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Bush stabs America in the back

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Keith Olbermann speaks for America regarding the corruption in the White House and Senate. We must ALL be on guard because this country is getting ready to turn into a dictatorship. We must clean out the corrupt government workers who are controlled by the super rich and do work ONLY for the large corporation at the demise of middle America.

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Ten ways to thwart Big Brother

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

We’ve never been under such intense scrutiny as we are today. So how do we evade the snoopers? Here, an ‘off-grid’ expert offers an insider’s guide

By Nick Rosen

We live in the most watched-over society in Europe. Exposure, especially in The Observer, has done little to hold the state and private sector in check. Phone records have become police records, as Henry Porter pointed out in this paper last week, and CCTV camera records are now fed into the automatic registration number computer. Credit and store-card records have become marketing records and our email addresses are points of entry for all sorts of crime and spam.

It’s time to fight back using all the legal means at our disposal. We need to duck under the radar of government surveillance, credit-checking agencies, internet and mobile phone companies or the DVLA. I have been learning how to keep the info-snoopers at bay. My research has led me into a world of middle-aged hoodies, who cover up in shopping centres to avoid the CCTV cameras; of young computer users who keep their names off spam lists and out of reach of the megacorps; and people who live off-grid, out of sight of the system and unplugged from the utility companies. So, here’s is a survival checklist for the information age.

1 Buy an untraceable mobile phone

Travel to a town you have never visited before, to an area with no CCTV cameras and ask a homeless person to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone for you. That way no shop will have your image on its CCTV. You will also have an anonymous mobile.

In order to keep your anonymity, top it up in a shop with no CCTV outside. Or dispense with the phone altogether and return to the humble payphone, now the preserve of tourists and the super-poor.

Even if you stick to your traceable phone, leave it switched off whenever possible to avoid having your movements tracked. Many phones are still traceable, so you need to take the battery out to be certain. If you have a Bluetooth phone, keep the service switched off because this is now being tested for advertising and other marketing activities.

2 Safeguard your email

If you use one of the free, web-based services like Gmail, your communications are being stored to build up a picture of your interests. Instead, you can use a service called Hushmail to send encrypted emails. Or work out a private code with friends you want to communicate with.

You do not need an email address of your own. One hacker I spoke to sends emails from cybercafes via The Observer website, using the service which allows anyone to send any article to a friend. He embeds his message into the covering note which goes with the article.

Others with their own computer use the free XeroBank browser (in preference to Explorer or Firefox), which includes several privacy-enhancing add-ons and sends all data through a network ‘cloud’ which hides most of the data you normally give away as you use a computer, but at the cost of reduced speed (http://xerobank.com/xB_browser.html).

3 Safeguard your computer and your files

There is sophisticated software that deletes all traces of your activities from your computer. Assuming you don’t have access to this, it is still worth remembering the data about you contained inside each file. Many digital photos, for example, contain within them the serial number of the camera that took them. Word documents contain the name of the author as well as traces of previous drafts.

4 Be invisible to CCTV cameras

Steve is a middle-aged IT consultant who lives in a bungalow on a smart private estate in south west London. He has never committed a criminal act. When he goes to business meetings, he wears a suit and tie, but when he walks around his local high street, he dons a hoodie. He does it on principle.

‘I don’t disapprove of the technology in its rightful place,’ Steve told me, ‘but we have an unregulated mess. It hasn’t reduced crime in any real sense - it’s displaced it in some cases.’ Media reports always say there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, but they have been using that figure for the past two years. So it’s a safe bet we have at least six million by now, and there is no central register. You can use the Data Protection Act to request a copy of your own image from any particular camera, but that is simply a way of harassing CCTV owners, not safeguarding your identity.

5 Stay off spam mailing lists

Each time you submit your email address to register for a new website, create a special address, either on a free webmail service or on your own email server so you have control over it. Then, if the company later sells your email address or loses it through poor security, you will know exactly who to blame. And you will be able to close the account or block all email to that particular address. Again, Hushmail is useful for this. You can set it up to create these aliases for you.

6 Prevent supermarkets knowing your shopping habits

Swap your supermarket loyalty card with a friend or acquaintance every few months, after having cashed in any points you have accumulated (treat Oyster and other local transport cards the same way). You lose no benefits and it prevents tracking of specific purchasing patterns (or journeys) tied to your name and address. Use cash more often - save your credit card for emergencies.

7 Avoid utility companies’ marketing departments

Live off-grid, unplugged from the system with solar panels and rainwater harvesting. There are tens of thousands of people living without mains power, water or sewerage, in isolated cottages, behind hedgerows in caravans or in groups of yurts in country fields. And this is not just a movement for tree huggers and climate campers. Many live on boats in towns and cities, and if you live in a flat or house, you can still unplug.

