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Calum Douglas on TalkSport Radio

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Calum Douglas is an engineering student at Oxford Brookes University. An active 911 Truth researcher and lecturer, he is working with pilotsfor911truth.org. In a recent breakthrough using the ‘Freedom of Information’ act he has gained access to raw Black Box data from the flight recorder of Flight 77, that allegedly struck the Pentagon. It has subsequently been decoded and analysed.

Listen to the radio interview here

Watch the video presentation here

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Taking liberties?

Monday, June 4th, 2007

By Brian Wheeler
Political reporter, BBC News

People will only wake up to the destruction of their civil liberties when it is too late to do anything about it.

Tony Blair was a ‘handy villain’ for the film

That is the fear driving a new documentary film which aims to do for civil liberties what Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s anti-George Bush polemic, did for the anti-war movement.

Director Chris Atkins wants Taking Liberties to shake the British public out of their apathy over what he sees as the dangerous erosion of traditional rights and freedoms under Tony Blair.

“This film uses shock tactics. We needed to be unashamedly populist.

“We wanted to give people a slap around the face and then they can go away and unearth some of the more complex cases,” says Atkins.

But although it shares a producer - and some stylistic tricks - with Fahrenheit 9/11, Atkins is wary of too many comparisons with Moore’s film.

Tony Blair was a “handy villain”, he says, but it is not enough to try and pin the blame on one political leader who is, in any case, standing down soon.

“We didn’t want to make the British Fahrenheit. We didn’t just want to say ‘this guy’s an arsehole, let’s get rid of him’.

“This issue is far more important than one leader. Once you give up traditional liberties such as free speech and the right to protest you are not going to easily get them back,” says Atkins.

Personal freedom

Tony Blair has often insisted that he understands the need to balance new police powers with the protection of civil liberties - but he is also confident he has public opinion on his side when it comes to fighting terror.

Brian Haw has been a thorn in Labour’s side (PIC: Marc Vallee)

His argument, as he explains in an archive clip in the film, is that it would only take one more atrocity to silence the civil libertarians, and have people asking why he had not gone further.

Atkins’ argument - told through a mix of animation, news footage and interviews - is that Labour has over-reacted to the terror threat, using it as an excuse to bring in a series of alarming curbs on personal freedom.

“If I had died, I would not have wanted the constitution to be shredded on my behalf,” says Rachel North, who was injured in the 7 July attacks, at one point.

There are interviews with Walter Wolfgang - the veteran peace campaigner ejected from the 2005 Labour conference and briefly held under anti-terror laws for heckling Jack Straw - and Maya Evans, arrested for breaking the ban on unauthorised protests in Westminster for reading out names of soldiers killed in Iraq near the Cenotaph.

Sinister tales?

David Bermingham and “the NatWest Three”, the bankers extradited to America on fraud charges, and Parliament Square protester Brian Haw, also feature.

The film also tries to highlight what Atkins sees as the more absurd aspects of new anti-terror laws. There is much footage of gleeful protesters trying to outfox baffled-looking police officers, struggling to apply the new laws.

But there are more apparently sinister tales too.

In one sequence, climate change protesters picketing an airport are held for a day and a half under anti-terror laws before being released in an unknown location, without phones or money, and told not to speak to each other again.

Atkins claims the film is “politically neutral” - the only MPs to give their views are Conservatives Boris Johnson and Ken Clarke and former Labour minister Clare Short.

Rendition flights

But he says his requests for interviews with senior Labour figures, such as Mr Blair and Jack Straw, were rejected - and found himself being held under anti-terror laws as he attempted to buttonhole Home Secretary John Reid at last year’s Labour conference.

“We actually interviewed Geoff Hoon but then he refused to appear on film,” he adds.

Climate change protesters were arrested under anti-terror laws

Mr Hoon’s comments, on the issue of rendition flights, will appear instead in an accompanying book, which like the film will be released next Friday, 8 June.

Atkins is a recent convert to the civil liberties cause. Until two years ago, he was a producer of low-budget dramas in Scotland, mostly known for his work with director - and former lead singer of punk band The Skids - Richard Jobson.

He says he raised the cash for Taking Liberties by borrowing from friends and persuading his girlfriend to mortgage her flat - “something she won’t let me forget.”

