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VIDEO: This is What a Police State Looks Like
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Cop Pepper Sprays, Punches, Nearly Breaks Girl’s Arm During Curfew Arrest
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Another shocking example of police brutality has been caught on camera showing a cop nearly breaking a girl’s arm, punching her and then pepper spraying her in the face as she cries after being arrested for violating a city curfew.
Watch the dramatic video of the incident which occurred in Fort Pierce, Florida.
The cop twists the 15-year-old’s arm right up behind her back to almost breaking point before the girl appears to bite the officer, upon which the cop punches the grl and pepper sprays her directly in the face.
Descriptions of the video on mainstream news websites strongly emphasized the fact that the girl bit the officer without even mentioning the fact that he would have probably snapped her arm out of the socket had the brutality continued.
Last week, a video showing a school security guard arresting and breaking a girl’s arm for dropping cake made national headlines.
The last couple of months have produced an epidemic of police and security guard brutality which seems to be spiraling out of control as cops are trained that the public is their enemy.
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Lancaster anti-supermarket protest camp
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Angry residents occupy proposed supermarket site
This morning Lancaster residents moved on to council owned land in Scotforth -
the site of a proposed supermarket, rumoured to be Tesco’s. Locals are shocked
by secret moves in the Council’s Cabinet to sell off land at Lawson Bridge, off
the A6. Their message: they will not allow the council to sell off their town
for what they call “dodgy development”.
Says local resident Deirdre Mason: “The council may love the idea of Tesco’s,
Centros Miller and the Bailrigg Science Park, but local residents are concerned
about the threat to local businesses and the unique character of the city!
These developments will be the death of Lancaster. Time to say ENOUGH! to all
these sordid schemes. Let’s send a clear message to all these developers: they
are not welcome in our town.”
The occupation will last for 24 hours and will be followed by a protest outside
the Cabinet meeting tomorrow (Tuesday 9th Oct) at Lancaster Town Hall from
9.30am onwards.
Residents are concerned about the way the Council is selling off Lancaster
piecemeal, leading to a town crippled by gridlock, and having only “clone town”
shops that are to be found in any high street in the country. “The council is
blinkered when it comes to recognising the historical value of our town, the
vibrancy and high quality of the local traders.” says Stephen Dickinson of
Scotforth. “They sold off our market - it’s now half dead. Now they want to see
off the rest of the town centre with Centros Miller’s proposed monstrosity and
this mega supermarket in Scotforth. The time has come to say ‘Enough!’. It’s
time for our councillors to listen to us!”
-ENDS-
For further information please contact Deirdre Mason at the protest camp on:
07798 745613
Photo opportunities:
Mon 1pm at the protest camp, Lawsons Bridge, Scotforth Road, Lancaster
Tuesday 10am at Lancaster Town Hall
Notes for the Editor:
1 The land threatened by supermarket development and currently under occupation
is near Lawson’s Bridge, between the railway line and the A6 (Scotforth Road).
Lancaster City Council owns about 5.5acres there, immediately to the south of
Ray’s Drive.
2 The land is currently rented to a farmer for use as pasture. It is also well
used by Scotforth residents for dog-walking and other kinds of recreation, and
there is a community woodland area at the northern end which is threatened by
the development.
3 Lancaster Council Cabinet will be discussing the proposed sale in their
Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, 9th October. The meeting takes place at Lancaster
Town Hall at 10am.
Have Your Say: Lancaster anti-supermarket protest camp
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VIDEO: Dead in the Water
Monday, October 8th, 2007
BBC Documentary on the USS Liberty:
“Dead in the Water”
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Cover-Up Alleged in Probe of USS Liberty |
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A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident. In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy’s inquiry to “conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” It was “one of the classic all-American cover-ups,” said retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigating the attack as part of an independent panel he formed with other former military officials. The panel also included a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins. |
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Moorer, who has long held that the attack was a deliberate act, wants Congress to investigate. [Newsday] |
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Photos of attack on USS Liberty |
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Crews mess hall used as an emergency room |
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Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested. Later, a dual-citizen Israeli major told survivors that he was in an Israeli war room where he heard that pilot’s radio report. The attacking pilots and everyone in the Israeli war room knew that they were attacking an American ship, the major said. He recanted the statement only after he received threatening phone calls from Israel. The pilot’s protests also were heard by radio monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Then-U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter has confirmed this. Porter told his story to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and offered to submit to further questioning by authorities. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. government has any interest in hearing these first-person accounts of Israeli treachery. [Washington Report] |
Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel’s story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt. Moorer, who as top legal council to the official investigation is in a position to know, agrees that Israel intended to sink the USS Liberty and blame Egypt for it, thus dragging the United States into a war on Israel’s behalf. This seems to be a common trick of Israel. Starting with the Lavon affair, through the USS Liberty, to the fake radio transmitter that tricked Reagan into attacking Libya, to potentially 9-11 itself, Israel’s game is to frame Arabs and set them up as targets for the United States. The official US investigation is discredited. And with it, every claim of innocence for Israel that relied on the official investigation as a source. The real question facing the American people is why the US Government seems more concerned with protecting Israel after they are caught playing these dirty tricks, rather than doing something to convince Israel not to kill any more Americans.
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Thanks to What Really Happened
Have Your Say: VIDEO: Dead in the Water
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VIDEO: Using Depleted Uranium as a Weapon
Monday, October 8th, 2007
“Using Depleted Uranium as a Weapon” with the subtitle :
“Putting our Troops and the Rest of the World at risk.”
A talk by Dr. Doug Rokke, member of U.S. Army Medical Command’s Special Operations during Gulf War 1, Produced February 23,2003 but as retinent to our time as ever.
http://gavinovz.vox.com/library/post/using-depleted-uranium-as-a-weapon.html?_c=feed-atom
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VIDEO: Preparation for Martial Law
Monday, October 8th, 2007
We support our military because we know there is good in you. You are our family. Our brothers, sisters & cousins. You are our sons. You are our daughters. Our fathers. Here is a letter to you from Robert M. Bowman, PhD, Lt. Col., USAF, ret.
Dr. Bowman, who describes himself as “an old fighter pilot (101 combat missions in Vietnam , F-4 Phantom, Phu Cat, 1969-1970) who’s now a disabled veteran with terminal cancer from Agent Orange.” has your letter posted here under the title:
“Duty, Honor, Country 2007: An Open Letter to the New Generation of Military Officers Serving and Protecting Our Nation”
Have Your Say: VIDEO: Preparation for Martial Law
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Ahmadinejad says Iran won’t negotiate over its “nuclear rights”
Monday, October 8th, 2007
TEHRAN, Iran: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed that Iran will not negotiate over its “nuclear rights” but said the government was prepared to answer questions from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
The comments Friday came as French diplomatic officials said Iran is set to run almost 3,000 centrifuges by the end of the month, nearing the threshold for industrial-scale uranium enrichment.
Ahmadinejad said Iran has already achieved proficiency in the whole nuclear fuel cycle, from extracting uranium ore to enriching it, and that Tehran has removed any hurdles in the way of its nuclear progress.
“The Iranian nation favors talks but it won’t negotiate over its definite and legal nuclear rights. They (world powers) have to know this,” Ahmadinejad said in comments before Friday prayers in Tehran.
He added he believed the nuclear issue was over and Iran will ignore attempts by the United States and its European allies to further politicize the issue.
