How This Old Brit Sees It ...

The BBC has also learnt that Mr Todd suffered from bouts of depression, and had previously threatened suicide.

And, wouldn't you concur, the quicker the bloody better?



And what about your boss, Brown?



Shouldn't he too be required to say something suitably sensible and plausible on such a serious score (of scandalous proportion), as this shocking story so obviously is?

Whistle-blower site taken offline

The case was brought by lawyers working for a Swiss bank

A controversial[Wikipedia-like], website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

(snip)

Wikileaks claimed that the order was "unconstitutional" and said that the site had been "forcibly censored".

(snip)

The court hearing took place last week and Dynadot blocked access from Friday evening.

Wikileaks says it was not represented at the hearing because it was "given only hours notice" via e-mail.

A document signed by Judge Jeffery White, who presided over the case, ordered Dynadot to follow six court orders.

(snip)

The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.

There are also questions over whether CIA agents withheld information from the courts and a presidential commission.

The CIA's failure to make the tapes available to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the 9/11 Commission could amount to obstruction of justice, according to the New York Times.

Well, we say the CIA are shower of shitty serial liars. What's more, we challenge absolutely anyone to prove us wrong.



Read the rest of this report.

*(Cross posted at Appletree)

Labels: ACLU, America, American fascism, CIA, Freedom of Information Act, Guantanamo, lies, torture, United States, US intelligence

CIA lawyer -- yes, that may be an oxymoron

John Rizzo, acting general counsel for CIA "from November 2001 until October 2002 and from August 2004 until today," -- i.e., during the let's-legalize-torture glory months of Yoo and Addington -- had his confirmation hearing yesterday. Here's the AP wrapup, and here are two posts by Spencer Ackerman, who happily was at the hearing for TPM.

The CIA's top lawyer said Tuesday he did not object to a 2002 memo authorizing interrogation techniques that stop just short of causing a sensation of impending organ failure or even death. [Because, you know, a sensation of drowning isn't a sensation of death, or even impending death ... just don't look up "drown" in the dictionary, okay? -- TBA.]

Yet John Rizzo, who is serving as the agency's temporary general counsel, said he later found the document to be an "aggressive, expansive" reading of U.S. law. * * *

"As with most legal memos, my reaction was it was an aggressive, expansive reading," Rizzo said. "But I can't say I had any specific objections to any specific parts of it."

What does that mean, "as with most legal memos"? Most of the torture memos?

CIA airs decades worth of spy documents

By JENNIFER C. KERR, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Little-known documents now being made public detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago: wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.

The documents provide a glimpse of nearly 700 pages of materials that the agency plans to declassify next week. A six-page summary memo that was declassified in 2000 and released by The National Security Archive at George Washington University on Thursday outlines 18 activities by the CIA that "presented legal questions" and were discussed with President Ford in 1975.

Among them: .................

"This is about telling the American people what we have done in their name," Gen Hayden told a conference of foreign policy historians.