Lindsey Williams Videos on the Oil/Energy ‘Crisis’

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I mention Lindsey Williams’ revelations in a few articles on the phony “Peak Oil” scam promoted by CIA agent Michael Ruppert and the Highway Robber Barrons known as American Oil companies. Lindsey discovered from top oil company executives in the early 1970s, that there is enough oil under Gull Island alone (Prudhoe Bay, Alasaka) to meet all of the energy needs of the United States for the next 200 years. American oil companies had drilled and tapped Gull Island in 1973, yet they have not pumped one drop of oil out of those vast oil fields to send down the Alaskan pipeline to American consummers. It is one of the best kept secrets in the oil industry. There is no Energy Crisis. There are only government liars and oil company robber barrons deceiving us at every turn..Ken]

Lindsey Williams Videos on the Non-Existant Oil/Energy ‘Crisis’ (May 22, 2007)

Subject: “The Energy Non Crisis” by Lindsy Williams
From: DAN
Date: Tue, May 22, 2007
To: Editor

Ken,

Here is a collection of videos about the “The Energy Non Crisis” by Lindsey Williams. He also has a book out by the same name. Feel free to send this to friends and family.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbakN7SLdbk

2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGGjbDjnNzw&mode=related&search=

3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q39ic04vhNo&mode=related&search=

4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCyCYz_aHY&mode=related&search=

5) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TYmSGwAumk&mode=related&search=

6) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbwMOvV6ctg&mode=related&search=

7) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5HGHsy3H_0&mode=related&search=

8) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC61X78-OI0&mode=related&search=

Veritas (truth)

© Copyright 2007 Educate-Yourself.org All Rights Reserved.

Hydrogen plane runs for three days without refuelling

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Iain Thomson

Boeing and Ford have successfully tested a new hydrogen aircraft engine with a simulated flight that lasted nearly four days.

The project, called the High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft, is being run to test the feasibility of having unmanned craft in permanent flight to act as communications systems that can be quickly and cheaply set up where coverage by traditional means isn’t available.

“This test could help convince potential customers that hydrogen-powered aircraft are viable in the near-term,” said Boeing Advanced Systems president George Muellner.

“This is a substantial step towards providing the persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities our customers desire.”

The HALE’s engine is a modified four cylinder Ford engine that can use hydrogen as a fuel and run for extended period. In a simulation chamber the engine ran for nearly four days, powering the craft up to an equivalent of 65,000 feet.

“This simulated flight allows us to showcase the capabilities of Ford’s proprietary hydrogen engine technology and the durability of our four-cylinder engines,” said Gerhard Schmidt, vice president of Ford Research and Advanced Engineering.

“We are very pleased with the results. The gasoline version of this same engine can be found in our Ford Fusion and Escape Hybrid vehicles.”

Iraq’s Environmental Crisis

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By Jeffrey St Clair and Joshua Frank

The ecological effects of war, like its horrific toll on human life, are exponential. When the Bush Administration and their Congressional allies sent our troops in to Iraq to topple Saddam’s regime, they not only ordered these men and women to commit crimes against humanity, they also commanded them to perpetrate crimes against nature.

The first Gulf War had a horrific effect on the environment, as CNN reported in 1999, “Iraq was responsible for intentionally releasing some eleven million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf from January to May 1991, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastline. The amount of oil released was categorized as twenty times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and twice as large as the previous world record oil spill. The cost of cleanup has been estimated at more than $700 million”.

During the build up to George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Saddam loyalists promised to light oil fields afire, hoping to expose what they claimed were the US’s underlying motives for attacking their country: oil. The US architects of the Iraq war surely knew this was a potential reality once they entered Baghdad in March of 2003. Hostilities in Kuwait resulted in the discharge of an estimated seven million barrels of oil, culminating in the world’s largest oil spill in January of 1991. The United Nations later calculated that of Kuwait’s 1,330 active oil wells, half had been set ablaze. The pungent fumes and smoke from those dark billowing flames spread for hundreds of miles and had horrible effects on human and environmental health. Saddam Hussein was rightly denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields.

However, the United States military was also responsible for much of the environmental devastation of the first Gulf War. In the early 1990s the US drowned at least eighty crude oil ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, partly to uphold the UN’s economic sanctions against Iraq. Vast crude oil slicks formed, killing an unknown quantity of aquatic life and sea birds while wrecking havoc on local fishing and tourist communities.

Months of bombing during the first Gulf War by US and British planes and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.

More than fifteen years later, the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire. Iraqi physicians call it “the white death” -leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation was compounded by Iraq’s forced isolation and the sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan as “a humanitarian crisis”, that made detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.

Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren’t soldiers. They are civilians. Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a billion tons of the material.

Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the tailings. They could be molded into bullets and bombs. The material was free and there was plenty at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser than lead. This makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons, designed to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and bunkers.

When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust, carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal bits when inhaled stick to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begin to wreck havoc on the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems and leukemias.

It didn’t take long for medical teams in the region to detect cancer clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, tripled in five years following the bombings. But it’s not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer.

The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety of rationales and excuses. First, the Defense Department shrugged off concerns about Depleted Uranium as wild conspiracy theories by peace activists, environmentalists and Iraqi propagandists. When the US’s NATO allies demanded that the US disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its munitions, the Pentagon refused. Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than four billion years, approximately the age of the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated forever.

Speaking of DU and other war-related disasters, former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said the environmental consequences of the Iraq war could in fact be more ominous than the issue of war and peace itself. Despite this stark admission, the US made no public attempts to assess the environmental risks that the war would inflict.

Blix was right. On the second day of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq it was reported by the New York Times and the BBC that Iraqi forces had set fire to several of the country’s large oil wells. Five days later in the Rumaila oilfields, six dozen wellheads were set ablaze. The dense black smoke rose high in the southern sky of Iraq, fanning a clear signal that the US invasion had again ignited an environmental tragedy. Shortly after the initial invasion the United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) satellite data showed that a significant amount of toxic smoke had been emitted from burning oils wells. This smoldering oil was laced with poisonous chemicals such as mercury, sulfur and furans, which can causes serious damage to human as well as ecosystem health.

According to Friends of the Earth, the fallout from burning oil debris, like that of the first Gulf War, has created a toxic sea surface that has affected the health of birds and marine life. One area that has been greatly impacted is the Sea of Oman, which connects the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf byway of the Strait of Hormuz. This waterway is one of the most productive marine habitats in the world. In fact the Global Environment Fund contends that this region “plays a significant role in sustaining the life cycle of marine turtle populations in the whole North-Western Indo Pacific region”. Of the world’s seven marine turtles, five are found in the Sea of Oman and four of those five are listed as “endangered” with the other listed as “threatened”.

The future indeed looks bleak for the ecosystems and biodiversity of Iraq, but the consequences of the US military invasion will not only be confined to the war stricken country. The Gulf shores, according to BirdLife’s Mike Evans, is “one of the top five sites in the world for wader birds, and a key refueling area for hundreds of thousands of migrating water birds”. The UN Environment Program claims that 33 wetland areas in Iraq are of vital importance to the survival of various bird species. These wetlands, the UN claims, are also particularly vulnerable to pollution from munitions fallout as well as oil wells that have been sabotaged.

Mike Evans also maintains that the current Iraq war could destroy what’s left of the Mesopotamian marshes on the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Following the war of 1991 Saddam removed dissenters of his regime who had built homes in the marshes by digging large canals along the two rivers so that they would have access to their waters. Thousands of people were displaced. The communities ruined.

The construction of dams upstream on the once roaring Tigris and Euphrates has dried up more than ninety percent of the marshes and has led to extinction of several animals. Water buffalo, foxes, waterfowl and boar have disappeared. “What remains of the fragile marshes, and the 20,000 people who still live off them, will lie right in the path of forces heading towards Baghdad from the south”, wrote Fred Pearce in the New Scientist prior to Bush’s invasion in 2003. The true effect this war has had on these wetlands and its inhabitants is still not known.

The destruction of Iraqi’s infrastructure has had substantial public health implications as well. Bombed out industrial plants and factories have polluted ground water. The damage to sewage-treatment plants, with reports that raw sewage formed massive pools of muck in the streets of Baghdad immediately after Bush’s ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign, is also likely poisoning rivers as well as human life. Cases of typhoid among Iraqi citizens have risen tenfold since 1991, largely due to polluted drinking water.

That number has almost certainly increased more in the past few years following the ousting of Saddam. In fact during the 1990s, while Iraq was under sanctions, UN officials in Baghdad agreed that the root cause of child mortality and other health problems was no longer simply lack of food and medicine but the lack of clean water (freely available in all parts of the country prior to the first Gulf War) and of electrical power, which had predictable consequences for hospitals and water-pumping systems. Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the UN’s US-dominated sanctions committee, a high proportion were integral to the efforts to repair the failing water and sewage systems.

The real cumulative impact of US military action in Iraq, past and present, won’t be known for years, perhaps decades, to come. Stopping this war now will not only save lives, it will also help to rescue what’s left of Iraq’s fragile environment.

_____

Jeffrey St Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon (Common Courage Press, 2003). His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate (AK Press, 2007), co-written with Alexander Cockburn. This essay will appear in Born Under a Bad Sky, to be published in December. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

Joshua Frank is the co-editor of DissidentVoice.org, and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008. He can be reached through his website, BrickBurner.org.

Seven years since the Blair slow hand-clap

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Seven years since the Blair slow hand-clap, the WI is getting tough in Wales

By Rhodri Clark 

GETTING a slow hand-clap from the massed ranks of Women’s Institute members was one of the first public displays of discontent with Tony Blair.

And while it was seen as a pivotal moment in his premiership, it has also proved a turning point for the WI, which had languished for decades under its “ jam and Jerusalem” label.

The protest at the 2000 conference marked the increasing politicisation of the movement, and has coincided with a growth in interest and more vociferous campaigning in Wales.

Four new WI branches have been established in Cardiff recently, because young women and professionals have suddenly started to notice that the WI is a campaigning organisation.

Although the WI is traditionally strong in rural areas — having started in Anglesey in 1915 — it is now attracting growing interest in urban areas of Wales.

Merched y Wawr, Wales’ own breakaway version of the WI, may also be taking notice of the WI’s campaigning edge.

It is now demanding a Welsh-language commissioner and other measures to strengthen the language.

Tegwen Morris, Merched y Wawr’s national director, said, “The movement wants to see Welsh become an integral part of daily life. As things stand, the rights of our members are not respected.

“They cannot use numerous services through their language of choice and, as long as this continues, their rights are being trampled over.”

The language was the reason Merched y Wawr was established in 1967, when WI members in Bala were unhappy that all the WI correspondence they received was English-only and there was not a word of Welsh in the North Wales edition of the WI magazine.