As a result, he says, he is conscious of avoiding the sort of dull but worthy film that will be seen “by about seven people”.

‘Lefty protesters’

He keeps interviews with “civil liberties nerds” - as Liberty chief Shami Chakrabati describes herself at one point - to a minimum, focusing instead on the personal stories of those who have fallen foul of new anti-terror laws.

“It can happen to anyone. It isn’t just middle class lefty protesters,” says Atkins.

“It isn’t just people you read about in the papers. A lot of people haven’t gone out of their way to find trouble. Trouble has found them.

“That was the message we wanted to get across - if it can happen to them it can happen to you.”

Atkins’ only hope is that, with an initial release on just 20 cinema screens around UK, in London and other big cities, it will create enough of an impact to break through to the mainstream audience at which it is aimed.

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Brown to seek longer detention without charge

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Tania Branigan
Monday June 4, 2007
The Guardian

Gordon Brown insisted yesterday that he would not put civil liberties at risk despite signalling his determination to match Tony Blair’s hardline stance on countering terrorism with a series of controversial new measures.Parts of the proposals will be laid out in detail on Thursday, when the outgoing home secretary, John Reid, announces a consultation on the terrorism bill due this autumn. They include detaining suspects for more than four weeks without charge, allowing questioning after charge and the use of intercept evidence.

Speaking at a Labour hustings in Newcastle, he said he was ready to be “tough in the security measures that are necessary to prevent terrorist incidents in this country”. But he said he would protect civil liberties. “There has got to be independent judicial oversight. There has got to be proper parliamentary accountability.”

Mr Brown, who will today speak at a conference on Islam and Muslims in the World, said: “We cannot win this [battle against terrorism] militarily or by policing or intelligence alone; we will need to engage people so that we can win the battle of hearts and minds. What we’ve got to do is not too dissimilar to the cold war in the 1950s and 60s - we’ve got to show people that we stand for freedom and democracy and the dignity of the individual, and reach out to all those members of other faith communities … so together we can isolate those people who are preaching extremist ideas.”

As part of his proposals to counter terrorism he is also planning to hold cross-party talks in the privy council on the use of phone-tap evidence in court. The security services have resisted such a change because they fear it will expose their surveillance methods.

The plan to detain suspects for more than four weeks is a controversial one. The government suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of rebel backbenchers in 2005 when it tried to extend the detention period to 90 days, and was forced to compromise on 28 days. Senior Labour MPs, including the deputy leadership candidate Harriet Harman, said compelling evidence would be needed to push through another extension.

The civil rights campaign Liberty warned that an extension to three months would amount to internment. Mr Brown, who will become prime minister on June 27, is also proposing to make support for terrorism an aggravating factor when judges pass sentence for other crimes.

But David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “It is extraordinary that the chancellor has chosen to publicise these proposals five days before John Reid announces his counter-terrorism plans in parliament. It does not augur well for cross-party attempts to build a consensus for the new counter-terrorism measures the whole country needs to get behind.”

A source close to Mr Reid said: “Things obviously get discussed at the highest level in government. I wouldn’t expect too many differences [in the proposals].”

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, said: “At least [Mr Brown] appears a little more concerned about parliamentary accountability than his predecessor. It remains to be seen whether this is a procedural fig-leaf for more authoritarian measures or part of a genuine shift in guaranteeing, and not undermining, our civil liberties.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights campaign Liberty, said the organisation had supported the use of intercept evidence and post-charge questioning as alternatives to extending detention before charge, not in addition to it. “Twenty-eight days is already the longest period to hold a person without charge in the free world,” she said. “If you go beyond 28 days it is internment.”

Writing in the Sunday Times, the Tory leader, David Cameron said: “A serious, long-term approach to this challenge cannot rest on a security response alone. We have to recognise the depth of the alienation felt by many Muslims in Britain today.”

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Former White House Deputy Communications Director Involved in Voter Suppression

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Jon Ponder

Big media is ignoring the story that former White House Deputy Communications Director — and former RNC Research Director — Tim Griffin resigned as the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas last week after evidence revealed he was directly involved in alleged voter suppression in the 2004 elections.

