The Senate on Thursday evening essentially blessed the indefinite detention of American citizens who join up with Al Qaeda. - By a 45-55 vote, senators rejected an amendment from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would have excluded U.S. citizens from the detention authority created by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed just after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. Feinstein's amendment would have inserted language excluding Americans into the detainee provisions of the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act. During floor debate on Feinstein's proposal, some senators argued that Supreme Court decisions make clear that American citizens can be detained under the law of war. They point to a 1942 decision upholding the trial of an American-born saboteur before a military commission and a 2004 decision in which four justices endorsed an opinion that found the government has the right to detain a U.S. citizen who joins with enemy forces. However, other senators said the facts of those cases don't squarely endorse the open-ended detention of a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil.

Tom Carter: US Senators back law authorizing indefinite military detention without trial or charge
Anthony Gregory: Understanding the U.S. Torture State
John Glaser: Senate Rejects Limits on Domestic Military Detention
John Glaser: Obama Lawyers: Killing U.S. Citizens Allied With Al Qaeda is an Executive Decision
Paul Joseph Watson: ‘Indefinite Detention’ Bill Passes Senate 93-7
Mike Adams: Senate bill 1867 would allow U.S. military to detain and murder anti-government protesters in American cities
AWIP: U.S. Congress on the move to legalize torture

The importance of the Fox-Gould-Werritty scandal is that it lifts the lid on the fact that the move to war with Iran is not a reaction to any street attack or any nuclear agency report. It is a long nurtured plan, designed to keep feeding the huge military industrial war machine that has become a huge part of the UK and US economies, and whose sucking up of trillions of dollars has contributed massively to the financial crisis, and which forms a keystone in the whole South Sea Bubble corporate finance system for servicing the ultra-rich. They need constant, regenerative war. They feed on the shattered bodies of small children. The resignation of the Defence Secretary in a scandal is a huge political event. People still talk of the Profumo scandal 50 years later. But Fox’s resignation was forgotten by the media within a fortnight, even though it is now proven that the Gus O’Donell official investigation into the affair was a tissue of lies. Take only these undisputed facts:

● Fox Gould and Werritty met at least five times more than the twice the official investigation claims
● The government refuses to say how often Gould and Werritty met without Fox
● The government refuses to release the Gould-Werritty correspondence
● The three met with Mossad

AWIP: Working for Israel: Lobbying clean-up is delayed – after lobbying

Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the EFD Group in the European Parliament (Europe of Freedom and Democracy): We live in an age when the gap between ordinary voters and the European political class grows wider by the day, I have to ask you having listened to your words this morning, just what planet are you on? This pretence that everything is going incredibly well. The EU is mired in deep structural crisis. Greece, Portugal and Ireland cannot survive inside the Euro. The Danes have torn up the Schengen Agreement and good for them because the total free movement of peoples is an irresponsible thing to have done. And public opinion is saying whilst they want a European cooperation, yes of course, I agree with that. What they do not want is this Europe run by unelected bureaucrats like Mr Barroso. You say "The EU is fantastic" in a recent comment. You are supporting the destruction of national democracy, but it is with reference to Greece that I am most concerned about you because when faced with their recent enslavement you said, "We lived for many years as a non-sovereign country under Soviet occupation. For us European integration is not a threat to sovereignty because we experienced not long ago a serious threat to our sovereignty." So what are you saying? That this isn't quite as bad as the USSR? Is that really good enough for your people? [The rest of the text HERE]

"We are not only talking about a fiscal union, we are beginning to create it."

Merkel's comments that the eurozone is on the "verge of" fiscal union to the German parliament this morning chime with what ECB president Mario Draghi and French president Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday about the "fiscal compact". It is clearly an orchestrated attempt to present a common front on this controversial issue, ahead of the summit meeting next week.

Raw Story: Germany, France push for ‘fiscal union’

A mental health nurse has broken her silence about working inside Australia's immigration detention system. - Ena Grigg, who has been nursing for almost 40 years, has told Lateline she saw despair and self-harm every day while caring for detainees at the Northern Immigration Detention Centre in Darwin. She says if she showed concern for her patients she was told to "harden up". Ms Grigg's personal account of a system under strain comes as more people people are being released into the community detention, and a large new detention centre prepares to open. This year, motivated by desire to see more of Australia, she signed up to a three-month contract to work at the immigration detention centre in Darwin as a mental health nurse.

