BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, Lt. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, predicted a coup was "unlikely" during the Pentagon's military training exercise on Thai soil, but a powerful Red Shirt opposition movement has now targeted America's relations with Thailand's coup-minded army.

"In the unlikely event of a coup, we will take our direction from D.O.D.," Lt. Gen. Mixon said a few days ago in an e-mail interview, referring to U.S. Department of Defense guidelines.

Ultimately, a coup did not occur during the Cobra Gold 2010 joint military exercise, which began on February 2 and successfully ended on Thursday (February 11).

South Korea participated for the first time, and joined Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand with a combined total of 11,500 personnel, including 6,000 from America, the U.S. Army's Pacific Public Affairs Office said.

But simultaneously, 20,000 Thai security forces are separately being deployed throughout Bangkok at strategic sites.

To understand Martin Scorsese's well-crafted psychological thriller Shutter Island, viewers should do an internet search on the following three terms: MK-Ultra, Manchurian candidates, and Operation Paperclip. For the extended value-added search, throw in the combination of "CIA" and "LSD."

Shutter Island is being released at a very propitious time. Just look at Saturday's (Feb. 21) front page of the New York Times. Above the fold we have two related stories, the first, under the inaccurate headline "A new report, a new verdict, in terror fight." A more accurate title would read "U.S. government and Obama administration reaffirm Bush administration commitment to torture."

The post-World War II U.S. administrations and its rising security-industrial complex covertly embraced torture and secret dosing of unsuspecting people with psychedelic drugs to control their behavior and create assets and assassins during the Red Scare. Now, overt torture done in the name of "fighting terror" has been embraced by the administration of Mr. "Hope and Change."

In a country with the kind of tumultuous history that Ireland has it's not surprising that a man being arrested and jailed for seven months would escape the notice of the media, at least outside of Ireland. What should hopefully pique some interest is that this is a man with a long history of being bullied, intimidated, arrested and treated roughly by the authorities for his nonviolent resistance against Shell Oil's construction of a gas pipeline, and now the judge is calling him a bully and jailing him for seven months on the extremely dubious charge of intimidating an officer.

To be sure, this is not Nigeria, where Shell regularly massacres those opposed to the oil drilling which is destroying the environment and the livelihoods of so much of the population. Shell doesn't run Ireland in the way it controls Nigeria. But at the same time, much like my own country, the Irish government has proven itself to be far from free of corruption.

When I arrived in Dublin last June, on the other side of the country from where Pat O'Donnell's family has fished the bay for the past five generations, the Shell to Sea campaign was a subject that came up regularly

As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.

In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not---pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure.

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.