By PETE YOST
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Government secrecy by almost any measure is expanding and little is being done to stop it, according to a coalition of 67 organizations favoring greater openness.

From classified information to the president’s use of the state secrets privilege, the lack of disclosure should be a growing concern to the public and the Congress, said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, which compiled a report using mostly the government’s own figures.

“While some of the increased secrecy is attributable to a reaction to 9/11 and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is also a significant expansion of the power of the executive at the expense of the public, the courts, and Congress,” McDermott said Friday. “The executive branch seems to believe that something is kept under wraps solely on its say’so, whether it is legitimately so or not.”

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the administration’s goal is to effectively protect classified materials and to enforce laws and regulations related to the handling of sensitive information.

From 2003-2005, the FBI made 143,074 requests for telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and others to turn over data, the coalition noted. The requests came in the form of national security letters, which are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval. In 2000, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 such requests.

read more HERE

Tina Turner
“Let’s Stay Together”

By Nat Hentoff

If and when there’s the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA’s secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament-as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey’s Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin’s Press) and Charlie Savage’s just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world-or else governments wouldn’t let them in.

Read full article at the Village Voice

Pay attention boys and girls……….

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians- military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They-re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

More at the TimesOnline

By Matthew Bigg
Reuters

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Felix could become a hurricane Saturday night or on Sunday in the Caribbean and may be a Category 3 hurricane by the middle of next week, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Saturday.

Felix had maximum sustained winds of near 70 mph (110 kph) and was moving west Saturday afternoon after skirting the Caribbean island of Grenada overnight. It would pass near or to the north of the islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao Saturday night or early Sunday morning.

“Felix could become a hurricane later tonight or on Sunday,” the hurricane center said.

A projection on the Weather Underground Web site for 8 a.m. Sunday showed Felix becoming a Category 1 hurricane on the five’stage Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane strength, meaning it would have sustained winds of at least 74 mph (119 kph).

“We are forecasting it to be a Category 3 hurricane in the northwestern Caribbean Sea by the middle of the week,” said forecaster Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

By Dean Yates
Reuters

So glad that the surge is working and that General Betrayus’ report will show that civilian deaths are….wait a minute…never mind. - JS

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Civilian deaths from violence in Iraq rose in August, with 1,773 people killed, government data showed on Saturday, just days before the U.S. Congress gets a slew of reports on President George W. Bush’s war strategy.

The civilian death toll was up 7 percent from 1,653 people killed in July, according to figures from various ministries.

Nearly a quarter of the August total comprised 411 people killed in massive truck bombings against the minority Yazidi community in northern Iraq on August 14.

Without the Yazidi attack, the death toll would still be higher than the June number of 1,227, which had been the lowest monthly total since a U.S.-backed crackdown began in February.

The figures showed 87 Iraqi security forces were killed in August, a big drop from the previous month when 224 were killed.

Bush, under pressure from opposition Democrats and some senior Republicans to begin pulling U.S. troops from Iraq, urged Congress on Friday to wait for the assessments on Iraq’s security and political situation before making any judgments.

“The stakes in Iraq are too high and the consequences too grave for our security here at home to allow politics to harm the mission of our men and women in uniform,” Bush said in a statement after visiting military officials at the Pentagon.

The U.S. military says sectarian attacks have fallen since 30,000 more American troops deployed under Bush’s plan to give Iraqi leaders “breathing space” to foster reconciliation between warring Shi’ite and Sunni Arabs.

read more HERE

Craig resigns. He plans on spending more time travelling….by air…..with lots of lay overs.

The legal battle over the rights of the hundreds of men held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay has lasted more than five years, including two rounds in the Supreme Court. Now, as the parties prepare for their next Supreme Court confrontation this fall, the arguments have come full circle to where they began: over the role of the federal courts.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which Congress passed in its final weeks under Republican control in order to negate the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling on behalf of a Guantánamo detainee, stripped all courts of jurisdiction “to hear or consider” challenges to any alien detainee’s continued detention. In a surprising about-face the day after it concluded its term in June, the Supreme Court accepted renewed appeals on behalf of two groups of detainees and agreed to decide whether the measure is constitutional.

Lawyers for the detainees and for dozens of organizations and individuals supporting them filed their briefs late last month. Two dozen briefs poured into the court. The government’s brief and those of any supporting groups are due by Oct. 9, with the argument likely to be scheduled less than two months later.

More at the International Herald Tribune

I can hardly wait to see what they come up with this month. Bet me they’ll go along with whatever Shitforbrains wants……including the extra billions.

President Bush’s strategy in Iraq isn’t working, a Democratic congresswoman said Saturday as she repeated calls to start withdrawing U.S. troops.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky addresses the “Take Back America” conference last year in Washington D.C.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois, who visited Iraq with a congressional delegation in August, delivered her party’s weekly radio address.

She said this year’s buildup in U.S. troops “failed to achieve its main goal — reducing the violence so that progress could be made on key political benchmarks.”

Schakowsky said Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Iraq war, told the delegation that the United States will be in Iraq for another nine or 10 years. “That was not the timetable I nor most Americans had in mind,” the congresswoman said.

More at CNN

Things you don’t need to know!

1. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

2. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

3. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

4. The average person’s left hand does 56% of the
typing.

5. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both
eyes.

6. There are more chickens than people in the world.

7. Two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New
Jersey.

8. The longest one’syllable word in the English
language is “screeched.”

9. On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying
over the parliament building is an American flag.

10. All of the clocks in the movie “Pulp Fiction” are
stuck on 4:20.

(more…)