Pakistan May Turn Over U.S. 'Spies' to Iran

In another sign of growing tensions with the United States, Pakistan is threatening to turn over to Iran six members of a tribal militant group Iran claims are "spies" for the CIA.

The group, Jundullah, operates in Baluchistan on both sides of the border between Iran and Pakistan and has carried out a number of violent attacks on Iranian army facilities and officers inside the country.

The CIA has denied any direct ties with the group, but U.S. officials tell ABC News U.S. intelligence officers frequently meet and advise Jundullah leaders, and current and former intelligence officers are working to prevent the men from being sent to Iran.

Iranian officials claimed this week that the U.S. had "a hand" in an April 12 bomb attack at a mosque in Shiraz that killed 14 people, according to Mehr News Agency, quoting Iranian Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei.

"The U.S. is behind many events in Iran and the region with the aim of bringing insecurity," the intelligence minister reportedly said. "We have proper documentations in this regard," the minister told the news agency's reporters. (...)

Medvedev Says China, Russia to Play Key Role in World Security

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said his country and China will work together to shape global security even if other powers don't approve.

Medvedev, speaking on the last day of a visit to China on his first foreign trip as president, said that the two neighbors have become "a major factor of global security without which the main decisions in international cooperation are impossible.''

"I will say frankly that not everyone likes the strategic cooperation between our two nations but we understand that it's in the interests of our people and we'll strengthen it whether others like it or not,'' he told students at Beijing University today. (...)

Russia and China condemn U.S. missile shield plan

China and Russia on Friday condemned the United States' plans to set up a missile defence system that Washington says is crucial to protecting the security of it and its allies.

"Both sides believe that creating a global missile defence system, including deploying such systems in certain regions of the world, or plans for such cooperation, do not help support strategic balance and stability, and harm international efforts to control arms and the non-proliferation process," Russia and China said in a joint statement.

"It harms the strengthening of trust between states and regional stability. In this respect (the two sides) express their concern," it said.

The statement was signed in Beijing by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is visiting China on his first foreign trip since taking over the presidency this month. (...)

The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement

by Robert Parry

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush's own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naive saying "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided," then what should be said about Bush's grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany. (...)

Ventura Fears ‘We Did 9/11 To Ourselves’

by Paul Joseph Watson

Former Governor Jesse Ventura went further in his 9/11 skepticism than ever before today when he told the Howard Stern Show of his fear that elements of the U.S. government carried out the attack, stating, “I hate to fear….that we possibly did it to ourselves.” (...)

Iran busts CIA terror network

The Intelligence Ministry on Saturday released details of the detection and dismantling of a terrorist network affiliated to the United States.

The group’s plans were devised in the U.S., according to the announcement, which added that they had planned to carry out a number of acts such as bombing scientific, educational, and religious centers, shooting people, and making public places in various cities insecure.

The United States Central Intelligence Agency comprehensively supported the terrorist group by arming it, training its members, and sponsoring its inhumane activities in Iran, the Intelligence Ministry stated.

The blast at a religious center in Shiraz last month was carried out by this group, and it also had plans to carry out similar attacks on the Tehran International Book Fair, the Russian Consulate in Gilan Province, oil pipelines in southern Iran, and other targets, the communiqué stated.

Thirteen people were killed and over 190 others wounded in a bombing carried out on April 12 at the Rahpuyan-e Vessal religious center, which is part of the Seyyed-ul-Shohada Mosque complex, located in a residential area of Shiraz. (...)

John McCain and Barack Obama tilt toward the center on Iraq plans

After launching their candidacies with opposite positions on the Iraq war, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama seem to be edging toward a middle ground between them.

Obama has emphasized his plan to withdraw all combat brigades within 16 months of taking office, but also has carefully hedged, leaving the option of taking more time -- and leaving more troops -- if events require. (...)

Bin Laden urges Muslims to liberate Palestine

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden -- in a blunt new message that coincides with Israel's 60th anniversary -- urged his followers to liberate Palestine, a terrorism analyst told CNN on Friday.

In a message entitled "The Causes of Conflict on the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israeli Occupation," bin Laden reiterated jihadist opposition to the existence of the Jewish state and its policies.

Bin Laden's audio message, released Thursday, told listeners that "liberating" Palestine should be the aim of every Muslim, according to terrorism analyst Laura Mansfield.

President Bush referred to al Qaeda on Friday in an address to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem.

