War // Current TV

Sad stories of conflict victims in Nepal

http://nepal.icbl.org/scholarships/ A short documentary filmed by Ban Landmines... more

infoncbl
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1 month ago
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Costs of war

This is probably conservative in estimates. http://costsofwar.org/

11dim
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1 month ago
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3 comments

Man Whose WMD Lies Led To 100,000 Deaths Confesses All

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a... more

rodstradamus
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1 month ago
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9 comments

Dog Welcomes Home Soldier

Chuck welcomes home his soldier

JRBarilla
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1 month ago
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10 comments

Raising Resistance: The GM soya war in South America

Beautifully shot and interweaving interviews with scenes from soy fields in Paraguay,... more

JanforGore
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2 months ago
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3 comments

The New World Order Of The 21st Century: Press for Truth

The agenda for a one world government is advancing at an exponential rate as it... more

rodstradamus
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2 months ago
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2 comments

Depleted Uranium Contamination: A Crime against Humanity

n this article the long term consequences of radiation contamination from unilateral... more

joeeddy
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2 months ago
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0 comments

Jewish Groups Upset Over Farrakahn Speaking Engagement at Alabama A&M University

Do these groups ever do anything else but complain? I mean, not one but two... more

maasanova
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2 months ago
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We Just Built Skynet in the Desert, Now What?

Ten years after 9/11, the National Security Agency (NSA) is close to putting the finishing touches on what will be the single biggest spy center in the country. According to James Bamford of WIRED, this new one million-square foot spy complex in the Utah Desert will actually be capable of monitoring, intercepting and de-encrypting just about any message sent over any communication network in the country. It will be capable of keeping tabs on any civilian in the U.S. or any foreigner visiting the USA. And it will all be hooked up to federal computers in Washington, giving it access to the records and databases of the most powerful government agencies in the country. If all this is starting to sound a lot like Skynet in the Terminator movies, that’s because, well, it is - minus the Schwarzenegger robots, of course.

The sheer amount of data that the NSA – and by extension the CIA, FBI and Pentagon – will be able to collect on both foreigners and its own civilians is staggering. The $2 billion center, which goes by the disarmingly bland name of the Utah Data Center, is the final piece in the puzzle for the Pentagon, which has been attempting to build a Global Information Grid ever since 9/11. Remember the Total Information Awareness program of 2003? Well, it’s now here in physical form – and it’s heavily guarded. In military parlance, it’s not a “soft” target - the facility has been hardened to the point where a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling at 50 miles per hour couldn't muscle its way inside. At its peak, this new surveillance center will be able to handle so much data that the NSA practically had to coin a new word to describe it: yottabytes. There are so many servers running this system that the annual cooling costs are estimated to be $40 million.

That’s quite an electricity bill for a "data center."

That's because this federal spy center goes far beyond what’s already being collected about us online, to explore the “Deep Web” that’s all but invisible to typical search engines. The spy center will also delve into the world of code-breaking and reverse-encryption. Even things that we think are far beyond any type of cyber-penetration will be readily available to the powers-that-be. That’s where things get downright scary. We assume that spambots and spiders slither behind us everywhere we go online, but what do we really know about all the other information that is being tracked about us? What information is being collected about us by security monitors in the streets and satellites overhead? The scope of what's being collected by the NSA is breathlessly thorough in detail, reaching into every area of our lives:

"Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy."

This digital "pocket litter" that each of us leaves behind us may sound harmless – but that's until all of this highly unstructured data gets dumped into a supercomputing capable of mining all this data and producing patterns and insights. This “pocket litter” is no longer trash once it can be used to construct ever-more precise profiles of everyday civilians and predict future behaviors.

“Cybersecurity” and “the war on terror” are handy little buzzwords for enabling governments to extend their cyber-surveillance over every aspect of our lives. At the end of the day, pure democracy and absolute authoritarianism are really just flip sides of the same coin. This is precisely why dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We are so terrifying. Authoritarian regimes always start out with a willingness to help - not enslave - its civilians. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. A government that claims to protect its citizens by spying on them is a government that needs to be watched, monitored and held under strict surveillance by its own citizens.

http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/we-just-built-skynet-in-the-desert-now-whatTen years after 9/11, the National Security Agency (NSA) is close to putting the... more

JRBarilla
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2 months ago
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1 comment

Sen. Rand Paul blocks Iran sanctions bill

By Eric W. Dolan Tuesday, March 27, 2012 19:47 EDT Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on... more

KB723
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2 months ago
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73 comments

Totalitarian Systems Always Begin by Rewriting the Law

I spent four hours in a third-floor conference room at 86 Chambers St. in Manhattan on... more

joeeddy
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2 months ago
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0 comments

Afghan massacre: Kandahar families given compensation

Afghan families who lost relatives in the Kandahar massacre have been paid... more

Radical_Centrist
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2 months ago
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The Antiwar Comic: It Ain’t Easy Being Antiwar

Being antiwar is surprisingly dangerous.