8 Keep your car off the automatic number recognition system

The simplest way is to leave the car at home and use a bicycle. But if you must drive, don’t go into a congestion zone at any time. There are other legal ways to hide your registration number from the cameras - swap the light above the rear numberplate for an infrared bulb and that will flood the video-camera which operates at near infrared frequency.

9 Safeguard your NHS data

If you are born in this country, then your NHS records are inescapable. But you can choose to store them with your GP to keep them off the central computer, and this should reduce the chances of the medical records being sold (legally) to drugs companies or (illegally) to private detectives or being snooped on by the 300,000 ‘authorised users’ of the system, without affecting medical care.

There is no need to worry about, for example, records of your blood group not being available to medical staff after an accident - doctors no longer rely on paper or computer records. The automated diagnostic blood group tests are done by the ambulance crew on the way to hospital. You can get a form letter to send to the NHS from nhsconfidentiality.org.

10 Shop outside the system

The website Freecycle (freecycle.org) could provide many of your needs. It consists of hundreds of short announcements from people trying to give away stuff they no longer need: beds, TVs, bookcases, the whole of human life is there in return for the cost of picking it up from the donor. There are local Freecycle groups all over the country (and the world), each with their own local web address. Some people make a decent living gathering things from Freecycle and selling them at car boot sales.

There are full-time scavengers living off food retrieved from supermarket bins, because vast amounts of produce are simply thrown away on the eve of their sell-by date.

Another way to avoid buying food is to barter for it. The car park of the pub in the centre of Longframlington village in Northumberland has been a barter centre for decades. On any Friday night between April and October, locals arrive and flip down the backs of their 4×4s laden with the week’s produce, whether its chanterelles, venison, pheasant, line-caught salmon or the latest crop of beetroots and lettuces.

Technically, this innocent activity is tax evasion. ‘It’s all very rustic and encourages a paper-free environment, but this can underpin what can only amount to potential income tax, corporation tax or VAT non-disclosure, or even fraud,’ said accountant Julie Butler. But does Alistair Darling really want to take another bash at the delicate fabric of the countryside?

It may seem almost comical to go to these lengths, but the ways companies and the public sector can misuse data isn’t a joke. We cannot trust them to safeguard our data or use it ethically, so we must provide our own safeguards.

· Nick Rosen is editor of the Off-Grid website: off-grid.net

RINF Editors Note: Via the awesome Aftermath News site which is a fellow comrade against the NWO agenda, make sure you include this excellent site in your bookmarks

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Is Bush Administration Planning Martial Law?

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Congressman DeFazio Denied Access to Government Documents

By David Gutierrez

The Bush Administration shocked lawmakers and analysts two months ago when it denied a member of the House Homeland Security Committee permission to examine classified plans for maintaining the functioning of the government in the event of a major natural disaster or terrorist attack.

In order to alleviate concerns that the White House has plans for martial law, Representative Peter DeFazio, (D-OR), asked to see the plan for government continuity. As a member of the Homeland Security Committee, DeFazio has the required security clearance to view such a plan. In the past, he has entered what is known as a “bubble room” to view classified documents, and his requests have never been denied.

But in a break with tradition, DeFazio’s request, although initially approved, was later rejected. The congressman has not been informed who made the decision about his request, nor about the reason for it.

“We do not comment … on the process that this access entails,” said White House spokesperson Trey Bohn. “It is important to keep in mind that much of the information related to the continuity of government is highly classified.”

“I just can’t believe that they’re going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack,” DeFazio said. “I would think that would be relevant to any member of Congress, let alone a member of the Homeland Security Committee.”

“Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right,” he said.

Political scientist Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, referred to the decision as “inexplicable,” saying he could not think of “one good reason” for it.

“I find it inexplicable and probably reflective of the usual knee-jerk overextension of executive power that we see from this White House,” Ornstein said.

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Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of “ordering and authorizing” torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military’s detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld shouting “murderer” and “war criminal” at the breakfast meeting venue, US embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary’s whereabouts citing “security reasons”.

Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activist point out that under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive.

“Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when US forces were hunting him down,” activist Tanguy Richard said. “He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn’t pay.”

International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed the complaint on Thursday after learning that Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit Paris.

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School uniforms use RFID to track kids

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Trevor Darnborough, whose company, Darnbro, filed for a patent on securing RFID tags to clothing, hopes other schools will be interested.

By Thomas Claburn

Ten schoolchildren in the United Kingdom are being tracked by RFID chips in their school uniforms as part of a pilot program.

If the program proves successful as a way to hasten registration, simplify data entry for the school’s behavioral reporting system, and ensure attendance, Trevor Darnborough, whose company, Darnbro, filed for a patent on securing RFID tags to clothing, hopes other schools will be interested, according to the Doncaster Free Press.

