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(interview with a Swiss banker  done in Mosсow 30.05.2011)  Q: Can you tell us something about your involvement in the Swiss banking business?A: I have worked for Swiss banks for many years. I was designated as one of the top directors of one of the biggest Swiss banks. During my work I was involved in the payment, in the direct payment in cash to a person who killed the president of a foreign country. I was in the meeting where it was decided to give this cash money to the killer. This gave me dramatic headaches and troubled my conscience. It was not the only case that was really bad but it was the worst. It was a payment instruction on order of a foreign secret service written by hand giving the order to pay a certain amount to a person who killed the top leader of a foreign country. And it was not the only case. We received several such hand written letters coming from foreign secret services giving the order to payout cash from secret accounts to fund revolutions or for the killing of people. I can confirm what John Perkins has written in his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". There really exists just a system and Swiss banks are involved in such cases.

Well, it turned. The police bureau is starting to crack after six weeks of Occupy Portland. And one picture, right here, crystallizes the precise moment when it happened. During a choreographed effort to pull a few dozen protesters out of the Chase bank branch outside Pioneer Square, part of today's hundreds-strong N17 day of action, Portland police officers resorted to a decidedly more muscular show of force in a clash watched by TV cameras and rush-hour commuters earlier this evening. Suddenly all the fun-the dance parties, the union songs, the peaceful arrests earlier on the Steel Bridge and at Wells Fargo-was for naught. Tromping in with mounted officers, they pushed marchers who had gathered on the sidewalks along SW Yamhill into the street-forcing them to block MAX trains, something no one was doing until the heavily armored riot squad showed up-and then poked and, for the first time, pepper-sprayed the marchers. Significantly, some of the spraying came after protesters had clearly retreated to the opposite sidewalk. (In another odd shift, there also was no federal-court-required verbal PA warning that chemical munitions would be deployed-a hallmark of every other mass police action to date.) Meanwhile, at almost the very same moment, Police Chief Mike Reese was on TV blaming Occupy Portland for his officers' inability to respond to a rape victim for three hours today. Consider that tantamount to a declaration of war. Reese's point? Officers are tired and have been too distracted to do their main jobs: responding to actual crimes. It was an attempt to spin sentiment against the movement, which seems to be attracting adherents. Even the O today said the movement is "building momentum" and said the average age of some 34 arrestees earlier today was 50-not a bunch of young, anarchists/punks/hoodlums/hippies/road warriors etc. But that might come back to haunt him, judging by a wave of outrage on Twitter and elsewhere among those who noted that it

In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber."  Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically.  All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials.  Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." "Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land." "At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minist

In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the triumphalist verdict of the mainstream media was that the war had been won; Iraq was assured of a benevolent, democratic future. The Times's writer William Rees-Mogg hymned the victory: "April 9, 2003 was Liberty Day for Iraq … It was achieved by "the engine of global liberation," the United States. "After 24 years of oppression, three wars and three weeks of relentless bombing, Baghdad has emerged from an age of darkness. Yesterday was an historic day of liberation."

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush's most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called a "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush's legal team." . . .

What Really Happened? Stella Liebeck, 79-years-old, was sitting in the passenger seat of her grandson's car having purchased a cup of McDonald's coffee. After the car stopped, she tried to hold the cup securely between her knees while removing the lid. However, the cup tipped over, pouring scalding hot coffee onto her lap. She received third-degree burns over 16 percent of her body, necessitating hospitalization for eight days, whirlpool treatment for debridement of her wounds, skin grafting, scarring, and disability for more than two years. Despite these extensive injuries, she offered to settle with McDonald's for $20,000. However, McDonald's refused to settle for this small amount and, in fact, never offered more than $800. The jury awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages - reduced to $160,000 because the jury found her 20 percent at fault - and $2.7 million in punitive damages for McDonald's callous conduct. (To put this in perspective, McDonald's revenue from coffee sales alone was in excess of $1.3 million a day.) The trial judge reduced the punitive damages to $480,000, but did state that McDonald's had engaged in "willful, wanton, and reckless" behavior. Mrs. Liebeck and McDonald's eventually settled for a confidential amount. The jury heard the following evidence in the case: McDonald's Operations Manual required the franchisee to hold its coffee at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit; Coffee at that temperature, if spilled, causes third-degree burns (the worst kind of burn) in three to seven seconds; Third-degree burns do not heal without skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability of the victim for many months, and in some cases, years; The chairman of the department of mechanical engineering and bio-mechanical engineering at the University of Texas testified that this risk of harm is unacceptable, as did a wid

