Dozens of logbooks and ledgers have been found, containing the names and photos of countless detainees. This one is dated July 24, 1967

The Guatemalan Police Archives

On July 5, officials from the Guatemalan government's human rights office (PDH - Procuraduría de Derechos Humanos) entered a deteriorating, rat-infested munitions depot in downtown Guatemala City to investigate complaints about improperly-stored explosives. During inspection of the site, investigators found a vast collection of documents, stored in five buildings and in an advanced state of decay. The files belonged to the National Police, the central branch of Guatemala's security forces during the war - an entity so inextricably linked to violent repression, abduction, disappearances, torture and assassination that the country's 1996 peace accord mandated it be completely disbanded and a new police institution created in its stead.

Doyle/National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 170
via I heart photograph

Gloomy Americans adjust:

Bush's approval rating was 24 percent, up one percentage point from last month's record low.
Approval ratings for U.S. economic and foreign policy nudged up two points each to a still-low 14 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
The number of Americans who believe the country is on the right track remained at its all-time low in a Zogby poll of 16 percent, and the approval rating for the U.S. Congress remained at its all-time low of 11 percent.

Zogby/Whitesides/Reuters 18.Jun.08

MIKE GRAVEL: That’s right. And we held a hearing. And then, when he said—he said, “I want a federal building,” I says, “Well, I’d love to give you a federal building, but we don’t have the money, and the reason why we don’t have the money is because we’re in Southeast Asia. Now, let me tell you how we got into Southeast Asia.” And I started to read the Pentagon Papers. That’s how—and then I started sobbing after an hour of reading. I’m dyslexic, so I read terribly.
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@Democracy Now!

Naomi Klein:

They also own several of the major news networks. They are in the fear business

the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed

Fallujah Guernica:

Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

al-Fahdily/Jamail/IPS
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What made it wrong, what makes it wrong forever isn't just the damage and the loss and the carnal degradation, the numbers of the dead and the deformed and the missing, it's where it goes from here as well, who it lifts and who it leaves behind, what it does to the human face.
The gamble and stake is on the outcome, Joshua tearing into Jericho because the Chosen People need that property, whether or not the Jericho natives have necessarily done anything morally wrong, just being there is morally wrong, in that context.
Fallujah is the great sin of Iraq, the place where it all got condensed and distilled into an obscenity that is beyond the ability of those who committed it to repair.
I really do believe George Bush and Lynndie England are a matched pair, a set of bookended tragic human figures. The catharsis of trying Bush for war crimes is important and therapeutic, but what really did this, what's doing it now, is as much spiritual as political, as much metaphysical as material. And in that light Bush is pathetic not demonic, a lost soul seduced and propped up by true evil and kept there intentionally, out in the light for all to see.
Bush has as much responsibility for Fallujah as Lynndie England had for those photographs from Abu Ghraib. Catharsis alone won't save us now.

From the archives:
Freedom, television, Helen Keller, 9/11

Andreas Carl Strassmeir
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Rev. Robert Millar
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Carol Howe
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Daniel Spiegelman
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Michael Brescia

our whole government rests on moral principles, not just on political principles

Blackwater on the southern border:

"This is a private company that would profit from instability and insecurity at the border. It's their motive and it's their interest that we have conflict and that we have problems at the border. The more there are, they more they'll profit. This is why we do not want private companies engaging in national security objectives. It is a complete conflict of interest when you mix corporate profits with community benefit."

San Diego City Councilmember Ben Hueso at Subtopia

The ethnically unbiased and scrupulously accurate NYTimes:

Rice Says Houses Hurt Mideast Talks

Biological Utilisation of Quantum NonLocality:

The assumption of a superconducting-like state provides an example of a context where different organisms can be highly correlated. Such a state may be relevant to the origin of life, or to the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis. Perturbations such as an increase in temperature cause the coordinated organisation to break up, and this would provide a mechanism by which the amount of linking of an individual organism to other systems through non-local interconnections could be adjustable.
One may imagine that life may exist from the beginning as a cooperative whole directly interconnected at a distance by Bell type non-local interactions, following which modifications through the course of evolution cause organisms to be interconnected directly with each other and with objects to an extent that is adapted to circumstances.
One can see conceptual similarities between psi skills and ordinary skills, e.g. between the perceptual skills of hearing and telepathy on the one hand, and between the forms of control of matter involved in the control of the body and in psychokinesis on the other.
From this point of view, it is only in regard to the mode of interaction that the ordinary phenomena and the analogous paranormal ones differ from each other. These analogies will be discussed in more detail elsewhere.
[...]
the self-consistent and completely logical multiple-description view of knowledge advocated here, an alternative to the conventional view that all knowledge may be reduced to quantum mechanical knowledge, allows life to have its own potentialities, beyond what the constraints of "good scientific method" will allow, for knowing and for acting on the basis of such knowing.
Included in these categories of acting and knowing are psychic functioning.

