PressTV: New book: Obama said he is really good at killing people - Video

US Shrugs Off Criticism, Insists Talks 'An Internal Matter'. ● A Friday drone strike which killed Pakistani Taliban (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud was particularly galling, according to Pakistani officials, because they’d received specific promises that the US would not carry out any strikes during the Pakistani peace talks. Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister for Pakistan’s Punjab Province and the younger brother of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he was assured at “high levels” that there would be no drone strikes during the Sharif government’s peace dialogue with the TTP. The US State Department shrugged off the complaints, insisting that Pakistan’s peace talks were an “internal matter” and unrelated to the drone strike, even though it targeted Hakimullah and other leaders of the group Pakistan is trying to negotiate with.

The US will inform and consult with Israel about any nuclear deal world powers arrive at with Iran before it is carried out, because the Jewish state’s security is paramount, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman said in an interview with Channel 10 on Sunday.

Mike Rivero ■ So let me see if I have this right. Israel is NOT a member of the P5+1. Israel is NOT a member of the UN Security Council. Israel has NOT signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has NOT allowed IAEA inspections. Yet Israel gets to barge into the negotiations with Iran and demand the right to tell everyone else that they may not reach an agreement without Israel's demand that Iran cease all nuclear enrichment for its power station. And as a reminder how just how arrogant this is, Israel HAS nuclear weapons. Israel HAS been caught trying to sell clandestine nuclear weapons to other countries; the very activity the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is supposed to prevent. And, Iran HAS signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran HAS allowed all IAEA inspections. Iran is playing by the rules. Israel is not. ● One more point. Iran has not invaded another country in a war of aggression in over 200 years, standing in stark contrast to the United States and Israel which these days cannot seem to go six weeks without bombing someone!

Justin Raimondo: The Language of Tyrants: In Britain, journalism is "terrorism" ■ If there was ever any doubt that the formerly "Great" Britain of today has devolved into a stinkhole of authoritarianism – a proposition I advanced in a recent column – it has been dispelled by the news that the British authorities justified the detainment of David Miranda by claiming that, in transporting materials released by Edward Snowden through Heathrow airport, he was engaged in a "terrorist" act. Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald – who broke the story of the Snowden revelations – was passing through Heathrow on his way back to Brazil, where the two of them currently reside. Police detained him, seized his electronics, and held him for nine hours – the maximum allowed without charging him. He was then released and sent on his way, minus his belongings.

Stephen Lendman: Police State Britain: Equating journalism with terrorism shows how low Britain has sunk ■ Freedom in Britain sustained another body blow. It's fast disappearing like in America. Both nations are more police states than democracies. They mock virtually all democratic principles. They govern lawlessly. They do it ruthlessly. Sweeping surveillance is official policy. So is suppressing information about government wrongdoing. Journalists involved in exposing it are threatened. Guardian disclosures fall under parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee's remit. It reinforces government claims about compromising national security. When good journalism is equated with doing it, freedom dies.

Turkish authorities say they have seized a large quantity of chemicals on the country’s border with Syria, adding that the chemicals “could be transformed into weapons.” Turkey’s army said in a statement issued on Sunday that a convoy of three vehicles attempted to smuggle the chemicals across the border on Saturday near the southeastern Turkish town of Reyhanli. Para-military police were forced to shoot out the tires of the vehicles to stop them, arresting one of the drivers while the other suspects fled in the direction of Syria. The statement added that a large amount of sulfur was part of the chemical haul.

Doctors were asked to torture detainees "for intelligence gathering", and unethical practices continue, review concludes. ● Doctors and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded. The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors.

Ewen MacAskill & James Ball: The NSA [allegedly] gathers intelligence to keep America safe. But leaked documents reveal the NSA's dark side – and show an agency intent on exploiting the digital revolution to the full. ■ Barack Obama hailed United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon as a "good friend" after the two had sat down in the White House in April to discuss the issues of the day: Syria and alleged chemical weapons attacks, North Korea, Israel-Palestine, and climate change. But long before Ban's limousine had even passed through the White House gates for the meeting, the US government knew what the secretary general was going to talk about, courtesy of the world's biggest eavesdropping organisation, the National Security Agency. Spying on Ban and others at the UN is in contravention of international law, and the US, forced on the defensive this week over the Snowden leaks about worldwide snooping, ordered an end to surveillance of the organization, according to Reuters. The incident is consistent with the portrait of the NSA that emerges from the tens of thousands of documents leaked by Snowden. Page after page shows the NSA engaged in the kind of intelligence-gathering it would be expected to carry out: eavesdropping on Taliban insurgents planning attacks in remote Afghanistan valleys, or listening in on hostage-takers in Colombia. But the documents reveal, too, the darker side of the NSA. It is indiscriminate in the information it is collecting. Nothing appears to be too small for the NSA. Nothing too trivial. Rivals, enemies, allies and friends – US citizens and 'non-Americans' – are all scooped up.

