The man spoke plainly as he explained the horrors he lived through in a Kosovo Liberation Army prison camp 10 years ago. He told me about how he watched people beaten with steel pipes, cut with knives, left for days without food, and shot and killed.

"What can you feel when you see those things?" he said. "It's something that is stuck in my mind for the rest of my life. You cannot do those things to people, not even to animals." As the man talked, his mother paced nervously in the nearby kitchen. She was panicked and tears were streaming down her face. "They'll kill him, they'll kill him," she moaned, clutching one of her grandchildren.

But her son persisted. We spent hours in the family's sitting room as our source detailed allegations of possible war crimes by KLA officers in a military camp in the Albanian border town of Kukes. It was a crucial interview for a delicate story I have been investigating for years.

Paul Mitchell and Chris Marsden: Washington’s “humanitarian” war and the KLA’s crimes

Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza's economy "on the brink of collapse" while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday. Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables leaked to WikiLeaks, showed that Israel kept the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv briefed on its internationally criticized blockade of the Gaza Strip. "As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to (U.S. embassy economic officers) on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge," one of the cables read.

AF/Reuters: Israel said would keep Gaza near collapse - Wikileaks

The US administration is ramping up a "secret war on terror groups" in hot spots around the globe by establishing a new military targeting center, officials say. According to incumbent and former US officials, the center, run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), keeps an eye on the growing use of special operation strikes against individuals.

"The new center would be a significant step in streamlining targeting operations previously scattered among US and battlefields abroad and giving elite military officials closer access to Washington decision-makers and counter-terror experts," the officials revealed to the Associated Press. "The center is staffed with at least 100 counter terror experts fusing the military's special operations elite with analysts, intelligence and law enforcement officials from the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies," they said. The new military center focuses on "the offensive end of counter-terrorism, tracking and targeting terrorist threats that have surfaced in recent years from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia and other hot zones."

The revelation comes while the US military has already increased the number of special operations and commando raids in Afghanistan.

Three civilians were killed in an overnight raid in the Nawar District of the Ghazni Province when NATO soldiers targeted them. Angry tribesmen from the region arrived in the provincial capital with the bodies, protesting and demanding US apologies for the killings.

NATO declined any comments on those killings, but issued a report relating to night raids in the nearby Rashidan Province, claiming they had killed “over a dozen” insurgents, but no civilians in the attacks on five buildings. It is unclear, then, if the three killed today were from those attacks or a separate, as yet unannounced attack.

PressTV: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to send an additional 1,400 marines to Afghanistan

The Knesset has resolved to create a parliamentary committee of inquiry to look into the activities of left-wing groups “and their contribution to the delegitimization campaign against Israel.” Such a panel would make even Senator Joseph McCarthy blush.

When did it become illegal to be a Leftist in Israel? The police, the legal system, the Knesset, the Shin Bet, and the IDF have joined forces with the propagandists of the right to act as prosecutors without a trial.

It’s high time a legal ban on the Israeli left be instituted. Why do we continue beating around the bush? Why do we need such a taxing, exhaustive legislative process in enacting law after law? What’s the use of all these various proposals and amendments? In lieu of all the aforementioned, let’s just do one very simple thing: declare the left an illegal entity in the State of Israel. From then on, whoever thinks left, acts left, demonstrates left or tolerates left will belong in jail.

Let’s build another “holding facility” for foreigners, but this time for the foreigners from within – the leftists – thus purging and purifying our camp. Such a step would accurately reflect the zeitgeist that has taken hold among the majority of Israelis, and allow them to sketch a genuine portrait of Israeli democracy. In the Israel of 2011, it’s no longer legitimate to belong to the left.

Israeli left-wing organizations warned that the legislatures approval of a commission to investigate certain non-governmental organizations (NGOs) would "destroy democracy" in the nation. The Knesset plenum approved a proposal by members of the rightwing Yisrael Beiteinu party Wednesday to investigate the sources of funding for left-wing NGO's accused of working against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

"The delegitimization of left-wing organizations by establishing this McCarthy-esque commission will bring Israel negative coverage from around the world," Knesset member Dov Henin said while the bill was being debated, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Antiwar: Israel Announces Probe of Antiwar NGOs

Elliot Cohen's reputation for prescient reporting precedes his new book, "Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project." In 2007, years before today's comparatively widespread coverage of the Comcast-NBC merger and other threats to net neutrality, Cohen won the first place Project Censored award for his story about the free speech implications of the 2005 Supreme Court decision cementing the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) position that telecommunications laws could not be applied to cable modem services.

