Race to the Bottom Round 2, Game 2: Cheney v. O'Reilly

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Welcome to Round Two, Game Two of BuzzFlash's Republican Race to the Bottom.

Here's how to play: Vote for the worse of the two contenders on the left. Vote by marking the circle next to the contender you dislike more, and click "Vote." A winner will be declared at midnight tonight.

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Clinton says US government drops "global war on terror" slogan

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters late Monday while flying to a London conference on Afghanistan that the new US government has stopped referring to the "global war on terror."

After the terrorist strikes on September 11, 2001, the government under former president George W Bush adopted that phrase to describe its anti-terrorism policies.
Since President Barack Obama took office in January, the "global war on terror" has disappeared. Clinton said that there was no official ban on the term.

"The administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself, obviously," she said, the Washington Post reported on its website. "It's just not being used."

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Security experts eye worm attack

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Security experts are downplaying the potential impact of a virus which some believe is set to strike on 1 April.

Conficker has infected up to 15 million computers to date and is set to change the way it works on Wednesday.

There have been some reports the worm could trigger poisoned machines to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites.

"We don't know what will happen but don't expect anything dramatic," Symantec's Vincent Weafer told the BBC.

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Sarah Palin's Love - Hate Relationship With America

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Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh reveals Cheney's assassination ring, gets no press

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Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is best known for breaking the shocking My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese village were slaughtered by U.S. soldiers in March 1968.

His courageous reporting on this sad chapter in history won him a Pulitzer Prize.

In recent years, his incisive coverage of the Abu Ghraib abuses and torture has also been widely followed and respected.

So when Mr. Hersh spilled the beans earlier this month about an executive assassination ring which reported directly to Dick Cheney, why did the major media give this so little coverage?

The news spread widely through alternative news websites, yet leading newspapers and other major media (with a few exceptions) gave little to no coverage. Could it be that there are powerful people who don't want the public to know about such things?

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Big Money is Going to Take Your Internet Access Away!

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What I`m talking about is control of the Internet.

The subject has been dubbed net neutrality, but that`s an entirely too bland term for what is going on. What is at stake is whether you and I can have the same kind of high-speed, equal-service access to the Internet that Big Business has, or whether giant telecommunications companies like Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will get away with creating a tiered, or multilevel system of Internet speeds so that certain providers can buy a fast lane ahead of you and me.

It would be like a rich guy having a lane all to himself on a six-lane highway because he paid for it. You would get the lane you could afford.

Net neutrality, on the other hand, would mean no special privileges for Big Money. It would mean equal access and equal service. It would reflect the democratic principles expressed in our Bill of Rights. A tiered system would give the corporations exactly what Thomas Jefferson feared they would acquire, power to corrupt democracy.

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Spanish judge accuses Bush officials over torture

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A senior Spanish judge has ordered prosecutors to investigate whether key Bush aides should be charged with crimes over the Guantanamo Bay detention center, a lawyer said Sunday.

Garzon says the case can be brought under Spanish law because several Spaniards were held at Guantanamo.

Investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzon has passed a 98-page complaint to prosecutors that accuses former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and five others of being the legal architects of system that allowed torture in violation of international law, human rights lawyer Gonzalo Boye told CNN.

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Major cyber spy network uncovered

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An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say.

They said the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

They included computers belonging to foreign ministries and embassies and those linked with the Dalai Lama - Tibet's spiritual leader.

There is no conclusive evidence China's government was behind it, researchers say. Beijing also denied involvement.

The report comes after a 10-month investigation by the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which comprises researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.

They were acting on a request from the Tibetan spiritual leader's office to check whether the computers of his Tibetan exile network had been infiltrated.

Researchers found that ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan appear to had been targeted.

Hacked systems were also discovered in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.

Analysts say the attacks are in effect industrial espionage, with hackers showing an interest in the activities of lawmakers and major companies.

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Liquid War

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What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war.

I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

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Truth behind Iraq war

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I assume that the purpose of any inquiry into the war in Iraq is to establish truth transparently, not bury it ("Miliband pledge to hold Iraq war inquiry dismissed as playing for time' ", The Herald, March 26). Truth enshrines due regard for history.

