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NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.
The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people’s communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Congress now is hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main law governing U.S. surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion of those powers expired last month and awaits renewal, which could be voted on in the House of Representatives this week. The biggest point of contention over the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is whether telecommunications and other companies should be made immune from liability for assisting government surveillance.
Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency’s mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.
According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.
The NSA’s enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.
The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.
It isn’t clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency’s work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all.
A number of NSA employees have expressed concerns that the agency may be overstepping its authority by veering into domestic surveillance. And the constitutional question of whether the government can examine such a large array of information without violating an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy “has never really been resolved,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a national-security lawyer who has worked for both parties on Capitol Hill.
NSA officials say the agency’s own investigations remain focused only on foreign threats, but it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between domestic and international communications in a digital era, so they need to sweep up more information.
The Fourth Amendment
In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, then NSA-chief Gen. Michael Hayden has said he used his authority to expand the NSA’s capabilities under a 1981 executive order governing the agency. Another presidential order issued shortly after the attacks, the text of which is classified, opened the door for the NSA to incorporate more domestic data in its searches, one senior intelligence official said.
The NSA “strictly follows laws and regulations designed to preserve every American’s privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” agency spokeswoman Judith Emmel said in a statement, referring to the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA in conjunction with the Pentagon, added in a statement that intelligence agencies operate “within an extensive legal and policy framework” and inform Congress of their activities “as required by the law.” It pointed out that the 9/11 Commission recommended in 2004 that intelligence agencies analyze “all relevant sources of information” and share their databases.
Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.
The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.
The information doesn’t generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.
Intelligence agencies have used administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI — which don’t need a judge’s signature — to collect and analyze such data, current and former intelligence officials said. If that data provided “reasonable suspicion” that a person, whether foreign or from the U.S., was linked to al Qaeda, intelligence officers could eavesdrop under the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.
The White House wants to give companies that assist government surveillance immunity from lawsuits alleging an invasion of privacy, but Democrats in Congress have been blocking it. The Terrorist Surveillance Program has spurred 38 lawsuits against companies. Current and former intelligence officials say telecom companies’ concern comes chiefly because they are giving the government unlimited access to a copy of the flow of communications, through a network of switches at U.S. telecommunications hubs that duplicate all the data running through it. It isn’t clear whether the government or telecom companies control the switches, but companies process some of the data for the NSA, the current and former officials say.
On Friday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a letter warning colleagues to look more deeply into how telecommunications data are being accessed, citing an allegation by the head of a New York-based computer security firm that a wireless carrier that hired him was giving unfettered access to data to an entity called “Quantico Circuit.” Quantico is a Marine base that houses the FBI Academy; senior FBI official Anthony DiClemente said the bureau “does not have ‘unfettered access’ to any communication provider’s network.”
The political debate over the telecom information comes as intelligence agencies seek to change traditional definitions of how to balance privacy rights against investigative needs. Donald Kerr, the deputy director of national intelligence, told a conference of intelligence officials in October that the government needs new rules. Since many people routinely post details of their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace, he said, their identity shouldn’t need the same protection as in the past. Instead, only their “essential privacy,” or “what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs,” should be veiled, he said, without providing examples.
Social-Network Analysis
The NSA uses its own high-powered version of social-network analysis to search for possible new patterns and links to terrorism. The Pentagon’s experimental Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was an early research effort on the same concept, designed to bring together and analyze as much and as many varied kinds of data as possible. Congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003 before it began operating. But it permitted some of the research to continue and TIA technology to be used for foreign surveillance.
Some of it was shifted to the NSA — which also is funded by the Pentagon — and put in the so-called black budget, where it would receive less scrutiny and bolster other data-sifting efforts, current and former intelligence officials said. “When it got taken apart, it didn’t get thrown away,” says a former top government official familiar with the TIA program.
Two current officials also said the NSA’s current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals’ data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who led the charge to kill TIA, says “the administration is trying to bring as much of the philosophy of operation Total Information Awareness as it can into the programs they’re using today.” The issue has been overshadowed by the fight over telecoms’ immunity, he said. “There’s not been as much discussion in the Congress as there ought to be.”
Opportunity for Debate
But Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the committee, said by email his committee colleagues have had “ample opportunity for debate” behind closed doors and that each intelligence program has specific legal authorization and oversight. He cautioned against seeing a group of intelligence programs as “a mythical ‘big brother’ program,” adding, “that’s not what is happening today.”
The legality of data-sweeping relies largely on the government’s interpretation of a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing records of phone calls — but not actual conversations — to be collected without a judge issuing a warrant. Multiple laws require a court order for so-called “transactional’” records of electronic communications, but the 2001 Patriot Act lowered the standard for such an order in some cases, and in others made records accessible using FBI administrative subpoenas called “national security letters.” (Read the ruling.)
A debate is brewing among legal and technology scholars over whether there should be privacy protections when a wide variety of transactional data are brought together to paint what is essentially a profile of an individual’s behavior. “You know everything I’m doing, you know what happened, and you haven’t listened to any of the contents” of the communications, said Susan Landau, co-author of a book on electronic privacy and a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. “Transactional information is remarkably revelatory.”
Ms. Spaulding, the national-security lawyer, said it’s “extremely questionable” to assume Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy for data such as the subject-header of an email or a Web address from an Internet search, because those are more like the content of a communication than a phone number. “These are questions that require discussion and debate,” she said. “This is one of the problems with doing it all in secret.”
Gen. Hayden, the former NSA chief and now Central Intelligence Agency director, in January 2006 publicly defended the activities of the Terrorist Surveillance Program after it was disclosed by the New York Times. He said it was “not a driftnet over Lackawanna or Fremont or Dearborn, grabbing all communications and then sifting them out.” Rather, he said, it was carefully targeted at terrorists. However, some intelligence officials now say the broader NSA effort amounts to a driftnet. A portion of the activity, the NSA’s access to domestic phone records, was disclosed by a USA Today article in 2006.
The NSA, which President Truman created in 1952 through a classified presidential order to be America’s ears abroad, has for decades been the country’s largest and most secretive intelligence agency. The order confined NSA spying to “foreign governments,” and during the Cold War the NSA developed a reputation as the world’s premier code-breaking operation. But in the 1970s, the NSA and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes. That led to the original FISA legislation in 1978, which included an explicit ban on the NSA eavesdropping in the U.S. without a warrant.
Big advances in telecommunications and database technology led to unprecedented data-collection efforts in the 1990s. One was the FBI’s Carnivore program, which raised fears when it was in disclosed in 2000 that it might collect telecommunications information about law-abiding individuals. But the ground shifted after 9/11. Requests for analysis of any data that might hint at terrorist activity flooded from the White House and other agencies into NSA’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters outside Washington, D.C., one former NSA official recalls. At the time, “We’re scrambling, trying to find any piece of data we can to find the answers,” the official said.
The 2002 congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks criticized the NSA for holding back information, which NSA officials said they were doing to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. “NSA did not want to be perceived as targeting individuals in the United States” and considered such surveillance the FBI’s job, the inquiry concluded.
FBI-NSA Projects
The NSA quietly redefined its role. Joint FBI-NSA projects “expanded exponentially,” said Jack Cloonan, a longtime FBI veteran who investigated al Qaeda. He pointed to national-security letter requests: They rose from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report last year. It also said the letters permitted the potentially illegal collection of thousands of records of people in the U.S. from 2003-05. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau had found additional instances in 2006.
It isn’t known how many Americans’ data have been swept into the NSA’s systems. The Treasury, for instance, built its database “to look at all the world’s financial transactions” and gave the NSA access to it about 15 years ago, said a former NSA official. The data include domestic and international money flows between bank accounts and credit-card information, according to current and former intelligence officials.
The NSA receives from Treasury weekly batches of this data and adds it to a database at its headquarters. Prior to 9/11, the database was used to pursue specific leads, but afterward, the effort was expanded to hunt for suspicious patterns.
Through the Treasury, the NSA also can access the database of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, the Belgium-based clearinghouse for records of international transactions between financial institutions, current and former officials said. The U.S. acknowledged in 2006 that the CIA and Treasury had access to Swift’s database, but said the NSA’s Terrorism Surveillance Program was separate and that the NSA provided only “technical assistance.” A Treasury spokesman said the agency had no comment.
Through the Department of Homeland Security, airline passenger data also are accessed and analyzed for suspicious patterns, such as five unrelated people who repeatedly fly together, current and former intelligence officials said. Homeland Security shares information with other agencies only “on a limited basis,” spokesman Russ Knocke said.
NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI’s Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn’t know the number. “As a matter of policy and law, we can not discuss matters that are classified,” said FBI spokesman John Miller.
The budget for the NSA’s data-sifting effort is classified, but one official estimated it surpasses $1 billion. The FBI is requesting to nearly double the budget for the Digital Collection System in 2009, compared with last year, requesting $42 million. “Not only do demands for information continue to increase, but also the requirement to facilitate information sharing does,” says a budget justification document, noting an “expansion of electronic surveillance activity in frequency, sophistication, and linguistic needs.”
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Police lose track of nine sex offenders
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
NEWS Shopper has discovered Kent police has lost track of known sex offenders.
