OpEdNews - Diary: PENTAGON RULES ALLOW COERCED DETAINEE TESTIMONY

The Pentagon's rules for upcoming detainee trials would allow terrorism suspects to be convicted and perhaps executed based on hearsay evidence and some coerced testimony.

::::::::

DIANE'S NEWS CLIPS begins here :)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~> Excerpted from: http://www.truthout.org PENTAGON RULES ALLOW COERCED DETAINEE TESTIMONY http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807R.shtml The Pentagon's rules for upcoming detainee trials would allow terrorism suspects to be convicted and perhaps executed based on hearsay evidence and some coerced testimony. --- Hawking Warns: We Must Recognize the Dangers of Climate Change http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011807EA.shtml "Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world," the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking said. --- David Swanson | Impeach Disney and General Electric http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807O.shtml David Swanson argues that by any serious standard of journalism, impeachment should be in the news right now. This illustrates the worst problem with our media. It's not how they cover stories. It's how they do not cover stories. A Newsweek poll a while back said that 51 percent of Americans want Bush impeached and 44 percent do not. That's about double the support there was for impeaching Clinton when it was in the news every single day. --- 71 Employees in Bush's Office Owe $660,000 in Back Taxes http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807M.shtml As the 2006 tax season approaches, the federal government is still trying to recover nearly $3 billion from its own employees who failed to file income tax returns for 2005. Seventy-one employees in the Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, owe $664,527 in taxes for 2005. About 20 of those employees have entered into an IRS payment plan, bringing the EOP balance down to $455,881 owed by 50 employees. --- Resignations at Federal Election Commission Raise Concern http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807S.shtml The announcement yesterday that the top two lawyers for the Federal Election Commission had resigned helped spread an undercurrent of concern about the diminishing role of a once-prominent public voice on the intersection of money and politics. --- Briggs and Briggs | Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807J.shtml According to John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD, President George W. Bush prides himself on "making tough decisions." But many are sensing something seriously troubling, even psychologically unbalanced, about the president as a decision-maker. They are right. Because of a psychological dynamic swirling around deeply hidden feelings of inadequacy, the president has been driven to make increasingly incompetent and risky decisions. This dynamic makes the psychological stakes for him now unimaginably high. The words "success" and "failure" have seized his rhetoric like metaphors for his psyche's survival. --- Bush Retreats on Use of Executive Power http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807K.shtml [snip] ... Under pressure from Congress and the courts, Bush in the past six months has closed secret overseas CIA prisons, transferred previously unidentified detainees to regular military custody, negotiated Congressional approval for tribunals to try foreign terrorism suspects and accepted at least some regulation of how harshly such prisoners could be interrogated. --- Kelpie Wilson | Where Is the Energy for Freedom? http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807L.shtml Kelpie Wilson writes: "A renewable-energy economy could be a decentralized free-market paradise. Imagine a network of small power producers, ranging from the family that invests in some extra solar panels to the city that owns a fleet of wind turbines - all feeding electricity into a robust electric grid, sharing electrons with Internet-like intelligence and resilience. The future is coming fast, and we'll choose it through our actions as citizens, consumers and voters. The question remains: Do we have the energy for freedom?" --- Democrats Target Royalty Breaks for Oil Firms http://snipurl.com/17shk --- Bills on Climate Move to Spotlight in New Congress http://snipurl.com/17shp --- Methodist Ministers Launch Petition to Stop Bush Library at SMU http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807T.shtml A group of Methodist ministers from across the nation launched an online petition drive Thursday, urging Southern Methodist University to stop trying to land George W. Bush's presidential library. The ministers are concerned that linking themselves with the current presidency was "utterly inappropriate." --- NOW | The Surge in Iraq-What's the Toll on America's Soldiers? http://snipurl.com/17tp1 --- Global Warming Tops Democratic Legislative Agenda http://snipurl.com/17tp4 --- Beluga Whales Faltering in Alaskan Waters http://snipurl.com/17tp7 --- Nicotine Boost Was Deliberate http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011807HA.shtml Data supplied by tobacco companies strongly suggest that in recent years manufacturers deliberately boosted