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20 percent of election printouts were unreadable

Friday, November 30th, 2007

A recount after next year’s presidential election could mean disaster for Cuyahoga County based on problems discovered Tuesday with paper records produced by electronic voting machines.

More than 20 percent of the printouts from touch-screen voting machines were unreadable and had to be reprinted. Board of Elections workers found the damaged ballots when they conducted a recount Tuesday of two races, which involved only 17 of the county’s 1,436 precincts.

The recount lasted more than 12 hours. Reprinting the damaged records and hand-counting them created an extra step that added hours.

“If it is as close as it’s been for the last two presidential elections and it’s that close again in 2008, God help us if we have to depend on Cuya- hoga County as the deciding factor with regard to making the decision on who the next president of the United States is,” said County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, a longtime opponent of the county’s touch-screen voting system.

Board of Elections Director Jane Platten said recounting the entire county for the 2008 presidential election could take more than a week.

“The high number of paper audit trails that need to be reprinted was at best a difficult task to have to work through,” Platten said. “I think that’s going to be an indication of future recounts.”

Tuesday’s recounts were for a North Royalton City Council seat and positions on the Bedford Heights Charter Review Commission. The recount upheld the official results that showed Dan Kasaris won the North Royalton race. Results were not available Tuesday night for the Bedford Heights election.

Cuyahoga County uses touch-screen voting machines that store votes on a memory card inside each machine. On Election Day, a paper record of each ballot is printed inside each machine on long reels of paper.

The printout is the paper trail used during recounts. If it’s damaged and unreadable — usually because the paper jammed when printing — a new copy is printed from the machine’s memory card.

“It’s workable, but tedious,” said board member Rob Frost after watching Tuesday’s recounts. “I think that’s, in part, the nature of recounts.”

Election workers inspected 70 paper printouts, which represented nearly 4,400 ballots cast Nov. 6 in North Royalton and Bedford Heights. Election workers found 15 of the 70 printouts damaged and those had to be reprinted.

“This is very much a cause for concern,” board member Inajo Davis Chappell said. “All the technology issues pose a challenge to us, especially given the volume of voters we expect in the primary.”

Diebold Inc. made the county’s voting equipment. The company renamed its elections division Premier Election Solutions. The high percentage of damaged paper trails seen on Tuesday is not typical, Premier spokesman Chris Riggall said. “That is a percentage that prompts us to do further investigation,” he said.

The board has two more recounts scheduled to begin today: A race for Olmsted Falls City Council and a seat on the Solon Board of Education. The recounts on Tuesday and today were automatically triggered because the margin of victory was one-half of 1 percent or less.

The damaged paper records found Tuesday were another problem for the board following the Nov. 6 countywide election.

The county still doesn’t know why its vote-counting software crashed twice election night. An investigation into the software problem could begin next week, once the county’s recounts are finished.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner hopes to answer concerns about the county’s voting system. She has initiated a statewide voting equipment review. A report expected Dec. 14 could recommend changes.

Meanwhile, elections officials must determine the best way to hold elections with their current machinery.

“I wish those paper trails would come out pristine — and they don’t, and they’re not going to,” Platten said. “We’re going to have to deal with it again.”

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US Roman Catholic Bishop: 9/11 was inside job

Friday, November 30th, 2007

RenewAmerica

Bishop Richard Williamson, seemingly the most outspoken and controversial bishop of the Society of St. Pius X, asserted in a recent talk that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were committed “to get the American public to accept the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,” according to a news item by Jack Kenny in the Nov. 15, 2007 issue of The Wanderer.

Bishop Williamson, whose talk was held Nov. 4, 2007 in Bedford, Mass., is quoted as saying:

“Without 9-11, it would have been impossible to attack Afghanistan or Iraq. The forces inside the United States government and driving the United States government absolutely wanted to attack and destroy Iraq. The destruction wrought upon Iraq is unspeakable. And now the same forces want to do the same thing to Iran . . . They may well be plotting another 9-11.”

The news item continues: “Heat from the burning fuel of the planes that flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center could not have melted the 47 steel columns in each tower, causing them to collapse, he claimed. And a commercial airliner could not have penetrated six of the ten walls that were breached by ‘whatever hit the Pentagon,’ he said.”