He decried the actions and the motivations of terrorists and noted that bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties." (...)

Bush and "bin Laden's voice" - always synchronized.

Revealed: torture centre linked to MI5

A secret interrogation centre in Pakistan where British terrorism suspects are alleged to have been tortured after UK authorities had them arrested has been found by the Guardian.

A British citizen says he was driven there in 2004, held for 10 months and tortured. Salahuddin Amin, now aged 33, had moved to Pakistan three years earlier from Luton, Bedfordshire.

Amin was eventually returned to the UK and successfully prosecuted. His trial heard that he was interviewed by officers from the British security service MI5 several times during his detention. His lawyers allege ISI officers beat and whipped him, and threatened him with an electric drill, in between the MI5 interviews, and that the British officers must have known he was being mistreated. (...)

It is definitely fascism when it happens to you

by Wayne Madsen

In Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's world of an "Israelized" America, the terms SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) and BDO (Behavior Detection Officer) are the new acronyms of Stasi-like control of the American citizenry by a government that treats anyone as a suspicious person in the same manner that Israel mistreats its own Arab citizens and Palestinians.

Sunday, this editor and his colleague faced the Chertoffian menace at Washington's Reagan National Airport while heading to the gate to board a flight to Houston. (...)

The Big Brother Matrix of Reality

Ethanol defended by President Bush

President Bush on Friday defended his emphasis on ethanol to help the nation meet its energy needs even though increased production of the corn-based biofuel has been blamed for contributing to sharp increases in food prices.

"As you know, I'm a ethanol person," he said, explaining his belief that it can help reduce U.S. dependence on oil. "It makes sense for America to be growing energy." (...)

United States is drawing up plans to strike on Iranian insurgency camp

The US military is drawing up plans for a “surgical strike” against an insurgent training camp inside Iran if Republican Guards continue with attempts to destabilise Iraq, western intelligence sources said last week. One source said the Americans were growing increasingly angry at the involvement of the Guards’ special-operations Quds force inside Iraq, training Shi’ite militias and smuggling weapons into the country. (...)

Global Famine

by Michel Chossudovsky

Since the 1980s, grain markets have been deregulated under the supervision of the World Bank and US/EU grain surpluses are used systematically to destroy the peasantry and destabilize national food agriculture. In this regard, World Bank lending requires the lifting of trade barriers on imported agricultural staples, leading to the dumping of US/EU grain surpluses onto local market. These and other measures have spearheaded local agricultural producers into bankruptcy.

A "free market" in grain --imposed by the IMF and the World Bank-- destroys the peasant economy and undermines "food security". Malawi and Zimbabwe were once prosperous grain surplus countries, Rwanda was virtually self-sufficient in food until 1990 when the IMF ordered the dumping of EU and US grain surpluses on the domestic market precipitating small farmers into bankruptcy. In 1991-92, famine had hit Kenya, East Africa's most successful bread-basket economy. The Nairobi government had been previously placed on a black list for not having obeyed IMF prescriptions. The deregulation of the grain market had been demanded as one of the conditions for the rescheduling of Nairobi's external debt with the Paris Club of official creditors. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Second Edition, Montreal 2003) (...)

D.C. madam's mystery death: The Orlando connection

Four days ago, the woman known as the "D.C. Madam" stood in the lobby of her condominium building near downtown Orlando, musing about the future.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey said she was preparing for federal prison. She hoped she'd get time off her sentence for good behavior. She thought she might buy a place in Germany one day.

On Thursday, Palfrey was found dead, hanging by a nylon rope from a metal beam in a backyard shed near her mother's home in Tarpon Springs, on the coast 100 miles west of Orlando. Police said it was an apparent suicide.

"It's hard to believe," said Joseph Strizack, a condominium-association manager at Park Lake Towers who got to know Palfrey during her decade as an owner there. "She did not seem the least bit distraught."

Palfrey's death was the second suicide associated with the case.

A woman who worked for the escort service, former University of Maryland professor Brandy Britton, killed herself in January 2007 before she was scheduled to go to trial on prostitution charges.

On Monday, Palfrey seemed no different. She carried clothing, briefcases and suitcases down the stairs from her second-floor apartment to a rented car in the parking lot, stopping to chat as usual.

She told Strizack she was taking her property to her mother's home in preparation for prison. Contrary to the U.S. Attorney's Office estimate, she told the condo manager she thought she might spend six or seven years behind bars.

