ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

NYT: WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.

So torturing should be okay, as long as they really, seriously mean it that this guy really seriously knows something and isn’t just some random taxi driver with nothing to tell.

It has been clear that the order preserved at least some of the latitude that Mr. Bush has permitted the C.I.A. in using harsher interrogation techniques than those permitted by the military or other agencies. But the new documents provide more details about how the administration intends to determine whether a specific technique would be legal, depending on the circumstances involved.

So all the guys we waterboarded because they had direct knowledge to the imminent attack we foiled were not tortured. To waterboard all those other guys in custody not directly involved, well that would still be torture. Because they have a lower outrage tolerance than the real badguys.

BofA, the bank that built the city by the bay, well, rebuilt, technically, but all that was left was ashes, is seeing some signs of trouble.

 First quarter Bank of America profit falls on credit losses.

Bank of America Corp , the largest U.S. retail bank, posted a 77 percent decline in quarterly profit on Monday, as a growing number of consumers and real estate developers failed to repay loans.

Lets hope they can pull out of this. There’s a whole lot more in the story, which can be read at the top link above. Basically, they’re predicting huge losses due to credit default, and admitted they didn’t expect as huge of losses as they originally got, but think they’re okay in predicting how hard they’ll be hit now. If I were them, I’d be over-predicting, but Shedlock thinks they’re under-predicting. Only time shall tell.

The United States arrested an 84-year-old American on Tuesday suspected of giving Israel secrets on nuclear weapons, fighter jets and missiles in the 1980s, in a case linked to the Jonathan Pollard spy scandal that rocked U.S.-Israeli relations.

Oh ho ho.

The arrest of Ben-Ami Kadish indicates that Israeli spying revealed by the Pollard case, still an irritant to the U.S. alliance with Israel, may have spread wider than previously acknowledged.

But we’ll threaten to kick the asses of anyone who threatens them, especially if that other country isn’t spying on us.

Kadish acknowledged his spying in FBI interviews and said he acted to help Israel, according to court documents.

He was accused of reporting to an Israeli government handler who was also a main contact for Pollard, an American citizen serving a life term on a 1985 charge of spying for Israel.

And we weren’t keeping tabs on a known spy-handler because…?

Pollard pleaded guilty in 1986. Israel gave him citizenship in 1996 and acknowledged in 1998 the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst was one of its spies. Israel has unsuccessfully sought Pollard’s release. [emphasis mine]

I thought people that handled sensitive data like that had thorough background checks. I guess we don’t have to worry too much anymore because it’s all farmed out to private contractors now.

 Kadish is a Connecticut-born U.S. citizen who worked as a mechanical engineer at the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal. His spying lasted roughly from 1979 to 1985, and his contact with the unidentified Israeli handler continued until March of this year.

Awesome.

The complaint cited Kadish as saying that, unlike Pollard, he received no money from the Israelis.

Dummy, everyone knows the world economy is controlled by an elite Judaic banking cartel. Shoulda gone for the duckets.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned Tehran on Tuesday that if she were president, the United States could “totally obliterate” Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel.

DO NOT WANT. I couldn’t vote for her in the primaries, as I am not a registered Democrat, but if it’s her against McCain I’m voting for Al Gore again.

On the day of a crucial vote in her nomination battle against fellow Democrat Barack Obama, the New York senator said she wanted to make clear to Tehran what she was prepared to do as president in hopes that this warning would deter any Iranian nuclear attack against the Jewish state.

Repeat after me: Iran does not have nuclear weapons. Iran is not trying to make nuclear weapons. If we keep threatening them, Iran may decide to get nuclear weapons. If you go down the street and start threatening to shoot neighbor A if they shoot neighbor B, whom they don’t like, but so far neighbor A doesn’t have a gun and claims to not want one, well, threatening to shoot neighbor A enough will certainly encourage them go get a gun in case you come back with yours.

Iran has attacked how many countries in the recent past? Israel has attacked how many countries in the recent past? And which one of them actually has nukes?

Looking over her shoulder at my fianceé’s myspace, I noticed something peculiar, perhaps in relation to why MySpace is full of pervs.

Look at the title bar for your MySpace - notice anything funny, like after it says “MySpace.com - Yourname” the only three things it displays are, in order, Age, Sex, and Location? It’s the oldest internet meme, heck, it may have even started on AOL before AOL was the internet, A/S/L.

Now I’m really glad I don’t have a MySpace.

They spent a lot of money on that banner, might as well use it again. (this was supposed to be posted weeks ago, but due to server issues that were fixed just 30 seconds ago, the post was delayed until right now.)

Gleeful news from the UK:

Organizers say that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection rules will remove key legal protection for “genuine” mediums.

They think skeptics might bring malicious prosecutions to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead.

Why should you be able to charge for it if you can’t prove you’re really doing something? I’m not allowed to charge people to do stuff I can’t prove I’m doing, why should someone who can hit the table with their knee at opportune times to fool people into believing the dead are speaking be able to charge for such theatrics unless they tell people it is just theatrics. I mean, true believers will know the law is forcing them to speak ‘lies’ before they get on to the ‘truth’ of their  communing with spirits or whatever.

Psychics also fear they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results. 

They say the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from prosecutors and onto them.

“By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine,” McEntee-Taylor told Reuters. “No other religion has to do that.”

Religions also don’t get paid by the hour to ‘heal’ people or ’speak to the dead’ or other such flim-flammery.  When you go to church, you choose to toss coin of the realm into the bucket, you don’t swipe your credit card at the door.

