BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

RINF Blogs Now Online

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Get your free blog here http://www.rinf.com/blogs/wp-signup.php

Have Your Say: RINF Blogs Now Online
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Resource Wars - Can We Survive Them?

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

Near the end of WW II, Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi King ibn Saud on the USS Quincy. It began a six decade relationship guaranteeing US access to what his State Department called a “stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history” - the region’s oil and huge amount of it in Saudi Arabia. Today, the Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proved oil reserves (around 675 billion barrels) and the Caspian basin an estimated 270 billion barrels more plus one-eighth of the world’s natural gas reserves. It explains a lot about why we’re at war with Iraq and Afghanistan and plan maintaining control over both countries. We want a permanent military presence in them aimed at controlling both regions’ proved energy reserves with puppet regimes, masquerading as democracies, beholden to Washington as client states. They’re in place to observe what their ousted predecessors ignored: the rules of imperial management, especially Rule One - we’re boss and what we say goes.

The Bush administration is “boss” writ large. It intends ruling the world by force, saying so in its National Security Strategy (NSS) in 2002, then updated in even stronger terms in 2006. It plainly states our newly claimed sovereign right allowed no other country - the right to wage preventive wars against perceived threats or any nations daring to challenge our status as lord and master of the universe. Key to the strategy is controlling the world’s energy reserves starting with the Middle East and Central Asia’s vast amount outside Russia and China with enough military strength to control their own, at least for now. These resources give us veto power over which nations will or won’t get them and assures Big Oil gets the lion’s share of the profits.

In Iraq, the new “Hydrocarbon Law,” if it passes the puppet parliament, is a shameless scheme to rape and plunder the country’s oil treasure. It’s a blueprint for privatization giving foreign investors (meaning US and UK mainly) a bonanza of resources, leaving Iraqis a sliver for themselves. Its complex provisions give the Iraqi National Oil Company exclusive control of just 17 of the country’s 80 known oil fields with all yet-to-be-discovered deposits set aside for foreign investors. It’s even worse with Big Oil free to expropriate all earnings with no obligation to invest anything in Iraq’s economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire local workers, respect union rights, or share new technologies. Foreign investors would be granted long-term contracts up to 35 years, dispossessing Iraq of its own resources in a scheme to steal them.

That’s what launched our road to war in 1991 having nothing to do with Saddam threatening anyone. It hasn’t stopped since. The Bush (preventive war) Doctrine spelled out our intentions in June, 2002. It then became NSS policy in September getting us directly embroiled in the Middle East and Central Asia and indirectly with proxy forces in countries like Somalia so other oil-rich African nations (like Sudan) get the message either accede to our will or you’re next in the target queue.

With the world’s energy supplies finite, the US heavily dependent on imports, and “peak oil” near or approaching, “security” for America means assuring a sustainable supply of what we can’t do without. It includes waging wars to get it, protect it, and defend the maritime trade routes over which it travels. That means energy’s partnered with predatory New World Order globalization, militarism, wars, ecological recklessness, and now an extremist US administration willing to risk Armageddon for world dominance. Central to its plan is first controlling essential resources everywhere, at any cost, starting with oil and where most of it is located in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The New “Great Game” and Perils From It

The new “Great Game’s” begun, but this time the stakes are greater than ever as explained above. The old one lasted nearly 100 years pitting the British empire against Tsarist Russia when the issue wasn’t oil. This time, it’s the US with help from Israel, Britain, the West, and satellite states like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan challenging Russia and China with today’s weapons and technology on both sides making earlier ones look like toys. At stake is more than oil. It’s planet earth with survival of all life on it issue number one twice over.

Resources and wars for them means militarism is increasing, peace declining, and the planet’s ability to sustain life front and center, if anyone’s paying attention. They’d better be because beyond the point of no return, there’s no second chance the way Einstein explained after the atom was split. His famous quote on future wars was : “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Under a worst case scenario, it’s more dire than that. There may be nothing left but resilient beetles and bacteria in the wake of a nuclear holocaust meaning even a new stone age is way in the future, if at all. The threat is real and once nearly happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. We later learned a miracle saved us at the 40th anniversary October, 2002 summit meeting in Havana attended by the US and Russia along with host country Cuba. For the first time, we were told how close we came to nuclear Armageddon. Devastation was avoided only because Soviet submarine captain Vasily Arkhipov countermanded his order to fire nuclear-tipped torpedos when Russian submarines were attacked by US destroyers near Kennedy’s “quarantine” line. Had he done it, only our imagination can speculate what might have followed and whether planet earth, or at least a big part of it, would have survived.

Now we’re back to square one, but this time a rogue administration, with 19 months left in office, marauds the earth endangering all life on it. It claims a unilateral right in its Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 to use first strike nuclear weapons as part of our “imperial grand strategy” to rule the world through discretionary preventive wars against nations we claim threaten our security, because we said so.

Orwell would love words like “security” and “stability” meaning we’re boss so other countries better subordinate their interests to ours, or else. To avoid misunderstandings, we spell it out further. The May, 2000 Joint Vision 2020 claims a unilateral right to control all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems. It gives us the right to use overwhelming force against any nation challenging our dominance with all present and future weapons in our arsenal including powerful nuclear ones.

Here’s the danger. The Bush administration effectively threw out the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) over 180 nations are signatories to including the US. Under NPT’s Article VI, nuclear nations pledged to make “good faith” efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons because having them heightens the risk they’ll be used endangering the planet. That doesn’t concern Washington now developing new ones, ignoring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It’s no longer hampered by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty either, and it rescinded and subverted the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. In addition, it won’t consider a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty preventing additions to present stockpiles already way too high, and spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined, plans big future increases, and is unrestrained using the weapons it has.

As things now stand, that’s an agenda for disaster according to former NATO planner, Michael McGwire. He thinks “a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable” by intent, accident or because, sooner or later, terrorist/rogue groups will get hold of nuclear weapons or materials and use them. Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison agrees in his 2004 book, “Nuclear Terrorism,” saying “consensus in the national security community (is that a) dirty bomb (attack is) inevitable,” and/or one with nuclear bombs, unless all fissionable materials are secured. At present they’re not.

This raises the specter Noam Chomsky developed in his 2003 book, “Hegemony or Survival.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez admired it enough to hold it up during his impassioned September, 2006 speech before the UN General Assembly. In the book, Chomsky cited the work of Ernst Mayr he called “one of the great figures of contemporary biology” who said human higher intelligence is no guarantee of our survival. He noted beetles and bacteria have been far more successful surviving than we’re likely to be, especially since “the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years” or about how long we’ve been around.

Mayr feared we might use our “alloted time” to destroy ourselves taking planetary life with us. Chomsky observed we have the means to do it, may recklessly try them out in real time, and if so, may become the only species ever to deliberately make ourselves extinct. Chomsky went further in his 2006 book, “Failed States,” addressing the three issues he believes are of greatest concern - “the threat of nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world’s only superpower is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of (causing) these catastrophes” by its recklessness.

In the book, Chomsky raises a fourth issue heightening the overall risk further. He wrote the “American system” is in danger of losing its “historic values (of) equality, liberty and meaningful democracy” because of the course it’s on. And in his newest book, “Interventions,” he quotes Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell saying 50 years ago when waging nuclear war was unthinkable under Dwight Eisenhower: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?”

The Environmental Threat to Our Survival

Human activity has consequences for the environment. It’s been mostly negative in the face of technological advances that should be as friendly to the earth as to the profits industrial corporations get from them. Instead, the opposite is true because Wall Street only cares about next quarter’s bottom line, Washington wants unchallengeable military dominance and the right to use it freely, and threatening planetary life from wars or ecological havoc is someone else’s problem later on - provided there is one.

Jared Diamond, for one, studied the way societies fail or survive in his 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” that hold lessons for the planet overall. He says ecological devastation brought down earlier failed ones citing one or more proximate causes:

– deforestation and habitat destruction;

– soil degradation through erosion, salinization or fertility decline;

– water management problems;

– over-hunting and/or fishing;

– over-population growth;

– increased per capita impact on the environment; and

– the impact of exotic species on native plant and animal ones.

In modern industrial states, add to these contaminated air, water and soil from toxic chemicals, biological agents and radioactive pollutants creating irremediable hazards threatening human survival. And to these add the inexorable warming of the earth’s air and surface from fossil fuel burning greenhouse gas emissions causing:

– arctic ice cap melting;

– rising sea levels;

– changed rainfall patterns;

– increased frequency and intensity of weather extremes like floods, droughts, killer heat waves, wildfires, and hurricanes and cyclones.

