Once you get into the world of intelligence, anything is possible, including the idea that this agent may be lying to divert us from something else.(It doesn't help that British authorities have classified the details of UN weapons expert David Kelly's death for 70 years.) Because of this and so many other unanswered questions about Kelly's death, this is a very interesting development for those of us who believe the evidence for invading Iraq was fabricated:

The mystery over the death of David Kelly took a further twist last night after a former KGB officer said he had evidence that the scientist did not commit suicide.

Boris Karpichkov, who worked as a Russian spy for 15 years before fleeing to Britain, has sent a dossier to Attorney General Dominic Grieve in which he claims to relay information from an ‘MI5 agent’ that Dr Kelly had been ‘exterminated’.

His move comes amid increasing calls from within the Coalition Government for a full, independent investigation into Dr Kelly’s death.

Mr Grieve has indicated that he is ‘concerned’ by the growing scepticism among experts about the official version of events.

Dr Kelly was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003, after the Government exposed him as the source of a BBC report questioning Tony Blair’s case for war in Iraq.

There was no full coroner’s inquest – instead, Lord Hutton chaired a public inquiry which concluded Dr Kelly died from loss of blood after slashing his left wrist with a blunt garden pruning knife.

A number of doctors have since come forward to say that the incision could not have caused his death.

Mr Karpichkov, who sought political asylum in the UK in 1998 and now has British nationality, says he met the ‘agent’, Peter Everett, on dozens of occasions while carrying out work for Mr Everett’s company Group Global Intelligence Services, which hiredex-MI5 operatives for corporate detective work and infiltration.

In the document sent to Mr Grieve, Mr Karpichkov says that during one of their meetings, two days after Dr Kelly’s body was found, Mr Everett told him that Dr Kelly had been ‘exterminated’ for his ‘reckless behaviour’.

Mr Karpichkov, who says that Mr Everett indicated that he was an ‘active field operative’ for MI5, writes: ‘He told me that it was extremely uncomfortable, inconsistent and unusual for Dr Kelly to slash his arm in the way he did. He would have lost some blood, but it would not have been fatal.

‘He also claimed that it was not a coincidence that Special Branch officers were the ones who first appeared on the scene – they moved Dr Kelly’s body to another location, changed the original position of his corpse and took away incriminating evidence.

‘He added that the scene where Dr Kelly’s body was found was carefully arranged and completely “washed out”, including the destruction of all fingerprints. When I asked who was behind his death, he [Mr Everett] answered indirectly, saying the “competing firm”, which I took to mean MI6.’

Empowering a private company run by end-times fundamentalists to work as military mercenaries in Iraq - what could possibly go wrong?

RALEIGH, N.C. – The former president of Blackwater Worldwide and four other former officials at the embattled security firm were indicted Friday on federal weapons charges, partially the result of a raid two years ago by agents that rounded up 22 weapons, including AK-47s.

The indictment issued Friday charges Gary Jackson, who left the company last year in a management shakeup, along with four other former workers. The charges against Jackson include a conspiracy to violate firearms laws, false statements and possession of an unregistered firearm.

Also indicted were former general counsel Andrew Howell, former executive vice president Bill Mathews, Ana Bundy, who at one point had oversight of the firm's armory, and Ronald Slezak, who was hired to oversee documents related to the company's status as a firearms dealer.

The charges open a new front of the government's oversight of the sullied security company. Several of the company's contractors have previously been charged with federal crimes for their actions in war zones, but the company's executives have so far weathered a range of investigations.

I've never seen Sen. Claire McCaskill quite so fired up about, well, anything:

A committee investigation of the company revealed that contracting personnel acquired hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47s, from a facility in Kabul that stores arms for use by the Afghan police. The contractors were not authorized to be armed.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill says if members of the U.S. military were involved in such actions they would face immediate and serious consequences.

"If one of the Army had gone out there with an AK-47 they were not supposed to have on top of a moving vehicle and shot a guy in the head and paralyzed him something would have happened in that chain of command," said Claire McCaskill.

"And if they had kept somebody on the force that had been using cocaine, that had been drunk, that had been charged with larceny that had done all these things these guys had done, they went out and killed Afghan people in the spring of 2009, something would have happened to them if they were in the military."

Senator McCaskill says most Afghans do not distinguish between private American contractors and members of the U.S. military.

She says reckless behavior by contractors is jeopardizing the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

"And what is killing me about this problem with Blackwater is we have two sets of rules and one image," she said. "And as long as we have two sets of rules and one image we are in trouble on this mission."

