CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect, The New York Times said on Sunday.

The Times said a 2005 Justice Department memorandum showed that Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner questioned in the CIA’s overseas detention program in August 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, although a former CIA officer had told news media he had been subjected to only 35 seconds underwater before talking.

President Barack Obama has banned the use of waterboarding, overturning a Bush administration policy that it did not constitute torture.

The Justice Department memo said the simulated drowning technique was used on Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. The Times said some copies of the memos appeared to have the number of waterboardings redacted while others did not.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating the CIA interrogation program, which under President George W. Bush also included slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in uncomfortable positions and depriving them of sleep.

Bush administration officials had claimed such methods were needed to get information but the repeated use of the waterboard on Zubaydah and Mohammed were sure to raise questions about its effectiveness.

Source Reuters

Senior White House adviser David Axelrod on Sunday suggested the “Tea Party” movement is an “unhealthy” reaction to the tough economic climate facing the country.

Axelrod was asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about the “spreading and very public disaffection” with the president’s fiscal policies seen at the “Tea Party” rallies around the country last week.

“I think any time you have severe economic conditions there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy,” Axelrod said.

Axelrod appeared to backtrack when pressed on whether the movement is unhealthy.

“Well, this is a country where we value our liberties and our ability to express ourselves, and so far these are expressions,” he said.

“The thing that bewilders me is that this president just cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people,” Axelrod argued. “I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere because he certainly understands the burden that people face.”

Democratic strategist James Carville disagreed with Axelrod on CNN’s “State of the Union” when John King asked him if it’s unhealthy for “an American to go out and hold a sign and say ‘I think my taxes are too high.’”

Carville said, “No.” He called the Tea Party movement “harmless and damaging to Republicans.”

On CBS, Axelrod also responded to Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent insinuation that his state could secede from the union in response to government overreach under President Obama.

“I don’t think that really warrants a serious response,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think most Texans were all that enthused by the governor’s suggestion.”

Source CNN

America’s Mysterious Fusion Centers Raise Alarm, Paradigm Could Unite All Americans

Intelligence-gathering centers sprouted across the US and acting under cloak secrecy are raising concerns for violating Americans’ privacy rights, while Muslims complain that the mysterious centers are particularly targeting them.

“Any domestic intelligence activity poses a potential threat to American values because it involves the government secretly peeking into the private lives of people,” Mike German, Policy Counselor for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a former FBI Agent, told IslamOnline.net.

Nearly 60 so-called fusion centers have emerged in cities across the country in the dying days of the Bush administration.

Established under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), their initial purpose was serving as a communication network to aid local, state and federal authorities in gathering information on possible gang, criminal and terrorist-related conduct.

But civil rights experts fear the centers have overstepped their intended purpose to secretly collecting and disseminating information about low-abiding citizens.

“We have documented many instances of improper intelligence activities involving fusion centers on our website,” German says.

Whether the government has probable cause to justify this invasion of privacy is unknown because it is done under excessive secrecy.

“The law enforcement and intelligence agencies only answer to themselves, which is inherently undemocratic,” contends German.

“It’s dangerous to give such a broad mission in an intelligence context because it will ultimately lead to over-collection.”

The New York Times reported Thursday that the National Security Agency had engaged in “over-collection” of Americans’ domestic communications on a scale that went beyond limits set by the Congress last year.

Congress authorized intelligence agencies to eavesdrop without court approval on foreign targets believed to be outside the US.

After 9/11, the Bush administration authorized a secret warrantless spying on Americans and tapping into the country’s main communication networks without court warrants.

Dangerous

Imam Mahdi Bray, Executive Director of the Muslim American Society Freedom (MASF), agrees that the secrecy under which these centers operate poses a threat to civil liberties.

“Many Americans, including public officials, are not aware of these centers and the threat they pose on American society,” he told IOL.

“Ironically, it might also be noted that even the Department of Homeland Security is recognizing that fusion centers represent a major problem.

Muslims rights groups complain that fusion centers are particularly eyeing their community, estimated at nearly seven million.

“Contrary to its original ‘intent’ of gathering information related primarily to gangs, criminals, terrorists, it is now abundantly clear that the real targets of the DHS fusion center network are members of the American Muslim community at-large,” said Bray.

Muslims have become sensitized to an erosion of their civil rights since 9/11, with a prevailing belief that Bush’s America was targeting their faith.

“Fusion centers collect information particularly about Muslims, generally from… Islamophobes, neo-cons and self-appointed right-wing terrorist experts,” said Bray.