– a plague of infectious diseases;

– water scarcity;

– agricultural disruption and loss of arable land;

– as many as one-third of plant and animal species extinct by 2050, according to some predictions; and

– increasing disease, displacement and economic losses from natural calamities like hurricanes, other extreme weather-related events, lowering of ocean pH, reductions in the ozone layer, and the possible introduction of new phenomena unseen before or never extreme enough to threaten human life or environmental sustainability that will when we experience them.

Is global warming a threat to the planet? The debate is over beyond increasing state-of-the-art knowledge further. The scientific community is almost unanimous except for outliers in it allied to the Bush administration, Big Oil or Big Chemical willing to say anything if it pays enough. These fraudsters spurn what scientific academies from all G-8 countries plus China, India and Brazil acknowledged prior to the 2005 G-8 summit in Perthshire, Scotland. Their alarming low-key statement read: “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Bush administration’s failure to address what’s now accepted as fact means America may one day face the dark future Peter Tatchell wrote about last November in the London Guardian after joining 20,000 protesters at a Saturday rally in Britain’s capital. They “call(ed) for urgent international action to halt global warming” with Tatchell disturbed one million weren’t in the streets demanding it.

He painted a grim picture of life in the UK with a glimpse of what’s ahead for the US and other nations, especially in coastal areas, if drastic remediable action isn’t undertaken soon. He began by calling “unchecked climate change….likely to be a thousand times worse than the horrors of Iraq. By 2080, England may no longer be green and pleasant. Instead, we’ll probably be living in a brown, sunburnt country (like the Australian outback or US desert southwest).”

He described a scenario only Hollywood filmmakers might conceive - scorching drought, unpredictable semi-tropical downpours, flash floods with coastal cities waste-deep in water, rising sea levels and tidal surges turning streets into canals “with much of low-lying London becoming a British version of Venice,” and all of London, Manchester and Liverpool frequently swamped by rising sea levels and tidal surges. This is the England he sees in less than eight decades unless global warming is stopped.

And that’s just “phase one” with a nastier “phase two” ahead in the 22nd century - “a Siberian-style ice age blanketing Britain and all of Europe for most of the year, with blizzards so strong and temperatures so low that food production will almost cease and our economies will be just a shadow of what they are today.” Already we’ve had a foretaste, he noted, with recent European heat waves killing thousands and many more devastated by flash floods.

Tatchell continued saying most climatologists predict a two to five degree average global temperature increase by 2100 as things now stand. That will produce all the devastating consequences listed above an island nation like Britain won’t be able to handle - loss of “low-lying coastal and river estuary regions” shrinking and changing the country’s geography permanently and harming inland areas as well.

He noted researchers at the government’s Office of Science and Technology believe “catastrophic mega floods,” having the negative economic impact of a major war, can be expected over the next two decades, and “lower-level floods will become routine causing around ($40 billion in) damage annually.” Regular flooding in a country Britain’s size “could put two million houses and five to six million people at constant risk” making homes uninsurable and unsellable “causing a cataclysmic melt-down in house prices” in flood-prone regions and a “corresponding astronomical rise in house prices” in secure areas.

Further, millions of flooded out refugees will have to leave unusable homes behind. With no ability to pay for new accommodations, they’ll need government help to get by. And businesses, too, will suffer. Many will have to relocate to safer areas at great cost meaning job losses will follow making things even worse. Power generating plants will be hit as well including coastal nuclear reactors with potential calamitous risks from that possibility alone.

Tatchell continued with much more painting an overall picture so dire, Britain no longer will be a fit place to live in. But bad as that prospect is, poorer countries around the world will fare even worse. One billion people in river delta areas (the rice bowl parts of the countries) of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China will see their land disappear under rising sea water causing a catastrophic drop in essential food production unlikely able to be made up.

Sometime around 2100, forests will have died, plankton will be gone by rising sea temperatures, and “these two important ‘carbon sinks’ will no longer be able to absorb dioxide emissions. (In addition, higher) sea temperatures will also release….vast amounts of methane….trapped in the world’s oceans….sending temperatures soaring.” Further, the disappearance of polar ice caps will raise sea levels at least five meters removing vast areas of the earth’s land mass.

Now, imagine how much worse things may be in the US, facing future hazards this great, with a land mass 39 times greater than Britain and a population five times the size. Democrat and Republican leaders ignore the threat meaning manana is someone else’s problem.

A day of reckoning may be approaching faster than earlier thought based on information Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean wrote June 3 in the London Independent. His article is titled “Global Warming ‘Is (accelerating) Three Times Faster Than Worst Predictions’ ” according to new “starting, authoritative studies.” One of them by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) shows CO2 emissions increasing 3% a year now compared to 1.1% in the 1990s. It’s causing seas rising twice as rapidly and Arctic ice cap melting three times faster than previously believed.

The NAS report is even grimmer than this year’s “massive reports” and worst case scenario by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting their forecasts of “devastating harvests, dwindling water supplies, melting ice and loss of species (likely understate) the threat facing the world.” Another study by the University of California’s National Snow and Ice Data Center shows “Arctic ice has declined by 7.8 per cent a decade over the past 50 years, compared with an average estimate by IPCC computer models of 2.5 per cent.”

Sum it up everywhere, underscored by these most recent findings, and it spells apocalypse made worse with many governments having to rule by decree to control chaos and disorder. It means democracy, civil liberties, human rights and most essential amenities are out the window in tomorrow’s world sounding more like Dante’s hell on earth because today we didn’t care enough to prevent it. Moreover, it’s wishful thinking imagining new technologies will emerge solving everything. Nor will market-based economies where profits trump common sense. How could they ever improve in the future what they’ve only worsened up to now.

Change cuts both ways though, and despite the apocalyptic title of his book, “Collapse,” Jared Diamond notes his sub-title is “How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail” saying that better states his sense of things. Ending an interview published in the spring, 2005 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, he says “We are in a horse race between the forces of destruction and….a solution. It is an exponentially accelerating race of unknown outcome (with his gut feeling being) it is up for grabs.” He continues saying we have a “fighting chance” to solve a “crisis of unsustainability….if we choose to do so (but) It will be fatal to our civilization, or near fatal, if we don’t.”

Nuclear Power Is Not the Solution

In the interview cited above, Diamond doesn’t address nuclear power, but he did in a July, 2005 public lecture in San Francisco. Mark Hertsgaard featured his comments in his August 12, 2005 Tom Paine.com and Common Dreams.org articles titled “Nukes Aren’t Green.” Diamond surprised his audience saying global warming is so grave “we need everything available to us, including nuclear power” to deal with it, disagreeing with most environmentalists believing otherwise and then some.

Nuclear power won’t solve, or even alleviate global warming, according to Helen Caldicott in her important 2006 book, “Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.” That’s aside from the catastrophic consequences from commercial reactor malfunction-caused meltdowns, terror attacks on them with the same result, or fissionable material falling into the wrong hands and used against us. Caldicott explained, contrary to government and industry propaganda, nuclear power generation discharges significant greenhouse gas emissions plus hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year.

The 103 US nuclear power plants are also sitting ducks to retaliatory terror attacks experts say will happen sooner or later. It means if one of Chicago’s 11 operating commercial reactors melts down from malfunction or attack, and the city is downwind from the fallout, the entire area will become uninhabitable forever and would have to be evacuated quickly with all possessions, including homes, left behind and lost.

Caldicott explains much more noting commercial plants are atom bomb factories. A 1000 megawatt reactor produces 500 pounds of plutonium annually while only 10 pounds of this most toxic of all substances are needed for a bomb powerful enough to devastate a large city. She also exposes the myth that nuclear energy is “cleaner and greener.” Although commercial reactors emit no carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary greenhouse gas causing global warming, they require a vast infrastructure, called the nuclear fuel cycle, which uses huge and rapidly growing amounts of fossil fuels. Each stage in the cycle adds to the problem starting with the largest and unavoidable energy needed to mine and mill uranium fuel needing fossil fuel to do it. Then there are the tail millings and what to do with them. They require great amounts of greenhouse-emitting fossil fuels to remediate.

Other steps in the nuclear fuel cycle also depend on fossil fuels including the conversion of uranium to hexafluoride gas prior to enrichment, the enrichment process, and the conversion of enriched uranium hexafluoride gas to fuel pellets. Then there’s nuclear plant construction, dismantling and cleanup at the end of their useful life, and all this requires huge amounts of energy. So does contaminated water cooling reactors, and the enormous problem of radioactive nuclear waste handling, transportation and disposal/storage. In sum, nuclear power isn’t the solution to global warming or anything else. Its risky technology plays nuclear Russian roulette with planet earth betting against long odds where losing means losing everything.