The chipped children are enrolled at Hungerhill School in Edenthorpe, England, a secondary school for ages 11 to 16.

David Clouter, a parent and founder of Leave Them Kids Alone, a children’s advocacy group, condemned the plan. “With pupils being fingerprinted and now this it seems we are treating children in a way that we have traditionally treated criminals,” he told the Doncaster Free Press.

“The system is not intrusive to the pupil in the slightest,” Hungerhill teacher Graham Wakeling told the Doncaster Free Press. He also said that all the patents of the children in the trial supported the tracking effort.

Video surveillance is already commonplace in the United Kingdom, and a growing number of schoolchildren are fingerprinted for administrative and security reasons. Since 2001, nearly 6,000 pupils have been fingerprinted in the United Kingdom, the Daily Mail reported earlier this month, with 20 new schools embracing the practice every week.

In a blog post about the report, security expert Bruce Schneier quipped, “So now it’s easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you’re elsewhere.”

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Street cleaners prepare to blast Banksy away

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Critics call the graffiti artist a genius, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have paid £1m for his work. But Hackney council has ordered its workers to power-hose his pictures out of sight

By Cole Moreton

What is the biggest eyesore on the streets of east London? A giant rat with a knife and fork in its paws, apparently. Or a rioter throwing flowers. Hackney council says these subversive images are making the place look dirty and have to go – even if they were spray-painted by Banksy, the art world’s most unlikely superstar.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have just paid £1m for some of his work. From Hollywood to Hoxton, art collectors are prepared to pay big money for anything Banksy does, with his most expensive single piece, Space Girl and Bird, selling for £288,000 at Bonhams in April. But Hackney council doesn’t care.

“We have to clean up the walls,” said a spokeswoman, confirming that the street cleaners are ready to blast some of modern British art’s most distinctive images away as part of a zero-tolerance policy. “We can’t make a decision as to whether something is art or graffiti. The Government judges us on the number of clean walls we have.”

Never mind that art tourists come from all over the world to try to spot the Grim Reaper with the smiley face or some of the other 30 or so Banksy works that have been made inside the borough boundary since he first started working with stencils seven years ago.

The council says it will remove the art “whenever we find it”. In that case, officers must be the last people in London not to know where it is. Maps available on the internet give exact locations. They also show where the cocaine-snorting policeman or the dinner-jacketed rats with a red carpet to their hole used to be. Banksy has been a victim of the street teams before, you see – but usually by accident.

A year ago, two officially sanctioned Banksy works were meant to be unveiled at the opening of a new square in Hackney, but when the covers were removed two days before the ceremony, the cleaners took exception to the stencils of a man’s face and a girl in a gas mask and hosed both away.

“These were famous artworks by Banksy and of considerable value,” said the co-operative responsible for them being there. The council apologised. That disaster was thought to have led to a list of untouchable sites, but if there was one it has been thrown away. “It is a myth that Hackney has a list of protected street art,” said councillor Alan Laing, the member of the ruling cabinet responsible for the look of the streets. “Some might see graffiti as street art, but to most people it is just plain vandalism.”

Born and raised in Bristol, Banksy started out as part of a graffiti team. According to the self-made legend, his real name may be Robert Banks, and his parents are said to believe he is still a painter and decorator.

His work is often funny, iconoclastic and strangely touching, from two policemen kissing to the naked man hanging off the window ledge of a sexual health clinic in Bristol. The city council chose to keep that one, because people liked it. Banksy has also carried out guerrilla-art stunts at London Zoo, the British Museum and several major American galleries. This summer he made a Stonehenge-style circle at the Glastonbury Festival out of portable loos.

In recent years his fame has spread and his ambition grown: he painted a hole with blue sky on the West Bank wall built by Israel, and made a live elephant look covered in crimson flock wallpaper for an exhibition in Los Angeles. That show introduced his work to Hollywood – the singer Christina Aguilera later bought a picture of Queen Victoria having lesbian sex, and Pitt and Jolie became collectors. Last week, 10 of his pieces raised a total of £500,000 at Bonhams in London.

Gareth Williams, senior picture specialist at the auction house, said after the sale: “Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the Banksy phenomenon is neither his meteoric rise, nor the substantial sums of money that his art now commands, but that as a self-confessed guerrilla artist he has been so wholeheartedly embraced by the very establishment he satirises.”

Embraced? Not everywhere. They may not know much about art in Hackney, but they know what they don’t like.

