Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty. LA Times: The Supreme Court justice has a history of dismissing prisoner brutality. And it's his former law clerk who was investigated for authorizing harsh interrogation tactics as a Justice Department lawyer.

Giving evidence to the public inquiry into Britain's role in the war on Monday, Miliband insisted that many Arab countries now respected Britain more for following through on threats of military force in Iraq. Miliband also claimed that the UK is now in a "stronger position," believing that UK decisions on Iraq have not "undermined our relationships or our ability to do business" in the region. AWIP: "It was the right decision" -Video. AntiWar: British Foreign Secretary: Arabs ‘Respected’ Attack on Iraq.

The United States backs Israel's authorization of new construction projects in the West Bank, saying Washington's Middle East ally has not violated its settlement moratorium. The decision received a chilly welcome from the Palestinians as the freeze fails to give the Palestinian demand of a full, permanent halt for it does not stop the work on some 3,000 houses, nor does it include the ones in East Jerusalem Al-Quds.

Jonathan Cook reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is set to accept Israel as a member – thus conferring legitimacy on its illegal occupation of Arab lands – despite Israel’s failure to meet a number of OECD criteria, including on corruption, copyright and wealth disparity.

In weeks to come, I am going to insist on the importance of Shlomo Sand’s book, the Invention of the Jewish People. Caricatured in the U.S. as a tract on the Khazar theory of Jewish genetics, the book is in fact a liberal’s assault on the racial politics of identity in Israel and the diaspora, a work of brilliant synthetic scholarship about nationalism and identity construction and the roots of Zionism that will resonate in Jewish and Palestinian life for decades. (By the way, the other criticism of Sand, that he was recycling others’ discoveries about the migration of the Jewish religion through Europe, is horse feathers. AWIP/Pierre Assouline: Comment Shlomo Sand a réinventé le peuple juif.

A dozen previously unknown shipwrecks, some of them believed to be up to 1,000 years old, were discovered in the Baltic Sea during a probe of the sea bed to prepare for the installation of a large gas pipeline, the Swedish National Heritage Board said Monday. "We have manage to identify 12 shipwrecks, and nine of them are considered to be fairly old," Peter Norman, a senior advisor with the heritage board, told AFP. "We think many of the ships are from the 17th and 18th centuries and we think some could even be from the Middle Ages," he said, stressing that "this discovery offers enormous culture-historical value.

The shipwrecks were discovered during a probe by the Russian-led Nord Stream consortium of the sea bed route its planned gas pipeline from Russia to the European Union will take through the Baltic. "They used sonar equipment first and discovered some unevenness along the sea bottom ... so they filmed some of the uneven areas, and we could see the wrecks," Norman explained. The discovery was made outside Sweden's territorial waters, but within its economic zone, he said. None of the wrecks were in the actual path the Nord Stream pipeline is set to take, but they were in its so-called anchor corridor, meaning they are in the area where ships laying the pipeline might anchor,

The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions. But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration. WUWT: NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing.

The Brazilian government has announced trade sanctions against a variety of American goods in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers. The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved the sanctions in a rare move.

LIFE and Google have teamed up to put 10,000,000 historic images online -- about 20 percent of the images are live now. The Disneyland images are great -- here's the old Submarine Ride. LIFE photo archive hosted by Google.

The US wants to deny that Turkey's slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage near Beirut, reports Robert Fisk. Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese hilltop village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order to survive starvation.

Wang Cuyun was attempting to prevent a demolition team from knocking down her house when she was allegedly beaten by a worker with a wooden stick and then pushed into a ditch that had been dug around the property. A bulldozer then covered Mrs Wang with earth, burying her alive. By the time her relatives dug her up, she was dead. The incident occurred last Wednesday in Maodian village in Huangpi district.

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’ “Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail.

They say an announcement will be made by Israeli Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau at an energy forum in Paris. Israel is facing a crisis over electricity supplies, but environmental objections have blocked efforts to build a new coal-fired plant. Israel has two nuclear reactors, including the Dimona facility which is said to have has produced nuclear weapons.

Who benefits from invading and occupying Iraq? Are Americans defending U.S. national security, or the security of our colonial outpost in the Arab World? This interview discusses the neoconservative Zionist cabal of the Bush administration who beat the drums for our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thanks to snowshoefilms for conducting the original interview and videography.

Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We’re familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every “green job” that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in the real economy. Times-Standard: State mandated “green” energy devastates ecosystem.

In an interview with the biggest-selling Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth before leaving for Israel, Biden stressed U.S. efforts to drum up greater diplomatic pressure on the Iranians, as well as unilateral measures imposed by the U.S. Treasury. Asked about the prospect of an Israeli attack, he said: "Though I cannot answer the hypothetical questions you raised about Iran, I can promise the Israeli people that we will confront, as allies, any security challenge it will face. A nuclear-armed Iran would constitute a threat not only to Israel -- it would also constitute a threat to the United States."

New bill allows U.S. citizens to be kidnapped and detained without trial indefinitely based on "suspected activity". Since the establishment media is convinced that tea party members, 9/11 truthers, libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, and basically anyone with a dissenting political opinion is a likely domestic terrorist, they should be celebrating the fact that a new bill would allow the government to detain such people as "enemy belligerents" indefinitely and without trial based on their "suspected activity". "Torture, indefinite imprisonment, secret trials and limited staged hearings are the stuff of cheap dictatorships," writes Ian McColgin. "They are the sort of idiocy we scorned in the Soviets, the Koreans and the Vietnamese. It is astonishing that we have senators and citizens even discussing this bill which is not a capitulation to terrorism - it’s the triumph of terrorism."

Congressman Dennis Kucinich invoked a procedural rule to help protect Americans from endless war to compel members of Congress to debate and vote whether to continue US war in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan is unlawful in Orwellian degree; tragic-comic in its violations of US war laws (useful analogy to well-understood laws for individual self-defense here). Although the laws of war are crystal-clear, complicit corporate media lies by omission and commission to explain what these laws have meant for 65 years and how they apply to unlawful US invasion of Afghanistan.

The objective evidence proves the US war against the people of Afghanistan is paper-thin propaganda of “self-defense” masking a psychopathic War of Aggression; but the world will continue to suffer from this and related vicious policies until the American people lead in understanding of verifiable evidence and law, thought, voice, and acts to force these unlawful policies to end.