That Saddam was a very bad man is not in doubt; but those who nurtured the man may be considered equally bad. Donald Rumsfeld was such a man. Nor was I ever in any doubt that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), not least because shortly before I arrived in Baghdad, in 1984, Mr Rumsfeld had been in the city to sell Saddam pathogenic material.

So whoever else might have been surprised by the attack on Halabja in 1987, in which 5000 Kurds were gassed, I wasn't one of them.


The invasion of Kuwait and the onset of genocidal sanctions marked a pivotal change and I tended to the view, promoted by the French and others, that from 1991 Saddam's WMD stockpile had degraded out of existence. Otherwise, what stopped him from deploying (again) the weaponry formerly held? However, it was his alleged arsenal of WMD, no less, that led to the deaths of two million Iraqis from 1991 to 2003 via economic sanctions, which included coalition cruise missile and bombing attacks. A key such episode was Operation Desert Fox (ODF), in 1998, encompassing remorseless US/UK attacks.

For four terrifying nights, a defenceless nation was assaulted by an unseen enemy in the dark. Non-military targets destroyed included the Baghdad Teaching Hospital, the Baghdad Museum of Natural History and the Tikrit Teaching Hospital.

The US Navy launched 325 cruise missiles, the US Airforce 100. Additionally, US and UK bombers flew 650 sorties with RAF Tornadoes alone dropping 50 200lb bombs. There were massive civilian losses. ODF was the direct responsibility of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and, like "shock and awe", five years later, it was predicated on a lie: that Saddam, now firmly the bad guy, owned WMD. The inquiry must also investigate both the politics and the quality of intelligence behind ODF again. As Rumsfeld himself might put it, "stuff happens". Question is, what?

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Hawaii is Leading the US in Getting Aspartame off the Market

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We citizens in Hawaii have begun a collection of victim reports that include death contributed to aspartame ingestion.

We have also released a Citizens' Declared Public Health Crisis/Alert, as a majority of Hawaii's doctors and the Hawaii Dept. of Health have not yet been trained to even begin to recognize the hidden and misdiagnosed illnesses that are part of the omnipresent Rumsfeld's Disease Epidemic.

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Is Diet Soda Killing Us?

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Some Studies Say Yes

Studies have said that over 90 different health side effects are related to consuming aspartame, even in small quantities.

Aspartame is a low-calorie sweetener used in foods and beverages all around the world. We generally link aspartame to diet sodas. It is about 200 times sweeter than sugar. Aspartame breaks up into solution and can travel throughout the body and deposit in any tissue. The body digests aspartame unlike saccharin, which does not break down in human bodies.

There are many effects that aspartame has that relate to everyday bodily functions.
Aspartame can affect your eyes, ears, brain, state-of-mind, chest, skin, stomach, and more. It can also trigger many different illnesses such as, epilepsy and ADD.

Aspartame can change the ratio of amino acids in the blood, lowering the levels of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline. This means that aspartame symptoms usually cannot be detected in lab tests.

Now, there are many people who dispute these claims, but certified doctors have made a lot of progress in this field so that people are exposed to the side effects. The most common effects are headaches and tiredness among the many ones that accompany this artificial sweetener.

If you want to eliminate the fear of these side effects, take the following precautions. Do not eat food with aspartame; detoxify, exercise, eat raw foods, and drink lots of water.

There are doctors that do treat aspartame poisoning if you feel that you are experiencing the side effects.

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Also read: How Aspartame Became Legal - The Timeline

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Dick Cheney, History

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Here he goes again, rewriting history. In The Ledger on March 16, in an article, by Douglass K. Daniel of The Associated Press, former Vice President Dick Cheney is quoted as saying "There is no prospect" that Iraq will return to producing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorists. I would like to remind him that since former President George W. Bush sent U.S. armed forces to invade Iraq on March 19, 2003, and up to the present, no weapons of mass destruction have ever been found.

The great white hunter and expert marksman is further quoted as saying that "the U.S. led invasion has led to the defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq." It is my understanding that Saddam Hussein did not have a friendly relationship with al-Qaida and did not permit their presence in his country, so, prior to the invasion there was no al-Qaida in Iraq.

And, if as he says that Iraq no longer supports terrorists and al-Qaida has been defeated in Iraq, I would ask, who then is maiming and killing the brave young American men and women that W. has sent to that country?

