Sir Peter Ricketts, now-Secretary at the Foreign Office, said that US and British officials believed at the time that measures against Iraq were failing: "sanctions, an incentive to lift sanctions if Saddam allowed the United Weapons inspectors to return, and the 'no fly' zones over the north and south of the country."

He also said that US officials had raised the prospect of regime change in Iraq, asserting that the British weren't supportive of the idea at the time.

"We were conscious that there were other voices in Washington, some of whom were talking about regime change," Ricketts said.

The head of the British Foreign Office's Middle East department, Sir William Patey, told the inquiry that his office was aware of regime change talk from some parts of the Bush Administration shortly after they took office in 2001.

"In February 2001 we were aware of these drum beats from Washington and internally we discussed it," Patey said. "Our policy was to stay away from that."

"We didn't think Saddam was a good thing, and it would be great if he went, but we didn't have an explicit policy for trying to get rid of him," he added.

A third official, who was policy director for the British Defense Ministry at the time, said the discussions between the US and Britain "weren't serious."

"The question of regime overthrow was, I recall, mentioned but it was quite clear that there was no proposition being put in our direction on that," he quipped.

News of the British officials comments were first reported Tuesday in the UK Independent.

Interestingly, the head of Britain's Intelligence Committee told investigators that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared to be in charge of US policy on Iraq until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Up till then we felt that dealing with the State Department, we were dealing with the people who were forming the policy," Ricketts said.

British investigators are probing how Britain got into the Iraq war and if officials misled the public. Already, they've released numerous documents showing that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair covered up British military plans for a full Iraq invasion throughout 2002, claiming at the time that Britain's objective was "disarmament, not regime change."

In an address to the nation next Tuesday, President Barack Obama will reportedly announce a decision he has already made on the future of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. McClatchy reports he has finalized a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year.

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag attended the war council meeting in the Situation Room last night, the ninth such meeting held by President Obama to discuss his strategy in Afghanistan. Asked by Politico why Orszag was at the meeting, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “Cost is a concern.”

Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the top U.S. general and the top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, have been instructed to prepare to testify before Congress as early as next week. The two are expected to “offer details and support for the president’s strategy for how to proceed with the eight-year-old war.”

In a new survey released today, the nonpartisan Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that while Americans are split on whether potential changes to the health care system “will be for good or ill,” they still “seem to want lawmakers to tackle health care.” “Seventy-nine percent say it is important for President Barack Obama to include health care reform in addressing the nation’s economic crisis.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has said that under no circumstances will he vote for a health care reform bill that contains any form of a public option. “I’m going to be stubborn on this,” he said. When asked if any version of public option will compel him to vote against bringing the bill to a final vote, Lieberman replied, “Correct.”

Yesterday, a “group of conservative Republican leaders” unveiled a “purity test” for potential GOP candidates, which, if adopted, would force the RNC to “withhold campaign money and endorsements from candidates who do not adhere to at least seven principles on the checklist.” The 10-point list gauges adherence to principles like “opposing government financing for abortion” and opposing a “socialist agenda.”

Nearly one in four mortgages are under water, according to an analysis by First American CoreLogic, a leading real-estate company. The company’s analysis finds that nearly 10.7 million households had negative equity in their homes during the first quarter of 2009.

The U.S. “will identify a near-term emission reduction target as part of an effort to reach a comprehensive climate agreement in Copenhagen next month as long as other major greenhouse gas emitters do the same.” But officials warned against negotiating “above the targets in domestic legislation without risking support for that legislation in the Senate.”

A report by the South Carolina state Ethics Commission has recommended 37 charges against Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) over his use of state money to purchase business-class airline tickets to travel to Argentina to see his mistress. The investigation also accuses the governor of violating campaign finance laws by improperly spending $2,940.68 from his campaign’s account.

And finally: The Hammer is back. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is making a special appearance on the “Dancing With the Stars” finale tonight, where he’ll be dancing the Texas Two-Step with Cheryl Burke. “I’m so excited to dance,” DeLay told Politics Daily.

Follow ThinkProgress on Twitter.

The opposition’s decision to stall and oppose President Barack Obama’s judicial nominations smacks of hypocrisy, and further draws into question the majority’s ability to govern.

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• November 23, 2009 Refuse Allegiance to Coal
• November 23, 2009 Beautiful Steamer
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• November 21, 2009 Obama’s Job Approval Slips Below 50 Percent

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Top climate alarmists have conceded that the climategate scandal represents a huge blow to the global warming movement and that the debate is not over, and yet establishment media organs are still invoking South Park’s Officer Barbrady in downplaying the story despite the fact that it clearly illustrates how evidence which directly disproves global warming is being censored by agenda-driven scientists.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot, a climate change zealot and a staunch defender of the faith, concedes that the science now needs “reanalyising” and that CRU Director Phil Jones should resign.

