Nine Years After 9/11, US Court Concedes that International Laws of War Restrict President’s Wartime Powers

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
8 September, 2010

Under President George W. Bush, a small group of advisors tied closely to Vice President Dick Cheney argued that neither Congress nor the judiciary should attempt to prevent the President from doing whatever he felt was appropriate as the Commander-in-Chief of a “War on Terror” that was declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As Sidney Blumenthal explained in an article for Salon in January 2006, the President and his advisors believed in the “unitary executive” theory — “the idea that the President as Commander-in-Chief is the sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva Conventions, and possesses inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat.” Blumenthal added, accurately, that this concept was “the cornerstone of the Bush legal doctrine.”

The extreme position taken by John Yoo regarding Presidential power

Naked Insecurity, Part II by Ralph Nader

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by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
September 8, 2010

September 7, 2010

Members of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator,

We are writing to urge you and your colleagues on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to convene a public hearing to review the government’s deployment of whole-body scanners at passenger security checkpoints in US airports.

Time for Helicopter Ben to Drop Some Money on Main Street by Dr. Ellen Brown

by Dr. Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
Sept. 8, 2010

The Federal Reserve is proposing another round of “quantitative easing,” although the first round failed to reverse deflation. It failed because the money went to banks, which failed to lend it on. To reverse deflation, the money needs to be funneled directly to state and local economies. The Fed may not be authorized to “monetize” state bonds, but it COULD buy bonds issued by state-owned banks.

In 2002, in a speech that earned him the nickname “Helicopter Ben,” then- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke famously said that the government could easily reverse a deflation, just by printing money and dropping it from helicopters. “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent),” he said, “that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” Later in the speech he discussed “a money-financed tax cut,” which he said was “essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.” You could cure a deflation, said Professor Friedman, simply by dropping money from helicopters.

The Imperial Anatomy of al-Qaeda: Empire, Energy and Al-Qaeda: The Anglo-American Terror Network, Part II

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
September 8, 2010

This is Part 2 of the series, “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda.”

Part 1: The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda: The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis” Part I by Andrew Gavin Marshall

The End of the Cold War and Strategy for the New World Order

With the end of the Cold War a new strategy had to be determined to manage the global system. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, declarations of a “New World Order” sprang forward, focusing on the United States as the single world superpower. This presented a great many challenges as well as opportunities for the worlds most powerful hegemon.

L’Shana Tova – Happy New Year!

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L’Shana Tova Umetuka Tikatevu

May you be inscribed in the book of a Good and Sweet Year.

Middle East Loses Trillions As U.S. Strikes Record Arms Deals by Rick Rozoff

by Rick Rozoff
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
Stop NATO-Opposition to global militarism Sept. 2, 2010
Sept. 8, 2010

The Internet has provided the world with, if nothing else, instantaneous access to news and in-depth information previously available only to governments and think tanks. It has also allowed for the exchange of data and analyses between groups and individuals around the globe, in part by making one tongue, English, the language of the World Wide Web. It remains to be seen whether the keystroke is mightier than the sword.

An illustrative case in point is an August 29 report from China’s Xinhua News Agency on a news article by Egypt’s Middle East News Agency regarding a study conducted by the Strategic Foresight Group in India. The latter, a report published in a book entitled The Cost of Conflict in the Middle East, calculates that conflict in the area over the last 20 years has cost the nations and people of the region 12 trillion U.S. dollars.

Judge Denies Habeas Petition of Afghan Shopkeeper at Guantánamo by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
8 September, 2010

On Friday September 3, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John D. Bates handed another victory to the government in its ongoing effort to continue holding insignificant prisoners at Guantánamo, when he denied the habeas corpus petition of Shawali Khan, an Afghan prisoner. Khan was accused of providing assistance to members of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), an anti-US militia headed by the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who, ironically, had received the lion’s share of US funding as a leader of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, which was channeled to him by the Pakistani authorities who championed his cause).