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Pretext of the false war

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On 20 March 2003, the US invaded Iraq with a false pretext that the latter was a threat to the world because it possessed weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

There was another weak excuse that the President George W Bush spoke about in every speech in those days was that the US military invasion of Iraq was absolutely necessary to secure it from the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, to set people free from the yoke of one-man show and bring back democratic governance.

None of it accomplished except death penalty to Saddam in a mysterious way, which, now seemed to the world that it was nothing more than a personal ego war due to which President Bush took revenge on Iraqi dictator.

Today, Iraq is a complete mess.

So is Afghanistan becoming, and so will Pakistan become in near future.

In fact, wherever, the US has made military intervention, the attacked country turned into horrible ghost town.

Remember Vietnam, where more than 2.5 million people were butchered during 16 years (1959-1975) of US military operation.

After the fall of Saddam, the world could know the pretext of the war was patently false that the US had vehemently campaigned and the Iraq war was bound to be a big failure. Defying all international conventions and pleas, President Bush attacked Iraq and turned it into the Dark Age and the entire world into an unprecedented economic doom.

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Republicans to Cheney: Get lost

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Beware the man with nothing to lose.

Don’t get Capitol Hill Republicans wrong; they love Dick Cheney.

More specifically, according to The Hill, they’d love to see him retire rather than take the lead in criticizing Barack Obama:

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.

Displeased with the former vice-president’s recent media appearances, Republican lawmakers say he’s hurting GOP efforts to reinvent itself after back-to-back electoral drubbings. …

Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public…But he has the right to speak out since he’s a private citizen.”

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U.S. fund for developing electric cars is untouched

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The future of the American auto industry is getting off to a slow start.

The U.S. Energy Department has $25 billion to make loans to hasten the arrival of the next generation of automotive technology - electric-powered cars.

But no money has been allocated so far, even though the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan program, established in 2007, has received applications from 75 companies, including start-ups as well as the three Detroit automakers.

With General Motors and Chrysler making repeat visits to Washington to ask for bailout money to stave off insolvency, some members of Congress are starting to ask why the Energy Department money is not yet flowing.

The loans also are intended to help fulfill President Barack Obama's campaign promise of putting one million electric cars on American roads by 2015.

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The Lasting Problem of Guantanamo Bay Prison

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The Constitution obviously does not leave Americans helpless in fighting against those who wish them ill. But it also sets standards of conduct that should not — indeed, cannot — be carelessly tossed aside.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay has become such an international symbol of the U.S. abandoning its principles because it reflects an anti-terrorism policy gone badly awry.

First, the Bush administration was both callous and careless in imprisoning people, even paying unreliable tribal allies for captives.

Second, the U.S. government created no effective and objective truth-determining processto assess guilt.

Third, Washington employed torture, violating both domestic and international law.

No doubt dangerous terrorists have been incarcerated at Gitmo. But so too have many innocent people. Indeed, the claims of former State Department Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson are particularly sobering:


Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, admitted today that of the approximately 800 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay since the controversial detention center opened, only “two dozen or so” were actually terrorists. Wilkerson told the Associated Press today that “there are still innocent people there,” and that “some have been there six or seven years.”

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Torture!

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Americans' interrogation methods have probably destroyed the nation's reputation

It's unlikely that the United States will ever live down the shame of torture during the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration.

It's history now and all the piety and wit of those former U.S. officials responsible for this horrendous chapter cannot wipe out a word of it.

Mark Danner published in the New York Review of Books excerpts of a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on CIA interrogation techniques used at secret U.S. "black site" prisons abroad and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Red Cross report is based on Red Cross interviews in 2006 with 14 "high value" detainees at Guantanamo as part of the ICRC's legally recognized duties to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war, the New York Review of Books said.

Red Cross officials interviewed each of the 14 detainees in private. The report was not intended to be released to the public but was to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them-- the CIA.

The shocking account tells of the sadistic punishment inflicted on prisoners picked up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under CIA control they were brutalized. They were beaten, their heads regularly slammed against walls and subjected to constant loud music. They also were deprived of sleep for days and, of course, there was water boarding -- a torture technique designed to make the victims think that they are drowning.

