statism watch

Nedra Pickler, Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press
February 20, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.

“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. “We all expected better.”

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AFP
February 20, 2009

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Amnesty International and a pro-Tibet group voiced shock Friday after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed not to let human rights concerns hinder cooperation with China.

Paying her first visit to Asia as the top US diplomat, Clinton said the United States would continue to press China on long-standing US concerns over human rights such as its rule over Tibet.

“But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis,” Clinton told reporters in Seoul just before leaving for Beijing.

T. Kumar of Amnesty International USA said the global rights lobby was “shocked and extremely disappointed” by Clinton’s remarks.

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Allison Hanes, National Post
February 20, 2009

Nine city staff were removed this week on suspicion of scamming employee benefits and now face a police investigation, Toronto announced today after a report revealed more than $500,000 in other potential fraud by city staff and contractors.

An annual report on tips to a city hotline revealed $260,538 in fraud was uncovered last year, and another $297,115 in potential fraud still under investigation.

Examples of abuse headed to the city’s audit committee next week include an employee who claimed $50,000 worth of unwarranted overtime, another who cancelled parking tickets for friends and family, and a pair of staff who used counterfeit passes to take advantage of $550 worth of recreational programming.

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Note that Volcker, after leaving his post at the Federal Reserve, was an employee of J. Rothschild, Wolfensohn & Co., is a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, and has a long association with other Rockefeller interests. A committed globalist.

Eileen Aj Connelly, Associated Press
February 20, 2009

Volcker, flanked by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller at a Trilateral Commission awards ceremony.

< />NEW YORK (AP) — “Even the experts don’t quite know what’s going on.”

Speaking to a number of those experts Friday, Paul Volcker, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, cited not only the lack of understanding of the global financial meltdown but the “shocking” speed with which it had spread across the world.

“One year ago, we would have said things were tough in the United States, but the rest of the world was holding up,” Volcker told a conference featuring Nobel laureates, economists and investors at Columbia University in New York. “The rest of the world has not held up.”

In fact, the 81-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve said, “I don’t remember any time, maybe even the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast.”

He noted that industrial production is falling in countries across the globe faster than in the U.S., one result of the decline caused by the breakdown of unbridled financial markets that operated on a global scale.

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It will likely go to somewhere between $2000 – $3000 an ounce before we’re out of this, according to prominent economists.

Nicholas Larkin, Pham-Duy Nguyen, Bloomberg News
February 20, 2009

Gold surpassed $1,000 an ounce in New York for the first time in almost a year as investors, hurt by plunging stocks and a deepening recession, sought to protect their wealth.

Gold futures for April delivery jumped as much as $23.80, or 2.4 percent, to $1,000.30 an ounce and traded at $996.60 at 12:03 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s Comex division. Gold, the only metal to advance in 2008, has rallied every year since 2000 and was up 10 percent in 2009 before today.

Global stocks have extended their slide, erasing 42 percent of their value since the end of August on concern that the economic slump may worsen and wipe out corporate earnings. Governments are lowering interest rates and spending trillions of dollars to combat the recession, spurring investors to also buy bullion as a hedge against potential inflation. Demand has pushed gold holdings in exchange-traded funds to records.

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That didn’t take long. See how those surveillance grids going in around the world might come in helpful if the people get upset, now? Of course, the military will be around to ‘help out‘ if required since all the laws that prevented them from operating domestically have been eviscerated.

Lynn Thomasson, Bloomberg News
February 20, 2009

Stocks tumbled around the world, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to an 11-year low, on concern the deepening recession will force banks to seek more government aid. Europe’s Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index slid to a six- year low, and Japan’s Topix Index declined to the worst level since 1984.

Treasuries rallied and gold climbed above $1,000 an ounce.

Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. lost more than 20 percent on concern the U.S. may take over both banks, which combined received $90 billion in government aid in four months. Anglo American Plc sank 17 percent as the mining company suspended its dividend and share buybacks. Bridgestone Corp., the world’s largest tiremaker, fell 7.4 percent after saying profit will slide 71 percent this year.

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Flashback: Tortured trio say report ‘vindicates us’

Jim Bronskill, Canadian Press
February 22, 2009

Three Canadians who were jailed and tortured in Syria are filing new lawsuits against the federal government, armed with fresh information from an inquiry that implicated several agencies in their ordeals.

The renewed legal actions come four months after a commission of inquiry said Canadian officials contributed to the brutalization of Ahmad El Maati, Muayyed Nureddin and Abdullah Almalki by sharing information — including unfounded and inflammatory accounts of extremist links — with foreign intelligence and police agencies.

Former Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci cited the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Foreign Affairs for mistakes. [Ed. Note: 'Mistakes'. Right. They knew exactly what they were doing.]

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