This may be the first time you’ve heard of the illegal tactic of “caging” voters, but if BBC investigator Greg Palast is correct, it will not be the last.

Caging is a form of voter suppression involving registered mail. Typically, campaigns send registered letters to voters who are are unlikely to respond — soldiers serving overseas, for example. A list is compiled of the voters whose mail is returned marked undeliverable, or “caged.” On election day, when people on the caging list arrive to vote, campaign operatives are on hand to float challenges to their residency in the precinct. Palast says caging is a felony.

Palast recently obtained hundreds of emails sent by White House officials to Bush-Cheney operatives during the 2004 campaign. Among these were emails containing caging lists sent by Griffin, apparently in his role as communications deputy. Late last week, Palast agreed to show Griffin’s emails to Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. On Thursday, Griffin abruptly announced his resignation in Little Rock, citing an urgent need to work in the private sector. (Some sources say Griffin is in negotiations to join Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign; while one wag suggests Griffin resigned “to spend more time in jail.“)

Griffin’s name first surfaced nationally in the investigation into the Bush administration’s unprecedented firing of eight U.S. attorneys last December. He has been depicted as a protege of Karl Rove with no real prosecutorial experience who was chosen to replace Bud Cummins as federal prosecutor in the Little Rock office. His appointment created a controversy in Arkansas — and in the U.S. Senate — when it was revealed that the White House installed him without Senate approval using a provision on “interim” appointments they’d slipped into the Patriot Act.

Why would the U.S. Dept. of Justice replace a seasoned, successful prosecutor with a political operative whose last job was working for the White House communications department? Here’s how David Iglesias, the New Mexico U.S. attorney who was also fired in December, described why the Bushies wanted him out of the way:

“They wanted a political operative who happened to be a US attorney … and when they got somebody who actually took his oath to the Constitution seriously, they were appalled and they wanted me out of there. The two strikes against me was, I was not political, I didn’t help them out on their bogus voter fraud prosecutions.”

None of this is new, by the way. In 2004, Palast, working then as now for the BBC, accused Griffin and the GOP of caging the votes of African-American service personnel who lived in Florida but were serving in Iraq — but this, too went unnoticed by America’s corporate media.

Update: The story is even older than I indicated previously. Palast first reported it in 2004, not 2006, as I’d stated earlier. Thanks to Brad Friedman for the correct date.

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Detainees confess to spying: Iran

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Iran Sunday said several US-Iranians detained on accusations linked to spying “have confessed” as it warned the united states not to interfere in their cases.

“Regarding the espionage of some Iranians, we have had good results. They have confessed to many issues,” the centrist ham Mihan newspaper quoted the Tehran deputy prosecutor for security affairs, Hassan Hadad, as saying.

Iran has said it is holding Iranian-American academics Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh on charges of harming national security, in cases that several officials have linked to alleged US efforts to topple the clerical authorities.

Washington and hardline Iranian media have said that a third dual national, California-based businessman Ali Shakeri, has also been arrested, although this has yet to be confirmed by the authorities.

A fourth US-Iranian, journalist Parnaz Azima, faces the same charges and has had her passport confiscated even though she remains at liberty.

Hadad did not specify which of the accused had confessed or what they had revealed. But his remarks are the first time an official has spoken of confessions in cases that have further intensified strains with Washington.

He emphasised that “all of those arrested” have Iranian citizenship, a reference to Iran`s longstanding rejection of dual nationality.

Iran`s Foreign Ministry spokesman today also told the United States to stop interfering in the cases after president George W Bush called for their immediate release.

“The American comments are a very evident example of interfering in our domestic affairs and they should stop these actions,” Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters.

Bureau Report

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Al-Qaeda-Bilderberg Connection?

Monday, June 4th, 2007

FBI Linking Al-Qaeda Funds, Insider Trading Amongst Global Finance Elites and a Soured Texas Asset Buyout as Pakistani Prime Minister Under Investigation

Aaron Dykes
JonesReport
Saturday June 2, 2007

As we reported yesterday, an FBI investigation led to charges for two high level Pakistani financiers on multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud. The FBI has announced it is now investigating further links to Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, as well as Salman Shah, the Prime Minister’s financial advisor, Ali Raza, the president of the National Bank of Pakistan and a significant list of other Pakistani financial heads.

