In retrospect, the signs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s growing anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem unmistakable. But even people who worried his increasingly strident views were clouding his ability to serve the U.S. military could not predict the murderous rampage of which he now stands accused.

In the months leading to Thursday’s shooting spree that left 13 people dead and 29 others wounded, Hasan raised eyebrows with comments that the war on terror was “a war on Islam” and wrestled with what to tell fellow Muslim solders who had their doubts about fighting in Islamic countries.

“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who complained to administrators at a military university about what he considered Hasan’s “anti-American” rants. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”

Finnell studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., where Hasan persistently complained about perceived anti-Muslim sentiment in the military and injected his politics into courses where they had no place.

“In retrospect, I’m not surprised he did it,” Finnell said of the shootings. “I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were.”

Source/Full Story:  FOXNews.com
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Source/Full Story: YouTube
Technorati Tags: Nidal Malik Hasan

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of “reasoning” has the following pattern:

1. Person A has position X.  “It is possible that the actions of Major Nidal Mailk Hasan were ideologically motivated.”
2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).  “You’re saying that because he is a Major in the army that he’s not going to feel like a private would feel.  That’s crap.”
3. Person B attacks position Y.  “You are a JAG officer and have no idea what it’s like to be in combat.”
4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.

The next phase of the discussion involves the use of the ole Ad Hominem attack, but I’ll leave that up to you to spot.  Great fun, that.

Anyway, plenty of other people suffered (and continue to suffer today) as a result of the mal-nutrition and stress and disease and death and all the other things associated with war.   Yes, including Germans.

My mother-in-law has just as many traumatic memories from her own childhood:  of clambering over the body parts of her neighbors that had just been blown to pieces, of being squeezed through basement windows to steal food because she was the only one who was small enough to fit through the window, etc, etc etc.  Incidentally, many many children started smoking back then as a means to stave off hunger.  It killed a lot of them. 

So I repeat:  What this 79 year old woman experienced during World War II was not unique in any way to the Jews.

And I have one question.  Why is the “German” propaganda piece behind this woman written in English?  Most certainly it would have been written in German.

The 12-year-old girl plucked cold, slimy potato peels out of the garbage containers in a village in eastern Poland. When those trash scraps became scarce, she ate clover.

Crumbs and decomposed food sickened Betty Potash Gold and her family members, causing diarrhea and bloody vomiting, as they hid from the Nazis.

Although Gold lived through extreme hunger, mental duress and near-death experiences during the Holocaust, she and other survivors face another peril decades after the war.

“Jewish survivors of World War II who were potentially exposed to the Holocaust were at a higher risk for cancer occurrence later on in life than those not exposed,” concluded a study published in the November issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Intense calorie deprivation, such as what Gold experienced, has long-term effects on survivors, said Dr. Micha Barchana, one of the study authors.
…
Although studies with rhesus monkeys and mice suggest that limiting calories conferred cancer-protecting benefits, this study showed the opposite effect. People subjected to the intense caloric deprivation, especially at an early age, had greater likelihood of cancer.

Source/Full Story: cnn.com

Parents are to be forced to allow their children to have sex education before the age of consent, the Government announced today.

Under the new laws, when children reach 15 their parents will lose the right to withdraw them from sex education.

At present parents can remove their children from lessons about sex until they are 19.

The move forms part of new laws that will make sex education compulsory in primary and secondary schools from 2011.

Faith schools will not be able to opt out of any part of the new curriculum, although they will be able to teach topics within the “ethos of their faith”.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: “Sex and relationship education is a very important element and we see it as crucial to our drive to reduce teenage pregnancy.”

The move is in response to a year-long review of sex education which found that 40 per cent of pupils are dissatisfied with the quality of teaching provided by schools on the issue.

A survey of parents, commissioned by the Government, suggests that 40 per cent believe children should attend sex education lessons but almost a third (30 per cent) said that the right to opt out was important regardless of the child’s age.

Under the new curriculum, pupils as young as 7 will learn about puberty and the facts of life and 5-year-olds will be taught about parts of the body, relationships and the effects of drugs on the body.

When they reach secondary school, pupils will learn about contraception, HIV and Aids, pregnancy and different kinds of relationships — including same-sex unions and civil partnerships.

Schools will be allowed to teach the subject “in line with the context, values and ethos of the school”.

