A new tasteless Trash-Piece about President John Kennedy, composed almost entirely of ficticious dialog, malicious rumors, and outright lies, is now being made by Joel Surnow (the creator of the series "24") -- a well-known Hollywood ultra-conservative Neocon, in the form of a 8-part Mini-Series, titled: "The Kennedys", to be aired on "The History Channel" network.
The piece is so completely full of made-up-out-of-whole-cloth garbage and malicious propaganda, that even the mild mannered Ted Sorenson (former Kennedy aide, and speechwriter) has come out publically denouncing it, in advance of its airing (which is one whole year away).
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald obtained an early version of the screenplay containing a draft of the dialog and its content. Greenwald said, "this one-sided right wing script suffers from a totally vindictive, malicious approach". Greenwald and Sorenson both contend that it is not only littered with easily documented falsehoods, they also insist that the production team drafted a ridiculous "cartoon" and "caricature" of the former president -- downplaying all the weighty historical episodes in favor of tawdry, salacious and entirely ficitious material and dialog.
Greenwald told the Huffington Post he counted more than a dozen sex scenes written into the biopic with only scant acknowledgment of the Cuban Missile crisis. Sorenson, in the film, says that each and every one of the conversations he is depicted to have had with the President never even happened.
"I was amazed to find reading those pages that every single conversation with the President in the Oval office or elsewhere in which I according to the script participated, never happened. There were no such conversations... A minimum amount of research could've avoided the remarkable number of obvious errors of that kind in this script."
---Ted Sorensen
Robert Greenwald has now started a Web Site: StopKennedySmears.com where you can sign a Petition to demand that The History Channel stop this character assassination piece that has no business, and no merit being aired on "The History Channel" network.
Everyone please go and sign the Petition StopKennedySmears.com. With enough public pressure from the public, this piece of sleaze journalism, and fraudulent history can be stopped.
Valentine's Day, Feb 14, 2010. Gen. McCrystal issued his first apology today for the deaths of 12 Afghan civilians who were cowering in their homes when 2 HMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) rockets went about 300 meters off target in Helmand, Afghanistan, and hit their house. The largest surge in the 9th year of the Afghanistan War started Friday.
Of course, he couldn't help but throw in an attempt to make this a bipartisanshipthingee:
Two Nato rockets aimed at Taliban insurgents in Helmand missed their target today, killing 12 civilians sheltering in their home and dealing a sharp blow to hopes that civilian casualties would be avoided in the largest western-led operation of the nine-year Afghan war.
Operation Moshtarak (meaning "together") involves 15,000 troops, mostly US, British and Afghan. The first US marines arrived in Marjah by helicopter before dawn on Saturday morning, while British forces are sweeping through Nad Ali.
"We deeply regret this tragic loss of life," said General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. "It's regrettable that in the course of our joint efforts, innocent lives were lost.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered an investigation.
Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, at a press conference in Kabul, said that the aim of operation Moshtarak was :
" not to kill insurgents" but to "expand the government's influence and protect the civilian population".
Afghan officials are claiming 27 insurgents have been killed so far.
On the second full day of fighting, the Taliban and other insurgent foot soldiers remained a shadowy enemy: Western commanders still do not have a solid estimate of how many Islamist militants remain in the farming town and its environs, which for years had served as a Taliban sanctuary.
Estimates prior to the assault ranged from 400 to around 1,000 Taliban and other fighters in the town. Perhaps 150 of those were believed to be "hard-core" militants, including Central Asian fighters with possible links to Al Qaeda who would likely fight to the death rather than slip away.
Some Taliban fled before the battle. The Marines had widely publicized their plans to take the town in hopes of driving off less committed fighters and thus limiting close quarters combat that could end up harming civilians.
http://www.latimes.com/news/na...
Instead, before leaving, they left a lot of land mines and other bombs buried all over the terrain, which will have to be cleared. Which is expected to take weeks.
2 British soldiers and 1 American Marine have also suffered loss of life, altho one of the British was not in this area of the latest surge. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2...
No word yet, as the effect of the latest stimulus spending spread, on whether or not the bonuses earned by the CEOs of the Afghan banks were having a negative polling effect on the Karzai administration.
It was 5:30 pm in Washington, DC, on Friday, Feb 12. The city had been shut down all week because of back to back record breaking snowfalls. On Friday morning, the TV pundits standing in front of a charming, snow shrouded scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, announced that the White House was open, and "back to business as usual."