The force was responding to a Freedom of Information request submitted by News Shopper.
It confirmed the whereabouts of nine registered sex offenders “became unknown” in 2007.
Police declined to say who the missing people are, where they used to live and what offences they had committed.
They say officers may find the contact details they have been given are incorrect and then work with partner agencies to locate the offenders.
Assistant Chief Constable Allyn Thomas said: “Kent police take this matter very seriously.
“Active investigations are ongoing in order to trace the nine people.”
He added: “We are working with partner agencies and other forces in a bid to locate these offenders.
“This may also include working with agencies overseas.
“Once these offenders have been located, Kent police will work with the Crown Prosecution Service to ensure they are dealt with appropriately, and in some instances, returned to prison.”
He said: “Kent police, together with the Kent Police Authority, has recently committed £750,000 towards monitoring offenders living in the county, including assessing any risks to communities.”
Family Matters is a charity which offers counselling to victims of sexual abuse in north Kent.
Its chairman, Malcolm Gilbert, says although the figures are disturbing they should not discourage victims from reporting offences.
He said: “We must not let a focus on the Sex Offenders’ Register diminish our vigilance against the sexual abuse of children and the sexual assault of young people and women.
“The vast majority of sex offenders go undetected because their crimes go unreported and so they have never been put on the register in the first place.”
Mr Gilbert added: “Many of these offenders continue to abuse and prey on the vulnerable with little fear of being caught.”
A national newspaper recently revealed police forces across the country had lost track of 337 sex offenders since 1997.
There are 92 registered sex offenders living in north Kent and 983 in the whole county.
Call the Family Matters helpline on 01474 537392 or visit familymattersuk.org
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UK Budget 2008: What it Means to You
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
High-polluting vehicles will be hit harder, but incentives for green cars will be introduced and fuel duty rises shelved, announced Chancellor Alistair Darling in his 2008 budget.
Fuel duty
Lobbying from consumer and freight organisations, as well as record increases in oil prices, have convinced Chancellor Alistair Darling to delay planned fuel duty rises by six months.
A rise of 2p per litre had been planned, but pressure from lobby groups and consumer unrest at the high cost of motoring has led to Darling shelving the plans.
But fuel duty will rise by 0.5p per litre in real terms in 2010, warned the Chancellor.
Road tax
Road tax will be regraded to punish those who buy the most polluting vehicles and encourage manufacturers to drive down emissions from their cars.
From 2010 cars that emit less than 130g/km - the proposed EU target for fleet-wide emissions by 2012 - will pay no car tax at all in the first year. A higher first year rate will be introduced on the most polluting cars. Currently a Band G vehicle that emits more than 225g/km pays £300 per year.
‘It is right that if people choose to buy a more polluting car that they should pay more in the first year to reflect the environmental cost,’ Darling said.
Biofuels
Darling announced that money will be set aside to develop road-pricing schemes and - as expected - announced that biofuels will not be subsidised from 2010, saving the Treasury over £500m a year.
Darling has scrapped the tax break on biofuels due to environmental concerns about the sustainability of biofuel crops. Instead the government will press ahead with existing plans to require petrol and diesel to include 5 per cent biofuel by 2010.
Other measures
It is believed that global economic pressures have delayed plans to introduce harsher green taxes on high-polluting vehicles.
Announcements on a showroom tax on so-called gas-guzzlers of up to £1,000 and laws that would force oil companies to develop more sustainable biofuels were not announced.
A report published alongside the budget called for -whole-life running costs of cars to displayed on new cars and clearer environmental information on advertising provided by manufacturers to indicate the relative greenness of their cars.
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CIA rendition flight spotted in Hungary
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
A Hungarian newspaper Wednesday ran a picture of a Boeing 737 allegedly used for CIA rendition flights in central and Eastern Europe.
The daily Nepszabadsag ran a photo of a white plane bearing the registration number N34315. That aircraft was allegedly used to ferry terror suspects from the Middle East and South Asia to the United States, the Hungarian news service, MTI reported.
The photo is from Budapest’s Ferihegy airport and the plane is thought to be the same one spotted in previous rendition photos taken in central Europe and Ireland. It doesn’t say when the picture was taken, however. A check of the Web site credited with the picture indicates the photograph is from 2006.
A spokesman for the Ferihegy airport said charter flights from the United States often stop in Budapest on their way to Iraq, noting a Boeing 767 landed for refueling there Tuesday.
The Hungarian Foreign Ministry had no official comment of the photo.
© 2008 United Press International
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CCTV camera sees under clothing
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Applications for CCTV operators go through the roof
A UK company is marketing the first CCTV camera that can see objects under a person’s clothing.
The ThruVision T5000 can spot items underneath clothing at a range of up to 25 metres.
All materials emit different terahertz waves, allowing the cameras to differentiate between sugar and cocaine, for example.
Clive Beattie, chief executive at ThruVision, said: “Acts of terrorism have shaken the world in recent years and security precautions have been tightened globally.
“The ability to see metallic and non-metallic items on people out to 25 metres is a key capability that will enhance any comprehensive security system deployment.”
ThruVision claimed that privacy campaigners should not be alarmed since the human body emits terahertz waves at a frequency which the device does not scan, meaning that personal body details are not revealed.
This contrasts with millimetre wave radar such as the Secure 1000 systems being tested at Heathrow which provide clear pictures of the body under clothing.
Dr Liz Towns-Andrews, director of knowledge exchange at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said: “Astronomers use T-ray cameras that can see through dust and clouds in space, revealing what lies beyond.
“This is a first-class example of how fundamental scientific research can be applied to benefit the whole of society.
“Who would have imagined that research carried out by space scientists to study the stars could be used to protect the public from terrorists and therefore save lives? The impact of this will be remarkable.”
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Democrat calls for inquiry into Blackwater
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman expanded his effort yesterday to investigate private security contractor Blackwater Worldwide, calling for a wide-ranging federal inquiry into the company’s employment practices.
In letters to the Internal Revenue Service, the Small Business Administration, and the Labor Department, Waxman, Democrat of California, questioned Blackwater’s classification of its workers as independent contractors instead of employees. That designation, which the government has questioned in the past, allowed the company to obtain $144 million in contracts set aside for small businesses and avoid paying as much as $50 million in withholding taxes under State Department contracts, he said.
A Blackwater spokeswoman called Waxman’s allegations completely without merit and said the company regrets his “decision to publicly air misleading information.” An IRS spokesman declined to comment.
The allegations were made public as a team of Justice Department and FBI investigators completed a two-week visit to Baghdad, where they interviewed additional witnesses in connection with a Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel guarding US diplomats killed 17 civilians at a Baghdad traffic circle. Although a grand jury was convened late last year in the case, federal prosecutors have not determined whether the contractors can be prosecuted under US law. They are immune from Iraqi prosecution under a decree promulgated by the former US occupation government in Iraq.
The shootings prompted criticism of the use of private security contractors by both the State and Defense departments. As a result, the State Department promised to increase supervision of their activities, and the two departments developed comprehensive guidelines for them.
In Senate testimony late last month, administration officials said that 163,590 contractor personnel were working in Iraq under Defense contracts, slightly more than the number of US troops there. Of those, 6,467 are armed security personnel, about 1,500 of them American citizens. State Department security contractors total 1,518, about half of them Americans. The officials said that many of the rest are British and South African.
An additional 32,520 Defense contractor personnel are working in Afghanistan.
Blackwater, one of three US companies that provide security for US diplomats and official civilians in Iraq, has received nearly $1.25 billion in federal contracts from State and other agencies since 2000.
According to Waxman, Blackwater has received contracts set aside for companies with fewer than 1,500 employees after self-certifying its own status. The addition of nearly 1,000 personnel in Iraq would put it over the Small Business Administration limit, but Blackwater has insisted that they are independent contractors it pays to work for the US government. That designation allows the firm to avoid withholding federal income tax from what company records have indicated is $1,222 per day the guards are paid.
Waxman also charged that Blackwater was violating Labor Department affirmative action regulations by withholding its employment records.
In its statement, Blackwater said that its classification of its personnel is accurate and that it has “always been forthcoming about this aspect of its business with its customer, the US government.”
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Guantanamo detainees allowed phone calls
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Cuba: The US military has agreed to let detainees make regular phone calls to their families from the Guantanamo Bay prison, where many have been confined in extreme isolation for as long as six years.
The new policy by the Defense Department, which previously said security concerns prevented such calls, is part of a strategy to ease conditions for frustrated prisoners at the US Navy base in southeast Cuba.
Critics suggest the move aims to improve the image of the prison, which has been a flash point for criticism of Bush administration policies at home and abroad since it opened in January 2002.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said the telephone policy reflects a commitment to maintaining the health and well-being of Guantanamo detainees. No start date has been set for the program.
It was not clear how the military plans to monitor the calls. A spokesman for the detention center, Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush, said it is working out procedures and has no timeline for starting the program. He declined to provide details about which detainees would be eligible and how often calls would be permitted.
Inmates’ contact with the outside world generally has been limited to mail delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross and meetings with their lawyers. The military has allowed a small number of detainees to speak with their families, but typically only on “humanitarian” grounds such as following a death in the family.
