President Obama, Prince Charles, Chancelor Merkel, President Sarkozy, and Prime Minister Berlusconi all canceled their appearance at the funeral on short notice.

Poland refused the Swine Flu vaccine. They had their own Central Bank and wouldn’t submit to the Euro zone. They wouldn’t jump in bed with the IMF and were not suffering a recession but were prospering.

According to the big wobble, “Author of the video seen by everyone by now has been stabbed near Kijow on 4.15 and transported in critical condition to the hospital in Kijow. On 4.16 three unidentified individuals unplugged him from life support system and stabbed him 3 more times. Andrij was pronounced dead that afternoon. Russian government claims it was a coincidence.”

Predictably, CNN’s report reinforces the official explanation and ignores everything unusual, like the shots heard in the video above.

“When I found the first piece of fuselage, I was shocked. It was flimsy, the thin metal easily twisted back on itself.”

“If you look down this bank, you begin to see all these bits of broken wood from the trees where the plane is beginning to hit as its coming down.”

“Looking up at the top, you can really see how the plane cut into them [the trees]. What investigators are going to focus on are the black box recorders. They say they’re still looking at the possibility of human error, the possibility of bad weather, . . . when the crash happened 24 hours ago there was thick fog, and they’re also saying there’s a possibility that it could have been mechanical error, so they’re not ruling out any of those things right now. The bodies have been removed from the site here. Most of them already taken to Moscow for identification. ”

Talk about framing the debate.

In late January, I wrote about the Obama administration’s “presidential assassination program,” whereby American citizens are targeted for killings far away from any battlefield, based exclusively on unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they’re involved in Terrorism. At the time, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest had noted deep in a long article that Obama had continued Bush’s policy (which Bush never actually implemented) of having the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile “hit lists” of Americans, and Priest suggested that the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list. The following week, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.

Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they’re sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind. I won’t repeat those arguments — they’re here and here — but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today. (Read more from salon.com)

U.K. demands Israel’s aid in probing alleged use of fake U.K. passports by killers of Hamas strongman.

Dubai authorities are looking into five U.S.-issued credit card accounts suspected to have been used by the alleged assassins of Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last January, the Wall Street journal reported on Thursday.

The cards, according to the Wall Street Journal report, issued by U.S. banks, were used by the suspected assassins to buy plane tickets connected to the operation, as well as other travel related items.

If indeed the cards will prove to have been used by the suspected killers of the Hamas commander, that incident could join a string of diplomatic strains between Israel, who many estimate is behind the assassination, and it’s western allies. (Read more from haaretz.com)

This examination of the latest theories about the J.F.K. assassination & cover-up was shown once in November, 2003 and quickly suppressed, due mainly to outrage and threat of a lawsuit by family and former associates of L.B.J. who is targeted in the documentary as being a lead conspirator in the Kennedy assassination plot and other murders as well.

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance. (Read more from nytimes.com)

“[I will] smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.” ~ John F. Kennedy

If Larry Frankel, past executive director and longtime lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, were to have played a character in a biblical pageant he would have been the burning bush, Andrew Chirls, his former longtime partner once told him. . . . .

On Friday, Frankel, who took a position last year as state legislative counsel for the ACLU’s Washington office, was found dead in the stream that gives Washington’s Rock Creek Park its name.

Police released little about the circumstances of Frankel’s death and as of yesterday had declined to officially identify the man found floating in water shortly before noon on Friday in the federally administered large park that cuts through Northwest Washington. (Read more from philly.com)

ABCNNBBCBS: You will mourn who we tell you to mourn, and forget who we tell you to forget!

“In a high profile press conference in the city of Zahedan, Iran, international media gathered to hear a statement from Abdolhamid Rigi, a high ranking member of the Balochi separatist movement Jundallah who is awaiting execution by the Iranian government for his role in a series of murders.

. . . .

In particular, Rigi confirmed that Jundallah previously had ties with al-Qaeda for operations in Pakistan, and that the groups split in 2003 over differences of opinion about strategy in Iran. Not long after severing its ties with al-Qaeda, the group started a relationship with the United States government.

