bin Laden dead?

Headline item on Reuters web site.

...The French regional daily L'Est Republicain reported that, according to a French secret service report, Saudi Arabia was convinced that bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan in late August. The French government has said it could not confirm the report and would investigate the intelligence leak....

LINK

CIA interrogators' strike closes secret jails

According to an article, quoted and linked below, on today's Financial Times web page, CIA interrogators refused to run our secret prisons because they were uncertain about their legal status. They were afraid they were going to be prosecuted. Looks like the cofidence in the power of the Bush gang to protect their evil doers is waning. Hopefully more will rediscover the consciences via fear of prosecution.

CIA ‘refused to operate’ secret jails
By Guy Dinmore in Washington

Published: September 20 2006 22:07 | Last updated: September 20 2006 22:07

The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.

The former officials said the CIA interrogators’ refusal was a factor in forcing the Bush administration to act earlier than it might have wished....

...But the former CIA officials said Mr Bush’s hand was forced because interrogators had refused to continue their work until the legal situation was clarified because they were concerned they could be prosecuted for using illegal techniques. One intelligence source also said the CIA had refused to keep the secret prisons going....

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More meltdown news

We may be past the tipping point, with warming accelerating at an unanticipated rate.

Scientists shocked as Arctic polar route emerges

Wed Sep 20, 7:18 AM ET


European scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.

The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.
Vast patches of ice-free sea stretched north of Svalbard, an archipelago lying midway between Norway and the North Ple, and extended deep into the Russian Arctic, all the way to the North Pole, the agency said in a press release.

"This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record low-ice seasons," said Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit.

"It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from Spitzbergen or Northern Siberia through what is normally pack ice to reach the North Pole without difficulty."...

LINK

Cheney

The New York Review of Books

via 3 Quarks Daily

He's worse than you thought, worse than you imagined.

torture

I have wanted to post something sensible about the torture debate but I can’t think of a damn thing to say. It seems so obvious that torture is wrong. Always. And that it is nonsensical to think any reasonable, modern government with democratic pretenses could hold otherwise. When I reflect on the torture discussion, I find myself astonished that we have gotten here without mass revulsion. Forty or fifty years go would anyone have believed that as a country we would have so quickly degenerated to open embrace of absolute evil?

Pack up all your cares and woes....

If you are a connoisseur of really deep and dark pessimistic views and take secret pleasure in imminent doom, then take a look at this post by billmon which brings us face to face with a possibly super heated earth in ten or twenty years. He offers a vision so chilling it will melt away your everyday cares and woes and transport you to the comfort of collapse so all encompassing there is little to do but surrender or elbow your way along with the throngs heading north.