Remember, these are 'the worst of the worst,' right?

Mohammed El-Gharani, the youngest prisoner at Gitmo, just 14 when he was captured in 2001, is finally being "freed five months after a U.S. federal judge ordered him released having reviewed the evidence against him and ruled that there was nothing to suggest he was ever an 'enemy combatant.'" El-Gharani has never been charged.

Andy Worthington, the man who literally wrote the book on the Guantanamo travesties, offers the sad background on the breaking news of the release of "Guantà¡namo's Forgotten Child," including details of alleged abuse such as being hanged by his wrists, and scissors held to his penis with threats of cutting it off. But we're supposed to look forward, not back, right?...

Guest Blogged by Sibel Edmonds

As noted in its announcement, 'Project Expose MSM' invites all members of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), other active (covert or overt) government whistleblowers, and reporters, to publish their experiences in regard to their own first-hand dealings with the media, where their legit disclosures were either intentionally censored/blacked out, tainted, or otherwise met with a betrayal of trust.

The first report, exposing Michael Isikoff and Newsweek was posted here.

This second project report is based on the first-hand documented experience of Mr. Sandalio Gonzalez, retired Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Special Agent in Charge. Time Magazine reporters Tim Burger and Tim Padgett had an opportunity to speak at length with Mr. Gonzalez and several other veteran DEA agents with direct knowledge of a major corruption case involving several DEA agents on drug traffickers' payrolls in Colombia. The involved corrupt US officers were also directly involved in helping Colombia's paramilitary death squads launder drug proceeds. Further presented at the meeting with Time's reporter was the documented cover up of this major scandal by the DEA and Dept. of Justice Inspector General (OIG) offices. Despite direct corroboration by a number of other sources, including several veteran DEA agents and other government officials with first-hand knowledge of the case; documented evidence disclosed and provided; and despite being given an 'exclusive' to the story as insisted on by the magazine, Time never published the story, and no reasons were ever provided...

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IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: It's official, it's a pandemic! (Go ahead and panic); Obama doubles down on mountaintop removal; Green jobs bring in the green; PLUS: Hot shingles! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (links below): "Food, Inc." opens Friday; Anti-oil protests turn deadly in Peru and extremely unpleasant in Ireland; "Bee Fences" in Africa; Wait, the U.S. is NOT 'the Saudi Arabia of coal?!?!'; Solar N' Salt, working together... PLUS: A Solar Explainer .... See below for more Green News!

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

This from Harris County, Texas --- the third largest county in the US:

"George Tiller's clinic will close in the wake of the Wichita abortion provider's shooting death, lawyers for the Tiller family said today," the Wichita Eagle is reporting. "Lee Thompson and Dan Monnat, the family's lawyers, said in a statement that the clinic, Women's Health Care Services, will be permanently closed, effective immediately."

Waytago anti-choice terrorists! You're winning!

Even Tiller's accused murderer, Scott Roeder is celebrating, telling CNN that closure is "a victory"!

On Sunday, the assassin of the man Bill O'Reilly repeatedly described as "Tiller the Baby Killer," told AP "there are many other similar events planned around the country," prompting Keith Olbermann to wonder, appropriately: "Why is the far right not calling for him to be waterboarded to tell us against whom the next gun or bomb will be directed?"

Good question, though Dick Cheney could not be reached for comment.

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IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: Protesting in Peru; Settling with Shell; Pollution solutions in Long Beach; PLUS: Republicans vow to block climate legislation in the Senate .... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (links below): Solar Everywhere! Innovations for roofs, roads & trains; Ocean trash hampering efforts in plane crash investigation; PLUS: High water footprint for biofuels.... See below for more Green News!

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

Two stories of thousands of "phantom votes" being added to election result totals by electronic voting system were in the news over the past couple of days.

One is some news in the older story of 1,500 votes added to a precinct's results in D.C.'s primary election last September. The maker of the failed voting system, Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc., originally tried to blame "static electricity" and then "human error" for the failure. But as the D.C. City Council was having none of it, the company has now agreed to allow an independent inspection of its hardware and software, in order to avoid yet another expensive court battle for the beleaguered company.