“From our point of view, Iran’s nuclear issue has been closed. The fact that these powers are screaming tells us the case is closed. This is a great victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.
Two rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions have failed to persuade Iran to halt enrichment, a process that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or materials needed for nuclear weapons.
The United States, France and Britain are seeking a third round of sanctions against Iran but in a setback for the U.S., Iran won a two-month reprieve from new U.N. Security Council sanctions over its nuclear program last month.
The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns.
The U.S. and some of its allies accuse Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons but Tehran has denied the charges saying its nuclear program is merely geared towards generating electricity, not bomb.
Iran says it will never give up its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel.
Meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush denied in an interview with Arab television that the U.S. is gearing up to attack Iran and said he remains committed to working diplomatically to resolve the standoff with Tehran over its nuclear program.
The president, in an hour-long interview with Al-Arabiya, also reiterated his pledge to negotiate with Iran once it gives up its nuclear program.
“I have said that if they suspend their nuclear program, we will be at the table,” Bush said, according to a transcript of the interview the White House released on Friday. “But they have so far refused to do that.”
Bush brushed off as “gossip” reports in the Arab press that he has issued orders to senior U.S. military officials to prepare for a major, precise strike on Iran during the end of January or February.
“I would call that empty propaganda,” Bush said.
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The Iraq Occupation and the Coming War Against Iran
Monday, October 8th, 2007
The Iraq Occupation and the Coming War Against Iran: Political Wickedness and Moral Bankruptcy
“Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.”Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [Iran will react to a bombing attack by the Bush-Cheney administration] “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Jimmy Carter “Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, [Ariel] Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel’s security problems.” Robert (Bob) Novak, veteran American reporter “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chairman 1987-2006 “There are people in Washington … who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they’re looking for ten, 20, 50 years into the future … the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that ten years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.”Jimmy Carter, former American President (February 3, 2006)
How do you get out of a hole? First of all, you stop digging. —This is the simple lesson that the Bush-Cheney White House has so much trouble understanding. For Bush and his neocon crowd, they are militarily occupying Iraq and they intend to remain there, no matter what. It doesn’t matter that this immoral and illegal occupation has caused the death of more than one million Iraqis and killed more than 3000 American soldiers. And now, they want to escalate the Iraq war into a wider Middle East conflict involving Iran, thus making sure the United States will be involved militarily in that region of the globe for the next twenty years. In 2002, immoral neocon officials in the Defense Department considered Iraq to be a “low-hanging fruit“, ripe for picking for its huge oil reserves, for the opportunity to displace French and Chinese oil companies, for increasing Israel’s security, for moving American military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq and for pleasing politically the end-times religious right in the U.S.—thus killing five birds with one stone. According to former CIA Director George Tenet—and this has been confirmed by former Secretary Paul O’Neill and many other insiders—the very idea of taking control militarily of Iraq was improvised and was unjustified because “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” Nevertheless, the Bush-Cheney-Libby-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle team, and their allies at the American Enterprise Institute and at the neocon Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), thought it was a win-win situation. They had decided they wanted a war under the clouds of 9/11, and nothing—truth, morality, reason or facts—could deter them from it. They were ready to lie a thousand times to achieve their goal. And they got it. But now the apprentice sorcerers do not know how to stop the infernal machine of destruction they have set in motion. They only know how to push forward and make a larger mess of it. That type of improvisation and political wickedness is all too well confirmed by newly released transcripts of talks George W. Bush had with then-Spanish Prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, in February 22, 2003, a few weeks before the onset of the March 20, 2003 Iraq war. In these transcripts, it is shown that Bush had a criminal intent to launch a war of aggression against Iraq, no matter what, and that he turned down every Iraqi offer that would have avoided a murderous war that has killed more than one million people so far. This includes Saddam Hussein’s offer to go into exile, and for Iraq to hold free and internationally-supervised elections as well as allowing armed foreign troops to conduct unfettered inspections for weapons of mass destruction. —But the Bush-Cheney regime of Neocons wanted war, and nothing could stop them. They wanted, above all, to put their hands on Iraq’s oil wealth. This is a prime example of historical grand theft, political wickedness and moral bankruptcy. Thus, this war has nothing to do with the morality of the “Just War” theory. In fact, it violates all the canons of a just and unavoidable war.Confronted with the abysmal cowardliness, moral corruption and incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration, Americans, on the whole, are more intelligent and more moral than their current leaders, and a large majority of them (63%) think it’s time for the United States to stop occupying illegally the country of Iraq and to stop murdering its citizens. Moreover, a good majority of them (54%) reject the blanket Bush-Cheney policy of aggression abroad, under the pretext of “preventive war”. Similarly, the U.S. Congress, the only government branch empowered by the U.S. Constitution to declare war, is officially on record as being against maintaining American troops in Iraq. First, the House of Representatives, on July 12, passed a bill, by a vote of 223 to 201, to withdraw American combat troops from Iraq by next April 1st. Second, in a July 18 vote, a majority of U.S. Senators voted 52 to 47 to bring home most American combat troupes from Iraq by May 1, 2008. —So, both the American people and the American Congress want this war to end, and soon. But the truth is that Bush II does not give a hoot about American democratic opinion, as he openly demonstrated recently. And, he does not much care for the U.S. Congress either, or the courts for that matter. In fact, Bush has a deeply ingrained tendency to disregard the truth, the law and the U.S. Constitution.In Iraq, the Bush-Cheney regime is still building “enduring” military bases in order to occupy Iraq militarily for decades to come. They even talk openly about the half-century American military presence in South Korea, as if this were a useful analogy.At the end of the day, as Bush has said: “I do not need to explain”. As the British magazine The Economist has warned, the world should beware of a President “who has little left to lose,” the more so if he has hardly any moral principle and is indifferent to the opinions of the majority of Americans.It is doubtful that a George W. Bush in denial and his delusional neocon advisors for permanent war will ever listen to reason and morality. To the contrary, the lame-duck president is still firing anybody who does not agree with him, while listening to chief Neocon Dick Cheney. The American people see that, and that is why nearly half of them want President George W. Bush to face impeachment, while about 54 percent of American adults now want the US House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney, because he is seen as the chief spreader of lies to launch the illegal Iraq War. As of now, there are twenty-one Congressmen who support the articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney contained in bill H Res 333 —If and when American troops leave Iraq, there will be fewer deaths because there will be fewer killers, both official soldiers and mercenaries. The latest victim of Bush’s pigheaded approach to foreign policy is General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Having started a war of aggression on his own, against the advice of most thinking people within the military, political, legal and intelligence communities, and having placed himself squarely against international law, George W. Bush is reduced to shifting the blame for his failures to others. Bush is afraid of having honest people around him, especially a man of the caliber of General Pace, who is a moral man. General Pace, in the spirit of the Nuremberg Charter, has publicly said, “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral” (Feb. 17, 2006). And since General Pace thinks it is immoral to be the first to use nuclear weapons, one wonders if Bush has fired General Pace because he intends to use nuclear weapons in the coming months.The U.S. Congress should wake up before it is too late. When armaments are in the hands of immoral people, the danger is high that a nuclear war could be launched. Indeed, people in power who have no morality and no judgment can be expected to do anything, including killing millions of people, to save face.In the book “The New American Empire“, I asked this fundamental question: Why is the Bush-Cheney administration so bent on using lies and distortions in order to justify a war whose end result would be predictably to eliminate from power the Iraqi Sunnis in favor of Shi’ites allied with Shi’ite Iran, thus automatically making Iran the dominant power in that unstable region? One has to remember that Sunnis make up 85 percent of all Muslims around the world and are dominant in the Arab world. —Now that they have realized their error in creating a Shia-dominated Iraq, the Neocons behind the Bush-Cheney team want them to up the ante and to attack Iran, thus turning the Middle East into an even larger murder scene than it is now.The American people have never received an answer to that simple question. That is why they are so dissatisfied with George W. Bush, but also with the Republicans and the pro-war neocon Democrats in Congress. This indicates that there is a huge void of leadership in the United States today. On this score, the most moral Democratic 2008 candidate for president is, by far, former senator Mike Gravel from Alaska. The very fact that the mainstream media boycott him should be a good indication that this man stands on the side of the people.According to polls, Americans are very dissatisfied with both major political parties because of their inability or their unwillingness to reflect the wishes of the people and to stop the immoral and illegal occupation of Iraq. In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track, but nothing is being done about it. In fact, average Americans are losing hope that they will ever be heard by the Washington D.C. political nomenklatura that runs the government while paying scant attention to the people.Rodrigue Tremblay is a Canadian economist who lives in Montreal; he can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.comVisit his blog site at:
www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog. Author’s Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check Dr. Tremblay’s coming book “The Code for Global Ethics” at:
www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/
Have Your Say: The Iraq Occupation and the Coming War Against Iran
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The ‘Silent’ 9/11 Settlement
Monday, October 8th, 2007
By Shaun Mullen
Said Irene Golinski of Columbia, Maryland, whose husband, Ronald was aboard Flight 77 and one of 125 people to die at the Pentagon:
“I really didn’t go into it for the money, I went into it for the answers.”