That fact has never been disputed, indeed US officials have repeatedly confirmed that the government has secretly encouraged and advised Jundallah as it fights the Iranian government. But Rigi insisted the US ties went well beyond encouragement.

Rigi insisted that five years ago when the relationship began the US government gave the group $100,000 and promised to provide it with ‘everything we needed.’ He also claimed that the US was directing the group’s attacks, saying ‘they told us whom to shoot and whom not to. All orders came from them.’

Previously US officials had insisted the government was deliberately avoiding direct funding to avoid Congressional oversight, but the Bush Administration did funnel considerable money into ‘covert’ operations against the Iranian government.” (Read more from antiwar.com)

Some of his statements seem obliquely inaccurate or highly unlikely to me. Nevertheless, this is an interesting talk. Judge for yourself:

“[I will] smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.” ~ John F. Kennedy

“In the wake of the accusation by Chas Freeman that his nomination to lead the National Intelligence Council was derailed by an “Israeli lobby,” a forthcoming memoir by another distinguished ambassador adds stunning new charges to the debate. The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, writes that over the years he not only came under pressure from pro-Israeli groups and officials in Washington but also was the target of an Israeli-inspired assassination attempt in 1980 in Lebanon, where he had opened links to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Dean’s suspicions that Israeli agents may have also been involved in the mysterious plane crash in 1988 that killed Pakistan’s president, General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, led finally to a decision in Washington to declare him mentally unfit, which forced his resignation from the foreign service after a thirty-year career. After he left public service, he was rehabilitated by the State Department, given a distinguished service medal and eventually encouraged to write his memoirs. Now 82, Dean sees the subsequent positive attention he has received as proof that the insanity charge (he calls it Stalinist) was phony, a supposition later confirmed by a former head of the department’s medical service.

Dean, whose memoir is titled Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests, was American ambassador in Lebanon in August 1980 when a three-car convoy carrying him and his family was attacked near Beirut.” (Read more from the nation.com)

Tyranny requires a secret, unaccountable police force. Perhaps that’s why John F. Kennedy said “[I will] smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.”

Seymour Hersh is a hero to me. He’s been fearless in exposing government lies about war, foreign policy and liberty.

“Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an ‘executive assassination ring’ throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of ‘America’s Constitutional Crisis’ whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

Hersh replied, ‘After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.’

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. ‘It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,’ he explained. ‘They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.’

‘It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,’ Hersh stated. ‘Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.’” (Read more from rawstory.com)

I’m putting this up in honor of our newly appointed secretary of state.

For more about Vince Foster’s death, click here.

Also, click here to learn about the SCORES of Clinton investigators, bodyguards, lovers, journalists, donors, partners, and associates who’ve committed suicide, died in small plane crashes, or under suspicious circumstances.

J�rg Haider, a charismatic far-right Austrian politician was killed in a car accident on October 11th. Since then, there has been rampant speculation about foul play, connecting his death to the politician’s outspokenness about holding bankers responsible.

From list last interview:

“Q. Highly-paid managers caused the misery. Is there sufficient cause to prosecute them for their irresponsibility?

HAIDER: Those who thoughtlessly dealt with entrusted money must reap the consequences. We need stricter oversight, a change of the criminal law, and a special courtyard for economic crimes. Those who earned gigantic sums of money are not poor. Their criminal responsibility must be established, then they must be locked up.” (Read more at rumormillnews.com)

Consipracy theories have been rejected by the Austrian police who said he had a blood alcohol level of 1.8.

SEE ALSO:

Haider widow believes death ‘not an accident’
The widow of Joerg Haider believes the far-right Austrian politician’s death in a car crash may not have been an accident and has saved his body from cremation for a second post mortem, a Vienna newspaper has reported. (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)

Read more at cato-at-liberty.org

-The Lives of Others
about the totalitarian excesses of East Germany.

-JFK
which was hugely slandered by critics before and after its release.

Both deal with an increasingly common theme in my thinking: history as a struggle not between nations, but between people and their governments.

Read More from statesman.com