Today Merched y Wawr and the WI still compete for members in Wales. If campaigning has drawn attention to the WI and attracted new members, it could achieve the same for Merched y Wawr.

“There’s always a bit of competition between organisations, even the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides,” said Eoin Redahan, of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI). “The Boy Scouts now accept girls, therefore the Guides could lose members.”

He said Merched y Wawr could be copying the WI’s approach.

“Certainly people learned from the WI’s calendar girls nine years ago. The number of calendars of half naked women and men has mushroomed.”

The WI had always campaigned, founding Keep Britain Tidy for example, he said.

“It’s just attracted more attention since the Tony Blair clap. Since then the media has realised how involved the WI is within the community.”

Rhian Connick, head of NFWI Wales, said, “Most of our members are in rural areas, but we’re seeing more and more branches opening in the towns and cities.

“Women come in and say they’ve got an interest in campaigning work. They see that we make a difference. That attracts people, including young women in their 30s and some in their 20s. Most are young mothers and professionals.”

In the past two years four new branches have opened in Cardiff, doubling the total. Four others have opened in the Newport area, two in Swansea and one in Efail Isaf, near Pontypridd.

She said overall Welsh WI membership had fallen from 19,000 in 1997 to 16,000 now, but the decline had bottomed out.

The WI’s current campaign topics include farm-gate milk prices, too much packaging, climate change, saving community hospitals, children’s diet, and the effect of chemicals on public health.

BBC: Big Brother Cooperation

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It’s a matter of alarm and concern that there are so many people out there who still believe that the BBC is a balanced and fair-minded source of news and current affairs. That belief was, at best ill-founded and at worst, typical of the hypocrisy of a British self-image of decency and fair-mindedness which, through that peculiarly British imperialist institution, the public school, gave succeeding generations the ideological veneer and justification for an unabashed and rapacious colonialism.

So successful were Britain’s ruling classes in persuading themselves of their manifest destiny to rule –an ideology which gained serious promotion through Rudyard Kipling’s obnoxious caricature of the ruled as being the White Man’s burden– that both Britain’s rulers and their ruled came to believe in their own Victorian spin.

It was out of that national hypocrisy that the BBC was born in the twilight decades of Britain’s decayed raj when, despite the harsh face of colonialism, a Scottish Presbyterian, Lord Reith, was canny enough to disguise the BBC’s real purpose of control through the instilling of elitist values by giving it the motto, “Let Nation Speak Peace Unto Nation”!

Today, in the post-Blair vassal state of a United Kingdom itself in collapse, Reith’s motto has become nothing more than an embarrassment for a corporation that is increasingly recognized as being little more than an exclusive conduit for state propaganda. The greater majority of BBC personnel may, as reports suggest, like to consider themselves to be liberal-minded nice guys but the message that Aunty puts out to the world is one of totalitarianism and brazen warmongering.

Its present, wholly one-sided, coverage of the war crime that was the invasion of Iraq and the imperialist occupation of that country and Afghanistan is just a case in point. Another is its calculated avoidance of any mention of the stolen US elections of 2000 and 2004 where the people of the United States were, in effect, hijacked by a group of robber politicians and a corrupt judiciary. Another is its continued promotion of the official Bush-instigated conspiracy theory of 911 and its silence over the extremely suspicious events surrounding that other probable conspiracy, the London bombings of 7 July 2005.

One could keep on with a long list of the BBC’s embedded reportage of events emanating as straight spin from the state’s sources, both in London and Washington. Keeping out any real, critical political analysis and barring its airwaves to anyone other than the apologists of the British state and its Washington boss, it stubbornly insists on promoting Neocon ideologues such as the unhinged John Bolton who is constantly given BBC airtime long after having been discredited and fired from office.


BBC’s ‘Bonkers’ Bolton

All that is bad enough but the role that the BBC is playing is much worse and far more deceptive than that.

Using anodyne language, innuendo and subtle suggestion, the BBC inverts the reality of affairs by creating an alternative reality and reporting on that instead as the authentic world.

The British media are masters in the art of deceit, they don’t distort reality so much as manufacture another version, casually dismissing the truth as an unrepresentative oddity.

Outright deception, delivered in a regular voice and pleasing prose, even and chirpy of tone, triumphs, as honesty is crowded out by the brilliant ruse that presents telling the truth not as the presence of honesty, but the absence of etiquette ..

 

Kola, Medialens, 28 October 2007

BBC News 24 is the corporation’s flagship, satellite broadcaster of news and current affairs, hence given a razzle-dazzle imagery of up-to-date, global news reportage accompanied with the sound of an urgent, authoritative yet vibrant, drumming rhythm heard in every airport departure lounge and hometown settlement across the planet.

But, together with the rest of the corrupt BBC, News 24 is feeding you and me, twenty four seven three sixty-five, what is little more than a carefully packaged, unmitigated lie.

A case in point was News 24’s recently broadcast programme in its Our World series, “Do they know who we are?” ostensibly a piece on the rapid growth of electronic surveillance technology but hidden beneath the packaging actually its promotion as something desirable that the majority of people want.

The attention span of the average viewer is no more than a few, brief seconds so the message has got to be put across in the first moments. It is then reinforced over and over with a few variations included such as an opposing view or argument which is then immediately demolished.

So this piece of surveillance promotion starts with a cheerfully upbeat version of the Harry Lime Theme from the Third Man, zither and all. This sets the mood for a positive reaction from the audience. If a negative reaction were required, the music would be appropriately anxious, even disturbing.

Almost immediately a message flashes across the screen: “75% want more security.” After some impressive clips showing Silicon Valley scientists predicting the inevitability of increasingly hi-tech surveillance technology we are introduced to the ‘product’, in this case a Gameboy-like hand-held sensor which can detect the presence of terrorists hiding inside a building whose architecture is predictably Muslim. Even their breathing, we are told, can be sensed through walls by this wonder gadget.

Then, rather cleverly, the reporter takes us to a Muslim community in Forest Gate, London and we are reminded how the police had conducted a heavy-handed raid on “suspect terrorists” last year, leaving one man shot and wounded. If the police had been able to use these sensors, the reporter suggests, perhaps all that would have been avoidable. Makes you think doesn’t it?

We are shown a group of Muslims being introduced to this technology by the reporter who, in an apparent concession to his audience, point out that there had been some immediate complaints about the imagery in the promotional video showing Muslim architecture. “But as soon as the audience were shown the technology being used in Iraq they accepted it,” he claims.

He picks on a young member of the audience who says, “We don’t need to worry. Anyone can watch us.” And then another older man who agrees that this kind of sensor could be used for “legitimate intelligence.” Thus, using recorded soundbites in a highly selective way, we see how a Muslim audience is persuaded that these highly intrusive sensors can be used in situations of war or surveillance, either against the enemy or an innocent public who should have nothing to worry about from ‘legitimate intelligence’!

Strange, is it not, that a Muslim audience could be persuaded of its use in the Iraq war? You would have expected a massive, negative reaction. But no. Instead, capitalising on guilt feelings among Muslims, they are sold the product as justifiable under wartime conditions. Once this breakthrough is achieved, the audience has been softened-up enough to accept its use by police or ‘legitimate intelligence’ (whatever that may be!) against a public that should not worry if it has nothing to hide!

This last is regularly used by the promoters of increased surveillance technology and totalitarianization. If you’ve nothing to hide, why worry? Using an individual’s anxiety (ie that he might have something to hide from ‘the Law’) and the principle of the Big Lie we are bullied into accepting further encroachments on our right to privacy.

The Big Lie is based upon the idea that most everyone tells little lies from time to time. Little lies and dishonesties are, therefore, understandable and acceptable. It’s what we all do. But Big Lies, on the other hand, are neither comprehensible or acceptable. So, when subject to a Big Lie, part of us –the part which governs our ‘little me’, personal values– shuts down, unable to deal with the enormity of it. But another part keeps running and is forced to come to terms with the unacceptable, to accept that as the message comes to us from a source of authority then it must, has to be, true.

This process is sometimes described by the mind manupilaters in blatant fashion as ‘thinking the unthinkable’, ‘pushing the envelope’, or put in another way which remains unsaid, of being coerced into accepting the unacceptable.

This process is called Cognitive Dissonance, the process used here to extract the appropriate soundbites from an audience made to feel guilty about the ‘war on terrorism.’ Well, that’s ok then, we are led to think. If a Muslim audience can accept this new technology (for they do have a problem with terrorism, don’t they?) then it should be perfectly acceptable to us. Again, the projection of our guilt (but we do have things in our life we prefer to keep hidden!) onto Muslims (who we know are susceptible to becoming terrorists).

The key-phrase to sum up this event was obtained from a man in his (responsible) ‘thirties who agrees that such intrusive technology would be fine when used by “legitimate intelligence,” meaning government authorities. Again, the phrase begs so many questions as to what is and isn’t legitimate but we aren’t given time to dwell on that.

Instead, we are taken to the final, reinforcing summation: there are already 4 million CCTV cameras in Britain so is our private life safe? We are then told (sources not revealed) that 75% want more surveillance and this ‘fact’ is borne out by an ‘expert’ from the US National Security Agency, a body with a suitably authoritative name (how many people would know that the NSC is a US government spy agency?)

The promotion is ended with the same upbeat introductory theme.

Neat one, eh? Being of a mischievous, cynical nature I was left wondering if the BBC got a nice little hidden backhander from some Silicon Valley manufacturer for having given airtime to this promotional piece? With government cutbacks on BBC revenue it is increasingly having to privatize and commercialize its operations. So, while doing what the government tells it to do, in this case to promote the totalitarianization of Britain, why not make a few dollars on the side?

And, I couldn’t help keep thinking of those Muslims in Forest Gate, my febrile imagination hearing their repeated cries of indignation against the way so many of the audience had left that meeting, feeling that they had been utterly conned into unwittingly cooperating with a foxy Big Brother BBC.

Chimes of Freedom 
 

The Programming Language for Mass Surveillance

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According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse.What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very clearly in a 2001 research paper from AT&T itself, entitled “Communities of Interest” (by C. Cortes, D. Pregibon, and C. Volinsky). They use high-tech data-mining algorithms to scan through the huge daily logs of every call made on the AT&T network; then they use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the connections between phone numbers: who is talking to whom? The paper literally uses the term “Guilt by Association” to describe what they’re looking for: what phone numbers are in contact with other numbers that are in contact with the bad guys?

When this research was done, back in the last century, the bad guys where people who wanted to rip off AT&T by making fraudulent credit-card calls. (Remember, back in the last century, intercontinental long-distance voice communication actually cost money!) But it’s easy to see how the FBI could use this to chase down anyone who talked to anyone who talked to a terrorist. Or even to a “terrorist.”

AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language  

By Ryan Singel

From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company’s telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes.

An AT&T research paper published in 2001 and unearthed today by Andrew Appel at Freedom to Tinker shows how the phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls “communities of interest” — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom.

The system was built in the late 1990s to develop marketing leads, and as a security tool to see if new customers called the same numbers as previously cut-off fraudsters — something the paper refers to as “guilt by association.”

But it’s of interest to THREAT LEVEL because of recent revelations that the FBI has been requesting “communities of interest” records from phone companies under the USA PATRIOT Act without a warrant. Where the bureau got the idea that phone companies collect such data has, until now, been a mystery.

According to a letter from Verizon to a congressional committee earlier this month, the FBI has been asking Verizon for “community of interest” records on some of its customers out to two generations — i.e., not just the people that communicated with an FBI target, but also those who talked to people who talked to an FBI target. Verizon, though, doesn’t create those records and couldn’t comply. Now it appears that AT&T invented the concept and the technology. It even owns a patent on some of its data mining methods, issued to two of Hancock’s creators in 2002.

Programs written in Hancock work by analyzing data as it flows into a data warehouse. That differentiates the language from traditional data-mining applications which tend to look for patterns in static databases. A 2004 paper published in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems shows how Hancock code can sift calling card records, long distance calls, IP addresses and internet traffic dumps, and even track the physical movements of mobile phone customers as their signal moves from cell site to cell site. 

With Hancock, “analysts could store sufficiently precise information to enable new applications previously thought to be infeasible,” the program authors wrote. AT&T uses Hancock code to sift 9 GB of telephone traffic data a night, according to the paper.

The good news for budding data miners is that Hancock’s source code and binaries (now up to version 2.0) are available free to noncommercial users from an AT&T Research website.

The instruction manual (.pdf) is also free, and old-timers will appreciate its spare Kernighan & Ritchie style. The manual even includes a few sample programs in the style of K&R’s Hello World, but coded specifically to handle data collected by AT&T’s phone and internet switches. This one reads in a dump of internet headers, computes what IP addresses were visited, makes a record and prints them out, in less than 40 lines of code.

#include "ipRec.hh" 
#include "ihash.h" 

hash_table *ofInterest; 

int inSet (ipPacket_t * p) 
{ 
 if (hash_get (ofInterest, p->source.hash_value) == 1) 
  return 1; 
 if (hash_get (ofInterest, p->dest.hash_value) == 1) 
  return 1; 
 return 0; 
} 
void sig_main (ipAddr_s addrs < l:>, 
{ 
 /* code to set up hash table */ 
 ofInterest = hash_empty (); 
 iterate 
  (over addrs) { 
  event (ipAddr_t * addr) { 
    if (hash_insert (ofInterest, addr->hash_value, 1) < 0) 
  } 
 } 
 /* code to select packets */ 
 iterate 
  (over packets 
   filteredby inSet) 
 { 
  event (ipPacket_t * p) 
  { 
    printPacketInfo (p); 
  } 
 }; 
}

Another sample program included in the manual shows how a Hancock program could create historical maps of a person’s travels by recording nightly what cell phone towers a person’s phone had used or pinged throughout a day.

AT&T is currently defending itself in federal court from allegations that it installed, on behalf of the NSA, secret internet spying rooms in its domestic internet switching facilities. AT&T and Verizon are also accused of giving the NSA access to billions of Americans’ phone records, in order to data-mine them to spot suspected terrorists, and presumably to identify targets for warrantless wiretapping.

No evidence of Iran building nuclear weapons – U.N.

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ElBaradei says he has no evidence Tehran is developing nuclear weapons

Indymedia (Hidden from newswire)

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster.

“We have information that there has been maybe some studies about possible weaponization,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency. “That’s why we have said that we cannot give Iran a pass right now, because there is still a lot of question marks.

“But have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weaponization program? No.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran this month of “lying” about the aim of its nuclear program. She said there is no doubt Tehran wants the capability to produce nuclear weapons and has deceived the IAEA about its intentions.

Vice President Dick Cheney has raised the prospect of “serious consequences” if Iran were found to be working toward developing a nuclear weapon. Last week, the Bush administration announced harsh penalties against the Iranian military and state-owned banking systems in hopes of raising pressure on the world financial system to cut ties with Tehran.

‘We cannot add fuel to the fire’
ElBaradei said he was worried about the growing rhetoric from the U.S., which he noted focused on Iran’s alleged intentions to build a nuclear weapon rather than evidence the country was actively doing so. If there is actual evidence, ElBaradei said he would welcome seeing it.

“I’m very much concerned about confrontation, building confrontation, because that would lead absolutely to a disaster. I see no military solution. The only durable solution is through negotiation and inspection,” he said.

“My fear is that if we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss. As I said, the Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire,” ElBaradei added.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agreed that the current “hot rhetoric” from the U.S. could prove dangerous.

“We ought to make it clear that there’s always a military option if Iran goes nuclear, but that we ought to just speak more softly because these hot words that are coming out of the administration, this hot rhetoric plays right into the hands of the fanatics in Iran,” said Levin, D-Mich.

‘We’re sending mixed signals’

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said strong action might be needed because he does not believe the United Nations adequately has kept Iran in check.

“I think the United Nations’ efforts to sanction Iran have been pitiful because of Russia and China vetoing a resolution. The European Union has some sanctions. They’re fairly weak.”

“So in this regard, I agree with the following, that the diplomatic efforts to control Iran need to continue. They need to be more robust but we’re sending mixed signals,” Graham said.

ElBaradei spoke on CNN’s “Late Edition,” and Levin and Graham appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Coming Soon – Police in Schools

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EMMA JUDD

Swansea’s police are to go back to class in a new drive to have community police based at every comprehensive school in the city within a year.

The plan was announced by Chief Superintendent Mark Mathias during a speech he made at the annual meeting of the Age Concern Swansea charity at St Mary’s Church in the city centre.

He said it would be an opportunity for the officers to get to know pupils and to become further involved with the community. But he stressed the initiative was not about policing the pupils.

“It is my intention, between now and this time next year, to have a police officer working from every comprehensive school in Swansea,” he said.

“I’ve had significant support from all the head teachers. The officers will patrol from those schools, and liaise with pupils at those schools.”

The system has already begun in some schools in the county, including Pontarddulais – an area which has come under the spotlight during recent months for anti-social behaviour.

Mr Mathias said addressing the concerns of older residents, tackling anti-social behaviour and improving community policing had been his priorities since becoming Swansea’s top officer.

He said that now the Swansea region of South Wales Police had 55 neighbourhood officers and 62 Police Community Support Officers, there was one dedicated beat officer for every community in the county.

Mr Mathias said his commitment to helping youngsters will continue.

“I believe that if our force support, manage and sometimes control young people, it would be better for us all,” he said.

“Not all young people are drug users or behave in an anti-social manner. In fact, of the 14 people in Swansea who have Asbos, only two of them are young people.

He added: “Young people today have far more pressure on them than years ago.”

Blackwater guards ‘given immunity’

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Private US security guards being investigated over a shooting in Iraq that left 17 civilians dead, have reportedly been offered immunity by the US state department.

The Blackwater employees, who were guarding an embassy convoy at the time of the shooting, were told they would not be prosecuted over statements to officials, the Associated Press news agency said.

“Once you give immunity, you can’t take it away,” a senior law enforcement official familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press on Monday.

US state department officials would not confirm or deny that immunity had been granted.

But one official, who refused to be quoted by name, told Associated Press: “If in fact such a decision was made, it was done without any input or authorisation from any senior state department official in Washington.”

Three senior law-enforcement officials said that all the bodyguards involved in the incident, both in the vehicle convoy and in at least two helicopters above, were given immunity.

‘No enemy activity’

The company has said that the convoy was under attack before it opened fire in west Baghdad’s al-Nisoor Square on September 16.

A follow-up investigation by the Iraqi government, however, concluded that Blackwater’s actions were unprovoked.

An initial incident report by US Central Command, which oversees military operations in Iraq, also indicated “no enemy activity involved” in the incident.

The report says Blackwater guards were travelling against the flow of traffic through a roundabout when they “engaged five civilian vehicles with small arms fire” at a distance of 50 metres.

The New York Times said on Monday that the immunity offer was made by agents from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the investigative arm of the agency, although they do not have the authority to do so.

The report said Blackwater guards had been offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, meaning they would not be prosecuted over statements as long as they were true.

FBI investigation

The deal has reportedly delayed the criminal investigation into the shooting.

FBI agents, who took over the investigation from the state department earlier this month, have reportedly been trying to collect evidence in Baghdad without using statements from the employees who were given immunity.

Blackwater has about 1,000 employees in Iraq
protecting diplomats and officials  [File: EPA]

Officials told the Associated Press that the FBI took over the case after prosecutors in the justice department realised they could not bring charges against Blackwater guards based on their interviews with state department investigators.

The FBI has reinterviewed some of the Blackwater employees, but one official said on Monday that some of them had refused to answer questions, citing their constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination.

Any new statements that the guards give to the FBI could be used to bring criminal charges.

Strained relations

North Carolina-based Blackwater has about 1,000 employees in Iraq. It is the largest of three private security firm protecting US diplomats in the country.

The immunity offer is likely to further strain relations between Washington and Baghdad, which is demanding the right to launch its own prosecution of the Blackwater bodyguards.

Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has said his cabinet is drafting legislation that would force the state department to replace Blackwater with another security company.

Human rights expert calls for Guantanamo closure

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A United Nations human rights expert called on the US to put on trial or release all people detained as “unlawful enemy combatants”, move quickly to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and abolish military commissions.

In a report, Martin Scheinin, the UN’s independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, expressed grave concern at US detention practices, the existence and operation of military courts, and interrogation techniques.

Navy Cmdr Jeffrey Gordon, the US Defence Department spokesman on Guantanamo, said: “The unlawful enemy combatants held at Guantanamo are afforded more due process than any other captured enemy fighters in the history of warfare.