"I was not very supportive of people coming to live here that way," she said. "I used to say I was one of the first people to say why don't we send the boats back to where they come from that will stop them, but it was my ignorance. "I am really ashamed I thought that way."

Two weeks after she was presented with depression and self-harm every day, Ms Grigg's world view turned around.

Alternate Focus interviews Nurit Peled-Elhanan, author of the forthcoming book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Nurit Peled-Elhanan argues that the textbooks used in the school system are laced with a pro-Israel ideology, and that they play a part in priming Israeli children for military service. She analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks, and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity.

Days after a NATO airstrike killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers amid worsening tensions between Islamabad and Washington, the White House says that President Obama does not plan to offer an apology for the executions. - There will be no “oops.” There won't be any “whoopsy daisy.” According to the officials within the administration, apologizes offered already — but not from Obama himself — will have to suffice for now. “The US government has offered its deepest condolences for the loss of life, from the White House and from Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta,” Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council said Wednesday, “and we are conducting an investigation into the incident.” Vietor added that no further comments will be issued until the full details of the weekend’s events come to light, reports the New York Times. With Obama’s approval rate slumping into some of its lowest numbers to date so soon before Election Day, an acknowledgment of the attack out of the Oval Office — if any — could be as far away as post-November 2012, lest the commander-in-chief wants to align himself as a president that projects his support towards a country unfavorable with many conservatives.

COAS General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has suspended 'chain of command' system to counter any aggression. - Sources said the Army Chief has suspended the chain of command system in order to enable the senior officers on the posts to take appropriate action in case Pakistani forces come under attack. Sources said that decision would however be applicable to eventualities involving Nato troops. Sources said that General Kayani has also ordered the troops to counter any aggression with full force and defend the motherland against any assailant. General Kayani has also said that the Pak Air Force should have taken action while Nato helicopters had violated the Pakistani airspace and attacked the Pakistani posts, sources said. In a letter written to the Armed Forces Chiefs, COAS Gen Kayani has said that the PAF jets must have dashed to the border area after the Nato attack. General Kayani has also observed that the communication of the attacked posts had snapped after the Nato attack. He said that now the senior officer on the ground would decide about counter measures.

Pakistan: US Attack on Base Lasted ‘Almost Two Hours’ as Calls to Stop Were Ignored
Pakistan orders US to leave airbase in row over deadly Nato assault
Nato helicopters 'kill Pakistan checkpoint soldiers'

Dunya News: Pakistan's Senate unanimously approves resolution against NATO attacks

Hundreds of metres under one of Iceland's largest glaciers there are signs of an imminent volcanic eruption that could be one of the most powerful the country has seen in almost a century. - Mighty Katla, with its 10km (6.2 mile) crater, has the potential to cause catastrophic flooding as it melts the frozen surface of its caldera and sends billions of gallons of water surging through Iceland's east coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. "There has been a great deal of seismic activity," says Ford Cochran, the National Geographic's expert on Iceland. "There have been more than 500 tremors in and around the caldera of Katla just in the last month, which suggests the motion of magma. And that certainly suggests an eruption may be imminent." Scientists in Iceland have been closely monitoring the area since 9 July, when there appears to have been some sort of disturbance that may have been a small eruption.

Wikipedia: Eyjafjallajökull

Over two million public sector workers took part yesterday in a 24-hour strike against the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government’s attack on their pensions. - The largest national walk-out for more than 30 years involved members of 37 unions in an action backed by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). They included teachers, health workers, civil servants and workers in local authorities and other areas of social provision, angered at the coalition’s plans to make public service employees pay more, and work longer for lower pensions on retirement. The government and the media attempted to downplay the strike, with Prime Minister David Cameron describing it as a “damp squib” even while he complained of extensive disruption.

Adnan Al-Daini: Callous and Cruel to the Vulnerable and the Poor
WSWS: Anger over pensions feeds into widespread opposition to government and the bankers
Craig Murray: The People Are Not Stupid