Detainees’ attorneys welcomed the phone calls but said reconnecting with family could make life more painful for those at Guantanamo, where the US military holds about 275 men on suspicion of links to terrorism, al-Qaida or the Taliban.
Human rights advocates and foreign leaders have repeatedly called for its shutdown, raising complaints about the duration of detentions and the US decision to classify detainees as “enemy combatants” without the same protections as traditional prisoners of war.
Marc Falkoff, a Northern Illinois University law professor who represents 17 detainees, said one of his Yemeni clients has a 6-year-old daughter with whom he has never spoken.
“To be honest, I don’t know whether speaking with her will lift him from his depression or simply shatter him,” said Falkoff, who added that the man has grown so hopeless he has asked his lawyers to stop meeting with him.
He also suggested the policy aimed to cast a better light on the prison ahead of a US Supreme Court decision on detainee rights.
Chicago lawyer H. Candace Gorman, who represents a Guantanamo detainee, said she learned on a recent visit with her client that prisoners will be allowed to speak with their families for one hour every six months.
Some attorneys are skeptical the calls will ever happen.
“I will believe it when I see it,” said Wells Dixon, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many Guantanamo detainees.
In an attempt to reduce hostility inside the detention center, military commanders have recently pursued plans for humanities courses and more open communal areas for men held in isolation 22 hours a day.
Attorneys for detainees say the assaults against guards are partly triggered by frustration among men with no real chance to confront accusations that they are enemy combatants.
AP
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VIDEO: Ex-DEA Claims CIA Imported Cocaine
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
A clip from “American Drug War: The Last White
http://www.AmericanDrugWar.com
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR8s-mIj9BM[/youtube]
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US Wants More Powers To Ban Air Travellers
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Washington seeks power to ban air travellers - even if they are only flying OVER the U.S.
The US government is demanding the right to ban British air passengers from flying over America en route to other countries – even when the flights will not land in the United States.
Under anti-terrorism measures due to come into force within two years, the US authorities insist they need to do background checks on all UK air passengers travelling to Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and South America.
Direct flights to popular holiday destinations such as the Bahamas, Barbados, Toronto and Mexico City would all be covered by stringent US security checks examining people’s passport details, travel plans and even how they paid for their ticket.
US security officials insist the checks must be completed 72 hours before departure or the flight will be banned from US airspace.
Anyone identified as having “suspicious indicators associated with travel behaviour” by US security would be prevented from boarding their flight.
Almost every flight leaving Britain and Europe for North and South America will be affected.
For safety reasons, transatlantic flights usually take the shortest route across the Atlantic and then fly over or close to the US coast so they can divert to an airfield quickly in an emergency.
The far-reaching new demands emerged last month during a private meeting between US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, but have not been revealed until now.
Mr Chertoff confirmed British passengers would be checked against US anti-terror and so-called “no-fly” lists.
Miss Smith said: “We agree that it is possible to maintain that ability for people to travel whilst at the same time building on the close relationship we have in sharing information, in ensuring that we’re working together to develop the strongest security around travel between our countries.”
Civil liberties campaigners fear the Secure Flight programme could be used to gather information about anyone flying, not just those with links to terrorism.
The Home Office insisted: “No decisions have been made.”
© 2008 Associated Newspapers Limited
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MRSA Infections Killing More Americans than AIDS
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
An antibiotic-resistant strain of the common staph bacteria is now responsible for more deaths in the United States than AIDS, according to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “This is a significant public health problem” said CDC medical epidemiologist Scott K. Fridkin. “We should be very worried.”
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a variant of a common bacteria species that normally causes easily-treated staph infections. While staph infections are not usually life-threatening, if untreated they can cause wounded flesh to necrotize (die), leading to painful and disfiguring abscesses. In severe cases, the bacteria can spread to other parts of the body, such as joints, bones, lungs, blood or other vital organs. This can cause potentially fatal complications, and patients so infected must be given intensive care immediately.
Because MRSA is resistant to all first-line antibiotics, it is far more dangerous than the easily treated varieties of the bacterium. And according to the CDC, MRSA infection is becoming more common.
Researchers analyzed data from nine states and concluded that 31.8 out of 100,000 U.S. residents are being infected by MRSA each year, leading to 94,360 infections and 18,650 deaths across the country. This is in comparison to 12,500 deaths from AIDS in 2005, and represents more infections than meningitis, bacterial pneumonia and flesh-eating strep put together.
“This indicates these life-threatening MRSA infections are much more common than we had thought,” Fridkin said.
The CDC says that MRSA infections are most common among children and the elderly, and more common among blacks than among members of other ethnic or racial groups.
Prior studies on MRSA have concluded that health care providers could significantly reduce the spread of the disease by implementing stricter hygiene measures. Outbreaks of MRSA in prisons, schools, and other institutions have also become increasingly common.
“MRSA outbreaks are entirely the fault of the conventional medical community, which has actually encouraged the breeding of the bacteria through rampant overuse of antibiotics,” said consumer health advocate Mike Adams. “The rest of the story is that MRSA is easily killed by colloidal silver, garlic, rainforest herbs and numerous other natural remedies, but the entire conventional medical community continues to pretend these substances don’t exist. Thus, they refuse to embrace the actual cures for MRSA, and thousands of people are dying each year as a result. This medical catastrophe will continue for as long as doctors remain ignorant about the curative powers of natural remedies while remaining foolishly limited to the use of patented pharmaceuticals to treat all infections,” Adams said.
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Top Commander Resigns
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Admiral William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, resigned on Tuesday, explaining that his reputation as an obstacle of President Bush’s military designs had become too much of a distraction. Fallon was often reported to be a thorn in the side of the president and his other military advisors, a role both the admiral and administration officials strongly deny.
U.S. commander in Mideast steps down
Navy Adm. William J. Fallon, head of Central Command, oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is seen as a critic of Bush’s policies.
By Peter Spiegel and Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
The Pentagon on Tuesday announced the abrupt resignation of the commander overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who was seen as an internal critic of the Bush administration’s troop decisions in Iraq.
The resignation of Navy Adm. William J. Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command, comes at a crucial time — a month before highly anticipated recommendations for the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq — and amid a debate among top military commanders over American deployments in the region.
Supporters of the administration’s troop buildup have criticized Fallon for pushing for an accelerated reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq. By doing so, they argued, Fallon undermined the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus.
“He fought Petraeus every step of the way, creating unrealistic demands and extra work,” said a former senior Pentagon official who has worked directly with both men. “And in so doing, he was not only undermining Petraeus, he was failing to support the president’s policy.”
Despite the increasingly heated bickering, Fallon’s decision, representing the departure of a combatant commander in wartime, stunned even senior officers.
In a statement issued by his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., Fallon insisted that he had no substantive differences with the White House over policies in the Middle East. Instead, press reports of “a disconnect between my views and the president’s policy objectives” had become a distraction, he said.
“Although I don’t believe there have ever been any differences about the objectives of our policy in the Central Command area of responsibility, the simple perception that there is makes it difficult for me to effectively serve America’s interests there,” Fallon said.
His resignation was announced at the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who also insisted Fallon had no significant policy differences with the White House.
Fallon’s resignation came just a week after the publication of a controversial profile in Esquire magazine that portrayed the admiral as the primary opponent of an administration plan to bomb Iran.
Administration officials ridiculed the idea of Fallon as the lone obstacle, citing similar concerns by Gates and others. But current and former officers said administration officials were upset with the article because it portrayed Fallon at sharp odds with the president on a wider range of issues. Some of the current and former officers spoke on condition of anonymity when describing internal discussions.
A senior Pentagon official said that while the Esquire piece was a final straw, Fallon repeatedly had angered administration officials with his public comments.
In one instance, Fallon allowed a New York Times reporter into a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a decision that made Maliki uncomfortable and seemed to upset President Bush. This month, Fallon testified before Congress that Turkey must reach “accommodation” with the Kurdistan Workers Party, a group the U.S. has labeled a terrorist organization.
“The Esquire piece had a big impact,” the official said. “But I think it is merely the most recent in a series of pieces that have left people with the impression that Fallon is out of step with the administration.”
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said Fallon’s resignation was a sign that the Bush administration was unwilling to tolerate dissent. But Geoff Morrell, Gates’ spokesman, insisted that Fallon’s resignation would not preclude admirals and generals from voicing their opinions.
Although both Gates and Fallon focused on the recent press reports as the source of distractions, those briefed on internal Pentagon debates said the administration had been souring on Fallon for months, largely because of his strained relations with Petraeus.
Both Fallon and Petraeus are known as hard-charging and intellectually gifted. But almost from the time Fallon first traveled to Iraq after assuming control of U.S. Central Command in early 2007, he and Petraeus had clashed over Iraq policy, according to current and former officials.
“I have the distinct impression that Fallon and Petraeus do not like each other personally and disagree dramatically on how extensive our effort in Iraq should be,” said Stephen Biddle, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who has advised the military command in Iraq.
The former senior Pentagon official said Fallon early in his tenure told Petraeus that he believed Iraq was slumping inevitably toward civil war and the that Iraqi government would be unable to turn the tide, meaning the U.S. should find a way to quickly disengage militarily.