TonyDiGerolamo
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2 months ago
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0 comments

Left VS Right - The Distraction

This video is to help others understand that both the left and the right are... more

shanklinmike
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2 months ago
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A Message to Iran from Israel

Please share this video and help it reach all the Iranian people.

JRBarilla
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2 months ago
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10 comments

FBI wouldn’t exclude extrajudicial killings in the US

United States Attorney General Eric Holder recently explained how the president can order the assassination of his own citizens abroad. But did his rationalization justify executions within the US? Apparently, the FBI wouldn’t exclude it.

Responding to a congressional inquiry this week on the rationale of assassinating Americans, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller affirmed that he himself isn’t too clear on the what Holder explained.

The attorney general addressed an audience at Northwestern University in Chicago this week with an explanation for US President Barack Obama’s killing of three American citizens overseas last year. Alleged terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki and two other US-born citizens were executed in a drone strike last year in Yemen, a kill that the White House has been reluctant to discuss in detail until just recently. Speaking from Northwestern this week, Holder insisted, however, that the details the president acted on were "sufficient under the Constitution for the United States to use lethal force against a US citizen abroad.”

Following up on Wednesday, US Congressman Tom Graves, a Republican from Georgia, asked the FBI’s Mueller if Holder’s qualifications for an ordered kill could be applied domestically.

"I have to go back. Uh, I'm not certain whether that was addressed or not," responded an unsure Mueller.

Rep. Graves from there rephrased his inquiry, asking if, "from a historical perspective," the federal government has "the ability to kill a US citizen on United States soil or just overseas." Mueller once again suspended an explanation.

"I'm going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice," responded the director.
When prompted by Fox News to extrapolate on Mueller’s deferral, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department defaulted to Holder’s earlier address, simply repeating the attorney general’s insistence that US citizens outside of the US are fair-game for an Executive Branch-ordered assassination. Under Holder’s explanation offered at Northwestern, however, it could be inferred that even those on American soil aren’t excluded. Congress wants to know if that is the case and with the feds unsure themselves, it might mean President Obama himself has to put in his two cents so Americans know if they are eligible for one of his personalized assassination orders too.
Holder said that the US government believes an assassination on one of the country’s own can be carried out if the individual makes the criteria established under three qualifiers — the target must pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, capture must be not be considered feasible and the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

Under the Obama-signed National Defense Authorization Act, of course, Americans considered by the government to be involved with a group expressing hostilities towards the US can be indefinitely detained. The president and countless other politicians have openly discussed the harsh realities of the NDAA since even before Obama inked his name to it on New Year’s Eve. Now Americans know for certain that government allegations can get them in jail without a trial. Obama just needs to confirm or disconfirm that he can shoot them down in their own homes as well.

http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-mueller-assassination-holder-193/United States Attorney General Eric Holder recently explained how the president can... more

Radical_Centrist
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2 months ago
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End the Failed War: A Call to End the War on Drugs & Revamp Our Nation's Drug Policies

There are currently an estimated 23.2 million people in the United States, age 12 or older, in need of treatment for alcohol or illicit drug abuse (Levinthal 2010). This is a far cry from the “Drug Free America” we were promised by politicians and policy makers when the near forty-year-old War on Drugs began in the United States. In 1972, one year into the current policy of drug prohibition, the federal allocation of drug money present in the country was $101 million and in the year 2000 that number was reported to be around $20 billion (Booth, 2007). Along with the fact that the amount of illicit drugs in the country has continually grown during the War on Drugs, illicit drugs have grown stronger and more potent than ever before as black market manufacturers and dealers compete to have the best product on the streets (Booth, 2007). Such facts are a clear indication that the current drug enforcement policies in the U.S. are failing to accomplish what officials have stated as their goals.

