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The Associated Press's Case for Releasing the Bin Laden Photo - (Read Full Story)

President Obama's decision to withhold the visual evidence of Osama bin Laden's death has created a fundamental disagreement between the White House and one of the largest journalism organizations in the world. "This information is important for the historical record," said Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at The Associated Press. "That's our view."

Last Monday, the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the photographic and video evidence taken during the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The organization's FOIA request included a reminder of the president's campaign pledge and a plea to be more transparent than his predecessor. "The Obama White House 'pledged to be the most transparent government in U.S. history," wrote the AP, "and to comply much more closely with the Freedom of Information Act than the Bush administration did."

Two days later, the president told 60 Minutes he would not release any of the footage related to the raid, including video of bin Laden's deep sea burial and photographs of his slain corpse. Though Oreskes voices his disagreement diplomatically, there's no way around it: The AP believes the president is wrong to maintain exclusive ownership of the evidence. "We're asking to see it," said Oreskes in an interview with The Atlantic Wire. "It's about us saying we would like to make our own news judgements about news worthy material."

The president insists that releasing bin Laden's photograph violates common decency and puts U.S. troops in harm's ways. "We don't trot out this stuff as trophies," he told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. "I think that given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk."

Paul Craig Roberts: Bin Laden “Assassination” Has Odor of Staged Event - (Read Full Story)

If today were April 1 and not May 2, we could dismiss as an April fool’s joke this morning’s headline that Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan and quickly buried at sea. As it is, we must take it as more evidence that the US government has unlimited belief in the gullibility of Americans.

Think about it. What are the chances that a person allegedly suffering from kidney disease and requiring dialysis and, in addition, afflicted with diabetes and low blood pressure, survived in mountain hideaways for a decade? If bin Laden was able to acquire dialysis equipment and medical care that his condition required, would not the shipment of dialysis equipment point to his location? Why did it take ten years to find him?

Consider also the claims, repeated by a triumphalism US media celebrating bin Laden’s death, that “bin Laden used his millions to bankroll terrorist training camps in Sudan, the Philippines, and Afghanistan, sending ‘holy warriors’ to foment revolution and fight with fundamentalist Muslim forces across North Africa, in Chechnya, Tajikistan and Bosnia.” That’s a lot of activity for mere millions to bankroll (perhaps the US should have put him in charge of the Pentagon), but the main question is: how was bin Laden able to move his money about? What banking system was helping him? The US government succeeds in seizing the assets of people and of entire countries, Libya being the most recent. Why not bin Laden’s? Was he carrying around with him $100 million dollars in gold coins and sending emissaries to distribute payments to his far-flung operations?

This morning’s headline has the odor of a staged event. The smell reeks from the triumphalism news reports loaded with exaggerations, from celebrants waving flags and chanting “USA USA.” Could something else be going on?

Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake - (Full Story)

An image apparently showing a dead Osama bin Laden broadcast on Pakistani television and picked up by British newspaper websites is a fake.

The bloodied image of a man with matted hair and a blank, half-opened eye has been circulating on the internet for the past two years. It was used on the front pages of the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror websites, though swiftly removed after the fake was exposed on Twitter.

It appears the fake picture was initially published by the Middle East online newspaper themedialine.org on 29 April 2009, with a warning from the editor that it was "unable to ascertain whether the photo is genuine or not".

Since then, however, the image has been claimed as genuine on a number of conspiracy forums and used to substantiate claims that the terrorist responsible for the 9/11 bombings had been killed.

The Guardian was one of the few sites to hold back from using the manipulated image on its front page, reporting the picture's existence in its live blog but questioning its legitimacy.

The image is based on a genuine photograph of Bin Laden taken in 1998 and used by the Reuters news agency.

Laser scan for Stonehenge secrets

Stonehenge is being scanned using modern laser technology to search for hidden clues about how and why it was built.

All visible faces of the standing and fallen stones, many of which are obscured by lichen, will be surveyed.

Some ancient carvings have previously been found on the stones, including a famous Neolithic "dagger".

The survey is already in progress and is expected to finish by the end of March.

Earth's magnetic pole shift unleashing poisonous space clouds linked to mysterious bird deaths

Following the unexplained deaths of several thousand birds over the last two weeks, events are now emerging that may offer a physics-based explanation for the mysterious deaths. It all begins on a runway in Tampa, where airport officials recently closed that runway in order to change the numeric designators painted there. Why are those numeric designators being changed? Because the Earth's magnetic poles are shifting and the numbers previously painted on the runway no longer match up with the magnetic measurements of sensitive airplane instruments (http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01...).

As Physorg.com explains:

The primary runway at the airport is designated 18R/36L, which means the runway is aligned along 180 degrees from north (that is, due south) when approached from the north and 360 degrees from north when approached from the south. Now the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has requested the designation be changed to 19R/1L to account for the movement of the magnetic north pole.

The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?

We have vain brains; we see ourselves as better than we really are. We like to think that we exercise free will, that put into a situation where we were challenged to do something we thought unacceptable then we'd refuse. But, if you believe that, then you are probably deluded.

I make this claim, based partly on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised and carried out ingenious experiments that exposed the frailty and self-delusion that are central to our lives. He showed how easy it is to make ordinary people do terrible things, that "evil" often happens for the most mundane of reasons.

I first read about Milgram's work when I was a banker in the Seventies, working in the City. I was so fascinated by his ideas that I re-trained as a doctor, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist. Instead I became a science journalist. Recently I got the chance to make The Brain: A Secret History, a television series which reveals how much we have learnt about ourselves through the work of some of the 20th century's most influential, and deeply flawed, psychologists.