“While we have stated our desires to close Guantanamo, it would be irresponsible to release these dangerous men into the general population.”

http://www.eecho.ie/news/bstory.asp?j=5014860&p=5xy4875&n=5014952

‘When President does it, it’s not illegal’

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By Nicole Belle

Download (Windows) Download (Quicktime)

BILL MOYERS: Remember “The Lives of Others” – the movie that won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign language film….a story of life under East Germany’s secret police. The critic Roger Ebert said: “The movie is relevant today, as our government ignores habeas corpus, practices secret torture, and asks for the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on its citizens. Such tactics, he said, did not save East Germany; they destroyed it, by making it a country its most loyal citizens could no longer believe in.” You want to say it couldn’t happen here but we’ve been close before. During the cold war with the Soviet Union and then the hot war in Vietnam, a secret government mushroomed in this country. …(transcript)

In 1975 the Select Senate Committee headed by Sen Frank Church (D-ID) began looking into allegations first reported by Seymour Hersh in the NYT and found that the CIA, NSA, FBI and other federal agencies had been involved in everything from plots to assassinate foreign leaders, illegal storage of poisons and biological warfare agents including anthrax, warrantless opening of mail and wiretapping and other intel-gathering on US citizens, and misuse of the IRS , just to name a few of the abuses by the Executive Branch they discovered. One of the ways Congress responded to try and restore checks and balances was by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which established a secret court to oversee all domestic wiretapping activity. Bill Moyers looks at the undoing of Congress’ checks and balances put in place following the Church Committee hearings and the unprecedented expansion of Executive authority in the wake of 9-11. You can watch the entire episode online here.

Shouting at the Devil

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By Jason Miller
RINF Alternative News

“America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.”

—Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine

Does my profanity offend? If so, accept my sincere apologies for having the audacity to use a vulgar expletive in reference to the malignant force that is raping the Earth and murdering its sentient inhabitants. Then take my ‘deeply sincere’ pleas for forgiveness, and with the aid of an unlubricated rod of significant diameter, ram them firmly up the collective asses of the plutocratic bags of shit who comprise the ruling elite in the United States.

Capitalism, capitalism. How do I loath thee? Let me count the ways….

1. Few would argue with the conclusion that greed, selfishness, ruthlessness, and egocentrism are qualities that all of us humans possess, to varying degrees of course. Equally compelling is the argument that nearly all of us are capable of acting with kindness, compassion, justice, honesty, generosity, and empathy. Yet despite the sweeping epidemic of unnecessary suffering caused by torrential waves of avarice, self-centeredness, and brutality, our filthy moneyed elite, their well-compensated sycophants, and countless millions of deeply inculcated members of the working class defend the sacred cow of capitalism with the zeal of the Siccari. What a brilliant way to conduct human affairs and organize ourselves socioeconomically! Not only do we embrace the inevitability of our human frailties; we willfully and perpetually embrace a system that ensures that the worst elements of the human psyche will predominate AND which amply rewards those who act the most reprehensibly.

2. One of the idiocies advanced as a logical argument to justify the continued existence of the abomination of capitalism is that while it may be flawed, it is still better than any alternative. If capitalism is the best humanity can do, it’s time to cash in our chips and leave Earth to our non-human animal counter-parts. They may not have opposable thumbs and formidably sized frontal lobes, but at least they don’t engage in the systematic destruction of themselves and the rest of the planet. However, before we act too hastily and engage in mass Seppuku, perhaps it would make more sense to implement a mass reorganization of our socioeconomic structure, basing the new paradigm on far more egalitarian, sustainable, democratic, just, and rational principles. Or we could just keep destroying each other and the fucking planet….

3. Capitalismo has raped Central and South America nearly to death. Unlike the “Land of the Free,” most of those horribly victimized nations have a vibrant, thriving, and well-organized Left to stand in opposition to the scourge of humanity and the Earth. US-sponsored death squads, torture, disappearances, privatization, “free” trade, deregulation, union busting, evisceration of social programs, coups, and vilification of leaders with the audacity to defy the status quo of avarice on steroids have assailed our southern neighbors since we in the United States (the self-appointed champions of capitalism) began our wholesale exploitation, imperialism, and neoliberalism by “acquiring” half of Mexico. Let’s see now. Remind me again. How many invasions has that “dire threat” to humanity named Hugo Chavez launched? How much “collateral damage” has he inflicted?

4. Capitalism is an anachronism that long ago out-lived its usefulness (except to the morally rotten parasites comprising our de facto aristocracy) and has proven itself to be an abject failure as a means of human interaction and organization. It’s one step removed from feudalism, for Christ’s sake! (Oops! Sorry, I forgot about mercantilism–the transition to capitalism made such a difference). One of humanity’s strengths is our capacity to evolve. Given that, why in the hell do we stubbornly cling to a system that enables a fraction of a percent of the population to live in OBSCENE opulence while 35,000 of our fellow human beings die of starvation-related causes each day? Are the rest of us truly inane enough to believe that asinine myth that any of us has a REALISTIC chance of becoming the next Bill Gates, if we “just work hard enough.” Or that there is an ounce of moral virtue in pursuing the accumulation of excessive wealth?

5. Resting upon the “pillars” of greed, selfishness and hyper-competitiveness, capitalism is irrational and unstable. Crisis and resource wars are chronic and inevitable. How could we expect it to be otherwise? Unleashing some of the ugliest aspects of the human spirit and creating artificial shortages in a world of abundance (by allowing a select few to hoard most of the resources as “their property”), capitalism doesn’t exactly engender an environment of peace and brotherly love. While our filthy ruling plutocracy has allowed a degree of socialism to diminish their power to rape, pillage and plunder, they only did so to quell social unrest during times of serious instability (i.e. The New Deal). Meanwhile, reactionary elements in our “democracy” are consistently scheming to eliminate the use of public monies to actually benefit the public. Witness George Bush’s ongoing demands for an open purse to fund our insanely bloated military and the war crimes we are committing in Iraq. Compare that to his recent refusal to spend an additional $35 billion to provide health care for 3.9 million children. Bush and the moneyed interests for whom he is fronting are inflicting gaping, cankerous wounds upon humanity and the Earth. How much more obvious could it be? (And this administration isn’t an aberration; they are simply bold enough to reveal their agenda–that’s the scary part).

6. Thanks to our slightly adulterated yet plenty virulent infestation of capitalism, the United States is not the “Christian nation” it touts itself to be. While we certainly abide by the Golden Rule in the sense that “he who has the gold makes the rules,” there is little about the manner in which we conduct ourselves as a nation (particularly in terms of foreign policy) of which the person meeting the Biblical description of Jesus Christ would have approved. Let’s just run through a few highlights. We have killed millions of Iraqis via two invasions and barbaric economic sanctions (the sanctions alone killed over half a million children–they’re on your tab, Bill Clinton)–and these are people who NEVER attacked us nor posed a true threat to our “national security.” We arm and support Israel, the diseased enforcer of the mental illness known as Zionism. Ethnic cleansing. Now there’s a spiritually nourishing Christian pastime for you. We revere, idolize, and empower talented, “beautiful” people whose moral evolution came to a screeching halt at about age five. They are our CEOs, politicians, celebrities, athletes, billionaires, pundits, and Wall Streeters whose smug, hubristic “all-American” mugs, talking heads, and ‘surgically enhanced’ bodies are blasted into our homes 24/7 via Fox, CNN, ABC, and a host of other disseminators of the fetid garbage of infotainment. Sorry folks. Calvinism is about as close as our culture comes to the compassion and love modeled by Christ. And with John Calvin in the saddle, we fall significantly short of that mark. As his unwitting disciples, we are imbued with cynicism and self-hatred (we are, after all, “original sinners”), a sadistic desire to inflict ample doses of punishment for the smallest of transgressions (hence the US having the largest prison population in the world–comprised largely of non-violent drug offenders) and the notion that being rich means one has acquired God’s stamp of approval. (Thoughts of camels, needles, and kingdoms of heaven keep throwing me into a horrid state of cognitive dissonance in my desperate efforts to be a good little capitalist by embracing Part III of the Calvinist doctrine…..). Somehow I don’t think Christ had capitalism in mind when he preached the Sermon on the Mount…..

7. Let’s consider sustainability and consumerism for a moment, shall we? Two more of capitalism’s noxious, life-extinguishing qualities are its demand for infinite growth and its unavoidable “dilemma” of excess production. Problem number one is insoluble, but we can simply let our grandchildren worry about our insane insistence on maintaining a system demanding infinite resources from a finite world. As for excess production, that one is simple. We have the most advanced agitprop industry (Madison Avenue) and the most powerful delivery devices (the mainstream media) in the history of humanity churning out alluring appeals to consumers to buy what they don’t need, can’t really afford, and may never even use. Surplus schmurplus….

8. As an “added bonus” to the wounds it inflicts upon humanity as a collective, capitalism also causes serious character malformations in individuals. As infants and young children, human beings naturally believe themselves to be the center of the universe. In order to “succeed” (and sometimes just survive) in the rat race of capitalism, as we mature we begin viewing our narcissism as an attribute. Rather than shedding it, we nurture it with the tenderness of the most devoted of mothers. Looking out for number one, careerism, an obsession with winning, acquisitiveness, and putting money and appearances ahead of principles and people are considered to be virtues in this violently seething cesspool we euphemistically call a culture.

9. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the way in which capitalism’s relentless advocates have managed to bamboozle billions of people into equating it with democracy. Diabolical to its core, but sheer genius nonetheless. Concluding that capitalism and democracy are somehow synonymous is a bit like saying that Dick Cheney and the milk of human kindness relate to one another in even a very remote fashion. (Have you seen the myriad pictures of his evil grimaces floating around the Internet? Despicable creature that he is, he doesn’t even attempt to mask his malevolence). Capitalism is naturally hierarchal, authoritarian, and brutal. Corporations, the legal vehicles for the plutocracy to maximize their profits while minimizing liability, are structured as tyrannies. What the hell is democratic about dog eat dog, law of the jungle, and every man for himself? Besides, if we uber-capitalists here in the United States are truly “democratic,” and we “elected” a depraved idiot like W to what is ostensibly the most powerful position in the world, what does that say about us?

George Bush, Dick Cheney, et al aren’t anomalies or accidents. They are the naked face of savage capitalism evolved to its ultimate and inevitable state, which is embodied by corporatism, monopolism, cronyism, imperialism, and fuck-everyone-but-the-rich-ism.

Slice it, it dice it and spice it any way you prefer. A pile of shit is a pile of shit by any other name. Capitalism is just that from the standpoint of compassionate, moral, and intelligent human beings. One exceptionally virtuous person, Archbishop Don Helder Pessoa Camara, who was a progenitor of Liberation Theology and an unwavering champion of the poor, once remarked, “To examine capitalism is to indict it.”

Unfortunately, capitalism remains the 800 pound gorilla in the room. There is little doubt that its countless millions of fiercely loyal minions amongst the working class and poor will continue heeding their indoctrination, daring us to pry their copies of Atlas Shrugged “from their cold dead hands.” And we can count on the fact that the likes of the Mars heirs, Richard Mellon Scaife, and their ilk are not destined to experience profound spiritual awakenings anytime soon.

