The National Security Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on a $1.2 billion data center at Camp W.G. Williams National Guard Post. The massive, one million square-foot facility currently is the largest U.S. Department of Defense project in the nation. The "data center" will be a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the Intelligence Community's efforts to further strengthen and protect the nation's "cyber security." NSA is the executive agent for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and will be the lead agency at the data center. The facility will assist various agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, in protecting national security networks.

AWIP:
NSA took part in the development of Windows 7
The criminal NSA eavesdropping program
Report: NSA creating spy system to monitor domestic infrastructure
Big Brother is coming: NSA's $1.9 billion cyber spy center a power grab

Floyd Rudmin: The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation
Paul Craig Roberts: The High Price of American Gullibility
Alissa Bohling: First, Your Shoes; Next, Your DNA: Elliot Cohen on How Surveillance Is Erasing Freedom and Autonomy, Step by Incremental Step

When people think about Wikileaks, they inevitably focus on Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial organization who was recently released from prison in Britain. Less attention is paid to Bradley Manning, who allegedly fed him large amounts of secret information and is currently kept in solitary confinement at a maximum security military prison in Quantico, Virginia. Manning became famous for leaking video footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter in Baghdad that killed a news photographer with Reuters and his driver. Though he has been in solitary for months, Manning has not been convicted yet.

Glenn Greenwald: The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention
Chris Floyd: Written on the Body: The Progressive Torture of Bradley Manning

Arriving today on an unannounced visit to Yemen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed the Saleh government for “tougher military action” against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the same time, Clinton insisted the Obama Administration’s partnership with the Saleh government “goes beyond counterterrorism” and pledged long term support for the “strategic partnership” between he two nations.

Addressing foreign journalists today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted the notion of more sanctions against the Iranian government was pointless, and insisted rather that only military threats from the US could stop Iran. “You have to ratchet up the pressure,” Netanyahu said, adding that they needed “a credible military option that is put before them by the international community led by the United States.”

In Defense of Uruknet! Tonight’s post is about defending one of our colleages, comrades, friends, and allies. Tonight is about defending Uruknet whose blog is dedicated to providing information from the Middle East. For those of you who don’t know who Uruknet, please have a look at http://www.uruknet.info/. This blog is one of those that I personally consider one of the invaluable ones out there (a comprehensive list of those I read regularly will follow at a later date).

What has happened today will likely not come as a surprize to many of you. As it turns out Facebook deleted/deactivated/froze Uruknet’s account/profile. This falls into a greater trend of limiting/censuring/disabling peace/Palestine solidarity activists and this has to stop!

So here is what I thought we should do. Uruknet managed to set up a ‘group’ on Facebook. The url is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Uruknet/142018729188512. If you have a Facebook account and feel so inclined, please go there and ‘like’ this page. If you have a blog, please do the same and also link (if possible, I still have to look into this) to this group.

We need numbers for this to work! Please help out with this…and in any other instance activists are censured for their very important work! (Sofia Smith) (Written for Palestine Solidarity Demo Information Center)

London, (Pal Telegraph) - Brisbane, Australia (CNN) -- Three quarters of the state of Queensland has been declared a disaster zone after torrential rain threatened the worst flooding in the state capital in 37 years. Ten people were confirmed dead in flash flooding Tuesday which swept through the town of Toowoomba, about 125 kilometers (80 miles) west of Brisbane, on Monday afternoon. The wall of water came without warning, overturning cars and swamping homes. More than 24 hours later, 78 people remained missing.

"It was almost like a movie scene -- I went to a car park, it's a council car park -- and we had cars stacked on top of each other," Toowoomba regional councilor Joe Ramia told the national broadcaster, ABC.

The deluge was compared to an "inland tsunami" which came with little or no warning despite weeks of rain. The flood alert spread to the Queensland capital of Brisbane Tuesday with authorities warning that more than 30 suburbs were at risk of flooding, with water threatening 6,500 homes.

AWIP: Amazing videos from the Australian floods
Time magazine: Flood-Stricken Australia Sets Up Temporary Morgue

Preventing terrorism funds from "infiltrating" "Israel" is one of the goals of the "Israel Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority." The authority banned Israeli organizations from receiving money from Interpal, a British charity which says its aim is to provide Palestinians with humanitarian aid and meet their basic needs. The organization has a turnover of 5 million pounds a year. After a number of investigations on suspicion of serving as a channel for funding for Hamas, Interpal was blacklisted in Israel and is no longer allowed to hold activities in the country or transfer funds to Israel, and activists belonging to the organization will be arrested if they arrive here.

The Charity Commission for England and Wales found Israel provided no proof that Interpal was connected to terrorism, but ordered the charity to break contact with a number of other organizations. Other blacklisted groups include the Islamic National Bank, which has opened in Gaza; the Palestinian Relief Society in Switzerland; Pakistani humanitarian organization Wafa; Pakistani trust fund Rabbit, which is believed to be associated with Al-Qaida; the Afghan Support Committee; a British-based company set up by five Libyan businessmen and suspected of organizing terrorism in Libya; the Al Taqwa Bank, based in the Bahamas with branches in Europe and suspected connections to the Muslim Brotherhood; and Qatar Charity, which has signed a multimillion sponsorship deal with the Barcelona soccer club. The Turkish organization IHH was banned after the flotilla raid in May.

[Editor's Comment:] There's no real authority here, just power (mostly military), no 'terrorism support' either, just money for the Palestinians and finally, there's no Israel, just the pretense of it -of being a state. 'Israel' is nothing but a label for vile, rogue elements fighting for a lost cause, for a tribe lost in evil. Evil will prevail, however "Israel" will not. It will indeed "Vanish From the Page of Time"...