The families, however, will be unable to share those answers because of a broad gag order that is part of the settlement, the financial terms of which also are confidential. It therefore is not known if the families received more than they would have from the compensation fund set up by Congress after the terror attacks.
Participants in the fund, administered by attorney Kenneth Feinberg, had to agree to not sue the airlines.
Feinberg was appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be Special Master of the fund, who worked for 33 months pro bono.
In a Herculean task, Feinberg had to decide how much each family would receive based on how much each victim would have earned in a full lifetime. He personally presided over more than 900 of the 1,600 family hearings and eventually awarded a total of $7 billion to 97 percent of the families. The average payout was $1.8 million.
I’m with blogger Ed Morrissey in having problems with the hold-out families, who to put the most charitable face on their litigation saw their seemingly altruistic intentions undercut by their not being able to get paid if they talked.
Captain Ed writes that:
“This bothers me more than most settlements of this nature. The families who sued, who opted out of the VCF to do so, insisted that the money was not important to them. They wanted answers to how the failures occurred, and decided that their separate lawsuits could provide more answers than government investigations. Apparently they have somehow been satisfied as a result of that process — but can’t tell us why. They agreed to remain silent as a condition of the settlement.
“Why? If truth was that important to them, why do they now choose silence and a payoff instead of revealing the deficiencies of the system that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people? Given their statement of mission, it makes it seem as though they either learned nothing more than what the official investigations revealed and took the money rather than admit it, or that they let the airlines off the hook for a substantial amount of cash.”
Some 13 other non-victims fund cases are still pending.
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BBC controller quits over ‘crowngate’ scandal
Monday, October 8th, 2007
BBC1 controller Peter Fincham resigned today in the wake of a damning report into misleading footage of the Queen.
The most high-profile casualty in a string of TV fakery scandals, he was forced to go after the independent inquiry revealed a catalogue of “misjudgements, poor practice and ineffective systems” at the Corporation.
The trailer for forthcoming series ‘A Year with the Queen’ appeared to show the monarch storming out of a photoshoot after photographer Annie Leibovitz suggested she remove her crown.
Fincham aired it to an audience of journalists at a press launch on the morning of July 11 and said it showed the Queen “walking out in a huff”.
By 7pm that night he was aware that the trailer had been misleadingly edited by production company RDF – footage of the Queen apparently walking out of the shoot was actually of her walking in.
But a decision was taken to delay issuing a correction until the following day.
An apology was eventually made at noon on July 12, only after the story had made headline news and caused serious embarrassment to the BBC.
BBC director-general Mark Thompson was kept in the dark about the episode.
The independent inquiry by former BBC executive Will Wyatt was highly critical of the BBC and of RDF.
Stephen Lambert, head of RDF and the man personally responsible for editing the footage, also resigned today. The report said his behaviour had been “cavalier”.
Fincham had resisted calls to quit in the days after the affair and said the director-general was behind him.
But this afternoon he announced “with great sadness” that he was leaving the post he had held for the past two years.
The Wyatt report said the fiasco had strained the “vital relationship” between the BBC and the Royal household.
And it said the BBC’s reputation was “tarnished further in the eyes of the licence fee paying public”, coming after a string of incidents which had damaged viewers’ trust.
The report decided there had been no conscious effort to defame or misrepresent the Queen.
But it went on: “That said, the incident reveals misjudgments, poor practice and ineffective systems as well, of course, as the usual helping of bad luck that often accompanies such sorry affairs.
“A fuse was inexcusably lit when RDF edited footage of the Queen in a cavalier fashion for a promotional tape.”
The report concluded that the BBC was “slow to appreciate the magnitude and import of the mistake” and “naive” in the hope that the story would blow over.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying it was a matter for the BBC.
However, the report revealed the Palace agreed a statement retracting the story at 9.44pm on the day the trailer was shown. But both they and the BBC decided to hold it overnight to “check the temperature of the story”.
Mr Thompson said he accepted the inquiry findings and repeated the BBC’s apology to the Queen.
“It is important that the BBC learns all the lessons from this matter and take steps to ensure that nothing of this kind is repeated.
“Although I take some comfort from Will Wyatt’s conclusion that no one consciously set out to defame or misrepresent the Queen in respect of the BBC’s preparation for the BBC1 launch, the fact is that serious mistakes were made which put misleading information about the Queen into the public domain.
“That is why we are determined to take all necessary steps to address the shortcomings set out in this report.
“When this matter first came to light, we unreservedly apologised to Her Majesty the Queen. I repeat that apology again today without hesitation.”
Mr Thompson praised Fincham as an “outstanding controller” and accepted his resignation “with real sadness”.
The BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons said it was clear from the report that “serious errors of judgements” had been made and proper controls were not applied.
RDF has already accepted responsibility for the editing of the trailer.
The report said it demonstrated “a cavalier way of treating any footage, let alone of the head of state going about her duties.”
In his resignation statement, Lambert said: “My action, which I accept in the words of the inquiry was ’cavalier’, was the first step in a chain of carelessness and misunderstandings which had very serious consequences. It was therefore right that I should go.”
It is not known whether the five-part documentary planned for this autumn will ever be shown.
The trailer showed the Queen walking into a room wearing a tiara and Order of the Garter robes.
Photographer Leibovitz said: “I think it will look better without the crown because the garter robe is so…”
A stony-faced Queen replied: “Less dressy? What do you think this is?” while pointing to what she was wearing. The trailer then cut to her apparently storming out.