If that’s not bad enough, Caldicott shows how much worse it is summarized briefly below:

– the economics of nuclear power don’t add up for an expensive technology, aside from the risks involved, the pollution generated, and the cost of insuring commercial plants needing billions in government subsidies private insurers won’t cover.

– the toll on human health to uranium miners, nuclear industry workers and potentially everyone living close to reactors including those downwind from them.

– accidental or terrorist-induced nuclear core meltdowns, already addressed, in one or more of the 438 operating plants in 33 countries worldwide and huge numbers of new ones under construction or planned increasing the danger further.

– nuclear waste storage that in the US will be Yucca Mountain known to be unsafe as it’s located in an active earthquake zone unable to assure no leakage or seepage will occur for the 500,000 years needed to guarantee safety.

– Newer planned so-called Generation III, III + and Generation IV reactor designs even more dangerous than earlier ones now in operation with plans to build hundreds of them worldwide despite the safety risk.

– the unacceptable madness of nuclear weapons proliferation assuring eventually a rogue nation or group will have enough fissionable material for a crude bomb and will use it with devastating consequences.

– the unacceptable threat of nuclear war causing nuclear winter ending all life on the planet if it happens.

In light of Caldicott’s convincing case, the solution seems clear for friends of the earth and everyone else. Western and allied major nations need a cooperative joint “Manhattan-type Project” to develop safe, non-nuclear, non-greenhouse gas emitting, alternative energy sources replacing ones now used harming the planet and threatening our survival. In addition, conservation must be emphasized and wasteful western lifestyles must change voluntarily or by law because there’s no other choice.

Final Thoughts

This article addresses reckless living unmindful of the consequences. It’s about endless wars and resources they’re waged for. It’s about gaining control of what we can’t do without, but must learn to, or we’ll risk losing far more, including the planet’s ability to sustain life. If we reach that point, it won’t matter except to resilient beetles and bacteria free at last from us. Instead of being an asset, superior human intelligence has us on the brink of our own self-destruction. It proves Ernst Mayr right saying greater brain power won’t guarantee our survival even though it may have helped him live 100 years till 2005.

The human species teeters on the edge putting excess personal gratification and living for today ahead of the long-term consequences of bad behavior. That assures one day Nixon and Ford Council of Economic Advisors chairman Herb Stein’s maxim will bite us. Back then, he noted “Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.” He meant bad economic policy, but his comment applies to all excesses, especially the worst ones, and what’s worse than endless wars, the threat of nuclear ones, and the sure threat ecological havoc will destroy us if nuclear war doesn’t do it first.

We know this and can explain it in precise, sensible, scientific terms, but what good does it do when we won’t heed our own advice. The privileged are rolling in good times, but look at the problem this way. We’re all at Cinderella’s ball and have till midnight to leave or turn into pumpkins losing everything. At this ball, clocks have no hands, so guessing right plays Russian roulette with planet earth. This article asks: can we survive our resource wars? The answer is only if we stop waging them and start using our superior intelligence to protect the earth, not destroy it as we’re doing now.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen Saturdays to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com at noon US central time.

Have Your Say: Resource Wars - Can We Survive Them?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Anti-Globalization Protesters Block Access to G8

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Patrick Donahue

Anti-globalization protesters blocked roads leading to the Group of Eight summit venue in the northern German seaside resort of Heiligendamm today, as they attempted to disrupt the arrival of world leaders.

Demonstrators avoided roadblocks and crossed through oat fields and forests to approach a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) barbed- wire perimeter fence surrounding the hotel complex, blocking access to Heiligendamm from the press center 8 kilometers to the west at Kuehlungsborn. Protesters said over 10,000 people gathered in the area to try and shut down the summit.

“There’s a high level of violence at the fence, lots of stone throwing,” police spokesman Manfred Luetjann said by telephone, adding that both entrances had been closed as “several thousand” protesters approached. Police deployed tear gas and water cannon to try and disperse the crowds, he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the summit host, welcomes leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to Heiligendamm today, where bilateral meetings are taking place before the first joint session begins tomorrow. The protests will have no effect on the summit because leaders are arriving by helicopter, Luetjann said.

Riot Gear

“There will be blockades in many areas,” Sabine Zimpel, a spokeswoman for the protest organizers, told reporters at a briefing early today in the Baltic port city of Rostock, close to Heiligendamm.

At least six helicopters carrying police wearing full riot gear and carrying nightsticks were deployed as protesters reached a road running beside the fence, according to a Bloomberg News reporter at the scene.

Mounted officers took up positions between the fence and demonstrators, many of whom were dressed as clowns and taunting police. Near the fence, youths clad in black hoods could be seen using clamps and files to cut through a wire mesh, with rows of police nearby.

Police vehicles were blocked by logs strewn across roads, while the rail line from Kuehlungsborn to Bad Doberan through Heilgendamm was also blocked by protesters. Russian delegation plans to organize a press conference in Heiligendamm were thwarted when neither trains nor boats could get through.

`Full Support’

Officers were injured in the stone-throwing exchanges, according to police spokesman Christian Zimmer, though he was unable to provide any number of casualties. By 3.30pm local time, the western entrance in the security fence had been reopened, he said.

“The police have my full support, it’s not an easy job,” Merkel told reporters today, adding that it was “legitimate” for heads of government and state to discuss global problems at Heiligendamm. “We want to shape globalization in a human way.”

As the police and demonstrators clashed, Merkel had lunch with President George W. Bush. The U.S. president arrived late yesterday at Rostock airport and was met by some 500 demonstrators in various locations, according to police, before he flew on to Heiligendamm by helicopter.

“My big concern is that images of violence will overshadow the issues being discussed at the summit,” Wolfgang Bosbach, a deputy parliamentary leader with Merkel’s Christian Democrats and member of the lower house of parliament’s interior affairs committee, said in an interview.

Rostock Violence

Several demonstrations against the G-8 meeting have been marred by outbreaks of violence. During a demonstration in Rostock on June 2, police fired tear gas and water cannons on hooded and masked youths throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. Almost 1,000 police and demonstrators were injured. More violence followed two days ago, when hooded rioters ignited a smoke bomb. The authorities have drafted in 16,000 police officers from every state in Germany to patrol the summit.

Police were “surprised by the size and scope of violence” in Rostock, Bosbach said.

“The violence, of course it overshadows the event,” Constanze Stelzenmueller, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said in an interview. “What I find startling is just how organized these guys are. What I would like to know is who these people speak for.”

Seventy-one percent of Germans say they approve of the police tactics in handling the demonstrations, against 21 percent who say the police actions were wrong, according to a poll by research organization Emnid for N24 television channel.

`Strong Forces’

Some 40 percent of respondents said the security measures implemented to protect the G-8 leaders were excessive, while 35 percent said they were sufficient and another 21 percent said they were not tight enough. The poll of 1,000 people was conducted June 4, with a margin of error of 2.5 percent.

“The police are operating with strong forces,” Frank Scheulen, spokesman for police special forces unit “Kavala,” told N-TV television in an interview. “There can be no talk about police having been surprised by protests.”

Protest organizers, which include anti-capitalist movement Attac, environmental organization Greenpeace, Germany’s Left Party, church groups and labor unions, have distanced themselves from the violence, focusing on criticism of policies pursued by industrialized nations that they say benefit the rich at the expense of the poor and the environment.

The G-8 member states are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.K. and U.S.

Have Your Say: Anti-Globalization Protesters Block Access to G8
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Had media done their job, there’d be no Iraq War

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

David Prejean

Do you get the feeling the mainstream media are not telling you the whole story? Let’s look at the post 9/11, pre-Iraq invasion period (September 2001 to March 2003). The Bush administration was beating the drum for war with Iraq as a vital part of the war on terrorism. While the administra-tion said they had solid intelligence, others (most of the rest of the world) had doubts. If the mainstream media had been doing their job, we all might have had more doubts and maybe wouldn’t have created the disaster that is Iraq today.

What the mainstream media didn’t tell us was the key players in the Bush administration who were pushing for the Iraq invasion (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and John Bolton) were also members of an organization formed in 1997 called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC, www.newamerican century.org). The goal of PNAC was to advocate the projection of U.S. power around the world and, as its statement of principles says, “… shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” It promotes the aggressive, pre-emptive foreign policy Bush has adopted since 9/11. PNAC also has been strongly urging regime change in Iraq since its formation.