What did hit the Pentagon, according to Bishop Williamson?

“It was a missile that hit the Pentagon. It was a missile that could only have been fired by the American military.”

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Torture Leads to Lies

Friday, November 30th, 2007

By Susan C. Strong

The administration’s torture policy is driven by fear and false assumptions. It’s time the public learned the truth about pain-tainted information.

Despite Mukasey’s confirmation and the next round of holidays coming on, progressives must not let up on the torture issue now. It has great power. It goes to the core of what it means to be an American during the George W. Bush era. And it’s a powerful wedge for all our foreign policy and domestic issues.

The administration’s main argument for their “alternative interrogation techniques” is still the need to get useful information to better protect Americans. Outcry against trusting pain-induced, pain-tainted “information” is growing. Nevertheless, Senators Schumer and Feinstein’s recent votes for Mukasy show just how far we still have to go in framing the torture issue for the American public. If the public changes its mind, the legislators will too.

There are a lot of valid ethical, practical, and moral ways to criticize “alternative interrogation” practices, but the most powerful, broad-based appeal is that information gotten by painful methods most certainly breeds lies, and lies taken for genuine military intelligence threaten our safety. So now we need two things: l. a sound bite like “torture or not, pain breeds lies, and lies mean danger,” or just “torture breeds lies, and lies mean danger,” and 2. a very simple, visually graphic way of communicating these ideas, as the sound bite opens up media space.

Why do we need very simple verbal and visual ways of communicating these realities? The reason there is still support for torture as a tactic in this country is that some people make false assumptions about it, based on their temperaments. Many people in our country need to be able to almost see a thing, hear it, taste it, or smell it before they are able to get how it really works. These frightened mainstream citizens imagine that if they knew something, and someone hurt them, they would tell what they knew. So we need to develop video clips, ads, and other graphics that depict the real story about pain-tainted information.

How can we do that? Let’s sketch two scenarios to see how this works out in reality. Number one: say you have, as we know we have, a lot of men and boys in custody who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when they were caught; these people actually know nothing at all. But our people hurt them until they say something. Possibly our military “checks out” this tainted bunch of lies, and finally, if our side has any integrity at all, they discover that they were fed a bunch of lies. But in the meantime, by tormenting “little people” who really did know nothing, they have created some new, seriously angry enemies, both in the prisons, in their home countries and families and around the world.

That’s one model. Let’s look at the other scenario: say our side has gotten hold of some real Al Qaeda operatives. They inflict pain on them until they “talk.” Again, the prisoners are going to tell lies, if they do talk. If our military personnel are trained to give only name, rank, and serial number, and to withstand torture themselves, just think what real Al Qaeda personnel must be trained to do: withstand torture and/or lie too. Maybe withstand torture and then finally, in the end, tell lies, so that it looks real.

If I can think of this scenario, so can Bin Laden, and long, long before me. Bin Laden must be laughing very hard at us. Along with believing in the lies of his followers, we are falling smack dab into the rest of his torture trap — the more we inflict pain on prisoners held without due process, the more the Islamic world (and the rest of the world too) grows to hate and distrust us, the more America’s image as the shining city on the hill is besmirched-just the effect Bin Laden is trying to create.

Real experts in military intelligence are unanimous in saying that inflicting pain is definitely not the way to get valid information from suspects. The latest article detailing this well known fact can be found in The New Republic, October 22. Other kinds of trust-inducing methods do work, and intelligence experts have the case studies to prove it. Even in domestic police work, there is startling new evidence of how often false confessions are made under even light or no duress at all. See “What Makes Criminal Suspects Give a False Confession?”

The administration’s torture policy is, at rock bottom, driven by fear and supported by public fear. In Rory Kennedy’s excellent documentary, Ghosts of Abu Graib, one witness said that right after U.S. forces took Bagdad, the American leadership panicked, because they couldn’t understand the people, the language or the culture, and they couldn’t find out what was really happening on the street or why. That was when they started using “alternative interrogation techniques” on ordinary Iraqis, who actually knew nothing at all. The Americans needed information, any information at all, to satisfy the frightened people in D.C., so they set out to get something, anything, and it really didn’t matter at all if it was just a pack of lies spit out by ordinary Iraqis, in order to stop the pain.

