Guardian – Nato air strikes killed 72 civilians in Libya last year, Human Rights Watch has said, accusing the western alliance of failing to acknowledge the scope of collateral damage it caused during the campaign that helped to oust Muammar Gaddafi. In a report based on investigations at bombing sites during and after the conflict, the New York-based HRW said Nato strikes killed 20 women and 24 children. It called on the alliance to compensate civilian victims and investigate attacks that may have been unlawful. Read Article
The Australian – CLAIMS that some of Australia’s leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to “more secure buildings” following explicit threats. Read Article
BBC – Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden’s suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned. The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez. In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture. Read Article
Guardian – A government scientist sacked for exposing the dangers to firefighters from the caustic air at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11 got her job back on Monday. A federal court ordered that Cate Jenkins, a chemist at the Environmental Protection Agency, be reinstated to her job with back pay. Her lawyer said the decision, although based on matters of legal process, amounted to vindication for Jenkins’s claims that the EPA had covered up the danger posed to first responders and others in lower Manhattan from the asbestos and highly corrosive dust that rose from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Read Article
WND – On the day the Los Angeles County coroner released Breitbart’s autopsy report, a photographic technician at the coroner’s office died suddenly of suspicious causes. In addition, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., just three weeks before Breitbart’s death – where he promised to unveil “damning” new video evidence of Barack Obama’s radical past that would change the election – Breitbart gave WND details of his upcoming revelations. He claimed to WND that he had a video showing radical Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama at Harvard planning revolution in the United States. Read article
DailyMail – The German government has been forced to hand over hitherto secret documents that expose the flaws of the euro – and the misgivings of European politicians – in the years before it became a reality. Der Spiegel news magazine made a successful request for the release of the euro files at a time when the odds on Greece quitting the common currency within 18 months rise to 75 per cent and the chances of a complete shattering of the eurozone have never been higher. Read article
Guardian – A would-be “underwear bomber” involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged. The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker. The plot, which the White House said on Monday had involved the seizing of an underwear bomb by authorities in the Middle East sometime in the last 10 days, had caused alarm throughout the US. Read Article
WashingtonTimes – The National Archives and Records Administration has lost track of dozens of boxes of confidential and secret government files at its records center just outside of Washington, the latest in a series of such incidents spanning more than a decade. The missing classified materials include four boxes of top-secret restricted files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as records from several U.S. Navy offices, documents obtained by The Washington Times show. Read article
Newstatesman – The illegal eavesdropping on well-known people by the News of the World is said to be Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate. But is it the crime by which Murdoch ought to be known? In his native land, Australia, Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper. Australia is the world’s first murdochracy, in which smear by media is power. The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. Read Article
Digital Journal – Pentagon officials recently disclosed to the Associated Press (AP) that they could not find any photo or video evidence to confirm that Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed in the Navy Seal raid in Pakistan a year ago. Read Article
RT – Federal agents announced on Tuesday that they successfully thwarted plans to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio. What was left out of most reports, however, was that the FBI was instrumental in plotting the potential attack. As is the case with most terrorist attacks revealed by the FBI, from the very beginning of the alleged crime until this week’s arrests, the charges introduced by federal agents were orchestrated by undercover agent provocateurs. Five men were arrested in the Cleveland area on Monday for charges of conspiracy and the use of explosive materials. According to the criminal complaint released this week by the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, prosecutors link Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; and Douglas Wright, 26, to an anti-government plot that involved bringing a large bridge in the region crashing down with the aid of at least two accomplices. Read Article
The Australian – CLAIMS that some of Australia’s leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to “more secure buildings” following explicit threats. Read Article
Morning Star – Anti-arms trade campaigners condemned the “hypocritical” British government today over its continued sale of weapons to repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Campaign Against Arms Trade (Caat) said that while the Foreign Office had praised the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring it continued to sell armaments to regimes such as Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Foreign Secretary William Hague launched the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) annual Human Rights and Democracy report on Monday for 2011. Read Article
TheGlobeAndMail – A Canadian spymaster’s business card was recovered last year in a trove of intelligence documents in Libya, providing a physical link between Canadian security agencies and Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s spy services. William “Jack” Hooper, a globetrotting deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was apparently among the Western intelligence officials who had cultivated ties with Libya, raising new questions about possible Canadian involvement in the arrests and interrogations of Arab-Canadians in their homelands following the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. Read article
ABC – One of al Qaeda’s most prominent radical clerics may have been killed in a drone strike last year, but his words appear to have lived on in a new issue of al Qaeda’s English-language magazine in which he calls for biological attacks against the U.S. “The use of chemical and biological weapons against population centers is allowed and is strongly recommended,” U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki is quoted as saying in one of two new issues of the Inspire magazine. Read Article
Comment – As our Editorial of 2nd October 2011 pointed out Mr al-Awaki certainly had an interesting life/lives. Not only has he been killed numerous times by the USA, but he also was entertained at the Pentagon back in February 2002, just 5 months after the 9/11 attacks. What a guy.
BBC – MI6 officer Gareth Williams was “on the balance of probabilities” unlawfully killed, coroner Fiona Wilcox has said. In a narrative verdict, she said it was unlikely he got into the bag his body was found in by himself, but doubted his death would ever be explained. The 31-year-old code-breaker from Anglesey was found at his central London flat in August 2010. Read article
RT – The opposition fighters in Syria might be getting help from a different source – in the form of training from the US private security firm, formerly known as the notorious Blackwater group. Security circles reportedly confirmed the information which was released earlier by Wikileaks – that the company is sending mercenaries from Iraq into Syria. RT discusses this with Christoph R. Horstel – who’s a government and business consultant. He joins RT from Germany.
Nature – Advocates of international trade and collaboration in space technology thought that they were making headway against rules that restrict both in the name of US security. But on the same day that the US government released a long-awaited report that recommends easing those regulations, allegations surfaced that a NASA director may have broken the rules when he gave foreign nationals access to an agency research facility. It is not yet clear whether the allegations will strengthen the case for preserving current restrictions. Read article
CNN – Nina Rhodes-Hughes wants the world to know that, despite what history says, Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Kennedy was murdered a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel. “What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right,” Rhodes-Hughes said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups.” Read article
AP – The military is under-reporting the number of times that Afghan soldiers and police open fire on American and other foreign troops. The U.S.-led coalition routinely reports each time an American or other foreign soldier is killed by an Afghan in uniform. But The Associated Press has learned it does not report insider attacks in which the Afghan wounds — or misses — his U.S. or allied target. It also doesn’t report the wounding of troops who were attacked alongside those who were killed. Read Article
The Guardian – The Google engineer behind the collection of wireless data by Street View cars told at least two colleagues – including a senior manager – about the controversial plans before it was released, a US regulator has found. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in a report that the Google engineer told colleagues in 2007 that his Street View programme could collect private information including emails and text messages. Read article
NY Times – In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers. It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.” Read article
BBC – The body of Libya’s former Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem has been found in the River Danube in Vienna, Austrian police say. A spokesman said there were no signs of violence to his body. The former prime minister, 69, worked as a consultant for a Vienna-based company. He apparently left his home early on Sunday, police said. Read article
NY Times – THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested. Read Article
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