“It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them,” writes Monbiot.

“Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.”

“Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.”

Another prominent global warming alarmist, Tim Flannery, now admits that there are holes in the “science is settled” mantra.

“We’re dealing with an incomplete understanding of the way the earth system works… When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate…We just don’t understand the way the whole system works… See, these people work with models, computer modelling. So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend,” said Flannery.

“And on these now-admitted uncertainties we must scrap all coal-fired generators, impose massive new taxes, shut entire industries, hand billions to the UN and change the way we live?” asks Andrew Bolt.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

However, while some alarmists have embarked on a course of damage control, the establishment has closed ranks and, after failing in their efforts to float the hoax that the emails were manufactured, are now ludicrously invoking South Park’s Officer Barbrady and crying in unison, “Move along, nothing to see here!”

In an article entitled, Hacked climate e-mails awkward, not game changer, Reuters’ Timothy Gardner writes, “Revelation of a series of embarrassing e-mails by climate scientists provides fodder for critics, but experts believe the issue will not hurt the U.S. climate bill’s chance for passage or efforts to forge a global climate change deal.”

Oh really? With numerous influential individuals calling for criminal investigations, and with climate alarmists themselves admitting that scientists closely affiliated with the UN IPCC exposed by the hacked emails should resign, only the wilfully naive could believe that this will not hamper the Copenhagen agenda for a global carbon tax, which was already being derailed before the scandal broke.

The latest to weigh in on the controversy was prominent skeptic Lord Monkton, who labeled the CRU scientists crooks who should be criminally prosecuted. “They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers,” writes Monckton. “With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute.”

The Reuters story quotes Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, who claims there is no smoking gun contained in the emails, despite the fact that they expose how scientists used “tricks” to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.

In another email, a scientist talks about changing temperature data on a graph in order to disguise evidence of global cooling that has been in play for the last few years.

“I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.”

To Leiserowitz, this isn’t evidence of conspiracy, merely “embarrassment” which would “provide fodder for the 2 to 3 percent of the general public that are hard-core climate change doubters.”

In reality, polls show that a huge and growing number of both Americans and Brits are “climate change doubters.” A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that only 36 per cent of Americans believe man is to blame for climate change, whereas in Britain, “Only 41 percent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made.”

Far from being a tiny minority, as Leiserowitz claims, climate change skeptics are now in the majority, as belief in global warming alarmism whittles away increasingly to the fringe.

The Reuters story also quotes Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, LLC, who characterizes the scandal as “scientists behaving badly.”

“This does nothing to the U.S. climate bill, which will be decided mostly by economic forces, not environmental ones,” said Book.

Precisely – this has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with companies like ClearView getting fat off the spoils of the climate fraud that they are intimately invested in. Obviously, to the scientists at the CRU, it has little to do with the environment either, since they are more than willing to block FOIA requests, change data and hide evidence of global cooling in order to make the science fit their agenda.

To dismiss this as “behaving badly” shows unparalleled ignorance of what science is supposed to be all about, namely empiricism, not bias and fraud, which is exactly what the global warming movement has now come to represent.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider buried deep beneath the Swiss-French border made history Monday, smashing two proton beams traveling at near-light speed into each other. The LHC, also known as the big bang machine, is the largest machine on Earth and was built to recreate conditions that existed just after the birth of the universe.

The collider, housed at CERN, has inspired doomsday premonitions, but—for the time being, anyway—we’re still here.

Researchers hope to increase the power of their experiments at a steady pace. The scientists at CERN have coped with months of delays and expressed joy that decades of work are finally bearing fruit.

One spokesman described the day’s events as “the start of a fantastic era of physics.”

The LHC is 17 miles in circumference, and ranges from 160 to 570 feet underground.  —PZS

CERN’s press release here.

BBC:

Housed in a tunnel 100m beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC uses some 1,200 “superconducting” magnets to bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the “ring”, the proton beams cross, smashing into one another with enormous energy.

Large “detector” machines located at these crossing points will scour the wreckage of the collisions for discoveries that could roll back the frontiers of knowledge.

Read more

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• November 23, 2009 Refuse Allegiance to Coal
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• November 21, 2009 Obama’s Job Approval Slips Below 50 Percent

"After completing a rigorous final meeting, President Obama has the information he wants and needs to make his decision and he will announce that decision within days," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

And that troop increase is likely to be large. According to veteran intelligence reporter Jonathan Landay at McClatchy's Newspapers, the White House plans to dispatch some 34,000 additional troops -- slightly more than half the number requested by Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal.

"President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he's called 'a war of necessity' in Afghanistan," officials purportedly told the newswire.

"Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire," Landay adds. "The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn't originate in the White House."