Brian Josephson

it's not the crack, it's the pipe:

“The oil and gas industry in operating under the kind of rules they have operated under for 15 years has not been a threat to the species,” H. Dale Hall, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s director, told the Associated Press Friday. “It was the ice melting and the habitat going away that was a threat to the species over everything else.”

Cappiello/AP/commondreams 15.Jun.08

It is a parable, yes:

For some time the thought has been gathering at the back of my mind that we are in the final act. We have finally insulted the planet so much that it can no longer sustain us. It is exhausted. It never occurred to me that vegetation might exterminate us.

Roger Ebert review of The Happening

We believe no one is better equipped to change the world than those who have been most scarred by what’s wrong with it. There is a way to break the cycle of violence, and it begins with showing survivors a new, more hopeful way forward.

Survivor Corps (formerly Landmine Survivors Network) is a global network of people helping each other overcome the effects of war and violence. We provide the tools and support survivors need to rise above their injuries and give back to their communities.

We work wherever there are communities recovering from war and conflict, in countries still trying to rebuild after generations of conflict, from the Balkans to Southeast Asia. We work where survivors, working together, have the best chance to influence policy and break cycles of violence.
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MAG (Mines Advisory Group) is a neutral and impartial humanitarian organisation clearing the remnants of conflict for the benefit of communities worldwide. MAG is co-laureate of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for its work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which culminated in the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty - the international agreement that bans antipersonnel landmines, sometimes referred to as the Ottawa Convention.

MAG moves into current and former conflict zones to clear the remnants of those conflicts, enabling recovery and assisting the development of affected populations. MAG consults with local communities and works to lessen the threat of death and injury, while releasing reclaimed and safe land and other vital resources back to the local population, helping countries to rebuild and develop their social and economic potential.
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Claudia Janke
via Mrs. Deane

Liberty:

6. That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack; evidence of the recall of rescue aircraft is supported by statements of Captain Joe Tully, Commanding Officer of the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, and Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the Sixth Fleet carrier division commander, at the time of the attack; never before in American naval history has a rescue mission been cancelled when an American ship was under attack;

7. That although Liberty was saved from almost certain destruction through the heroic efforts of the ship's Captain, William L. McGonagle (MOH), and his brave crew, surviving crewmembers were later threatened with court-martial, imprisonment or worse if they exposed the truth; and were abandoned by their own government;

8. That due to the influence of Israel's powerful supporters in the United States, the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people;

9. That due to continuing pressure by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, this attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crewmember has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack
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"There's been an egregious wrong done here, there's been an extreme number of lies told to the American people and the American people do not know the truth about what happened."

Among the most popular theories as to why Israel would take such drastic action against its superpower ally is that the Liberty, a $40m state-of-the-art surveillance ship, was eavesdropping on an Israeli massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war.
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Every few minutes, Bron writes, Israeli soldiers would escort an Egyptian POW from the group to a hearing conducted by two men in Israeli army uniforms.Then the man would be taken away, given a spade, and forced to dig his own grave."I watched as (one) man dug a hole for about 15 minutes," Bron wrote.
"Afterwards, the (Israeli military) policeman told him to throw the shovel away, and then one of them leveled an Uzi at him and shot two short bursts, each of three or four bullets."Bron says he witnessed about ten such executions, until the grave was filled. Then an Israeli Colonel threatened him with a revolver, forcing him to leave the area.
As those executions were underway, America's most sophisticated intelligence platform, USS Liberty, was less than 13 miles from ElArish.

"Today's report makes it more important than ever that we get past outdated, anachronistic views of marijuana," said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Britain:

More secret anti-terror government files found on train:

The papers were found on the same day that another batch of secret papers relating to intelligence assessments of Iraq and al-Qaida were handed to the BBC after being left by a senior official on a train.

Government sources last night played down suggestions the two incidents were linked.

Guardian
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David Hockney:

He is also outraged by the severe penalties for marijuana use. Marijuana, he said in a letter to The Spectator, "is a harmless and pleasant plant that, like a couple of cocktails, makes you feel relaxed and, unlike them, quiet."

He added: "Why is the stuff still illegal? I assume it's the power of the alcohol lobby being behind most things. Alcohol has damaged and killed friends of mine, but I've never known anyone harmed by the weed, whose relaxing pleasure I have enjoyed for 40 years."

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We've stopped this train to prevent it delivering 1,000 tonnes of coal to be burnt at Drax and then released into the atmosphere.

Her clipped tone and arched brows revealed annoyance.

With peace talks under way, Rice said, now is a time to build confidence on both sides. "This is simply not helpful to building confidence," she told reporters before arriving...