Top prices: Off the street and into the auction house

£1m

Various works sold to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, October 2007

£288,000

‘Space Girl and Bird’ (commissioned by the band Blur for their album ‘Think Tank’), April 2007

£102,000

‘Bombing Middle England’, February 2007

£96,000

‘Ballerina with Action Parts’, February 2007

£57,600

‘Mona Lisa’, October 2006

£25,000

Three prints including Queen Victoria sitting on a woman’s face sold to Christina Aguilera, summer 2006

Further reading: ‘Banksy Locations and Tours’ by Martin Bull (Shellshock Publishing, £10.99)

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White House Leak: Cheney’s Plan for Iran Attack

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

High-ranking military experts say an attack would lead to world economic chaos, or even what Bush calls ‘World War III.’

By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Cordula Meyer, Der Spiegel

US Vice President Dick Cheney — the power behind the throne, the eminence grise, the man with the (very) occasional grandfatherly smile — is notorious for his propensity for secretiveness and behind-the-scenes manipulation. He’s capable of anything, say friends as well as enemies. Given this reputation, it’s no big surprise that Cheney has already asked for a backroom analysis of how a war with Iran might begin.

In the scenario concocted by Cheney’s strategists, Washington’s first step would be to convince Israel to fire missiles at Iran’s uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Tehran would retaliate with its own strike, providing the US with an excuse to attack military targets and nuclear facilities in Iran.

This information was leaked by an official close to the vice president. Cheney himself hasn’t denied engaging in such war games. For years, in fact, he’s been open about his opinion that an attack on Iran, a member of US President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” is inevitable.

Given these not-too-secret designs, Democrats and Republicans alike have wondered what to make of the still mysterious Israeli bombing run in Syria on Sept. 6. Was it part of an existing war plan? A test run, perhaps? For days after the attack, one question dominated conversation at Washington receptions: How great is the risk of war, really?

Grandiose Plans, East and West

In the September strike, Israeli bombers were likely targeting a nuclear reactor under construction, parts of which are alleged to have come from North Korea. It is possible that key secretaries in the Bush cabinet even tried to stop Israel. To this day, the administration has neither confirmed nor commented on the attack.

Nevertheless, in Washington, Israel’s strike against Syria has revived the specter of war with Iran. For the neoconservatives it could represent a glimmer of hope that the grandiose dream of a democratic Middle East has not yet been buried in the ashes of Iraq. But for realists in the corridors of the State Department and the Pentagon, military action against Iran is a nightmare they have sought to avert by asking a simple question: “What then?”

The Israeli strike, or something like it, could easily mark the beginning of the “World War III,” which President Bush warned against last week. With his usual apocalyptic rhetoric, he said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could lead the region to a new world war if his nation builds a nuclear bomb.

Conditions do look ripe for disaster. Iran continues to acquire and develop the fundamental prerequisites for a nuclear weapon. The mullah regime receives support — at least moral support, if not technology — from a newly strengthened Russia, which these days reaches for every chance to provoke the United States. President Vladimir Putin’s own (self-described) “grandiose plan” to restore Russia’s armed forces includes a nuclear buildup. The war in Iraq continues to drag on without an end in sight or even an opportunity for US troops to withdraw in a way that doesn’t smack of retreat. In Afghanistan, NATO troops are struggling to prevent a return of the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists. The Palestinian conflict could still reignite on any front.

In Washington, Bush has 15 months left in office. He may have few successes to show for himself, but he’s already thinking of his legacy. Bush says he wants diplomacy to settle the nuclear dispute with Tehran, and hopes international pressure will finally convince Ahmadinejad to come to his senses. Nevertheless, the way pressure has been building in Washington, preparations for war could be underway.

In late September, the US Senate voted to declare the 125,000-man Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. High-ranking US generals have accused Iran of waging a “proxy war” against the United States through its support of Shiite militias in Iraq. And strategists at the Pentagon, apparently at Cheney’s request, have developed detailed plans for an attack against Tehran.

Instead of the previous scenario of a large-scale bombardment of the country’s many nuclear facilities, the current emphasis is, once again, on so-called surgical strikes, primarily against the quarters of the Revolutionary Guards. This sort of attack would be less massive than a major strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Conservative think tanks and pundits who sense this could be their last chance to implement their agenda in the Middle East have supported and disseminated such plans in the press. Despite America’s many failures in Iraq, these hawks have urged the weakened president to act now, accusing him of having lost sight of his principal agenda and no longer daring to apply his own doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

Sheer Lunacy?

The notion of war with Iran has spilled over into other circles, too. Last Monday Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, made it clear that the president would first need Congressional approval to launch an attack. Meanwhile, Republican candidates for the White House have debated whether they would even allow such details to get in their way. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said he would consult his attorneys to determine whether the US Constitution does, in fact, require a president to ask for Congressional approval before going to war. Vietnam veteran John McCain said war with Iran was “maybe closer to reality than we are discussing tonight.”

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has also adopted a hawkish stance, voting in favor of the Senate measure to classify the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Her rivals criticized Clinton for giving the administration a blank check to go to war.