Late on Monday Obama held the ninth and last in a series of meetings with top commanders to examine the troubled war effort.

The results of those discussions are now widely expected to be made public next Tuesday, although a White House official said "nothing had been confirmed" about the timing of the announcement.

Obama has been weighing requests from the military top brass for tens of thousands of extra troops to be deployed.

"As it now stands," McClatchy writes,"the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., and a Marine brigade from Camp Lejeune, N.C., for as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

"In addition, a 7,000-strong division headquarters would be sent to take command of U.S.-led NATO forces in southern Afghanistan — to which the U.S. has long been committed — and 4,000 U.S. military trainers would be dispatched to help accelerate an expansion of the Afghan army and police," he adds.

With AFP.

The fall of the Republic, Obama’s unkept promises and lies, the economic crisis as part of a bigger new world order strategy, the swine flu hoax, the fraud behind the fed – Alex Jones talks about all this in an exclusive interview with RT’s Anastasia Churkina.

First the good news. George Monbiot – aka the Great Moonbat – has issued a personal apology for the shabby behaviour of his climate-fear-promoting scientist chums in the Climategate scandal.

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).

Now the not-so-good-news. He’s trying to limit the damage by pinning the blame on one (admittedly very deserving, but there are others, Lord knows there are others) man.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Now for the bit where it gets unpleasant. So seriously unpleasant that I’m not sure I should be posting such things in a family newspaper. You ready? I’m warning you, it’s not pretty. The Moonbat makes a brave but not – I fear – wholly successful foray into the unfamiliar terrain of humour and satire. Here goes:

To bury manmade climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed. Luckily for the sceptics, and to my intense disappointment, I have now been passed the damning email which confirms that the entire science of global warming is indeed a scam. Had I known that it was this easy to rig the evidence, I wouldn’t have wasted years of my life promoting a bogus discipline. In the interests of open discourse, I feel obliged to reproduce it here.

No, no. Keep up there at the back! The Moonbat isn’t really experiencing “intense disappointment.” This is a joke, geddit? He’s about to show you the kind of letter which really would be a smoking gun, if it existed, which of course it doesn’t because you see – (ho ho!, stap me vitals, ooh nurse, etc) – George made it up using the humorous medium of comical exaggeration for satirical effect.

Full article here

With more and more people changing their minds about man-ma de global warming as a consequence of the increase in juvenile alarmist propaganda on behalf of the warmists, Al Gore’s lies are increasingly being confronted in the public arena.

The Powerline blog has done an excellent job of summarizing the issues surrounding the Climatgate/CRUtape Letters in the past couple of days. Since they reference WUWT in the most recent article, it seems relevant to also post here.

It seems Dr. Jones frets about the “weather, not climate” issue that we have been so often chastised for, whenever WUWT covers a record cold event, or a record snow event. We’ve seen quite a few of those lately. It seems CRU is concerned this “weather” may become a trend. Maybe they’ll just blame it on China and SO2 emissions. There’s an app for that. – Anthony

TV weather forecast from the UK -”over the top re cold”? 

POWERLINE:

We’ve written about the leaked emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Center here, here and here. Another intensely interesting email thread, which doesn’t seem to have gotten much notice, relates to the fact that the last decade, contrary to the alarmists’ predictions, has tended to get cooler, not warmer.

At the end of 2008, the scientists at East Anglia predicted that 2009 would be one of the warmest years on record: 

On December 30, climate scientists from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia projected 2009 will be one of the top five warmest years on record. Average global temperatures for 2009 are predicted to be 0.4∞C above the 1961-1990 average of 14 ∫ C. A multiyear forecast using a Met Office climate model indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

We know now that the alarmists’ prediction for 2009 didn’t come true. What’s interesting is that in January of this year, another climate alarmist named Mike MacCracken wrote to Phil Jones and another East Anglia climatologist, saying that their predicted warming may not occur:

Your prediction for 2009 is very interesting…and I would expect the analysis you have done is correct. But, I have one nagging question, and that is how much SO2/sulfate is being generated by the rising emissions from China and India…. While I understand there are efforts to get much better inventories of CO2 emissions from these nations, when I asked a US EPA representative if their efforts were going to also inventory SO2 emissions (amount and height of emission), I was told they were not. So, it seems, the scientific uncertainty generated by not having good data from the mid-20th century is going to be repeated in the early 21st century (satellites may help on optical depth, but it would really help to know what is being emitted).

That there is a large potential for a cooling influence is sort of evident in the IPCC figure about the present sulfate distribution–most is right over China, for example, suggesting that the emissions are near the surface–something also that is, so to speak, ‘clear’ from the very poor visibility and air quality in China and India. So, the quick, fast, cheap fix is to put the SO2 out through tall stacks. The cooling potential also seems quite large as the plume would go out over the ocean with its low albedo–and right where a lot of water vapor is evaporated, so maybe one pulls down the water vapor feedback a little and this amplifies the sulfate cooling influence.