It means that children at some faith schools could be taught that their religion frowns on the use of contraceptives at the same time as learning about condoms.

Source/Full Story: Times Online

The Air Force is looking to harness advances in bio-science so they can “degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive abilities.” It’s all part of a $49 million dollar bio-research effort unveiled last month by the Air Force Research Lab’s “Human Effectiveness Directorate,” and it’s the latest in a series of out-there military ideas to mess with adversaries’ heads.
…
This new Air Force project looks to do just that – and boost the cognitive abilities of U.S. troops at the same time. One component of the research effort, called Biobehavioral Performance, is looking for military specimens who are already resistant to physical or mental stressors. By analyzing the biochemical brain pathways of troops who are cool under pressure, the Air Force wants an “external stimulant” that can act as a synthetic version of optimal cognitive stress response and keep airmen operating at top level.

Source/Full Story:  Wired.com

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

Gary Comerford, Inspector General spokesman for the Defense Department, told Raw Story last week that his office is conducting an investigation into the retired military analyst program and confirmed that the investigation began during the summer.

Source/Full Story: Raw Story

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Source/Full Story: Raw Story

The former head of the CIA in Milan has been given an eight-year jail sentence for kidnapping at the end of the first trial anywhere in the world involving the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” programme.

Robert Lady was tried in his absence and convicted of helping to organise the seizure of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street in February 2003. His superior, Jeff Castelli, the head of the CIA in Italy at the time, was acquitted on the grounds that he was covered by diplomatic immunity. Most of the other 23 alleged CIA operatives on trial were given five-year jail sentences in their absence.

Extraordinary rendition involved the abduction of suspects and their forcible transfer for interrogation to third countries, often states in which torture was routinely employed.

The judge ruled that neither the former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, nor his deputy could be convicted because the evidence against them was subject to official secrecy restrictions. Two other Italian intelligence officials were given three years’ jail.

Successive Italian administrations avoided applying to the US for the extradition of the 26 American defendants, who included a senior US air force officer. Their lawyers, appointed by the court, had no contact with their clients, who were regarded in Italian law as being on the run.

Source/Full Story: guardian.co.uk
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GUNMEN shot dead a former KGB spy turned basketball tycoon in his car yesterday a few hundred metres from the Moscow office of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, officials said.

Shabtai von Kalmanovic, who went on to organise a Michael Jackson concert in Moscow and help two clubs win Europe’s top basketball title, died at the scene, the state prosecutor’s office said.

More than 20 shots were fired at Kalmanovic’s Mercedes from a silver Lada a few hundred metres from the White House, the seat of Russia’s Government headquarters, state Russian television channel Vesti reported.

Kalmanovic’s driver, who was wounded, gave chase to the attackers but had to abandon it because of his wounds, investigators said.

Kalmanovic spent five years in an Israeli prison for passing secret military technology to the KGB before being released in 1993, state media reported.

Returning to Russia, Kalmanovic set up a market in the centre of Moscow and helped organise concerts by Tom Jones, Liza Minnelli and Michael Jackson in Russia, the reports said.

The attack was likely a contract killing, senior investigator Anatoly Bagmet said.

A citizen of Israel, Russia and Lithuania, Kalmanovic’s financial support helped Lithuanian basketball club Zalgiris Kaunas win the Euroleague, the continent’s top basketball competition, in 1999.

He helped Spartak Moscow win the women’s Euroleague in each of the past three years.

Source/Full Story: News.com.au

The National Security Agency (NSA) is setting up a new $1.5 billion cybersecurity data center at the Utah National Guard’s Camp Williams near Salt Lake City.

At 1 million square feet, the center will form the hub of the highly-classified Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched during the Bush Administration.

It is not clear, though, whether that is the only purpose that the new data center will serve, or whether it will support other NSA cybersecurity activities.

Source/Full Story: computerworld.com
Technorati Tags: NSA, CNCI

A Maryland woman lost her accounting job after a background check performed through the FBI’s criminal database indicated, erroneously, that she was unsuitable for the job, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Eschol Amelia “Amy” Studnitz had been working for Corporate Mailing Services since August 2008 as a senior accountant.

Last July, after CMS won a contract to handle mail for the Social Security Administration, the administration performed a routine background check on Studnitz and other CMS employees, who needed a low-level security clearance to work on the contract. The SSA subsequently sent CMS a letter stating that the background check showed Studnitz was “unsuitable” to work on the contract. The SSA letter didn’t say what the background check had uncovered.