The other story concerns nearly 5,000 "phantom" ballots added by the ES&S AutoMark optical-scan system used in last week's Rapid City (Pennington County), South Dakota, City Council race, for some still unknown reason, currently chalked up for now to "software glitch." The discovery of the failure led to a change in the originally reported election results.

The skinny on both stories, and an extra observation or two on the Sequoia/D.C. matter, follow below...

Not sure whether to laugh deliriously or cry here. The 'death of media,' and the ensuing plummet in ad sales, don't help or please folks like us either...even if some believe we're somehow partially responsible for it all...

(Hat-tip Coleen Rowley.)

Cindy Sheehan, whose Army son was killed in the early days of the Iraq War, and who became well known during her controversial stand in protest outside of George W. Bush's property in Crawford, TX, in the summer of 2005, is taking her protests to Bush's new tony suburban enclave in Dallas.

RAW STORY covered Sheehan's plan to lead a "march on former President Bush's new home in the well-to-do Dallas suburb of Preston Hollow" on Monday, June 8th, in protest of what Dallas' NBC affiliate quotes her as describing as "crimes against humanity."

"We can't allow George Bush's crimes to be forgotten just because he is not in office anymore," she told the NBC affiliate via e-mail, as reported in their story, which also quotes Bush's new neighbors chiding protesters to "Go away...Go back! Leave us alone!" (See their video coverage above right, courtesy of RAW STORY's David Edwards.)

In an apparent attempt to offer additional "balance" to his coverage of Sheehan's new protests, RAW STORY's Stephen C. Webster reports that Sheehan "was hit by the right for criticising [sic] the invasion of Iraq and, eventually, by the left for being a perpetual spotlight-seeker."

Webster notes that he "would link to sources" backing up his claims of criticism from the left, "but that bit comes first-hand." He recounts that he'd "spen[t] months covering Cindy's activity for The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford," and writes that he "understand[s] many of the various opinions expressed about this woman's activism." He then goes on to associate with his former Iconoclast colleague Nathan Diebenow who, he writes, "quite accurately summarized, her constant angling for the spotlight and failure to significantly modify her tactics," which, Webster goes on to charge, "made Cindy into a 'media bore' (as opposed to the oft referenced 'media whore' insult so many on the right would hurl at her)."

To all of that, Sheehan replied in comments --- confirmed as her own to The BRAD BLOG today --- in a scathing rebuttal which begins: "Eff whoever wrote this article and Nathan Dibenow [sic] from the Lonestar Icnonoclast. [sic]"...

Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story, the critically-acclaimed, award-winning documentary based on The BRAD BLOG's years-long investigation of the remarkable story, is screening on Sunday (5/7) @ 4pm at San Francisco's Roxie Theater as part of the Burning Fuse Film Festival (screening details here, video preview of festival here).

If you're in the 'hood, spread the word and please drop in to check it out! It's horrifying, gripping, and even funny (and yes, I'm in it, but it's good anyway.) If you're not in that 'hood or can't get there, click here to see how you can get your own copy of the DVD version signed by both myself and filmmaker Patty Sharaf!

Guest Editorial by Ernest A. Canning

"Americans think that it's healthcare that produces health, when there really is very little evidence for that. What turns out to be really important is the nature of caring and sharing in society"¦.Where societies are more equal --- and economic equality is the thing that is most important in this --- people look after each other"¦and pretty well everyone does better. There's almost nothing that is better in a society that tolerates the extreme levels of inequality in the United States. And so, we end up dying younger than people in all the other rich countries, despite spending half the world's healthcare bill." - Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, March 30, 2009

"Who are we? Is this what we have become --- a nation that dumps people off like garbage who can't pay their hospital bills?" - Michael Moore, following a segment in which a confused elderly woman in a flimsy hospital gown is dumped curbside near a Skid Row rescue mission, in his documentary Sicko!*

In Failed States (2006), Prof. Noam Chomsky, a preeminent linguist and one of this nation's most prolific political writers, concludes that the U.S. suffers from a "democracy deficit" --- the significant gap between the policy positions of the electorate and their elected representatives --- which he attributes to the manner in which "elections are skillfully managed to avoid issues and marginalize the underlying population"¦freeing the elected leadership to serve the substantial people."