Knowing this adds perspective to things like the “cherry picking” of intelligence by the Office of Special Plans, the yellow cake from Africa line in the president’s State of the Union speech (the infamous 16 words), and the bogus links between Iraq and al-Qaida. These “facts” would have been more suspect if we knew the key players had long wanted Saddam overthrown.

The Bush administration knew exactly what it was doing - no one could be that incompetent - namely, manipulating the post-9/11 feelings of the American people to push us into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Why did the media not tell us? My only guess is that, post 9/11 we were a country that was fearful and bent on revenge. Seventy-two percent of the public thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved with 9/11. If the news media started to explain the difference between a secular ruler (Saddam Hussein) and a radical Islamic fanatic (Osama bin Laden), eyes would glaze over, remotes would start clicking and the all-important viewers would tune out. And they can’t sell advertising without viewers.

Have Your Say: Had media done their job, there’d be no Iraq War
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

What was discussed at Bilderberg?

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Editor’s Note:

The report below is an example of how Bilderberg propaganda works as I’m sure the reporter has never truly investigated the history of the group. A nice show for the media boys, but the Bilderbergs have NO CHOICE since awareness has grown and the spotlight is pointed at the event more so every year.

The reporter seems overwhelmed to just be there, and does not ask the tough questions which we would expect from a journalist.

###

Mehmet Ali Birand

I, too, attended the three-day Bilderberg meetings on the weekend. It took place under extensive secrecy and security. We were confined to the Ritz Carlton Hotel. There were nearly 100 participants. No one else was allowed into the hotel; not even one single outsider was let in. We went to sleep, got up, ate at the same place and held meetings one after the other from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m.

My head was full of questions before going into the meetings. The identities of the attendees were known beforehand. They were all very prominent people.

What could have happened when so many famous and important people got together? Of course, according to our conspiracy theories, scenarios had to be written and decisions had to be made. If one studied the articles in the media, he or she was left with an impression that even the Turkish president could be chosen at the meetings.

I settled in my room with this excitement. I wore my best suit, put on my most stylish tie, and went down…

My excitement intensified when I looked around me. I was surrounded by people who almost constantly made it in newspaper and television headlines.

I wondered what else I would experience once the meetings started. So I let the tide of Bilderberg carry me away…

I was dead-tired at the end of the three days.

I got out of one meeting to go into the next. I needed to participate, ask questions, and watch attentively. Everyone took the meetings seriously. Nobody would leave the sessions to go outside, stroll around, and have coffee.

On the last day, when I looked at my notes, I was completely disappointed. Where were the secret decisions? Where were the conspiracy theories? And were there not supposed to be decisions made about presidential elections and a coup attempt?

Where?

There were neither secret plans made, nor secret sentences uttered, nor secret decisions taken. It was no different than hundreds of other high-end international conferences I had attended.

There was nothing different except for the influence of the participants.

On the other hand, it was heaven for someone interested in international relations, just like myself. I got to breath the air. I learned a lot.

I would like to give a couple of examples:

We started at the developments in Iraq and went on to discuss China’s place in the world. Would it be a single-polar world, or a multi-polar one?

How Iran’s nuclear power would affect all of us was discussed in detail. Concerns on the issue were conveyed.

The developments in the United States, what the elections would bring, and how the public opinion in the United States was progressing was deliberated.

The most important issues facing the world, from energy policies to expansion in the communication technologies, were reviewed.

At the end of the three days, we have learned and discussed the world’s most prominent problems with the world’s experts.

Turkey in Bilderberg

Of course, Turkey was also among the subjects discussed during the meetings.

And in two different sessions… Important questions were asked. Where the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was taking the country and whether there was a probability of a coup were deliberated.

There were four questions about Turkey: Who would win the elections? Was there the threat of a system change to Islamic canon law?Would there be a coup?Would Turkey intervene in Iraq?

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the developments in Iraq, the Kurdish issue, and the events in northern Iraq were discussed in great detail.

I did not witness secretive plans or decisions. But I heard what the world’s most prominent leaders thought about Turkey and their concerns. I saw how confused they were.

Most importantly, I saw that, at the end of the three days in Istanbul, their views about Turkey have become clearer and their knowledge of our country has deepened.

This is why holding the Bilderberg convention in Istanbul has proved to be beneficial for Turkey.

Have Your Say: What was discussed at Bilderberg?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

NSA Rolls with Tech Changes to Keep Spying

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Lisa Vaas

On Dec. 15, 2005, the New York Times broke the news that soon after the Sept. 11 attacks President Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and other persons within the country.

A Federal judge has since ruled that the NSA’s actions were both illegal and unconstitutional—a matter that will likely be decided by the Supreme Court.

But how, exactly, did the NSA do that snooping?

James Bamford, an expert on intelligence gathering and author of several books on the NSA, including “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies,” described the technological underpinnings of the NSA’s ongoing eavesdropping and how it has had to change to keep up with technology at his keynote here at the Gartner IT Security Summit on June 4.

One of the NSA’s main jobs is to eavesdrop—to intercept communications and thereby gather intelligence from countries outside of the United States. Some might picture an agent climbing a telephone pole and attaching a wire to a telephone line, but such a technique, called retail eavesdropping, is only useful for going after one phone line at a time.

The NSA, on the other hand, goes after entire streams of communications, with each channel containing millions of conversations, Bamford said.

At one point, the NSA’s job was fairly easy. The agency was targeting microwave communications, which travel in a straight line from one tower to the next. That’s “a nice thing for the NSA,” Bamford said, “especially when they’re trying to get Russian communications or those from outside the United States. Those signals go right out into space.”

In the former Soviet Union, cables can’t easily be buried due to permafrost. At one point, this led the country to depend heavily on microwave communications. In order to gather intelligence, the NSA would put one of its many satellites in space and position it where it can capture the microwaves. The method is so elegant that many times the NSA can capture information even before a person receiving a given call has picked it up, Bamford said, given the lack of atmospheric interference in space.

The satellites capture communications, convert them and retransmit them, through another satellite or through a ground station, back to earth. The NSA also has ground stations all over the world to pick up satellite and other communications. “They’re enormous facilities; they look like moon bases,” Bamford said. Most of these bases are covered so observers can’t tell where their antennas are pointing. Listening posts also eavesdrop on scores of communications satellites orbiting the earth, picking up on some 2 million pieces of communications per hour.

The NSA has another type of antenna array, nicknamed an elephant cage, which houses 360 elements. When the agency marries multiple elephant cages together, it can pinpoint exactly where a signal is coming from. If a submarine pops to the surface even for a brief moment to send a message, the array can pinpoint it. This type of array is going out of style, Bamford said, but there are still a number around.

This was all well and good until the late ’90s, at which point most telecommunications companies began switching from satellites to fiber-optic undersea cables due to their lower cost, higher quality and improved speed. Such undersea cables avoid atmosphere and bandwidth problems, are faster since they don’t have to travel as far, and are fairly cheap, Bamford said.

When satellites ruled the communications interception business, all NSA had to do was put a dish out, sit back and collect signals, without having to ask anybody for permission, Bamford said. “Phone calls, e-mail, data communications, all that information came down like rain into dishes,” he said. The switch to undersea cables made it more challenging to collect the same information.

“When [telcos] switched to fiber optics, [the question became,] how do you get access to cables? [The cables] go under the ocean, come up and go into a little building owned by AT&T or another company,” Bamford said.

It was a big problem for the agency in the late ’90s, he said. One way to handle the issue was to build a submarine to go right to the source of communications, and hence the USS Jimmy Carter was commissioned in June 2004. According to Bamford and others, the sub was designed to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The United States won’t admit that it designed undersea “bugs” to tap the systems, Bamford said, but an earlier version of such a device is on exhibit at the KGB museum in Moscow.

Referring to this earlier version of the cable bug, which the United States used to listen in on Soviet communications during the Cold War in an operation called “Ivy Bells,” Bamford said, “They put this big thing underwater and used induction from copper cable. They would program it [to listen] for the most important channel. One good one they listened to was on Soviet missile testing. NSA did that by having the sub sail into [the Northern part of the Sea of Okhotsk]. They’d look at the shore, looking for warning signs to fishermen saying, ‘Don’t drag nets, there are cables here.’ They found it.”

It’s more difficult to tap fiber-optic cables, however. “Information doesn’t leak out as with copper cables,” Bamford said. “You’ve got glass fibers and photons, not electricity going through.”

