Slashdot | Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him: "'The top climate scientist at NASA, James E. Hansen, says that the Bush Administration tried to silence him (NY Times) after he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth 'a different planet.' The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.'"

(Via /.)

AlterNet: President Jonah: "Novelist Gore Vidal argues that America under Bush is evincing characteristics of the post-fall-of-Rome Dark Ages."

...

Unfortunately the foreign gross of 'King Kong,' the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood--the Indian film business--may soon surpass us! Berman writes, 'We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.' '

Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place. Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.

...

Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. 'Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?' He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: 'How eager you are to be slaves.'"

(Via AlterNet.)

Salon.com | News Wires: "The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of 'leveraging' their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

...

In one memo, a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer described what happened when he took part in a raid on an Iraqi suspect's house in Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, on May 9, 2004. The raid involved Task Force (TF) 6-26, a secretive military unit formed to handle high-profile targets.

'During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender,' wrote the 14-year veteran officer.

He said he objected, but when they raided the house the team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway."

(Via Salon.)

In China, Google censors more than just politics: beer, dating, joke, gay sites too [Politech]: "Google's new China search engine not only censors many Web sites that question the Chinese government, but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes.

In addition, CNET News.com has found that contrary to Google founder Sergey Brin's promise to inform users when their search results are censored, the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it."

(Via POLITECH.)

Martini Republic » Bush: homocide now legal in majority of states: "Yesterday, President Bush articulated a bold new standard for determining the validity of statutes — whether they’re sorta old:

Mr. Bush took issue with a questioner who asked why he felt the need to circumvent the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court warrants for wiretaps.

‘Wait a minute,’ Mr. Bush said. ‘That’s a — there’s something — it’s like saying, you know, ‘You’re breaking the law.’ I’m not.’ He said that the surveillance act ‘was written in 1978″ and that now ‘it’s a different world.’

If Bush’s novel legal theory is correct, and laws sort of expire on their own without any further action by the legislature, then we alls are in a heap of trouble."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Newly Declassified National Security Agency History Questions Early Vietnam War Communications Intelligence: "The largest U.S. intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, today declassified over 140 formerly top secret documents -- histories, chronologies, signals intelligence [SIGINT] reports, and oral history interviews -- on the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Included in the release is a controversial article by Agency historian Robert J. Hanyok on SIGINT and the Tonkin Gulf which confirms what historians have long argued: that there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin on August 4, 1964. According to National Security Archive research fellow John Prados, 'the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence.' Last year, Prados edited a National Security Archive briefing book which published for the first time some of the key intercepts from the Gulf of Tonkin crisis."

(Via The National Security Archives.)

Rice: US Still Considers Hamas a Terrorist Group: "U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the United States still considers Hamas a terrorist organization and urged it renounce violence following the group's apparent victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections."

(Via GlobalSecurity.org.)

Rumsfeld's Roadmap to Propaganda: "Washington, D.C., January 26, 2006 - A secret Pentagon 'roadmap' on war propaganda, personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for 'boundaries' between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not 'targeted,' any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter.

Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and posted on the Web today, the 74-page 'Information Operations Roadmap' admits that 'information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa,' but argues that 'the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices.'

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, amended in 1972 and 1998, prohibits the U.S. government from propagandizing the American public with information and psychological operations directed at foreign audiences; and several presidential directives, including Reagan's NSD-77 in 1983, Clinton's PDD-68 in 1999, and Bush's NSPD-16 in July 2002 (the latter two still classified), have set up specific structures to carry out public diplomacy and information operations. These and other documents relating to U.S. PSYOP programs were posted today as part of a new Archive Electronic Breifing Book.

Several press accounts have referred to the 2003 Pentagon document but today's posting is the first time the text has been publicly available. Sections of the document relating to computer network attack (CNA) and 'offensive cyber operations' remain classified under black highlighting."

(Via The National Security Archives.)

Martini Republic » NYTimes: Filibuster Alito: "It’s easy to tell: he’s a pig. He won’t answer questions that should be answered; he favors an executive that shelves civil liberties. His past track record is abundant with conservative kowtowings. He needs to be blocked, and the New York Times says so too."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Martini Republic » What to do. . . what to do. . .:
"Bush faces a quandry:
An army that is stretched to the breaking point,
A budget deficit soaring above $400 billion,
Escalating violence in Iraq,
...
Ford announcing 30,000 layoffs,
So obviously the only answer is More Tax Cuts."

(Via Martini Republic.)

t r u t h o u t - Marjorie Cohn | Bush on Trial for Crimes against Humanity: "The International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration convened last weekend in New York City's Riverside Church. Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait hangs in the foyer. Dr. King delivered his historic 1967 speech, 'Beyond Vietnam: A Place to Break the Silence,' opposing the war and calling for the removal of all foreign troops from Vietnam, in that same church.

    

Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner, who delivered a keynote address to the commission of inquiry, invoked Dr. King's words from 1967: 'A time comes when silence is betrayal.' The following year, the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal put the US government on trial for 'crimes without precedent' it was committing in Vietnam. In the tradition of the Russell tribunal, the panel of judges at the commission of inquiry heard evidence of George W. Bush's war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere."

(Via t r u t h o u t.)

Slashdot | Election Officials And Crackers Challenge Diebold: "'The Washington Post is reporting that election officials in Florida have manipulated election results in controlled tests. From the article: 'Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.''"

(Via /.)