Now, I am not at all sure that having more tropospheric sulfate would be a bad idea as it would limit warming–I even have started suggesting that the least expensive and quickest geoengineering approach to limit global warming would be to enhance the sulfate loading…. Sure, a bit more acid deposition, but it is not harmful over the ocean…. Indeed, rather than go to stratospheric sulfate injections, I am leaning toward tropospheric, but only during periods when trajectories are heading over ocean and material won’t get rained out for 10 days or so.

In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong.

Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc.

Sulphur dioxide, like carbon dioxide, is emitted as a result of industrial activity. Unlike carbon dioxide, it is actually a pollutant. But whereas carbon dioxide tends to warm, sulphur dioxide tends to cool, and MacCracken suggests that SO2 emissions from China and India may well be offsetting the temperature impact of CO2. The net effect of human activity, therefore, may be much closer to neutral than the alarmists have been claiming.

How did the British scientists, whose careers are committed to the proposition that human activity is causing catastrophic warming of the globe, respond? Surprisingly, Tim Johns reacted with insouciance:

Mike McCracken makes a fair point. I am no expert on the observational uncertainties in tropospheric SO2 emissions over the recent past, but it is certainly the case that the SRES A1B scenario (for instance) as seen by different integrated assessment models shows a range of possibilities. In fact this has been an issue for us in the ENSEMBLES project, since we have been running models with a new mitigation/stabilization scenario “E1″ (that has large emissions reductions relative to an A1B baseline, generated using the IMAGE IAM) and comparing it with A1B (the AR4 marker version, generated by a different IAM). The latter has a possibly unrealistic secondary SO2 emissions peak in the early 21st C – not present in the IMAGE E1 scenario, which has a steady decline in SO2 emissions from 2000. The A1B scenario as generated with IMAGE also show a decline rather than the secondary emissions peak, but I can’t say for sure which is most likely to be “realistic”.

The impact of the two alternative SO2 emissions trajectories is quite marked though in terms of global temperature response in the first few decades of the 21st C (at least in our HadGEM2-AO simulations, reflecting actual aerosol forcings in that model plus some divergence in GHG forcing). Ironically, the E1-IMAGE scenario runs, although much cooler in the long term of course, are considerably warmer than A1B-AR4 for several decades! Also – relevant to your statement – A1B-AR4 runs show potential for a distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C, which I’m sure skeptics would love to see replicated in the real world… (See the attached plot for illustration but please don’t circulate this any further as these are results in progress, not yet shared with other ENSEMBLES partners let alone published). We think the different short term warming responses are largely attributable to the different SO2 emissions trajectories.

So far we’ve run two realisations of both the E1-IMAGE and A1B-AR4 scenarios with HadGEM2-AO, and other partners in ENSEMBLES are doing similar runs using other GCMs. Results will start to be analysed in a multi-model way in the next few months. CMIP5 (AR5) prescribes similar kinds of experiments, but the implementation details might well be different from ENSEMBLES experiments wrt scenarios and their SO2 emissions trajectories (I haven’t studied the CMIP5 experiment fine print to that extent).

Cheers,
Tim

Got that? Here is a translation: assumptions about SO2 emissions do have a “quite marked…impact” on global temperatures under the warmists’ various models. What impact they have varies from model to model. Which model is correct (if any)? Who knows? But as a result of increased SO2 in the atmosphere, there is “potential for a distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C.”

That must come as a great relief, since everyone involved in this exchange has been telling the public that global warming is an imminent catastrophe. But no! The prospect of a “distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C[entury]” is bad, because “skeptics” would “love” it!

Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit, now weighs in. Does he welcome the idea that, contrary to his own predictions, there may be little or no warming in coming decades? No!

Tim, Chris,

I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like -half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!

Still a way to go before 2014.

I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where’s the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Better that the Earth experience the cataclysm of global warming than that the skeptics be proved right? It makes one wonder how seriously Jones believes in the catastrophe of global warming. Jones then frets about whether the weather is really as cool as the weathermen are saying:

Chris – I presume the Met Office continually monitor the weather forecasts. Maybe because I’m in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems a bit over the top re the cold. Where I’ve been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn’t seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.

So the very climate scientists who keep saying that global warming will be an unparalleled disaster for humanity are telling the Earth: Heat up, damn it!