Rather than simply keep her off the contract, CMS decided to fire Studnitz. The company gave her just a few minutes to leave its offices.

Studnitz maintained that she had no criminal history and, indeed, the only court record the Baltimore Sun was able to uncover on her was a civil case related to a $11,676 judgment that a nursing home had been awarded in 2005. Studnitz told the paper this actually involved a suit against her late father’s estate.

Source/Full Story: Wired.com

Newly released FBI data offer evidence of the broad scope and complexity of the nation’s terrorist watch list, documenting a daily flood of names nominated for inclusion to the controversial list.

During a 12-month period ended in March this year, for example, the U.S. intelligence community suggested on a daily basis that 1,600 people qualified for the list because they presented a “reasonable suspicion,” according to data provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the FBI in September and made public last week.

FBI officials cautioned that each nomination “does not necessarily represent a new individual, but may instead involve an alias or name variant for a previously watchlisted person.”

The ever-churning list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million entries. The committee was told that over that same period, officials asked each day that 600 names be removed and 4,800 records be modified. Fewer than 5 percent of the people on the list are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government’s “no fly” list.

Source/Full Story:  washingtonpost.com
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Israel and the United States have launched a three-week joint air defense exercise, code-named Juniper Cobra 10, in the port city of Haifa.

The military exercises which are described as the largest ever by the two allies are conducted under a media blackout in the West.

About a thousand US troops, from all four branches of service, would work alongside an equal number of Israel Defense Force personnel, taking part in computer-simulated war games.

The air maneuver will include the newly-developed Arrow 2 as well as America’s THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) and the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System.

Israel’s aerial artillery brigade, the US Army Corps’ 69th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, and naval destroyer USS Higgins are all taking part in the drill. The US has also sent 17 warships equipped with radar systems. The drill involves the deployment of missile batteries throughout Israel.

The Joint Task Force commander is Rear Admiral John M. Richardson, deputy commander of the US Sixth Fleet. It began October 21 and will last through November 3, 2009.

The US says the war games are aimed at protecting Israel against possible threats.

This is while Tel Aviv has initiated several wars in the region in its 60-year-long history and is considered as a major threat by regional countries given its nuclear weapons capabilities.

The United States is Israel’s closest ally, providing it with about 2.2 billion dollars a year in military assistance.

Source/Full Story: presstv.ir

It has been just over one year since the U.S. Army announced that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was being placed under the direct control of the US Army Northern Command (NORTHCOM), and was being indefinitely reassigned as an “on-call federal response force” for emergencies of all sorts, natural and man-made, including terrorist attacks, within NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility — the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

…The number of uniformed soldiers assigned to this duty continues to increase annually and the force is estimated to reach a strength of 20,000 by the year 2011. This massive force will all be trained and equipped to “subdue unruly or dangerous individuals” and “help with civil unrest and crowd control.” As usual, these directives are vague and could be applied to any number of scenarios. Furthermore, the critical question to be asked in light of such an arrangement is who will decide who is unruly or dangerous? Whoever is appointed the arbiter of such things will of necessity be feared as he will have 20,000 troops on alert and ready to quell these civil disturbances.

…President Barack Obama marches on headlong, bent on disregarding this act and the applicable provisions of the Constitution in order to continue training the United States military to participate in purposefully undefined “emergency” situations within the borders of the United States. Recently he and Congress received an analysis of how well this unlawful cooperation between state and national government is progressing. By all accounts, NORTHCOM is withholding some critical information regarding the activities of this force. When it does release the required information, it does so slowly and clumsily.

…Not surprisingly, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has examined NORTHCOM’s reports and agrees with the command’s assessment of the provenance of the difficulties they are encountering in the present arrangement, and they have accordingly suggested that states relinquish administration of their forces and agencies and cede management and command to NORTHCOM. There is fear among those zealous of the Constitution’s prohibition of commingling of federal and state forces that Democratic governors and legislators may tamely acquiesce to President Obama’s desires and thereby further debilitate the strength and sanctity of state sovereignty, the foundational principle of federalism, and the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution that protects it.

Source/Full Story: thenewamerican.com
Technorati Tags: NORTHCOM, 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team