These senators, well-known war skeptics, could find allies in lawmakers who support Bush’s current Iraq policies. In hearings last week, Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates whether Baghdad should start paying some U.S. combat costs, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised the possibility that an anticipated Iraqi budget surplus this year could be used to help Afghanistan, whose $700 million in annual revenue represents a small fraction of Iraq’s $46.8 billion budget.

So we want Iraq… to pay for Afghanistan now? Because we… invaded them, and now… they… owe?.. us for it? Does this mean if Afghanistan had oil and had not only been making money from selling poppies that we would be asking them to help us pay for Iraq, or maybe help us fund a build-up to invading Iran? How about paying us to leave? Why are we saying what they should be doing anyway? They have a democratically elected government now. Much like Iran and Israel they should be left alone.

Some reckonings of the annual US Military dollar input, including ‘emergency’ war time funds for Iraq and Afghanistan and everything that’s not reported in the actually claimed amounts being close to $750 billion, which is a nice number so let’s work with that.

According to the Whitehouse’s web propaganda, (remember kids, public relations is the newspeak term for propaganda to make it family-friendly), our military budget is projected to be $553 billion, up around $50 billion for the year before, and we’re now “actually winning” the war or something (though our troop drawdown has, you guessed it, started failing just in time for them to say “oh look the surge fails when the men are gone” and start bucking to bump the troop numbers back up. For what? Gas that’s $3.76 at Safeway, one of the cheapest in town? Gas costs so much now it boggles me to think of it at $1.40 the day Clinton passed from office. And if you’re telling me that’s inflation adjusted, then my dollars are now worthless, so what sort of comfort do you expect me to get from that? I made $15 an hour in 2001, and I make the same now. Gas used to eat 10% of my hourly wage per gallon, now that’s up to almost 25%.

$553 billion + $157 billion already requested for the “Global War on Terror,” yes, that is the actual line-item from the United States budget. It still sounds to me like something from the cartoons I watched as a child. Still in request status for last year is $90 bil for the GWT, so $553 + $157 + 90 = $800 billion . So, assuming I don’t know exactly what we’re talking about when it comes to what this fantasy land budget actually means, we can at least guarantee $710 billion of that is asked for. And considering how badly things have gone thus far, the longer we keep troops there the more likely that is to increase.

Our war bills are up, our economy is down, and the deficit is supposed to shrink by $4 billion this year, after we’ve sent back $162 billion in tax rebates, just ‘cuz ? Our war bill is 3x our deficit, our tax rebate is more than half of what our projected deficit is going to be.

Imagine what $750 billion could mean for America if we were spending that money for the troops to fix our country, not bomb another, innocent, country?

Used judiciously, derivatives can limit the damage from financial miscues and uncertainty, greasing the wheels of commerce. Used unwisely — when greed and the urge to gamble with borrowed money overtake sensible risk-taking — derivatives can become Wall Street’s version of nitroglycerin.

Bear Stearns’s vast portfolio of these instruments was among the main reasons for the bank’s collapse, but derivatives are buried in the accounts of just about every Wall Street firm, as well as major commercial banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. What’s more, these exotic investments have been exported all over the globe, causing losses in places as distant from Wall Street as a small Norwegian town north of the Arctic Circle.

Coming soon to an object lesson in abject misery - JPMorgan has approximately $91 trillion in derivatives - I finally googled that damned post of Mish’s with the charts I’ve been looking for over the last week.

From Mish’s month-old article: Notice that Bear Stearns is not EVEN LISTED as holding derivatives in any of the tables we looked at in the OCC Report. Is this because of their ‘non-bank’ status? We wonder how many other US corporations are quietly loaded up with derivatives risks as well, either as a large counterparty, or the target of a pyramid of wagers on failure risk many hundreds of times their actual net worth. What a monster Wall Street has created for the world.

Citi’s been in trouble lately, you may or may not have heard about it on the news - and at 5 am it’s way too late/early to dig up another article at this point, just google Citi and billion and you’ll probably find plenty, and they’ve only got a 3rd of what JPMorgan has exposed in derivatives, $34 trillion or so. Incidentally, my Chase credit card keeps throwing free money at me, in the form of “sign up for this risk free trial and have $15 bucks,” so I do, and as soon as the check deposits I call them up and cancel whatever service and basically take their money and walk away with it for free, all the while carrying no debt on their card and not paying them a dime in excess interest. If anyone else catches on to this (and really, it takes like 5 minutes to cancel the shit, you have nothing to fear in this process - just read the fine print to make sure it’s a ‘no obligation’ offer, don’t fuck yourself) and we all start taking them bigtime for these piddly $15 amounts (my latest was a Circuit City Gift Card - which I fully intend to use to buy a second controller for my xbox or something), well, they will eventually crash. And with $91 trillion of promised derivatives… well, that’s 7 times the good ol’ U.S. of A’s annual income. Not profit, the entire GDP. And we’re on top, baby, for now anyway. Hell, according to the world bank, that’s barely less than twice of the entire WORLD’s GDP (2006). It doesn’t take a freaking math genius to go “WTF, are they fucking kidding us?” Even amortized over 30 years, that’s $3 trillion a year. And with the supposed $1 trillion in mortgage related write-offs coming… (not to mention what may show up in corp.debt, credit cards and auto/boat/whatever else loans…)

Well, not looking good, to be sure. Check your investments, make sure they’re FDIC or SIPC insured or pull them the fuck out, I imagine we’re going to see economic wormsign the likes of which God has never seen before.

Speaking of which, my fianceé proposed an interesting question tonight: “Can God create a password so complex that even he couldn’t remember it? If he can’t, then he’s not omnipotent, if he can, then he’s not omniscient.” I think that’s about the most profound argument against monotheistic views of the world I have ever heard. I guess the answer would be “God doesn’t have a myspace so he doesn’t need a password.”