Yet there is hope. Capitalism exists in a state of perpetual crisis. Inequality is on the rise, globally and domestically. Our lords and masters are beginning to fall victim to their own hubris as they practice their predations more and more overtly. Palliatives can only delay the system’s inevitable collapse for so long. Sooner rather than later the deepening undercurrent of social unrest will burst the levees of injustice asunder.

Relative to what’s coming, the Great Depression was a mere warm-up. Yet in adversity there lies opportunity. Our US gulag, often referred to as the prison industrial complex, will serve as excellent quarters for the irredeemable scum stalking the corridors of power in DC, the Walton clan, Larry Ellison, and the rest of the parasites atop the capitalist pyramid.

Or perhaps things will take a more Jacobin turn and we won’t need to waste any more precious resources on these predatory sociopaths….

Fuck you, capitalism; fuck you…..

Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

Appeals Court Shuffle Shields FBI Tactics Post 9/11

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Kathy Gill

It sounded good: Egyptian student helps 9-11 hijackers with airplane radio. Too good, in fact, because Abdallah Higazy is suing an FBI agent because of a coerced a confession in the wake of the 9-11 attack. And the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has muddied things by withdrawing its original decision allowing Higazy’s suit to move forward. In the substitute opinion, it has redacted Higazy’s testimony about the forced confession.

Higazy, who had arrived in the States on 27 August 2001 to study computer science at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, escaped from his room at the Millennium Hotel on 9-11-2001 with only his student ID and cash. He was arrested in December 2001 after an ex-cop-turned-security-guard (falsely) claimed to have found an aviation radio and Egyptian passport in Higazy’s hotel room.

The FBI believed the security guard, not Higazy, and put him in the same maximum security jail as Zacarias Moussaoui. In January 2002, the FBI charged Higazy with “making false statements” after his interrogation with Agent Templeton, even though he did not sign a confession; the court denied bail. Higazy was released two days after “a private pilot who was staying one floor below Higazy at the Millennium on Sept. 11, returned to the hotel looking for his aviation radio.”

But the story does not end here. The original Court decision provided online (pdf) included this language:

Continue

UK firm sued over US soldier’s death

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· Erinys guards accused of causing death in Iraq
· Authorities close down UK contractors in Afghanistan

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian

A British private security firm hired to protect the oil installations of post-invasion Iraq is being sued for causing the death of an American soldier.The case against the Erinys security firm, which reportedly has close ties to the former Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, is believed to be the first brought against a private security contractor operating in Iraq by a member of the US military.

It comes at a time of rising unease about the actions of private security firms in Iraq after 17 Iraqi civilians were shot dead in Baghdad by Blackwater guards travelling with a convoy of US diplomats.

The suit against Erinys, filed last week in Houston, was brought by the father of Specialist Christopher Monroe, who was struck by an Erinys convoy on October 25 2005. He was on guard duty in southern Iraq when he was struck and killed by a speeding Erinys vehicle, the suit alleges.

“The family just didn’t have the answers that they were seeking,” said Tobias Cole, a lawyer for the family. “For example, why did their son die on a non-combat mission? There was no reason to have extreme driving, no reason to drive without headlights, no reason to drive at speed through a parked convoy.”

Monroe, 19, was the third generation of his family to serve in the US military and was an eager recruit. He enlisted before finishing secondary school at the age of 17. The lawsuit alleges the four vehicles in the Erinys convoy were driving at an estimated speed of up to 80mph on a dark road using only their parking lights. The Erinys vehicles were not under fire, and they were not carrying high-profile passengers.

Monroe’s right leg was sheared off by the force of the collision, and he was thrown 40ft into the air.

Erinys employees, who were driving in a four-vehicle convoy, had passed through two US checkpoints moments before Monroe was hit, and they had been warned that more US troops were ahead, the suit said.

But it accuses the Erinys team of ignoring the warnings, and driving so fast that they failed to see Monroe or the five-tonne truck he was guarding. “Although extreme driving manoeuvres may be appropriate for private security contractors at certain times, driving recklessly at a high rate of speed with no headlights through a parked US convoy after being specifically warned is not,” the law suit said.

At the time of Monroe’s death, Erinys had been providing security to the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The company denies any wrongdoing and says it was cleared by a US military investigation. “It was a very tragic accident for which Erinys and its employees have been thoroughly exonerated,” a spokesman for the firm told the Guardian yesterday.

The Monroe family’s law suit comes at a time when the Bush administration is under growing pressure at home to rein in private security firms and the lucrative business of guarding US diplomats and troops. The Iraqi government last week revoked the legal immunity under which Blackwater and the other firms had operated.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the authorities stepped up their crackdown on private security contractors yesterday, raiding the premises of a British-based firm, Olympus, in Kabul. It was the eighth private security firm to be raided and closed in a month, but the first foreign firm.

Erinys was the subject of a great deal of attention in the summer of 2003 when the firm was awarded an $80m (£39m), 18-month contract to provide security for Iraq’s oil refineries and pipelines. The firm created a new entity called Erinys Iraq.

Erinys has also been caught up in controversy closer to home. Shortly before his murder, the former Russian security services agent, Alexander Litvinenko, visited the London offices of Erinys where traces of polonium 210 were found.

The first recruits of the 14,000-strong oil protection force raised by Erinys Iraq were members of the Iraqi Free Forces, the US-trained militia that was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who was America’s protege in the run-up to the invasion. Members of Mr Chalabi’s inner circle were among the founding partners of Erinys Iraq. Erinys now has about 1,000 employees in Iraq, the spokesman said. Most are UK nationals.

“Fool me once…” Ian R. Crane – Just released on DVD

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“Fool me once …” is the latest offering from one of the UK’s most active Truth Campaigner’s. Recorded live at the Glastonbury Symposium in July 2007 Ian R. Crane, the immediate past Chair of the UK 9/11 Truth Campaign, reflects upon Gordon Brown’s overt commitment to the agenda of the New World Order and offers a startling prediction of what is being planned to accelerate implementation of the One World Government … with particular focus on the 2012 London Olympics.

Bonus Track:

This DVD also contains another informative presentation. In ‘The Hidden Agenda’, Ian R. Crane explores the occult belief systems of those who believe that they are the rightful rulers of a global fiefdom … and presents the evidence which might explain why they are running scared from a forthcoming event, as foretold in ancient texts. An event which they fear might relieve them of their planetary command … in 2012!

Who is Ian R. Crane?

An ex-oilfield executive, Ian now lectures and writes on the geo-political webs that are being spun; with particular focus on US Hegemony and the NWO agenda for control of global resources. Prior to his retirement from the corporate arena, Ian enjoyed a career of 25 years in telecommunications and international oilfield services, a career that provided the opportunity to live & work in the U.K., Continental Europe, the Middle East & Houston, Texas.

An Alternative to IMF and World Bank Dominance

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The Bank of the South: An Alternative to IMF and World Bank Dominance 

By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

In July, 2004, the IMF and World Bank commemorated the 60th anniversary of their founding at Bretton Woods, NH to provide a financial framework of assistance for the postwar world after the expected defeat of Germany and Japan. With breathtaking hypocrisy, an October, 2004 Development Committee Communique stated: “As we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Institutions….we recommit ourselves to supporting efforts by developing countries to pursue sustainable growth, sound macroeconomic policies, debt sustainability, open trade, job creation, poverty reduction and good governance.” Phew.

In fact, for 63 hellish years, both these institutions achieved mirror opposite results on everything the above comment states. From inception, their mission was to integrate developing nations into the Global North-dominated world economy and use debt repayment as the way to transfer wealth from poor countries to powerful bankers in rich ones.

The scheme is called debt slavery because new loans are needed to service old ones, indebtedness rises, and borrowing terms stipulate harsh one-way “structural adjustment” provisions that include:

— privatizations of state enterprises;

— government deregulation;

— deep cuts in social spending;

— wage freezes or cuts;

— unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations;

— corporate-friendly tax cuts;

— crackdowns on trade unionists; and

— savage repression for non-believers under a system incompatible with social democracy.

Everywhere the scheme is the same: huge public wealth transfers to elitist private hands, exploding public debt, an ever-widening disparity between the super-rich and desperate poor, and an aggressive nationalism to justify huge spending on security for aggressive surveillance, mass incarceration plus repression and torture for social control.

An Alternative to Debt Slavery – The Bank of the South

Last December, Hugo Chavez announced his idea for a Banco del Sur, or Bank of the South, as part of his crusade against the institutions of international capital he calls “tools of Washington.” The bank will be officially launched at a presidential November 3 summit in Caracas, where it’s to be headquartered, with seven founding member-states – Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Ecuador.

On October 12, Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe announced his nation agreed to become the eighth member but said “The decision is not a rejection to the World Bank or Inter-American Development Bank, but a sign of solidarity and fraternity towards the South American community.” At this time, only four South American states aren’t included – Chile, Peru, Guyana and Surinam, but Chile seems likely to come aboard following Colombia’s lead, and the others may decide to join them.

Finance ministers from the founding countries met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil October 8 to finalize the Bank’s Founding Document. Many key operating issues have yet to be resolved, but unofficial information was that each nation will commit 10% of its international reserves and have equal oversight over the new institution. In a concluding news conference, Brazilian finance minister Guido Mantega stated: the participating countries “have been able to overcome all obstacles that were in the way of an understanding around the formation of the Bank of the South. We can now say that the (bank) is close to becoming a reality” even though Brazil (Latin America’s largest economy) hasn’t yet formalized its entry.

Venezuelan finance minister Rodrigo Cabeza explained the bank will help develop the region by offering South Americans more credits. It’s being “created to build a new architecture that assumes an improved relationship of the bank and its capacity to offer credits for its people.” It also aims to increase liquidity and revive socioeconomic development and infrastructure investments in participating countries and keep them outside the restrictive control of the IMF and World Bank that are fast losing influence and being phased out of the region.

In 2005, 80% of IMF’s $81 billion loan portfolio was to Latin America. Today, it’s 1% with nearly all its $17 billion in outstanding loans to Turkey and Pakistan. The World Bank is also being rejected. Venezuela had already paid off its IMF and World Bank debt ahead of schedule when Hugo Chavez symbolically announced on April 30: “We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone.” Ecuador’s Raphael Correa is following suit. He cleared his country’s IMF debt, suspended World Bank loans, accused the WB of trying to extort money from him when he was economy and finance minister in 2005, and last April declared the Bank’s country representative persona non grata in an extraordinary diplomatic slap in the face.

The Banco del Sur will replace these repressive institutions with $7 billion in startup capital when it begins operating in 2008. It will be under “a new financial architecture” for regional investment with the finance ministers of each member nation sitting on the bank’s administrative council with equal authority over its operations as things now stand. Venezuelan Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabeza stressed the banks Latin roots saying: “The idea is to rely on a development agency for us, led by us” to finance public and private development and regional integration projects. He added: “There will not be credit subjected to economic policies. There will not be credit that produces a calamity for our people and as a result, it will not be a tool of domination” like the international lending agencies.

