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MI6 and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan intelligence service set up a radical mosque in a Western European city in order to lure in al-Qaeda terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. The operation, which had the potential to backfire if a terrorist cell launched an attack using the location as a base, was run behind the backs of Western allies in the chosen city. The joint operation, which was undertaken as Britain attempted to secure a deal with Col Gaddafi to reopen diplomatic relations, shows how closely Britain's Secret Intelligence Service was prepared to work with his regime's spies despite widespread allegations of human rights abuses. At the time, Britain was encouraging Col Gaddafi to give up plans for weapons of mass destruction. Four months later, the dictator and Tony Blair, then prime minister, struck the 2004 "deal in the desert" which ended Libya's pariah status. The cooperation extended to recruiting an agent to infiltrate an al-Qaeda t...

US Border Patrol  Beat and Taser Man to Death    : Information Clearing House

Why America Needs the Left -- In These Times From the beginning of the American republic, most of the country’s thinkers and politicians have argued that our nation neither had nor needed a Left. Historians of the so-called liberal consensus school argue that the United States has simply always enjoyed agreement on such matters as private property, individualism, popular sovereignty and natural rights. Others claim that the country never developed the leftist working class or peasantry seen in other nations, a claim often termed American exceptionalism. Still others say that the country doesn’t need a Left because it already believes in, or has even achieved, such goals as democracy and equality – a view held by Cold War liberals and neoconservatives.

Methodist Church divestment group forcefully rejects American Jewish Committee attack Members of United Methodist Church have responded forcefully to an attack from Rabbi A. James Rudin, the “senior interreligious adviser” of the American Jewish Committee, just as the Church’s upcoming national conference is to vote on a major initiative to divest from companies profiting from Israeli occupation and human rights abuses against Palestinians. Writing in The Washington Post, Rudin belittled the divestment initiatives in the Methodist and other Protestant churches as “pointless,” and deployed the now standard tactic of trying to divert attention away from Israel by berating church members for a “biased double standard that judges Israel much more harshly than its neighboring nations and terrorist organizations including Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.” Not taking the bait United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR), a group organizing in favor of the divestment initiative rejected Rudin’s c...