“It drove Fallon for the rest of his command,” the official said of that early analysis, adding that the reasons Fallon had been picked for the job — his ability to work diplomatically with Iraq’s neighbors and the hope he would go to bat for Petraeus in Washington — fell by the wayside.
“The administration, and particularly the White House, immediately lost confidence in him,” the former official said.
Fallon repeatedly has denied such deep differences with Petraeus, who issued a statement calling Fallon a “true warrior.” At the same time, Petraeus said that although the two men had collaborated for more than a year on Iraq policy, they had come to a “shared view” of the future only “more recently.”
By pushing for quicker withdrawals in Iraq, Fallon was seen as siding with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have warned of stress on U.S. forces.
As well, Fallon and his staff are known to share concerns of the Joint Chiefs about Petraeus’ ties to the White House. Petraeus officially works for Central Command. But because he regularly speaks to Bush, Centcom has been left out of planning processes, to Fallon’s frustration.
Despite apparent White House displeasure with Fallon, Gates insisted that the Central Command chief decided to retire “entirely on his own.” Bush praised Fallon, saying he deserves “considerable credit” for progress in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gates said that Army Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the deputy Centcom commander, would take over temporarily for Fallon. Possible successors include Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the former No. 2 commander in Iraq who is currently Gates’ top military aide; Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, who led troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now heads Joint Forces Command; Dempsey; and Petraeus.
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Is the UK Hunting Ban Working?
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
It’s three years since the Fox Hunting ban came into force in England. What’s changed - not much, with fox hunts still going on…
THREE YEARS ON - SCHNEWS REVIEWS THE UK ‘BAN’ ON HUNTING
“It’s pretty much business as usual hunt sabbing in the fields of rural England, three years after the hunting ban came into force - if you can call it a ban; week in week out we see hunts chasing and killing foxes in direct violation of the ban.” - H.S.A. Press Officer
Three years since the ban on hunting with hounds was passed through parliament, has it made a blind bit of difference to the bloody fate of persecuted British wildlife? No – but it has provided an invaluable lesson on how people with cash and influence can buck the law with impunity. Not only that, but those trying to curb their illegal activities face police harassment and hunt thuggery.
When the the Criminal Justice Act 1994 was first introduced, one of its main targets was the Hunt Saboteurs movement, denounced as “Thugs, wreckers and bullies” by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard. Within hours of the bill receiving royal assent, police moved in and began arresting those disrupting bloodsports under the new offence of ‘aggravated trespass’. At one point, Sussex police were fielding nearly eighty officers every weekend to arrest and harass hunt saboteurs.
Contrast this with the Hunting Act 2005. Pretty unequivocal in its terms, it made hunting with hounds a criminal offence. The more naïve might have expected a similar police effort made to clamp down on those now in breach of the law. What actually happened was that David ‘there’s none so blind as those who will not see’ Blunkett announced a ‘softly-softly’ approach, letting the police off the hook. In a backstairs deal, hunting became an offence - but not one for which details of those arrested would be recorded, or one which would count towards national crime enforcement statistics. The same police forces which had deployed vast resources to harass anti-bloodsports activists now simply ignored the hunting issue.
Bloodsports enthusiasts carried on their merry way, initially using the flimsy legal camouflage of ‘exempt’ hunting. What this meant in fact was that some hunts took to having a bird of prey on hand (falconry isn’t banned), others a few bumpkins with shotguns (because it’s allowed to use two hounds to flush prey towards guns) and others still took to dragging smelly rags around miles from the action in attempt to pretend they were drag-hunting. Once it became apparent that across the country police were not about to take any action anyway even these pantomimes were dropped. For example on Saturday 5th January, the Surrey Union foxhunt chased and killed a fox on the village green at Ockley, Surrey. This was photographed by sabs. Efforts to interest police in the footage were met with the thin blue line of complete indifference.
Of course there have been a handful of prosecutions across the country - twenty-five to be exact. Almost all of those prosecuted by the CPS have been targeted for ‘low-level’ hunting – using lurcher dogs to hunt rabbits and hares. While just as cruel as yer redcoated, stirrup cup drinkin’ landownin’ variety, the setting of dogs on wildlife isn’t protected by that most vital exemption in the Hunting Act – the defence of being a toff.
When huntsmen from the more prestigious hunts find themselves in court, always as a result of footage taken by the League against Cruel Sports and often as a result of private prosecutions taken out by them, they are equipped with the best legal advice money can buy. As a result they can afford to pay for continual appeals and, like Premiership footballers charged with speeding, find themselves able to wriggle through the smallest of courtroom loopholes.
We are now nearing the end of the third fox-hunting season since the introduction of the ban. Sab groups, committed to taking direct action against bloodsports, have gathered hours of footage of hunts breaking the ban. In response, the hunts have upped the level of violence and intimidation – especially against those carrying cameras. This season has seen a rise in violence targeted at sabs, with vehicles attacked and people hospitalised. And it is usually the camera operators they go for first.
When police do turn up, naturally they haven’t developed a sudden sympathy for the anarchists in their (t)rusty black landrovers. In November last year, sabs out with the notorious Old Surrey and Burstow fox hunt, filmed huntsman Mark Bycroft blatantly urging his hounds on to a fox.
One sab told us, “They were on to their third fox of the day – it broke out of some woodland and we were standing there filming. Police arrived and told the sabs, “You lot move away or you’ll be arrested.” When we asked what for, we were told aggravated trespass. Pointing out that we were disrupting a unlawful activity didn’t do any good as at that point Bycroft rode up and told the police, “You lot sort ‘em out or we will.” The cops then immediately jumped on one cameraman and wrestled him to the ground, putting him in handcuffs. Minutes later they arrested me.”All charges have since been dropped.
Of course it’s not surprising that the boys in blue line up with the chinless in pink – some of them ride with the hunt! On Saturday 9th February 2008, Sabs on the South Downs and Eridge hunt were bemused to have an off-duty WPC from Surrey ride up to them flashing her warrant card. Strangely enough two sabs were later arrested and held for 22 hours. “Basically our vehicle had been blocked in by hunt thugs. After one female hunt sab had been ridden down we’d asked for police assistance and been told that the matter ‘had already been dealt with’ – i.e. they’d asked the WPC if everything was OK. To try and get out I rolled forward with the Land Rover and cracked a brake light on the 4×4 blocking the road. When the police eventually did turn up I was nicked for criminal damage!”
And the courts take a lenient view of hunt violence. One hunt supporter, convicted of GBH in November for breaking a woman’s arm in two places, merely received an eight month suspended sentence. You can easily imagine what would have happened if the offence had been the other way round.
As one greying veteran of the anti-bloodsports battles told SchNEWS, “Screw this monitoring lark: no more standing around with cameras while still getting attacked by the huntscum and arrested by the plod – let’s get back to old fashioned sabbing…”
With the law still an ass, all kinds of anti-hunt action continues – and help and support is still needed. See www.huntsabs.org.uk
Have Your Say: Is the UK Hunting Ban Working?
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CIA Holocaust Claims Twenty Million Victims
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
The world’s number one terrorist organization, the CIA has committed heinous acts of terrorism abroad, murdering critics of US foreign and domestic policies and has done it on behalf of an increasing tiny, privileged American elite. This elite is a tiny one percent which owns more than the combined wealth the remaining 95% [See: the L-Curve]. On behalf of this tiny, privileged base, the CIA has placed itself above all law and supervision. The CIA’s war on the world has claimed an estimated 12 million to 20 million victims, far more than the best estimates attributed to Adolph Hitler’s ‘Holocaust’ of World War II.
A war of plunder waged by the CIA on much of the world has been called the Third World War because many of its victims are chauvinistically, imperialistically, termed “third world”. Given the magnitude of these CIA atrocities, we may, indeed, consider this panoply of terrorist acts a world war waged by privilege upon those who are less privileged, a war waged by the rich on the poor, a war of aggression by those who have against those who are without.
The official history of the CIA is dull reading. But one would not expect an official document of the US government to reveal the early connections between the CIA and Yale’s notorious Skull and Bones society; one would not expect the US government to reveal the nature of CIA backed coups in Chile to its role in the notorious Bay of Pigs debacle. One would not expect an official document to detail the role played by the CIA in the Iran/Contra affair. One would not expect a sanitized government version of the CIA to reveal how the CIA creates and support death squads that have resulted in a holocaust not seen since the Third Reich.
The passage of the National Security Act in July 1947 legislated the changes in the Executive branch that had been under discussion since 1945. The Act established an independent Air Force, provided for coordination by a committee of service chiefs, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and a Secretary of Defense, and created the National Security Council (NSC). The CIG became an independent department and was renamed the Central Intelligence Agency.
Under the Act, the CIA’s mission was only loosely defined, since efforts to thrash out the CIA’s duties in specific terms would have contributed to the tension surrounding the unification of the services. The four general tasks assigned to the Agency were to advise the NSC on matters related to national security; to make recommendations to the NSC regarding the coordination of intelligence activities of the Departments; to correlate and evaluate intelligence and provide for its appropriate dissemination and “to perform such other functions … as the NSC will from time to time direct….”
–CIA Organizational Development, [Adapted from: United States Senate Select Committee on Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence -- Book I, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 26 April 1976, pages 102-118.]