The only way to fight that kind of fear is with a bigger fear-fear of pain-induced lies, deliberate or not, that really do threaten our safety. Just saying “we don’t torture” isn’t even a fig leaf, as long as we use pain to get so-called “information.” (To stay current on this issue, see the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.)

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Facebook Users Protest Online Tracking

Friday, November 30th, 2007

By Louise Story and Brad Stone
The New York Times

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

”Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

”Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

”Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

”We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad executives have poked fun at Facebook users.

”Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

Facebook users each get a home page where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their friends’ pages.

Under Beacon, when Facebook members purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com, for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel venues on NYTimes.com, friends are also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.

Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding if it would still push for a universal opt-out.

The whole purpose of Beacon is to allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad, for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a “recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But Facebook users say they do not want to endorse products.

”Just because I use a Web site, doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was cheaper.”

Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene It?” game.

”I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are getting me for Christmas.”

Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy
By Ellen Nakashima
The Washington Post

Friday 30 November 2007

Sean Lane’s purchase was supposed to be a surprise for his wife. Then it appeared as a news headline - “Sean Lane bought 14k White Gold 1/5 ct Diamond Eternity Flower Ring from overstock.com” - last week on the social networking Web site Facebook.

Without Lane’s knowledge, the headline was visible to everyone in his online network, including 500 classmates from Columbia University and 220 other friends, co-workers and acquaintances.

And his wife.

The wraps came off his Christmas gift thanks to a new advertising feature called Beacon, which shares news of Facebook members’ online purchases with their friends. The idea, according to the company, is to allow merchants to effectively turn millions of Facebook users into a “word-of-mouth promotion” service.

Lane called it “Christmas ruined,” and more than 50,000 other users signed a petition in recent days calling on Facebook to stop broadcasting people’s transactions without their consent.

Last night, Facebook backed down and announced that the Beacon feature would no longer be active for any transaction unless users click “ok.” Beacon is a core element of Facebook’s attempt to parlay the personal and behavioral information it collects about its members into a more sophisticated advertising business, an effort to turn a user’s preferences into an endorsement with commercial value.

The merging of social networking and online advertising combines two of the most powerful forces on the Internet today, and privacy advocates say it raises issues about the way personal data are disclosed for marketing purposes.

”Sites like Facebook are revolutionizing how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy,” said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group that has launched the petition drive to pressure Facebook to stop broadcasting members’ purchases and using their names as endorsements without explicit permission. “The question is: Will corporate advertisers get to write the rules of the Internet or will these new social networks protect our basic rights, like privacy?”

The site, which was started in a Harvard dorm room, has become a Silicon Valley powerhouse, recently valued at $15 billion. It allows its users to share messages, photos and updates on their lives.

Facebook launched Beacon as part of a wider social advertising campaign Nov. 6, with 44 announced partners, including Overstock, Travelocity, the auction site eBay, the movie ticket site Fandango, Blockbuster and the shoe site Zappos. The Beacon feature, free to advertisers, is not restricted to commerce. A person’s high score on an online game might also be posted for friends to see.

Facebook puts a string of code called a cookie on a user’s computer, which tracks the user on Beacon partner sites. In the version that Facebook launched, a person logged into Facebook who bought, say, a movie ticket, was alerted that the Web site was sending a “story” to his profile and had a chance to opt out - both at the merchant’s site and on his own page, Facebook says.

But privacy advocates criticized the opt-out feature - a pop-up box - because it disappeared after a few seconds and said Facebook should allow users to turn off Beacon and include an “opt in” feature for those who wish to receive the service. Last night, Facebook apparently added an “opt in” feature for each transaction, which Green called “a huge step in the right direction,” but still did not include a way to shut off the service permanently.

Beacon is a key part of what Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, 23, called “a completely new way of advertising online.” Sometimes, ads accompany the news feeds. The ads could contain a person’s photo.

Yesterday Facebook issued an apology on MoveOn’s Facebook page: “We’re sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans.”