But let’s go back to the main point. Apparently the alarmist climatologists acknowledge that SO2, frequently emitted in conjunction with CO2, nullifies, wholly or in part, any warming tendency associated with the CO2. What is the net effect? This is, obviously, an empirical, quantitative question. But these scientists can’t answer it, not only because each of their models gives a different answer, but because they have no idea how much SO2 is being emitted by the main countries that produce that pollutant, India and China. Having no idea what the facts are, their models are useless. It does appear, however, that one obvious alternative to impoverishing humanity in a most-likely-futile effort to stave off global warming would be emitting a whole lot of SO2 over the ocean, and continuing those emissions indefinitely rather than banning them as is currently contemplated by the warmists’ models.

Climate science is in its infancy, and every proposition is controversial. What climate scientists like those at East Anglia don’t know dwarfs what they do know. They can produce a model for every occasion, but are the models any good? If so, which one? One thing we know for sure is that they don’t generate reliable predictions. In every scientific field other than global warming, a scientific hypothesis that generates false predictions is considered disproved. When it comes to global warming, however, there is no such thing as falsification. Which is the ultimate evidence that the alarmist scientists are engaged in a political enterprise, not a scientific one.

US authorities expanded a probe Monday into health impacts of drywall imported from China, saying an initial study found a “strong association” with indoor pollution in homes using the product.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission said it would be leading an investigation into the relationship between the drywall and the reported health symptoms, and electrical and fire safety issues reported by some home owners.

Some of the drywall linked to the problems was used in rebuilding in southern states after damage from hurricanes.

The agency said it would also examine the origin and distribution of the drywall, which are sheets of plaster used for home interior.

The announcement came after months of complaints from consumers and local officials that defective drywall from China was leaking chemicals that caused illness and safety problems.

Full article here

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Fall Of The Republic – Buy the DVD here

 

The Obama administration is using mercenaries with the firm formerly known as Blackwater to kidnap and assassinate high value targets in Pakistan, according to a published report.

The program, operated out of the US Joint Special Operations Command, “is so ‘compartmentalized’ that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence,” an unnamed source with direct knowledge of the program told The Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill.

Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, is also allegedly involved in intelligence collection for a drone bombing campaign in the country.

Scahill’s report added: “A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. ‘We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,’ the official said. ‘There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.’ The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. ‘This is a parallel operation to the CIA,’ said the source. ‘They are two separate beasts.’”

A Blackwater spokesman told The Nation that none of its forces are operating in Pakistan. However, a “former senior executive at Blackwater” told Scahill that Xe’s mercs are indeed working in Pakistan, sometimes employed by the country’s government to operate alongside soldiers. The arrangement allows the Pakistani government to deny any U.S. military presence in the country, while allowing them to tap former U.S. special forces members for high-risk missions.

Scahill added that the CIA is also employing the firm in parallel operations.

“Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that,” Scahill’s source reportedly said. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don’t care. If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality. They’re not accountable to anybody and they know that. It’s an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?”

During the Bush administration, the JSOC was reportedly being commanded by the vice president’s office, effectively making them Dick Cheney’s own “executive assassination squad,” according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

President Obama’s top official on the occupation of Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, oversaw the JSOC from September 2003 to August 2008.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, Scahill reported.

Read Scahill’s full report.

Alex asked is listeners to spread the story of “Climate-Gate” to the far reaches of the Globe, and expose the biggest con job by the globalist the world has ever seen!!

Former minister MP Peter Lilley discusses on RT the scandal dubbed Climategate, after the University of East Anglias Climate Research Unit (CRU) servers were hacked into, bringing to public attention many emails and documents from scientists that suggest data on climate change has been manipulated to suit the Global Warming “Theory”.

Many officials and experts have warned of violence stemming from the economic crash.

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is now warning that there might be a revolution if some countries if governments hand out another round of bailouts to the financial sector:

The public will not bail out the financial services sector for a second time if another global crisis blows up in four or five years time, the managing-director of the International Monetary Fund warned this morning.Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the CBI annual conference of business leaders that another huge call on public finances by the financial services sector would not be tolerated by the “man in the street” and could even threaten democracy.

“Most advanced economies will not accept any more [bailouts]…The political reaction will be very strong, putting some democracies at risk,” he told delegates.

The decision was first disclosed yesterday by Murray Waas in a little-noticed posting on the blog of New York Magazine. The magazine cited public court records and federal law enforcement officials as its sources.

Although Gonzales remains under investigation by the Justice Department for two other matters, it had been allegations that he gave false or purposely misleading testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the warrantless eavesdropping program that placed him by far in the greatest legal jeopardy.

In not bringing criminal charges, however, investigators for the Department’s Inspector General, which conducted the investigation, hardly let Gonzales off the hook completely. They concluded that Gonzales testimony before Congress about the eavesdropping program was “confusing,” “incomplete’ and had the “effect of misleading” both Congress and the public.

