Two 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls will take time to court Tea Party activists before participating in the first presidential debate of the cycle next Thursday.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) will bothappear at the South Carolina Greenville Tea Party's "Presidential Debate Freedom Rally" on May 5.
HELEN KENNEDY
NY DAILY NEWS
May 2, 2011
Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler share a towering reputation for evil – and also an anniversary.
Both were declared dead on May 1.
Late on May 1, 1945 – about as late as President Obama’s TV announcement Sunday – German radio announced that Hitler had fallen “fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany.”
He had actually committed suicide the day before.
In some cultures May 1 is the official beginning of summer. In many places, May Day is also Labor Day, a celebration of the working man.
The Slog
Monday, May 2, 2011
After comment-threading at Huffpost this afternoon about the range of inconsistencies between the White House account of the anti-Bin Laden operation and what appear to be the facts, this little message greeted me when I went to leave a link to tonight’s piece there an hour ago:
Sorry, but you have been banned from commenting.
There was nothing obscene, hateful or libellous in what I wrote. Just a comment saying how come helicopters fell out of the sky but no Navy seals died; and by the way where does it say in the Q’ran that Muslims should be buried at sea.
Two weeks ago, a threader here told me to ‘expect more censorship now Arianna has sold out to the right-wing AOL mavericks’. Oh how I laughed then. Oh how silly I feel now….especially given this post from a couple of days ago:
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/stop-moaning-and-demand-the-right-to-complain/
So, it looks like the Democrats have caught the Guardian disease.
I believe Bin Laden is dead. But I also believe we are being fed a stream of bollocks about who knew what, and when. I believe it is my right in a liberal democratic society and a free Web to post about it. Clearly, I’m mistaken.
FACT SHEET
National Level Exercise 2011 (NLE 2011) is scheduled for May 2011. The purpose of the exercise is to prepare and coordinate a multiple-jurisdictional integrated response to a national catastrophic event.
NLE 2011 is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise. Tier I exercises (formerly known as the Top Officials exercise series or TOPOFF) are conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), which serves as the nation’s overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises. The NEP was established to provide the U.S. government, at all levels, exercise opportunities to prepare for catastrophic crises ranging from terrorism to natural disasters.
NLE 2011 is a White House directed Congressionally-mandated exercise that includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, their deputies and staff; and key operational elements. NLE 2011 will focus on regional catastrophic response and recovery activities between federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants.
NLE 2011 will simulate the catastrophic nature of a major earthquake in the central United States region of the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ). The year 2011 is the bicentennial anniversary of the 1811 New Madrid earthquake, for which the NMSZ is named. NLE 2011 will be the first NLE to simulate a natural hazard.
NLE 2011 activities will take place at command posts, emergency operation centers and other locations to include federal facilities in the Washington D.C. area and federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector facilities in the eight member states of the Central United States Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC). The eight member states of CUSEC encompass four different FEMA regions: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee (FEMA Region IV); Illinois and Indiana (FEMA Region V); Arkansas (FEMA Region VI); and Missouri (FEMA Region VII).
Through a comprehensive evaluation process, the exercise will assess response and recovery capabilities both nationally and regionally. The exercise is designed to validate the following capabilities:
Exercises such as NLE 2011 are an important component of national preparedness, helping to build an integrated federal, state, tribal, local and private sector capability to manage a catastrophic event; and rapidly and effectively respond to and recover from any major disaster that occurs.
The functional exercise offers agencies and jurisdictions a way to test their plans and skills in a real-time, realistic environment and to gain the in-depth knowledge that only experience can provide. Participants will exercise response and recovery functions that are critical to responding to a catastrophic event. Lessons learned from the exercise will provide valuable insights to guide future planning for disasters and other emergencies.
FEMA’s mission is to support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.
Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would "wash out" radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities.
More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material.
"The wind direction was moving from west to east and the radioactive clouds were threatening to reach the highly populated areas of Moscow, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl," he told Science of Superstorms, a BBC2 documentary to be broadcast today.