In a news release last night, Facebook said “we appreciate feedback from all Facebook users and made some changes to Beacon in the past day. Users now have more control over stories that get published.”

Marketers can target paid social ads on Facebook according to criteria such as age, gender, political views and taste in movies, Zuckerberg told media and ad executives at the launch, according to Online Media Daily.

”What’s unique about Facebook is it’s really turning over personal profile data to advertisers,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group. “In essence, it’s telling advertisers, we know exactly who your targets are, what their favorite entertainment is, the books they read, the kinds of social networks they have, what their political leanings are.”

Chester’s group, along with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Facebook and MySpace, a rival social networking site that is also targeting members for ads, are using deceptive practices to violate people’s privacy.

MoveOn has created a blog on its Facebook page for people to post comments. The wall contained more than 800 as of yesterday.

They include Tasha Valdez from Michigan, who wrote: “Oh my gosh, my cousin’s entire Christmas shopping list this week was displayed on the [Facebook News] feed. That’s so messed up. This has gotta stop!”

Beacon’s risks go beyond ruining someone’s Christmas, said Mike Rogers, editor and publisher of a gay-oriented Web site, PageOneQ. “We teach young people to be very careful about what they post and all of a sudden comes along an automated system like this. What happens if a kid is on a football team and he buys a ticket to ‘Brokeback Mountain’ [a gay-themed film]?” he said, alluding to the possibility that the youth could be outed and harassed as a result.

For Lane, spoiling his wife’s surprise was bad enough.

Within two hours after he bought the ring on Overstock.com, he received an instant message from his wife, Shannon: Who is this ring for?

What ring, he messaged back, from his laptop at work in Waltham, Mass.

She said that Facebook had just put an item on his page saying he bought a ring. It included a link to Overstock, which noted that the 51 percent discount on the ring.

Lane, 28, a technical project manager at an online printing company, was crestfallen. He had gone to lengths to keep the ring a secret, even telling Shannon he was not going to give her jewelry this year.

Lane complained to Overstock. Company spokesman Judd Bagley said this week that on Nov. 21, Overstock abandoned its Beacon feature until Facebook changes its practice so that users must volunteer if they want to participate.

”I was really disappointed because for me the whole fun of Christmas is the surprise,” said Shannon Lane, 28, who married Sean a year ago in September. “I never want to know what I’m getting.”

———

Staff writer Ylan Mui contributed to this report.

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Habib ‘told not to talk about Guantanamo torture’

Friday, November 30th, 2007

AAP

FORMER Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib says he did not reveal details of his torture in early interviews with media and others because he was told not to by his doctors and lawyers.

Mr Habib was giving evidence today in second-stage defamation proceedings against Nationwide News, over a February 2005 column in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph.

A jury has found the article defamed Mr Habib by implying he falsely made claims about torture.

The former terror suspect told the NSW Supreme Court that in interviews in 2005 with human rights group Amnesty International and the 60 Minutes television program, he did not talk about being given electric shocks and being drugged on legal and medical advice.

In one interview he denied being tortured before being taken to Guantanamo Bay, saying there was “just kicking”, and in the other he stated that he had been beaten only once for refusing to sign a document.

“I explained I be kicking (sic), no blanket, and told (Amnesty) I have a lot of stuff I can’t talk about until my court case,” Mr Habib said.

“I have been told by my psychological doctor not (to) go through the torture because I was very stressed.”

Mr Habib said his memory of what happened had come back slowly because of the trauma and the drugs he had been given, but he insisted his current account was accurate.

“Now I have no reason not to give evidence about tortures,” he said.

Nationwide News barrister Alec Leopold accused Mr Habib of trying to erect a “smokescreen” around what actually happened.

“(Mr Habib’s evidence this week) was a complete revision of history,” Mr Leopold said. “I want to suggest to you that you made up your evidence… on Wednesday.

“The real position was that stated approximately two years ago to (Amnesty).”

Mr Habib replied: “No.”

Mr Leopold grilled Mr Habib on his recollections of Australian consular official Alastair Adams during his interrogations.

He also played a tape of Mr Habib’s first interview with Australian officials at Guantanamo Bay in May 2002, saying he seemed then to be “articulate, in terrific spirits and very good condition”.

