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Jason Leopold, Truthout: “The US Army has told a reservist who has spent half his life in the military that he is barred from re-enlisting, asserting he ‘leaked’ classified information to this reporter during an interview in which he spoke candidly about his experiences working as a guard at Guantanamo Bay eight years ago.”

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William Rivers Pitt | War: Too Big to Fail William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: “A pair of vitally important news reports were lost recently amid a blizzard of stories about the gyrating stock market and a rogue East Coast earthquake. The first came from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who announced that a deal had been struck to keep US forces in Iraq beyond the oft-publicized December 31st withdrawal deadline and into 2012, contrary to Mr. Obama’s promises. Not long after, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki came forward to say hold on, wait a minute, nothing along these lines has been agreed upon as yet, and negotiations are still ongoing.” Read the Article  

Arrested at the White House: Acting as a Living Tribute to Martin Luther King Bill McKibben, TomDispatch: “I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days. As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.” Read the Article  

A Platform for Retrieving the American Dream: The Pursuit of Happiness Harriet Fraad, Truthout: “The conditions for the pursuit of happiness promised in our Declaration of Independence are fast disappearing for all of us. One condition for saving our dream is a movement to create the pursuit of happiness for all. Changing personal life is the one place where Americans seem hopeful. An achievable program for the pursuit of happiness follows.” Read the Article  

On the News With Thom Hartmann: Millionaires and Billionaires in France Ask for a Tax Increase, and More French government introduced a new debt reduction package that includes a 3 percent income tax increase on people making more than $720,000 a year, new Congressional Budget Office report shows unemployment will likely be at or above 8.5 percent through next year’s elections, Koch’s endangering national security by lobbying against security measures at chemical plants, and more. Watch the Video and Read the Transcript  

US May Back Refinance Plan for Mortgages Shaila Dewan and Louise Story, The New York Times News Service: “The Obama administration is considering further actions to strengthen the housing market, but the bar is high: plans must help a broad swath of homeowners, stimulate the economy and cost next to nothing. One proposal would allow millions of homeowners with government-backed mortgages to refinance them at today’s lower interest rates, about 4 percent, according to two people briefed on the administration’s discussions who asked not to be identified because they were not allowed to talk about the information.” Read the Article  

Depleted Uranium Weapon Use Persists, Despite Deadly Side Effects H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout: “By 2003, reports were surfacing of cancer clusters and birth disorders in conflict areas of the Balkans and Iraq, raising fears about human exposure to depleted uranium (DU) and its fate and transport in war environments. Gulf War Syndrome, a catchall for mysterious and disabling symptoms and conditions suffered by nearly 40 percent of 540,000 veterans of the three-week ground war (which killed fewer than 200 US soldiers), remained an unyielding conundrum.” Read the Article  

Paul Krugman | Republican Candidates: Pawlenty Is Out, but Nonsense Continues Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: “I’m going to miss Tim Pawlenty, now that he’s dropped out of the Republican race. He was, after all, an econopundit’s dream. I mean, there’s a constant torrent of nonsense flowing from the likes of Michele Bachmann – but it’s so unvarying that there’s not much to say. What made Mr. Pawlenty fun was that he was supposed to be the smart, capable candidate, someone who actually knew stuff. Yet every time he opened his mouth on policy issues, he revealed that he didn’t know a blessed thing, that he just read supposed fact sheets from right-wing hacks with no notion that, say, claims about a vast expansion of government employment based on temporary Census hiring were something to discount.”Read the Article  

Qaddafi Defiant as Rebels Seek to Consolidate Takeover David D. Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, The New York Times News Service: “Rebel fighters sought to consolidate their hold on Tripoli on Wednesday and continued to hunt down an elusive and defiant Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a day after they crashed through the gates of his fortresslike compound, ransacking its barracks for weapons and carting off mementos of his 42-year dictatorship.” Read the Article  

With CIA Help, New York Police Secretly Monitored Mosques, Muslim Communities Post 9/11 (Video) Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now!: “A new investigation by the Associated Press reveals how, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York City Police Department decided it could no longer trust other agencies to prevent terrorism and started expanding its own intelligence gathering. In the process, it became ‘one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies,’ targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government.”Watch the Video  

From Hiroshima to Fukushima: Japan Set to Declare Wide Area Uninhabitable Due to Radiation Greg Mitchell, Asia-Pacific Journal: “The worst nuclear disaster to strike Japan since a single bomb fell over Nagasaki in 1945 occurred in the spring of 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the epic tsunami. On August 22, The New York Times reports (in submerged fashion, headlining Gaddafi’s imminent fall in Libya) the disturbing news that a wide area around the Fukushima plant ‘could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels.'” Read the Article  

Robert Scheer | Amnesty for the Indefensible Robert Scheer, Truthdig: “They will get away with it, at least in this life. ‘They’ are the Wall Street usurers, people of a sort condemned in Scripture, who have brought more misery to this nation than we have known since the Great Depression. They will not suffer for their crimes, because they have a majority ownership position in our political system.”Read the Article  

Debt Free: Steps the US Can Take to Revive the Economy Rick Rowden, Truthout: “There are several good steps the United States could adopt to stimulate the US economy that would not involve adding to the deficit or national debt. One such idea was underscored by former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ (August 7), who pointed to the need to get a large chunk of the over $1 trillion dollars in cash currently being held by US banks out the door and into job-creating investments.” Read the Article