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In a new report (PDF) by the Open Society Institute, human-rights researcher Jonathan Horowitz contrasts the official prison system that the Pentagon has constructed in Afghanistan-where they often arrange press briefings and invite journalists on tours-with the super-secret facility run on the periphery of Bagram Air Base, the "Tor" or "Black Jail."

NEW YORK - As U.S. officials struggle to control damage from the secret cables, Russia is planning to block a similar dump about the Kremlin. And they will be ruthless, Philip Shenon reports.

Welcome to the brave new world of post-bailout capitalism. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday that corporate profits are at their highest level in U.S. history, and the Fed released minutes of an early November meeting in which officials predicted a stagnant economy and continued high unemployment.

Apparently, the US government has been spying on its citizens. Who knew!!! This is a fascinating and damning inside account of US eavesdropping on Americans from former NSA officials. Read it!

The 'Volcker Rule' got fresh support this morning when five former Treasury Secretaries endorsed the key financial regulation in a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

The best "justice" money can buy via packing the Supreme Court with "conservatives" is bearing smelly, polluted fruit. Specifically, those "conservatives" are showing themselves to be "activist judges" in "watering down" conservation and public safety laws passed by Congress. Polluting "business" entities are apparently NOT to be considered to be within the oft-quoted and loved "conservative" limitation of the purview of the federal government to merely protect the populace from "enemies foreign and domestic". That this pollution kills and injures thousands (and poisons the environment for the countless of the "unborn") apparently doesn't matter (but if Al Qaeda was doing it, then complete suspension of all domestic rights would be justified to "fight" that!). Pictured: In 2007, a pipe maker was fined millions of dollars for dumping oil, lead and zinc into Avondale Creek in Alabama. A court ruled the waterway was exempt from the Clean Water Act. The firm eventually settled by agreeing to pay a smaller amount and submit to probation.

"Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece's fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory."

"The No. 2 official on the Federal Reserve Board said Monday that he will retire, opening a third seat on what may be the world's most powerful economic body and giving President Obama a historic opportunity to reshape the central bank.\n\n[...]\n\nThe changes come at a time of epic transformation in, and intense scrutiny of, the Fed's mission. During the past two years, the Fed has taken extraordinary actions to contain a financial crisis and prop up the economy. Now the institution must decide how and when to wind down some of those emergency measures."

The prime ministers of India and Pakistan have agreed that the two countries relations should be normalised after months of diplomatic deadlock prompted by the attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008, according to officials.

When Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano declared New York hadn't spent $275 million in anti-terror cash since 2006, she told only half the story, lawmakers and security officials say.

WASHINGTON - The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

Do you have something that is interfering in your business that you simply can't get the officials you deal with to listen to? Seriously - if you feel you have an answer to how government can get out of the way of you creating jobs - check this out - this is great news to business owners and job creators. And it might ACTUALLY DO some good too.

Washington - President Obama, who is proposing his third annual budget on Monday, will say that it can reduce projected deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, enough to stabilize the nation's fiscal health and buy time to address its longer-term problems, according to a senior administration official.

The time element of "30 years" keeps slipping into American official reports and news stories about the origins of crises - the latest in "The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report" - but rarely is the relevance of the three-decade span explained, and there is a reason.

Peak Oil is the point at which petroleum production reaches its greatest rate just before going into perpetual decline. In "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth productions, radio host Thom Hartmann explains that the world will reach peak oil within the next year if it hasn't already. As a nation, the United States reached peak oil in 1974, after which it became a net oil importer. Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and the other scientists, researchers and writers interviewed throughout "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" describe the diminishing returns our world can expect as it deals with the consequences of peak oil even as it continues to pretend it doesn't exist. These experts predict substantially increased transportation costs, decreased industrial production, unemployment, hunger and social chaos as the supplies of the  fuels on which we rely dwindle and eventually disappear. Chomsky urges us to anticipate the official response to peak oil based on how corporations, news organizations and other institutions have responded to global warming: obfuscation, spin and denial. James Howard Kunstler says that we cannot survive peak oil unless we "come up with a consensus about reality that is consistent with the way things really are." This documentary series hopes to help build that consensus. Click here to watch the introductory video, and check back here for new videos each Wednesday.

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.

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

Here's a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn't Cairo after all. Maybe it's Baghdad - specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

Last June, when Rolling Stone published Michael Hastings' article which ended the career of Obama's Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- an article which was just awarded the prestigious Polk Award -- the attacks on Hastings were led not by military officials but by some of Hastings' most celebrated journalistic colleagues.  The New York Times' John Burns fretted that the article "has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations" and accused Hastings of violating "a kind of trust" which war reporters "build up" with war Generals; Politico observed that a "beat reporter" -- unlike the freelancing Hastings -- "would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal's remarks"; and an obviously angry Lara Logan of CBS News strongly insinuated (with no evidence) that Hastings had lied about whether the comments were on-the-record and then infamously sneered:  "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has."  Here's Jon Stewart last year mocking the revealing media disdain for Rolling Stone and Hastings in the wake of their McChrystal story.