Former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is the most gagged woman in US history. Attorney General John Ashcroft twice invoked the rarely used States Secrets Privilege in her case under the guise of classified secrets and protecting national security.

In a recent speech, Sibel again emphasized that the reason that she has been gagged is not for reasons of national security, but rather to cover-up criminality, treason, by high level US officials.

As evidence for this claim, Sibel explained that for the three months prior to Ashcroft blanket-gagging her case, the FBI was conducting unclassified briefings for Congress on the case.

In other words, from the beginning, neither Congress, nor the FBI, even considered that this information might be classified, let alone a ‘national security’ issue.

As Michael Ostrolenk, National Director of the Liberty Coalition, said: “The excuse of protecting national security is fallacious.”

(more below the fold) (more…)

Christine Smith discusses peace activism on the Liberated Space.

Read all about it.

“With the positions he has, it’s easy to see why he’s not ahead with the media or the polls, but why isn’t he leading the pack among conservatives?

“I doubt it’s his anti-war stand. Outside a dwindling band of administration loyalists in the wagons circled around George W. Bush, I can’t detect much enthusiasm for the Iraq war among conservative commentators and e-mailers. “We gave the Iraqis a fair shot, now let’s leave them to it and concentrate on chasing down worldwide terrorism,” is the dominant sentiment. I’m not clear about Ron Paul’s position on routine counterterrorism and covert ops, but on the war in Iraq, I don’t see much of a problem for him base-wise.”

Thanks for the link to the director of the Web’s de facto Ron Paul news HQ, Lew Rockwell.

for today:

Andy Worthington, The Plot to Seize the White House.

Listen live here from 11am to 1pm Central.

Update: David Beito writes:

“Been listing to the FDR plot stuff. My sense is that it was much ado
about little but could be wrong. The show was not very objective or
fair and related a lot of suppositions and guilt by association.

“Interestingly, it is now KGB files now completely confirm that Rep.
Samuel Dickstein, the chair of the committee that investigated the
alleged plot, was a Soviet spy who was being paid by the Soviet Union.
He is the only member of Congress ever to be revealed as a commie spy.”

Max Blumenthal discusses the theology and politics of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel as he documented for the Huffington Post.

 

 Antiwar Radio: Max Blumenthal [20:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I am so happy that Tex is blogging again.

And I thank Tex for this:

Yesterday, I switched my network away from using the DNS servers provided by my ISP, and started using OpenDNS instead.
It doubled the speed of my web browsing.
DNS servers translate the domain you’re trying to go to into an IP address. Humans tend to think in terms of names, while computers are based on numbers. If you type “yahoo.com” into your browser, a DNS server has to take that request and turn it into a number (in this case 66.94.234.13), so it can be reached on the web. Your internet provider has DNS servers it uses for this purpose. Unfortunately, most DNS servers aren’t good DNS servers. Most ISPs don’t bother to make them good, and many bad internet connections are due to poor DNS servers provided by the ISP.
This is where OpenDNS comes in. You can tell your computer, or your whole network (if you have a router) to use these servers instead of your ISP’s junk. It will almost certainly speed up your web browsing experience. There are step-by-step instructions on the website for every operating system, but I would recommend using your router’s backend admin menu to change things for your whole network, assuming you have a router.
Oh, and the service is free.