The voice on the tape is heard to say: “I don’t fight, I don’t kill nobody, I don’t harm nobody.

“Jihad does not mean carrying a gun and killing people for no reason.”

The former Guantanamo inmate said a number of his supposed answers in the interview were incorrect and refused to confirm that the person speaking on the tape was him.

“I believe I met with people from Australia (in Cuba), but I never have any interview with them,” he said.

ASIO officers were to give evidence this afternoon about their interviews with Mr Habib in Guantanamo, Egypt and Pakistan.

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We are all put at risk by identity scheme

Friday, November 30th, 2007

The suggestion by James Hall that Project Stork (Letters, November 29) has nothing to do with the national identity scheme is risible. The roadmap for the project was presented on June 13 at this year’s European e-identity conference in Paris. Frank Leyman, manager for international relations at FEDICT (the Belgian public service responsible for e-government), described the project thus: “Implementation of an EU-wide interoperable system for recognition of electronic identification and authentication that will enable businesses, citizens and government employees to use their national electronic identities in any member state.”

Mr Leyman’s presentation placed identification at the heart of the project and explained how Belgian ID cards would link into the system. Although final project details were still to be formalised, the schedule showed the UK government taking responsibility for Work Package 4: identification, digital signatures, and association and provision of personal data. To suggest this is unrelated to the national identity scheme is beyond belief. Meanwhile, Mr Hall states that the national identity register will hold only “core identity information”. His notion of what constitutes core data will not be shared by most readers.

Few people would consider details of visits to clinics or applications for credit to be core identity data. Yet these will be recorded on the ID database. The Identity Cards Act specifies approximately 50 categories of information to be registered.

Fraudsters will find the database immeasurably more useful than child benefit records: it will contain everything the discerning conman could need to practise identity fraud. The biometric data will prove priceless for criminals. Unlike passwords, fingerprints cannot be changed after hackers gain access.

The register will store full names and details of all places of residence - a matter of concern to people who are trying not to be found by those who would do them harm, such as men and women fleeing domestic abuse. The government has demonstrated time and again that it cannot be trusted to look after our personal data. A degree of transparency and honesty from ministers and officials seeking to seize more data still would not go amiss.

Geraint Bevan, NO2ID Scotland, 3e Grovepark Gardens, Glasgow.

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Armageddon: February 2008‏

Friday, November 30th, 2007

By J A Blacker, Science Correspondent
RINF Alternative News

What level of lies, deceit , treason and down right inhuman behaviour do the United States of America & its NEOCONS elite practice?

Well, this is just a sanitized taste of the level of utter bile these so called allies exhibit, with friends like these who needs brutal & murderous enemies?

These Animals, PEAR & Chaney, along with the rest of his buddy NEOCON pirates, are directly, personally, responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people, men women & children, including our troops. The Neocons have mutilated many more & want much more blood - your blood!

This is the face of SATAN folks, the evil which the elite operate & are directing against ALL, included in that bag of filth are the TREASONOUS British establishment including and particularly the so called Monarchy. Depleted Uranium is supplied from the Queens companies & will kill millions more in years
to come including UK citizens.

Watch & learn, for you shall be next if you do not WAKE UP!!!

February 2008 is earmarked fro the beginning of Armageddon folks, that is if we do not inform and alert the world Public!

Firstly, what did the NEOCONS know prior to gulf war 2 yet ignored:

Indeed the US deaths from the first gulf war was over 100,000 due to the Gulf War Syndrome, ie, depleted Uranium poisoning & other toxic effects of nerve agents & injections.

Now see how the Vultures claim no responsibility:

http://www.truthnews.us/?p=954

Look, don’t take our word for any of this - do your own research, but do it fast.

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VIDEO: Mayor “Crook and Bully” Giuliani Pre-9/11

Friday, November 30th, 2007

New Yorkers know this Rudy Giuliani. He was a bully, he regularly called people names, he was divisive, thin skinned, and arrogant. A Giuliani presidency would be packed with his ring kissing cronies and neocons eager to exploit his aggressiveness in the Middle East. Be very, very careful.