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I'm a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom "Family Guy", and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Being Peace" when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protesters who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted "We Are Peaceful" and "We Are Nonviolent" and "Join Us." As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA's First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family's dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as "30 tons of garbage" that was "abandoned" by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

NOTE: It is important to separate hunting down terrorists who attack our country and deserve justice (which Ron Paul is 100% for), and not confuse justice with occupying entire countries for a decade under the guise of the "War on Terror" or "Spreading Democracy". Terrorists are individuals and small groups, so why are we picking fights with entire nations? BILLIONS for Defense, NOT A PENNY for Empire. This speech is called "Imagine" and it was given by Ron Paul on March 11, 2009. The original text of the talk is below: Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests." Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence. Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but inst

Not long ago I was sitting at home writing something for publication - I won't say what, except that it was a passage about a certain politician on the Hill. Out of habit I launched into a description that was full of nasty and personal language, and I was about to press on to the next part of the piece when suddenly I hit a mental speed bump. A voice in my head whispered - this really happened - "If you write that shit and Bernie Sanders sees it, he's going to be disappointed in you." So I went back and removed the gratuitous body blows from the article.

On January 26, 2011, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell stood before the Pentagon press corps and made a series of patently false statements about Bradley Manning (the video is here).  Even taking into account the position Morrell occupies -- in which a penchant for telling the truth is not exactly a job requirement (it actually would be disqualifying) -- this Press Conference was an extraordinary display of pure official mendacity.   Morrell was asked several times about the evidence -- first reported here -- that Manning was being held in repressive and inhumane conditions:  specifically, 23-hour/day solitary confinement, a prohibition on exercising in his cell, and being allowed out only 1 hour per day to "exercise" which entails walking around alone in a room, shackled.  Morrell repeatedly insisted that everything being done to Manning was being done to all of the other detainees at the brig; in his words:

WARNING: Graphic and disturbing photos between 38:40 and 40:45. U.S. Army Ranger John Needham, who was awarded two purple hearts and three medals for heroism, wrote to military authorities in 2007 reporting war crimes that he witnessed being committed by his own command and fellow soldiers in Al Doura, Iraq. His charges were supported by atrocity photos which, in the public interest, are now released in this video. John paid a terrible price for his opposition to these acts. His story is tragic.  CBS reported obtaining an Army document from the Criminal Investigation Command suggestive of an investigation into these war crimes allegations. The Army's conclusion was that the "offense of War Crimes did not occur." However, CBS also stated that the report was "redacted and incomplete; 111 pages were withheld."  This video is placed with the context of Vice President, Dick Cheney, insistence that this nation's efforts "must go to the dark side;" which included ignoring the Geneva Conventions.  John's story is told, here, by his father, Michael Needham. It is produced in the spirit of the public interest and towards promoting justice and the rule of law.

In late 2009, Charles Robinson was able to interview Peter Joseph, the creator of Zeitgeist: The Movie, Zeitgeist: Addendum, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, several lectures and a presentation; Founder of The Zeitgeist Movement and a friend of Jack Fresco, in his home. He described himself and his life in details in what is likely a rare interview. He was kind enough to provide him with previously unreleased media and video and in turn Charles did his best to create a documentary (albeit kinda poor in quality compared to his work!) that would help express who this person is. Peter Joseph was born in North Carolina to a middle class family. He has said in interviews that his mother's role as a social worker helped shape his opinion and impressions of American life. He later moved to New York to attend art school. Currently he lives and works in New York City as a freelance film editor/composer/producer for various industries. Due to the controversial content of his films and a desire to keep his day job private, he has not released his full name to the public.