A major reason that Gonzales escaped criminal charges, according to people close to the investigation, was that he was willing to do something that he had steadfastly refused to even contemplate before: admit that many of his most controversial decisions, first as White House counsel, and later, as Attorney General, in authorizing, overseeing, and concealing the eavesdropping program were done at the specific director of former President Bush.

In other instances, Gonzales and his attorneys argued to the Justice Department that Gonzales’ actions were done in furtherance of Bush administration’s policies, and thus he did not act with personal intent to do wrong.

“He was willing to be lightning rod in the past for the President,” one legal source close to the investigation purportedly told New York Magazine, “He has done that during the entire course of his career. But it was pressed upon him that that was not going to work in this instance—and he did what he had to do.”

The internal Justice Department watchdog agency, the department’s Inspector General, which conducted the investigation, has no prosecutorial powers of its own.

If during the course of an investigation, however, the Inspector General can seek to have a criminal prosecutor or even special prosecutor take over his investigation to determine if criminal charges are warranted. However, in this case that wasn't done.

The uproar over mammogram guidelines is proof that health care reform that actually controls costs would be virtually impossible to achieve.

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After surviving a car wreck in 1983 at the age of 20, Rom Houben was written off as a vegetable. He was actually perfectly alert. The Belgian would spend the next 23 years in a private hell until doctors finally discovered his consciousness and found a way to communicate with him.

The story has revived the fiasco that surrounded Terri Schiavo, the vegetative Florida woman whose case was distastefully taken up by Congress.

Whatever the parallels, the Houben case seems the worst kind of nightmare. For more than two decades, he was treated as a piece of furniture. He was unable to speak or cry even when he overheard that his father had died.

His was not a unique experience. It’s called locked-in syndrome, the most famous patient being Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French journalist who blinked out his memoir using only his left eyelid.  —PZS

AP via Yahoo:

For 23 torturous years, Rom Houben says he lay trapped in his paralyzed body, aware of what was going on around him but unable to tell anyone or even cry out.

The car-crash victim had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state but appears to have been conscious the whole time. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s finally realized it, and unlocked Houben’s mind again.

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"Countries will need to put on the table what they are willing to do on emissions," a senior administration official told journalists. "We expect that a decision will be made in the coming days."

The official refused to be drawn on specific numbers but indicated the US target would not differ much from levels mentioned in legislation before Congress.

A US House of Representatives bill, passed in June, calls for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and by 83 percent by 2050.

A slightly more ambitious bill before the Senate, but not due to be debated again until early next year, talks of a 20-percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020.

The senior administration official said Obama could make a last-minute decision to attend the conference if "negotiations have proceeded sufficiently that going to Copenhagen would give a final impetus, a push, to the process."

As the leader of one of the world's two biggest polluters, Obama is under considerable pressure to attend the conference and show flexibility on new emission targets.

Sixty-five leaders, including from Germany, France and Brazil, have already committed to participating at the December 7-18 meeting to find a global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer told journalists in Brussels that a US emissions target was a crucial factor in the negotiations.

"The key issue here at the moment is the United States. My sense is Obama will be in a position to come to Copenhagen with a target and a financial contribution."

The two-year UN haggle leading up to the Copenhagen conference has been hamstrung by what the world's No. 2 polluter and wealthiest country will propose.

In Europe, green groups said the big question was how far the United States planned to trim its carbon output and over what timeframe, and whether this met scientific criteria for tackling global warming.

"Getting clarity from the US on what their commitment is going to be is going to be crucially important," Kim Carstensen of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told AFP.

Compared to the 1990 benchmark used by almost every other country, the expected US target only amounts to something like a four-percent reduction.

The EU has vowed to reduce its emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels before 2020, raising the target to 30 percent in the event of an international agreement on the issue. Japan has offered 25 percent, but attached conditions.

Greenpeace urged Obama to commit to levels above and beyond what was envisaged by the US Senate bill, demanding at least a 25-percent reduction target.

"We believe that there is still room for the US to upgrade their target. We need to see more from them," Joris den Blanken, Greenpeace's EU climate and energy policy director, told AFP.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, visiting Washington, said his emerging economy was ready to do more on climate change if developed nations made financial commitments.

"We will do more if there is global support in terms of financial resources and technology transfer."

India, China and other developing nations have been pressing for Western nations to offer technology and other support to help them reduce the intensity of emissions blamed for global warming.

But the emerging economies have resisted legally binding requirements, saying that wealthy nations, not them, bear the historic responsibility for carbon emissions.

De Boer has ruled out the possibility that a comprehensive treaty can be reached in Copenhagen and anticipates a list of "rich country targets" and more clarity on goals from the likes of India and China.

The United States was the world's biggest carbon emitter until it was overtaken by China in 2006, according to the Global Carbon Project, a consortium of leading climate scientists.

In order to limit warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a threshold widely adopted as safe, scientists say emissions by industrialized nations must fall by 25-40 percent by 2020 over 1990 levels.