The Red Cross report noted that the detainees told similar stories of their treatment. Since the detainees were kept "in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention . . . the striking similarity in their stories, even down to small details, would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely, if not impossible."

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FLASHBACK: Monsanto's Many Attempts to Destroy All Seeds but Their Own

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1. They’ve bought up the seed companies across the Midwest.

2. They’ve written Monsanto seed laws and gotten legislators to put them through, that make cleaning, collecting and storing of seeds so onerous in terms of fees and paperwork that having normal seed becomes almost impossible.

3. Monsanto is pushing laws that ensure farmers and citizens can’t block the planting of GMO crops even if they can contaminate other crops.

4. There are Monsanto regulations buried in the FDA rules that make a farmer’s seed cleaning equipment illegal because it’s now considered a “source of seed contamination.”

Monsanto has sued more than 1,500 farmers whose fields had simply been contaminated by GM crops.

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UN Launches Probe of Secret Detention Sites

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U.N. human rights investigators are launching a year-long global investigation into secret places of detention. They note the use of such facilities has increased since the global war on terror was declared after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

The investigators say their probe will look at so-called rendition flights used by the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, in the United States to secretly transfer suspects to third countries for interrogation.

The UN probe also will examine the policies of secret detention as practiced by other nations around the world.

Cracks are appearing in the wall of silence surrounding the secret practice of extraordinary rendition as prisoners are coming forward to tell of their ordeals.

“The torture was going on sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly,” said a former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed, who accuses the British security service MI5 of helping U.S. intelligence agents interrogate him after he was seized in Pakistan in 2002. Mohamed claims U.S. agents took him to Morocco, where he was tortured.

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Obama slams Cheney on '60 Minutes'

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President Obama is reprising some of his most familiar campaign rhetoric to criticize Dick Cheney, saying in an interview that the former vice president has no room to criticize him on national security.

“How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?” Obama asked on “60 Minutes,” according to excerpts released by CBS ahead of its Sunday airing. “It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment.”

Obama’s volley comes a week after Cheney said the new president was taking steps to “raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Cheney, in an interview with CNN’s John King last Sunday, singled out Obama’s intent to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where many terrorism suspects are held, arguing that the administration was returning to a law enforcement rather than a full-scale military approach to terrorism.

Obama's tough words for Cheney represent the latest Salvo in what has become a shooting war between the new administration and the forner vice president.

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Torture Revealed Yet Again

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We should all insist upon is that Bush and Cheney committed serious crimes and have yet to be held accountable, and that we risk a slide into presidential dictatorship if we allow our nation to become reconciled to that, notes David Swanson.

As with the evidence that Bush, Cheney and gang intentionally lied us into a war, or the evidence of illegal and unconstitutional spying, each time a major new piece of evidence of torture emerges, it is impossible not to hope that this is the one that will compel the Justice Department or Congress or the courts or the American people to act decisively.

Certainly I hope that, right now, after Mark Danner reported on a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

But let's not kid ourselves. Everyone has known that the United States was torturing for years.

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Afghanistan and Iraq: War Crimes Against Children ascribed to former President Bush

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Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture.

Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.


The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements.

Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime.

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Cheney lies: Knows that most in Guantanamo are innocent

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The AP’s Andrew O. Selsky just posted a story potentially devastating to the credibility of Dick Cheney and the Bush administration’s Guantanamo policy.

The headline, by itself is an indictment of everything Cheney has done, and as important, everything he has said recently about Obama’s decision to close the Cuban base: "Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent."

Quoting Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican and former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, it appears that there are about 24 actual terrorists in Guantanamo. The rest, more than 200 still housed at the naval base, are innocents who were "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

According to Wilkerson, not only did Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld KNOW that the majority of the so-called "enemy combatants" were innocent, they "fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because ‘to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership.’ "

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TARP head: Bush OK'd AIG Bonuses

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President George W. Bush's administration specifically contemplated paying bonuses to American International Group Inc. employees in its November agreement to provide federal bailout funds to the insurance giant, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said today.

Neil Barofsky testified before the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. The panel is holding a hearing on the TARP program, which so far has spent $300 billion trying to reverse the financial meltdown.

The TARP contract between AIG and Treasury specifically contemplated the payment of bonuses and retention payments to AIG employees, including AIGs senior partners, Barofsky said.