But the report revealed that, far from being irritated by Leibovitz’s suggestion, the Queen paused after her “less dressy” comment, then chuckled and carried on with the photoshoot.
This was caught on film but left out of the trailer.
RDF told the inquiry it was not clear in the original sequence why the Queen was in a bad mood and edited it so that it “made more sense”.
Following Fincham’s resignation, BBC2 controller Roly Keating will take over as acting controller of BBC1.
There is speculation that he may take on the role full-time.
Other names in the frame include former Endemol boss Peter Bazalgette.
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US denies breaking torture laws after memos exposed
Monday, October 8th, 2007
In the United States, the Bush Administration is again under fire for secretly authorising torture tactics during the interrogation of terrorism suspects.
Although the White House is insisting that the US does not injure prisoners, two separate, secret memos endorsing the harsh techniques have previously been exposed.
And there are also reports that secret CIA prisons holding terrorism suspects are still being run around the world.
Democrats are demanding that the Justice Department turn over the two secret memos, which explicitly authorise painful physical and psychological tactics - things like head-slapping, simulated drowning and freezing temperatures.
The New York Times disclosed the existence of the 2005 memos, which were apparently written months after the Justice Department withdrew an earlier legal opinion approving harsh methods.
Anonymous officials say the opinions remain in effect, yet Congress has prohibited cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of terrorism suspects.
But the White House is insisting that the Bush Administration has not violated America’s anti-torture laws.
Fran Townsend is President’s George W Bush’s homeland security adviser.
“The United States does not torture. Do we have a program? Yes we do. People who participate in that program are carefully trained with more than 250 hours of training,” she said.
“The average age of an interrogator is 43. They’re not just interrogators who are part of the team, there are also subject matter experts and individuals who are there to monitor the health and psychological wellbeing of the detainee himself.”
Ms Townsend will not confirm whether the specific interrogation techniques being reported by The New York Times are being or have ever been used.
She says detainees are only subjected to a harsh interrogation if they can provide timely information about the location of Al Qaeda leaders, or about an imminent threat to the US.
“There have been fewer than 100 CIA detainees in any type of program,” she said.
“Less than a third of those have ever had techniques used against them; I will say to you though, that [group of] less than a third produced 8,500 intelligence reports on threat information.”
‘Shameful’ secret
The New York Times reports that the secret interrogation memos were approved by then attorney-general Alberto Gonzales - over the objections of his deputy James Comey, who reportedly told colleagues that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Human Rights Watch spokesman Tom Malinowski says the memos are significant.
“What these opinions show is that the Justice Department was still trying to authorise the use of torture, even when Republicans and Democrats in Congress led by Senator McCain were trying to outlaw it once and for all,” he said.
Democrats are promising a congressional inquiry into the two Justice Department legal opinions. They say that the alleged content and the fact that they have been kept secret from Congress are extremely troubling.
And while the White House skirts around whether the CIA has resumed using secret prisons to detain and interrogate suspects, an anonymous US counter-terrorism official has confirmed that the program is still active.
Asked if the CIA is currently holding anyone, an agency spokesman said, “We do not comment on this question as a matter of course”.
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Stop the Depleted Uranium Poisoning of America
Monday, October 8th, 2007
By Cathy Garger
DU is being blasted, burned, fired, and spewed all over our indigenous peoples, suburbanites, and city dwellers alike. It is being dispersed -in nanoparticle form - all over our wild lands, harming innocent people as well as animals, birds, fish, and plants. We must each take a stand now and help to stop this radiation poisoning madness via the weaponized ballistic Uranium!
du_explosion_yuma_proving…
How You Can Help Stop the Depleted Uranium Poisoning of America
How can we, dear friends, allow the use of “Depleted” Uranium inside the US (or anywhere, for that matter) to continue? Ballistic “Depleted” Uranium is weakening, sickening, and killing our own citizens right here at home.
As we speak, DU is being blasted, burned, fired, and spewed all over our indigenous peoples, suburbanites, and city dwellers alike. It is being dispersed -in nanoparticle form - all over our wild lands, harming innocent people as well as animals, birds, fish, and plants.
So-called “Depleted” Uranium is making us sick, radioactively contaminating our air, water, and soil. DU mutates our genetic material forevermore. To get a concept of the permanency of DU use? Please consider for a moment that in 4.5 Billion years, one-half of the daughter products of “Depleted” Uranium that have decayed and are even *more* radioactive that the US government (Dept. of Defense and Dept. of Energy) has been using since the 1940s will still remain in our environment!
What can we do, you may ask? We must each take a stand now and help to stop this radiation poisoning madness via the weaponized ballistic Uranium that is not Depleted of radiation - despite what the Military Spin-Masters want us to believe!
It matters not whether you choose to help those being “dosed” by Ballistic “Depleted” Uranium in: Los Alamos, New Mexico, or in Hawaii, or near San Francisco, or in other areas, such as Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, off the California Coast, and in Aberdeen, outside Baltimore, Maryland, too.
And - this is important to know - Ballistic “Depleted” Uranium oxide does not stay neatly in one area, but, rather has been show to travel in the winds from Iraq to England - a total of 2,400 miles - within only nine (9) days.*
The important thing is that each and every one of us learn more about this - and decide to take a stand today and get busy! We must educate and inform all those who do not know. We must also take a stand to help Hawaiian Islanders now - * before October 30 * - to stop the Stryker Brigade from further contaminating Hawaiian Paradise!
If you were not previously aware of this… please know you are in good company. Less than three years ago I had no idea whatsoever that any of this was going on, either! It is Uncle Sam’s most insidious, “hot” and “dirty” secret - hidden well from public awareness. The practice of using “Depleted” Uranium on many of our military facilities and national nuclear weapons “laboratories” is, in effect, the “nuking” of our very own citizens… yes, America itself.
So many people have written to ask me, “Since when did WE, the American People, become our own enemy?!” The answer seems to be sometime in the 1940s, although many argue that this all started way, way back, even before then…
Won’t you please read the following information and join me in taking a stand against what is truly the radiation aerosol/gas poisoning of Americans - by use of ceramic Uranium oxide, a poison gas - by our very own government?
Volunteers are needed now to help keep DU out of Hawaii. To become involved in volunteering to help keep the Stryker Brigade out of Hawaii (they would greatly appreciate even a small amount of your time!) please write to them at: NoDUHawaii [at] yahoo.com .
If all you can do is forward this along to everyone you know and take 5 minutes of your time to write a public comment against the Stryker Brigade being permanently stationed in Hawaii,
http://www.sbct-seis.org/ please know that would mean a whole lot to a great number of people who want nothing more for themselves and their children than to simply breathe clean air and drink clean water and eat healthy food that has not been radiologically contaminated.
Really, if you think about it, isn’t the right not to be radioactively poisoned by one’s own government a basic human right that has been persistently violated inside the United States for the past 60-plus years?
Thank you so much in advance for your help!
Warm best wishes,
Cathy Garger
http://www.mytown.ca/garger
HAWAII - Important Note! Please, everyone, send your public comment before
October 30 to: PublicComments [at] aec.apgea.army.mil.