By the evening, during Hardball's televised cable show with Chris Mathews, it was back to casually inserting the news via an interview with Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklazewski that the United States and "Afghan forces" had just launched the largest Afghanistan offensive of the war, in southern Afghanistan, near the city of Marjah.
25,000 to 30,000 troops (US, Nato, and "Afghan forces" per Miklazewski, without elaborating that number means it's all the US and some intrepreters.....) were to chase out the Taliban from Afghanistan's largest opium poppy area. And now, Miklazewski said, there was something different, the US had "walking around money" for the "recovery effort" after the offensive, when they had "settled in." "They have money that has been appropriated by Congress to hand out in the south, to pretty much help them." Oh, and to buy their allegiance.
Yes, he said that. "oh, and Chris, as you know, to buy their allegiance."
This area of Afghanistan produces 60% of the world's opium. 4 billion dollars a year's worth. 400 million for the Taliban. And it's poppy harvest season in Afghanistan.
Wait a minute. It's effing FEBRUARY. You know, like, uhm, "winter." They're harvesting this crap in February ?
http://www.paktribune.com/news... New Headline: Global Climate Change Pops Poppy Harvest Up Entire Season From May To MidWinter !
"This is going to deny them some badly needed revenue, Chris."
Okay dokey. Let me guess. This is going to provide some badly needed Revenue Enhancement for the CIA and Black Opts, isn't it ?
Same old, same old. No wonder General McChystal recently said the Afghan situation was now "under control."
A British Court of Appeals has ruled against the Foreign Secretary David Milliband, that the British government can no longer refuse to disclose what MI5 knew about the torture of Binyam Mohamed while in US custody, according to an article published today in the Guardian UK.
UK Foreign Secretary Milliband concured with the ruling only because of previous disclosures in a US Court, which would then preserve the "control principle" of one country doesn't turn loose intelligence without the cooperation of the other, if they share intelligence.
"The foreign secretary spoke last night to Hillary Clinton. He stressed to her that the court had strongly supported the control principle and would have agreed with HMG [her majesty's government] had it not been for the Kessler judgment in the US court last December, which had effectively disclosed the material in the seven paragraphs.
An MI5 officer known only as Witness B is being investigated by the Metropolitan police over his alleged role in questioning Mohamed incommunicado in a Pakistan jail.
Mohamed was detained in 2002 in Pakistan, where he was questioned incommunicado by an MI5 officer. The US flew him to Morocco, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, where he says he was tortured with the knowledge of British agencies.
The 7 paragraphs that the British Government were trying to hide are below, below the fold. As noticed by commenters under another story at FDL, there are 2 dates. The date in the Guardian story says 17 May 2002 in the first paragraph. The date in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office dot gov dot uk site, has the date as 17 May 2001, with a disclaimer that "we have alerted the Court to a typographic error."
Oh, those pesky typos. What's a year, here or there ? ask Bush & Cheney.
On the topic of extra-judicial assassinations of Americans by CIA hit squads, Glenn Greenwald writes:
...government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they're assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly.
Veronica Bowers, 35, and her seven-month-old daughter, Charity, were killed when their Cessna was mistaken for a drug plane in 2001...
...A cockpit video tape obtained by ABC News shows how a CIA spotter plane sneaked up behind the Cessna and wrongly identified it as a drug plane. CIA operatives then called in the Peruvian Air Force.
The contrast in WBZ mainstream tv and my daily news survey cycle is interesting. I think of if a tree falls in the woods yet nobody hears the sound does the tree fall? Or why people fail to see the elephants in the room.
What did I find on the internet while searching the CT circuit and what was playing on the cognitively dissonant TeeVee. Mainstream propaganda delivery system channel WBZ. Yeah I am multi-tasking, kind of like driving while texting.