The insurer has received $173 billion in federal bailout funds and is now 80 percent owned by the government.

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Stewart to Cheney: Drink a cup of 'Shut the f**k up'

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Noting that Cheney no longer can truly know what he is talking about as he no longer receives daily intelligence briefings, Stewart indignantly said, “Maybe I could interest you in a hot cup of shut the f**k up.”

“The guy’s vice president for eight years, you barely see a whiff of him. He lives in some subterranean lair, literally has his house removed from Google Earth,” Stewart said. “Then when he’s no longer accountable to the American people he’s popping up everywhere. I can’t get him off my TV. He’s like the Mario Lopez of doom now.”

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Iraq War Began Six Years Ago Today

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It was on this day six years ago that President George W. Bush announced the United States was at war with Iraq.

The President spoke for four minutes in a nationally broadcast address telling the world the effort was underway to, quote, "disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." He told the men and women in the U.S. armed forces "the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you."

In his address Bush said no outcome but victory would be accepted.

The war that most Americans thought would be over within months has now cost the lives of more than 42-hundred U.S. troops and more than 600-billion dollars in treasure.

President Obama says he'll keep at least 50-thousand troops in Iraq beyond 2010.

More than 130-thousand American men and women are there today.

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Bush Lied And Over 100 Canadians Died

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By Chimpplanet

Today, George W. Bush will give a speech defending his eight years in the White House to 1,500 Canadian elite businessmen who will pay $400 each to listen to his lies.

No Canadians died in Iraq as Canada was smart enough not to send their boys to fight a lie. However, over 100 Canadians have died in Afghanistan, thanks to Bush.

These 100 Canadians will not be able to listen to his lies and their families won’t be able to read about his lies as the Canadian press will not be allowed in the room while Bush Blabbers.

Not only does Canada allow a potential criminal to enter their country as Canada is also bound by anti-torture laws but they even pay over $600,000 to listen to the “torturer-in-chief” defend his crimes. And then, the entire event is censored from all the rest of the Canadian public.

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Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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Bush visits Cowtown

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Bush is expected to address a crowd of 1,500 at the Telus Convention Centre, remarking on his eight years in the Oval Office.

But not everyone is welcoming with open arms the former most powerful man in the world.

Members of the group Lawyers Against the War labeled Bush a war criminal for his actions regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts as well as the alleged torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and wrote to Canadian government officials opposing his entry into Canada.

Tickets to the invite-only event reportedly sold for $400 each.

Members of the media have been barred from hearing Bush's comments tonight.

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Obama Demands a Refund

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The New York Times and Washington Post lead with, and everyone else fronts, the continuing fallout from the $165 million in bonuses that American International Group handed out to employees who were at least partly responsible for the insurance giant's fall from grace.


President Obama ordered his administration to "pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses" that started to go out Friday.

Separately, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said he would subpoena the company to find out details about the bonuses and their recipients.

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Red Cross report says detainees at CIA 'black sites' were tortured

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The confidential report, published Sunday, could bolster calls for legal action against the Bush administration.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concluded in 2007 that US methods to extract information from prisoners at secret CIA jails as part of the "war on terror" amounted to torture, according to excerpts from a confidential report published on the website of the The New York Review of Books on Sunday.

With US President Barack Obama on record as backing the prosecution of officials involved in "clear instances of wrongdoing," the report could fuel calls for such legal action.

Though allegations of the torture of terror suspects at CIA-run "black sites" have been widely detailed before, the Red Cross report has "an unusual claim to authenticity," the article's author, Mark Danner, wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.

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Battered Bush begins image rehab in Calgary

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George W. Bush, who left office with one of the lowest popularity ratings in U.S. history, kicks off his unofficial post-presidential image rehabilitation tour with a speech in Calgary tomorrow.

But protesters say "Dubya" doesn't deserve a soapbox -- he should be arrested for the alleged torture of prisoners in U.S. military camps.

At the closely controlled private event, he'll face some 1,500 friendly faces brought in by organizers and the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. Tickets reportedly cost $400 each.

Bush is to discuss "eight momentous years in the Oval Office," and "challenges facing the world in the 21st century."

Protesters like Toby Pollett promise to be outside the convention centre venue in full force.