The Times of India reported that FBI investigators believe the criminal operation may also be tied to allegations of money-laundering operations for Al Qaeda.


Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, also former Chairman of Citigroup	Pakistani Financial Advisor Salman Shah, also governor of World Bank of Pakistan	Ali Raza, president of the National Bank of Pakistan

The alleged insider trading took place on knowledge of the TxU buyout, a largest-ever $45 billion leverage deal brokered by Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) and Goldman Sachs, two key firms inside the Bilderberg group, who dominate the investment banking world, and are shown to be very closely linked.

Credit Suisse First Boston, who served as advisors on the TxU buyout and are also represented annually at Bilderberg, are named in the FBI insider trading case that has so far charged Hafiz Naseem, a Credit Suisse FB investment banker, with criminal counts of conspiracy and fraud.

Is there a link between elite Pakistani bankers who brokered the TxU leveraged buyout with Bilderberg firms KKR, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse and the alleged Pakistani role in a laundering scheme for Al-Qaeda?

Civil charges have been filed against Ajaz Rahim, the head of investment banking at Faysal Bank in Pakistan, on conspiracy and 25 counts of securities fraud.

The high levels of investigation are interesting– given the close relationship with Western banking, as well as the pivotal role Pakistan plays in the intelligence community and the so-called War on Terror. Pakistan is well known for harboring Al Qaeda, though the government does not officially support the terrorist group.

It was from Pakistan that former ISI chief General Mahmud Ahmad wired $100,000 to supposed lead-hijacker Mohammad Atta, a known CIA-asset, to fund the 9/11 attacks. Of course, the ISI is largely an extension of the CIA and other western intelligence agencies, and works as base of operations for intelligence in the Middle East.

Fmr. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski with Osama bin Laden, circa 1979.

Just north of Pakistan, Zbigniew Brzezinski funded, armed and created the Taliban– headed by bin Laden– to offset expected aggression by Soviet forces into Afghanistan in 1979 while Brzezinski was National Security Adviser to President Carter– proving directly the U.S. link to bin Laden.

“I told the President, about six months before the Soviets entered Afghanistan, that in my judgment I thought they would be going into Afghanistan. And I decided then, and I recommended to the President, that we shouldn’t be passive…We weren’t passive,” Brzezinski told CNN during a 1997 interview.

Brzezinski, of course, helped David Rockefeller found the Trilateral Commission, and is also involved in the Council on Foreign Relations, both of which bleed over into the Bilderberg group, all of which serve an agenda working towards world government.

When Osama bin Laden and his Taliban became a red herring in the War on Terror, they simply moved south to Pakistan, leaving American forces to seize control of Afghanistan (as well as its land, oil, Caspian trade route, and opium crop) while fighting a non-existent enemy. Despite the fact that the phony War on Terror is supposedly fought globally, neither American, Pakistani or U.N. troops have gone after the Taliban forces residing in Pakistan. The reason for this is not Pakistan’s duplicity, but that the terrorist group was simply a pretense to control Afghanistan, as its governing forces were perhaps not as accessible as Rick Perry has been in selling out Texas.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has also been accessible to the globalists– he is basically a controlled asset, after all. While he is currently under investigation in the related cases of insider trading over Texas asset deals and Al Qaeda money laundering operations, he was Citigroup’s Chairman– a New York-based investment group operating in the top echelon of the financial world. Aziz spent approximately 30 years with the company.

Citigroup, obviously well established in the banking web, has several Bilderberg ties, including notorious former chair Walter Bigelow Wriston (who transformed Citigroup into one of the biggest conglomerates in the world and also wrote a book called The Twilight of Sovereignty [1992]). Former Citigroup Chairman and CEO John S. Reed was a Bilderberg member as well and also Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. A number of other top Citigroup executives are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, including CEO Charles Prince, former president & CEO Richard A. Freytag and Vice Chairman William R. Rhodes.

Citigroup grew out of the National City Bank of New York, which was built up by William Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller. William’s grandson James Stillman Rockefeller also headed the bank and worked closely with Walter B. Wriston.