The numbers don’t lie! At the end of a detailed statistical study, the CIA will be found, like a spider in its web, at the bump on a bell curve, at the very nexus of murder, mayhem and heinous acts of terrorism that it has exported across the globe and behind the deaths of US citizens in America.
• CIA atrocities may be categorized.
• Secret Wars
• Assassinations
• Subversions of targeted regimes
• Overt terrorism
• Support of other terrorist organizations
• Exploitation and/or creation of terrorist organizations like ‘al Qaeda’.
• Drug sales, primarily cocaine and its derivative –crack.
• Domestic Assassinations and acts of terrorism
The US government, especially under the GOP regimes of Ronald Reagan, Bush Sr, and now the shrub, have given up the dream of peace. The result is an Orwellian nightmare, a state of perpetual war put into effect by the CIA, the Praetorian Guard to America’s privileged elite. The nightmares –domestic and foreign –are of our own making. Worse than “mutually assured destruction”, this thug government within a government may very well spell the end of humankind, at least the end of those dreams that make life worth living. It was an avoidable choice forced upon us by incompetent, cowardly and corrupt right wing inspired ‘leadership’.
CIA Mission: Prop Up Right Wing Extremists and Elites; Suppress Everyone Else
Since World War II, the peace achieved with this strategy has been illusory. “Peace” has become an Orwellian term for a series of crimes against humanity. The secret wars waged by the CIA hardly penetrates the American consciousness, numbed as we are by a compromised mainstream media. Largely owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and other extreme right wing corporations, media, at the highest levels of ownership and management, are complicit. Many conflicts escape the glare of publicity –by design or by incompetence. Some are low-intensity conflicts designed to slip under the radar.
At the very heart of the CIA modus operandi is the network of proxy governments, by nature, oligarchical, naturally allied with America’s privileged classes. The CIA has little trouble convincing this class that its work abroad is ‘patriotic’.
The CIA has naturally allied itself with ruling oligarchs abroad, most notably the Saudi Royals. It was significant that the Saudi royals were provided a ‘royal’ exit from the US when every other aircraft was grounded on 911.
Throughout the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, wealth and income disparities are even greater than those in the US. The oil emirates, only some 0.5 percent of the population, are billionaires. Everyone else, like the poorer and middle income folk in America, share less or none of the wealth that is generated by the production of oil. In Latin America, Cesar Chavez may be a notable exception, hence the Bush administration’s campaign of demonization. Chavez dares to maintain control of his nation’s oil wealth.
In Latin America, Central America, this same system is working. If the people don’t like it, you organize the police into death squads, as we’ve done in many countries, including, conspicuously, El Salvador, and you kill enough of them that they are emasculated. They can’t do anything about it. They are crippled. They are repressed, suppressed and oppressed, and you can get by with this system of milking the countries to your will and to your way.
The [Sen. Frank] Church Committee of 1975 ….. Again this is not a lecture about the Secret Wars of the CIA. That’s a separate lecture. I could give it again, but it takes a full hour in its own right. But you must know how the CIA weaves into this war complex — this war machinery of ours.
–John Stockwell, The CIA and the Gulf War
According to Stockwell, the Church Committee of 1975 discovered over thirteen thousand covert operations since World War II.
Late in 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA was not only destabilizing foreign governments, but was also conducting illegal intelligence operations against thousands of American citizens.
On January 27, 1975, an aroused Senate voted overwhelmingly to establish a special 11-member investigating body along the lines of the recently concluded Watergate Committee. Under the chairmanship of Idaho Senator Frank Church, with Texas Senator John Tower as vice-chairman, the select committee was given nine months and 150 staffers to complete its work.
The so-called Church Committee ran into immediate resistance from the Ford administration, concerned about exposing American intelligence operations and suspicious of Church’s budding presidential ambitions.
The committee interviewed 800 individuals, and conducted 250 executive and 21 public hearings. At the first televised hearing, staged in the Senate Caucus Room, Chairman Church dramatically displayed a CIA poison dart gun to highlight the committee’s discovery that the CIA directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin sufficient to kill thousands.
Stockwell maintains that many of these ‘covert operations’ were violent and led to wars. Examples include the propaganda campaign that led directly to the Korean and Viet Nam wars.
…we have so many of them in the public record that it’s obviously very difficult to know exactly how many people died in Vietnam or in Korea or in Nicaragua or in the Congo — but still, working with conservative figures we come up with a minimum figure of SIX MILLION PEOPLE killed in the Secret Wars of the CIA through its de-stabilizations over these past forty years:
One million people killed in the Korean War;
Two million people killed in Vietnam;
One to two million people killed in Cambodia;
Eight hundred thousand people killed in Indonesia;
Fifty thousand people killed in Angola.Now that began with the war that I organized as Commander of the Angola Task Force, working for a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Fifty thousand is the number that the Sandinistas and The New York Times pretty much agreed on were killed and wounded in Nicaragua in the ONE BILLION DOLLAR Contra de-stabilization in that country that we effected in the 1980s.
–John Stockwell, The CIA and the Gulf War
Stockwell concludes that throughout what is called the ‘Cold War’ some twenty million people were murdered, ‘…the second or third bloodiest war in all of human history”. Stockwell calls this the Third World War, a war waged by the CIA upon a ‘third world’. Is there any question now about why the US is hated throughout the world? Any questions?
Torture and death squads we do not run in England or Canada or Belgium or Sweden or Switzerland. They are, virtually all of them, done against countries of the Third World where the governments of those countries are not strong enough to prohibit us, to prevent us from brutalizing their people. The six million people killed are people of the Third World: people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of Nicaragua. And now, of course, the Middle Eastern deserts, in a new wrinkle on this system.
–John Stockwell, The CIA and the Gulf War
By now, the CIA has become expert in waging wars by proxy, encouraging domestic terrorism, subverting elected governments.
CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: “We’ll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us.” The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy).
–Steve Kangas, A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
Pakistan is a case in point.
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been propping up Musharraf’s military regime with $3.6 billion in economic aid from the US and a US-sponsored consortium, not to mention $900 million in military aid and the postponement of overdue debt repayments totaling $13.5 billion. But now the administration is debating whether Musharraf has become too dependent on Islamic extremist political parties in Pakistan to further US interests, and whether he should be pressured to permit the return of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who have formed an electoral alliance to challenge him in presidential elections scheduled for next year.
–Pakistan: Friend or Foe? The US shouldn’t prop up President Musharraf’s military regime, Selig S. Harrison
The late Benazir Bhutto revealed the truth before she was brutally gunned down in the streets of Karachi: US policy causes world terrorism. She died before she could tell the rest of the story. See also: Terrorism is worse under GOP regimes.
When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation — namely, life, liberty and justice for all. Dictatorships such as Musharraf’s suppress individual rights and freedoms and empower the most extreme elements of society. Oppressed citizens, unable to represent themselves through other means, often turn to extremism and religious fundamentalism.
Benazir Bhutto, A False Choice for Pakistan
Quoted above was a paragraph from A Timeline of CIA Atrocities by Steve Kangas, whose death under questionable circumstances raises still more questions given his encyclopedic knowledge of the CIA and the antipathy he inspired from Richard Mellon Scaife –the spider at the center of a malicious, right wing web, perhaps the “great right wing conspiracy” referred to by Hilary Clinton at the height of the GOP blow job jihad and scandal.
In 1984 Kangas moved to Germany where he was involved in electronic eavesdropping on Soviet military units in Eastern Europe, analyzing the transcripts and reporting back to NATO. It was at this time he began to question his conservative political beliefs.
Kangas left military intelligence in 1986 and became a student at the University of California in Santa Cruz. This experience moved him further to the left: “There, kindly professors pointed out to me the illogic of defending life by taking it, destroying the planet for a buck and shutting down schools to build more prisons. I am now thoroughly brainwashed to believe that kindness and human decency are positive traits to be emulated and encouraged.”
Kangas ran the Liberalism Resurgent website. This included several articles on the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of his online essays, The Origins of the Overclass, attempted to show “why the richest 1 percent have exploded ahead since 1975, with the help of the New Right, Corporate America and, surprisingly, the CIA.” In the essay he argues that Richard Mellon Scaife ran “Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world.”
Scaife was very unhappy with the attack made on him and employed private detective, Rex Armistead, to carry out an investigation into Kangas.
It is believed that Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: “Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas’ past?”
–Spartacus International; See also: A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
Violence against against America, often called ‘blowback’, is an inevitable reaction to CIA atrocities and interference. Concurrently, the US leads the world in the production of military hardware –tanks, missiles, nuclear weaponry, weapons of mass destruction. More recently, since the regime of Ronald Reagan specifically, the US has begun to trail the world in many other key industrial classification.
Under GOP ’stewardship’, the US is rapidly becoming a third world nation on steroids. As long as this is the case, no one living in the US, no citizen of the US abroad, is truly free. We are all reduced to mere units in a bigger, evil machine. Bush and his servile ilk serve Moloch willingly and visibly at Bohemian Grove. Slavery, however, is forced upon the rest of us, a process assisted ably by a corporate media.
Secrets of the CIA, Parts 1 - 7
The most extreme example of this, of course, is Fox News, best described as political porn. If the Fox outfit did not deflect attention from more insidious designs, it would be laughable, even indulge for the low-class, beer drinking’ entertainment that it might bring to certain demographics. In practice, however, it might as well be a state run organization reduced to merely dramatizing officially sanctioned news.