On one trip down the stairs, she lugged a 2-foot-wide box she suggested carried materials related to her infamous court case.

"This is my evidence," she told Strizack before carrying it out the door. (...)

I don't see much of a mystery here, it's unfortunately very obvious what happened. To anyone who still believes the mainstream media, and usually laughs at 'conspiracy theories', let this tragic case be a lesson to you.

Contrived Media Ploy As DC Madam Tape Ignored

by Paul Joseph Watson

Within hours of the announcement that DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey had allegedly hanged herself at her mother's home in Florida, Time Magazine released an interview with her "friend," a professional conspiracy debunker and an individual who has fabricated quotes in the past, who claimed Palfrey had told him of her wish to end her life.

Only the dangerously naive could take this report at face value without being massively suspicious.

“She wasn’t going to jail, she told me that very clearly. She told me she would commit suicide,” Dan Moldea told Time Magazine. “She had done time once before [for prostitution],” Moldea recalls. “And it damn near killed her. She said there was enormous stress — it made her sick, she couldn’t take it, and she wasn’t going to let that happen to her again.”

The fact that the corporate media has given Moldea's claim a thousand times more attention than our recorded interview with Palfrey - in which she unequivocally states that she would never commit suicide on multiple occasions - and treated his words as gospel, tells its own story.

Moldea bills himself as an "investigative journalist," and is writing a book about the DC Madam case, but a closer look at his past activities proves that he is nothing less than an unreliable conspiracy debunker.

Moldea's book about the RFK assassination is nothing more than an echo of the official story that has now been definitively discredited with the recent release of evidence proving there were multiple shooters in addition to Sirhan Sirhan.

“In 1995, Dan Moldea wrote his apologia for the LAPD… for their handling of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination,” writes Jim DiEugenio for Probe. It appears Moldea fabricated a Sirhan B. Sirhan quote. “Moldea had provided Sirhan B. Sirhan a chance to fact-check an eight-page report culled from his visits with the prisoner,” writes DiEugenio. Moldea claims Sirhan had wanted to shoot Kennedy between the eyes, but “that son of a bitch turned his head at the last second.”

Sirhan denied such an exchange and Sirhan’s brother Adel, present during Moldea’s visit, also denied the exchange took place. Moreover, Lynn Mangan, Sirhan’s chief researcher, found the comment hardly tenable. “I flatly deny making the statement Moldea ascribes to me in his book,” Sirhan declared in a letter to Mangan.

The fact that the corporate media immediately accepted Moldea's claim at face value and featured it front and center within hours of the announcement of Palfrey's death, while completely ignoring her recorded intention never to commit suicide, smacks of a contrived ploy and underscores just how easy it would be to make murder look like suicide with the aid of a graciously compliant mass media to endlessly parrot the official story while blackballing clear evidence to the contrary. (...)

DC Madam Predicted She Would Be Suicided

by Paul Joseph Watson

Click here to listen to Palfrey clearly state that she would not commit suicide.

During several recent appearances on The Alex Jones Show, Palfrey also said that she was at risk of being killed and that authorities would make it look like suicide. She made it clear that she was not suicidal and if she was found dead it would be murder.

Palfrey had threatened to release the names of well-known clients of her upscale call girl ring in the nation's capitol, and had indicated that Dick Cheney may be one of them.

"We now know it goes at least as high as a United States Senator," Palfrey told The Alex Jones Show, "I'm hearing rumors now from other people that there are other possibilities in that stratosphere so to speak, on that level."

"No I'm not planning to commit suicide," Palfrey told The Alex Jones Show on her last appearance in March, "I'm planning on going into court and defending myself vigorously and exposing the government," she said. (...)

‘D.C. Madam’ Is Found Dead, Apparently in a Suicide

A woman convicted two weeks ago of running a Washington call-girl ring that catered to the capital’s power elite was found dead here Thursday, and the authorities said she had apparently hanged herself.

The body of the woman, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 52, was found in a shed at her mother’s home here about 20 miles northwest of Tampa. The police said Ms. Palfrey had left a notebook containing at least two suicide notes and other messages to her family, but they did not give additional details.

Ms. Palfrey, who had quickly become known as the D.C. Madam when the case against her began unfolding, apparently hanged herself from the shed’s ceiling with nylon rope, the police said. Her mother, Blanche Palfrey, discovered the body. (...)