In May 2008, Josh Fox received a letter from a natural gas company offering to lease his family's land in Milanville, Pennsylvania for $100,000 to drill for gas.[1]Following the lease offer, he looked for information about natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale under large parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia. He visited Dimock, Pennsylvania where natural gas drilling was already taking place. In Dimock, he met families able to light their tap water on fire as well as suffering from numerous health issues and fearing their well water had been contaminated.Fox then set out to see how communities are being affected in the west where a natural gas drilling boom has been underway for the last decade. He spent time with citizens in their homes and on their land as they relayed their stories of natural gas drilling in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Texas, among others. He spoke with residents who have experienced a variety of chronic health problems as well as contamination of their air, water wells or surface water. In some instances, the residents are reporting that they obtained a court injunction or settlement monies from gas companies to replace the affected water supplies with potable water or water purification kits.[2]Throughout the documentary, Fox reached out to scientists, politicians and gas industry executives and ultimately found himself in the halls of Congress as a subcommittee was discussing the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, "a bill to amend the Safe Drinking Water Act to repeal a certain exemption for hydraulic fracturing."[3] Hydraulic fracturing was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.[4]Making appearances in the film are Dr. Theo Colborn, founder of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX); John Hanger, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP); Dr. Al Armendariz, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator for Region 6; W

t's increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition - except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects." In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it "believed" that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn't know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence - which, as we soon learned, Washington didn't have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that "we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda." Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's "confession," but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

They are frequently cited as the first instance in American history when people in the homosexual community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted sexual minorities, and they have become the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world. American gays and lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s faced a legal system more anti-homosexual than those of some Warsaw Pact countries.[note 1][2] Early homophile groups in the U.S. sought to prove that gay people could be assimilated into society, and they favored non-confrontational education for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. The last years of the 1960s, however, were very contentious, as many social movements were active, including the African American Civil Rights Movement, the Counterculture of the 1960s, and antiwar demonstrations. These influences, along with the liberal environment of Greenwich Village, served as catalysts for the Stonewall riots. Very few establishments welcomed openly gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay. The Stonewall Inn, at the time, was owned by the Mafia.[3][4] It catered to an assortment of patrons, but it was known to be popular with the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, representatives of a newly self-aware transgender community, effeminate young men, hustlers, and homeless youth. Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s, but officers quickly lost control of the situation at the Stonewall Inn, and attracted a crowd that was incited to riot. Tensions between New York City police and gay residents of Greenwich Village erupted into more protests the next evening, and again several nights later. Within weeks, Village residents quickly organized into activist groups to concentrate efforts on establishing places for gays and lesbians to be open about their sexual orientation without fear o

While filming a police line at Occupy Oakland after midnight on Nov. 3 following the Nov. 2 general strike, an officer opens fire and shoots me with a rubber bullet. I was standing well back. There was no violence or confrontations of any kind underway. At 0:31 seconds you can see a tall officer in the front raise his weapon and then fire. This is the full clip of the incident.

Seattle photographer Joshua Trujillo captured what may become the defining image of this week of Occupy unrest - an elderly woman being led away from the mayhem, her face covered with pepper spray. A pregnant woman and a priest were also hit with pepper spray during a march on Tuesday night. You see more photos of the confrontation at SeattlePI.com. (More photos here as well.) The Seattle branch of the Occupy movement, which has been camped out near Seattle Central Community College, held the march in support of the New York camp, which faced a day long eviction battle with the city yesterday. On Monday, Occupy Oakland was the scene of another attempt by police to drive campers out of a city park. There were reports that both Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Cal (on the Berkeley campus of the University of California) are being raided on Wednesday morning. The week of police crackdown comes amid reports that the federal government and is coordinating with multiple on legal strategies that can shut down the Occupy protests. The woman in the picture is not just any elderly woman, however, as she is well known to Seattle residents. Dorli Rainey is a former school teacher who has been active in local politics since the 1960s. In 2009, she ran for mayor, but eventually dropped out by saying, "I am old and should learn to be old, stay home, watch TV and sit still." We guess she didn't learn. Rainey emailed The Stranger, Seattle's alternative paper, to say she stopped by the march to see what was happening when her group got pinned in by police and nearly trampled in the chaos.

Rabiha al Qassab, a British Iraqi woman who lives in London, describes the harrowing story of her husband, Ramze Shihab Ahmed. Having fled in 1998 after being accused of trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Ramze returned to Iraq last year to get his son out of prison. He, too, was arrested and was tortured. Like 30,000 other Iraqis, he and his son are being held without charge.