The US military is building a base in Iraq less than 10 kilometers (about six miles) from Iran’s border. The facility, known as Combat Outpost Shocker, is meant for American soldiers preventing Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. But it’s also rumored that Bush authorized US intelligence agencies in April to run sabotage missions against the mullah regime on Iranian soil.

Gary Sick is an expert on Iran who served as a military adviser under three presidents. He believes that such preparations mark a significant shift in the government’s strategy. “Since August,” says Sick, “the emphasis is no longer on the Iranian nuclear threat,” but on Iran’s support for terrorism in Iraq. “This is a complete change and is potentially dangerous.”

It would be relatively easy for Bush to prove that Tehran, by supporting insurgents in Iraq, is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. It might be harder to prove that Iran’s nuclear plans pose an immediate threat to the world. Besides, the nuclear argument is reminiscent of an embarrassing precedent, when the Bush administration used the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — which he didn’t — as a reason to invade Iraq. Even if the evidence against Tehran proves to be more damning, the American public will find it difficult to swallow this argument again.

The forces urging a diplomatic resolution also look stronger than they were before Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wants the next step to be a third round of even tighter sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. Rice has powerful allies at the Pentagon: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral William Fallon, head of US Central Command, which is responsible for American forces throughout the region.

Rice and her cohorts all favor diplomacy, partly because they know the military is under strain. After four years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US lacks manpower for another major war, especially one against a relatively well-prepared adversary. “For many senior people at the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department, a war would be sheer lunacy,” says security expert Sick.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, agrees. A war against Tehran would be “a disaster for the entire world,” says Riedel, who worries about a “battlefield extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent.” Nevertheless, he believes there is a “realistic risk of a military conflict,” because both sides look willing to carry things to the brink.

On the one hand, says Riedel, Iran is playing with fire, challenging the West by sending weapons to Shiite insurgents in Iraq. On the other hand, hotheads in Washington are by no means powerless. Although many neoconservative hawks have left the Bush administration, Cheney remains their reliable partner. “The vice president is the closest adviser to the president, and a dominant figure,” says Riedel. “One shouldn’t underestimate how much power he still wields.”

‘Is it 1938 Again?’

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran last week also played into the hands of hardliners in Washington, who read it as proof that Putin isn’t serious about joining the West’s effort to convince Tehran to abandon its drive for a nuclear weapon. Moreover, the countries bordering the Caspian Sea, including Central Asian nations Washington has courted energetically in recent years, have said they would not allow a war against Tehran to be launched from their territory.

Cheney derives much of his support from hawks outside the administration who fear their days are as numbered as the President’s. “The neocons see Iran as their last chance to prove something,” says analyst Riedel. This aim is reflected in their tone. Conservative columnist Norman Podhoretz, for example — a father figure to all neocons — wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he “hopes and prays” that Bush will finally bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees the United States engaged in a global war against “Islamofascism,” a conflict he defines as World War IV, and he likens Iran to Nazi Germany. “Is it 1938 again?” he asks in a speech he repeats regularly at conferences.

Podhoretz is by no means an eccentric outsider. He now serves as a senior foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani. President Bush has also met with Podhoretz at the White House to hear his opinions.

Nevertheless, most experts in Washington warn against attacking Tehran. They assume the Iranians would retaliate. “It would be foolish to believe surgical strikes will be enough,” says Riedel, who believes that precision attacks would quickly escalate to war.

Former presidential adviser Sick thinks Iran would strike back with terrorist attacks. “The generals of the Revolutionary Guard have had several years to think about asymmetrical warfare,” says Sick. “They probably have a few rather interesting ideas.”

According to Sick, detonating well-placed bombs at oil terminals in the Persian Gulf would be enough to wreak havoc. “Insurance costs would skyrocket, causing oil prices to triple and triggering a global recession,” Sick warns. “The economic consequences would be enormous, far greater than anything we have experienced with Iraq so far.”

Because the catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran are obvious, many in Washington have a fairly benign take on the current round of saber rattling. They believe the sheer dread of war is being used to bolster diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis and encourage hesitant members of the United Nations Security Council to take more decisive action. The Security Council, this argument goes, will be more likely to approve tighter sanctions if it believes that war is the only alternative.

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De Menezes ’shot for 30 seconds’ to silence him? Why?

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

By John A Blacker
RINF Alternative News

Witness feared terrorists were attacking train as police GUNNED Brazilian, leaked statement reveals

Armed police officers under the control of “Common Purpose “ Agent Cressida Dick fired at Jean Charles de Menezes for over 30 seconds when they killed him at Stockwell tube station, according to a witness statement made to independent investigators and obtained by the Guardian Newspaper.

The witness says the shots were fired at intervals of three seconds and that she ran for her life fearing terrorists had opened fire on commuters. Indeed she was correct; police were shooting a commuter in the head at point blank range.