"If the rain had fallen on those cities it would've been a catastrophe for millions. The area where my crew was actively influencing the clouds was near Chernobyl, not only in the 30km zone, but out to a distance of 50, 70 and even 100 km."
WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- The U.S. Treasury Department will implement measures this week to buy time before the debt ceiling is reached, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Monday.
Awaiting congressional action is consideration of whether to raise the debt ceiling beyond $14.3 trillion.
"This letter is to inform you of the extraordinary measures the Treasury Department will begin taking this week in anticipation of the date the debt limit will be reached, and to provide an updated estimate of the department's ability to use these measures to preserve lawful borrowing authority without exceeding the debt limit," Geithner said in a letter written to House and Senate leadership.
Geithner said the measures should allow the Treasury Department to extend borrowing authority until about Aug. 2.
Geithner said the department was prepared to suspend the issuance of state and local government treasury securities on Friday, if necessary.
If Congress doesn't increase the debt limit by May 16 -- an unlikely scenario -- the Treasury Department "will be forced to employ further extraordinary measures on that date to provide headroom under the limit," such as declaring a debt issuance suspension period for the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund so the department can redeem existing Treasury securities held by the fund as investments, and suspend issuance of new Treasury securities to the fund as investments.
Geithner also said he would suspend the daily reinvestment of Treasury Department securities held as investments by the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees' Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.
A secret memo indicates that SF cops may be working as FBI spies — with no local oversight
San Francisco cops assigned to the FBI's terrorism task force can ignore local police orders and California privacy laws to spy on people without any evidence of a crime.
That's what a recently released memo appears to say — and it has sent shockwaves through the civil liberties community.
It also has members of the S.F. Police Commission asking why a carefully crafted set of rules on intelligence gathering, approved in the wake of police spy scandals in the 1990s, were bypassed without the knowledge or consent of the commission.
"It's a bombshell," said John Crew, a long-time police practices expert with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
The ACLU obtained the document April 4 under the California Public Records Act after a long battle. It's a 2007 memorandum of understanding outlining the terms of an agreement between the city and the FBI for San Francisco's participation in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
And, according to Crew, it effectively puts local officers under the control of the FBI. "That means Police Commission policies do not apply," Crew said. "It allows San Francisco police to circumvent local intelligence-gathering policies and follow more permissive federal rules."
Veena Dubal, a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, agreed: "This MOU confirms our worst fears," she said.
Dubal noted that in the waning months of the Bush administration, the FBI changed its policies to allow federal authorities to collect intelligence on a person even if the subject is not suspected of a crime. The FBI is now allowed to spy on Americans who have done nothing wrong — and who may be engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment.
Taliban in Pakistan deny information that the founder and leader of the international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, has been killedovernight.
The information was reported Monday by GEO TV, citing Taliban representatives.
According to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, TTP, (Student Movement of Pakistan) Bin Laden is alive. The authorities in Pakistan have not yet issued an official statement in connection with the Taliban claims.
The new that the Al-Qaeda leader has been killed was announced overnight by US President, Barack Obama.
No body. No photograph or DNA evidence – at least, not yet. [Update: The White House now says there was a DNA match between the body and tissue taken from bin Laden's dead sister's brain.] Conspiracy theorists are an ingenious bunch, but at the moment the White House is making this ridiculously easy for them. Gideon Rachman says he gives it 24 hours before conspiracy theories about Osama bin Laden begin circulating, but they are already flowing vigorously. The Taliban says he’s still alive, for example.
The Islamic world is amazingly receptive to what I call “counterknowledge”. Let’s start by reminding ourselves that most people in Muslim countries have their doubts about 9/11, and millions them believe unquestioningly that it was plotted by the CIA. One of the most important features of what sociologists call the cultic milieu is that political and religious extremists happily exchange conspiracy theories, irrespective of their origin. We’ve seen this in the popularity of the far-Right Russian Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab world. We’ve also seen young, Left-wing disciples of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore happily draw on 9/11 “truther” theories constructed in the American fascist underground.