He regretted the data collected suggests that even activities such as Muslim boys’ scouts, girls’ scouts troops or voting registration should be viewed with suspicion.

Bray added that they also propagate stereotypes about mainstream US Muslim organizations, accusing them of disloyalty, being a “5th column”, or a front for radical groups abroad.

“A clear example of the danger that fusion centers represent would be the information pertaining to mainstream organizations in Virginia. They’ve taken a youth organization like the Muslim Student Association and accused it of being a front for radical Islamic organizations,” he explained.

“This is ridiculous, and would even be hilarious, if it wasn’t for the fact that such inaccurate information gets filtered down to local law enforcement where it gains credibility because it came from a national government agency,” lamented Bray.

“These centers are dangerous and detrimental to the civil liberties of not only Muslims but all Americans.”

Thanks Global Research

The media have finally discovered homelessness. Not surprisingly, they get the story wrong.

Over the past few months, reporters from around the world have flocked to the now-famous tent city in Sacramento, Calif. When they find out that 55-year-old John Kraintz has been living in a tent for almost seven years, they turn around and walk away.

“They don’t want to talk to me,” he says. “They’re searching for people who just lost their homes. It’s kinda tough to lose a home when you’ve never owned one. Sorry, but most of the people here have been homeless for a long time.”

A tall and lanky man with a long beard tied in a ponytail, Kraintz is one of 100-200 people who have been told to leave the homeless camp between Sacramento’s Blue Diamond Almond factory and the American River.

Kraintz and so many other homeless people like him have been living in scattered Sacramento encampments for years, but they’ve been largely ignored and hidden from public view. That is, until Lisa Ling, a reporter with the Oprah show, came to town in late February to focus on what Oprah Winfrey called the “new faces” of homelessness.

The show reported — inaccurately — that an estimated 1,200 people in Sacramento are living in tent cities after losing their jobs and homes. According to Loaves & Fishes, a privately funded group that has been feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless in Sacramento for 25 years, 1,226 people live on the streets of the city. Between 100 and 200 temporarily call tent city home.

Like Oprah, several national and international articles and TV pieces have falsely portrayed everyone in tent city as once-middle-class people driven to homelessness because of the economic meltdown.

“The credit crunch tent city which has returned to haunt America” is the headline of a March 6 piece in the London-based Mail Online. On March 20, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece called “In Sacramento’s tent city, a torn economic fabric.”

Joan Burke, Loaves & Fishes’ advocacy director, says those headlines are misleading. The majority of Sacramento’s homeless population suffer from physical disabilities, mental illness and drug and alcohol addictions.

“The media are trying to capture a very complex situation in a sound bite,” she says. “We’ve had homelessness in this country for decades. Each person has his or her own circumstance, and you have to tease that out if you’re going to address this problem. Why do we care so much for people who suffer for a short time versus those who suffer for a long time? What is that about?”

Over the past few months, Burke has been bombarded with media requests from as far away as Colombia, Hungary, Australia and the Philippines.

On one of the days I was there, I saw a German radio team, reporters from a French magazine and several local TV trucks. The majority of the people I met at tent city say reporters aren’t asking the right questions.

“The other day, I heard a German reporter ask if this is happening because of the recent economic collapse,” says Kraintz. “This has been happening for 30 years, but the powers that be have been able to pretend it doesn’t exist. Why aren’t reporters asking about flat wages, jobs being shipped overseas and the lack of affordable housing?”

Burke agrees, saying one of the many issues ignored in most articles about tent city and homelessness is the fact that poor people cannot afford housing, especially in an expensive state like California.

“People who are poor end up homeless through no fault of their own, but because people higher up on the food chain have made affordable housing a very scarce commodity,” she says. “If we had sound housing policies and programs that helped people when they have a run of bad luck, we would not have a tent city.”

Kraintz says he knew the system would finally blow up. It was just a matter of time. The question, according to him, is this: Do the powers that be have the political will to create a fairer, more just economic system?

“I listen to NPR all day. I know what’s going on at AIG,” he says. “If you’re working class, you can’t achieve the American Dream. I tried, and look where I am.”

Seven years ago, Kraintz had a hard time finding enough construction work to make ends meet. He lost his apartment and has been living in encampments ever since.

Today, he serves on Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s homelessness task force. At emergency city meetings, he urges officials to make this area a permanent tent city for people who are tired of being forced to move from place to place: “It may look like anarchy out here, but it’s peaceful and organic,” he says.

The people living in tent city have created what they call self-governed communities.

