Another US Coup?

Honduran military ousts president ahead of vote

Honduran soldiers have seized the national palace and sent President Manuel Zelaya into exile, hours before a disputed constitutional referendum.

Zelaya, a leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, says he's the victim of a coup.

Hours later, Congress voted to accept what it says is Zelaya's letter of resignation, but Zelaya said the letter isn't his and vowed to remain in power.

White House Watched

The journey Froomkin describes here really ties in closely with mine...

White House Watch - White House Watched

Today's column is my last for The Washington Post. And the first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you to all you readers, e-mailers, commenters, questioners, Facebook friends and Twitterers for spending your time with me and engaging with me over the years. And thank you for the recent outpouring of support. It was extraordinarily uplifting, and I'm deeply grateful. If I ever had any doubt, your words have further inspired me to continue doing accountability journalism. My plan is to take a few weeks off before embarking upon my next endeavor -- but when I do, I hope you'll join me.

It's hard to summarize the past five and a half years. But I'll try.

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long.

WHIG SCUM: Where Are They Now?

Guess Who's Selling Wall Street's Bull? | Mother Jones

Jim Wilkinson, a one-time senior aide to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, is part of a campaign, spearheaded by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), to quell the upsurge of "populist" anger directed at the financial sector.

Strange Indeed

FBI Ignored Evidence of bin Laden Role in Khobar Attack by Gareth Porter -- Antiwar.com

"We had thought that the Riyadh and Khobar blasts were a sufficient signal to sensible U.S. decision-makers to avert a real battle between the Islamic nation and U.S. forces," said bin Laden, "but it seems that they did not understand the signal."

According to Coleman, one of the FBI’s top investigators on al-Qaeda, bin Laden always took credit for terrorist actions he had planned but not for those he had not planned. For example, bin Laden issued no claim about the World Trade Center bombing and told his former business agent turned FBI informer, Jamal al-Fadl, that he had nothing to do with it, Coleman says.

Happiness Is Just An Illusion

Do we really want to solve the world's financial problems, or would we rather just go back to pretending that everything is OK?

I guess it's a stupid question...

Late in, early out of the downturn

Shocking Statistics

A quarter of prisoners are indigenous

One in four prisoners in Australia is indigenous and their over-representation in the jail system is only getting worse, a new report states.

Aborigines are 13 times more likely to be locked up than other Australians, while the proportion of indigenous women being incarcerated has tripled in the past 20-odd years.

Half of the 10- to 17-year-olds in corrective institutions are indigenous.

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists - NYTimes.com

Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity.

And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims’ families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.

But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.

Another Beautiful Mind

Tapes Reveal Nixon’s View of Abortion - NYTimes.com

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

Kibbutz's Gone Crazy

Fictions on the Ground

Israel needs “settlements.” They are intrinsic to the image it has long sought to convey to overseas admirers and fund-raisers: a struggling little country securing its rightful place in a hostile environment by the hard moral work of land clearance, irrigation, agrarian self-sufficiency, industrious productivity, legitimate self-defense and the building of Jewish communities. But this neo-collectivist frontier narrative rings false in modern, high-tech Israel. And so the settler myth has been transposed somewhere else — to the Palestinian lands seized in war in 1967 and occupied illegally ever since.

It is thus not by chance that the international press is encouraged to speak and write of Jewish “settlers” and “settlements” in the West Bank. But this image is profoundly misleading. The largest of these controversial communities in geographic terms is Maale Adumim. It has a population in excess of 35,000, demographically comparable to Montclair, N.J., or Winchester, England. What is most striking, however, about Maale Adumim is its territorial extent. This “settlement” comprises more than 30 square miles — making it one and a half times the size of Manhattan and nearly half as big as the borough and city of Manchester, England. Some “settlement.”

Much More To Come

"Suck on Our Yachts": Goldman Sachs Issues Non-Apology for Destroying the World Economy | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

This isn't really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn't have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money.

Where's The Australian Inquiry?

Those Downing Street Memos are set to resurface, and Phillipe Sands has some good comments about transparency in this article.

   Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq   : Information Clearing House - ICH

This year, the Dutch government launched its own inquiry into its support for the war. Significantly, the inquiry will see all the intelligence shared with the Dutch intelligence services by MI5 and MI6. The inquiry intends to publish its report in November - suggesting that confidential information about the role played by the UK and the US could become public before Chilcott's inquiry reports next year.

So How Is This Possible?

Goldman Sachs to make record bonus payout | Business | The Observer

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

WAPO Actively Pursuing Complete Irrelevance

Wapo sacked Froomkin, can you believe it?

Letters: Email from John Harris: regrets dispute with Dan Froomkin - Salon

Blair Knew

Tony Blair knew of secret policy on terror interrogations | Politics | The Guardian

Tony Blair was aware of the ­existence of a secret interrogation policy which ­effectively led to British citizens, and others, being ­tortured during ­counter-terrorism investigations, the Guardian can reveal.

The policy, devised in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, offered ­guidance to MI5 and MI6 officers ­questioning detainees in Afghanistan who they knew were being mistreated by the US military.

British intelligence officers were given written instructions that they could not "be seen to condone" torture and that they must not "engage in any activity yourself that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners".

But they were also told they were not under any obligation to intervene to prevent detainees from being mistreated.

"Given that they are not within our ­custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this," the policy said.

That Took A While

tUS Senate approves apology for slavery

The US Senate approved a fiercely worded resolution formally apologising for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery" of African-Americans.

The unanimous voice vote came five months after Barack Obama became the first black US president, and ahead of the June 19 "Juneteenth" celebration of the emancipation of African-Americans at the end of the US Civil War in 1865.

The non-binding resolution now heads to the House of Representatives, where a similar resolution passed by voice vote in July 2008, only to wither in the upper chamber.

House approval, which could come as early as next week, would make it the first time the entire US Congress has formally apologised on behalf of the American people for one of the grimmest wrongs in US history.

The bill, which does not require Obama's signature, states that the US Congress "acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws" that enshrined racial segregation at the state and local level in the United States well into the 1960s.

The Congress "apologises to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow laws."

And it "expresses its recommitment to the principle that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and calls on all people of the United States to work toward eliminating racial prejudices, injustices, and discrimination from our society."

Who Needs Therapy?

Bush Breaks Silence, Goes After Obama In Speech

"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

Typical

This is what Israeli politicians always do - announce some abomination, gauge the outcry, then packpedal a foot or two and say that is compromise.

Retreat? Hutton and Butler 'back public Iraq inquiry' - UK Politics, UK - The Independent

Fit To See?

Maybe it's great that ABC is showing bloody videos of demonstrators being shot in Iran, but one has to ask why they don't show similar videos of civilians being killed by US and Australian troops in Iraq?

Video - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Howard's Australia

The bastard's gone but the legacy lives on....

More in jail as Australia tinkers with justice system - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Prisoner numbers in Australia have increased by more than 50 per cent over the last decade or so.

How Do You Say "Adios USD$" In Russian?

I wonder if he was smiling when he said this?

Emerging giants issue dollar warning at key summit

But he also emphasized that Moscow did not want to see a sudden plunge in the dollar's value.

"There is an understanding that the last thing we need now is turmoil on financial markets," Dvorkovich said. "No one wants to ruin the dollar, including us."