Sir Christopher Meyer, our former Ambassador to the Washington, said this in response today’s news: “I can’t conceive the US president would go out to make a statement to the world that Bin Laden is dead without being able to produce evidence that he is dead. I think we will see some evidence – DNA or photographic – to prove there is not still some phantom Osama bin Laden riding the Tora Bora mountains.”
Glenn Beck nearly pulled a fast one on his viewers on his Monday show, suggesting he was disappointed in the American reaction to Osama bin Laden’s demise. But the totality of his reaction exhibited all the theatrics one has come to expect from Beck.
On his Fox News Channel show, Beck led off his show by suggesting as Americans we were better than celebrating the fall of bin Laden by celebrating with flash mobs. No, he insisted upon something bigger.
“By now you have probably heard that Osama bin Laden is dead,” Beck said. “Shot in the head by a fearless and very, very precise U.S. military special ops assault team. This is a great day in the war on terror. But as I watched all the celebrations taking place on the streets of America, all over America, you may have — and maybe I’m alone, had a strange feeling. You may have seen students jumping in the lake in Ohio, and rushing to White House, carrying signs and smoking cigars. As I watched these things happen last night, I couldn’t help but be reminded when the Palestinians danced in the street and passed out candy after 9/11 attacks, when they danced in the street over the killing of five American students and slaughter of a Jewish family. All of these things you know and I know were offensive. All of those victims were innocent. America, we are better than this. We are better than jumping in to lakes and holding signs and cigars. I think we’re better than that. I mean, why hand out candy? When you can have cookies and confetti — and a marching band! Huh? Yes!”
Beck later said he was disappointed bin Laden had received such reverence with his burial and asked what warranted that.
“This guy is not a Muslim – he’s murder,” Beck said. “So why the need to be so religious in the burial? I bet the non-radical Muslims everywhere are offended this guy was treated with religious honor. I spoke to a Muslim friend of mine who said the very same thing today. This is like Timothy McVeigh getting buried in Arlington Cemetery. He was a deranged killer.”
"I support what NATO did. I thought this was a good use of the mandate. This is the way to end this [conflict]. Thousands of people are subject to dying, the longer this takes. No one in the world is going to regret Gadhafi being replaced, however you do it. I want to thank NATO for expanding the scope of these operations."
"A good use of the mandate" – killing three grandsons of the Libyan dictator, all under the age of 12? And what about that "mandate," which was proclaimed in the name of preventing civilian deaths in Libya’s civil war? In the Orwellian logic of "humanitarian" interventionism, raining death on 12-year-olds is an act of love. Welcome to Bizarro World: we hope you enjoy your stay.
Because it looks like we’re going to be trapped in this alternate dimension – where up is down and truth is lies – for quite a long time to come. Instead of crumbling like all the other Arab despots who face their day of reckoning, Gadhafi has survived – in some measure, I would argue, because of UN intervention. Without that, it’s likely the eccentric tyrant – although he might have temporarily retaken Benghazi – would’ve fallen victim to the same seismic forces that toppled his neighbors: Ben Ali, in Tunisia, and Egypt’s Mubarak. His regime was saved by the cavalry – the NATO bombers that are daily wreaking devastation on the Libyan people.
A thoroughly despicable – and, within the wider Arab world, hugely unpopular – tinpot dictator is fighting NATO to a draw. That has to earn him some credit on the Arab street – and in his own country, where the much-vaunted "tribes" show no signs of abandoning him.
As I predicted from the outset, the rebellion is a regionalist phenomenon, roughly centered in – but not confined to – Benghazi and the eastern part of the country. Libya was never a real country anyway, and so the rapid reversion to the ancient borders of Tripolitania (in the West) and Cyrenaica (in the East) is hardly surprising.
Yet the rebels – and their Western backers – are hardly content with half the pie. They want the whole thing, and that’s what this war is really about – it is a war of aggression by the de facto government of eastern Libya against the pro-Gadhafi Western half. Actually, the Gadhafi forces enjoy the support of two-thirds of the country if we include the Fezzan region, the source of many of the black African "mercenaries" Gadhafi is accused of importing.
