THE EVIL EMPIRE

As British Ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. "People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were boiled alive."
"Intelligence" from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.

Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan's torture prisons "were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."
The great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin's gulags, are prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.

Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from "terrorism," and the fools would believe the lie.

"If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, its about energy, it's not about democracy."

Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan's and Turkmenistan's natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed "president" of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.

Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.

Excerpted from Paul Craig Roberts @ Counterpunch

There is a large and growing consensus across the political spectrum for breaking up banks that are too big to fail. Advocates of this position include former Federal Reserve Board Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, Sheila Bair, the current head of the FDIC, and Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. There is no reason that we need financial institutions that are so big that they cannot be safely unwound without large commitments of government money.

The only people who seem to stand outside this consensus are those who hold power and are steering the process of financial reform. This is largely the crew whose regulatory failures gave us the current disaster. If they cannot learn from their mistakes, then someone else will have to drive the reform process.

excerpted from Dean Baker