the killing of 500,000
to 2 million Indonesians. Not America's finest hour.
The second part of a three-part series that analyzes the use of violence in activism.
In
this article, I explain the international political order and the
global-power system of the future. No state can any longer dominate
world affairs, and we have entered an era of diffused power. But I
predict that certain dynamics will dominate the international system,
such as US-China strategic competition, multilateralism for conflict
resolution, the role of situational powers, and strategic partnerships.
A
country cannot be a totalitarian state and a democratic state at the
same time - it has to choose one way or the other. I would add that it
cannot be both a military empire and a democratic republic, either. That
is because an empire requires a high degree of centralization of power
and information while a democracy needs a decentralization of power and
information.
The Cloud is Dangerous, BUT You Can Stay Safe(r)
How safe is the cloud? Creating more secure passwords in a simple way, and more.
Hackers
with bad intentions make up a surprisingly small percentage of the
hacker community. Learn more about hackers and how hackers help the
computer world. [Informative article about hacking, good for general
knowledge.]
The
establishment response to those who have dared to challenge Obama's
surveillance state has a bi-partisan tone to it. So much so that one
must wonder how much of the beltway soap opera is nothing more than
stagecraft. When it comes down to war and the transformation of the U.S.
into a fascist police state, there is a rare consensus. We're being fed
a line of B-S when it comes to this and it's time to ask serious
questions.
By David Swanson
A Nuclear Free World We've managed to outgrow or to come within sight of outgrowing cannibalism, slavery, blood feuds, duels, capital punishment, child labor, tar and feathering, the stocks and pillory, wives as chattel, the punishment of homosexuality, and listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Former
President Jimmy Carter said recently, "America has no functioning
democracy." Recent revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leave
little doubt that Carter's view was trenchant, perhaps even
understated. At issue is the power of the American security-industrial
complex.
At
last, there will be a congressional inquiry into the strange
circumstances surrounding the fatal helicopter crash in Afghanistan in
August 2011, which resulted in the deaths of 30 American service members
and 8 Afghans, including elite troops from Navy SEAL Team Six, the
contingent who killed Osama bin Laden a few months earlier. Parents of
the fallen have repeatedly asked the military top brass, including
President Barack Obama, for answers to their questions. Instead of being
told the truth about what happened that night, they have been bullied,
mocked, intimidated, ignored and repeatedly lied to.
Former
Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Comey, a Republican who gained fame
when he refused to sanction a government surveillance initiative in
2004, won Senate confirmation on Monday as President Barack Obama's pick
to head the FBI. The vote was 93-1. Comey, 52, will replace Robert
Mueller, who has led the bureau since shortly before the September 11,
2001, attacks on the United States.
So
I have some great news folks! The Republicans and the Democrats in
Congress and the White House finally came together and agreed on
something. This is huge. These guys disagree on EVERYTHING! Getting them
getting Eskimos and polar bears to play Jenga.
Wisconsin
Governor Scott Walker is an exceptionally ambitious career politician
who loves the sound of cheering crowds in the presidential primary
states where he hopes to be a 2016 contender. But he's does not care for
the sound of dissent.
By Richard Clark
Is there an invisible government, parallel to the one we foolishly think of as a democracy? Two governments: the one its citizens are familiar with, operated more or less in the open; the other a parallel top-secret government whose secret parts have mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre. It's guided in some respects by its own court, known as the FISA court, which according to the NY Times has become almost a parallel Supreme Court.
The
unrest gripping Turkey has less to do with headscarves and Islam than
with politics and economics, fueled by a growing discomfort with the
AKP's policies of privatization, its push to centralize authority in the
hands of the country's executive branch, and its silencing of the
media. The three are not unrelated.
By Tom Engelhardt
William deBuys, Goodbye to All That (Water) Martha and the Vandellas would have loved it. Metaphorically speaking, the New York Times practically swooned over it. ("An unforgiving heat wave held much of the West in a sweltering embrace over the weekend, tying or breaking temperature records in several cities, grounding flights, sparking forest fires, and contributing to deaths.") Latest Articles
Don't Make Me Laugh
What Bradley Manning did was what was required of him and of all of us under the circumstances... which is to say, to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all its enemies foreign and domestic.
Reflections
on Senate bill S. 1105, introduced June 6, 2013, assigned a 0% chance
of passage. It proposes to replace all $1 FEDERAL RESERVE notes with $1
UNITED STATES coins.
The
only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and
institutional authoritarians in both parties. That's enough for the
moment to control Washington outcomes -- as epitomized by the unholy
trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener
and the Obama White House -- but it is clearly not enough to stem the
rapidly changing tide of public opinion.
Gibney's
film treats Assange as if he and the US corporate-military behemoth
were engaged in a simple game of cat and mouse, two players trying to
outsmart each other. This documentary could have been a fascinating
study of the moral quandaries faced by whistleblowers in the age of the
surveillance super-state. Instead Gibney chose the easy course and made a
film that sides with the problem rather than the solution.
Massacre of Egyptian People by the Military on Saturday, Sniper Fire Used with Most Shot in the Head and Chest
During the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt that sparked the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Feb. 2011 the Egyptian military refused to fire on the Egyptian people. Now w/ the coup of Pres. Morsi on July 3 the military killed over 60 Islamist supporters of Morsi w/in days of his ouster & then Saturday the military massacred over 72 more people using sniper fire. It's hard to imagine a worse scenario.
Tom Engelhardt, Luck Was a Lady Last Week
He came and he went: that was the joke that circulated in 1979 when 70-year-old former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack and died in his Manhattan townhouse in the presence of his evening-gown-clad 25-year-old assistant. In a sense, the same might be said of retired CIA operative Robert Seldon Lady. Recently, Lady proved a one-day wonder.  Best News Links from the Web
Nearly
doubling the efficiency of a photovoltaic breakthrough made in 2012,
researchers have developed a two-layer, see-through solar film that
could be placed on building windows, sunroofs, smartphone displays and
other surfaces to harvest energy from the sun.
Sun-drenched
rooms make for happy residents, but large glass windows also bring
higher air-conditioning bills. Now a bioinspired microfluidic
circulatory system for windows could save energy and cut cooling costs
dramatically -- while letting in just as much sunlight.
The
financial crisis likely cost at least a year's worth of U.S. economic
output, a new Fed study finds. Worse, it's hurting the economy even now
and will hurt it for years to come.
Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas laid out his vision on Monday for the final
status of Israeli-Palestinian relations ahead of peace talks due to
resume in Washington for the first time in nearly three years. Abbas
said that no Israeli settlers or border forces could remain in a future
Palestinian state and that Palestinians deem illegal all Jewish
settlement building within the land occupied in the 1967 Middle East
war. The forceful statements appeared to challenge mediator U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry's hopes that the terms of the talks,
scheduled to begin Monday night over dinner, be kept secret.
Americans
are eager for Washington to act on a host of issues they care deeply
about, but instead they just witnessed another week of sharp rhetoric
and political finger-pointing. They're clamoring for their elected
representatives to do something about all their concerns, or even just
one; but think that they're not. President Obama's job approval numbers
this month hit their lowest level in nearly two years, and Congress' are
even worse.
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