Bradley Manning Suffering Extreme Isolation Prison Torture by Our Goverment — Courageous Whistleblower ‘Physically Deteriorating’
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his 23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime, but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention that’s usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals in America’s supermax prisons. He is kept isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, where he is cut off from most human contact, denied reading materials and personal items, prevented by the guards from exercising and regularly awakened from his sleep. He has been at Quantico for five months, following two months of detention in Kuwait.

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North Korea threatens nuclear ‘holy war’ with South
Jonathan Watts in Beijing

Tensions on the Korean pensinsula were at their most dangerous level since the 1950-53 war today when North Korea threatened to usenuclear weapons in a “holy war” against its neighbour after South Korean tanks, jets and artillery carried out one of the largest live-fire drills in history close to the border.

The military exercise at Pocheon, just south of the demilitarized zone, was the third such show of force this week by South Korea. Multiple rocket-launchers, dozens of tanks and hundreds of troops joined the drills, which the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, insisted was necessary for self-defence, following two deadly attacks this year. Last month, two civilians and two marines were killed by a North Korean barrage on Yeonpyeong island following a live-fire drill in disputed territory. In March, 46 sailors died when the South Korean naval ship, Cheonan, was sunk, apparently by an enemy torpedo.

“We had believed patience would ensure peace on this land, but that was not the case,” Lee told troops today. He earlier warned that he was ready to order a “merciless counterattack” if further provoked.

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For DC residents, Marylanders and Virginians (and others) who oppose this policy, there’s a petition at:

MCM

Random bag checks start at DC-area Metro stations
By BRETT ZONGKER
The Associated Press

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — The Washington area’s Metro transit system is randomly checking passenger bags for explosives and other dangers for the first time, following similar efforts in New York and Boston.

Screeners swabbed some riders’ bags and inspected them in at least two Metro train stations early Tuesday, in Maryland and Virginia suburbs of the nation’s capital. The checks took less than one minute each.

Metro Transit Police Department Chief Michael Taborn said the idea has been in the works for years and is not a response to any particular threat. Two men have been arrested this year in separate cases of alleged bomb plots against the system.

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Obama’s Liberty Problem: Why Indefinite Detention by Executive Order Should Scare the Hell Out of People
Bill Quigley

The right to liberty is one of the foundation rights of a free people. The idea that any US President can bypass
Congress and bypass the Courts by issuing an Executive Order setting up a new legal system for indefinite detention of people should rightfully scare the hell out of the American people.

Read more.

“Jarrett even made a pretty startling admission, one attendee told me. Asked why Obama said he wants to raise taxes on upper-income people for no other reason than to level the playing field, “She basically told me he said what he said during the heat of the campaign, and that’s not his true belief.”

When fat cats talk
By CHARLES GASPARINO

It took continued 9-plus percent unemployment, falling approval ratings and a[n ostensible] “shellacking” in the November elections, but President Obama finally appears to understand that he actually needs at least some of those fat cats in the business community, if he’s going to fix the economy anytime soon.

At least that was the feeling to come out of a private dinner this month, where two key Obama advisers met with 20 or so top business leaders.

The meeting was at the swank Manhattan home of Betty and John Levin, a man who made a fairly large fortune as a hedge-fund manager and investor. Other guests included Loews Corp CEO James Tisch, Ajit Jain of Berkshire Hathaway, Honeywell CEO David Cote and John Myers, the former president of GE Asset Management.

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EIA Projects Climate Catastrophe

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that the United
States will lead the world into catastrophic global warming over the next
twenty five years. In its 2011 Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA predicts that
energy-related CO2 emissions will “grow by 16 percent from 2009 to 2035,”
reaching 6.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (or 1.7 GtC):

The fuel mix the EIA projects remains predominantly coal and oil, with a
moderate rise in renewable energy, whose pollution benefits are offset by
growth in energy demand:

This pathway would almost certainly commit the world to catastrophic climate
change, including rapid sea level rise, extreme famine, desertification, and
ecological collapse on land and sea. Right now, the United States, with less
than five percent of global population, produces 20 percent of global
warming pollution. Center for American Progress senior fellow Joe Romm
published in Nature in 2008 that humanity “must aim at achieving average
annual carbon dioxide emissions of less than 5 GtC [5 billion metric tons of
carbon, or 18 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide] this century or risk
the catastrophe of reaching atmospheric concentrations of 1,000 p.p.m.” To
do so, he said, humanity needs to adopt a “national and global strategy to
stop building new traditional coal-fired plants while starting to deploy
existing and near-term low-carbon technologies as fast as is humanly
possible.”

Read more.

Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government

23 Dec 2010 http://www.legitgov.org

All links are here:

UN torture rep to investigate treatment of jailed leaks suspect Bradley Manning –Office of rapporteur on torture confirms it is looking into complaint made by Manning supporter 23 Dec 2010 The United Nations is investigating a complaint on behalf of Bradley Manning that he is being mistreated while held since May in US Marine Corps custody pending trial. The army private is charged with the unauthorised use and disclosure of classified information, material related to the WikiLeaks, and faces a court martial sometime in 2011. The office of Manfred Nowak, special rapporteur on torture based in Geneva, received the complaint from a Manning supporter; his office confirmed that it was being looked into. Manning’s supporters say that he is in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day; this could be construed as a form of torture.

The NYT spills key military secrets on its front page
By Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/12/21/nyt

***

Published on Monday, December 20, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Wikimania and the First Amendment
by Ralph Nader

http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/369-wikileaks/4356-wikimania-and-the-first-amendment

***

Why Shouldn’t Freedom of the Press Apply to WikiLeaks?
You may not like Julian Assange, but the campaign to silence WikiLeaks should appall you

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-shouldn-t-freedom-of-the-press-apply-to-wikileaks-20101215

via Portside:

The Largest Prison Strike In American History Goes Ignored By US Media
By Joe Weber

Today marks the end of a seven-day strike where tens
of thousands of inmates in Georgia refused to work
or leave their cells until their demands had been
met. The odd thing is, that until today, no one had
ever heard about this strike.

Inmates in ten Georgia prisons, Baldwin, Hancock, Hays,
Macon, Smith and Telfair State Prisons, to name a few, went
on strike last Thursday to protest their treatment and
demand their human rights.

According to an article by Facing South, Department of
Corrections have been nervous about deteriorating conditions
in Georgia’s prisons since early 2010. Wardens started
triple bunking prisoners in response to budget cuts -
squeezing three prisoners into cells intended for one.
Prison officials have kept a watchful eye out for prisoners
meaning to riot, for prisoners’ rights lawyers to litigate,
or both.

Read more.

Bayer: Bee-Toxic Pesticide Killed German Bees, But Is Safe in America
BY Ariel Schwartz

As we have detailed in a number of stories, a pesticide (clothianidin) produced by Bayer may be responsible, at least in part, for the precipitous decline of the bee population in the last few years. The pesticide was approved on the basis of a study that the EPA knew to be faulty. There is little evidence supporting Bayer’s claim that clothianidin is safe (and a growing stack of evidence that it isn’t).

Bayer’s response to all the negative press surrounding clothianidin: go into spin mode. But the company’s recent blog post on clothianidin’s safety is itself full of holes.

Take this sentence, for example: “Bayer CropScience was recently made aware of an unauthorized release from within the Environmental Protection Association (EPA) of a document regarding the seed treatment product, clothianidin, which is sold in the United States corn market.” The document’s release was not “unauthorized”; it was available through the Freedom of Information Act. It was forwarded to Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald by an EPA employee, who first made Theobald aware of it. But that’s almost beside the point.

Read more.