Prime Minister Aziz also publicized his relationship with the Carlyle Group and plans for Pakistani investment while attending the 2007 Davos meeting. According to this report:

On the second day of Davos, Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told the group that the United States’ very own Carlyle Group, which “manages $46.9 billion worldwide,” is planning to invest several billion dollars in the Middle East.

Aziz’s attachments to Western banking go too deep for him to have any real separation from it; on the contrary, it surely those ties launched him into to the top of the Pakistani government.

Dr. Salman Shah with Paul Wolfowitz in 2005

Dr. Salman Shah, financial advisor to the Prime Minister in Pakistan with Paul Wolfowitz in 2005. He also serves as the governor of the World Bank for Pakistan.

Dr. Salmon Shah with Paul Wolfowitz in 2005

The Prime Minister’s financial advisor, Salman Shah, who is also under investigation, serves as the Governor of the World Bank for Pakistan, which he spoke to in 2004, 2005, 2006 (PDF links). He was educated in the United States and taught for many years at a number of Western institutions. He has also spoken at Credit Suisse First Boston conferences, the Bilderberg firm which advised the TxU merger. Haseem, who has been criminally charged in the case, worked for Credit Suisse FB.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister, Moin Qureshi, was Vice President at the World Bank prior to becoming PM and obtained permanent residence in the United States after his term where he established the Emerging Markets Company.

Investigations probing top positions in Pakistani finance and government have implications for the world finance community at large, particularly as the investigations relate to trading on the TxU buyout– which was nothing more than the leveraging of Texas assets by Bilderberg brokers, particularly Henry R. Kravis, founding partner of KKR who led the TxU deal. Kravis also holds the previous record for largest buyout– the leveraging of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company at approximately $26 billion in 1988– a price that came after a bidding war, which was dramatized in the film Barbarians at the Gate.

Texas has been realigned to shift control to globalist development throughout the region, particularly in regards to new infrastructure such as the Trans-Texas Corridor and energy conglomerates, namely TxU, all of which Texas Governor Rick Perry has personally facilitated, nursed, defended and championed.

In this view, it is fitting that Perry was invited to the 2007 Bilderberg meeting, which Presidential candidate Ron Paul noted was “sure a sign that he’s very much involved in the international conspiracy.”

Perry sits in a pivotal access point for political manipulation in a state undergoing massive manipulation. Though the Texas governorship is theoretically weak as set up by the Texas constitution, Perry has been all-too-ready to mandate accommodation for globalist investment and to veto any attempts to block such giveaways and defend traditional nation-state based sovereignty. Furthermore, he has proved quite willing to hand over access and assets to global finance– without prodding by international institutions like the IMF to leverage control, as has been done throughout the third world.

At this point, it is not clear if investigations of inside trading will implicate any of the players in Texas or the Western banking network, but the TxU deal certainly links them with top Pakistani officials currently under investigation, and charges for Nafiz Haseem and Ajaz Rahim.

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Neocons Wanted Confrontation With China As Well As Iraq

Monday, June 4th, 2007

By Jeff Stein

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials.

Under the deliberately fuzzy diplomatic formula hammered out between former President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1971, the United States agreed that there is only “one China” —with its capital in Beijing.

But right-wing Republicans in particular continued to embrace Taiwan as an anticommunist bastion 125 miles off the Chinese coast, long after their own party leaders and U.S. big business embraced the communist regime.

With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, some of Taiwan’s most fervent allies were swept back into power in Washington, particularly at the Pentagon, starting with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

They included such key architects of the Iraq War as Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, and Steven Cambone, Rumsfeld’s new intelligence chief, Wilkerson said. President Bush’s controversial envoy to the United Nations, John Bolton, was another.

While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian.

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

“This went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”

Routine military ties had been suspended in early 2001 after China forced a U.S. reconnaissance plane down on Hainan Island off Vietnam.

Strong Denials

Feith, now teaching and working on a book at Georgetown University, responded that Wilkerson’s “remarks are not even close to being accurate. They are phrased so vaguely and sweepingly that it is impossible to deny them with precision, but they are not right.”

Rumsfeld’s former spokesman Lawrence DiRita called Wilkerson’s allegations “completely ridiculous—clear and simple . . . absurd.”