The murderous assassination of the innocent Brazilian, who could not have been mistaken for a suicide bomber because he was wearing only a light coloured open light denim jacket, is supposedly being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and what sort of face that will be is anybodies guess.

Much of the immediate eyewitness evidence after the shooting was covered up by the police except the fact that 7 shots were fired into the head of De Menezes - a fact which was not made public at the time.

The account from Sue Thomason, a freelance journalist from south London, gives new detail of the police “Common Purpose” murder of De Menezes:
In her statement she says: “The shots were evenly spaced with about three seconds between the shots, for the first few shots, then a gap of a little longer, then the shots were evenly spaced again.”

Mr de Menezes was murdered on July 22 on a tube train after being followed from his flat by undercover officers and soldiers who claim they were hunting terrorists.

On the morning of July 22 Ms Thomason was on her way to work, and was reading a book as the train pulled into Stockwell.

Her statement to the IPCC says: “When the tube was stationary at the platform at Stockwell I recall shouting, it was a male’s voice, it may have come from more than one male. People then started to get out of their seats and look in the direction where the shouting was coming from.

“I recall hearing gunshots… The shooting was coming from the carriage to the left of me. When I heard the gunshots I thought it was terrorists firing into the crowd. I thought about getting behind a seat… After the initial first shots… I left the carriage.”

She and other commuters started running along the platform to leave the station.
Her statement continues: “While I was making my way to the escalator I remember hearing more shots coming from behind me. I thought that I would be shot in the back… Half way up the escalator I remember looking behind me and hearing two more shots… Once I got outside the station my legs went. I would say there was 10 or 11 shots fired. The shots were … evenly spaced out (time wise).”

She says two IPCC investigators who interviewed her were equipped with a map of Stockwell tube, which had key features in the wrong place. This initially led them wrongly to challenge her account.

In an email of complaint to the IPCC she wrote: “If the people investigating such a serious matter… can’t even get the plan of the station correct for interviewees to point out where they were, then what chance does the rest of the case have?”

She also says a key detail she gave of the number of shots and the interval between them was deliberately missed out from her final statement until she insisted it be included: “I’m not anti the IPCC, I just want them to get it right.”

At the farcical Health and Safety ongoing trial Ronald Thwaites QC, representing the Metropolitan Police, told the Old Bailey: “He was shot because when he was challenged by police he did not comply with them but reacted precisely as they had been briefed a suicide bomber might react at the point of detonating his bomb.”

Mr Thwaites said most people challenged the day after London “was nearly blown to bits” would have put their hands up slowly.

Instead, he said Mr de Menezes had appeared “agitated” with his hands “held below his waist and slightly in front of him” and then “advanced to within three or four feet”.

There was a fear he might be “putting two wires together”, said the barrister.
Mr Thwaites suggested that Mr de Menezes might have reacted the way he did because he had a forged stamp in his passport and had taken cocaine, though he stressed he was not attacking the Brazilian’s character.

Speaking of the firearms team, he said: “These are not trigger-happy gunslingers ready to shoot anybody and everybody. These officers can, and do, act with restraint.”

The Metropolitan Police, which is on trial accused of a “catastrophic” series of errors leading to the death of Mr de Menezes, denies a single charge under health and safety laws.

Making his closing speech, Mr Thwaites criticised the treatment during the trial of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick (Common Purpose Agent), the officer in charge of the operation, saying: “She has been treated as badly as a common criminal.”

He added that the prosecution had been brought “without regard to the usual courtesies”.

Mr Thwaites said no individual officer was to be blamed for what happened, saying: “They all did their conscientious best. We live in a blame culture, when nothing can happen without somebody being called to account.

“What better for some people than the sport of prosecuting the police? They would wet their lips with relish at the thought of having the Commissioner himself, never mind his office, here on trial at the Old Bailey, to have the Commissioner of Police disgraced over the killing of an innocent Brazilian.

“This case should never have been brought by any conscientious prosecuting authority worth its salt, who looked coolly and calmly and comprehensively at the facts, but here we are, the Office of the Commissioner in the dock”

CCTV footage is said to show De Menezes walking at normal pace into the station, picking up a copy of a free newspaper and apparently passing through the barriers legitimately before descending the escalator to the platform and running to catch a train.

De Menezes boarded the tube train, paused, looking left and right, and sat in a seat facing the platform.

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CIA resumes use of secret prisons

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

The CIA has resumed its use of overseas secret prisons, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

In the last six months, five new terrorism suspects have been transferred to the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. One of the new detainees, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, spent months in CIA custody overseas, Pentagon officials told the Post.

On Sept. 6, 2006, the White House announced the CIA’s secret prisons had been emptied for the time being and 14 al-Qaida leaders shipped to Guantanamo. There has been no official statement of what happened to nearly 30 other “ghost prisoners” held by the CIA for extended lengths of time, the Post reported.

