Neil Katz

HARDIN, Mont. (CBS/AP) This is the strange story of how American Police Force, a little known company which claims to specialize in training military and security forces overseas, has seemingly taken control of a $27 million, never-used jail, and a rural Montana town's nonexistent police force.

After arriving in this tiny city with three Mercedes SUVs marked with the logo of a police department that has never existed, representatives of the obscure California security company said preparations were under way to take over Hardin's jail, which has no prisoners.

Significant obstacles remain - including a lack of any contracts to acquire prisoners from other jails or other states.

And on Friday came the revelation the company's operating agreement for the facility has yet to be validated - two weeks after city leaders first unveiled what they said was a signed agreement.

Still, some Hardin leaders said the deal to turn over the 464-bed jail remained on track.

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Fred Reed

All God's Chillun Gottun Gotta Have Structure. Most'em, Leastways

People seem to need an overarching explanation of things—of origins, meaning, purpose, and destiny. Christianity provided these things for a long time but, at the close of the Enlightenment, was losing its luster among the educated. Too much in Christianity just didn’t make sense in light of continuing discoveries. The sciences were more compelling, and a better fit for the changing mood of the times.

When the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, it offered a plausible and rational alternative to God Did It. Evidence in its favor existed. Selective breeding of animals greatly changed them. That this might have occurred by natural selection made sense.

But natural selection did not explain where life came from in the first place. The notion of abiogenesis—that life began by accident in remote primal seas—was tacked on to Darwin. Scientists passed sparks through flasks of chemicals hoped to represent the primal seas, and molecules of compounds usually found in living things were discovered afterward. This was exceedingly thin evidence, but it pointed in the desired direction, and was accepted.

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Ian Williams

[Judge Richard Goldstone (l), head of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special mission investigating Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay prior to the Council’s Sept. 29, 2009 meeting in Geneva at which Goldstone presented his findings. (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini)]

It is a tribute to the legal meticulousness of Richard Goldstone and his colleagues on the U.N. Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) fact-finding mission that the Israeli government is so obsessed with their report. It can see prosecutions of IDF and Knesset members just over the horizon. Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers have raucously complained to Britain and France for not voting against the Council resolution that accepted the report, and to Russia and China for supporting it. And, of course, they keep confusing Obama administration criticism of the mandate the Council gave with criticism of the report itself.

In fact, Britain, France and the U.S. united in telling Israel to set up an impartial inquiry. Indeed, to their credit, Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy apparently tried to trade a “no” vote for Israeli pledges to hold an inquiry, lift the blockade and stop settlement activity and evictions. In the flood of personal attacks on Goldstone and his mission, neither Washington, nor London, nor Paris has seriously challenged the substance of his report or the integrity of his mission, let alone his own personal integrity.

Israel’s Western allies have been reduced to inanities, lamenting the mission’s failure to hear the case the Israelis refused to make. “Because Israel did not cooperate with the Mission, which we regret, the report lacks an authoritative Israeli perspective on the events in question, so crucial to determining the legality of actions,” declared the British envoy in Geneva, who should have been fully aware that it was precisely with that eventual excuse in mind that Israel refused to cooperate.

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Chris Floyd

On Friday, Tony Blair appeared before the "Chilcot Inquiry," the panel of hoary, lugubrious Establishment worthies set up to "examine" -- with extreme circumspection, exquisite politeness, and all due reverence to authority -- the "origins" of Britain's involvement in the mass-murder spree known as the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The event could be summed up entirely in a single headline:

Tony Blair to a million dead Iraqis, and the grieving survivors of British soldiers: Fuck you.

Blair's appearance before the panel has occasioned some entirely misplaced and uninformed kudos from some in the American progressiverse, who laud the Brits for holding such a bold inquiry. "It's the kind of thing you would never see in the United States," they say, forgetting, if they ever knew, such minor matters as the Watergate hearings -- which actually had the power to send people to jail for lying, unlike the completely powerless Chilcot panel -- or the Watergate grand jury, which named a sitting president as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a criminal case, or even the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton by the United States Senate, which I believe happened well within the adulthood of at least some of our leading progressives.

In any case, there was never any chance that the well-wadded Chilcot worthies were going to lay a glove on former PM turned corporate shill and Catholic saint-in-waiting. Blair was never going to do anything but repeat the bluster -- and outright lies -- he has regurgitated ad infinitum about his blood-soaked adventure with George W. Bush -- and the Chilcotniks were never going to call him on his bullshit. [Blair's knowing and deliberate lies are thoroughly detailed here.]

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Aleksandr Shustov

In a number of regards, 2009 was a watershed year for the Central Asian republics which gained independence 18 years ago as the result of the disintegration of the USSR. No doubt, the key 2009 developments will be affecting the situation in the region in 2010 and beyond. Some of the political and economic decisions made last year are going to define the future of the Central Asian republics both in the nearest and more distant future.