Alternate Brain: BWA HAHAHAHA...Rethugs claim they're upholding the legacy of MLK

Scott Horton: The Guantanamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

Main Justice: The FBI invoked non-existent terrorism emergencies to illegally collect phone records betweem 2002 and 2006

One Penny Sheet: What Bush did to Haiti

Seeing the Forest: Health Care

HOLY CRAP: Killing ragheads for Jayzus...Tea Party same as old party...The Family that prays together...The Book of Moron...When Timmy met Jimmy...Dawkins vs Creationist...Ministerial propriety...Cult ...What would God say?...Oh noes!...What's God got to do with it?...God and Steele..Last word on Holy Hume...Goldberg's religion problem...

SHORTER Bob Kagan: "Obama's being a pussy about confronting China's massive military build-up."

China's defense budget in 2008 was $57 billion, or just under one-tenth of the US defense budget. In 2009, China will spend around $70 billion - or just over one-tenth of the US defense budget. It's a funny thing, Bob - when nation-states have a booming economy and a large geographical area with lots of well-armed neighbors, they tend to buy more weapon systems (the US government being the exception, we buy more weapons whether or not the economy is good). Neocons view this as "threatening" and want to negotiate over the barrel of a gun. Realists understand it as a natural progression of an evolving superpower and want to negotiate as a potential partner.

There have been a number of right wing protesters showing up at Democratic town hall meetings with guns over the past couple of weeks, even at events held by President Obama. Many have made note that countless people were shoved into cages called "free speech zones," or arrested at events held by former president George Bush for merely wearing anti-Bush t-shirts, yet people have been allowed to openly carry loaded weapons while protesting against Obama, for the most part without incident. How many of you have either posted or said aloud something along the lines of the following statement:

Can you imagine what would would have happened if a protester had brought a loaded gun to a Bush event?

Of course, that protester would have been tased, beaten, arrested and labeled a terrorist -- but times have changed:

Armed men seen mixing with protesters outside recent events held by President Obama acted within the law, the White House said Tuesday, attempting to allay fears of a security threat.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," he said. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."

Not everyone agrees:

"What Gibbs said is wrong," said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "Individuals carrying loaded weapons at these events require constant attention from police and Secret Service officers. It's crazy to bring a gun to these events. It endangers everybody." Read on...

Personally, I believe it's just a matter of time before one of these gun-toting, Fox News-inspired whackjobs take a shot at the president or a Democratic member of Congress.

(h/t Andy K)

Erik Prince's company Blackwater (now known as XE) has been embroiled in controversy for years. Company employees have posted videos online of their own ruthless behavior and abuses against Iraqi citizens, and can be heard laughing off camera. We're now finding out that this brutality most likely came from the top, down from Prince himself -- former employees are finding their consciences and telling horrifying stories about their former boss:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Read on...

We've already seen this movie, and it has the same awful ending every time. But since these things tend to benefit the disaster capitalists, we'll see it again and again. Troops will die, corruption will be identified, the public will be outraged, the politicians will hold hearings - and nothing will change. What can you expect, really, when war zones are the ultimate free-market economies?

KABUL - Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.

The scope of that diversion remains unknown, and the 30 magazines represented a single sampling of fewer than 1,000 cartridges. But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.

There are varying views on gun rights and gun control in America, and since Barack Obama was elected president, the right has been whipping up their fringe base, warning that the Democrats are coming for their guns. We've seen unprecedented displays of weapons outside Obama events in recent months and right wing violence is on the rise.

In this very ironic and tragic story, a woman from Pennsylvania who carried an open, loaded pistol to her child's soccer game was shot and killed in an apparent murder-suicide:

Meleanie Hain, the pistol-carrying Lebanon mom who received national attention for taking a loaded gun to her daughter’s soccer game, was shot to death Wednesday night with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.

Meleanie Hain was thrust into the national spotlight when she took a gun, in plain view and holstered on her hip, to a soccer game Sept. 11, 2008, at Optimist Park in Lebanon.

In a case that was sure to get a lot of traction from the right, Hain was in the process of suing the sheriff who revoked her gun permit after the incident -- even though her license was reinstated shortly after.

Hain then filed a lawsuit against DeLeo for $1 million in U.S. Middle District Court seeking reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and costs, emotional distress and lost wages.

"Just the fact that he was wrong is evidenced by the fact that my license was restored to me. ... I am a victim of Sheriff Michael DeLeo’s. I am a victim of those in society as a direct result of his actions as well. The way people look at me sometimes when I am out running errands, I feel as if I am wearing a scarlet letter, and really it’s a Glock 26." Read on...

I'm not trying to put Hain on trial here, but I disagree with her irresponsible actions in taking a loaded weapon and openly displaying it at a children's sporting event. I feel for their three children who were at home at the time of the shootings and are now faced with growing up without their parents.