Should you have doubts about press complicity with CIA/government lawlessness, I urge you to consider, as an example, revelations from Dan Rather about what CBS did to curry favor with the White House; or what can happen to a corporate, fully politicized, fourth estate: the Iraq war. Once called Yellow Journalism, it is now cleverly called “fair and balanced”. In the worst cases, journalism become little more than a CIA ‘front’.
After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in US psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the “father of public relations,” Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays’ achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using US public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam’s savior.[3]
The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of “democracy” obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis — the capacity to see and understand the world around them — entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.
–Daniel Brandt, NameBase NewsLine, Journalism And The CIA
So it naturally follows that the robber barons and their fourth estate business partners should indeed benefit from the puppet they all worked so vigorously to enthrone.
Corporate Interests merged with State Interests
The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We “the people” do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.
–Laura Alexandrovna, Our Cold Civil War
The CIA is symptomatic of a militarized society, in which the CIA and the military play important roles in a circular self-justification. Much is made of the fact that the military provides opportunities for high school dropouts, the disadvantaged who might not otherwise get an education or a job. What is to be said of a society for which the export of death and destruction becomes essential to its economic well-being?
As Gore Vidal argued persuavesively in his “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire“, the military/industrial complex is a drag on the economy. The Pentagon budget, he argues, is an economic black hole. He sites, as an example, the construction of a ‘tank’! Once built, the economic life of the tank if finished! From that point on, the tank becomes a net drag on the economy. It produces nothing, adds noting! Moreover, the Pentagon soaks up monies that might have been budgeted for truly productive programs like education and training. What is to be said about a society that finds it necessary to send young people off to die in immoral wars in order to get them employed and off the streets?
Eisenhower saw Big Brother’s approach but could not have known how it might have been avoided. The revolution, decades in the making, is like a slow boil. We did not even know when we were “done”, but cooked we are! We are like one of many puzzles that originated in the mind of the ancient Megarian logician, Eubulides of Miletus.
The puzzle is called “sorites”, from the Greek for “heap.” The question is whether or not a single grain of sand is a “heap”? The answer is obviously “no”. But, if we add grains one at a time, the question arises: at what point have we made a “heap”? At what point have we made of the Military/Industrial complex a Frankenstein monster, Moloch, a Big Brother? At what point have we sacrificed our souls to ol’ Scratch? At what point did MIC become the Owl god?How CIA Became ‘Praetorian Guard’ to America’s Fascist Right Wing
While Americans in general opposed involvement in foreign wars, American industrialists were not inclined to turn down a quick buck.
On December 20, 1922 the New York Times reported that automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was financing Adolph Hitler’s nationalist and anti-Semitic movements in Munich. Simultaneously, the Berlin newspaper Berliner Tageblatt appealed to the American Ambassador in Berlin to investigate and halt Henry Ford’s intervention into German domestic affairs. It was reported that Hitler’s foreign backers had furnished a “spacious headquarters” with a “host of highly paid lieutenants and officials.” Henry Ford’s portrait was prominently displayed on the walls of Hitler’s personal office:
Opposition to US involvement in World War II is most often linked to Charles Lindbergh.
However, most AFC supporters were neither liberal, nor Socialist. Many simply wanted to stay out of the war. Since many also came from the Midwest, an area never as sensitive to European problems as the east coast, isolationist arguments was soon buttressed by more traditional prejudices against eastern industrial and banking interests. (Almost two-thirds of the Committee’s 850,000 registered supporters would eventually come from the Midwest, mostly from a radius of three hundred miles around Chicago.)[13] Many AFC supporters were certain industry and the banks wanted war for their own profit.[14] Many other supporters were Republicans who flocked to the AFC for partisan political reasons. Still others were covertly pro-German. Some were German-Americans whose sentimental attachments had not been diminished by the crimes of the Nazi regime. Others, whether of German origin or not, were attracted to Hitler’s racism and anti-Semitism.
–David Gordon, America First:the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War, 1940-1941, History Department, Bronx Community College / CUNY Graduate Center
Ideologically, Bush and Lindbergh have much in common. It is no stretch to imagine this faction welcoming a Hitler victory in Europe, perhaps plotting a Nazi coup d’etat in the US had that happened.
Lindbergh wanted Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union, and was willing to accept Nazi domination of Europe as the price.[118] His protests to the contrary are not convincing.[119] Long before most Committee members, he had come to believe the existence of the Soviet Union had made Hitler’s dictatorship necessary. The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 made the need to keep America out of the war greater than ever. As a result, the efforts of America Firsters to keep America neutral became more frenetic as German successes in Russia mounted, and Roosevelt’s efforts to enter the war increased.
–David Gordon, America First:the Anti-War Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War, 1940-1941, History Department, Bronx Community College / CUNY Graduate Center
Lindbergh opposed US entry into WWII for the same reasons the Bush family continued to do business with Hitler and the Nazis’ after war had begun. The Bush family were Hitler’s trading partners.
The debate over Prescott Bush’s behavior has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
…
Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush’s involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.
The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.
The second set of papers, which are now in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush’s ventures, had also been seized. –
British Guardian: How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power
By now it is common knowledge, verified in the public record, that in October of 1942, Prescott Bush was accused of “Running Nazi front groups in the United States”. He was charged under the Trading With the Enemy Act as the US government shut down the operations at New York’s Union Banking Corporation.
Bush’s actions might have been considered high treason. They are interesting by virtue of the myriad connections about what is commonly referred to as the “Bush Crime FAmily” –Avril Harriman, the Rockefellers, Allen Dulles, James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, and Osama bin Laden. The connections are labyrinthine, involving a host of corporate connections, high ranking Nazis, the CIA and Allen Dulles.
Certainly, opposition to the US entry into World War II was not essentially “leftist”. It was, rather, the right wing that overtly supported Hitler’s adventures in Europe. Their opposition was, in fact, an ideological opposition to the US opposition to Hitler. There is a stunning picture of American Nazis giving the Nazi salute as they filed past the coffins of German Nazis killed in the crash of the airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Some recent history may be in order. Before their resurgence amid delicious vindication, the Dixie Chicks were vilified by the same crowd that attacked dissenters for daring to compare Bush with Hitler. In Europe, by contrast, the similarities were clear and irrefutable, quite beyond the power of Fox to spin or lie about.
…one woman who is a translator and teacher of German-language literature – a woman who lived in Germany for ten years and has immersed herself in the German culture for twenty years said that among the people in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and among Holocaust survivors in the United States, she hears the parallels between Bush and Hitler and the similarities between the United States now and Germany in the 1930’s all the time. “She writes:”
“It’s almost like this knowledge is a given–a basic assumption shared by everyone I know who is intimately familiar with the Nazi era (that is, 90% of my professional colleagues, clients, collaborators, etc.). It is like the unspoken known. Unspoken, and unspeakable”
–Lonna Gooden VanHorn, America’s Hitler: Part V
The most recent right wing variation about WWII peaceniks had its origins in Bush’s run up to war against Iraq. It goes like this: the allies had already done all the hard work because US “Peaceniks” did not want to go to war. However, it was not “leftist peaceniks” who wanted to keep the US out of the war; it was the fascist right. It was Charles Lindbergh and Prescott Bush, who led domestic opposition to US entry into World War II. Prescott Bush, later charged with treason, and Charles Lindbergh, an avowed fascist, were the most notable figures in a movement that most certainly included Nazis, sympathizers and other admirers of Adolph Hitler
Keeping the US out of WWII had been a ring wing goal when goal when Prescott Bush, the Shrub’s Grandfather, conspired to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States and replace the administration of FDR with a fascist dictatorship.
The conspirators were operating under the umbrella of a front group called the American Liberty League, which included many families that are still household names today, including Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye and General Motors.
Butler played along with the clique to determine who was involved but later blew the whistle and identified the ringleaders in testimony given to the House Committee on un-American Activities.
However, the Committee refused to even question any of the individuals named by Butler and his testimony was omitted from the record, leading to charges that they were involved in covering the matter up, and the majority of the media blackballed the story.”
In 1936, William Dodd, the US Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated:
“A clique of US industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime…. A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies.
Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. [ed. treason!] Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.”
Prescott Bush’s role in helping finance Hitler’s Nazi War Machine is a fact, a matter of record. Clearly, then, the elder Bush was a part of a criminal, treasonous enterprise that sought to overthrow the elected government of the US and impose upon it a fascist dictatorship.
The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
Thyssen’s partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of I.G. Farben, the powerful German chemical company.
Flick’s plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while “American interests” held the rest.
–How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power [See: BBC: Bush's Grandfather Planned Fascist Coup In America] Also: Bush’s Grandfather Planned Fascist Coup In America. Certainly, this treasonous gang of right wing insurgents, bore little resemblance to the broad-based, often leftist coalition of peace activists who opposed US action in Viet Nam upon broader, philosophical principles.
In 1980, Stockwell said that “if the Soviet Union were to disappear off the face of the map, the United States would quickly seek out new enemies to justify its own military-industrial complex.”