SCOTT: Well, it certainly informs the vision of people around him. It was the neocon vision for the world. Brzezinski was certainly not a neocon, but on this point he sounds very much like them. You know, when [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Lewis "Scooter"] Libby were working for Cheney, when Cheney was secretary of defense back in 1992, they came up with this defense planning guidance draft which was later disowned, but it was the same thing, that we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. And then there was a JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] strategic document, Joint Vision 2020, which for all I know is still in force, calling for "full spectrum dominance." And this is a quote from the document: full spectrum dominance means the ability of US forces operating alone or with our allies to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations. I mean, this talk is just insane, but it is the language of geopolitics, and I think it's the language that people learn in military schools. And that's why it's wrong to think it was just neocons. I've written something very recently and I'd like to quote it: all thought is socially conditioned, and at the center of large, highly developed societies, all bureaucratic thought is bureaucratically conditioned. But at the heart of dominant societies, this bureaucratic thinking slowly acquires the features of a dominance mindset, and those conditioned by this mindset come to participate in what I call the war machine. We saw it in Britain. And ironically, you know, when Britain started talking about global dominance, it was Sir Halford Mackinder, and the year was 1919, when Britain was already, after World War I, destined to no longer play the role that it played before. It's a way, I think, of trying to keep the morale up. And I think that Brzezinski, when he wrote that book in 1997, he was worried that America would not be interested in playing the dominance role. And he, of course, is by background a Pole, for whom the great enemy in the world was Russia. And so he was trying to cheer America on to do things which it's not capable of doing. His metaphor is The Grand Chessboard, which is, of course, a zero-sum model for world politics. The good sense of geopolitics is the way it's been talked about by, say, Kissinger, when he says it's seeking a mode of equilibrium in the world. And that, I think, is [inaudible] I think a better model than a chessboard for the world would be a canoe, an overloaded canoe with some very heavy players and it, and the art of geopolitics is to learn not to capsize the canoe.
JAY: And when you look at President Obama's own statements during the election campaign when asked about foreign policy, he always rooted himself very clearly in what he said was the tradition of American pragmatic foreign policy, starting with Truman. He even included George Bush senior, Reagan. He never differentiated himself fundamentally, other than with George Bush junior. But the idea, even his opposition to the war in Iraq, had to do with that it was a stupid war that would weaken America's ability to project power. So if you look at, in terms of Latin America, Afghanistan, his relationship with Russia, in terms of this either change of mindset or traditional, dominant theory of dominance, where do you put him after one year?
SCOTT: Well, as long as he's trying to look forward to a second term, he's going to fit into Washington. And I watched Brzezinski's interview with you-a very good interview, I thought-and I can see how Brzezinski repeatedly said that he's now no longer inside the system; he's an outside adviser and remote from the way power decisions are made. I think that's true. That allows him to be much wiser than he was when he wrote his book or when he had his famous interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. He is a wise man now, and almost by definition that means he doesn't have as much influence. The wise are not the people who prevail in Washington. So that Obama, now that he's at the heart of things, he's got to live with his joint chiefs, he's got to live with his Democratic Party. I mean, a lot of us like to think that democracy is the answer, but if we mean by democracy the two-party system that we have, the two-party system is very definitely part of the problem, because he is going to get attacked. If he does anything to pull back from Afghanistan, if he does anything that looks like he's knuckling under to those outside forces there, he will be jumped on by members of both parties, who are, of course, all elected with the same money from the same big donors. We used to emphasize how the big donors came from the military-industrial complex, but we have to add to that now, having seen what's happened in the last couple of years, they've come also from Wall Street and the big banks. They're all part of the same -.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).
This is part one of an interview in which Scott talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war and is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington, but rather is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in society, and about the need for a new kind of American foreign policy.
SCOTT: I think I have talked about the deep state. I prefer now just to talk about deep politics, that there are things which we just don't face in our society, things we're not willing to talk about. With respect to Afghanistan, one of the things that we don't want to face and talk about is the presence of drug trafficking in the plans of the CIA for controlling remote areas of this world. And when you have a number of facts which are not being talked about, our politics becomes more and more like an iceberg, in which the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what's going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all. And that's the part that I call deep politics. The phrase "deep state" is a bit dangerous, 'cause it might make people think that there's a secret Pentagon and a secret White House, it's nothing like that. It's more this matter of the mindset that I'm talking about.
JAY: When you described the war machine, you use the words "drug-corrupted war machine," and everyone knows that Afghanistan is now the manufacturer of the majority of the world's heroin, but it doesn't ever get talked about as a policy issue or as an underlying driving force in this struggle for all sides. So talk about this.