This is why the Gadhafi regime has repeatedly called for a truce. Upon announcing the death of Gadhafi’s son, Seif, and the three grandchildren, Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim put it this way:
"This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country. This is not permitted by international law. It is not permitted by any moral code or principle. If people claim they want to protect civilians, we have again and again declared, we are ready for negotiation, ready for road maps for peace; ready for political transitional periods; ready for elections; ready for referendum.
"NATO does not care to test our promises. The West does not care to test our statements. They only care to rob us of our freedom, our wealth, which is oil, and our right to decide our future as Libyans."
This isn’t just a desperate ploy to buy time – Gadhafi really thinks he can win a national election, even one scrutinized in every detail by the UN. That’s a true megalomaniac for you. Well, then, why not take him up on his offer? After all, if Gadhafi is really the monster he’s now portrayed as being – as opposed to the rather rosy portrait of a "reformed" terrorist which took hold after he came in from the cold – then he’ll lose, big time, and the problem is solved without further loss of life.
(Reuters) - A woman killed during the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan was not his wife and was not used as a human shield by the al Qaeda leader before his death, a U.S. official said on Monday, correcting an earlier description.
John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top counter- terrorism adviser, told reporters earlier that the slain woman had been one of bin Laden's wives and had been used -- perhaps voluntarily -- as a shield during the firefight.
However, a different White House official said that account had turned out not to be the case. Bin Laden's wife was injured but not killed in the assault.
U.S. officials have said a small U.S. strike team, dropped by helicopter to bin Laden's hide-out near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad under cover of night, shot the al Qaeda leader dead with bullets to the chest and head. He did not return fire.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Alister Bull; editing by Christopher Wilson)
n Kabul, the Afghan capital, the streets are quieter than usual.
Nearly 10 years after the US-led war on terror against al Qaeda began, its leader Osama bin Laden has been killed in a mansion in Abbottabad, just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. But unlike scenes in the US on Monday, Afghans are not yet publicly celebrating.
"Most people are really emotional now that he is killed, we are happy. At lunch everyone was congratulating each other, especially those who lived under the Taliban," Shakib Shariffi, a 29-year-old Kabul resident, told Al Jazeera.
"But most people say they are also scared of any repercussions. The streets of Kabul not as busy as they usually are. People are worried there may be a reaction and that suicide bombers may come out on the streets."
While for many across the US, the death of bin Laden will be seen as some kind of conclusion to a decade-long war, Afghans continue to live under the constant threat of violence from Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters, and a US and Nato campaign continues in the war-ravaged country.
Mullah Zaif, a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, told Al Jazeera the killing would not give "any fruit to the Americans or bring stability to the region. This is an ideological war. It was not just Osama bin Laden fighting," he told Al Jazeera.
Changing attitudes
Others also express little hope for the future.
"The assassination of bin Laden will not end our suffering, so al Qaeda will continue its terrorist attacks, the Taliban will continue their insurgency in Afghanistan," Haroun Mir, the deputy director of Afghanistan's Centre for Research and Policy Studies, said.
"People are still afraid ... it is still a dangerous country. A lot of people are afraid that al-Qaeda and the Taliban will take revenge for what has happened. We are under a permanent threat.
"The death of Osama bin Laden will not itself lead to lasting peace in this country."
Mohammed Fahim Dashty, editor of the English-language newspaper Kabul Times, was badly injured by suspected al-Qaeda bombers two days before the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US, in an explosion that killed a national hero, Ahmad Shah Massoud.
He does not believe the death of bin Laden will bring any short-term change, but that it might alter people's attitudes to Afghanistan and the US-led operation against the Taliban.
"Most of the people were thinking that this war against terrorism was not a real war. Now I think this mindset has been changed.
"Afghans are also proud, because it has changed the global point of view [in relation to al-Qaeda].
"They have been saying that the al-Qaeda leader was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, but there wasn't any proof of that. But now they have that evidence."
WASHINGTON |
(Reuters) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday cooperation with Pakistan helped lead the United States to the Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden was found and killed by U.S. special forces.
Clinton also said the United States remained committed to its partnership with Pakistan and she declined all comment on the potential payment of any reward for information that led to bin Laden.