The deficit is especially acute in what Chomsky describes as "the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world." Chomsky notes that a single-payer system --- that is a system in which all medical providers would be paid by a government entity as now occurs with Medicare --- has long been overwhelmingly favored by "a considerable majority" of the American people, but routinely dismissed by both the corporate media and the leaders of both political parties as "lacking political support" and not being "politically possible."

The issue touches on the core contradictions which arise because we have allowed private authoritarian entities, corporations, to subvert democracy by controlling our economy, our mass media and the manner in which we conduct elections.

This piece will focus on the irrationality of a privatized health care system which values the wealth of a handful of CEOs of the parasitic and entirely unnecessary middle-men --- for-profit carriers and HMOs --- over the health and very lives of our people. It will explain what corporate America and their bought-and-paid-for politicians do not want you to hear...

Now, he's just lying. On his TV show, and in his newspaper column. We understand why Fox "News" is willing to let him say any irresponsible thing he wants, but what of the newspapers who run his syndicated garbage? Do they have no responsibility to do any fact checking? How about his column's syndicator, Creators Syndicate? Do they have any responsibility to fact check their authors' work before they send it out to be published in hundreds of papers around the country?

O'Reilly is now claiming he only "reported" that far-right anti-choice groups referred to Dr. George Tiller, the assassinated KS physician, as "Tiller the Baby Killer," not that he did so himself. That's what he reported, as we noted on Monday, in subtly back-pedaling his previous inflammatory rhetoric on his first show back after the murder.

In fact, O'Reilly himself used that term, over and over again, to describe Tiller. Media Matters offers the documented, video-taped facts which, as usual, aren't even close to O'Reilly's blatant Spin, which is now also being perpetuated by this nation's newspapers. Here are the facts...

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IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: Obama moves mountains --- unfortunately; Coal state Democrats heart coal; Chemical industry hearts BPA; PLUS: Big Bellies now in Philly! .... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail, billions in funding for the coal industry? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (links below): Grist test drives green toilet cleaners; Judge orders Duke Energy to shut down Indiana coal plant; Landowners: get paid for doing nothing!; "Green bank" could provide green lending if Congress approves; PLUS: Endangered Right whales get right-of-way protection in Boston Harbor... See below for more Green News!

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

Waytago, New Hampshire! We've now got six states in the union who respect the conservative principle of Equal Protection for all as written into our U.S. Constitution. At least in the case of marriage (we'll talk about that whole election mess at another time). The rest of you 44 America-hating states comin' aboard soon?

BTW, for those of you making summer travel plans this year, might I recommend spending some money in New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine or Iowa? I understand they're all lovely this time of year!

Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) informed MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:

Pawlenty's remarks are consistent with MN Election Law as interpreted [PDF] by the MN Supreme Court in Franken v. Pawlenty. (The latest MN Supreme Court action in Coleman v. Franken was recently covered here). MN law prevents either Governor Pawlenty (R) or Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D) from signing the certificate once an election contest has commenced and before it is completed in state court. It is also consistent with the legal argument presented by Al Franken in his MN Supreme Court brief [PDF] that the MN Supreme Court should order the Governor and Secretary of State to perform what amounts to a "ministerial duty" to sign and countersign the certification of election upon the completion of the state court process. This statement follows, within one day, Pawlenty's announcement that he would not seek a third term as Governor.

[Hat-tip BRAD BLOG commenter 'FreedomOfInformationAct']

UPDATE 6/4/09: Roll Call now reports that Coleman also may be ready to throw in the towel if he loses at the MN Supremes: "Sources close to Coleman say the former Senator would likely give up his legal battle and accept defeat if the Minnesota Supreme Court decides in Franken's favor. That's because Coleman anticipates that Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) would ultimately sign Franken's certification papers."