Bamford didn’t offer any thoughts on how the NSA has overcome the difficulties presented by fiber-optic cables in relation to tapping by submarine, but he did describe an internal network that the NSA has set up to achieve its monitoring goals, including junction point hubs.

“The NSA began going to AT&T and began building secret rooms,” he said. “A cable from overseas would terminate in this room. They would convert it to usable signals to be sent out around the country” to NSA agents. “They had a big splitter put on the cable, so when it came in you built a mirror copy of it. The mirror copy goes to a secret room that only two people had access to,” Bamford said.

That activity began after Sept. 11 and continued until 2003, he said, only coming to light after a whistleblower at AT&T publicized photos and internal blueprints of the setup. The whistleblower was a retired communications technician, Mark Klein, who has joined the Electronic Frontier Federation in a lawsuit against AT&T.

Bamford himself said he has joined the ACLU in a lawsuit against the NSA over its spying on U.S. residents.

Have Your Say: NSA Rolls with Tech Changes to Keep Spying
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

The limits of online freedom

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

We can’t take an all or nothing approach to online expression, argues Bill Thompson.

Bill Thompson

The idea that the internet is an unregulated space where free expression is the guiding principle and we can all talk openly took another blow last week with the latest report on net filtering from the Open Net Initiative.

Their study found many countries were filtering websites and email, and some were blocking new services such as net telephony.

China, Burma, Tunisia and Iran were among the countries mentioned, and the overall message was that things are getting worse for the open internet.

I had been discussing many of the same issues just a few days earlier at a seminar at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where I am spending a term as a Press Fellow.

My colleague, Chinese journalist and blogger Michael Anti, pointed out that although political expression is tightly controlled in China the government is not really interested in other aspects of people’s lives, while here in the UK we can talk about democracy but other forms of speech are restricted for legal and commercial reasons.

He has a point. The ONI report only looked at official, state-sanctioned filtering, and it did not consider the situation in the UK or US where most controls are imposed by companies trying to protect their reputation or achieve competitive advantage.

Limits on free speech

Here we see numerous examples of limits on free speech.

Apple has repeatedly sued journalists for revealing details of its product plans.

A Romanian blogger has been threatened with prosecution by a US internet radio station for revealing how to link directly to its audio streams and bypass the media player it wants you to use.

Respected online publisher Jon Newton has been sued over the comments added to an article he posted on the popular p2pnet news site.

Yahoo! has been roundly criticised for removing comments made on the Flickr photosharing site it owns after photographer Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir complained that a commercial company was selling prints of her photos without permission.

Unreasonable restrictions

And we recently saw the fiasco that resulted when the group that manages copy protection for the new generation of high capacity disks tried to use the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to stop people publishing a code that with the right software can be used to decrypt some HD-DVD titles.

These sorts of restrictions happen all the time, and rarely involve direct government action, as we can see on the Chilling Effects website where there are copies of thousands of ‘cease and desist’ letters from lawyers trying to remove web content, including some from the BBC.

Most of us recognise that there are limits on what we can say or do, limits imposed to benefit the wider society and which serve us all, even if they sometimes seem onerous.

The point is not that speech is controlled but the openness with which it is done, the way that limits are discussed and agreed on and the ease with which unreasonable restrictions to freedom of expression can be challenged.

There is also a difference between censorship imposed by governments and the restrictions put in place by people or organisations for themselves.

Yahoo has been criticised for removing comments on Flikr

Yahoo! says that it made a mistake in taking down Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir’s posting, but in fact if the discussion went against the terms of use and included abusive comments then it is under no obligation to host them.

Just as I can’t expect to be allowed to wander into your home and shout at you because you spend your time watching trash TV instead of reading improving books, so my ability to say what I want on private forums is limited.

The same principle applies to Slashdot, Digg, The Guardian or any other organisation that hosts content. Every day I delete dozens of spam comments from my blog and I don’t consider that to be unreasonable censorship.

If the controls are too onerous then the discussion will move elsewhere. If the policy is inconsistently applied or seen to be biased then that will itself form the basis of public discussion, perhaps in other forums.

I’m happy to allow anyone to decide for themselves what they will or will not publish on their own site or service, but it gets a lot more dangerous when we allow individuals or governments to use legal remedies to stop other people speaking out, as with the furore over the HD-DVD key.

Nuanced approach

And the limits on speech that are acceptable when imposed by private companies as part of their terms and conditions would not be acceptable when imposed by governments.

In an open society we want to be as permissive as possible, limiting free expression only when it is absolutely necessary, and debating such limitations openly.

But we should not expect the rules to be straightforward or universal.

We need to take a more nuanced approach to this fundamental issue, one which allows that different nations, cultures and groups will have different standards, and one which also respects the difference between public and private provision of spaces for publication and debate.

Unfortunately, as I’ve pointed out in the past, nearly all of the open spaces we occupy online are in fact privately controlled and managed.

The real danger in the coming years might not be that governments look at what China has achieved with its ‘Great Firewall’ and decide to emulate it, but that the companies behind our online gathering places become more conservative, more limiting and more repressive, while we find we have nowhere else to go.

Perhaps it’s time for the Open Net Initiative to have a look at filtering policies at Facebook, Bebo and MySpace as well as Burma, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Have Your Say: The limits of online freedom
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

NSA Surveillance Program Violated Congressional Notification Law

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Luke O’Brien
Wired News

The Bush administration may have broken a law requiring broader congressional notification of intelligence activities when it authorized an NSA warrantless wiretapping program that snooped on American citizens after 9/11. The Hill reports today that Democrats are beginning to make noise over the White House’s decision to limit its disclosure of the NSA program to the “gang of eight” — the leaders of both parties from the House and the Senate and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress.

For four years, only this small group of lawmakers was aware of the NSA program, which bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in spying on Americans (with the help of major telecoms). But the program may have circumvented a 1991 law that allows the administration to limit disclosure of its snooping only in highly sensitive cases involving covert activity overseas, not in instances of foreign or domestic intelligence gathering. Under the law, passed after the Iran-Contra scandal to give Congress better oversight of the executive branch, intelligence gathering must be reported to the full intelligence committees of the House and the Senate.

A Congressional Research Service report (.pdf) last year reaffirmed the conditions under which the president can withhold information from Congress and said that “the NSA surveillance program would appear to fall more closely under the definition of an intelligence collection program, rather than qualify as a covert action program as defined by statute.”

Have Your Say: NSA Surveillance Program Violated Congressional Notification Law
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Libby sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

AP

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison Tuesday for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation - the probe that showed a White House obsessed with criticism of its decision to go to war.

Former White House aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, center, gets into his car outside federal court in Washington, Tuesday, June 5, 2007. [AP]

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the highest-ranking White House official sentenced to prison since the Iran-Contra affair, asked for leniency, but a federal judge said he would not reward someone who hindered the investigation into the exposure of a CIA operative. The operative’s husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

No date was set immediately for Libby to report to prison.

“Mr. Libby failed to meet the bar. For whatever reason, he got off course,” said US District Judge Reggie B. Walton.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who spent years investigating the case, said, “We need to make the statement that the truth matters ever so much.” He had asked for a sentence of up to three years, while Libby had asked for probation and no time in prison.

Reaction from the White House was still supportive - but somber.

President Bush, traveling in Europe, said through a spokesman that he “felt terrible for the family,” especially Libby’s wife and children. Libby and his wife, Harriet Grant, have two school-age children, a son and a daughter.

Cheney said he hoped his former top aide would prevail on appeal.

Libby did not apologize and has maintained his innocence.

“It is respectfully my hope that the court will consider, along with the jury verdict, my whole life,” he said in brief remarks in court before the sentencing, his first public statement about the case since his indictment in 2005.

A Republican stalwart, he drew more than 150 letters of support from military commanders and diplomats who praised his government service from the Cold War through the early days of the Iraq war.

Among Libby’s supporting letter writers were former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as well as Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, a former longtime House member from California.

Cox said he gave the judge information on Libby’s pro bono work as a private attorney, telling reporters that such letters are common at the sentencing phase. He said he wrote as an individual and not in his official capacity. “I provided to the judge information about Mr. Libby’s pro bono work at an earlier point in his career.”

Libby was convicted in March of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters about CIA official Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald questioned Bush and Cheney in a probe that became a symbol of the administration’s deepening problems.

“Mr. Libby was the poster child for all that has gone wrong in this terrible war,” defense attorney Theodore Wells said. “He has fallen from public grace. It is a tragic fall, a tragic fall.”