Hugo Chavez’s vision is to liberate the region’s countries from IMF, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IBD) control that condemn millions to poverty through their lending practices. Helped by windfall oil profits, his government is already doing it with an unprecendented commitment to provide financial aid and below-market priced oil to regional and other countries. So far this year, it’s on the order of around $9 billion, and, unlike the Washington-controlled kind, it comes at low cost and with good will, a cooperative spirit and few if any strings.

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz recognizes Chavez’s efforts and stated his support for the Banco del Sur on an October 10 visit to Caracas. He said “One of the advantages of having a Bank of the South is that it would reflect the perspectives of those in the South (while in contrast IMF and World Bank conditions) hinder (regional) development effectiveness.”

Stiglitz met with Hugo Chavez on his visit and praised his redistributive social policies. He also criticized Washington Consensus neoliberal practices that exploit the regions’ people, “undermin(e)….Andean cooperation, and it is part of the American strategy of divide and conquer, a strategy trying to get as much of the benefits for American companies” at the expense of the region and its people.

Venezuela’s acting ambassador to the Permanent Mission to the UN, Aura Mahuampi Rodriguez de Ortiz, warned the world body about Latin American debt during her participation in the General Debate on Macroeconomic Policies in October. She stressed: “The persistence of the foreign debt of the developing countries affects negatively on its process of development. It is not worthy to direct resources for the development of poor countries if such resources end up directed to the payment of the foreign debt” instead of going to economic development internally. She also spoke of the new Bank of the South, how it will help strengthen regional integration and also fairly distribute investments and finance projects to reduce poverty and social exclusion.

A less publicized Bank of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) will also begin operating by year end under “a new regional financial architecture under principles that create a new form of channeling financial resources” to its four country alliance – Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

Chavez first proposed ALBA as an alternative to the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) in 2001 with Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia its original members in December, 2004. Nicaragua then joined the alliance in January, 2007 under its newly elected president, Daniel Ortega, who signed on as his first act in office. ALBA’s goal is ambitious. It’s the comprehensive integration of the region and development of its “the social state” for all its people. It’s boldly based on member states complementarity, not competition; solidarity, not domination; cooperation, not exploitation; and respect for each participating nation’s sovereign right to be free from the grip of other countries and corporate giants.

In April, the 5th ALBA summit was held in Caracas to discuss ways to improve the alliance. Initiatives covered included a Permanent (coordinating) Secretariat and a plan to create 12 public companies to be co-managed by ALBA member states. Its goal is to strengthen key economic sectors in areas of energy, agriculture, telecommunications, infrastructure, industrial supplies and cement production. ALBA country foreign ministers then agreed in June to create a development Bank of ALBA to help finance these ventures with low-cost credit. It will complement the Banco del Sur and also be headquartered in Caracas.

Uncertain Future Prospects

Socially responsible regional banks, like those discussed above, will challenge the dominant institutions of finance capital if they fulfill their promise. But therein lies the problem. These new institutions aren’t panaceas, and they may end up letting capital interests exploit them for their own advantage. In addition, financial autonomy alone won’t free the region from Washington’s grip without greater change. What’s needed are sweeping nationalizations of basic industries, an end to one-way WTO-style trade deals, socially redistributing national resources, developing local economies, achieving land and housing reform plus a sweeping commitment to social equity and a resolve to end a 25 year neoliberal nightmare. From 1960 to 1980, the region’s per capita income growth was 82%. From 1980 to 2000, however, it was 9%, and from 2000 to 2005 only 4%. For the region, it meant sweeping poverty, inequality and the most extreme disparity between the super-rich and desperate poor in the world.

Change is needed, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has done most in the region to achieve it. Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas just presented his government’s 2008 budget to the National Assembly that allocates 46% of it to social spending. It devotes special attention to health and education but also to subsidized and free food, land reform, housing, micro credit, job training, cooperatives and more as Chavez continues to use his nation’s resources to address the needs of his people. Since he took office, social spending per person is up more than threefold and in 2006 was 20.9% of GDP.

Chavez now has an ally in Ecuador under Raphael Correa who’s early efforts are promising. Hopefully, they’ll continue under a new constitution to be drafted in the next six months and then put to a national referendum next year. Other Bank of the South founding countries like Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, however, claim to be center-left but, in fact, embrace 1990s neoliberalism, and financial autonomy won’t change that. The Bank of the South will only work if it fulfills a mandate to prioritize local needs and development, not corporate ones. That’s a tall order, and achieving it won’t be easy with its dominant member, Brazil under Lula, closely tied to Washington and in its grip.

Nonetheless, small signs of change are emerging, the Bank of the South may be one of them, and a new generation of leftist leaders may in the end break Washington’s weakening (but still strong) hold on the region. That’s the hope, and every step forward means more power to the people and another possible world.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.

Blair was warned of looming disaster in Iraq

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By John Ware

John Ware discloses how the former prime minister was told repeatedly about America’s lack of planning for peace — and did nothing

Five days after the fall of Saddam, Tony Blair declared: “Iraq will be better. Better for the region, better for the world, better, above all, for the Iraqi people.”

Yet, as we know, four and a half years later, Iraq is far from a better place. It is still in pieces and the reality is that by invading Iraq not only did Britain help to break the country but we are no longer seriously trying to fix it. As No Plan, No Peace on BBC1 tonight and tomorrow will show, despite his promises, Mr Blair was aware before the invasion that America’s planning for post-war recovery was woefully inadequate – and so was Britain’s.

 
Tony Blair and George Bush, Blair was warned of looming disaster in Iraq
Tony Blair had severe doubts about US plans to stabilise Iraq after the invasion

It has become clear that Mr Blair had severe doubts about US plans to stabilise Iraq after the invasion. There was no properly worked out strategy for the key longer-term objective of transforming it into a stable, prosperous nation that the Blair-Bush vision held out.

We know Mr Blair was aware that post-war Iraq might be heading for trouble because Lady [Sally] Morgan, his former political secretary, says he was “tearing his hair out”; Sir David Manning, his foreign affairs adviser at the time of the invasion, has said he was “very exercised about it”; Peter Mandelson has also said he knew the preparations were inadequate.

The fact that Mr Blair knew all this is potentially far more damaging to his reputation than his decision to put the full weight of his office behind the flawed intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. For that, he had cover from the Secret Intelligence Service.

What, then, is his defence to the charge that he recklessly continued with the invasion, thereby sharing responsibility for the deaths of 100,000 civilians and 4,141 coalition soldiers – 171 of them British – the displacement of four million refugees inside and outside Iraq, and the cost of more than £5 billion

The defence that is emerging from Mr Blair’s friends and advisers is that No 10 was let down by the Bush administration.

All say his frustration stemmed from Britain’s inability to influence the Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld, on post-war planning. The hawkish Defence Secretary wanted a “lite” US footprint — a small invasion force that could be rapidly withdrawn afterwards.

This defence looks thin: it suggests that Mr Blair’s “hair-tearing” could not have begun until dangerously late in the day: not until January 20, 2003, in fact – eight weeks before the invasion. Only then was Rumsfeld put in charge of post-war planning,

by a Presidential directive establishing a reconstruction unit in the Department of Defence.

That is precious little time: the US General George C. Marshall was given three and a half years to plan the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War. So why wasn’t Blair “tearing his hair out” long before January 20? Sir David Manning, his foreign policy adviser, who went to Washington as ambassador after the invasion, said when he retired recently that neither he nor Blair “had any sense that the Department of Defence was going to take over the running of the country”.

Until then, he says, Mr Bush had assured them that the State Department, under the moderate Colin Powell, would be in charge. There had been “plans made and deployed by the State Department… It’s hard to know what happened.”

Yet this runs counter to what the Washington embassy was telling London in the run-up to the invasion. First, it was well known that very little of the State Department’s work could be seen as a blueprint for stabilisation and reconstruction. Rather, a series of study groups had been set up to engage Iraqi Americans in thinking about their country’s future after Saddam.

“It was never intended as a post-war plan,” says Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq.

Secondly, it seems unlikely that Mr Powell ever wanted responsibility for post-war planning. He raised no protest when the President assigned the task to Rumsfeld.

“I think Colin Powell probably thought, and rightfully so, ‘Disaster Looming’,” his chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, told me.

Far from being sure that State would run reconstruction, throughout 2002 the British struggled to find out who would get the job.

A series of telegrams from Sir Christopher Meyer, Manning’s predecessor as British ambassador, to No 10 vividly make the point.

A year before the invasion — on the eve of the first Blair-Bush Iraq summit in April 2002 — Sir Christopher says he urged Blair to “above all start getting them to focus on what next if and when we drive Saddam from office.”

If Mr Blair did raise this, it can’t have made much impact, because in July Mr Blair was warned by the Cabinet Office: “In particular, little thought has been given to… the aftermath and how to shape it.”

Again, in early September, Sir Christopher warned Mr Blair that “planning for the aftermath is a blind spot”. As Sir Christopher says: “I remember thinking to myself: ‘We’re nowhere on this.’?” A few weeks later he “upped the volume” to a warning that “there was a black hole in American planning for the aftermath”.

All this was because the embassy knew that Mr Rumsfeld was actively manoeuvring for control of post-war planning to ensure that the US did not get tied down in Iraq as it had in Bosnia.

No doubt Mr Blair did try to impress on the Americans how seriously they needed to take post-war planning.

But if he was tearing his hair out it doesn’t seem to have happened when it mattered — throughout 2002 — when there was still time to put together a practical plan.

Three months before the invasion, I’m told that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, warned the Pentagon that they would be “lucky to get six hours’ worth of flowers and roses”, as liberation would soon turn to occupation.

There were no plans to fill the vacuum after regime change with a development programme delivering quick wins to show Iraqis that things would be better.

So criminals and insurgents poured into the vacuum and have been there ever since. The charge against Mr Blair at any future inquiry is that he never investigated the risks diligently.

It’s not even clear that Mr Blair’s hair-tearing began the moment No 10 heard that Mr Rumsfeld would be in charge.

His next summit with Mr Bush was 11 days later. A leaked memo records that Mr Blair was told “a great deal of work was now in hand”.

It does not, however, record the Prime Minister being surprised that Mr Rumsfeld had got the job and suggests the discussion was brief.

Nor is there evidence that Whitehall did any better than the US in planning reconstruction in its part of Iraq: the four southern provinces, including Basra. A planning unit was not set up in London until eight weeks before the invasion. Specialists — such as engineers to help with water, power and other basic services — were very late in being lined up.