SCOTT: Well, I would say, actually, it has become talked about in the last year, with the beginning of Obama's campaign. You know, when Bush first went in in 2001, they had a list of the main refineries, and they were never touched, because America's coalition for developing local support in Afghanistan was made up very largely of warlords who were involved in the drug traffic. Our principal ally was going to be [Ahmad Shah] Massoud, and there was a big debate in Washington, before we went into Afghanistan, whether to make him an ally or not, because they knew he was involved in the drug traffic. Well, he was in fact assassinated, just a day or two before 9/11. But the Northern Alliance, which was the only faction in Afghanistan in that year that was growing poppy, they were our allies. And if you look at almost any newspaper story about drugs in Afghanistan, it's going to be talking about the Taliban. But the Taliban are getting at most about a tenth of the revenues that are being raised by opium and heroin in Afghanistan, and the vast majority of it is going to the big warlords who essentially make up, to this day, the coalition that are supporting [Hamid] Karzai in Kabul.
He was poised, articulate, even more forceful than aloof at various times. He sure seemed like he really cared. I certaintly wouldn't mind getting the chance to talk with him. He seems like such a well intentioned guy.
The only problem is Obama outright lied in several places, and his wonderful rhetoric is in great conflict with his actual governing decisions and priorities. For example:
1. Obama assured us again that he was "Ending the Iraq War". First he said that he would have all our "combat" troops out by August. Then a few sentences later he claimed that "all our troops" (unqualified) would be out of Iraq. But the reality is that this is the man who brought back George W. Bush's outgoing War Secretary, Robert Gates (CIA-IRAN-CONTRA crook) to run his War Policies. Gates and Obama and Hillary Clinton (also a WarHawk) are all in agreement that at least 50,000 troops will remain permanently in Iraq, and of course, the 17 unwelcome U.S. Military Bases will also be there permanently. The private contractors Halliburton and Blackwater (which operates under another name now), will all continue to remain as well. Obama's claim to end the Iraq War in August 2010 has about as much validity as his claim to end Guantanimo within 1 year. The crooked Oil Contracts, the Corporations, the Military Bases, the huge multi-hundred million dollar U.S. Embassy, and at least 50,000 troops to protect all of that -- ain't going nowhere.
Whether the people that are stuck there are classified as being "combat" troops or not, is hardly relevant. The War and the Foreign Occupation has not ended, is not ending, and will not end. The vow to end the Iraq War is another empty promise from President Obama, and until and unless he stops listening and empowering the likes of Robert Gates - no meaningful change to this corrupt War policy will truthfully occur. We have over 1.5 million dead Iraqis, over 2 million Iraqi refugees, over 5,500 dead Americans, over 75,000 wounded or disabled Americans, and have wasted of some 3-Trillion of the taxpayers dollars. Clearly our Foreign Policy does far more damage to our own Country (as well as to the World) then anything any terrorist could ever dream up. Obama's patty-cake policy on confronting the tragedy of the U.S. Iraq intervention is sadly insufficient.
Moreover, he is expanding our excessive American Militarism and violence to the far corners of the Earth even more by tripling the troop exposure in Afghanistan, starting War with Pakistan, killing civilians with cowardly CIA-run, unmanned Drones equiped with Hellfire bombs, threatening Iran, Yemen, and Venezuela (via Columbia). He has embraced the illegitmate Bush-era policies of detaining people with no charges, and no rights. And he has kept torture sites such as Bagram, Gitmo, and Abu Grahib open for business, while additionally directly outsourcing human torture through the disgraceful secret program of CIA renditions to Foreign prisons. And let us never forget that the Obama Military budget far exceeds any of the Miltary budgets submitted under Bush & Cheney. While the words sounded good, the governing remains a shameful tragedy, and a bankrupt wasteland of corruption and unnecessary human carnage, and bloodshed.
2. Obama also spoke about the plight of the middle-class and winning their trust. He said: "To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve." It is hard to take him seriously however when his administration has empowered and promoted the very special interests that were responsible for the Financial meltdown, such as Timothy Giethner, Lawerence Summers, Ben Bernanke, and unabashed GOP-Lite Corporatists like Rahm Emanuel. If Obama wants to help the middle-class, why are the crooked Banking/WallStreet elites hand chosen by him to run his policies? Why does he want to give the Federal Reserve even more power, instead of audit them?
In December 2007, the Washington Postreported on the first CIA agent to openly admit the government used torture. John Kiriakou says that the CIA used waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah, and that it worked.
Recall that it was later reported that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.
Kiriakou said:
"It was like flipping a switch," said Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of "high-value" al-Qaeda detainees to speak publicly.