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | |
Global Research, May 2, 2011 | |
If today were April 1 and not May 2, we could dismiss as an April fool’s joke this morning’s headline that Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan and quickly buried at sea. As it is, we must take it as more evidence that the US government has unlimited belief in the gullibility of Americans. | |
Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations,led a discussion last week about a report she co-authored that argues for increased funding for international family funding as a part of U.S. foreign policy. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)
(CNSNews.com) - U.S. foreign policy should include increased U.S. taxpayer funding of birth control, a liberal think tank says.
The report, released by the Council on Foreign Relations, says increased funding for family planning programs would allow women to make “critical decisions” about the size of their families and the spacing of pregnancies – “better enabling them to be linchpins of positive change in their communities.”
“Women today are recognized as critical to reducing poverty, boosting economic growth and agricultural productivity, promoting environmental sustainability, and raising healthy and well-educated children – steps that are imperative to confronting a range of pressing foreign policy challenges around the globe,” the report says.
Comment: Interesting in the light of several other reports suggesting that Pakistani authorities were completely unaware of the presence of US special forces.
Flashback: Intimate links between ISI, CIA, Al Qaeda exposed
MSNBC
May 2, 2011
[...]
U.S. officials have taken custody of bin Laden’s body. No Americans were harmed in the operation in Pakistan and U.S. forces took care to avoid civilian casualties, the President said.
CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh reports, citing a senior Pakistani intelligence official, that members of Pakistan’s intelligence service – the ISI – were on site in Abbotabad, Pakistan, during the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The official said he did not know who fired the shot that actually killed Bin Laden.
The circumstances surrounding Osama bin Laden's reported death raise urgent questions over how the US is so sure it got its man.Skip related content
US officials have said DNA testing has proved the al Qaeda leader was killed in a villa in Pakistan.
They have also identified him by facial recognition.
But photographs of Bin Laden after his reported death have not been released.
Also, reports have suggested that Saudi Arabia was asked to take his body - but refused to do so.
The fact his body was buried at sea has so far only added to the speculation, although as a Muslim, he had to be laid to rest as quickly as possible.
Under Islamic law, people can only be buried at sea if they died there, or if there is a risk their body will be exhumed or dug up if buried in the ground.
The release of a photograph purporting to show bin Laden's corpse - which was later confirmed to be a fake - added to the confusion.
Journalists have not yet had the opportunity to ask more than a few questions of the Obama administration about details of Bin Laden's death.
A former British ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, told Sky News: "I imagine we will see proof.
"I can't concede the US president would go out to make a statement to the world that bin Laden is dead without being able to produce evidence that he is dead.
"I think we will see some evidence - DNA or photographic - to prove there is not still some phantom Osama bin Laden riding the Tora Bora mountains."
We were knowingly told verified lies to invade and occupy Iraq. We were lied to entirely about the "spontaneous" "Arab Spring" later admitted to by the US State Department as a preplanned operation years in the making. We were knowingly told verified lies regarding Libya to engage in military operations in North Africa and we are currently being told verified lies about US-fueled uprisings in Syria.
Government says it has real images and video, still deciding whether to release them
Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
May 2, 2011
The London Guardian has suggested that the fake image used by several British mainstream media websites this morning on their front pages was the work of “conspiracy theorists” who claimed it was genuine.
The Guardian notes that the image was used by the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror websites, who picked it up from an online news site. The image was removed by the newspapers after it became apparent that it was a fake that had been online for over two years.
“Since then, however, the image has been claimed as genuine on a number of conspiracy forums and used to substantiate claims that the terrorist responsible for the 9/11 bombings had been killed.” Guardian writer Amelia Hill states.
Hill provides no link to the forums she is referring to, or the “conspiracy theorists” that suggested it was genuine.
The Guardian’s live blog speculated whether the image was real when it was first used this morning, where as this website, Prisonplanet.com, the “conspiracy theorists”, immediately reported it to be completely fake.
Indeed, after we reported it was fake, the news spread like wildfire on Twitter and led directly to the removal of the image by all the mainstream sources that had used it.
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