Gold hit exactly 1,174 dollars an ounce in late trading on the London Bullion Market. It later pulled back slightly to stand at 1,170.32 dollars.

"Gold reached new highs as the dollar continued its decline," said ODL Markets analysts in a note to clients.

The dollar slid against the euro Monday on concerns that the Federal Reserve may keep emergency stimulus measures in place for a while longer, traders said. Comments by a US Federal Reserve official that he would prefer to keep the central bank's asset-buying programme active beyond its current cut-off date pushed the dollar lower, analysts said.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said an extension of the programme, widely considered a negative factor for the US currency, would give more flexibility to US policymakers.

"Central bank rhetoric provided fresh incentive" to push the dollar lower, said Jane Foley, analyst at online trading firm Forex.com.

"Gold prices printed another fresh high on the back of dollar weakness with Bullard's comments promoting the discussion of medium-term inflation potential, though economic data continues to indicate a absence of price pressures," Foley added.

The program, operated out of the US Joint Special Operations Command, "is so 'compartmentalized' that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence," an unnamed source with direct knowledge of the program told The Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill.

Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, is also allegedly involved in intelligence collection for a drone bombing campaign in the country.

Scahill's report added: "A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. 'We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period,' the official said. 'There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.' The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. 'This is a parallel operation to the CIA,' said the source. 'They are two separate beasts.'"

A Blackwater spokesman told The Nation that none of its forces are operating in Pakistan. However, a "former senior executive at Blackwater" told Scahill that Xe's mercs are indeed working in Pakistan, sometimes employed by the country's government to operate alongside soldiers. The arrangement allows the Pakistani government to deny any U.S. military presence in the country, while allowing them to tap former U.S. special forces members for high-risk missions.

Scahill added that the CIA is also employing the firm in parallel operations.

"Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," Scahill's source reportedly said. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality. They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"

During the Bush administration, the JSOC was reportedly being commanded by the vice president's office, effectively making them Dick Cheney's own "executive assassination squad," according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

President Obama's top official on the occupation of Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, oversaw the JSOC from September 2003 to August 2008.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, Scahill reported.

Read Scahill's full report.

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Unfortunately for one Fox affiliate, this was neither.

During a Friday broadcast, MyFox Chicago ran a graphic that apparently showed Sarah Palin enjoying a surge in support among Republicans in her quest to run against President Obama in 2012.

According to a recent Fox news poll, her backing for the GOP nomination has swelled to 70 percent among party voters, anchor Byron Harlan said.

According to the poll, the other top candidates for a 2012 bid on the Republican ticket are Mike Huckabee, with 63 percent and Mitt Romney with 60 percent.

Wait, that's 193 percent. Isn't the purpose of a pie chart to show how 100 percent of something would be divided?

The numbers came from Republican respondents to a recent Fox News opinion poll [PDF link], as pointed out by Think Progress.

The document produced by the poll does not present Republican favorability ratings with a pie chart. Instead, respondents were simply asked if they held a favorable view of certain public figures.

Atop the list of names sampled, Oprah Winfrey claimed the highest rating at 61 percent. Among Republicans, her favorability is just 46 percent.

Palin's overall placement on the list was second with a rating of 47 percent.

This video is from MyFox Chicago, broadcast Nov. 22, 2009.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman says he will never let any form of public option—opt-out, trigger or otherwise—through the Senate, citing budget concerns. This—despite CBO estimates showing the health reform bill reducing the deficit over 10 years—from a senator who has thrown billions at boondoggles throughout his career.

Keep in mind that the Democrats don’t need Lieberman to actually vote for the bill. They simply need him to vote with the party to end debate. It’s for situations like this that the Democrats have allowed Lieberman to keep his committee chairmanship and protected him from retribution despite his many betrayals. Because on the big votes—you know, the things Democrats have spent decades fighting for—he’s supposed to hold his nose and deliver.

Something, it seems, he rarely does. The Wall Street Journal speculates that if Lieberman won’t bend, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will. Or maybe the Democrats will finally do something about the shameless opportunist in their midst.  —PZS

Wall Street Journal:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, speaking in that trademark sonorous baritone, utters a simple statement that translates into real trouble for Democratic leaders: “I’m going to be stubborn on this.”

Stubborn, he means, in opposing any health-care overhaul that includes a “public option,” or government-run health-insurance plan, as the current bill does. His opposition is strong enough that Mr. Lieberman says he won’t vote to let a bill come to a final vote if a public option is included.

Probe for a catch or caveat in that opposition, and none is visible. Can he support a public option if states could opt out of the plan, as the current bill provides? “The answer is no,” he says in an interview from his Senate office. “I feel very strongly about this.” How about a trigger, a mechanism for including a public option along with a provision saying it won’t be used unless private insurance plans aren’t spreading coverage far and fast enough? No again.

