The plane of America’s top military officer, General Martin Dempsey, was damaged early on Tuesday and two members of maintenance crew were injured as a rocket was fired on US airbase of Bagram. - Two rockets struck the vast Bagram air field overnight, with one causing damage to the C-17 used by the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who left the base using another plane, Dempsey’s spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said. Shrapnel from the rocket struck the door of the plane while it was parked on the runway, with two American maintenance crew suffering minor injuries in the attack, Lapan said. The attack posed no threat to the safety of Dempsey or his staff, who were asleep in their quarters at the time of the incident, officers said. Dempsey had been visiting Kabul to meet commanders of the NATO-led force and Afghan top brass amid a surge in assaults by Afghan security personnel on the occupation forces, in the so-called “green-on-blue-attacks”.

In reaction to her son's arrest, the decorated Marine’s mother has called into question the freedom of speech in the United States. Her remarks followed the abrupt arrest of Raub whose posts on Facebook have been under scrutiny. The case, experts say, is a flagrant indication of the US government’s strict control over social networking websites, above all Facebook. Thomas said her son was questioned about why he was writing comments critical of the government. "He basically said 'I have some disagreements with the government and share this', and they said, 'You have to go with us'," Thomas noted. She added, "He was handcuffed, not read his rights, put into a Chesterfield Police Department vehicle and taken to John Randolph Psychiatric Hospital in Hopewell, Virginia," Thomas said.

Washington's Blog: Marine Locked In Mental Ward for Questioning 9/11 - Former marine Brandon Raub was carted off by the Feds and locked in a psychiatric ward for his Facebook posts questioning the government’s version of 9/11. Raub isn’t the first person who has suffered this fate. Claire Swinney was also held in a psychiatric ward and called “delusional” for claiming government liability for 9/11. Others have been committed for the same reason over the last decade.

ABC News: Va. Veteran Detained After Strident Facebook Posts - A former Marine involuntarily detained for psychiatric evaluation for posting strident anti-government messages on Facebook has received an outpouring of support from people who say authorities are trampling on his First Amendment rights. Brandon J. Raub, 26, has been in custody since FBI, Secret Service agents and police in Virginia's Chesterfield County questioned him Thursday evening about what they said were ominous posts talking about a coming revolution.

Police allowed to track cell phones in US without court warrants. - The US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy when carrying cell phones, allowing police to track GPS signals without a warrant or probable cause. The decision came the court ruled in United States v. Skinner that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) abided by the Constitution by using a drug runner’s cellphone data to track his location and determine his identity. [...] The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures” without the issuance of a warrant obtained due to probable cause. The Court considers cell phone use to be a public – not private – action, thereby being ineligible for the protections of the Fourth Amendment. A court brief of the case states that “a suspect’s presence in a publicly observable place is not information subject to Fourth Amendment protection.”

Naomi Wolf: The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology

According to the top military analyst for Israel’s Hebrew Language Channel 10, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “determined to attack Iran before the US elections,” once again bringing the timetable for war into what Obama Administration officials earlier this year called the “sweet spot” for such a war.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been loudly pushing for the war for months, and have openly spurned popular opposition as well as criticism from the military’s leadership. The Obama Administration is said to be trying to push for a delay until after the vote but the analyst, Alon Ben-David, added that “I doubt Obama could say anything that would convince Netanyahu to delay.”

Meanwhile, defense officials have been pushing 91-year-old Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of much of the religious right in Israel, to weigh in on the attack. Yosef has regularly called for the deaths of those he perceives as “enemies” of Israel.

US officials have gone relatively quiet on the matter, with Gen. Martin Dempsey saying the US is not under any pressure to “back” an Israeli attack. That doesn’t mean that an attack might not happen unilaterally, however.

Jonathan Cook (about Rabbi Ovadia Yosef): Four Realms Beneath the Jews: Talking Animals, Dumb Animals, Vegetables and Minerals

Insists They're Trying to Distract From Sex Claims. - US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has angrily condemned both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the nation of Ecuador today, after the former criticized the US “war on whistleblowers” in a speech from the Ecuadorean embassy. She accused Assange of making up “wild accusations” about US plans to prosecute him in an attempt to distract attention from sex crime allegations in Sweden. The US has neither confirmed nor denied plans to prosecute Assange in the past, but US officials have called him a “terrorist” and several Congressmen have demanded his summary execution related to leaked State Department cables. Nuland likewise condemned Ecuador for calling an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States last week, calling it a “sideshow” and that the OAS has “no role” in the situation. Ecaudor called the meeting after British FM William Hague threatened to attack the embassy and take Assange by force.

Hacker group Anonymous targeted United Kingdom government websites today in a show of solidarity with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is holed up at the Ecuardorian embassy in London, hoping to flee the U.K. for fear of being extradited to Sweden and then the United States. - The hacker collective, famous for using distributed denial of service attacks to make a political point, allegedly attacked the U.K. Justice Department website, along with the British Prime Minister’s website “Number 10.” Other reports indicate the group has also attacked the Department of Work and Pensions. Anonymous used the hash tag “#OpFreeAssange,” referencing the founder of Wikileaks who is supposed to be under house arrest in the U.K. for sex-crime allegations in Sweden.

French President Francois Hollande has said that there is no political solution for the unrest in Syria unless President Bashar al-Assad leaves power. - In a meeting with new UN envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi on Monday, Hollande said there “cannot be a political solution without the departure of Assad.” On Friday, Brahimi was appointed to replace Kofi Annan who will quit the UN envoy position on August 31. China and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council, have so far defied the West’s insistence on military intervention in Syria, blocking efforts at the UN to materialize the objective.

Thierry Meyssan: France Falls Victim to Its Allegiance to the U.S.

US adopts Al-Qaeda's tactic of secondary attacks for drone strikes. The US has been carrying out follow-up attacks after its drone strikes in Pakistan, specifically targeting people coming to the aid of the wounded. The tactic has been widely condemned, including by the UN – which considers it a war crime.

A Guardian report by Glenn Greenwald shows the US government's hypocrisy regarding such tactics. While the FBI has warned that “terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack,” the US regularly applies the same methods. A 2004 FBI alert warned Americans against secondary attacks meant to “incite more terror,” advising that such incidents can usually be expected within an hour of the initial attack. “These devices may be hidden in everyday objects such as vehicles, briefcases, flower pots or garbage cans, or can be sequential suicide attacks in the same locations, and are generally detonated less than one hour after the initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population,” the alert read.

Glenn Greenwald: US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan – and the west stays silent - Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration. The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.

Recently-released video footage shows US-led foreign forces mistreating and disrespecting their fellow Afghan forces during controversial joint operations in the war-torn country. The footage displays a foreign trooper brutalizing an Afghan soldier during a joint operation. It also indicates that US-led forces exert full control over the notorious night raids. The nighttime operations by the US-led forces have resulted in many civilian casualties and increasing tensions between the Afghanistan and the United States. Afghan officials have repeatedly condemned the attacks. Insecurity continues to rise across Afghanistan, despite the presence of some 130,000 US-led forces in the country.