“Hawaii At War - Stop the SuperLie”
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893476.shtml or
“Hawaii Residents Say No Stryker Brigade In Hawaii”
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893619.shtml or
“Hawaiian Islands are Contaminated with Ballistic Uranium”
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893492.shtml or
“Depleted Uranium Contamination by Strykers in Hawaii”
http://www.indymedia.org/pt/2007/09/893176.shtml
Army Plans to Bring 2/25th Stryker Brigade Combat Team to Hawaii
http://www.sbct-seis.org/
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
“Dust Up” and “Uranium Dust”
http://john-upton.com/lab.htm
“Livermore Nuclear Weapon Lab’s 200 Executioners Ready”
http://www.rense.com/general75/hyd.htm
“Depleted Uranium Poison Targets US Citizens”
http://axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=151&num=23826
“Livermore to Poison San Francisco Area - On Purpose”
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/04/18344023.php
LOS ALAMOS, NM
“Native Women Mark Autumn in Nuclear Shadows”
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/100407WA.shtml
Laura Paskus for Women’s eNews reports on a gathering of women from
six native communities near Los Alamos National Laboratory to discuss
their concerns about nuclear contamination, type-II diabetes and the
near-extinction of traditional midwifery.
Thanks goes to Lisa, a veritable Angel…
http://angelsfortruth.com/Welcome.html
*DU Travels 2,400 miles in only 9 days report:
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2006/DU-Europe-Contamination1jan06.htm
To learn more about what “Depleted” Uranium is, do a Google Video search for Leuren Moret or Rosalie Bertell.
Or you can visit: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2007/Moret-Aishah-Ali1aug07.htm
http://lonestaricon.com/2006/Archives/09/news03.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/DUuse+hazard.html
Have Your Say: Stop the Depleted Uranium Poisoning of America
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Countdown: Wounded vet calls Limbaugh’s comparison of him to suicide bomber ‘repugnant’
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Keith Olbermann reported on Wednesday’s Countdown that Rush Limbaugh has responded to criticism of his remark describing anti-war veterans as “phony soldiers” by comparing a real soldier who criticized him to a suicide bomber.After Limbaugh’s initial statement — which he now claims was taken out of context — Sgt. Brian McGough, a wounded combat veteran, appeared in a VoteVets.org ad saying that many troops in Iraq “believe George Bush’s military policy has been a disaster” and telling Limbaugh, “Until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face stop telling lies about my service.”
Limbaugh’s response to the VoteVets ad — which he admitted he hadn’t seen — was to call it “a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said and then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out in the media … Whoever pumped him full of these lies about what I said and embarrassed him with this tv ad has betrayed him.”
Olbermann then welcomed McGough to his program to address Limbaugh’s comparison of him to a suicide bomber, noting that Limbaugh had not been willing to allow McGough on his own show to confront him directly.
McGough — who served in Kosovo, earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, and was seriously wounded in Iraq — described his initial reaction to Limbaugh’s statement as “disgust” and stated, “I’ve seen the after-effects of a suicide bomb. I’ve had friends that were hurt in suicide bombs. It makes me mad down to a place where I can’t even think to describe. It’s just repugnant.”
McGough further explained that he agreed to do the VoteVets ad because it expressed his own sentiments, and that “for Rush Limbaugh to say that an American soldier like me can’t think for myself because I speak out against the Iraq War is preposterous.”
“[Speaking out] is my right, that I fought for, I bled for,” McGough asserted. He also appealed repeatedly for Limbaugh to invite him or any other member of VoteVets.org on his own show to discuss the issue directly.
The following video clips are from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast on October 3, 2007. (story continues below)
Have Your Say: Countdown: Wounded vet calls Limbaugh’s comparison of him to suicide bomber ‘repugnant’
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Thanks to his dad, George W. Bush was saved from the horrors of Vietnam
Monday, October 8th, 2007
It is documented that the current U.S. president was partying in Alabama while 58,000 of his contemporaries were dying in that country • This truth that he was forced to deny cost CBS commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD
WHILE the number of victims among U.S. soldiers condemned by George W. Bush to die in Iraq continues to rise, the truth of the circumstances in which the president himself avoided being sent to the war on Vietnam, like thousands of young men of his generation, are still censored.
Circulating information on that issue in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections cost CBS journalist and commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation. Rather has just filed a million-dollar claim against his former employer for having punished him in order to calm down the furious White House occupant.
At that time, Rather was forced by his bosses to apologize in the middle of the top U.S. news program for having “used apparently false documents” on the military service record of President George W. Bush during the war in Vietnam… although he knew perfectly well that they were authentic.
In an article just published on this controversy, Greg Palast, the British-based investigative journalist revealed how Bush’s notorious cowardice has been an open confirmed secret since 1999.
Palest recalls that on September 8, 2004, Rather presented his report in which he explained how in 1968, then Congressman George Bush – father of the current president – had arranged things so that his son was not called up for the war in Vietnam, as he should have been, but did his military service in an aviation unit of the National Guard. Something totally unusual when that military corps demanded of its pilots three years’ previous experience in a regular National Air Force unit.
George junior was thus spared from the war in order to defend Houston from a Vietcong attack, the journalist ironically commented.
Bush Sr. maneuvered that solution just 12 days before his son was to be formally recruited.
The BBC had disclosed that information one year previously, Palast noted, and never had to retract it.
23 MILLION TO SAVE HIS BOY
The BBC report, Palast says, was based on a confidential Justice Department document that states how Ben Barnes, lieutenant governor of Texas, who made the arrangements to have Bush junior removed from the U.S. Army registers, received his reward 35 years later.
In 1997, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush, acting irregularly, granted a state lottery contract worth more than one million dollars to a company linked to Barnes, who received a commission of $23 million.
Barnes confessed how, in 1968, he received a call from businessman Sid Adger, a buddy of the Bush family, asking him to do him the favor of moving Bush junior’s name up the waiting list for the National Guard. The current president has always falsely claimed that there was a shortage of candidates to join that military corps whose members are not usually deployed outside national territory.
Barnes then called General James Rose, the local National Guard commander, who sorted out “W”’s registration in a unit of the Ellington airbase where he hooked up with other daddies’ sons.
Bush rapidly rose to the rank of second lieutenant while his less privileged counterparts had to wait years to gain such recognition.
Bush always distinguished himself for his unjustified absences and delays in completing the tasks ascribed to him. Over time, he learned to pilot an F-102, an obsolete aircraft that was not even being used in the South East Asia conflict.
From Ellington, he asked for a transfer to Montgomery, Alabama, where he never showed up. But he was seen taking part in maneuvers surrounding the Senate electoral campaign of Winton “Red” Blount, a buddy in his clan. And enjoying himself at parties where his excessive inclination to alcohol could already be seen. Marijuana and cocaine consumption was in fashion then in get-togethers of moneyed youth and his former buddies have affirmed that the future president was happy to indulge in that pleasure.
A number of documents that would make it possible to confirm the activities or lack of activities of George W. Bush in the war years have mysteriously disappeared from the National Guard files.
In 1972 (the year of Watergate), “W”, then aged 26, decided to extract himself from the masquerade; as it happened, at a time when the National Guard began to impose doping tests. He was then assigned to civilian tasks in Denver where he never showed up.
Meanwhile, 58,000 compatriots of his age lost their lives in Vietnam, in another useless war of a decadent empire.
Despite his documented cowardice, Bush has never hesitated to show himself off in the same Air Force uniform worn by those who never returned from the conflict.