Liberal Smear Machine Backfires After Gunman Found To Be Occultist, Pot-Smoking Left Winger

A full scale demonization campaign against conservatives, free speech and the Second Amendment on behalf of Democrats and the establishment media in the wake of Saturday’s shootings has sensationally backfired after it emerged that gunman Jared Lee Loughner was a left-wing, pot-smoking liberal who was into dressing like the grim reaper and dabbling in the occult.

In their fervor to tear down the First and Second Amendments, Democrats and their allies in the corporate media hastily characterized Loughner as an anti-government right-winger in their rush to link him to the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, a connection that is still being invoked as Dems seek to rush through gun control legislation as well as a bill that could make criticism of government a form of hate speech.

Maryland Staged Terror? FBI Caught Provocateuring Patsies

Reports of two explosions at the Maryland Department of Transportation’s headquarters in Hanover and a state government building in Annapolis should be treated with a huge amount of suspicion given the fact that the FBI has been caught habitually provocateuring patsies to commit bombings, most recently in Baltimore itself.

“A source has told 11 News that two packages exploded, one at the MDOT building and another at the Jeffrey Building on Francis Street in Annapolis. The source said when the packages were opened in the mail rooms of the buildings, a small explosion happened,” reports WBAL TV.

Confirmed: Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory Episodes Disappearing from DVRs

Emails sent to Infowars.com and comments posted on Alex Jones’ flagship websites today provide multiple confirmations that episodes of Jesse Ventura’s popular truTV show Conspiracy Theory are disappearing from the DVRs of TiVo, Comcast, DirectTV and AT&T customers.

Shows finding their way to the digital memory hole include the already heavily censored “Police State” episode and shows on the JFK assassination and the worldwide water conspiracy.

“All of the shows that we have recorded on our Direct TV DVR of Jesse Ventura’s Show season 1 & 2 was removed without mine and my husband’s permission,” an email received on December 27 explains. “We do not have any setting’s on the DVR which would allow or permit the shows to be erased and deleted from our Direct TV Receiver/ Recorder.”

Video released in mysterious murder of war veteran

Eyewitness News has obtained exclusive surveillance video of a former presidential aide that was taken two days before his body was found dumped in a Delaware landfill.

The body of John Wheeler III was found in the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington on New Year's Eve.

The video shows a man that appears to be Wheeler entering the lobby of a parking garage at 5th and King Streets in Wilmington on December 29.

Ventura Show FEMA Camps

This is an update on the now-confirmed bizarre cancellation of the "Police State" FEMA camp episode from TruTV's schedule, which is apparently due to background pressure.

Alex Jones, a consultant to the show who appears in "Police State", noticed three weeks ago that the episode was scheduled to air before the then-newest episode on Fridays at 10 PM EST / 9 PM CST. Alex knew that encore episodes were consistently replayed over-and-over prior to brand new Friday premiere episodes, so red flags went up when it did not re-air like all the others. Now that more inconsistencies have been documented, Alex made some phone calls to get to the bottom of the matter.

Scientists attach barcodes to mouse embryos – human ones coming soon

Fans of the film Blade Runner may remember a scene in which the maker of an artificial snake is identified by a microscopic serial number on one of its scales. Well, in a rare case of present-day technology actually surpassing that predicted in a movie, we’ve now gone one better – bar codes on embryos. Scientists from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), along with colleagues from the Spanish National Research Council, have successfully developed an identification system in which mouse embryos and oocytes (egg cells) are physically tagged with microscopic silicon bar code labels. They expect to try it out on human embryos and oocytes soon.

The purpose of the system is to streamline in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer procedures. If egg cells and embryos can be quickly and easily identified, then things should run much smoother, and success rates should be higher.

FEMA Camps Confirmed

Former Gov. Jesse Ventura and his crew at Conspiracy Theory have blown the FEMA camp issue wide open in a truly groundbreaking episode from the program's second season on TruTV. The "Police State" episode proves once and for all that the feds have trained to take on American citizens, planned for riots and disasters and made preparations to maintain order at any cost. Tune in this Friday, Nov. 12 at 10 PM Eastern/ 9 PM Central and leave the denial at the door.

This powerful episode is the largest and most in-depth investigation into FEMA camps to date- and it is scheduled to air on television. Radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones returns to the series yet again, as the team takes you to confirmed on-the-ground facilities, confronts the legislators who authorized FEMA camps and breaks down the full-scale technologically-integrated police state that includes Fusion Centers, FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security and more.

The end of the world as we know it

It's true that the Mayan odometer will hit zeros on 21 December 2012, as it reaches the end of a 394-year cycle called a baktun. But this baktun is part of a larger 8,000-year cycle called a pictun, and there's no evidence that anything astronomically untoward will happen as the current baktun slides into the next. However, that hasn't stopped the feverish speculating that sells books and cinema tickets.

What kind of catastrophe would it take to end the world? Astronomical intruders provide a potentially serious threat. Impacts can be caused by stray rubble from the Asteroid Belt and the rocky snowballs that travel in highly elliptical orbits in the comet cloud. There are many fewer large bits of debris than small bits, so the interval between large impacts is much longer than the interval between small impacts.

9/11: Chemical Engineer Mark Basile Found Nanothermite in WTC Dust

Yet another professional discusses his analysis of WTC dust, where he found evidence of nanothermite, a military grade explosive many scientists, physicists and engineers now believe may have been used to bring down the Twin Towers and WTC 7.