Details of the secret prisons remain classified, though it is believed some of the prisoners were transferred secretly to their home countries and remain imprisoned, while other have simply vanished, said human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees.

Most of the ghost prisoners were captured in Pakistan, where they fled after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

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Government secrecy changes promised

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has presented plans to overhaul secrecy and data protection laws.

In a speech on the subject of liberty, the Prime Minister has revealed plans to extend Freedom of Information laws, review the 30 year limit on releasing sensitive government papers and to review the rights of protestors in Parliament Square.

Brown said that the Freedom of Information laws can be “inconvenient” to government, but at the same time it “is the right course [to extend them] because government belongs to the people, not the politicians.” He launched a three month public consultation on extending the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to cover private firms working on public sector projects.

The Prime Minister also promised a review to consider if the 30 year rule was still necessary as people were gaining access to more sensitive documents on a much more regular basis through the FOI Act.

He said: “It is time to look again at whether historical records can be made available for public inspection much more swiftly than under the current arrangements.”

Brown has appointed the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard owners, Associated Newspapers, to undertake the review alongside former top civil servant Sir Joe Pilling and historian David Cannadine to review the rules.

Restrictions on the media reporting of coroners’ court proceedings would also be scrapped, Brown said.

The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has also been assigned to hold a review into personal data sharing safeguards in the public and private sector.

Thomas will also be given powers to protect legitimate investigative journalists from a planned crackdown on the trade in personal data, such as utility bills and health records.

The commissioner said the prime minister “has sent significant signals to Whitehall and the rest of the public sector that FOI must be taken seriously”.

Alan Beith, chairman of the constitutional affairs committee, welcomed the speech but said he was “disappointed” Brown had ignored calls for independent funding for the information commissioner.

He said: “Can it be appropriate for the Ministry of Justice to set the funding levels for the independent regulator and thereby directly influence its capacity to investigate complaints?”

Shadow justice secretary Nick Herbert said: “Brown’s speech looks like a desperate attempt to resurrect his ‘new politics’ which has already been discredited by his serial use of spin.”

Lib Dem justice spokesman David Heath said: “One of the main threats to civil liberties over the last decade has been the behaviour of an increasingly overbearing Labour government that has transformed Britain into a surveillance state.

“If Gordon Brown is genuinely signalling a change of heart then that is good news, but authoritarianism seems to run deep in the lifeblood of this government.”

http://www.publicservant.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=4219

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Diana was alive after the crash: Witness

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Princess Diana cried, “Oh my God, oh my God,” as she lay in the smoking wreckage of the car, according to one of the first witnesses to reach the crash site in the Paris tunnel, the inquest into her death heard.

The evidence contradicts earlier suggestions that the princess was never conscious enough to speak after the crash.

Damian Dalby, a volunteer fireman travelling to Paris with his brother and friends, told the London [Images] high court through video-conferencing on Thursday that when he first saw the car in the Pont de l’Alma underpass, there were people around it taking photographs.

He ran to the car, and found the rear right-hand door open and a photographer close by — though no attempt was made to block his efforts to help.

He said he heard the the lady in the car saying, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

Dalby said as he got out of his car, he had seen a medical emergency vehicle, but when he reached the crash site nobody was there.

Dalby’s brother Sebastien Pennequin said he had helped police push photographers back.

“They continued taking photographs, it was then I spoke to them telling them to stop,” he said.

Their friend Sebastien Masseron said the crash happened just before they arrived. “There were no other vehicles in that part of the tunnel. There was however people around the vehicle,” Masseron said.

Earlier the evidence of another French witness Jacques Morel was questioned.

He claimed that he saw a line of 10 to 12 photographers and a man with a video camera inside the tunnel before the crash, waiting for Diana’s car to arrive, the Guardian reported.

In an unpublished book he suggests the crash was a photo opportunity that went horribly wrong, when the paparazzi planned to stop the car so they could snap Diana and Dodi Fayed.

http://ia.rediff.com/news/2007/oct/26diana.htm

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‘Ghost prisoners’ not accounted for after held by CIA

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Rights groups wonder where the roughly 30 are being kept

By CRAIG WHITLOCK

On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush announced that the CIA’s overseas secret prisons had been temporarily emptied and 14 al-Qaida leaders taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But since then, there has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other “ghost prisoners” who spent extended time in the custody of the CIA.

Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may still be under CIA control.

The bulk of the ghost prisoners were captured in Pakistan after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Among them is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a dual citizen of Syria and Spain and an influential al-Qaida ideologue who was last seen two years ago. On Oct. 31, 2005, the red-bearded radical with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head arrived in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, unaware he was being followed.