"It's a war criminal being invited to Canada by a municipal representative body to . . . have a chat," he said.

Bush left office Jan. 20 when President Barack Obama was sworn in. His image was battered by constant criticism over a crumbling economy and the Iraq war.

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Conspiracists Push 'Bilderberger' Theory

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another conspiracy theory surrounding President Barack Obama is making the rounds, according to Politico.com.

The latest one contends that many top officials in Obama's administration are involved in a clandestine global cabal bent on creating a one-world government that supersedes the United States.

For decades, conspiracy theorists have viewed the Bilderberg group, an international organization made up of political, financial, academic and military heavyweights that comes together annually to discuss world affairs, as similar to the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations -- two groups comprised of influential movers and shakers who, some say, control world events from behind the scenes.

And now, some in the Obama administration who have taken part in Bilderberg conferences in the past are gaining attention for their alleged involvement in a secret bid for worldwide domination.

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Why The US Will Never Join The International Criminal Court

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By Chimpplanet

When George Bush took over the US presidency in 2001, he “unsigned” any connection with the International Criminal Court.

At that time Bush may not have known that he and many in his administration could become the court’s main pursuit in the future but he still felt he had to protect prior criminals in the US like his father the former CIA chief who ust by being the head of the CIA, one becomes a criminal.

Also, to protect another “wanted” criminal like Henry Kissinger and many others whose crimes we Americans are not even aware of but may be hunted by the international community.

After eight years of George Bush’s reign, many new criminals have been added to the International Wanted list. This of course includes Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

But it also includes Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Alberto Gonzales, Condi Rice and many others whose names most Americans have never even heard.

Just like Nancy Pelosi blocked all attempts to impeach Bush and Cheney while they were in office, President Obama will also block any attempts to indict these high-profile government criminals.

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Washington protester who outlasts presidents

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She is President Barack Obama's closest neighbor, but don't expect her to be invited over for tea any time soon -- not while carrying on the longest continuous act of political protest in the United States.

Each morning like she has for the past 28 years, Concepcion Picciotto pulls back the plastic flap of her makeshift shelter in Lafayette Park and stares across the street at the White House, but the protester-in-residence voices little hope that the new president will make a difference on issues that dominate her life: ending US interventionist wars and banning nuclear weapons.

"No, they're all the same," Picciotto laments about the commanders-in-chief she has literally watched come and go since 1981, when she and fellow activist William "Doubting" Thomas began their 24-hour White House peace vigil.

"From the beginning I said Obama isn't going to work, because he's inside there," she hisses, pointing to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"It's a revolving door," she tells AFP in an interview on a recent frigid night.

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DOJ Watchdog Probed Yoo/Bybee Rendition Memo; Report May Criticize Opinion

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Two weeks before U.S. intelligence agents captured a "high-value" terrorist detainee named Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked him off to a secret CIA "black site" prison in Thailand where he was allegedly tortured, the Department of Justice prepared a legal memorandum for George W. Bush stating he could ignore a law that prohibited the transfer of prisoners to countries that engage in torture.

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America's Darth Vader / Dick Cheney

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As I have said for years, Dick Cheney's fingerprints are on virtually every lie and abuse of power committed by the corrupt Cheney/Bush administration.

Seymour Hersh's recent revelations about an 'executive assassination ring' that directly reported to Cheney is another strong indication of Cheney's shadow presidency ~ which will eventually be linked to the 9/11 conspiracy or cover up.

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The trouble that is not found on any map

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Most U.S. citizens are unaware that our government has plenty of dirty secrets, and for many, this ignorance is bliss.

Not for geographer and journalist Trevor Paglen. For nearly a decade he has tracked a host of clandestine government and military agencies and "black" sites that remain hidden from public view and knowledge — and often from the budgetary decisionmakers within Congress.

"Each year," the author writes, "the United States spends more than $50 billion to fund a secret world of classified military and intelligence activities, a world of secret airplanes and unacknowledged spacecraft, 'black' military units and covert prisons, a secret geography that military and intelligence insiders call the 'black world.' "

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No more 'enemy combatants' at Guantanamo Bay

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The Obama administration abandons the term favored under Bush and declares that the president may no longer order suspects deemed to be dangerous captured and held without trial.

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