‘Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring’. Rabbi Dov Lior rules that Jewish Law prohibits sterile couples from getting pregnant using non-Jewish man’s sperm, as it causes adverse traits. On subject of single mothers he says, ‘Child cannot be 100% normal’. Rabbi Dov Lior, a senior authority on Jewish law in the Religious Zionism movement, asserted recently that a Jewish woman should never get pregnant using sperm donated by a non-Jewish man – even if it is the last option available. According to Lior, a baby born through such an insemination will have the “negative genetic traits that characterize non-Jews.” Instead, he advised sterile couples to adopt.

Mission, British Columbia, resident Len Gratto recently experienced the wrath of local city officials who fined him $5,200 for growing cucumbers in his basement. Under current laws, municipal regulators are permitted to enter premises on suspicion that a homeowner is illegally growing marijuana -- and even if no pot is found, they can levy the fines anyway. "It's upsetting they can do this," explained Gratto to The Province. "We were growing cucumbers in the basement because they wouldn't take outside."

Yesterday, David Koch — one of the richest men in America, co-owner of the conglomerate Koch Industries, and a top financier of right-wing front groups — attended the swearing-in ceremony for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and also hosted a party for the new Republican majority he helped bankroll. Perhaps no one has been more aggressive in exposing Koch’s activities than ThinkProgress. We first reported in April 2009 that Americans for Prosperity, the front group founded and chaired by Koch since 1984, helped orchestrate many of the first Tea Party rallies and anti-Obama protests. ThinkProgess also unearthed a memo detailing how Koch convened a meeting of executives from Wall Street and the oil industry — along with hate talker Glenn Beck and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — to plan how to win the November elections for Republicans in 2010. Yesterday, ThinkProgress came face-to-face with David Koch, so we seized the opportunity to conduct an impromptu interview.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is living in fear of being illegally deported to the US, held at Guantanamo Bay and then executed by the American authorities, according to the defence team fighting his extradition from Britian to Sweden. In their summary of arguments against Sweden's extradition request, Assange's lawyers state that there is a "real risk" that he could end up facing the death penalty on the other side of the Atlantic. They are concerned that if their client is sent back to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual assault, the US would subsequently seek his extradition and could even try to have him illegally seized. The lawyers' 35-page submission to the court states:

"There is a real risk that, if extradited to Sweden, the US will seek his extradition and/or illegal rendition to the USA, where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere." [It goes on:] "If Mr Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well-known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Mr Assange should be executed."

Antiwar: Lawyer: Assange Could Be Renditioned to Gitmo

Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens delivered a 35-page skeleton outline of his court arguments to various media after the brief review hearing this morning at Belmarsh magistrates court. In it he outlines his arguments (paraphrased in brief):

(1) It is not accepted that the Swedish prosecutor is authorised to issue European Arrest Warrants (EAW).
(2) European arrest warrants should only be issued for the purposes of prosecution, and it has been made very clear that Mr. Assange is wanted for further questioning.
(3) There has been abuse of process: non-disclosure by the Swedish Prosecutor.
(4) There has been a further abuse of process: the conduct of the prosecution in Sweden.
(5) The offences alleged in the EAW are not of serious nature in the UK, as they must be to constitute extradition offences.
(6) Mr Assange reserves the right to argue extraneous considerations.(section 13 of the Act).
(7) Mr. Assange reserves the right to argue that his extradition may be incompatible with Articles 3, 6, 8 and 10 of the European Commission on Human Rights.

National Law: Jason Ching: Journalism WikiLeaks Style Bradley Manning will likely be prosecuted and convicted under the Espionage Act, but not Julian Assange because he is joined at the hip with news organizations.

President Ben Ali gave a speech yesterday repeating such brazen slanders against the protesters. He blamed “hostile elements paid from abroad, who have sold their souls to extremism and terrorism, who are manipulated from outside the country and who do not want what is best for a country determined to persevere and to work.”

The Financial Times reported that Internet social networks in US-allied dictatorships like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are spreading messages of solidarity with Tunisian and Algerian protesters. In the United States, Time magazine noted a “wave of protests and violence against two US-friendly authoritarian regimes in North Africa.” It explained that Washington had not objected to their practices so far, “not least because the authoritarian governments of Algeria and Tunisia are allies in the fight against Islamist terrorism.” Time added that if these regimes failed to line up with the requirements of the US “war on terror,” Washington might consider replacing them with other, pro-US figures it thinks are more able to keep their populations in line: “The social instability their policies have provoked can actually work to the advantage of regional extremists. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a visit to the Gulf states this week, plans to call publicly for political reform in the Arab world.”

More brazenly, Michèle Alliot-Marie—the foreign minister of France, the former colonial power in Tunisia—proposed that the French police might share its “French know-how” with the Tunisian security forces. She explained: “We are indeed proposing that our two countries could, in the context of the cooperation that exists between them, act so that the right to demonstrate would go together with the assurance of security.”

Gabrielle Gifford’s assassination attempt was an act of domestic terror. Giffords is the first Jewish woman elected to Congress from Arizona which raises the possibility of a hate crime but the increased violence of an ongoing policy of border militarization is the far more likely reason for this domestic terror.

Why isn’t Jared Loughner’s attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords being treated as an act of domestic terror instead of an irrational act of a deranged left or right wing crackpot. There’s more than enough evidence that this act was not only premeditated but encouraged. Loughner’s police mug shot shows the demeanor of someone who is at peace with his horrific actions ~ mission accomplished!

Patrick Martin: Media whitewashes ultra-right in Arizona massacre