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Top officials at the meeting, the ninth gathering of Obama's national security team to review Afghan strategy since August, included Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

An administration official said Monday could "possibly" be the last time Obama will consult his team before making an announcement, though he cautioned "that's not something we can say definitively."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters there would be no announcement before the weekend, but said Obama could reach a decision on the biggest strategic move of his young administration sooner.

"It may be tonight, it may be over the course of the next several days," Gibbs said.

Attending Monday's war meeting via videoconference were two men very much at odds over the decision: General Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Karl Eikenberry, US ambassador in Kabul.

McChrystal has asked for around 40,000 more US troops, cautioning that the intensifying Taliban insurgency could win out if he does not get the reinforcements within a year. Currently, there are 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan.

In leaked cables earlier this month, Eikenberry, a retired army general who commanded US forces in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, warned against sending more troops until Afghan President Hamid Karzai gets a grip on the rampant corruption in his administration.

While Karzai has earned the opprobrium of the international community since a fraud-tainted election in August highlighted the massive levels of official graft in Afghanistan, his inauguration speech Thursday generally won praise.

He pledged to clean up corruption, eradicate drug production and trafficking, work towards ending a Taliban-led insurgency, and see that Afghan security forces can take over from international forces in five years.

Clinton, attending the inauguration, sought to turn the page and hailed the speech as a "new starting point" for the war-torn country.

But some of America's allies in the war, now in its ninth year, are no longer willing to wait for the tide to turn: Canada and the Netherlands have announced plans to pull their troops out in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

Gates in a speech in Canada Friday said US forces could provide a "sustainable" replacement in the south for the departing Dutch and Canadian troops.

But he called on other allies to step forward, saying the Afghan effort will "require more commitment, more sacrifice, and more patience from the community of free nations."

Obama also faces opposition to the dispatch of more troops from members of his own Democratic Party who question the wisdom of deploying additional soldiers.

Polls show the American public is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the war, and some fear a deepening military commitment could sidetrack his presidency, as Vietnam did Lyndon Johnson's in the 1960s.

But the military strongly favors a so-called surge, and Obama risks being denounced by Republican critics as weak on national security if he refuses McChrystal's request.

More than 800 US soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan and the number of casualties is rising. October was the deadliest month for US forces there since 2001 and another four US fatalities were reported Monday.

In an interview broadcast by CBS on Monday, Joey's mother Mieko said that medical marijuana essentially saved her son's life, helping to reignite his appetite after he'd lost interest in food and began "wasting away."

When Joey had deteriorated to just 46 pounds, Mieko decided that something had to be done. "You could see the bones in his chest," she told ABC. "He was going to die."

"At first I did some research, and I found a doctor who actually had a protocol for medical marijuana in children diagnosed with autism," Mieko said.

All it took was one batch of marijuana-laced brownies to bring his hunger back. But it wasn't just the boy's appetite that changed, it was his overall demeanor as well.

"My son had self-injurious behaviors," she told He was extremely aggressive, he would run out of our house," she said. "He was a danger to himself and others."

After eating the brownies his aggressive temperament subsided, she said.

There is no evidence that marijuana cures autism, CBS noted. "The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes legalization of marijuana, but supports more research," correspondent Hattie Kauffman added.

This video was broadcast by CBS on Monday, Nov. 23, 2009.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

However, the reality is there already is someone standing between you and your doctor: health insurance companies. Single mother Ellen Hayden knows this from experience. After losing her mother at the age of 7 from breast cancer, Hayden has done everything she can to get regular mammograms. Following an abnormal mammogram, her doctor recommended that she have an MRI. After the scan, her insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, refused to pay for the procedure and is also refusing to pay for a follow-up second MRI her doctor has suggested.

Ned Helms, a former health insurance industry executive who now works at the University of New Hampshire, told Sea Coast Online that this is Hayden’s case is an example of “insurance people” getting between patients and their doctors:

“It’s understandable that this is an emotional issue because most patients believe that ‘nothing is going to stand between me and what I want to get done,’” said Ned Helms, a former health insurance industry executive and director of the N.H. Institute of Health Policy and Practice at the University of New Hampshire. [...]

“We have this notion in our political debate and popular culture that we can’t have reform because that means that government bureaucrats will make decisions but we already have insurance people playing that role,” said Helms

Helms went on to say that one of the major obstacles to attaining proper reform is the way insurance companies often “write their own rules for the road.” Late last year, former Cigna executive Wendell Potter left his 15-year career at the major health insurer and joined the fight for universal health care. He told Bill Moyers last July that politicians who warn about the government getting between patients and their doctors are “ideologically aligned with the [health insurance] industry.”