“The idea that there was some kind of DoD attempt to favor some faction in Taiwan, as described by Wilkerson … is just crazy,” DiRita said in a brief telephone interview.

Wilkerson told a similar story in a recent critical biography of Rumsfeld by Washington-based British journalist Andrew Cockburn.

He elaborated on the episode during a May 7 panel, organized to discuss the controversy over Iraq intelligence at the University of the District of Colombia, as well as in subsequent conversations last week.

“It was a constant refrain of they said one thing, we said another thing for months on end,” Wilkerson said by e-mail. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, you are our allies and we will defend you—regardless.’ We said, ‘Do worry—if you declare independence, we may not be there; so be quiet and let sleeping dogs lie. . . .’ ”

Rewriting Bush

Another key character in the minidrama was Therese Shaheen, the outspoken chief of the U.S. office of the American Institute in Taiwan, which took on the functions of the American embassy after the formal 1979 diplomatic switch.

Shaheen, who happens to be DiRita’s wife, openly championed Chen and the independence movement, at one point even publicly reinterpreting Bush’s reiteration of the “one China” policy, saying that the administration “had never said it ‘opposed’ Taiwan independence,” according to a 2004 account in the authoritative Far Eastern Economic Review.

“Therese Shaheen . . . said don’t sweat it, the president didn’t really mean what he said,” Wilkerson said.

Coming from the wife of Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Shaheen’s remarks sent off angry alarms in Beijing.

Powell asked for her resignation.

Douglas Paal was then head of the American Institute in Taiwan, effectively making him the U.S. ambassador there. He backed up Wilkerson’s account.

“In the early years of the Bush administration,” Paal said by e-mail last week, “there was a problem with mixed signals to Taiwan from Washington. This was most notably captured in the statements and actions of Ms. Therese Shaheen, the former AIT chair, which ultimately led to her departure.”

Now retired, Paal said he, too, “received many first- and second-hand reports of messages conveyed to Taiwan by DoD civilians and perhaps a uniformed officer or two during that time that were out of sync with President Bush’s position.”

DiRita defended his wife, saying “she understood U.S. policy and executed it to the very best of her abilities and wasn’t trying to play games with” Taiwanese independence forces.

“That was always kind of a mythology of what happened over there,” he said.

Mushroom Clouds

“They are dangerous men who will lie about almost anyone or anything,” Wilkerson angrily responded by e-mail, singling out Feith, DiRita, Cheney and Rumsfeld for scorn.

He called back-stage encouragement of the Taiwanese “even more serious” than the alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence, because it could provoke China to attack the island, triggering a U.S. response and the world’s first nuclear shooting war.

The independence issue, agrees China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon, is Beijing’s third rail—touch it and you die.

“Even if the odds are fairly low of miscalculation leading to war, and war then bringing in the United States, this scenario is scary,” they recently wrote in The Washington Times.

A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

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One-fifth of world’s surveillance focused on Brits

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Peter Hinchliffe

Are Brits sleepwalking into the nightmarish Big Brother world envisioned by Orwell?

The British, who invented the spy novel, are now the most spied-upon citizens on earth.

Four million cameras watch them in the lanes, streets, public squares and highways across the land, more than in any other Western democracy. In an average day, a Brit will be surveyed by around 300 cameras.

One-fifth of the world’s surveillance cameras are focused on the Brits.

The closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) are mounted on high, fixed to buildings, or sometimes on poles. The pictures relayed day and night by the cameras are monitored by the police, or civilian firms acting for the police.

The aim is to deter crime and to provide filmed evidence if criminal acts occur.

Most Brits are blissfully unaware that they are being constantly spied upon. If they do look up and notice a camera, the majority think that being monitored is a small price to pay if surveillance deters criminals and terrorists.

CCTV cameras are also widely used in areas where security is essential, such as banks, casinos, airports and military installations.

In London there is roughly one camera for every 14 people. The authorities say citizens should not worry about being closely surveyed — unless they are doing something wrong.

“Talking” CCTV, which tells people off for dropping litter or behaving in an antisocial manner, are in use in the city of Middlesbrough. Plans are afoot to use talking cameras in other parts of the country.

