The military contractors have much to gain from proliferation of drones in US airspace. - The big push in Congress to open up domestic airspace in the U.S. to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, is developing with hardly any lobbying opposition, despite potentially dire consequences for civil liberties. Congress quietly authorized the domestic use of drones this past winter, which the government says can be used for everything from law enforcement, first responders, and environmental monitoring. Drones have typically been used to kill people in Pakistan, Yemen, and beyond, and their domestic use could present problems for privacy and other civil liberties concerns. But opposition to the bill was negligible. The American Civil Liberties Union was the only organization to really lobby against the push for domestic drones, spending $500,000 during the first quarter, which partially went towards fighting this bill. But that is nothing compared to the benefits proliferation of domestic drones could bring to military contractors. Among those lobbying for the bill was Textron Inc., which makes surveillance drones. The company spent $2.2 million lobbying in the first quarter on a variety of issues, including this one.

The House of Representatives has approved Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act with a vote count of 248-168. The bill is now headed for the Senate. President Barack Obama will be able to sign or cancel it pending Senate approval. - Initially slated to vote on the bill Friday, the House of Representatives decided to pass Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) Thursday after approving a number of amendments. Apart from cyber and national security purposes, the bill would now allow the government to use private information obtained through CISPA for the investigation and prosecution of “cybersecurity crime,” protection of individuals and the protection of children. The new clauses define “cybersecurity crime” as any crime involving network disruption or hacking.

The key difference between CISPA and the defunct SOPA/PIPA bills is that CISPA has support from a number of tech companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Facebook and others. (SoftWareArchiveNet)

Cyberwar Central: Why CISPA sucks and what you can do about it
Russia Today: ‘CISPA: Patriot Act for the web’ – Internet activist
Time/Techland: 5 Reasons the CISPA Cybersecurity Bill Should Be Have Been Tossed

Jason Ditz: ‘Cybersecurity Bill’ CISPA Broadened Then Passed Through House - Already subbed “SOPA 2” by many of its detractors for its broad language and its potential use to violate the privacy of individual Americans, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was actually given even broader authority by an amendment today, then passed in a 248-168 vote. The bill nominally aimed to strengthen information sharing across the intelligence community, but also encourages them to collect data on American citizens that they believe might conceivably benefit national security.

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says Washington has not yet achieved any concrete information that proves Iran is building a nuclear weapon. - "I do not have any specific information that indicates (the Iranians) have made any decision one way or another" on whether to build a nuclear weapon, Panetta told reporters on Thursday after a meeting with his Chilean counterpart Andres Allamand, AFP reported. Panetta also pointed to the recent remarks by Israel's military chief Lieutenant General Benny Gantz describing Iran's leadership as “very rational” and expressed hope his statements were "correct." [...] Iran argues that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence indicating that Tehran's nuclear energy program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.

American Network “CBS” disclosed, on Tuesday, that there was Zionist pressure exerted on the network to stop it from broadcasting a report within “60 Minutes” program discussing the Zionist policies to displace Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem and Bethlehem. - The correspondent on the U.S. news program “60 Minutes”, Bob Simon, has scolded Israel’s ambassador to US Michael Oren for his intervention and his attempt to prevent the airing of the report, saying that he had never received a reaction to a story that hadn’t been broadcast yet. The ambassador replied that there is always a first time for everything, and that he is serving his country and protecting it, pointing out that the channel should have broadcast reports on the situation of Christians in other countries in the region. The channel aired last night, the report unveiling the policy of the Zionist entity to displace Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land revealing the harassment and oppression by the occupation that Christians face and that turns their lives into hell.

This short documentary addresses the issues of solitary confinement and other measures of inhuman and degrading treatment to which Palestinian prisoners are subjected in Israeli jails. The film further highlights the human rights violations related to family visits and the Israeli abuse of administrative detention. Help give a voice to those who are isolated behind bars and calling out for justice through a wide distribution of this video.

On Israeli Independence Day, same day that marks the premeditated ethnic cleansing of ~700,000 Palestinians in order to create a Jewish majority by force, the Israeli police besieged the offices of Zochrot at the heart of Tel-Aviv in order to prevent the activists present from holding a very symbolic memorial activity for that day. This video shows arriving at the place already besieged by the police, the people inside prevented from leaving and those outside prevented from entering the office building. At the time of writing this, police is still present as well as over 100 citizens demonstrating outside the offices. The police attacked and arrested some demonstrators, while preventing entry-exit to the office.