Cheney, looking to Libby’s appeal, said, “Speaking as friends, we hope that our system will return a final result consistent with what we know of this fine man.”

Defense attorneys sought to have the sentence delayed until appeals run out. A delay also would give Bush more time to consider calls from Libby’s allies to pardon the longtime aide.

Walton said he saw no reason to put the sentence on hold but agreed to consider it. He scheduled a hearing for a week from Thursday.

Libby and Fitzgerald left court without speaking to reporters.

Among Libby’s supporting letter writers were former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Libby’s attorneys noted that Fitzgerald never charged anyone with leaking Plame’s identity, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage or White House political adviser Karl Rove, the original sources of the leak.

“No one was ever charged. Nobody ever pleaded guilty,” attorney William Jeffress said. “The government did not establish the existence of an offense.”

But Walton, a Bush nominee who served in the White House as deputy drug director under Bush’s father, said public officials in particular had a duty to testify honestly. His voice raising at times, he said the leak investigation was a serious one and obstructing it deserved a serious penalty.

“It’s one thing if you obstruct a petty larceny. It’s another thing if you obstruct a murder investigation,” he said.

He fined Libby $250,000 and placed him on two years probation after his prison sentence expires. There is no parole in the federal system, but Libby would be eligible for release after two years.

Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, applauded the sentence, and, though Fitzgerald has said his investigation is complete, they urged Libby to cooperate with authorities.

“As Mr. Fitzgerald has said, a cloud remains over the vice president,” Wilson said.

It was Cheney who revealed Plame’s identity to Libby in June 2003 after her husband began questioning the administration’s prewar intelligence. Several other officials testified that they, too, discussed the CIA operative with Libby as Wilson’s criticism mounted.

Libby said he forgot those conversations and was surprised to learn about Plame a month later from NBC newsman Tim Russert. Russert, the government’s star witness at trial, testified the two men never discussed Plame. Fitzgerald said Libby concocted the Russert story to shield him from prosecution for improperly handling classified information.

The trial also revealed how the White House strategically leaked information and used journalists to make its case for war and defend itself from criticism, often through the cloak of anonymity.

Though the trial is over, the legal fight over the leak continues. Plame and Wilson are suing Libby, Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials, accusing them of violating their privacy rights. A judge is considering whether to dismiss the lawsuit.

Plame is also suing the CIA for allegedly holding up publication of her memoir, in which she wants to discuss details about her 20-year career at the intelligence agency. CIA officials say the material she wants to publish is classified.

Libby left court to shouts of two or three protesters and a throng of reporters and photographers.

“You should go right to jail!” a protester screamed.

Libby said nothing, stepping into a car and being driven away.

Have Your Say: Libby sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Censorship ‘changes face of net’

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Amnesty International has warned that the internet “could change beyond all recognition” unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms. The warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights.

The “virus of internet repression” has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group.

Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.

Website closures

When challenged on their presence in countries such as China in the past, the companies accused have always maintained that they were simply abiding by local laws.

Amnesty is concerned that censorship is on the increase.

“The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers,” said Tim Hancock, Amnesty’s campaign director.

“Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.

More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts,” he said.

Amnesty has criticised Google’s presence in China

According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian blogger

Filtering was only one aspect of internet repression, the group said. It added that increasingly it was seeing “politically motivated” closures of websites and net cafes, as well as threats and imprisonments.

Twenty-two-year-old Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman was imprisoned for four years in February for insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt.

Fellow Egyptian blogger Amr Gharbeia told the BBC that the internet was allowing people to express themselves: “The web is creating a more open society, it is allowing more people to speak out. It’s only natural that upsets some people.”

The Amnesty conference - Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace - will have some well-known speakers including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

It marks the first anniversary of Amnesty’s website irrepressible.info, which is being relaunched to become an information hub for anyone interested in the future of internet freedom.

BBC

Have Your Say: Censorship ‘changes face of net’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

C4 to screen dying Diana pictures

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

A documentary featuring photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales as she lies fatally injured following a car crash will be broadcast by Channel 4 on Wednesday despite pleas from Prince William and Prince Harry.

The royal brothers said plans to screen the images had left them “deeply distressed” but the broadcaster has remained determined to use the controversial pictures.

Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the Princes’ private secretary, said the brothers were attempting to “protect their mother’s memory” and repeated their calls to Channel 4 not to feature the photographs.

In a television interview he said: “It is their mother’s last moments on earth and it’s an invasion of her privacy. They are chipping away what little dignity there is in death.”

The private secretary, who earlier wrote to Channel 4 appealing on behalf of the Princes, added: “We are not objecting to the documentary, we are objecting just to these photographs.

“The photographs tell a story, the story could be equally well told by talking heads, the doctor (who treated Diana) himself describes the scene very, very vividly.

“There’s no need to distress these two young men in a way that these pictures will…”

The images due to be screened include one of Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor as she lies dying in 1997, but her face is obscured.

Other pictures include the wrecked Mercedes and a view through the back of an ambulance in which the Princess was treated.

Julian Bellamy, head of Channel 4, said: “We have weighed the Princes’ concerns against the legitimate public interest we believe there is in the subject of this documentary and in the still photography it includes.”.

© owned by or licensed to Western Mail & Echo Limited 2007
icWales™ is a trade mark of Western Mail & Echo Limited.

Have Your Say: C4 to screen dying Diana pictures
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Cost reports of ID cards ‘destroyed’

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

JAMES CHAPMAN

Documents on hugely expensive Government computer projects are being destroyed to prevent leaks of embarrassing information, it has been revealed.

Officials at the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) - an independent office of the Treasury - have been told they should dispose of internal assessments of IT schemes as soon as they have read them, according to leaked documents.

The move was condemned by the Tories, who accused the Government of trying to hide details of ‘badly mismanaged’ computer projects.

The guidance, leaked to Computer Weekly magazine, comes as the Government is involved in a legal battle to prevent the release of reviews of the its controversial £5.3 billion ID card scheme.

Ministers have been told to release the documents after a request under freedom of information laws, but the OGC is appealing against the decision at the High Court.

Major Government projects are subject to so-called ‘gateway reviews’ carried out by independent specialists to monitor their progress and likely success.

The Government has been accused of squandering huge amounts on failed computer projects over the years.

The all-party Commons Work and Pensions Committee concluded that massive and disastrous IT failures had brought misery to thousands of people.

The Child Support Agency, the Passport Office, the Prison Service and the Immigration Service have all been hit by problems.

MPs concluded that ministers ’seem to commit themselves to completely unworkable projects’.

As well as the massive IT programme that will be needed to run the ID cards scheme, the Government is also spending more than £12bn on a controversial new computer system for the NHS.

The leaked paper tells officials: ‘You must securely dispose of the (final gateway) report and all supporting documents immediately after delivery of the final report.’

Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Heald said: “This demonstrates that Gordon Brown’s recent promise to ‘involve and engage people’ more in politics is just more spin.

“The reality is that Gordon Brown’s Treasury is probably the most secretive Government department, frequently dodging questions in Parliament and now issuing orders to undermine the spirit of freedom of information.

“It is hardly surprising that the Treasury wants to hide from the public the details of their badly mishandled computer projects and it seems that Gordon Brown’s tendency towards obsessive secrecy and shutting out the public will continue with him as Prime Minister non-elect just as it did when he was Chancellor.”

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable accused the Government of ’shockingly arrogant behaviour by those who should know they are accountable for public money’.

An OGC spokesman refused to say why it has ordered the ’secure disposal’ of gateway reports.

Have Your Say: Cost reports of ID cards ‘destroyed’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Life in the New World Order

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Peter Zaza

“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government …. all under their control…. Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.” - Congressman Larry P. McDonald, 1976

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Our lives are being directed according to a business plan. The agenda has been laid out over decades and centuries, we are just led to believe it’s happening in real time. There are some very significant dates coming up within the next few short years. Hard to imagine that we are smack dab in the middle of an end-game scenario, with plans coming to fruition that have been laid out and documented since at least the 1920’s and 30’s. Even more incredible, you can literally go back hundreds of years to find out it’s the same basic cast of characters through elite bloodlines responsible for secret societies and shadow governments. Members of this group are said to include such prominent families as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, Duponts, as well as presidents, prime ministers and European monarchs.

