Stephen Lendman

Ronald Reagan meeting with the Afghan Mujahideen inside
the White House. (Photo: picturesofwar.net)

They're merciless cutthroat murderers. They commit grotesque atrocities. Torture, beheadings, and other monstrous savagery are all in a day's work.

They're Washington favorites. They're recruited, heavily armed, trained, funded and directed in all US regional wars. Ronald Reagan called earlier equivalents "freedom fighters." Some got White House visits.

A March 1983 photo showed Afghan Mujahideen fighters there. Reagan had the following to say about them:

“To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.”

He called Nicaraguan Contra killers

"our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers."

History doesn't just rhyme. It repeats in horrifyingly disturbing ways. Wherever America shows up, deaths, mass destruction, and brutal atrocities follow. Countries are ravaged one at a time or in multiples. Millions die. Appalling crimes are committed. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya tasted US-style liberation.

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Julie Hyland

Prime Minister David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch

Democracy is a façade behind which plutocrats and their political hirelings operate as a law unto themselves.

On Monday, UK Labour MP Chris Bryant stated that News International’s Management and Standards Committee had stopped cooperating in May with the investigation into phone-hacking and other illegal activities at Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News of the World.

Using parliamentary privilege, he suggested this was because evidence had emerged that could implicate the billionaire oligarch and his son, James, in criminal practices. News International had been happy to help the police investigation by “chucking overboard” journalists, Bryant said, as long as “the proprietor’s feet didn’t get wet.”

Bryant asserted that News International had destroyed a laptop to conceal evidence of an illegal payment by Murdoch’s Sun newspaper in 2005 for photographs of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein in his underwear. Bryant said that the illegal payment, involving a US soldier in California, meant that “at some point there will be charges brought against senior directors, quite possibly including James and Rupert Murdoch, as part of the body corporate.”

The fact that even a possible criminal prosecution of Murdoch and son was raised only on this single question, and in the United States at that, underscores the fraud perpetrated by the Leveson Inquiry, set up in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

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Wendy McElroy

The TSA agents and their “partners” want your freedom, your obedience, and control of your life.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is tightening its grip on domestic travel. I don't mean the random, unpredictable security checks at bus, subway and train stations which already exist. I mean a coordinated and systematic police control of internal travel within America. Groundwork is being laid.

APPLICATION TO MAKE U.S. INTO AN AIRPORT SCREENING ZONE

The application was tucked away on page 71431 of Volume 77, Number 231 of the Federal Register (November 30). It was surrounded by soporific references to forwarding “the new Information Collection Request (ICR) abstracted below to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and approval under the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).”

The application for funding from the TSA constitutes a preliminary step toward systematically expanding TSA's authority from airports to highways and almost every other means of public travel. The expansion would erase one of the last remaining differences between the US and a total police state; namely, the ability to travel internally without being under police surveillance. The total police state you experience at airports wants to spill into roads and bus stops, to subways and trains. Or, rather, the TSA wants to solidify and spread the fledgling and erratic presence it already has.

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