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Giuliani & the 9/11 Mastermind

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Rudy Giuliani Does Business With Sheik Who Helped 9/11 Mastermind Elude FBI

Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city’s skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir’s own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: “You are a friend of his, are you not?”

Abdallah al-Thani remains a named defendant in the 9/11 lawsuits that are still proceeding in Manhattan federal court, but his Washington lawyers declined to address the charges that he shielded KSM, insisting only that he never “supported” any “terrorist acts.” Asked if Abdallah al-Thani ever supported any terrorists rather than their acts, his lawyer David Nachman declined to comment further. The Congressional Research Service report summarized the evidence against him: “According to the 9/11 Commission Report and former U.S. government officials, royal family member and current Qatari Interior Minister, Sheikh Abdullah (Abdallah) bin Khalid Al Thani, provided safe harbor and assistance to Al Qaeda leaders during the 1990s,” including KSM. While numerous accounts have named Abdallah as the KSM tipster, the report simply says that “a high ranking member of the Qatari government” is believed to have “alerted” KSM “to the impending raid.”

In other words, as incredible as it might seem, Rudy Giuliani—whose presidential candidacy is steeped in 9/11 iconography—has been doing business with a government agency run by the very man who made the attacks on 9/11 possible.

Source

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China tells Bush to Sling his Hook

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President George W. Bush on Wednesday that Beijing’s refusal to let a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier into Hong Kong was a “misunderstanding,” the White House said.

The Defence Department said it had issued a formal complaint to China and that Beijing still had not provided sufficient explanation for blocking the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, and eight ships travelling with it, entry to Hong Kong for a long-planned Thanksgiving holiday visit.

Bush brought up the issue with China’s foreign minister in a meeting at the White House.

“The president raised the issue about the recent aborted port call by the USS Kitty Hawk. Foreign Minister Yang assured the president that it was a misunderstanding,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

China also denied access last week to two smaller U.S. Navy ships, the minesweepers USS Guardian and USS Patriot, seeking refuge from an approaching storm. Top U.S. Navy officers said that decision was more troublesome than the move to block the Kitty Hawk because the sailors needed safe harbour.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the complaint to China was related to both incidents.

“It is baffling,” he said. “It’s regrettable and we have not to date received sufficient explanation as to why it took place.”

Beijing’s action came as a surprise just weeks after a visit to China by U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates that has been described by U.S. officials as positive.

Relations between China and the United States have improved since 2001, when the countries’ militaries broke contact following a collision between a Chinese fighter jet and U.S. spy plane.

But many differences remain between Beijing and Washington over issues such as China’s military build-up and U.S. weapon sales to Taiwan.

There has been speculation that China’s move to block the ships was related to irritation over U.S. plans to sell Taiwan an upgrade to its missile system and a meeting between Bush and exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Bush and Yang also discussed North Korea, Iran and other bilateral issues in their meeting, Perino said.

(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and Kristin Roberts; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Judge: Bank debt collectors behaved like robbers

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Ashling O’Connor

When Tapan Bose fell behind on his car loan repayments to the largest commercial bank in India he could not have known that it would leave his friend’s son requiring 12 stitches in his battered skull.

Mr Bose escaped a vicious beating by a gang of the country’s notorious debt collectors because he was inside a club when they came calling for 34,000 rupees (£400) owed to ICICI Bank. Instead, it was 21-year-old Vinod Kumar who was sitting in Mr Bose’s car, waiting for his father and his friend to emerge. Three men dragged him out and beat him with iron rods before seizing the car. He was in hospital for a fortnight with severe head and back injuries.

This week a Delhi judge condemned the savage attack carried out in the name of ICICI and fined the bank 550,000 rupees in a landmark case that comes as India’s banking regulator tries to reform the nascent debt-collection industry. The behaviour of rogue agents is of increasing concern in India, where the credit culture is new and interest rates are rising.

“No civilised society governed by the rule of law can brook such kind of conduct,” Justice J. D. Kapoor, the President of the Consumer Commission, said. Handing down the biggest fine yet in a consumer case, he said that the bank had allowed the agents to behave like robbers.