The CIA and Iran/Contra
CIA and Iran/Contra
Addendum:
The Speech that may have motivated the murder of Sen. Paul Wellstone
In the middle of tough re-election campaign, Sen. Paul Wellstone announces his opposition to Bush’s Iraq war resolution. His speech to the US Senate, entitled “Regarding Military Action Against Iraq” was presented on October 3, 2002. By October,Mr. President, as we turn later today to address our policy on Iraq, I want to take a few minutes to outline my views. The situation remains fluid, and Administration officials are engaged in negotiations at the United Nations over what approach we ought to take, with our allies, to disarm the brutal and dictatorial Iraqi regime.
Our debate here is critical because the administration seeks our authorization now for military action including possibly unprecedented, pre-emptive, go-it-alone military action in Iraq, even as it seeks to garner support from our allies on a tough new UN disarmament resolution.
Let me be clear: Saddam Hussein is a brutal, ruthless dictator who has repressed his own people, attacked his neighbors, and remains an international outlaw. The world would be a much better place if he were gone and the regime in Iraq were changed. That’s why the US should unite the world against Saddam, and not allow him to unite forces against us.
A go-it-alone approach, allowing for a ground invasion of Iraq without the support of other countries, could give Saddam exactly that chance. A pre-emptive go-it-alone strategy towards Iraq is wrong. I oppose it.
I support ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction through unfettered UN inspections, which should begin as soon as possible. Only a broad coalition of nations, united to disarm Saddam, while preserving our war on terror, is likely to succeed. Our primary focus now must be on Iraq’s verifiable disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. This will help maintain international support, and could even eventually result in Saddam’s loss of power.
Of course, I would welcome this, as would most of our allies. The president has helped to direct intense new multilateral pressure on Saddam Hussein to allow UN and International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspectors back in to Iraq to conduct their assessment of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear programs. Saddam clearly has felt that heat, and it suggests what might be accomplished through collective action. I am not naive about this process, and much work lies ahead. But we cannot dismiss out-of-hand Saddam’s late and reluctant commitment to comply with UN disarmament arrangements, or the agreement struck Tuesday to begin to implement it. We should use the gathering international resolve to collectively confront his regime by building on these efforts through a new UN disarmament resolution.
This debate must include all Americans, because our decisions finally must have the informed consent of the American people, who will be asked to bear the costs, in blood and treasure, of our decisions. When the lives of the sons and daughters of average Americans could be risked and lost, their voices must be heard by Congress before we make decisions about military action.
Right now, despite a desire to support our president, I believe many Americans still have profound questions about the wisdom of relying too heavily on a pre-emptive, go-it-alone military approach.
Acting now on our own might be a sign of our power. Acting sensibly and in a measured way in concert with our allies, with bipartisan Congressional support, would be a sign of our strength.
It would also be a sign of the wisdom of our founders, who lodged in the President the power to command US armed forces, and in Congress the power to make war, ensuring a balance of powers between co-equal branches of government. Our Constitution lodges the power to weigh the causes for war and the ability to declare war in Congress precisely to ensure that the American people and those who represent them will be consulted before military action is taken.
The Senate has a grave duty to insist on a full debate that examines for all Americans the full range of options before us, and weighs those options, together with their risks and costs. Such a debate should be energized by the real spirit of September 11: a debate which places a priority not on unanimity, but on the unity of a people determined to forcefully confront and defeat terrorism and to defend our values.
I have supported internationally sanctioned coalition military action in Bosnia, in Kosovo and Serbia, and in Afghanistan. Even so, in recent weeks, I and others including major Republican policymakers like former Bush National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Bush Secretary of State James Baker, my colleague on the Foreign Relations Committee Senator Hagel, Bush Mideast Envoy General Anthony Zinni and other leading US military leaders have raised serious questions about the approach the Administration is taking on Iraq.
There have been questions raised about the nature and urgency of Iraq’s threat, our response to that threat, and against whom, exactly that threat is directed. What is the best course of action that the US could take to address the threat? What are the economic, political, and national security consequences of possible US or US-British invasion of Iraq? There have been questions raised about the consequences of our actions abroad, including its effects on the continuing war on terrorism, our ongoing efforts to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan, and efforts to calm the intensifying Middle East crisis, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there have been questions raised about the consequences of our actions here at home.
Of first and greatest concern, obviously, are the questions raised about the possible loss of life that could result from our actions. The United States could send tens of thousands of US troops to fight in Iraq, and in so doing we could risk countless lives, of US soldiers and innocent Iraqis. There are other questions, about the impact of an attack in relation to our economy. The United States could face soaring oil prices and could spend billions both on a war and on a years-long effort to stabilize Iraq after an invasion. The resolution we will be debating today would explicitly authorize a go-it-alone approach.
I believe an international approach is essential. In my view, our policy should have four key elements. First and foremost, the United States must work with our allies to deal with Iraq. We should not go it alone or virtually alone with a pre-emptive ground invasion. Most critically, acting alone could jeopardize our top national security priority, the continuing war on terror. The intense cooperation of other nations in matters related to intelligence-sharing, security, political and economic cooperation, law enforcement and financial surveillance, and other areas has been crucial to this fight, and enables us to wage it effectively with our allies. Over the past year, this cooperation has been our most successful weapon against terror networks. That — not attacking Iraq should be the main focus of our efforts in the war on terror.
We have succeeded in destroying some Al Qaeda forces, but many of its operatives have scattered, their will to kill Americans still strong. The United States has relied heavily on alliances with nearly 100 countries in a coalition against terror for critical intelligence to protect Americans from possible future attacks. Acting with the support of allies, including hopefully Arab and Muslim allies, would limit possible damage to that coalition and our anti-terrorism efforts. But as General Wes Clark, former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe has recently noted, a premature go-it-alone invasion of Iraq “would super-charge recruiting for Al Qaeda.”
Second, our efforts should have the goal of disarming Saddam Hussein of all of his weapons of mass destruction. Iraq agreed to destroy its weapons of mass destruction at the end of the Persian Gulf War and to verification by the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that this had been done. According to the UN and IAEA, and undisputed by the administration, inspections during the 1990’s neutralized a substantial portion of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and getting inspectors back in to finish the job is critical. The prompt resumption of inspections and disarmament, under an expedited timetable and with unfettered access in Iraq, is imperative.
Third, weapons inspections should be enforceable. If efforts by UN weapons inspectors are tried and fail, a range of potential UN-sanctioned means, including proportionate military force, should be considered. I have no doubt that Congress would act swiftly to authorize force in such circumstances. This does not mean giving the UN a veto over US actions. No one wants to do that. It simply means, as Chairman Levin has observed, that Saddam is a world problem and should be addressed in the world arena.
Finally, our approach toward Iraq must be consistent with international law and the framework of collective security developed over the last 50 years or more. It should be sanctioned by the Security Council under the UN Charter, to which we are a party and by which we are legally bound. Only a broad coalition of nations, united to disarm Saddam, while preserving our war on terror, can succeed. Our response will be far more effective if Saddam sees the whole world arrayed against him.
We should act forcefully, resolutely, sensibly with our allies, and not alone, to disarm Saddam. Authorizing the pre-emptive, go-it-alone use of force now, right in the midst of continuing efforts to enlist the world community to back a tough new disarmament resolution on Iraq, could be a costly mistake for our country.
–Paul Wellstone, Speech to the US Senate regarding US military action in Iraq, 2002
The CIA has enabled a right wing dictatorship in America, and, in doing so, has inspired generations of ‘terrorist’ antagonists who might never have found cause until given it them by the CIA’s ham-fisted approach to empire. The CIA has been called a new ‘Praetorian Guard’, as apt a description as any I have found. Certainly, the CIA is to Big Brother what the ‘Praetorian Guard was to the Emperors of Rome. The CIA does not merely exercise absolute power via the apparatus of the police state, it marshals the resources of the monolithic state to rob the individual of person hood. Big Brother literally changes what it means to be “human”.
In Goethe’s version of Faust, Mephistopheles tries to grab Faust’s soul when he dies but is frustrated by a divine intervention. Can the people of the US afford to wait passively for divine intervention? No! We must deny the state its power to define us. Challenged by aristocrats who demanded to know just who he thought he was, Voltaire said “I have no name but the name that I have made for myself!”
Big Brother’s lies have made of us our own worst nightmares, but only if we buy into the scheme. It follows, therefore, that Big Brother is finished when we make Voltaire’s existentialist choice, when we take responsibility for what we have become, when we dare to define ourselves. The seeds of revolution are born when each individual chooses to be free!
Additional resources:
Five Days in London by John Lukacs
The transcripts of the Nuremberg Tribunal
Churchill’s History of World War II
Liddell Hart’s History of the Second World War
Read this or George W. Bush will be president for the rest of your life
Lessons Bush Learned from Hitler
Bush’s Fascist, Private Army of Paid Cutthroats, Murderers and Mercenaries
Emergent Properties
Grand Jury: “Can We Indict Bush & Cheney?”
Why the Bush Regime is an Orwellian Threat
Lessons Bush Learned from Hitler
Len Hart
Have Your Say: CIA Holocaust Claims Twenty Million Victims
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John Pilger: Australia’s hidden Empire
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable clichés of innocence – cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent “G’Day USA” campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade Americans that, unlike the empire’s problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under. After all, George W Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime minister, John Howard, “sheriff of Asia”.