nicotine levels in cigarettes to more effectively hook smokers, Harvard researchers concluded. --- America's Slave Labor http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011807LA.shtml --- VIDEO | Bill Moyers: Life on the Plantation http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807B.shtml Bill Moyers, speaking to the National Conference for Media Reform, states: "Our democracy is now put to a vital test, for the conflict is between human rights on the one side and on the other, special privilege asserted as a property right. The parting of the ways has come." --- ElBaradei: Sanctions Could Escalate With Iran http://snipurl.com/17tpd _________________________________ IRAN: PIECES in PLACE FOR ESCALATION ... "The fuel for a fire is in place". by Colonel Sam Gardiner The following text by Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Retired) confirms our worst fears. The US is in an advanced state of readiness to wage war on Iran. To reverse the tide requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war, which contemplates the use of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel. Even without the use of nukes, the proposed aerial bombardments could result in escalation, ultimately leading us into a broader war in the Middle East. More: http://tinyurl.com/2424dn _________________________________ .ron corvuswire@verizon.net BLOGGERS WHO CRITICIZE GOVERNMENT MAY FACE PRISON Bill would allow rounding up and imprisoning of non-registered political writers

You'd be forgiven for thinking that it was some new restriction on free speech in Communist China. But it isn't. The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress in the latest astounding attack on the internet and the First Amendment. Continued >> http://snipurl.com/17trd --- AIPAC is pushing us to war with Iran for Israel | VIDEO: http://snipurl.com/17ts6 _________________________________ [NEWSDISSECTOR] Emerging: Showdown on Capitol Hill ... by Danny Schechter ...................snip.................... http://snipurl.com/17rzw AUDIO: Iran Does Not Pose A Threat To The US | 10:00 ...................snip.................... RUSSIANS TO PROVIDE DEFENSE WEAPONS TO IRAN http://snipurl.com/17tr4 More@ http://snipurl.com/17tr5 _________________________________ Excerpted from: http://www.alternet.org As Bush's War Strategy Shifts to Iran, Christian Zionists Gear Up for the Apocalypse. Is Bush pushing for a second war or a Second Coming? Christian Zionists are dancing the hora in San Antonio. Armageddon appears to be at hand. As George W. Bush sets his sights on Iran, even Republicans are wondering how to constitutionally contain the trigger-happy king. But for an influential group of Christian fundamentalists -- White House allies that garner not only feel-good meetings with the President's liaisons to the "faith-based" community but also serious discussions with Bush's national security staff -- an attack on Iran is just what God ordered. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/46753/ --- Iraqi Death Toll: Why the UN Can't Count The UN has drastically underreported the number of Iraqis killed in 2006. [Excerpt] : None of the reports in leading newspapers mentioned the other count of Iraqi deaths: the Johns Hopkins study reported last October in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. They estimated that 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war -- 600,000 from violence and 50,000 from other war-related causes. President Bush rejected that figure -- "I don't consider it a credible report," he told a press conference last October -- and most of the media seem to have agreed. http://www.alternet.org/stories/46872/ --- The Stop Online Expression Act A new bill is the latest attempt to curtail free expression online by raising the specter of child abuse. http://www.alternet.org/stories/46858/ --- Lies some right-wing lawyers told me Joshua Holland: Veterans of the Reagan Justice department unearth a heretofore secret provision in the Constitution prohibiting Congress from criticizing the Wingnut-in-Chief. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/46841/ _________________________________ http://jablankfort@earthlink.net CP: Tilley: Iran-What It Would Take to Stop It "A strike on Iran by Israel might be the magic bullet for the sinking US Neocons and their stumbling military global mission. No Democrat now breathing is going to vote to withhold the US funds necessary in "defending Israel" from an Iranian counter-attack. Generating a direct threat to Israel may indeed now be their only way to ensure that war funding continues to flow lavishly. JB : "If an Israeli attack is indeed pending, only something close to a coup in Washington can stop it. The real question now, therefore, is whether the same pragmatists who entered US politics unbidden to comprise the Iraq Study Group (led by Baker but representing the old Cold-War guard, including now-frightened Pentagon officers, desperate State Department experts, and even alarmed oil men) will conclude that the US national interest is indeed in such imminent peril that they must launch emergency political measures to preclude a US or Israeli attack." What It Would Take to Stop It By VIRGINIA TILLEY ---Johannesburg, South Africa *Virginia Tilley is an alarmed