In Middlesbrough loudspeakers have been fitted to seven of the city’s 158 cameras. When misbehavior is spotted a warning message goes out. The manager of the warning system said, “It is one hell of a deterrent. It’s one thing to know that there are CCTV cameras about, but it’s quite another when they loudly point out what you have just done wrong.

“Most people are so ashamed and embarrassed at being caught they quickly slink off without further trouble.

“This isn’t about keeping tabs on people, it’s about making the streets safer for the law-abiding majority and helping to change the attitudes of those who cause trouble. It challenges unacceptable behavior and makes people think twice.”

Requests for misbehavior to cease are made in a polite manner. If it does so, the operator in the control center says, “Thank you.”

Home Secretary John Reid, supporting the introduction of talking CCTV, told BBC News that some people may be concerned about what they claim to be civil liberty intrusions, but the vast majority of people were more upset because they can’t go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people.

The British taste for spy fiction dates back more than a hundred years. Erskine Childer’s novel The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, is hailed by some critics as the first book in the British spy genre. It is still in print. However, others claim that Rudyard Kipling’s Kim was the first book to cater to an appetite for spy stories.

The Cold War spy novels of John le Carre were very popular, and still command an eager audience despite the fact that the dismantling of the Berlin Wall nearly two decades ago de-frosted East-West relations.

Britain’s most famous fictional spy, the creation of author Ian Fleming, is of course Agent 007 James Bond. Bond movies still rake in millions of dollars worldwide.

Critics of Britain’s ever-growing “regiments” of spy-on-high CCTV cameras claim that their homeland has become the Big Brother state imagined by author George Orwell.

Orwell’s famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949, tells the story of citizen Winston Smith, who works in the Record Department of the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past to suit the needs of the ruling Party. He rebels against the totalitarian world in which he is trapped, a world controlled by a Party that demands absolute obedience and enforces it by monitoring every citizen through all-seeing telescreens, and the watchful eyes of Party head, Big Brother.

Civil liberties campaigners say that the general acceptance of millions of surveillance cameras suggests that Brits are sleepwalking into the nightmarish Big Brother world envisioned by Orwell.

Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator magazine some years before CCTV cameras had spread throughout the land, said, “The inexorable rise of the fly-on-the-wall documentary suggests that a good many of us see nothing but good in being watched, down to the last belch and fumbled kiss. In star-struck Britain, perhaps, the thought that some government employee ensconced in a basement considers our humble little lives interesting enough to warrant surveillance is more flattering than frightening.”

Clark wondered whether the most effective guarantor of freedom might be not in trying to stop the state from snooping, but in obliging the snoops to share their secrets with its citizens: “CCTV footage? Put it on the Internet so we can all see what’s going on in Brentwood High Street. Credit ratings, police records, MI5 footage — let us see the lot. At the very least, it would get the voyeurs of modern Britain interested in the relationship between the state and the individual.”

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‘Super wardens’ go on patrol

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Alan Salter

PRIVATELY-employed `super wardens’ are to go on patrol in Greater Manchester wearing head-mounted video cameras.

The 20 parking attendants, who work for NCP Services, will be the first in the country to be issued with the equipment.

Their main role is to issue parking tickets but under legislation brought in last year they will also have powers to give on-the-spot fines for anti-social behaviour.

Salford council has asked the wardens to issue penalties up to £80 for offences which include littering, flyposting and allowing dogs to foul the pavement. NCP will use the film as evidence to back up their wardens if any fine is challenged and also in the event of any attack or abuse.

In some cases the footage could be handed to police and used in court.

The first wardens fitted with the RoboCop style cameras will go on patrol in Salford from the NCP HQ in Eccles next month.

The use of head-mounted cameras was piloted by British Transport Police in Manchester last year and Greater Manchester Police followed suit seven months ago in Little Hulton, Salford, when two officers began using them on the beat.

Local authorities were given greater powers to tackle anti social behaviour under the 2006 Clean Neighbourhoods Act and Salford is one of the first to take advantage of the legislation.

Coun Derek Antrobus said: “We have 20 parking attendants walking around the city and we decided that they might as well look at more than just cars. One of the biggest issues on people’s minds is the disrespect that some are showing to our environment. The police have not got the resources when they are chasing criminals so this makes a lot of sense.

