SALON.COM-In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous,aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers).

The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a “preliminary review” to determine if a full investigation was warranted — in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

Yesterday, it was announced that this “preliminary review” by the prosecutor assigned to conduct it, U.S. Attorney John Durham, is now complete, and — exactly as one would expect — even this category of criminals has been almost entirely protected, meaning a total legal whitewash for the Bush torture regime.

Read full article about U.S. Torture Crimes Permanently, Officially Shielded.

© 2011 Salon.com

Photo by Flickr user Nan Palmero

THE NATION– A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.

According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.

Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”

Read the full article about US Orders News Blackout Over Crippled Nebraska Nuclear Plant.

© 2011 The Nation

Photo by Flickr user x-ray_delta_one

RAW STORY– Approximately $6.6 billion in cash was likely stolen after being flown to Iraq during the months that followed the U.S.-led invasion, Pentagon officials said recently.

Stuart Bowen, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, told The Los Angeles Times that the sum just might be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

The cash was part of a series of shipments totaling more than $12 billion, taken largely from the U.N. “oil-for-food” program and the sales of Iraqi oil. Officials in the Bush administration had hoped the massive pallets of cash would help calm Iraq’s civilian population following the chaotic and violent invasion and toppling of Saddam.

The funds — which were separate from a $53 billion appropriation Congress approved for Iraqi reconstruction efforts — were cobbled together by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before being flown to Baghdad and distributed to interim Iraqi ministers, who U.S. officials see as the most likely culprits in the theft: an allegation that’s not officially been leveled.

Read the full article about Billions Missing in Iraq May Be ‘Largest Theft of Funds in National History’.

© 2011 Raw Story

Photo by Flickr user

Podcast Show #45 – The Boiling Frogs Presents Paul Craig Roberts

“Paul Craig Roberts joins us to discuss the September 11 terrorist attacks as the defining event of our time, which has launched our nation on interminable wars of aggression, a domestic police state where the American President is a Caesar and completely above the law. He describes the US corporate media’s role today, which is to serve the government and the interest groups that empower the government, their astonishing blackout on legitimate investigations regarding 9/11 such as the investigation results supported by more than 1500 architects, and how currently the majority of Americans are ruled by propaganda and with little regard for truth and little access to it. Mr. Roberts talks about the conflicting, ever-changing and in many ways dubious accounts of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Military Industrial Complex’ need for the next ‘black hat,’ the question of China, and more!

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/podpress_trac/web/3802/0/BF.0045.Roberts…

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has been reporting on executive branch and cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. He has written or co-written eight books, contributed chapters to numerous books, and has published many articles in journals of scholarship. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Mr. Roberts has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy, and has been a critic of both Democratic and Republican administrations. His writings frequently appear on OpEdNews, Prisonplanet.com, Antiwar.com, Lew Rockwell’s web site, CounterPunch, and the American Free Press.”

Photo of Abby Martin in SD 9/11 Truth march, Balboa Park

VETERANS TODAY– The Department of Veterans Affairs, May 2007, Gulf War Veterans Information System reports the following: Total U.S. Military Gulf War Deaths: 73,846

• *Deaths amongst Deployed: 17,847

• *Deaths amongst Non-Deployed: 55,999  

• *Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906

• *Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911

• *Disability Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995

• *Percentage of combat troops that filed Disability Claims 36%

Soldiers, by nature, typically don’t complain.  In other words, the real impact of those who are disabled from all US invasions is not fully reflected in the official Veterans Affairs numbers.  When soldiers are sent to murder women and children, they tend to not be able to live normal lives thereafter.
     
How come the government numbers of 3,777 as of 9/7/7 are so low?  The answer is simple: the government does not want the 73,000 dead to be compared to the 55,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam.  What the government is doing is only counting the soldiers that die in action before they can get them into a helicopter or ambulance.  Any soldier who is shot but they get into a helicopter before he dies is not counted.

73,000 dead amongst the U.S. soldiers for this scale operation using weapons of mass destruction is not high – we expect the great majority of U.S. soldiers who took part in the invasion of Iraq to die of uranium poisoning, which can take decades to kill.

From a victors perspective, above any major war in history, The Gulf War has taken the most severe toll on soldiers. More than 1,820 tons of radio active nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armor piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the world’s worst man made ecological disaster. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb. The U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust represents far more than fourteen thousand Hiroshimas.

The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded into the Middle East will continue killing for billions of years and can wipe out more than a third of life on earth. Gulf War Veterans who have ingested the uranium will continue to die off as well. So far more than one million people have been slaughtered in the illegal invasion of Iraq, and just as the birth defects are up 600% for Iraqis – the same will apply to U.S. Veterans.

Statistics and evidence published by the government and mainstream media in no way reflect the grave reality of the situation. Those working for the government and media must wake up and take responsibility by immediately reversing this U.S. Holocaust.

Read the full story about Department of Veterans Affairs Reports 73 Thousand U.S. Gulf War Deaths.

Source: http://www1.va.gov/rac-gwvi/docs/GWVIS_May2007.pdf

© 2011 Veterans Today

Photo by Flickr user Hebe