Just like now he is resolutely maintaining more than 150,000 young soldiers in Iraq. More than 3,800 have already died in this war of occupation and thousands have been mutilated… as have one million-plus Iraqis, victims of the lessons in ‘democracy’ of this Texan cowboy who was so afraid of war.
Have Your Say: Thanks to his dad, George W. Bush was saved from the horrors of Vietnam
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Bush aide has denial down pat
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Allegations of torture dismissed
Sheldon Alberts
Say this much for Dana Perino, the White House press secretary — she faced the braying media hounds yesterday with her talking points down pat.
“The policy of the United States is not to torture,” she told reporters at the daily press briefing.
Then again, a moment later, “I will reiterate to you once again that we do not torture.”
And finally, for good measure, “The bottom line is that we do not use torture.”
Seven times in all, the spokeswoman for U.S. President George W. Bush denied her boss was the fingernail-pulling, waterboarding bad guy The New York Times made him out to be in yesterday’s editions. It was tough work.
Her semantic gymnastics aside, Perino confirmed the existence of a secret February, 2005, memo approved by then-attorney-general Alberto Gonzales that gave a green light to the toughest interrogation tactics in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The memo, signed just after Gonzales took control of the Justice Department, explicitly authorized the use of head-slapping, simulated drowning and exposure to frigid temperatures against detainees, sometimes in rapid succession.
According to a front-page story in the Times, he did so against the specific objections of his then-deputy, James Comey, who warned colleagues they would be “ashamed” if the details became public.
Not only did Gonzales ram the memo down the throats of concerned Justice Department employees, he did so less than two months after they had publicly forsaken torture as “abhorrent” and contrary to U.S. law.
The Bush administration has been playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Congress over acceptable methods of interrogation since the 9/11 terror attacks.
Bush has said Geneva conventions prohibiting the mutilation, cruel treatment and torture of detainees do not apply to al-Qaeda members.
Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel seemed to agree. In a 2002 memo to Gonzales, then White House counsel, it claimed Bush was not bound by federal anti-torture laws and argued that anyone using tactics authorized by the President could not be prosecuted.
Moreover, the memo argued cruel and degrading treatment was not illegal so long as it did not produce physical pain equivalent to organ failure or death or mental pain causing lasting psychological damage.
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal triggered a marked shift in public — and congressional — opinion. In 2005, U.S. lawmakers passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which explicitly banned “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners.
Word of the new memo is significant because critics say it reveals a deliberate Justice Department attempt to sidestep the congressional legislation.
Even before the Detainee Treatment Act was passed, officials there were looking for a way out by contending none of the approved CIA tactics violated provisions in the law.
“It appears that under attorney-general Gonzales, [officials at the Justice Department] reversed themselves and reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret,” said Patrick Leahy, the Democratic senator who is chairman of the Senate judiciary committee.
Brian Roerhkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, denied any clandestine attempt to bypass broader prohibitions against torture.
“Neither attorney-general Alberto Gonzales nor anyone else within the department modified or withdrew that opinion,” he said.
But the Justice Department and the White House are treading in murky water here. Is there a difference between “waterboarding” — pouring water over the hooded head of a prisoner –and the “simulated drowning” authorized in the classified memo?
Perino declined to offer details of what that particular tactic entailed. “What I can tell you is that any procedures that they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful,” she said.
© National Post 2007
Have Your Say: Bush aide has denial down pat
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PETER HITCHENS: North Korea, the last great Marxist bastion, is a real-life Truman show
Monday, October 8th, 2007
A rare and remarkable dispatch from inside the secret world of Kim Il Sung
Last week’s summit between the leaders of North and South Korea was hailed as a step towards world peace because North Korea is portrayed as a member of the “Axis of Evil” with plans to develop nuclear weapons.
But, as Peter Hitchens found when he evaded the Marxist state’s ban on foreign journalists, it is a nation to be pitied rather than feared…
Insider’s view: Peter Hitchens saw a sinister country verging on collapse
If this is a showcase, then what can it be like in the parts they do not want us to see? North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, is closed to all but the most favoured citizens. Only friends of the regime may live here.
Yet in this citadel of privilege, every face I see is thin, every belt tight, every garment worn and faded, every child and adult under-sized, most windows unlit.
For the ordinary poor, who cannot even leave their towns without a permit, Pyongyang is almost as inaccessible as New York or Paris. How thin and ragged are they?
Those considered unreliable must live out their chilly, pinched lives amid the dreary spoil-heaps and miserable townships of the coalfields. How wretched can they possibly be?
As for those who offend the regime, a chain of labour camps, stretching from Yongchon on the west coast to Onsong in the far north east, is hidden in the northern mountains, where no foreigner penetrates and where people die of hunger and despair, unrecorded.
I am not sure how we can live our prosperous lives, knowing these wretches exist. Here in the alleged paradise city of Pyongyang, the buildings are blistered and stained, the paint faded and cracked. Except for a few main processional ways – and even here there are signs of decay – the shabbiness and gloom are overwhelming.
At dusk, when a normal city would begin to sparkle, an almost total darkness falls in the long interval before the first lights come on.
Later, when the government considers bedtime has arrived, the power is cut off from a million homes, whose occupants will be wakened at 5am by plonky music leaking from loudspeakers, and ordered to work by a siren at 7am, every day but Sunday (and sometimes even then).
Now, in the early evening, silence is almost complete. I can hear a drunken man singing from what feels like half a mile away. Yet we are at the heart of a city of perhaps three million people.
And the lights, when they do come on, are so feeble that I am suddenly reminded – poignantly – of the austere British townscapes of my own childhood in the early Fifties.
Except that even they were never as austere as this. Nor were they sinister and mad, as this place is.
Empty gesture: A glamorous police officer directs almost non-existent traffic
If all politics is a sort of mental illness that gets worse as the politicians’ power increases, then this is the locked ward where absolute power has brought absolute insanity.
Brooding over the deranged cityscape is the ugliest building in the universe, a 1,000ft pyramid, already a ruin though it has never been finished and never will be, perhaps because the money has run out, perhaps because it is so jerry-built that nobody would ever have dared stay in it.
Official guides pretend not to notice it though it is by far the tallest structure in Pyongyang.
This symbol of overweening ambition is by a strange coincidence the exact shape and size of the Ministry of Truth, the chief source of official lies in George Orwell’s prophecy of just such a state, and just such a city, in 1984.
It is almost as if North Korea’s rulers have taken Orwell’s novel as a handbook rather than a warning.
But where Orwell’s ministry was a glittering white, the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel is a dingy dun-brown, its hundreds of glassless windows like sockets gazing at what its maker, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, has wrought.
And what he has wrought is hopeless failure, a long, grim joke that has yet to reach its punchline.
Kim’s city is the capital of a state that is far more of a danger to its own people than it is to the rest of the world.
It may be – I think the evidence is sketchy – that North Korea has a nuclear bomb. What is certain is that it has almost nothing else.
It cannot any longer even fake success at its very heart. Its great propaganda festival, the Arirang Games where thousands of young Koreans create vast pictures with eerily synchronised movements, is a pathetic remnant.
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Stalin meets Disney: The Arirang Games often descended into farce
It is the only show I have ever been to where the cast is far bigger than the audience. The colossal May Day Stadium was three-quarters empty the night I went.
The performance, in which Joseph Stalin meets Walt Disney, was less confidently militaristic than in past times and most of the “soldiers and sailors” were attractive young women in pert skirts, none looking very menacing.