Nasar was cornered by police as he and a small group of followers stopped for dinner. Soon after, according to Pakistani officials, he was handed over to U.S. spies and vanished into the CIA’s prison network. Since then, various reports have placed him in Syria, Afghanistan and India, though nobody has been able to confirm his whereabouts.

Virtually all the Arab members of al-Qaida caught in Pakistan were given to the CIA, Pakistani security officials said. But the fate of several Pakistani al-Qaida operatives who also were captured remains murky; the Pakistani government has ignored a number of lawsuits filed by relatives seeking information.

“You just don’t know — either these people are in the custody of the Pakistanis or the Americans,” said Zafarullah Khan, human rights coordinator for the Pakistan Muslim League, an opposition party.

Where are they going?

Others have been handed over to governments that have kept their presence a secret.Since 2004, for example, the CIA has handed five Libyan fighters to authorities in Tripoli.

Two had been covertly nabbed by the CIA in China and Thailand, while the others were caught in Pakistan and held in CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and other locations, according to Libyan sources.

The Libyan government has kept silent about the cases. But Libyan political exiles said the men are kept in isolation with no prospect of an open trial.

Other ghost prisoners are believed to remain in U.S. custody after passing into and out of the CIA’s hands, according to human rights groups.

Relatives of a Tunisian al-Qaida suspect known as Retha al-Tunisi, captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002, received notice recently from the International Committee of the Red Cross that he is detained at a U.S. military prison in Afghanistan, said Clara Gutteridge, an investigator for Reprieve, a London-based legal rights group that represents many inmates at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Other prisoners, since released, had previously reported seeing Tunisi at a secret CIA “black site” in Afghanistan.

At least one former CIA prisoner has been quietly freed. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence agent captured after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was detained at a secret location until he was released last year.

Ani gained notoriety before the Iraq war when Bush administration officials said he had met in Prague with Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker Mohamed Atta. Some officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, cited the rendezvous as evidence of an alliance between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. The theory was later debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Sept. 11 commission, which revealed in 2004 that Ani was in U.S. custody.

The Iraqi spy resurfaced two months ago when Czech officials revealed that he had filed a multimillion-dollar compensation claim. His complaint: that unfounded Czech intelligence reports had prompted his imprisonment by the CIA.

CIA resumes

When Bush confirmed the existence of the CIA’s prisons in September 2006, he said they had been vacated for the time being. But he said the U.S. government would use them again, if necessary.The CIA has resumed its detention program. Since March, five new terrorism suspects have been transferred to Guantanamo. Although the Pentagon has not disclosed details about how or precisely when they were captured, officials have said one of the prisoners, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, had spent months in CIA custody overseas.

Details of the secret-detention program remain classified. U.S. officials have offered only vague descriptions of its reach and scope.

Last month, in a speech in New York, CIA Director Michael Hayden said “fewer than 100 people” had been detained in the CIA’s overseas prison network since the program’s inception in early 2002.

In June, a coalition of human rights groups identified 39 people who may have been in CIA custody but are missing.

Many of those on the list, however, were identified by partial names or nom de guerres, such as one man described only as Mohammed the Afghan.

Still in ‘proxy detention’?

Joanne Mariner, director of terrorism and counterterrorism research for Human Rights Watch, said the CIA has moved many prisoners from country to country and relied on other spy services to take custody of suspects, sometimes temporarily and sometimes for good.”The large majority have gone to their countries of origin,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean all of them. There could be some that are still in proxy detention.”

In a footnote to its 2004 report, the Sept. 11 commission named nine al-Qaida suspects who were in U.S. custody at black sites. Seven were later transferred to Guantanamo.

Still missing is Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani national captured in northern Iraq in January 2004. U.S. officials have described him as a high-level emissary between al-Qaida’s core command in Pakistan and its affiliates in Iraq.

Another prisoner on the commission’s list was Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, a Saudi accused of planning attacks in the Arabian Peninsula. He surrendered to Saudi authorities in June 2003.

Repeated queries to U.S.

Although the Sept. 11 commission reported that Ghamdi was in U.S. custody, Saudi officials said that was not the case. They said he remains in prison in Saudi Arabia and has never left the country.”He was never, under no condition, in U.S. custody,” said a Saudi security source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross said they have failed to find dozens of people once believed to have been in CIA custody, despite repeated queries to the U.S. government and other countries.

“The ICRC remains gravely concerned by the fate of the persons previously held in the CIA detention program who remain unaccounted for,” said Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington.”The ICRC is concerned about any type of secret detention.”

The CIA declined to comment on whether certain individuals were ever in its custody.

“Apart from detainees transferred to Guantanamo, the CIA does not, as a rule, comment publicly on lists of people alleged to have been in its custody — even though those lists are often flawed,” said Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman.

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