Stephen Lendman

In Washington, the more things change, the more they stay the same, or usually get worse. It's true each election cycle, and when Congress enacts "reform," watch out.

Exhibit A:

Obamacare: legislation that rations care and enriches corporate providers.

Exhibit B:

Financial reform, shaping up to be more business as usual, masquerading as change, and leaving what's needed unaddressed and papered over.

What Real Reform Looks Like - Abolish or Nationalize the Fed

For many years, Ron Paul waged a lonely struggle to abolish the Fed, trying and failing in the 106th, 107th, 108th, and 110th Congresses. Numerous times he explained what he said on the House floor on September 10, 2002, namely:

"Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary cycle. In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people," a 1913 dollar (when the Fed was created) today worth about a nickel and continues to erode.

Under the Fed, we've also had rising consumer debt; record budget and trade deficits; an unsustainable national debt; a high level of personal and business bankruptcies; millions of lost homes; high unemployment; loss of the nation's manufacturing base; soaring poverty levels; an unprecedented wealth gap between the rich and most others; and a hugely unstable economy lurching from one crisis to another, the current one near-catastrophic with years more pain and suffering ahead for growing millions."

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E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D
The Corwall Alliance

Wanted for Premeditated Murder: How Post-Normal Science Stabbed Real Science in the Back on the Way to the Illusion of "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming

Climate Change and the Death of Science is the most important article we've linked to in quite a long time. If you have time to read nothing else from this issue, read this. It's worth every minute it will take.

As Climategate and other transgressions of fundamental scientific procedure by global warming alarmists continue to unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that a great deal of what's been called "climate science" isn't science at all. It's ideological propaganda, often religious (but certainly not Biblical), masquerading as science.

In Climate Change and the Death of Science, Christian blogger Jerry Bouey nails practitioners of post-normal science fair and square, in their own words, demonstrating that even they know and admit they're no longer doing science but politics. To put it bluntly, they stabbed real science in the back. This article strikes at the very root of many environmentalists' routine practices.

Bouey explains brilliantly how science got hijacked by post-normal science along the hurried way to the "overwhelming scientific consensus" on manmade global warming. Bouey points out that one of the world's leading global warming alarmists is himself a devotee of post-normal science and therefore a traitor to real science.

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Richard North

The sooner Canada gets its troops out of Afghanistan the better because the mission is a waste of lives and money in a doomed cause, one of Canada's most eminent diplomats told a Montreal conference Sunday.

That is Robert Fowler, who has told the Liberal party's Canada 150 conference: "The bottom line is that we will not prevail in Afghanistan." He adds: "Once we understand and accept that reality it is time to leave, not a moment, not a life and not a dollar later."

Fowler is not a man to be dismissed easily. He has been a foreign policy adviser to three Canadian prime ministers, deputy minister of national defence and Canada's longest-serving ambassador to the United Nations. More recently, as special UN envoy to Niger he was kidnapped by al Qaeda in December 2008 and held captive in the Sahara for 130 days.

On Afghanistan, he said that it is difficult to rationalise or understand what the Canadian mission can accomplish, what with the Taleban gaining in strength and reach day by day.

"They say look at the number of little girls we have put in school – at a cost of 146 Canadian lives and an incremental cost of $11.3 billion. My, think of the number of little girls we could put in school throughout the Third World – particularly in Africa – with that kind of money. And without having to kill and be killed to get that worthy job done."

He said it appears that our goal in Afghanistan is to colonize the country and replace its culture with ours, a mission impossible for which the Taliban know Canada lacks the resources and dedication to accomplish.

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MondoWeiss

Palestinian-American lawyer Huwaida Arraf sent out the following note to friends yesterday after her release from detention:

I was arrested on Friday at around noon as I tried to get the Israeli soldiers to stop shooting at people in Nabi Saleh (a small village of about 400 people), especially after International Solidarity Movement volunteer Ellen Stark was shot in the arm. We were in Nabi Saleh for a weekly demonstration by the villagers against the theft of their land. Simultaneous demonstrations were taking place in Jerusalem and in a number of villages throughout the West Bank.

In Nabi Saleh, the demonstration took the form of people walking down a hill towards the confiscated land. "Stop shooting…a woman has been injured and needs medical attention" I yelled at the soldiers, making my way back up the hill to the road they stood on (shooting down at us knowing the rugged terrain we were on made it very difficult to move quickly to avoid their barrage of tear gas and bullets). When I got on the road the soldiers turned their guns on me but I just get talking and walking towards them. "We have a woman that has been shot; she needs help. Stop shooting. There is no reason to be shooting at people like this. You are in THEIR village."

For this I was handcuffed and thrown in a jeep, later accused of: (1) attacking a police officer; (2) cursing at the military and police; (3) obstructing the operations of the military; and (4) being in a closed military zone.

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Stephen Lendman

On February 3, 2010, after a sham trial, the Department of Justice announced Siddiqui's conviction for "attempting to murder US nationals in Afghanistan and six additional charges." When sentenced on May 6, she faces up to 20 years for each attempted murder charge, possible life in prison on the firearms charge, and eight years on each assault charge.

In March 2003, after visiting her family in Karachi, Pakistan, government Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents, in collaboration with Washington, abducted Siddiqui and her three children en route to the airport for a flight to Rawalpindi, handed them over to US authorities who took them secretly to Bagram prison, Afghanistan for more than five years of brutal torture and unspeakable abuse, including vicious beatings and repeated raping.

Bogusly charged and convicted, Siddiqui was guilty only of being Muslim in America at the wrong time. A Pakistani national, she was deeply religious, very small, thoughtful, studious, quiet, polite, shy, soft-spoken, barely noticeable in a gathering, not extremist or fundamentalist, and, of course, no terrorist.

She attended MIT and Brandeis University where she earned a doctorate in neurocognitive science. She did volunteer charity work, taught Muslim children on Sundays, distributed Korans to area prison inmates, dedicated herself to helping oppressed Muslims worldwide, yet lived a quiet, unassuming nonviolent life.

Nonetheless, she was accused of being a "high security risk" for alleged Al-Qaeda connections linked to planned terrorist attacks against New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building, accusations so preposterous they never appeared in her indictment.

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