This time, Cohen zeros in on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Total Information Awareness project, a comprehensive surveillance program begun under the Bush administration that continues under Obama and that Cohen characterizes as an "Orwellian nightmare." In the book, Cohen tackles a topic ripe for speculation and paranoia with an approach that is both urgent and measured, tempering the terrifying results of his research with two simple questions – how bad could it get, and what can we do about it?

Raw Story: White House’s ‘insider threat’ program targets federal employees for surveillance In an effort to prevent another Bradley Manning, the Obama administration is urging all federal government agencies to watch its employees for signs they may be leaking classified information. In a memo dated Monday, Jacob J. Lew, the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, directed government agencies that deal with classified information to ensure that they are in compliance with secrecy rules brought in after WikiLeaks' release of classified material. The document (PDF), which was leaked to NBC less than 48 hours after it was written, urges agencies to develop an "insider threat program" that would monitor employees for "behavioral changes" indicating they may be leaking classified documents or be willing to do so.

Lew Rockwell: Are Refuseniks the Next Crop To Be Harvested?

Depleted uranium (DU) is a radioactive substance that has been used by the U.S. military most prominently in defensive armor plating and armor-piercing ammunition due to its extremely high-density characteristics. The use of DU has been controversial due to the proven toxic effects it has on people and the environment. DU weapons have been used heavily in Iraq, ever since coalition troops invaded the country in 2003, and according to some experts, citizens and soldiers of the war-torn country are now forced to suffer dangerous health hazards in the aftermath of the now DU contaminated area.

The city of Fallujah, which was bombarded with DU early on in the invasion of Iraq, has seen an incredibly high rate of birth defects and cancer diagnoses since 2004, and birth statistics from Fallujah show that in the month of May 2010, 15 percent of the 547 babies born had defects, 14 percent were spontaneous abortions, and 11 percent were born prematurely before 30 weeks. Last week, a report published online in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health linked the abnormal amount of birth deformities to depleted uranium exposure.

Abel Bult-Ito Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'
SOTT.net: American Atrocities: Depleted Uranium in Iraq

WikiLeaks has released 12 cables, which originate from the American embassy in Harare in addition to others from the South African capital Pretoria, London and the State Department commenting on the situation in Zimbabwe. They range in date from September 2000 to February 2010. This was a decade in which President Robert Mugabe’s regime came into increasing conflict with the Western-backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by white agribusinesses and headed by former trade union leader Morgan Tsvangirai. The present power-sharing government was ultimately established in 2008, with Robert Mugabe as president and Tsvangirai as prime minister. Inflation in Zimbabwe had by then reached the figure of 40 million percent. The infrastructure was breaking down, and the country had been devastated by a cholera epidemic. Thousands were fleeing across the border into South Africa every day to escape unemployment, poverty and hunger. Approximately 1.5 million Zimbabweans are now thought to live in South Africa.

A country that had once been among the richest in Africa, with an effective health service and educational system, had slipped to the lowest point in the UN Human Development Report for 2010. In 2006, life expectancy was the lowest in the world at only 34 years for women and 37 for men, according to the World Health Organisation. Since then, there has been some improvement, and life expectancy now averages 47 years. But in 2010, UNICEF estimated that one third of Zimbabwe children were at risk of dying as a result of malnutrition. The cables track this human tragedy through the indifferent eyes of American diplomats, whose main concern was always for the potential profits to be made from Zimbabwe’s natural resources. They chart the efforts of US, British and European diplomats, often working through the UN, to establish a regime that will open up the country to international investment.

Over the last three years—as the economic recession and 2008 crash took hold—4 million consumers filed for bankruptcy, with last year’s numbers matching the record levels reached before 2005. While most filers earn less than $30,000 and lack a college degree, a growing percentage of families with incomes above $60,000 and college degrees are being forced into bankruptcy.

As tens of millions are finding it impossible to pay their bills, the corporations and banks are raking in record profits, top executives are pocketing huge payouts and the richest 2 percent of the population is celebrating the tax cut handed to them by Obama and the congressional Republicans.

Now, the debate in Washington is dominated by a drive to forge a bipartisan consensus to slash social spending, cut taxes and regulation on big business and reduce wages and benefits in order to make American corporations more competitive and profitable. This only underscores the class chasm between the corporate-political elite and the masses of working people who are facing a social catastrophe.

This morning China is forced to do some unpleasant diplomatic damage control. After an earlier report in Kyodo News disclosed leaked documents that China has revised its escalation doctrine to initiate a pre-emptive nuclear strike in response to a conventional attack, the country is now furiously scrambling to refute any such "interpretations." After all the last thing the already volatile North-South Korean theater needs is the worry of an unstable big brother next door who may just type in the launch codes if an artillery shell veers a few degrees off course.