This is the first time that an Indian bank has been held accountable for the actions of third-party agents appointed to collect bad debts. In its defence, ICICI argued that it had not sanctioned any criminal conduct. It has since sacked the collection manager of the branch who appointed the agents and two men have been arrested by police. The bank was ordered to pay Mr Bose, a 42-year-old builder, 5,000 rupees’ compensation, write off the loan and deposit 50,000 rupees into a consumer welfare fund for court costs. ICICI said that it would abide by the judgment.

The economic boom in India has led to a surge in earnings and consumer aspirations. Commercial lenders have been quick to offer easy finance for homes, cars and other big purchases previously out of reach for most Indians. Banks have been accused of employing aggressive tactics, such as persistent cold calling, to win new business with little regard to a potential customer’s credit risk.

“In order to make more profits, these banks attract people who cannot afford a two-wheeler and encourage them to buy a four-wheeler,” Prashant Mehendiratta, Mr Bose’s lawyer, told The Times. “This is OK for most salaried employees but the cash income of the lower middle classes fluctuates. They don’t understand that it is easy to get a card but harder to pay it off.”

With the number of defaulters on the rise, Indian banks have come under pressure to collect more loans to protect their credit ratings. This has led to the outsourcing of the task to agents, who can employ thuggish tactics to earn their commission.

In some cases, the intimidation has had tragic consequences. Prakash Sarvankar, a father of three, hanged himself in Bombay two months ago because he was unable to repay a 50,000-rupee ICICI loan. In his suicide note he blamed the agents for threatening him and his family. The bank eventually agreed to pay 15,000 rupees compensation.

Borrowing ideas

— The Indian loan market has grown 11-fold in the past five years, partly because of aggressive marketing

— HSBC India advertises its personal loans for “when expenses arise, like your daughter’s marriage, furnishing your home or a family holiday”

— The bank claims that it is “just like borrowing money from a friend”

Sources: HSBC, agencies

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Banks scourged by falling dollar

Friday, November 30th, 2007

The supply of dollars is now so profuse that it is always higher than the banks’ purchasing capacity. Banks now buy dollars in dribs and drabs, as they do not have enough VND.

The volume of dollars flowing into Eximbank these days is 30% higher than the same period last year. In the first 10 months of the year, some US$2bil went in. In the last few days, the bank has purchased US$5-7mil every day.

Currently, Vietcombank, the biggest foreign currency trader in Vietnam, always quotes the dollar purchase price equal to the sale price, at VND16,048/USUS$1 (as of November 27), reflecting the bank’s desire to bring as few dollars as possible.

An official from Vietincombank said that the supply of dollars is very profuse but the bank is not able to purchase dollars in large quantities, as the bank does not enough VND.

The official said that banks are now incurring losses due to the devaluation of the dollar. However, banks still have to buy dollars at prices higher than the levels they want since they must adhere to the floor level set by the State Bank of Vietnam.

In principle, when there is an excess of foreign currency supply, the central bank would buy, in order to prevent devaluation which harms exports. However, the central bank has yet to interfere in the market. There are no signs that the central bank will buy up dollars from commercial banks.

People are now exchanging the dollar for VND at a tremendous rate to prepare for Tet shopping. Meanwhile, making dollar deposits in foreign banks is not profitable for Vietnamese banks, as the world’s interest rates are reducing due to the FED’s rate cuts.

The supply and demand imbalance of the dollar has become more serious as commercial banks cannot find borrowers. Import-export companies, the biggest clients, rarely borrow dollars at the end of the year; they need VND to pay local companies.

The Vietincombank official said that the demand for VND loans is increasing, but the bank is trying to limit outstanding VND loans. Meanwhile, the bank is ready to satisfy any and all dollar loan demands.

Ho Huu Hanh, Director of the HCM City Branch of the State Bank of Vietnam, acknowledged that dollars are now in excess. Nguyen Van Hung, Deputy Director of the Hanoi Branch of the State Bank, also said that banks are facing dollar abundance. However, he said that Hanoi’s banks would not bear insurmountable pressure as Hanoi is the banking centre.

Mr Hung said that there would be no significant changes to the VND/USUS$ exchange rate towards year end. Banks top priority now is to help curb inflation, he said.

Source: VnExpress

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