Using their influence through international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the CFR, the United Nations and NATO, the objective of the internationalists is nothing less than the subjugation of everyone on the planet to a one world government. How long has all this been going on? Without stretching the limits of your indulgence regarding quotations (I’ll do that later), consider these, which, if you disregard the names and dates, could easily have been uttered this morning:

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” - Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli of England 1844

“From the days of Sparticus, Wieskhopf, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”- Winston Churchill London Press l922

” If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.” - President Andrew Jackson 1829-1837

“The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen….At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties.” New York City Mayor John F. Hylan, 1922

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson” - President Franklin D. Roosevelt, l933

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952

The Council on Foreign Relations states the following on their website:

“Three former high-ranking government officials from Canada, Mexico, and the United States call for a North American economic and security community by 2010 to address shared security threats, challenges to competitiveness, and interest in broad-based development across the three countries.”

“North America is vulnerable on several fronts: the region faces terrorist and criminal security threats, increased economic competition from abroad, and uneven economic development at home. In response to these challenges, a trinational, Independent Task Force on the Future of North America has developed a roadmap to promote North American security and advance the well-being of citizens of all three countries.” - May 2005 task force report Building a North American Community published by the Council on Foreign Relations

I refute these assertions categorically. The biggest terrorist and criminal threat we face in North America is from the US government itself. There is a long history of false flag operations or self inflicted wounds like 9-11 committed by this country, so having us join them would surely not mitigate that threat, rather it would increase. As far as competition or uneven economic development, the market will have to take care of any imbalances within itself. Just because the economy is not doing so well right now is no excuse to do away with a sovereign country, or abrogate our rights as a free individuals, or steal our resources. There is no reason to believe that secretly plotting to merge these nations against the will of their citizens would advance the well-being of anyone, instead, it would destroy our heritage and turn us all into slaves of a corporate fascist state. No thanks. Same goes for the plans to adopt a new common currency for all 3 countries, as if we should have anything to do with the corruption tied to the Federal Reserve System. I would rather not have any part of a nation that can remove people from their home, torture and imprison them, and then deny them any right to a fair trial. What happened to sweet land of liberty, oh right, that’s just a song.

Everyone should be aware that the corporate elites in this world fully endorse the Red Chinese model of social governance and economics as the standard for their emerging New World Order. That is the reason for the FEMA camps that have been set up currently under the guise of emergency centers for immigration, natural disaster, or “other”. As per the Chinese model, dissidents will be dealt with severely and placed into work camps. A United Nations global police force will help keep everyone in line, once they implement their plans for the Universal Biometrics Identification Card.

“Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.” David Rockefeller 1973 New York Times

The movers and shakers of this world will use any means necessary to force their plans of unification on the world. Any issue, whether real, imagined or created can and will be utilized to achieve their objectives; overpopulation, global warming, disease, natural disasters, civil unrest. Population control measures include biological warfare targeting food supply, as well as various methods of climate manipulation through Chemtrails spraying and implementation of the HAARP technology .

The net has begun to close. You are not going to like the changes coming up - we will be forced, bribed and cajoled into accepting new identification measures, new laws, new taxes for global warming, new taxes for more security. After all, there’s going to be a lot of angry Iraqi Muslim terrorist types who are out to kill us, especially after we invaded, then decimated their country, destroyed their noble and learned culture, killed about a million of them, displaced a few million more. I guess you could say they might be a tad snarly toward America. They hate our freedoms huh? I guess after we brought our freedom and democracy to them so spectacularly in Iraq, they checked it out and said, “I hate it”.

“The terrorist is the one with the small bomb” - Brendan Behan

You’re going to hear more hoo-ha about things like the NAU, the Amero, RFID chips, you’re going to see more jack-booted heavily armed militia types wearing Kevlar, detaining you and abrogating every god-given right you once had, rights that were once so beautifully encoded by those brilliant fathers of the Constitution, you remember the Constitution don’t you? - that inspired set of principles that once made America the envy of the world, until the likes of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld ripped it up and wiped their arses with it, all the while laughing while they grew rich and flushed the country and it’s noble ideals down the toilet.

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” - Thomas Jefferson

“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded” - Charles-Louis De Secondat 1748

The coup has already happened folks, you’re too busy worried about Democrats and Republicans, but the truth is - these crooks rigged at least a couple of elections which is common knowledge, so they assumed power illegitimately. In reality, the false left/right paradigm is but another low-level reality to keep the masses diverted and occupied. Republican or Democrat, they all answer to the same bosses - now would you like Coke or Coke Classic? - it’s the same damned pop. And how nice when you control the military, the media, the judiciary, the senate - you can just pretend you have support, even if the vast majority of people in your own country are fully cognizant of the fact that you lie, cheat, murder and abuse. How else can you explain the polls which show 80 - 90% of the populace demanding an end to war, or a real investigation of the US governments unquestionable cover up and involvement in 9/11. A real opposition would call them on at least some of the lies, a real media would research some of the corruption, a real Supreme Court would hold everyone accountable to the law. These guys are good at it too, they make the Sopranos look like choir boys. There’s going to be more fireworks so get ready. These psychopaths are being backed into a corner, and it’s going to get rough.

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Starting to get hot around here

“There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine . . . been here 4 1/2 billion years. We’ve been here, what, a 100,000 years, maybe 200,000. And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry a little over 200 years. 200 years versus 4-1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? The planet isn’t going away. We are.” - George Carlin

The global warming thing is already past due and beginning to stink. Any sane person would have to admit that this planet is in some kind of trouble if we don’t properly manage our resources and stop polluting ourselves into ecological extinction. What I object to is the way the globalists are trying to use this fact, and sometimes distort it to further their own agenda. I can remember back in the 70s when we were told about the cooling down of the earth and the impending ice age. Soon they will find a way to blame and tax us for the temperature rising on other planets as well, in the meantime - let’s see a few of you politicians get out of your limos and hop on a bus like a regular shmoe.

“‘Protecting the Environment’ is a ruse. The goal is the political and economic subjugation of most men by the few, under the guise of preserving nature.” J. H. Robbins

Witness all the stark incongruity that exists in this strange world of ours - there are now special units that check garbage cans to make sure people are fined for not managing their refuse properly, we’re made to feel like some kind of criminal if we screw up sorting our tin cans. I only hope that they make a carbon tax that is very high so we can feel guilty for driving the car to buy milk, or pay a fine for using a 60W bulb - meanwhile, the US government is dumping depleted uranium that will continue to poison the earth for, let’s say (glances at watch) 5 BILLION YEARS. But never mind that - don’t you dare put the plastic milk jug in the same box with the cardboard - you Bastard!

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” Thomas Jefferson

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” H. L. Mencken

Another Path

“If totalitarianism wins this conflict, the world will be ruled by tyrants, and individuals will be slaves. If democracy wins, the nations of the earth will be united in a commonwealth of free peoples, and individuals, wherever found, will be the sovereign units of the new world order.” - Declaration of the Federation of the World

Two men stand at the top of a mountain - one man sees the panoramic beauty of all existence, the line of sky between earth and the heavens but a jumping off point for his consciousness - what other worlds? what other possibilities in my mind? What a blessing and a benediction is this life, I have my family, my friends, and all the beauty of nature at this moment to behold. The other man stands in the exact spot - he sees an opportunity to capitalize on the richness of the mountain, extract the ore, use the local tribe for cheap labour, and if I can just get rid of this guy standing beside me…

We spend most of our lives trying to acquire things like knowledge, experience, wealth, respect. Once past a certain point in our lives, usually closer to the end, many find themselves trying to cast off those trappings they have spent a lifetime gathering, seeing all such things as chains or diversions, layers between ourselves and our truth. Focused within the resolution provided through the lens of wisdom, and diminishing opportunity of time - those vestments, once thought as prizes to be won, can be seen as constraints that limit one’s true potential. We learn to redefine our perspectives or else we end up very frustrated with the world, our greatest fear being stagnation and mental intransigence, which only inhibits growth and progression in our life. We learn that the only thing constant in this world is change.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

Change is good, change is inevitable, but no matter how many things might change in our life there will always remain certain constants that must never change. You know, basic things, like the things we learn as children - simple rules that tell us it’s wrong to lie, to kill, to steal. These things do not change because you are a bus driver, a politician, a multi-billionaire, or you work for the CIA.

“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations” - David Friedman

I spent my whole life thinking I could avoid politics and anything to do with the public realm. I believed that if I just looked after myself and my family, what happened outside of my little sphere would not matter too much. After all, I’ve never hurt anyone, always paid my taxes, was known to enjoy the odd hockey game with a beer. My discovery of the truth regarding 9/11, followed by my realization of the malevolent forces that control our world has turned my life around, and so once again I must change.

