Sheila Casey

Google map constantly updates with locations of swine flu cases

The pink ones mark suspected cases of swine flu, purple marks confirmed cases.  If there is no black dot on the marker, the patient died.

The constantly updating map is here.

Army psychologist objects to participating in torture, a few days later she's dead

Alyssa Peterson worked only two nights in a torture facility in northwestern Iraq called "the cage," before objecting and being reassigned. 

A few days later, on September 15, 2003, she died from her own gun in what the Army is considering a suicide.  Her personal notebook, which was found with her body, was redacted (the contents not released). 

From Editor and Publisher:

"Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."

According to the official report on her death released the following year, she had earlier been "reprimanded" for showing "empathy" for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of that report is: "She said that she did not know how to be two people; she ... could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."

Peterson was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and was sent to suicide prevention training. "But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle," the documents disclose.

Her parents, who live in northern Arizona, stated that they never received any official documents corroborating the report issued by the Army. 

Alyssa was 27. 

Why won't the Army reveal the "techniques" that Alyssa objected to?  Why was her personal notebook redacted?   What are they afraid of?

The rich coughed up more dough under Reagan and Nixon than they will under Obama (graph)

Source: MoveOn.org

Who would have guessed that the most impassioned denunciation of torture would come from Fox News?

This clip of Shepard Smith moved me to tears.  After all the bullshit, all the lies, all the equivocating and justifying of those who intentionally inflicted extreme torment on those who have not been convicted of any crime -- after all that, to hear one man say definitively that "We are Americans, we do NOT torture," it was a glorious thing to hear.

In contrast, Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, comes off as lacking several crucial body parts:  spine, brain and heart. FDD is lousy with heartless neocons: Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich. 

I hope Smith is not right now being tortured by Roger Ailes for speaking the truth.

Thank you Shepard Smith.

 

Journalist bets he can stand waterboarding for 15 seconds (Video)

A Playboy journalist bet he could withstand 15 seconds of waterboarding by a trained US soldier.  Watch to see how it turned out.

If Spain used rendition - as the US does - we could see the Bush 6 kidnapped off an American street and into a Spanish prison

Published in the May, 2009 Rock Creek Free Press

An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.  Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General  to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges.  As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back. 

Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.   

The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration.  The AG also said "If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn't going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water boarded suspects.  Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture, because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the U.S would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.

The 1984 Convention Against Torture states:  “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating. 

Who sat on Harman's wiretap for four years and why is it just now being exposed?

California Rep. and Democrat Jane Harman is apparently guilty of treason, it was reported last night.  The story is reported by Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly here.

Knowing that all high ranking political players are kept in line by bribes and blackmail, I can only assume that Harman has now in some way disobeyed her handlers, and voila!  this incriminating tape from October 2005 suddenly surfaces.

From Congressional Quarterly:

"Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Jeff Stein addresses the obvious issue:  Why are we just now hearing about this? but does nothing to calm my suspicion that they've been sitting on these tapes until they needed them to take out Harman for some reason:

The New "Legal" Arguments from Obama's DOJ Are Worse Than Bush's

Many of my friends, even fairly well informed people, fell for Obama's charm and vague promises and collapsed in tears on election night, believing that we would now get "change" and now had reason to "hope." It is understandable to want a Daddy figure to come swooping in out of no where to rescue us, but unfortunately there was never any good reason to believe that Obama was that person.

One can settle into a movie theatre and be swept away to a land of make-believe:  ancient Japan, 19th century Wyoming, or a gritty story of inner city Baltimore.  We silently exult when the hero escapes the bad guy and weep when he dies at the end in his lover's arms.  But we won't be shocked when we see him alive and well at the Oscars, for we know it was just theatre. We know that if we saw him dancing with joy or sneering with contempt on the silver screen, it wasn't that he was really feeling those emotions.  He was acting.

Gary Caradori: Killed to stop his investigation into government pedophiles

In the first two pages of The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, by former Republican Nebraska state Senator John W. Decamp, the reason Caradori was killed is quickly established:

Highly engineered explosives found in WTC rubble

This incredible discovery has been published in a peer-reviewed science journal.  Lead author Niels H. Harrit was interviewed for ten minutes on Danish television, and gave a concise and compelling explanation about the importance of this finding.  Watch him here:

As reported by Raw Story:

A team of scientists claim to have unearthed startling data from dust and debris gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.

In a study published by the Open Chemical Physics Journal -- a peer-reviewed, scientific publication -- Steven E. Jones and Niels Harrit level a stark allegation: that within the dust and rubble of the World Trade Center towers lays evidence of "a highly engineered explosive," contrary to all federal studies of the collapses.

"We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center," reads the paper's abstract. "One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)."

Dr. Stephen Jones explains what "peer reviewed" means here:

Since the days of Sir Isaac Newton, Science has proceeded through the publication of peer-reviewed papers. Peer-review means a thorough reading, commentary and even challenge before publication by "peers", that is, other PhD's and professors. This paper was thoroughly peer-reviewed with several pages of tough comments that required of our team months of additional experiments and studies. It was the toughest peer-review I've ever had, including three papers for which I was first author in NATURE. (Please note that Prof. Harrit is first author on this paper.) We sought an established journal that would allow us a long paper (this paper is 25 pages long) with many color images and graphs. Such a scientific journal is not easy to find. Page charges are common for scientific journals these days, and are typically paid by the University or by the first or second author (as is the case with this paper) or by an external grant.

A peer-reviewed journal is also called a "refereed" journal. Peer-reviewers are almost always anonymous for scientific publications like this -- that is standard in the scientific world. While authors commonly recommend potential peer-reviewers, editors choose the referees and usually pick at least one or two reviewers that the authors did not mention -- and that is almost certainly the case with this paper (based on commentary we received from the reviewers). In the end, all the reviewers -- who were selected by the editor(s) -- approved publication. Thus, the paper was subjected to peer review by the editor or editors, and it passed the peer-review process.

Debunkers may raise all sorts of objections on forums, such as "Oh, it's just paint" or "the aluminum is bound up in kaolin." We have answered those questions in the paper, and shown them to be nonsense, but you have to read to find the answers. I may also provide answers here and in emails, often quoting from the paper to show that the answers are already in it.

Here's what you need to know (especially if you are not a scientist): unless an objector actually publishes his or her objection in a peer-reviewed established journal, (yes that would include Bentham Scientific journals), then the objection is not considered serious in the scientific community.  You should not worry about non-published objections either. 

So how do you, as a non-scientist, discern whether the arguments are valid or not? You should first ask, "is the objection published in an established peer-reviewd journal?" If not, you can and should say -- "I will wait to see this formally published in a refereed scientific journal. Until then, the published peer-reviewed work by Harrit et al. stands."