Sometimes it descended into circus, with platoons of dancing children dressed as boiled eggs, and a motorbike on a tightrope.
Every machine in the country is close to breakdown. This even affects parts of the system that are on show.
I was there as a tourist, arriving in a Soviet-built Tupolev from the age of Yuri Gagarin, which shuddered and strained into the sky and was prudently kept clear of terminal buildings at the Chinese airport from which I began my journey.
My tour bus failed (its fuel tank sprang a leak that the driver tried to plug with chewing gum) on the way to a museum of gifts given to Kim Il Sung.
Our guide pedalled off for help on a borrowed bike but the bus that eventually rescued us also breathed its last, forcing us to walk the final few hundred yards to an unscheduled break for lunch.
We never arrived at the museum.
While the first bus was broken down, we were prevented from moving more than a few yards away from it – probably because we would then have been able to look closely at the nearby lorryload of runt-sized troops, part of the supposedly fearsome North Korean army.
The weapons they carried were ancient, probably more dangerous to their users than to their targets.
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Casting a shadow: Peter walks alongside the immense bronze statue of the country’s Great Leader Kim II Sung
Vehicles everywhere were decrepit, clothes shabby and faded from much washing, in the greys, browns and greens that dominated our streets in the years before cheap and colourful fabrics.
I never saw anyone in jeans or a baseball cap.
The soldiers looked universally undersized and underfed, usually with prominent cheekbones. And the ‘military-first’ policy means that they get better food supplies than most civilians.
How do the ordinary people fare? We cannot tell.
But here is one possibility. Some years ago, the leading American expert on North Korea, Bradley Martin, had an accidental and obviously unintended glimpse, in a remote district, of a train bearing ordinary North Koreans: “They were a ghastly sight.
“Their clothing was ragged and filthy, their faces darkened with what I presumed to be either mud or skin discolourations resulting from pellagra. There was no glass in the windows of their train.”
Yet much of the country is hauntingly lovely, willow-fringed fields in which peasants stagger under heavy sheaves, villages that are picturesque from a distance but squalid at closer quarters.
This month the roads are lined with flowers growing riotously in the verges, a hint that beneath the weight of despotism, Koreans seek freedom in ordinary things.
One of my five days in the country was a public holiday, an ancient festival of ancestor worship too powerful to be suppressed, when the whole country went picnicking in hilltop country graveyards.
But on a working day, in a 200-mile drive, I saw just two tractors in operation in the fields – probably because there is no fuel for them.
In five days of travelling by road, I saw miles of electrified railway, but only four moving trains, and they were rolling slowly and hauled by diesel locomotives, suggesting the current is erratic or just switched off.
My allegedly luxury hotel in Pyongyang had its power cut off each morning as soon as the tour parties had set off on their various pilgrimages to the many shrines of the Great Leader.
Sometimes it was if we were witnessing a sort of Truman Show, in which even the casual passers-by might easily have been rehearsed actors pretending to be real people.
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History lesson: A North Korean officer gives Pyongyang’s version of the Korean War. The conference chamber is where representatives of the North and South sometimes meet
A promised visit to Pyongyang’s underground railway consisted of a trip between two stations, during which ordinary travellers were cleared from our carriage.
Many passengers stared at us with shock that we were there at all. Even in Pyongyang, a foreigner is an event.
As we descended the immensely deep escalators, a party of women on the upward staircase were singing a song about how they couldn’t manage without their Dear Leader.
A similar hymn drifted from the loudspeakers.
Genuine? Accidental? Or staged?
But not everything could be arranged or controlled. A number of incidents lifted the veil without meaning to.
Richard Jones, the intrepid photographer who accompanied me, raised his camera towards an ancient, 5ft gentleman in a Mao cap, trimming the grass on a Pyongyang boulevard.
The old man, possibly a veteran of the Korean War, snarled and raised his sickle as if to strike.
Having been taught from childhood that Westerners are wolves in human form, he intended to defend the fatherland against the imperialist spy.
On another occasion, we arrived at our pre-booked restaurant to find a drunk – or possibly a corpse – sprawled outside.
Seeing us approaching, loyal citizens immediately formed a human barrier to shield the sight from alien eyes.
The trouble is, even if everything we saw was what we were meant to see, the impression given is of a society in an advanced stage of decomposition, held together by a fragile web of lies.
The cult of the Great Leader is much like that of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito before 1945.
In fact it is probably modelled on it, since all Korea was under Japanese rule until 1945 and the people were compelled to worship the emperor as a god.
But it has other elements, too. Confucianism demands respect for ancestors, perhaps the origin of the red-and-white obelisks in every town proclaiming that the Great Leader is “always with us”.
But there may be other roots for this. Kim Il Sung as a teenager played the organ in his father’s Protestant church and seems to have liked it. When American soldiers captured his offices in the Korean War, they found a sizeable organ, of all things, installed there.
Kim was bored by Christianity, preferring (by his own account) to go fishing than to church. But he was paying attention, and many have wondered if the worship of father and son – Kim Il Sung and present leader Kim Jong Il – is a blasphemous copy of Christianity.
In any case, it seems to work. As we barrelled down the long, straight, empty motorway that leads to the closed border with South Korea, our guide asked merrily if we knew how the Korean War had started.
I said, cautiously, that our imperialist history books said that it had been started by the North.
The poor man’s face fell as if I had wounded him. It is an essential part of North Korea’s founding myth that the war was started by the Americans and the South.
Even a mention of any other version of history upset him, an intelligent person with a sense of humour, judging by his behaviour the rest of the time.
He took it as a British person of my generation might take a claim that Britain was the aggressor in 1939.
It was to avoid upsetting or scandalising him that I later made a shameful obeisance to the Kim Il Sung image, laying flowers and offering a perfunctory bow.
I feared that if I didn’t, I would be treading on a real, living personal faith, not just showing disrespect to a cold, dead cult.
And I think I was correct in this judgment. For this really is – as Eastern Europe and Russia never were – a wholly closed country where a large majority more or less believe the state propaganda.
East Germany tried to stop its people watching West German TV, but abandoned the effort because it was just too difficult.
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Show and tell: A mural proclaims the country’s determination to resist western ‘imperialism’
Powerful transmitters – the BBC, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe – broadcast to Russia and her empire so successfully that in Prague in the Seventies people would come up to me in trams to pass on their thanks for the existence of the BBC Czech service.
But not here. Every radio and television has its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only North Korean signals.
Inspectors visit frequently to check that nobody has tampered with this mental barricade. And, while a few brave souls defy this (resoldering the dials when an inspection is due), most are too frightened, or so loyal, that it would never occur to them to do so.
In Cold War days South Korea used to float radios across the border on balloons, but few dared use them even when they got through.
There is no internet access here for ordinary beings. On a trip round a vast “people’s study centre”, we were shown North Koreans supposedly working at computers.
But when one of us tried to reach the Google search site, he could get nowhere. The screens had no link to the outside world.
A librarian boasted of her stock of English-language books but, asked if she had a copy of 1984, had plainly never heard of it.
A supposed economics expert, likewise, did not seem to have heard of the free-market economist Milton Friedman – and there was much consternation among the guides when I asked about these things.
North Koreans live under a thick blanket of darkness, with a hopelessly distorted or restricted picture of the outside world.