1. Escalation in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan

The return of some of the armed formations of the former united Tajic opposition, which were forced to leave Pakistan due to the intensification of fighting in the Swat valley, to Tajikistan's Tavildara Province became a prologue to a series of armed conflicts and terrorist outbreaks in Central Asian republics. The formations clashed with the government forces in July and the insurgents were largely routed by the end of August. An Uzbek border checkpoint came under fire in Hanabad in late May, and later several kamikaze attacks took place in Andijon. Two groups of insurgents were eliminated in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan in July. Several attempts on clerics and officers of law-enforcement agencies were reported in Uzbekistan, and a number of armed groups were eliminated in Tashkent in September. In October a group of 8 guerrillas managed to fight its way from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan but was subsequently suppressed in the Vorukh enclave. The above range of events highlights the threat of further destabilization in Central Asia.

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Ellen Brown

We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Rubin/Geithner). The bodies left strewn on the battleground could include your pension fund and 401K.

The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.

In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm’s reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Rubin protégé. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury “Goldman Sachs South.”

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Stephen Lendman

The response to Obama's first State of the Union address was predictable. Democrats loved it. Republicans were skeptical to critical, while the media tried to have it both ways.

The New York Times called his tone "colloquial, even relaxed" in quoting him stating "the worst of the storm has passed," then the Times saying "Americans are concerned, even angry." He urged Democrats not to "run for the hills," called for an end to "tired old battles," and focus(ed) intently on the issue of most immediate concern to the nation, jobs."

A Times editorial headlined "The Second Year," saying

"The union is in a state of deep and justifiable anxiety about jobs and mortgages and two long, bloody wars. President Obama did not create these problems, and none could be solved in one year. (He) used his (address) to show the country what he has learned and how he intends to govern in the next three years. (It) was a reminder (of his ability) to inspire with a grand vision and the simple truth frankly spoken. It was a long time coming."

A Wall Street Journal editorial headlined "Staying the Course (but) with a little more humility, and a touch more bipartisanship....But whether this outreach is anything more than rhetoric will depend on a change of policy." It "could be a long year," concluded The Journal.

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Chris Floyd

As the overflow of pundit effluent after the State of the Union speech continues to sulfurize the political air, Glenn Greenwald brings up a background point that we have been hammering on about here for years: i.e., the fact that the President of the United States claims the arbitrary right to kill anyone on earth -- including U.S. citizens -- without charges, without trial, without warning.

As I first wrote in November 2001, George W. Bush proclaimed this divine power shortly after 9/11. And as we have often noted (here, for example), Barack Obama has reaffirmed this megalomaniacal principle. Greenwald focuses on the latest, and one of the most brazen, assertions of the doctrine of presidential murder: the Obama Administration's casual compiling of "hit lists" of people in Yemen that it wants to assassinate, including at least three U.S. citizens. (Fittingly enough, one of the first people murdered by Bush's universal murder racket was an American citizen in Yemen. Continuity, continuity, in all things continuity!)

Greenwald notes the rather glaring fact that Obama's open embrace of this murderous principle has occasioned not the slightest protest, debate or even discussion amongst the political and media elite. He also points to rather different view of these matters: Abraham Lincoln's General Order 100, issued in the middle of an actual civil war on American soil, in which thousands of people were dying every week.

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Jim Hightower

"Two legal perversions are at work here. First, the Court has equated the freedom to spend money with the freedom of speech. But if money is speech, those with the most money get the most speech. That's plutocracy, not democracy, and it's totally alien to our Constitution, as well as a gross distortion of the crucial principle of one person-one vote."

Despite 234 years of progress toward the American ideal of equality for all, we still have to battle unfairness.

How happy, then, to learn that a handful of our leaders in Washington took bold and forceful action last week to lift another group of downtrodden Americans from the pits of injustice, helping them gain more political and governmental power. I refer, of course, to corporations.

Say what? Corporations should get more power over our elected officials?

"Free the corporate money," cried the movement's leaders, demanding that America sever the few legal restraints that remain on corporate efforts to buy our elections. "Si, se puede," chanted these assertive champions of corporate supremacy -- "Yes, we can!"

So, they did. "They" being the five doctrinaire corporatists who now form the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Let's remember their names: Sam Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. These five men, on their own whim, have executed a black-robed coup against the American people's democratic authority.

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John Pilger

With US troops in control of their country, the outlook for the people of Haiti is bleak

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured "formal approval" from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to "secure" roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in a US naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now a US military base and relief flights have been rerouted to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US air force dropped bottled water to people suffering dehydration.

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Mehdi Hasan

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, our prime minister insisted that he didn’t want war – yet he rushed headlong into it anyway, based on a hunch. Here, experts he ignored at the time judge him in a way the Chilcot inquiry may fail to do.

On 25 February 2003, less than a month before the invasion of Iraq, and in one of his most important speeches as prime minister, Tony Blair stood up before the House of Commons to deliver a statement on Saddam Hussein and the crisis in the Middle East.

“I detest his regime," he said, in a passionate address to sceptical MPs on both sides of the house. "But even now, he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." He added, solemnly: "I do not want war."