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” - Pericles 430 B.C.

The raising of my family confers upon me the responsibility to try and make sure they can grow up in a world where mass-murderers are not allowed to rule the planet, despoiling the earth and killing whomever necessary to fit their plans for expansion and domination. As the saying goes, it’s not about right and left, its about right and wrong! If somebody marched into your country, accused you of international high crimes, occupied your land and slaughtered your family and friends while stealing your resources, and was then found to be guilty of lying about those accusations - which were subsequently proved to be categorically false, but stayed on year after year, killing, stealing, lying….Would that seem all right to you? How can you not allow that same reasoning to prevail for the people of Iraq, or anywhere else?

“Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it” - William Penn

I am just one person, but we are many. In every sense they have lost the battle with me, and so I know it is possible for others. The truth movement is only gaining in strength with each passing day. The truth will out, every time - it’s only got one way to go. I salute the great people in this movement who have inspired me with their integrity, their bravery, and most of all their brilliance as scholars in search of the truth. And on the other side, I feel only contempt for those who knowingly uphold such deceit and hypocrisy which brings us all to war.

“An individual’s character is not defined by their circumstance, it is revealed through it” - Peter Zaza

I am able to live in a psychologically clean environment where nobody rules my thoughts, I pay little attention to the mainstream media, other than to discern the true subtext of every headline and article so blatantly part of the grand pysops campaign. Most importantly, I have a cause, and a true inner moral compass with which I can live my life and fight this battle, and let’s be clear - this is going to be tantamount to war - a war for our thoughts, and as so many who are still dying every day prove to us all - a battle for our very lives.

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” - Elie Wiesel

Yes, the truth can only get bigger, it is within its nature. Those who would adhere to the myths promulgated by liars must employ increasingly desperate measures - repressive laws, no fly lists, surveillance, termination of basic rights, more aggressive tactics to instill fear. Fascist dictators do not claw back measures like the egregiously titled Patriot Act, they don’t make bogus laws giving themselves omniscient powers because they intend to repeal them 6 months later, they just keep on exposing themselves further as parasites and psychopaths, with ever more obvious signs of their waning struggle for power. Do you want the Patriot Act? Or do you want to act like a patriot?

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” Benjamin Franklin.

“Why, the Government is merely…a temporary servant…Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.” - Mark Twain

Something else seems to happen in these situations as shown to us through history - there will be a large economic correction or depression which will help settle the matter of the current cabal in office. It will most likely be expensive for us all, but the cost of our hubris and callous indifference will exact a price on ordinary men, as well as the nations they support.

“Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later” - Benjamin Franklin

It’s too bad really, they could have invested those trillions of dollars and all that human potential into energy research, education, health care, anything to do with the betterment of mankind rather than its destruction. Instead, they opted to make war and commit the worst crimes of humanity in some insane quest for dominance.

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” - Jimi Hendrix

How can we retain hope or have any chance of true fulfillment in our lives with all this going on?

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of Truth and Love has always won There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it, always. - Mahatma Gandhi

I alone retain complete and utter sovereignty over my life - no one gave me my freedom, and no one is going to take it from me. I refuse to carry RFID tracking devices, biometric implants, or whatever else you want to use to restrict and monitor my life. I will not let you degrade and humiliate me at airports, roadside checks, random searches, or whatever else you concoct to try and subjugate us with in the name of your bullshit war on terror. I reject your new world order and the idiot box TV it rode in on.

I challenge everyone to turn off the television, do some research and think for yourself. Stop looking toward anybody outside of yourself for direction, leadership, understanding or help in this world - especially if that someone is a politician. Stop waiting for somebody else to get their hands dirty and fix all the problems.

Stop thinking about other people who live on this Earth as being other.

“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” - Thomas Jefferson

Authors Website: http://hubpages.com/profile/casazaza

Have Your Say: Life in the New World Order
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

UK and US must quit Iraq quickly, says former ambassador

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Tania Branigan and Rosie Lavan
Wednesday June 6, 2007
The Guardian

The British and American military presence in Iraq is worsening security across the region and should be withdrawn quickly, the UK’s former ambassador to Washington warned yesterday.Sir Christopher Meyer acknowledged that leaving Iraq would be “painful”, but said the mission was not worth the death of one more serviceman. “I personally believe that the presence of American and British and coalition forces is making things worse, not only inside Iraq but the wider region around Iraq. The arguments against staying for any greater length of time themselves strengthen with every day that passes,” Sir Christopher said.

He added: “I think the Iraqis are in fact sorting themselves out - often bloodily - independent of what we’re doing.”

The former diplomat, posted in Washington in the runup to the 2003 invasion, was giving evidence to the Iraq Commission in London. The cross-party group - modelled on America’s Iraq Study Group - was set up by the Foreign Policy Centre thinktank and Channel 4 to examine possible options for Britain’s future role.

British commanders in Iraq have drawn up a plan for the withdrawal of almost all UK troops within 12 months, as one of several options to be presented to Gordon Brown when he takes over as prime minister. But Sir Christopher said Mr Brown was unlikely to announce a unilateral troop withdrawal that was not coordinated with the United States.

He acknowledged that foreign policy decisions were always “fraught with risk”. But asked about criticisms of withdrawal, he replied: “It always seemed to me this was one of the key moral arguments in Iraq, that however bad things were … the overriding requirement for us was to be able to say to parents and relatives in Britain, your sons and daughters did not die in vain. I think we have now crossed the line - we now have to say the mission is no longer worth another life of a British or American serviceman.”

Sir Christopher’s controversial book, DC Confidential, argued that the coalition failed to plan for securing and rebuilding Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion.

Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the army, said last year that the British should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems”.

Oliver Burch, of Christian Aid, told the commission that reconstruction efforts by the military had made the work of aid agencies harder in some ways.

It meant military operations were run alongside humanitarian work.

“For that reason those who do not like the coalition forces do not like NGOs either,” he said.

The commission, chaired by Lord King, Lord Ashdown, and Lady Jay will report in mid-July after hearing evidence from a range of military and policy experts.

Have Your Say: UK and US must quit Iraq quickly, says former ambassador
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

New Database Debunks Terrorism Myths

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Jeanna Bryner

The majority of terrorist attacks result in no fatalities, with just 1 percent of such attacks causing the deaths of 25 or more people.

And terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.

These and other myth-busting facts about global terrorism are now available on a new online database open to the public.

The database identifies more than 30,000 bombings, 13,400 assassinations and 3,200 kidnappings. Also, it details more than 1,200 terrorist attacks within the United States.

The unclassified Global Terrorism Database (GTD) will give anyone interested the opportunity to peruse through the actual details of global terror attacks. The online terror rap sheet is expected to be a critical tool for researchers and policy-makers who can use it to improve responses to terrorism.

Digital weapon

The database was developed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) based at the University of Maryland, with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It includes unclassified information about 80,000 terror incidents that occurred from 1970 through 2004. (Visit the database.)

“This is a powerful new weapon in the hands of researchers and policy-makers who must respond to the threat of terrorism,” said Gary LaFree, director of START, a University of Maryland criminologist.

The searchable database parses the data by more than 100 variables, ranging from type of perpetrator—such as religious or ethno-nationalist—to type of weapon used and the number of injuries incurred. Summaries of each incident divulge the date, location, weapons used, target type, number of casualties and, when possible, the perpetrator.

“We’re not just counting up the number of attacks,” LaFree said. “We’re looking at a long list of specific details, as well as social and economic considerations that may help us understand the ’whys‘ and ’hows‘ of terrorism.”

He added, “This can especially help counterterrorism experts and researchers improve their understanding of violent radical groups and movements, and to predict the nature of future incidents.”

Myth busters

Searches of the database have uncovered some additional unexpected statistics. For instance, terrorist groups are not so long-lived, with about 75 percent of such alliances formed between 1970 and 1997 lasting no more than one year.

From 1998 through 2004, India reportedly experienced the greatest number of terror attacks (1,000), followed by Colombia, the Russian Federation and Iraq, which came in fourth with nearly 500 attacks.

LaFree and a colleague mined the database for clues about the effectiveness of counter-terror measures. Among their findings announced last year: British counter-terrorist interventions used in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1992 may have backfired and actually aided in a terror backlash.

Have Your Say: New Database Debunks Terrorism Myths
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

• Publish YOUR News on RINF
• RINF Alternative News on Twitter
• Subscribe to RINF - Help keep us online!
• RINF Forums Now Online
• Could a germ spraying program be back in operation?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Latest News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.