In an interview, Kiriakou said he did not witness Abu Zubaida's waterboarding but was part of the interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan for weeks after his capture in that country in the spring of 2002.
He added:
The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.
"He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers," Kiriakou said.
God wanted him to co-operate so his brothers wouldn't be tortured as well. Man the CIA is good.
"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."
But never mind, he says now.
"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."
[...]
But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn't have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn't.
So one of the main arguments trotted out to claim that torture works was a lie. This isn't surprising given all the lies from the previous administration. This guy was all over ABC News and other places "admitting" his story to anyone who'd listen and telling us that torture worked. Waterboarding saved lives.
It was just another campaign to make us believe lies the government wanted us to buy.
I spent Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday in Washington, D.C. as part of the Witness Against Torture fast, which campaigns to end all forms of torture and has worked steadily for an end to indefinite detention of people imprisoned in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other secret sites where the U.S. has held and tortured prisoners. We're on day 9 of a twelve day fast to shut down Guantanmo, end torture, and build justice.
The community gathered for the fast has grown over the past week. This means, however, that as more people sleep on the floor of St. Stephen's church, there is a rising cacophony of snoring. Our good friend, Fr. Bill Pickard, suggested trying to hear the snores as an orchestra, when I told him I'd slept fitfully last night.
There is a young boy in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, in Pakistan, who also lies awake at night, unable to sleep. Israr Khan Dawar is 17 years old. He told an AP reporter, on January 14th, that he and his family and friends had gotten used to the drones. But now, at night, the sound grows louder and the drones are flying closer, so he and his family realize they could be a target. He braces himself in fear of an attack.
We're told that we will be more secure if the CIA continually attack the so-called lawless tribal areas and eliminates "the bad guys."
In late May and early June of 2009, while visiting in Pakistan, a man from the village of Khaisor, also in North Waziristan, told us about his experience as a survivor of a drone attack. Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, mentioned that the people operating the drones and analyzing the surveillance intelligence have a word for people like him who managed to survive a blast and run away. They are called "squirters." So, I suppose he would have been considered a squirter.
This man, at some risk to himself, walked a long distance and took two buses to meet with us. Because of travel restrictions, we would not have been allowed to visit him in North Waziristan. His village is so remote that there are no roads leading up to it. Five hundred people live there. Often, western media refers to his homeland as "the lawless tribal area." One day, three strangers entered Khaisor and went to the home of vigil elders. For centuries, villagers have followed a code of hospitality, which demands that when strangers come to your door, you feed them and give them drink. It's not as though you can point them toward a Motel 6 or a 7-11. The strangers were welcomed into the home they approached and they left after having been served a meal. They were long gone when, at 4:30 a.m. a U.S. drone, operated by the C.I.A., fired 2 Hellfire missiles into the home they had visited, killing 12 people, two of whom were village elders. Children were dismembered and maimed.
"There's been a coup - have you heard? It's the CIA coup.
The CIA runs everything! They run the military .. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on these Countries...It's not even the Military that does it. The CIA runs this. ...And, of course, the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve.
And yet, think of the harm they have done since they were established since World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, they're in drug businesses, and they take out dictators......We need to take out the CIA!"
LONDON - A BBC investigation has cast doubt on key evidence in the case against the Libyan convicted of blowing up a US jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, the broadcaster said Wednesday.
A tiny fragment of the timer allegedly used to blow up Pan Am flight 103 -- crucial in linking Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to the bomb -- was not properly tested and was also unlikely to have survived the explosion, it said.
Megrahi was jailed in 2001 for the attack which left 270 people dead, but was controversially released from his Scottish prison in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal cancer and only had months to live.
Investigators believe the plane bomb was contained in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown suitcase with various items of clothing, and was triggered by a digital timer that was later linked to Libya.
But according to the BBC's Newsnight programme, the fragment of the timer -- found embedded in a charred piece of clothing three weeks after the bombing -- was never tested to confirm if it had actually been in a blast.
Even now, they pull back, far back, from the truth of this story. It's not just that this was "never tested".
A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb's timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: "I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans ... I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant."
Mr Dalyell, a long-standing critic of US and British government insistence that Libya was behind the attack, said an analysis of the fragment had shown it had been exposed to a temperature of 4,000deg C. But a Swiss police specialist had cast doubt on this, saying the explosion would have lasted only a fraction of a second in outside air temperatures of about minus 40C.