That Australia runs its own empire is unmentionable; yet it stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the ancient hinterlands of the continent and across the Arafura Sea and the South Pacific. When the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to the Aboriginal people on 13 February, he was acknowledging this. As for the apology itself, the Sydney Morning Herald accurately described it as a “piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away… in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre.”
Like the conquest of the Native Americans, the decimation of Aboriginal Australia laid the foundation of Australia’s empire. The land was taken and many of its people were removed and impoverished or wiped out. For their descendants, untouched by the tsunami of sentimentality that accompanied Rudd’s apology, little has changed. In the Northern Territory’s great expanse known as Utopia, people live without sanitation, running water, rubbish collection, decent housing and decent health. This is typical. In the community of Mulga Bore, the water fountains in the Aboriginal school have run dry and the only water left is contaminated.
Throughout Aboriginal Australia, epidemics of gastroenteritis and rheumatic fever are as common as they were in the slums of 19th-century England. Aboriginal health, says the World Health Organisation, lags almost a hundred years behind that of white Australia. This is the only developed nation on a United Nations “shame list” of countries that have not eradicated trachoma, an entirely preventable disease that blinds Aboriginal children. Sri Lanka has beaten the disease, but not rich Australia. On 25 February, a coroner’s inquiry into the deaths in outback towns of 22 Aboriginal people, some of whom had hanged themselves, found they were trying to escape their “appalling lives”.
Most white Australians rarely see this third world in their own country. What they call here “public intellectuals” prefer to argue over whether the past happened, and to blame its horrors on the present-day victims. Their mantra that Aboriginal infrastructure and welfare spending provide “a black hole for public money” is racist, false and craven. Hundreds of millions of dollars that Australian governments claim they spend are never spent, or end up in projects for white people. It is estimated that the legal action mounted by white interests, including federal and state governments, contesting Aboriginal native title claims alone covers several billion dollars.
Smear is commonly deployed as a distraction. In 2006, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s leading current affairs programme, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of “sex slavery” among the Mutitjulu Aboriginal people. The source, described as an “anonymous youth worker”, was exposed as a federal government official, whose “evidence” was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and police. Lateline never retracted its allegations. Within a year, Prime Minister John Howard had declared a “national emergency” and sent the army, police and “business managers” into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. A commissioned study on Aboriginal children was cited; and “protecting the children” became the media cry – just as it had more than half a century ago when children were kidnapped by white welfare authorities. One of the authors of the study, Pat Anderson, complained: “There is no relationship between the emergency powers and what’s in our report.” His research had concentrated on the effects of slum housing on children. Few now listened to him. Kevin Rudd, as opposition leader, supported the “intervention” and has maintained it as prime minister. Welfare payments are “quarantined” and people controlled and patronised in the colonial way. To justify this, the mostly Murdoch-owned capital-city press has published a relentlessly one-dimensional picture of Aboriginal degradation. No one denies that alcoholism and child abuse exist, as they do in white Australia, but no quarantine operates there.
The Northern Territory is where Aboriginal people have had comprehensive land rights longer than anywhere else, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. The Howard government set about clawing them back. The territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, including huge deposits of uranium on Aboriginal land. The number of companies licensed to explore for uranium has doubled to 80. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the American giant Halliburton, built the railway from Adelaide to Darwin, which runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world’s largest low-grade uranium mine. Last year, the Howard government appropriated Aboriginal land near Tennant Creek, where it intends to store the radioactive waste. “The land-grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse,” says the internationally acclaimed Australian scientist and actvist Helen Caldicott, “but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump.”
This “top end” of Australia borders the Arafura and Timor Seas, across from the Indonesian archipelago. One of the world’s great submarine oil and gas deposits lies off East Timor. In 1975, Australia’s then ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, who had been tipped off about the coming Indonesian invasion of then Portuguese East Timor, secretly recommended to Canberra that Australia turn a blind eye to it, noting that the seabed riches “could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia . . . than with [an independent] Timor”. Gareth Evans, later foreign minister, described a prize worth “zillions of dollars”. He ensured that Australia distinguish itself as one of the few countries to recognise General Suharto’s bloody occupation, in which 200,000 East Timorese lost their lives.
When eventually, in 1999, East Timor won its independence, the Howard government set out to manoeuvre the East Timorese out of their proper share of the oil and gas revenue by unilaterally changing the maritime boundary and withdrawing from World Court jurisdiction in maritime disputes. This would have denied desperately needed revenue to the new country, stricken from its years of brutal occupation. However, East Timor’s then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, leader of the majority Fretilin party, proved more than a match for Canberra and especially its bullying foreign minister, Alexander Downer.
Alkatiri demonstrated that he was a nationalist who believed East Timor’s resource wealth should be the property of the state, so that the nation did not fall into debt to the World Bank. He also believed that women should have equal opportunity, and that health care and education should be universal. “I am against rich men feasting behind closed doors,” he said. For this, he was caricatured as a communist by his opponents, notably the president, Xanana Gusmão, and the then foreign minister, José Ramos-Horta, both close to the Australian political Establishment. When a group of disgruntled soldiers rebelled against Alkatiri’s government in 2006, Australia readily accepted an “invitation” to send troops to East Timor. “Australia,” wrote Paul Kelly in Murdoch’s Australian, “is operating as a regional power or a potential hegemon that shapes security and political outcomes. This language is unpalatable to many. Yet it is the reality. It is new, experimental territory for Australia.”
A mendacious campaign against the “corrupt” Alkatiri was mounted in the Australian media, reminiscent of the coup by media that briefly toppled Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Like the US soldiers who ignored looters on the streets of Baghdad, Australian soldiers stood by while armed rioters terrorised people, burned their homes and attacked churches. The rebel leader Alfredo Reinado, a murderous thug trained in Australia, was elevated to folk hero. Under this pressure, the democratically elected Alkatiri was forced from office and East Timor was declared a “failed state” by Australia’s legion of security academics and journalistic parrots concerned with the “arc of instability” to the north, an instability they supported as long as the genocidal Suharto was in charge.
Paradoxically, on 11 February, Ramos-Horta and Gusmão came to grief as they tried to do a deal with Reinado in order to subdue him. His rebels turned on them both, leaving Ramos-Horta critically wounded and Reinado himself dead. From Canberra, Prime Minister Rudd announced the despatch of more Australian “peacemakers”. In the same week, the World Food Programme disclosed that the children of resource-rich East Timor were slowly starving, with more than 42 per cent of under-fives seriously underweight – a statistic which corresponds to that of Aboriginal children in “failed” communities that also occupy an abundant natural resource.
Australia is engaged in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, where its troops and federal police have dealt with “breakdowns in law and order” that are “depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities”. A former senior Australian intelligence officer calls these “wild societies for which intervention represents a blunt, but necessary instrument”. Australia is also entrenched in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rudd’s electoral promise to withdraw from the “coalition of the willing” does not include almost half of Australia’s troops in Iraq.
At last year’s conference of the American-Australian Leadership Dialogue – an annual event designed to unite the foreign policies of the two countries, but in reality an opportunity for the Australian elite to express its historic servility to great power – Rudd was in unusually oratorical style. “It is time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” he said, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world… I look forward to more than working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom, in bringing about long-term changes to the planet.”
The new sheriff for Asia had spoken.
Have Your Say: John Pilger: Australia’s hidden Empire
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Salvia divinorum targeted as next marijuana
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Salvia divinorum is being targeted by U.S. lawmakers concerned that the inexpensive and easy-to-obtain plant could become the next marijuana, media reported Wednesday.
Eight states have already placed restrictions on salvia, and 16 others, including Florida, are considering a ban or have previously.
Salvia divinorum is not one of the several varieties of common ornamental garden plants known as salvia.
Called nicknames like Sally-D, Magic Mint and Diviner’s Sage, salvia is a hallucinogen that gives users an out-of-body sense of traveling through time and space or merging with inanimate objects. Unlike hallucinogens like LSD or PCP, however, salvia’s effects last for a shorter time, generally up to an hour.
“It’s much more powerful than marijuana.” said Jonathan Appel, an assistant professor of psychology and criminal justice at Tiffin University in Ohio who has studied the emergence of the substance.
Native to Mexico and still grown there, salvia divinorum is generally smoked but can also be chewed or made into a tea and drunk.
No known deaths have been attributed to salvia’s use, but it was listed as a factor in one Delaware teen’s suicide two years ago.
Salvia’s short-lasting effects and the fact that it is currently legal may make it seem more appealing to teens, lawmakers say. In the Delaware suicide, the boy’s mother told reporters that salvia made his mood darker but he justified its use by citing its legality. According to reports, the autopsy found no traces of the drug in his system, but the medical examiner listed it as a contributing cause.
A study released last month by the Department of Health & Human Services found just under 2 percent of people age 18 to 25 surveyed in 2006 reported using salvia in the past year. A 2007 survey of more than 1,500 San Diego State University students found that 4 percent of participants reported using salvia in the past year.
(Agencies)
Have Your Say: Salvia divinorum targeted as next marijuana
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