A US federal court has backed the Obama administration in refusing to release pictures or video from military operation. [For a good reason: Osama bin Laden probably died in December 2001. Therefore they probably didn't kill him in Pakistan in May 2011. So far they have not submitted anything whatever with which to prove that they actually did so. - Photoshopped images don't cut it.]

A federal judge has refused to order Barack Obama's administration to release pictures and video of the US military operation that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan almost a year ago. The government watchdog group, Judicial Watch, had requested that the defence department and Central Intelligence Agency release any pictures or video footage of the operation on 1 May 2011 that killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The defence department said it had no pictures or videos sought by the group and the CIA said it had 52 such records, but refused to release them. It cited exemptions to the US freedom of information act for classified materials and other reasons. Judicial Watch sued in federal court and the US district judge James Boasberg sided with the Obama administration.

Paul Craig Roberts: Osama bin Laden’s Second Death
Paul Craig Roberts: Americans Are Living In 1984: A people as gullible as Americans have no future
AWIP: Americans so happy over "killing Osama Bin Laden" they're even giving Congress credit

TEHRAN (FNA)- Senior Iranian military officials announced that the country's experts have decoded the intelligence gathering system and memory hard discs of the United States' highly advanced RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft that was downed by Iran in December after violating the country's airspace. - The unmanned surveillance plane lost by the United States in Iran was a stealth aircraft being used for secret missions by the CIA. The aircraft is among the highly sensitive surveillance platform in the CIA's fleet that was shaped and designed to evade enemy defenses. The drone is the first such loss by the US. The RQ-170 has special coatings and a batwing shape designed to help it penetrate other nations' air defenses undetected. The existence of the aircraft, which is made by Lockheed Martin, has been known since 2009, when a model was photographed at the main US airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The revelation came after Russia and China asked Tehran to provide them with information on the capture US drone.

The drone-happy President authorizes attacks on people in Yemen even when their names are not known.

Ten days ago, I wrote about a request made by CIA Director David Petraeus to expand the drone war in Yemen in accordance with the following, as expressed by the first paragraph of The Washington Post article reporting it:

At the time, I wrote that “it’s unclear whether Obama will approve Petraeus’ request for the use of ‘signature strikes’ in Yemen,” though that was true only in the most technical sense. It was virtually impossible to imagine that a request from David Petraeus, of all people, to Barack Obama, of all people, for authority to target even more people in Yemen for death, now without even knowing who they are, would be anything but quickly and eagerly approved. And that is exactly what has now happened. - So here’s yet another war that Obama is escalating, now ordering people’s death with greater degrees of recklessness, now without even bothering to know who is being targeted.

PressTV: Obama Administration approves broader Yemen drone strikes

Russia has condemned the armed opposition in Syria for using terror and embarking on a campaign to kill as many civilians as possible despite a UN-backed ceasefire. - Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich on Thursday called on Damascus to "fully implement the obligations it assumed” in accordance with the six-point peace plan proposed by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan in March. "There is another side in Syria," Lukashevich noted. "Opposition groups have essentially reverted to waging wide-scale terror in the region," he pointed out, accusing the gunmen of using tactics that pointed to the involvement of al-Qaeda terrorists. "Killing as many peaceful civilians as possible and destroying civilian infrastructure remind one of what is happening in Iraq, Jordan and other places where al-Qaeda and its groups operate," the official said.

Special Report day two: Stillbirths, disabilities, deformities too distressing to describe - what lies behind the torments in Fallujah General Hospital? - The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia. "We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in all my service," she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There's always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word "propaganda" under their breath. But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts.

Abel Bult-Ito: Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'
Gerry Georgatos: Victims of war - Iraqi children and families - Depleted uranium and trauma

AWIP: Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - Sayef's story

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) suggested Tuesday that the prostitutes at the center of the Secret Service scandal represented a grave danger to national security because they could have been planted by another country like Russia Israel. - After The Hill published a story on Grassley’s remarks, an aide to the senator said Grassley was not insinuating that the prostitutes in this case were themselves Russian Israeli spies. Grassley has been pressing the White House for more information on the controversy, including whether any White House staffers engaged in improper behavior. The White House on Monday said an internal probe had cleared White House staff, but Grassley on Tuesday morning said he wanted more questions answered.

Philip Giraldi: Washington Felons Fret Over Hanky-Panky in Cartagena