Accusing the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecuting authority, of failing to follow up the right leads, Mr Dalyell said - to strident denials from Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Office minister - that it had allowed itself for six years "to be suborned by political pressure into failing to carry out its duty".
He said this was a "wicked" dereliction of duty that brought shame on Britain.
That's from 1995. Thanks, BBC, for being on the ball here!
Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the tragedy, describes the ruling of Megrahi as the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history, blaming both the Scottish legal system and US intelligence.
"The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution," Swire told the Scotsman Newspaper.
Top level UK diplomats tend to agree with him, such Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya.
"No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence," Miles told the BBC.
The spectacular decision of the SCCRC is certain to give a second life to the dozen of alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Nearly two decades later, the case is back to square one.
Back to square one
Let us give Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean some credit. After hearing 230 witnesses and studying 621 exhibits during 84 days of evidence, spread over eight months, the three judges of the Lockerbie trial almost got correctly the date of the worst act of terror in the UK.
In the first line of the first paragraph of the most expensive verdict in history they wrote: "At 1903 hours on 22 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky." As a matter of fact, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on December 21st 1988.
Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the UN Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.
"It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys," Sharf wrote.
"The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove."
JALALABAD, Afghanistan - Protesters took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting "death to Obama" to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.
Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.
"The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces)," students from the University of Nangahar's education faculty said in a statement.
Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted "death to Obama" and "death to foreign forces", witnesses said.
The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.
"Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country," Safiullah Aminzai, a student organiser, told AFP.
"They have not brought democracy to Afghanistan but they are killing our religious scholars and children," he added.
Man, these people have no appreciation whatsoever. We come to their country, spend trillions of dollars doing it, just trying to help them. If only these people would change, dude!
I really don't see what they've got to be angry about.
UNITED States troops have been accused of dragging innocent Afghan civilians from their beds and shooting them at close range, in a night raid that left ten people dead.
Government investigators said eight schoolchildren had been killed and all but one of the victims was from the same family. Locals said some had been handcuffed before they were killed.
But western military sources insisted the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed countless soldiers' and civilians' lives.
I am outraged, OUTRAGED, that the CIA should have to put up with a few deaths in their ranks, when they have recently been planning raids that kill Afghan children.
We kill eight of their children, they kill eight of our CIA guys.
And the CIA just can't believe it happened.
Yes, how DARE they.
Meanwhile, Americans have absolutely no idea that any of this happened. Except for the CIA guys actually getting whacked. Just like in Iraq, when the Iraqis dragged those Blackwater guys from their car and burned them and hung their bodies from a bridge, Americans had NO IDEA that that was in response to Abu Ghraib. None. And they still don't.
Meanwhile, CNN continues with its round the clock "TERRORGASM".
This is just a ramble -- some reflections on the arguments going on within the progressive movement. I think we need to move on and think things out carefully rather than moving from news item to news item. What we see is a whole, a system. This system is very robust and we shouldn't pretend it is not.
The Liberal age was from 1933 to 1980. The Reagan Era signaled a radical shift in U.S. politics. Reagan and his operatives were able to leverage the latent chauvinism, racism anti-intellectualism and class-hatred of the white working-class into a new (old) vision of America and American Exceptionalism. To be called a "liberal" was nearly as bad as being called a homosexual. Liberals were seen as people who deliberately set out to destroy families and all traditional values and thus were existential threats. This was hard for most liberals to understand since they, in the best American tradition, just wanted to make sure we lived in a decent society were people were treated fairly and civilized behavior was encouraged. Interestingly liberals also favored traditional Christian virtues like charity, gentleness towards the sick, poor, disabled, as well as people in classes that were traditionally excluded from mainstream America like African-americans, Native peoples, women and so on. Liberals tended not to get this visceral hatred and what was behind it and what was the ultimate goal of the neo-Conservative movement (it was not a Conservative movement at all but a radical neo-fascist movement).
The more it's showing what the cheney and his puppet bush were telling us, after They established the Homeland Security Agency and Swore that the Intelligence Agencies would share information and work together for Homeland Security etc. etc. etc., that They Didn't Do Much Of Anything As To Security Against Any Criminal Terrorist Attacks!!
Before I get into the reasons why I've decided to discontinue posting essays or comments at buhdydharma's Daily Kos-inspired blog, let me briefly explain why I began posting there in the first place.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