Three weeks after the fall of Saddam, Whitehall had mustered exactly four civilians to staff what became the office of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Sir Hilary Synnott, who later took charge of the CPA office, says: “I simply wasn’t aware of any planning in relation to the civilian aspects of Basra… my first challenge was to find a computer.” And that was in July — three months after the invasion.

It may suit the Government, past and present, to blame the chaos in Iraq on US lack of foresight, but the evidence suggests that post-war planning was no more a priority in London than in Washington.

Indeed, I am told that it was not until war started that Mr Blair pushed hard on post-war reconstruction, and even then it was more about getting US support for a UN resolution to give legitimacy to the occupation rather than the practicalities of rebuilding a nation with no history of democracy.

In the rush to war, and in the blur of ideology, both capitals abandoned a principle that’s been an iron law of warfare since Napoleon: never take the first step without planning for what comes afterwards.

-John Ware presents Part One of No Plan, No Peace on BBC1 this Sunday at 10.15pm and Part Two tomorrow at 10.45pm

Why America Sent Someone to Be Tortured in Syria

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Arar

Condoleeza Rice loses her memory at the most convenient times—call it diplomatic Alzheimers. Asked why America sent an innocent Canadian, Maher Arar, to be tortured in Syria, she answered:

My memory of some of the details has faded.

Those words are reminiscent of her testimony to the 9/11 Commission in which she repeatedly invoked her imperfect memory. One exchange with Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste virtually mirrors her testimony this week:

BEN-VENISTE: Did the president meet with the director of the FBI?…between August 6 and September 11?

RICE: I will have to get back to you on that. I am not certain.

Here is some more evidence of Rice’s Alzheimer’s from her 9/11 Commission testimony:

I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst.

I don’t remember the discussion that Dick Clarke relates… So I don’t know the context of the discussion. I don’t personally remember it.

I really don’t remember, Commissioner, whether I discussed this with the president.

I was not made aware of that. I don’t remember being made aware of that, no.

I don’t remember anything of that kind.

Congress has repeatedly tried to get Rice to testify about various matters, but she has successfully fended them off until this week. With the Iraq War continuing to sour, the Bush Administration needed someone to try to plug the holes in a policy that more and more seems stitched together with rotting threads.

While the American media focused their coverage on her remarks about the Blackwater fiasco, Connecticut Representative Ron Delahunt wanted to ask Rice about Maher Arar. Under his pointed questioning she finally admitted:

Our communication with the Canadian government on this [case] was by no means perfect; it was in fact quite imperfect.

We have told the Canadian government we do not think this was handled particularly well … and we will try to do better in the future.

But that was not good enough for Delahunt. He pressed Rice as to whether the United States sought assurances from Syria that he would not be tortured if sent there. Her answer sounded like the one she gave Ben-Veniste. She offered to provide details of the case at a future time because:

My memory of some of the details has faded.

Told of Rice’s testimony, Arar responded with less anger than most people who had been illegally tortured, which only helped to strengthen his image as an unlikely terrorist:

I am pleased that the U.S. administration has taken the encouraging step of acknowledging that my case was mishandled. I fully support the very important work of the congressional committees which are trying to get to the bottom of the extraordinary-rendition program.

A lot of people are still trying to get to the bottom of the extraordinary-rendition program, whose name evokes the old dodge of calling a lie a misstatement, for the extraordinary-rendition program is one of this government’s most despicable actions in history. It involves sending suspected terrorists to countries whose methods of extracting information go far beyond waterboarding.

At this point I should, as a good reporter, tell you my bias in this story and also why it moves me to depart from my usual focus. My grandfather was a famous German politician who fiercely opposed Hitler, which earned him a death sentence in 1933. He worked for the League of Nations for a while in China, then ended up in France. Long before the first shots were fired in World War II, the Nazis pressured France to arrest my grandfather and deport him. My family spent some time in a French jail before cooler heads prevailed, whereupon my family came to this country. The punchline of the story is that the Gestapo actually tried to abduct my grandfather, but my father saw them coming when he happened to look out the window. He tried to drag my father to the fire escape to get away, but for a minute my grandfather hesitated, saying, “They can’t do anything here, this is a democratic country.”

I imagine Mr. Arar having similar thoughts. Unfortunately he did not have the same luck as my family. The Canadian government investigated the entire affair and issued a much-publicized report last September, following which the Canadian House of Commons formally apologized to Arar and the Canadian government awarded him $10 million in compensation. Arar was detained in New York while awaiting a connecting flight home to Canada from a trip to Tunisia. He was arrested by American authorities based on what turned out to be faulty information supplied by those red-coated heroes of Hollywood the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Our “extraordinary-rendition program” spirited him off to Syria where he spent almost a year being interrogated and tortured.

Arar described his experiences in a news conference held in November 2003, a month after he was finally released:

Interrogations are carried out in different rooms. One tactic they use is to question prisoners for two hours, and then put them in a waiting room, so they can hear the others screaming, and then bring them back to continue the interrogation.

The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists. They were sore and red for three weeks. They also struck me on my hips, and lower back. Interrogators constantly threatened me with the metal chair, tire and electric shocks.

The tire is used to restrain prisoners while they torture them with beating on the sole of their feet. I guess I was lucky, because they put me in the tire, but only as a threat. I was not beaten while in tire. They used the cable on the second and third day, and after that mostly beat me with their hands, hitting me in the stomach and on the back of my neck, and slapping me on the face. Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding. At the end of the day they told me tomorrow would be worse. So I could not sleep.

Then on the third day, the interrogation lasted about 18 hours. They beat me from time to time and make me wait in the waiting room for one to two hours before resuming the interrogation. While in the waiting room I heard a lot of people screaming…

They kept beating me so I had to falsely confess and told them I did go to Afghanistan. I was ready to confess to anything if it would stop the torture.

The most bizarre part of the Arar story is not just that we send anyone anywhere to be tortured but where we sent him. It is a sad comment on how low morality has sunk in this nation that we contract out our dirty work to others, as if somehow that makes our hands cleaner. But Syria?

In 2003, the Bush administration strongly pushed for the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It called on Syria to:

Halt Syrian support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, cease its illegal importation of Iraqi oil and illegal shipments of weapons and other military items to Iraq.

The Act gave the president the power to impose at his discretion two of six of the following sanctions:

  • 1) Reducing U.S. diplomatic contacts with Syria;
  • 2) Banning U.S. exports to Syria;
  • 3) Prohibiting U.S. businesses from investing or operating in Syria;
  • 4) Restricting the travel of Syrian diplomats in Washington and the United Nations;
  • 5) Banning Syrian aircraft from taking off, landing in or flying over the United States;
  • 6) Freezing Syrian assets in the United States.

Speaking about Syria that year as part of an effort to drum up support for the bill, then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a BBC interview:

Syria has been a concern for a long period of time. We have designated Syria for years as a state that sponsors terrorism.

The impossible twist to all this is that according a CBC News timeline on the Arar case, US officials deported Arar to Syria on October 7th or 8th 2002. He spent the next 375 days in jail! This timeline very closely parallels the path of the Syria Accountability Act, which was introduced in April and signed in December of 2003. In other words, at the same time we were condemning Syria and threatening to ban exports or not allow US businesses to invest or operate in Syria, we were willing to export people for torture in Syria. The juxtaposition of this indefensible act with Bush Administration quotes at the time Arar was being beaten, represent yet another example of their moral bankruptcy.

Those who sent Arar to Syria knew what they were doing. During the interrogation Arar underwent in this country he said:

They wanted to know why I did not want to go back to Syria. I told them I would be tortured there. I told them I had not done my military service; I am a Sunni Muslim; my mother’s cousin had been accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was put in prison for nine years.

In other words, We used Syria as a threat and when Arar refused to confess being a terrorist, we sent him there.

Arar, of course, is not the first person we have sent off in the extraordinary-rendition program. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a fact sheet about the practice in 2005. It stated:

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone.

The report quotes former CIA agent Robert Baer:

“If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.

Baer’s statement confirms we knew exactly what we were doing when we bundled Mr. Arar off to Syria. The problem is that, as the ACLU points out , the practice is illegal:

It is clearly prohibited by the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States in 1992, and by congressionally enacted policy giving effect to CAT.

The European Union has been especially angered by the practice. Earlier this year a yearlong European parliamentary investigation into CIA flights transporting terror suspects to secret prisons revealed according to TimesOnline:

Fourteen governments in Europe turned a blind eye to at least 1,245 CIA flights through their airspace, some of which were used to illegally abduct terrorist suspects for questioning.

The Times also noted:

The report revealed that all EU countries had been fully informed of the practice of extraordinary rendition by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, at a Nato-EU meeting in February 2005 and subsequently at high-level meetings in Brussels on February 8 and May 3 last year.

All this background makes Rice’s convenient memory loss about the Arar affair seem ingenuous at best. She may not have known the specifics of the Arar case, but she was obviously aware of the policy that sent him to Syria. However, her “diplomatic Alzheimers”—should we call it “Bushheimers?”—has worn thin. Increasingly, this administration appears top have a short memory about much that has happened in the Iraq War.

Lurking behind all this is a disquieting question. Someone please tell me why we were sending a suspected terrorist to be tortured by a country we had labeled as a terrorist sympathizer? If the Bush Administration believed its characterization of Syria, did they really think Syria would punish a “fellow terrorist” or that we would get accurate information? And, if not, then the anti-Syria rhetoric and putting Congress through seven months of bill writing was all a sham. In other words, is this administration crazy or beyond hypocrisy? I can’t think of another administration we have ever asked that question of.

http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/condis-alzheimers-she-cant-explain-why-we-sent-someone-to-be-tortured-in-syria.html

Exposed: Secret Government Collusion with GM Firm

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Ministers are funding genetically modified crop projects with scores of millions of pounds every year and are colluding with a biotech company to ease its GM tests, the IoS can reveal. Geoffrey Lean on a murky tale that Whitehall tried to hide

 

Ministers are secretly easing the way for GM crops in Britain, while professing to be impartial on the technology, startling internal documents reveal.

The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, show that the Government colluded with a biotech company in setting conditions for testing GM potatoes, and gives tens of millions of pounds a year to boost research into modified crops and foods.

The information on funding proved extraordinarily difficult to get, requiring three months of investigation by an environmental pressure group, a series of parliamentary questions, and three applications for the information.

Friends of the Earth finally obtained still partial information last week which shows that the Government provides at least £50m a year for research into agricultural biotechnology, largely GM crops and food. This generosity contrasts with the £1.6m given last year for research into organic agriculture, in spite of repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, “sustainable” farming.

Publicly ministers claim to be neutral over GM. Four years ago, at the height of controversy about plans to introduce modified crops to Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted that the Government was “neither for nor against” them. The then Environment minister, Elliot Morley, added: “There is an open and transparent process for their assessment and all relevant material will be put in the public domain.” Last month the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, reiterated: “There is no change in the Government’s position.”