“We will be monitoring it very carefully and hopefully the residents of Salford will notice the difference.”

NCP’s James Pritchard said: “Salford council is very keen to do this and we told them that we were happy for our parking attendants to get involved but they would need a better way of getting evidence.

“The cameras will give a much better standard of evidence in case of disputes or assaults on the attendants.

“We are more than happy to work with the police and pass on any evidence we gather. It can only help them to have people out on the streets with a camera all the time.

“Our attendants do a very good job but they are not police officers and they have very specific powers. It makes the job more interesting.”

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Does ‘The Decider’ Decide on War?

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Patrick J. Buchanan

Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran?

For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war.

Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Iran is making progress in the enrichment of uranium and denying it access to Iran’s nuclear sites.
Bush is calling on Russia and China to toughen sanctions.
A flotilla of U.S. warships, including the carriers Stennis and Nimitz, has passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf.
U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell has told CNN there is “very credible intelligence” Iran is funding Sunni extremists engaged in the roadside bombing of U.S. troops.
CBS reports the United States has engaged in the industrial sabotage of Iran’s nuclear program by making the equipment Iran acquires on the black market unusable or destructive.
ABC reports Bush has authorized the CIA to mount a “black” operation to destabilize Iran, using “non-lethal” means. The absence of White House outrage over the leak suggests it may have wanted the information out.
ABC.com reports U.S. officials are supporting a militant group, Jundallah, in the “tri-border region” of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jundallah, a Sunni Islamist group seeking independence for Baluchistan, claims to have killed hundreds of Iranians.

While U.S.-Iran discussions have begun, there are reports Vice President Cheney and the neo-con remnant, along with the Israelis, are opposed to talks and believe that the only solution to Iran’s nuclear program is military. Whether this is part of a good-cop, bad-cop routine to convince Tehran to suspend enrichment, we do not know.

But this much is sure. If the U.S. government is aiding Islamic militants who are killing Iranians, and Iran is providing roadside bombs to Iraqi militants, Sunni or Shia, to kill Americans, we are in a proxy war. And it could explode into a major war.

So the questions come. Where is the Congress, which alone has the power to take us to war? Why are the Democratic candidates parroting the “all-options-are-on-the-table!” mantra, when as ex-Sen. Mike Gravel noted in the first Democratic debate, this means George W. Bush is authorized to attack Iran.

Why does Congress not enact the resolution Nancy Pelosi pulled down, which declares that nothing in present law authorizes President Bush to launch a pre-emptive strike or preventive war on Iran – and before launching any such attack, he must get prior approval from both houses of Congress?

If we are going to war, is it not imperative that, this time, we know exactly why we must go to war, what exactly the threat is from Iran, what are the likely consequences of a U.S. attack on a third Islamic country and what are the alternatives to war?

For there are arguments against war, as well as for war – and the former are not receiving a hearing, as both parties compete in their fulminations against Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler of the Middle East.

What are those arguments?

On Iran’s nuclear progress, there is a real question as to whether they are producing purified uranium. Iran’s refusal to let the IAEA see what it is doing suggests it may be covering up failure.

Second, though Iranians sound bellicose, Iran has not started a single war since the revolution of 1979. Indeed, Iran was the victim of a war launched by Saddam Hussein, whom we secretly supported. Not within living memory has Iran invaded or attacked another country.

But in the last 110 years, peace-loving Americans have fought Spain, Germany twice, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Italy, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq twice and Serbia. We have intervened militarily in the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Lebanon and Grenada. We bombed Libya. Now, a case can be made for most of these wars, whose fallen we honor on Memorial Day.

But the point is this. Why would Iran, with no air force or navy that can stand up 24 hours against us, no missile that can reach us, no atom bomb, and no ability to withstand U.S. air and sea attack, want a war with us that could mean the end of Iran as a modern nation and possible breakup of the country, as Iraq is breaking up?

Whether one is pro-war or anti-war, ought we not – if we are going into another war – do it the right way, the constitutional way, with Congress declaring war? Or does the Democratic Congress think what is best for America is to let “the decider” decide?

Because that is what George Bush is doing right now.

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