They have never seen pictures of the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre.
They are vaguely aware of The Beatles (I was proudly offered the chance to listen to a rare tape of Ob La Di, Ob La Da in the People’s Study Hall).
One of my guides claimed to have heard of The Rolling Stones, but couldn’t name any of their songs.
It is easy to understand why North Korea does not want “I can’t get no satisfaction” echoing round its darkened avenues.
But this skewed, half-blind view of the world has its serious side. It is a judicious mix of truth and outrageous lies.
Heaven knows what is taught in schools (we were not allowed near any) but the authorities have produced an English-language version of a propaganda pamphlet called US – The Empire Of Terrorism, which is the local answer to American accusations that North Korea sponsors terrorist groups, and to George W. Bush’s accusation that North Korea belonged to an ‘Axis of Evil’.
Some of its charges against America are truthful. But these are mingled with unhinged fantasies and lies.
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On message: This mural praises the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. His cult is a sort of national religion and many seem to be genuine believers
After a relatively factual attack on the United States’ treatment of the Native Americans, and on seizure of Mexican territory, the pamphlet declares: “In April 1968, the US administration organised the assassination of Martin Luther King, a black Baptist leader who advocated freedom and equality of the blacks.
“Enraged by this, the blacks rose in a revolt that swept across 46 cities simultaneously. It was an act in self-defence. However, the administration retaliated by going on a spree of white terror…
“Black survivors of white hooliganism and terror are now confined to Detroit, Appalachia and the delta of southern Mississippi, where they live a dispirited life. For fear of racist terrorism, the 22million black population hesitate to go to schools, theatres, restaurants and even public lavatories…”
I am not making up this rubbish, nor did anyone try to conceal it from me.
The bookstall attendant, in a pleasant mountain resort, who sold it to me (for $1) was delighted by my purchase.
One of Pyongyang’s unexpected treasures is an American warship, the spy vessel USS Pueblo, which is moored as a trophy on the Taedong River, and is perhaps the last place on Earth where the Cold War is kept alive.
It is extraordinary to walk into the most secret rooms of this ship, where the ultimate espionage technology of 40 years ago is on open display (including decoding machines marked ‘NOFORN’, which means that their products could not be shared with the British MI6).
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Daily struggle: Grinding poverty is the reality for all apart from the ruling elite
It still looks surprisingly modern.
An angry propaganda video records the ship’s capture in January 1968, and the dismal humiliation of her captain and crew in an incident rather similar to (but much nastier than) Britain’s recent experience in the Persian Gulf.
If only, the North Korean government must wish, the Cold War could be brought back. As a Soviet ally, Pyongyang received the aid that allowed it to build this concrete show city and sustain its unyielding regime with food for the loyal and brute force for the rebellious.
Now the concrete crumbles and there is no money for food or bullets. North Korea, desperate and destitute, is accused of everything from drug-running and money-laundering to forging dollar bills to stay alive.
It reluctantly seeks food aid from the outside (and gives most of it to friends of the regime).
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Much more typical of real life than the grandiose Metro shown proudly to visitors
Last October’s supposed nuclear blast (which experts still dispute) may well have been the leadership’s infuriated response to the freezing of its accounts in a Macau bank, accounts allegedly used to buy luxuries for the loyal elite who dwell behind police barriers in tree-shaded Changgwang Street near the old Soviet Embassy, venturing out in black 4×4s with tinted windows.
Certainly the unfreezing of these accounts has been a key part of the talks that reopened after the bomb went off.
Here, too, is “office Building No 15″, headquarters of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il who took over from his father in 1994.
The younger Kim, short, podgy and unimpressive, has spoken in public only once and has been careful not to usurp too much of his father’s prestige.
The old man was, after all, a guerrilla leader in the war against the Japanese and is revered by older citizens who remember their country rising out of the flattened ruins of the Korean War before it was surpassed economically by the capitalist south.
Much effort was devoted to keeping him alive, for fear that his successors would fail to maintain his magical hold over the people.
Doctors at the Kim Il Sung Institute of Health and Longevity prescribed a special diet of extra-long dog penises (minimum length 2.8in) to keep the Great Leader well.
Maybe it was this regime that kept him going until he was 82, perhaps helped by the “Happy Corps” and the “Satisfaction Corps” of attractive young women recruited to serve in the chain of secret palaces and mansions inhabited by Kim Il Sung and his far-less-impressive son and heir, Kim Jong Il. Female beauty is a passport to preferment in North Korea.
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Cult viewing: Throughout the country, images of the benign leadership are pressed home
The Dear Leader is still rumoured to choose Pyongyang’s famously attractive traffic policewomen who, clad in fetching uniforms, control the sparse traffic with strangely provocative robotic gestures.
But the succession, a laughable breach of Marxist dogma, surely cannot go any further. The Younger Kim was 65 in February and is said to suffer from diabetes and to have recently undergone unnamed major surgery.
He looked unwell when he appeared in public for Tuesday’s summit with the South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun. His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, is an unlikely heir, though he is already 36 and was educated in Switzerland and China. Inconveniently, he was caught in 2001 travelling to Japan on a false Dominican Republic passport, with two women (neither of them his wife) and a suitcase full of cash.
The passport was in the name Pang Xiong, Chinese for “fat bear”, a name that rather suits him.
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The same shape and size as the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in George Orwell’s ‘1984′, the 1,000ft tall PyongYang hotel looms, unfinished and crumbling, over Pyongyong
The world needs to work out – quickly – how this murderous black comedy can be brought to an end that is not too painful. The obvious answer would be reunification with South Korea.
But South Korea and North Korea alike are terrified by the example of Germany, where unity devastated the East and nearly bankrupted the West.
It also left the old East German elite jobless and humiliated, and pursued by the courts.
Economic experts believe a merger of the two Koreas would ruin the South. As for the Dear Leader, he presumably thinks it safer to cling on than risk being strung up like Saddam, locked up like Slobodan Milosevic or hounded to death like Augusto Pinochet.
North Korea’s new version of nuclear blackmail is just that, crude extortion by people who have no honest way of supporting themselves.
Give us aid and money, they demand, or we may do something terrible. If they do fulfil their threats, it is hard to know who will be most badly hurt.
Pyongyang’s Taepodong rockets are wildly unreliable and as likely to fall into the sea or strike the wrong country as to hit their intended targets.
Their nuclear technology is crude and possibly faked.
Meanwhile, increasing numbers of emaciated North Koreans are fleeing across the Chinese border or working abroad.
The long-hidden truth about the outside world filters back from them to their friends and families.
And the Dear Leader and his loyalists have no idea how they can secure the succession of the world’s first Marxist-Leninist hereditary monarchy, a problem that looks rather urgent.
Quite soon, it will have to be admitted that neither Kim Il Sung nor Kim Jong Il are the godlike beings they are made out to be.
Quite soon, the entombed, defrauded North Koreans will realise their fatherland is not a great power and that it is bankrupt and backward.
It will be a hard moment for them and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
It is our responsibility to try to see that there is nothing worse.
Pretending that North Korea is a terrifying great power, when it is in truth a crippled nation stranded between two worlds by the end of the Cold War, and made increasingly irrational by poverty and pain, will not help.
It is a country to be pitied rather than feared.
Have Your Say: PETER HITCHENS: North Korea, the last great Marxist bastion, is a real-life Truman show
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