New York Times: No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.

● This is how the BBC website introduces a report by its BBC Panorama’s Syria correspondents Ian Pannell and Darren Conway on August the 30th, 2013. The story contained a video, ostensibly shot near Aleppo, Northern Syria, by an anonymous school headmaster, and documenting the aftermath of a napalm attack on his school, supposedly perpetrated by the Syrian armed forces on August 26th.
● According to the story, the “evil” forces of Bashar al-Assad, at a time when they had just about established their strategic advantage over the anti-government rebel forces and the foreign mercenaries they had been fighting for over two years, had found nothing better to do than attack a school, a target which presented no military interest whatsoever, with napalm – no less – just so the international media, and BBC Panorama in particular, could pick the story and broadcast it to Western audiences, in perfect timing to coincide with the British Parliament’s vote on the so-called “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, which was being pushed for by Prime Minister David Cameron, ostensibly to prevent precisely this kind of atrocities.
● Were Assad’s forces really that stupid? Of course not. It did not take long before several international commentators and observers pointed out the many implausibilities in the video and the story in general. Among them, Italian author Francesco Santoianni, showed how incongruent the whole story was, sparking the suspicion that the entire video might have been a fabrication.

A 5.0 earthquake was registered on Japan’s east cost in a prefecture neighboring Fukushima. It comes as a top Japanese politician called for acknowledgement of the fact that some Fukushima evacuees would never be able to return to the area. ● Sunday’s tremors were felt as far away as Tokyo, but no casualties or damage reports were released at the time. The news comes just ahead of one of the most dangerous nuclear cleanup operations ever attempted. Scheduled to start at the beginning of November, it will involve the careful, manual removal of 400 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods from the plant’s Reactor No. 4 - with an atomic yield greater than the Hiroshima bomb. The long and cumbersome operation will not permit even the slightest tremor, or Japan risks a catastrophe greater than Chernobyl.

Truth Frequency Radio: Our oceans are dying: health of the world’s ocean threatened by pollution ■ Newcastle, Australian yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen said: "As we left japan it felt as if the ocean itself was dead. We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumor on it's head. it was pretty sickening. I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks, and big flocks of feeding birds, but this time for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen." (H/T: The People's Voice)

● “Remember, Dick Cheney is a politician who engaged in some of the worst, most radical and criminal conduct in the last century in the United States and did it all in secret — from lying about the war in Iraq to torturing people, to putting people in cages with no lawyers, to eavesdropping on the American people without the warrants required by law,” he told CNN host Anderson Cooper. “So of course political people like Dick Cheney, people in political power always want to do what they do behind a wall of secrecy because that’s how they abuse power.”
● “And they always consider those who bring transparency to what they do to be evil, treasonous people,” he continued. “Edward Snowden is considered a hero to people around the world and the United States and received a whistle blowing award because he did what people have conscience do, which is tell that world about things that they should know.”
● “That the world’s most powerful people are trying to keep concealed,” Greenwald said. “It’s created a worldwide debate over internet freedom and the value of privacy and dangers of surveillance. It’s created movements for reform and all kinds of legislators around the world including in the United States and the world is much better off that the Dick Cheneys of the world aren’t able to abuse their power in secret.”
● “What we told the world what they didn’t know is this spying system is directed at innocent people, people that have nothing to do with terrorism,” Greenwald said.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) spied on its world's foes and allies, including Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Israel, several Latin American countries and Europe: Germany, Italy, Spain and others. Here is Part One of the timeline of the NSA's blatant spy programs from June to September 2013. (INFOGRAPHIC MAP)

Paul Krugman: A War on the Poor ■ John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did an end run around his state’s Legislature — controlled by his own party — to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that is an important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.” bviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality. The big question is why. But, first, let’s talk a bit more about what’s eating the right.