For most of the duration of the War on Drugs, there has been an assumed presupposition that law enforcement focuses on the dealers and sellers of illicit drugs but the numbers do not add up. “Of the 1,841,182 arrests for drug law violations in 2007, 82.5% (1,518,975) were for possession of a controlled substance. Only 17.5% (322,207) were for the sale or manufacture of a drug.” (McVay, 2008) At the same time, most federal drug laws prohibit any chance for probation or parole. Demographically, most people incarcerated for drug possession or “intent to sell” illicit substances are of minority races and from the low-income bracket of the socioeconomic scale (Levine, 2003). When the private prison industry costs taxpayers $50 billion annually and the majority of their inmates are nonviolent drug offenders, it raises a few eyebrows to say the least. At the same time, you have the tobacco and alcohol industries hypocritically as the largest contributors to the Partners for a Drug Free America campaign (Booth, 2007). In the 2007 documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope, CIA Clandestine Officer Robert Steele may have surmised it all best when he stated:

"The drug war is a perfect continuing example of why we will never win the war on terrorism because it captures the ineffectiveness of U.S. government and it captures the fact that it's being used against poor people and not against the people who benefit most from drugs, which are bankers that launder the money." (Booth, 2007)

The backlash against the War on Drugs has consistently escalated over the past two decades and the movement has mainly focused on supporting the decriminalization or legalization of marijuana. Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in not just the United States, but the entire world (Levinthal 2010). This November, the State of California will vote on whether or not to legalize marijuana at the state level and tax it. The recent economic atmosphere has certainly lit a fire under the marijuana reform movement as states look for ways to recover from the current recession. Now that marijuana reform has hit the mainstream debates, the spotlight has expanded to encompass the entire War on Drugs itself. More and more political and social leaders are speaking out against the current drug policies in the United States each week in both the mainstream and alternative media. The proceeding reviews of literature will address the social, political, and economic dilemmas of the current War on Drugs and envision avenues for which the United States may turn down in order to end it while revamping our social values, norms, and policies in regard to drug use for the betterment of the entire nation as a whole. The economics of the War on Drugs is a hot topic currently and thus the starting point for the following research.

In a 1993 article titled Drug Prohibition: A Legal and Economic Analysis, Walter Block supports the legalization of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin with his argument based in economic and legal analysis. His economic argument is based on pure, capitalistic free market values and ideology as he states there is, “nothing in the tenets of value free economics that would preclude the legalization of drugs.” (Block 1993) Block goes on to discuss basic fundamentals of free market economics, asserting that it bases itself on the premise that no trade occurs unless both parties assume they will both benefit and that there will always be third parties, uninvolved in the trade, who are distressed “when consenting adults engage in voluntary capitalist acts.” (Block 1993) With this, he denounces the argument against drug legalization that claims it would lead to an increase in economic welfare since in all instances of free market trade the economic welfare of all participants is enhanced and that third parties not liking the sale of drugs occurring does not equate to a violation of the third party’s rights as would a trade that resulted in the third party’s murder, for example. Legally, Block refers to Libertarian legal code and argues that each person’s body is their own property and they should be free to put whatever they wish into it. He likens prohibition to slavery on the premise that restrictions are made on our own personal bodies (Block 1993).

The analysis by Block brings to light a daunting contradiction in the current political atmosphere in regard to drug prohibition... Continued at: http://scopicthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/03/end-failed-war-call-to-end-war-on-drugs.html

There is an inevitable time ahead where the federal government will have no choice but to admit their failure and respond accordingly. How they should respond is debatable, but significant amounts of research time, gathered evidence, and living, breathing examples to model new policy initiatives after do exist. A complete overhaul of our society’s perception of drug use, drug users, and our goals for dealing with the negative aspects of drug use in society with helping in mind rather than punishment is severely needed. The American people can no longer tolerate this war on them by their own government economically, socially, and psychologically. Academic study and analysis, as evident in the aforementioned articles, has destroyed the antiquated knowledge base upon which the current policy of prohibition is built. It is time for a new way.There are currently an estimated 23.2 million people in the United States, age 12 or... more

JRBarilla
added this
2 months ago
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31 comments

Worldwide Hippies Book Nook

Book Nook will appear every Sunday here at WorldWide Hippies. We want to bring you... more

joeeddy
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2 months ago
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0 comments

Ironies in American justice and political cheerleading

(1) A reader reminded me of this yesterday and it’s really quite something: in... more

JRBarilla
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2 months ago
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No retreat: 101 assaults in the War on Women

By Stephanie Whiteside / current.com Is there really a war on women?... more

sgwhites
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2 months ago
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67 comments

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