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Fascist Police State Looms Closer With “Intelligent CCTV”

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

A new CCTV system is being trialed at one of the UK’s busiest train stations. Known as “Intelligent CCTV”, the software will monitor and predict human behaviour and can be linked to a national police database.

Sheffield is the first train station in the UK to trial the system but a national roll out of the technology is expected, creating 20% of all UK CCTV systems using these methods. So far intelligent CCTV has not proven reliable as recent tests in Germany found face recognition CCTV software failed on three separate occasions to successfully recognize 8 out of 10 people, even when standing still and in good light conditions.

“Intelligent CCTV technology is so sophisticated it can detect whether a passenger is standing too close to the platform edge, if someone has had a fall, if any luggage has been abandoned or even if a wall has been defaced by graffiti or fly-posting,” said Garry Raven, Managing Director of Midland Mainline.

“We are confident that this new approach will ensure our passengers feel safer, especially at night, and that it will lead to a reduction in crime at stations. When an incident does occur, our staff will be able to respond much more quickly, giving us a far better chance at catching the perpetrators and obtaining a successful conviction,” said Garry Raven.

Alan Lipton of ObjectVideo, one of the companies creating this software said: “We want to teach the software to identify patterns and to recognize certain human activities.

“This idea involves teaching the computer to recognize complex human actions, such as a fight; a person reaching for a gun; a person falling over; or a room in which everyone has started to run,” Lipton said.

But who decides what normal behaviour is? We are creating a surveillance society that will one day have its citizens living in fear while machines constantly monitor our behaviour, judge and decide who is a threat and who isn’t, and being treated as a suspect on a daily basis is simply the price we pay for living in Great Britain.

Intelligent CCTV is just one of the many shocking methods police and government are introducing to “protect us”, which individually are often tolerated, but when combined they create a terrifying vision of our future.

This is not a democracy; it is the birth of a fascist police state.

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Aaron Russo dies of cancer

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

flamesong
RINF Alternative News

Unconfirmed reports on the internet suggest that filmmaker and political activist Aaron Russo died on 24th August 2007 after a struggle with cancer. He will be perhaps most remembered for his outspoken work, America: From Freedom to Fascism.

Although a filmmaker, famous for producing films as Trading Places and The Rose as well as managing Bette Midler, Aaron Russo became politically active when he produced the film Mad As Hell - which took its name from the phrase ranted by Peter Finch in the film Network - in which he was critical of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), the introduction of identity cards, the so-called war on drugs and proposed regulations on alternative medicine.

He made numerous attempts to seek elected office including his 2004 campaign for nomination as the Libertarian Party candidate for US president in which he was only defeated in the final ballot by a modest majority.

He had been acquainted with some of the most powerful people in the world with some of whom he fell foul - including Nicholas Rockefeller about whom he said:

‘Here’s what I do know first hand - I know that about eleven months to a year before 9/11 ever happened I was talking to my Rockefeller friend (Nicholas Rockefeller) and he said to me ‘Aaron there’s gonna be an event’ and he never told me what the event was going to be - I’m not sure he knew what the event was going to be I don’t know that he knew that,’‘He just said there’s gonna be an event and out of that event we’re gonna invade Afghanistan so we can run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we can go into Iraq to take the oil and establish bases in the middle east and to make the middle east part of the new world order and we’re going to go after Venezuela - that’s what’s going to come out of this event.’‘Eleven months to a year later that’s what happened….he certainly knew that something was going to happen.’‘In my relationships with some of these people I can tell you that it’s as evil as it really gets - this is it - this is the game.’

‘People know that 9/11 was an inside job, look what they did here in America, look at 9/11, look what they did - they killed thousands of Americans - people jumping out of windows from a hundred floors up - they don’t care.’

In the end he couldn’t afford the treatment he required to help him fight his cancer and a fund was established to help him pay for it. Sadly, it has been too late.

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Robert Fisk: Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the “raver”. Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the “raver” is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a “raver”.

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the “raver” bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece

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