It is perhaps on this single Commons statement that the entire case against Blair rests. Is it true that he did "not want war"? Could Saddam have saved his regime? As the Conservative former prime minister John Major - who supported the war - remarked in a BBC radio interview in January: "The suspicion arises that this was more about regime change than it was about weapons of mass destruction."

“Regime change" is a euphemism for the unilateral and often violent overthrow of a ­foreign government. Regime change is illegal under international law - and has become, in recent days and weeks, the chief focus of the Iraq inquiry led by the former Whitehall mandarin John Chilcot.

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Craig Murray

One of these two was an honest man. The other one caused his death.

Lord Goldsmith is partial to war. He likes to sit his well-padded bottom on comfortable leather chairs in expensive offices, and be flattered into agreeing that a bit of war would not be a bad idea.

Baha Mousa was a very quiet man, not partial to war at all. Unfortunately he is the one who got killed.

I have a policy of not using atrocity photos, not even on the issue of torture and extraordinary rendition. But the contrast between the easy glibness of Goldsmith and the consequences of his actions needs to be rammed home. The media seems imprssed by his 248 pages of well rehearsed verbiage. I am not. http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43803/100127-goldsmith.pdf

To call Lord Goldsmith's evidence yesterday "Partial" is ludicrously polite. It turned on the crucial period in March, when he changed his advice to the view that UNSCR 1441 did indeed give, in itself, sufficient grounds to invade. With no personal experience of ever having negotiated a Security Council Resolution, Goldsmith did this in the teeth of fierce opposition from the FCO Legal Adviser Sir Michael Wood, a world renowned eminence in the subject of use of force and the security council, who had also served for four years in our mission to the United Nations.

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Stewart Dougherty

At certain times, focusing on the big picture is important not just for investment success, but for personal welfare, and even survival. We believe such times are here. It is estimated that 98% of Americans have never held a gold coin in their hands. Yet 100% of Americans regularly handle Federal Reserve Notes. From a contrarian standpoint, the financial message from those two statistics is clear. Even so, gold is much more than money or an investment medium; it stands for liberty and throughout history has facilitated escape and ensured freedom. Never having touched a gold coin is the monetary equivalent to never having breathed fresh air, felt the warmth of sunshine, looked up at the stars or risen from the gutter. Fiat Federal Reserve Notes are becoming nothing more than sewage decomposing in the vast, toxic septic tank of predatory Washington politics, epic Federal Reserve arrogance and error, blatant Wall Street fraud and outright Master Class plunder. Below, we outline America’s troubling and compounding predicament, and urge you to think about how to protect yourself from its consequences, both financially and personally.

Thanks to the endless barrage of feel-good propaganda that daily assaults the American mind, best epitomized a few months ago by the “green shoots,” everything’s-coming-up-roses propaganda touted by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the citizens have no idea how disastrous the country’s fiscal, monetary and economic problems truly are. Nor do they perceive the rapidly increasing risk of a totalitarian nightmare descending upon the American Republic.

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Ron Jacobs

The left needs to organize the unorganized. The working people, the unemployed, the young, and the restless. The right wing has their core group of supporters who organize around fear of the other. The liberals have those who believe in the myth of American equality because they have no class analysis. The Left needs to organize the rest and they need to do so without the Democratic Party. It should be quite clear to almost every left-leaning American by now that the Democrats are nothing more than another wing of the party that works for Wall Street and the Pentagon. To continue to work for and elect their candidates is self-defeating. As the first year of the Obama presidency has clearly shown, not only do the Democrats support the right wing agenda, that support makes it easier for the right wing to put their candidates into power. Why? Because after promising progressive reforms and then failing to deliver, voters tend to either not vote or vote for the right wing candidates out of anger and frustration.

This occurs because the current system provides no alternative. There is no progressive third party or grassroots movement to support such a party. There is not even a grassroots movement that vocalizes the desires of millions for a fair and just society where people’s needs come before Wall Street’s profits and the Pentagon’s wars that help protect and expand those profits. So, the Democrats step in as they have always done and pretend that they are the party that will address these desires. There was a time when such an argument was plausible. From FDR to LBJ, the Democrats were the party that passed many reforms making life better for America’s working people. They even passed bills outlawing racial segregation. Of course, this occurred because of immense pressure from the Left–pressure a hundred times greater than the pressure from America’s right that the Democrats claim has caused them to compromise on virtually every progressive piece of legislation during the current period. Yes, there was a time when that claim could have been made. Today’s Democratic Party however, is not that party.

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Dr Bruno Bandulet

How one of the world’s richest countries collapsed over night – and what we can learn from it.

When I was flying to Iceland in summer 2006 in order to visit the economic miracle near the Arctic Circle and to talk to people of the Issue Bank and of Kaupthing, the biggest private bank, it was utterly unimaginable that this high developed national economy would collapse within a few days in October 2008. Measured against its per capita income Iceland was then richer than the US, Germany and Great Britain. They had an exemplary pension system with capital cover, the state debts amounted to only 27% of GDP, the government’s budget showed a surplus, the creditworthiness of state securities was AAA [triple A, highest creditworthiness], and the low taxes an example for the whole of Europe.

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