Full Article At AlterNet

“OBAMA TO REGULATE ‘POLLUTANT’ CO2″ screams the headline. Thus does our most recent fearless leader thumb his nose at We the People. Not trusting to democratic institutions like Congress, Obama hides behind EPA’s skirts in a spineless ploy to have his way mandated upon us.

Straightforward or transparent legislation was not looking promising. The U.S. Senate voted down Obama’s climate plan. Climate czar Carol Browner has been so rebuffed by the Senate moderates that no one was wagering that cap and trade climate legislation was going to get passed. Did Browner put her old EPA hat back on to help rattle this saber? How embarrassing for greens to hold so many political Democratic Party cards and still be so impotent.

It overall is a very bad day for pushing expensive climate change alarmism. Climate policies are shifting toward reason, sobriety, debate, engaged real science, and fiscal restraint.

Obama ought to have second thoughts about the advice he’s being given when so many prominent scientists are freshly skeptical:

• Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, has become outspoken and critical of the computer models which are driving climate alarmism. Dyson says, “I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.” Dyson tackles these bogus climate models along with stratospheric cooling in two short YouTube videos.
• Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, is now saying that “models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view.”
• Richard Lindzen, Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, takes a harder look at negative climate feedbacks. “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”
• Australia’s foremost Earth scientist, Ian Plimer, publishes Heaven And Earth: Global-Warming – The Missing Science. The inconvenient professor Plimer states that “The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology.”
• A U.S. Navy physicist warns of possibly “several decades of crushing cold temperatures and global famine.” Concern about cooling becomes commonplace. Mother Nature might even be credited with saving capitalism if this climate realism can end the suffocating alarmism. Russia airs cooling concerns freely. The Russians say our twelve-thousand-year-long warm period is ending and we are entering another ice age.
• Scientific graphs (within the PDF report) show global temperature has been falling for seven years. The graphs also show “CO2 concentration had been rising at about half the UN’s central estimate, requiring its warming projections to be halved and rendering them harmless; and that 20 years of satellite observations of changes in outgoing long-wave radiation had demonstrated conclusively that the UN had exaggerated the effect of CO2 on temperature by a factor of 7–10. The economic graph showed the cost of adapting to “global warming” (if and when it resumed) as being many times cheaper than the cost of attempting to mitigate it.”

Obama’s running out of time to force us to swallow his catastrophic global warming agenda. The catastrophe evaporates as the harsh reality of the economic costs of such a global climate bureaucracy become clearer. Climate policies in Europe are changing rapidly. France’s most eminent climate skeptic, Claude Allegre, is likely to become that country’s equivalent head of the EPA. The G-20 meeting in London earlier this month ignored climate change. The G-20’s written statement mentioned the word “climate” only two times out of 3,146 words. Expectations are falling rapidly for the Copenhagen Climate Convention efforts this December to birth Son-of-Kyoto.

“OBAMA’S GREEN POLICY WILL KILL U.S. ECONOMY, SAYS OIL CHIEF” screams another headline. Has this President forgotten already that our U.S. economy is in a protracted nosedive? His budget calls for a $646 billion climate tax through a carbon-trading system that will throttle taxpayers. White House officials already admit this tax could be three times larger. A family of four could have to shell out nearly $45,000 in climate taxes during the coming decade. And that is all before the EPA gets started regulating. Whatever is he thinking of?

Some states have not waited for any EPA to tell them they can’t breathe out. They’ve gotten a jump on rationing energy. One victim is protesting. An electric utility sues New York over CO2 regulation. The utility valiantly fights the state on claims broadly ranging from “impermissible taxation” to Constitutional violations. I wish the utility well, but our government has never met a tax that was “impermissible” and doesn’t appear to give a flip about the Constitution.

That having been said, you can take action on the EPA’s proposed action. The EPA’s action is that the EPA Administrator signed a proposal with two distinct findings regarding greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act:

• The Administrator is proposing to find that the current and projected concentrations of the mix of six key greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) – in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations. This is referred to as the endangerment finding.
• The Administrator is further proposing to find that the combined emissions of CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, and HFCs from new motor vehicles and motor vehicle engines contribute to the atmospheric concentrations of these key greenhouse gases and hence to the threat of climate change. This is referred to as the cause or contribute finding.

This proposed action would not itself impose any requirements on industry or other entities. An endangerment finding under one provision of the Clean Air Act would not by itself automatically trigger regulation under the entire Act.

The public comment period is open for 60 days. Take the gloves off. Submit written comments. Attend one of two hearings. Support those who do. Obama has to already know that this issue is going to take him down. Whatever is he thinking of?

Thanks LewRockwell