US citizen now working at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. She can be reached at http://tilley@hws.edu . From its inception, the US occupation was a lose-lose proposition. Simply rolling into Iraq -- a society of which the Bush neocons had so distorted a conception and US occupation commanders and foot soldiers had no grasp at all - was a formula for doom. But US policy in the Middle East has now advanced to a new stage and the risk to the rest of us has changed. For stopping an attack on Iran, which is the only way to avert final regional disaster, may require action in Washington that falls outside the parameters of what is normally politically possible. .....................snip....................... Predictably, their neocolonial efforts to foster and employ ethnic divides - e.g., creating Shi'a militias to attack Sunni neighborhoods to root out Baathi insurgents -- have resulted in blowback. The soaring death count (at this writing, some 100 Iraqis are dying daily) is grim testimony of the country's slide out of the US's hammy hands. Everyday, old norms of Sunni-Shi'a ethnic coexistence are transforming further into mutual fears and murderous mutual hatreds. With every death, the Iraqis' own ability to reconcile this deepening ethnic bitterness dwindles. Every day the US stays in the country, the ethnic militias grow in size and legitimacy. The US capacity to contain them has withered to nothing. One might think the US military architects would grasp their fatal blunder and try to amend their ethnic machinations, but the latest US plan is to send Kurdish troops to patrol Baghdad, on the insane premise that a third ethnic force will somehow defuse the other two. (Kurdish naivety in collaborating in this fatal plan is equally impressive.) Full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley01182007.html _________________________________ Missed? Dept. By Gustav Wynn Hillary Scores, Obama Fumbles And Kucinich Blitzes Rush Hillary Clinton? Master puppeteer. Barack Obama? Again proven human with flawed energy policy. Dennis Kucinich? The slow, steady engine that could, chugging away for the American people. http://snipurl.com/17ts1 _________________________________ Excerpted from: http://mediamatters.org NY Times quoted Libby supporters, failed to ID them as officials of his legal defense fund In a January 17 article about the trial of former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, The New York Times quoted several high-profile political operatives and other prominent people heaping praise on Libby but failed to identify them as members of his legal defense fund's advisory committee. Further, while the article included numerous comments from Libby's compatriots regarding his purported competence and apolitical character, the Times quoted only one vaguely negative assessment of Libby's tenure. Read more >> http://mediamatters.org/items/200701180001?src=other _________________________________ North American sales of organic beers grew from $9 million in 2003 to $19 million in 2005, according to the Organic Trade Association. Also, Anheuser -Busch is now producing two organic beers of its own, Wild Hop lager and Stone Mill pale ale, reported CBS News. Full Story >> http://snipurl.com/17tzo _________________________________ http://www.whatdoesitmean.com | http://www.americanpolitics.com/ _________________________________ COOL USEFUL FUN FREEBIE OF THE WEEK THIS WEEK'S FOCUS: Surf the Web for music There are many Web sites offering music, some of it free. I'll tell you about a program that automatically lists any music downloads available on sites you visit. Surf the Web, find songs and organize your music library with this unique player. http://komando.com/downloads/ Be sure to listen to me Monday through Friday. Use to find me near you http://www.komando.com/listen/index.aspx _________________________________ eHEALTHY NEWS How to Petition Your Angels - You can easily call upon the powers of angels to help you create a beautiful, prosperous life. http://snipurl.com/17pq8 ----- Want to Live Longer? Make Sure Your Mom is Less Than 25 Years Older Than You - Shocking new research shows how old your mom was when she gave birth to you has a powerful influence on your likelihood of living to 100. http://snipurl.com/17pqa ----- Why Unprotected Cellular Phone Use ''Excites'' Your Brain - More new evidence shows potential damage of cell phone use. If you can't give up your cell phone what are your practical options? http://snipurl.com/17pqd _________________________________ Beauty (dir. Amati & Bourru) France | 3:55 | Vitor Amati, Francois Bourru On a hot day, a dialogue takes place between two beautiful sunflowers. One has a dream: she wants to go away and become a star! How could her friend think of leaving her roots, source of her well-being? Sometimes wisdom and ambition can both lead to big surprises. http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/atom_1451 _________________________________ NationalGeographic.com http://lava.nationalgeographic.com/pod/ _________________________________ NASA Astronomy picture of the day http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html _________________________________ I have my own little world, but it's okay - they know me here. ~ Author Unknown