But the documents show that ministers have been far from even-handed. One set, obtained by the campaigning group GM Freeze, clearly demonstrate that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) allowed the biotech giant BASF to help to set the conditions for field trials it has conducted on modified potatoes. On 1 December last year the company was given permission to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields over the next five years, in a series of 10 trials. The set of emails and letters between Defra and the company reveal that officials repeatedly went to remarkable lengths to make sure the trial conditions, supposed to protect the environment and farmers, were “agreeable” to BASF.

On 29 September a department official emailed BASF to inform it of a recommendation by the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (Acre), its official advisers on risks to health and the environment from GM, that “the land should be left fallow for two years following each trial” and added “I would like to know whether you think that this is workable for you”. The official pointed out that other EU countries had specified that “berries/true seed should be removed from the trial” but that Acre had “not specified this because the committee believes that this would be a very big job”. The email went on: “If you think this is completely unworkable, I think the committee may be prepared to accommodate a reduction of this fallow period to one year but there may be other conditions (eg removal of flowers/berries).”

The writer added: “In addition to this, Acre has recommended a particular tillage regime, hopefully you are able to accommodate this.”

On 6 October Defra sent BASF a draft of the consent to the trials, adding: “Please let me know whether or not the conditions as they stand would be agreeable to BASF or whether there are any conditions that would be difficult to meet.”

BASF replied on 26 October that it believed that the “probable conditions” were “very agreeable to us”, adding: “We hope that the final conditions will not change too much.”

On 9 November Defra again emailed BASF to check that one of the conditions “does not affect your plans”, and five days later was in touch again to say that it had “redrafted” another “in response to your concerns”.

Yet the department insisted in a written statement last week: “There is no truth in any allegation that Defra was in any way influenced by BASF in relation to the terms under which BASF could conduct trials on GM potatoes in the UK.”

Pete Riley, the campaign director of GM Freeze, said: “That is simply not correct. The documents clearly show that Defra colluded with BASF to ensure that Acre’s conditions for growing their GM crop were to their liking. Its role is to protect the environment and public health. It is supposed to be a watchdog, but the documents reveal it to be the industry’s lapdog.”

Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative environment spokesman, added: “This is a government department that claims to be objective and science-based in its approach to biotechnology, but clearly it has bent over backwards to model its conditions on the requirements of BASF.”

A spokesman for BASF said: “I do not think that they granted us any concessions that would not normally have been granted.”

The funding disclosure came when the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) — which is funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills — revealed that it gave £39.3m to its seven sponsored institutes for research on “agricultural biotechnology” in 2006-07.

The sum has more than doubled, from £15.5m, since 1997, even though the prospects for GM crops in Britain have been declining in this period, with ministers admitting three years ago that none would be grown commercially “for the foreseeable future”.

Besides this “core strategic grant”, the BBSRC also gives tens of millions of pounds a year for similar research to universities and other institutes.

In 2003-04 this sum totalled £27.1m. The BBSRC told Friends of the Earth that it could not provide it with up-to-date information until January, unless it paid a fee of £750, because this “would take considerable effort, beyond the appropriate limit” to assemble. But the figure is believed not to have fallen over the past three years. On top of the BBSRC funding, Defra provided £12.6m for agricultural biotechnology research in 2005-06, the last year for which figures are available.

Nor is it clear how much money goes to genetic modification, since the BBSRC defines agricultural biotechnology as “the application of molecular genetic and other modern biological techniques to crops, livestock and disease-causing organisms”.

It says it is not yet able to provide information on the proportion that has recently been devoted to GM, as opposed to other techniques. But figures on its website show that in 2000-01 about half of its core strategic grant to the seven institutes was spent on the technology.

In contrast, Defra spent £1.6m on research “relating to organic farming”, while BBSRC refuses to provide any funds at all, saying it “does not fund applied work on entire farming systems”.

It justifies spending so much taxpayers’ money on GM before, as it admits, “there is any clear evidence that the public wants them” by saying that research must retain “the flexibility to remain competitive and to respond to changing global situations and changes in consumer demand”.

Yet when the Government officially asked the public, four years ago, about their preferences, 86 per cent said they would not be happy to eat GM foods. By contrast, sales of organic produce rose by 22 per cent last year to break through the £2bn barrier. More than half of Britons now buy it, at least from time to time.

The BBSRC says that its funding for the research on GM crops would continue even if there was “a Europe-wide ban” on growing them commercially.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth’s food campaigner, said: “The Government’s support for GM crops and foods is out of all proportion to its non-existent benefits, let alone the public’s non-existent desire to consume them.

“Despite continually promising to support sustainable agriculture, it is spending tens of millions on a technology that has fallen flat on its face while starving organic farming, which is producing food that people want to buy.

“It is also staggering that there is no clear information in the public domain on exactly how much money is going into GM research, and that it has proved so hard to get even partial figures out into the light of day.”

A farmer’s story: ‘It’s all about control of food production’

The spectre of GM contamination has cost John Turner dear. A succession of trials near his 250 acre farm in Little Bytham, south Lincolnshire, between 2000 and 2002 forced him to stop growing certain crops — suffering heavy financial losses as a result.

“It was a nightmare and we just felt absolutely powerless to do anything over it at all,” he recalled. “Without any real protection against contamination, we were forced to stop growing crops like maize that could be vulnerable to cross-pollination. It wasn’t easy but it was preferable to the damage that could have been done if our crops were no longer GM-free. We feel that we are in remission at the moment, but every few months there seems to be a new PR push from the GM lobby.”

The facts are being twisted to fit a commercial agenda, according to Mr Turner: “There is no sound science behind the push for GM crops. It’s all about money and control of not only the seeds but also food production from one end to the other. The more I find out about it the less I understand why there has been this impetus to force this technology on farming. It has been hugely over-hyped by those trying to promote it. There are plenty of ways of improving crops that don’t involve swapping genes around.

“But farmers could sleepwalk into using GM crops and by the time they realise the proposed benefits just aren’t there they will not be in a position to go back to a GM-free style of agriculture — that’s the danger and that’s been the experience of farmers in other parts of the world.”

Jonathan Owen

20% of US Troops Suffer Brain Injury

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MoD begins study amid fears that up to 20,000 soldiers may be affected

Matthew Taylor and Esther Addley
The Guardian

The Ministry of Defence is conducting a major study into brain injury in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan amid fears that thousands of soldiers may have suffered damage after being exposed to high-velocity explosions.The US army says as many as 20% of its soldiers and marines have suffered “mild traumatic brain injury” (mTBI) from blows to the head or shockwaves caused by explosions. The condition, which can lead to memory loss, depression and anxiety, has been designated as one of four “signature injuries” of the Iraq conflict by the US department of defence, which is introducing a large-scale screening programme for troops returning from the frontline.

Defence officials were reluctant to extrapolate directly from the US experience, arguing that the science is still inconclusive and that the US and UK experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has been different. But the Guardian has learned that the government has put in place a series of measures – including a comprehensive screening process – to deal with what could be a 20-fold increase in troops with mTBI. If the most alarming US predictions are accurate, as many as 20,000 UK troops could be at risk.

Kit Malia, a cognitive rehabilitation therapist who will oversee the programme to treat TBI at Headley Court military rehabilitation centre in Surrey, said: “I think the issue is that we don’t know whether the Americans are correct. But if the American figures are correct, this is massive. Absolutely massive.”

Surgeon commodore Lionel Jarvis, director of medical policy at the MoD, said the UK is doing all it can to improve diagnosis and treatment of the condition and is “running very, very much in parallel” with the US. He added: “The only significant difference is that there is a much higher political profile on this in the US.”

He said the MoD had drawn up a list of measures to help deal with mTBI that included circulating information to all ranks in the field on what symptoms to look out for; plans to screen all service personnel when they return from combat; a four-stage treatment programme at Headley Court; and research into body armour to improve protection for the brain.

Liam Fox, the Conservative defence spokesman, said: “It is a dereliction of duty, a failure of duty of care. They are already well behind the US in terms of identifying this disease. We have to ask again why should US troops be getting better care than British troops?”

The mTBI injury can occur when a soldier gets a blow on the head or is in close proximity to an explosion. The increased use of improvised explosive devices (IEDS) – roadside bombs – in Iraq and Afghanistan means more troops are at risk than in previous conflicts, and experts say that even the most advanced helmets cannot protect the brain from the shock waves.

A US neurologist and former doctor at the US department of veterans affairs, P Steven Macedo, said: “The enemy combatants are not trying to put missiles or bullets into our troops – they are trying to blow up their vehicles with IEDs. But the vehicles and the men wear heavy armour so what goes through them in many cases is the blast wave and we are beginning to see the impact this is having on the neurological make-up of our troops. This is the first war since the first world war where the major cause of injuries is blasts.”

Advances in brain scanning have revealed that soldiers can sustain bruising and blood clots on the brain, even if there is no visible injury. If the condition is not diagnosed it can lead to long-term problems – from depression and anxiety to violence and relationship break-up.

Dr Macedo said US army doctors are reporting that up to 20% of soldiers coming home from Iraq have “blast injuries”, with 15% of those never recovering. “Someone suffering from this will still be able to use a knife and fork, still be able to talk and walk but they may struggle with bad moods, memory problems or become easily agitated. It is like a computer which is not running programmes properly: you can function but not as quickly or effectively as before.”

Giuliani Dishonesty: Secret 9/11 Commission Testimony

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Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane

David Shuster, substituting for Keith Olbermann as host of Countdown, reported on Thursday that Rudy Giuliani’s description of himself as the only candidate who foresaw the danger posed by al Qaeda before 9/11 has now been refuted by a leaked document.

Typical of Giuliani’s claims on the campaign trail is a speech he gave last summer in which he said of the pre-9/11 period, “Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it. … I thought it was pretty clear at the time — but a lot of people didn’t see it, couldn’t see it.”

Wayne Barrett, a reporter for New York’s Village Voice and author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, has now obtained leaked memos describing Giuliani’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission which directly contradict that claim.

Barrett told Shuster that taken as a whole, Giuliani’s testimony “was a confession of ignorance. He basically said, ‘I knew nothing about al Qaeda.'”

For example, Giuliani acknowledged that even though he had received information on threats between 1998 and 2001, “At the time I had no idea it was al Qaeda.” He further told the commission that after 9/11, “we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda. … We had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake.”

Giuliani’s testimony, like that of other witnesses describing New York City’s response on 9/11, was supposed to remain secret until after the 2008 presidential election.

Barrett also emphasized Giuliani’s continuing ignorance of technological systems involved in the fight against terrorism. As late as April 2004, when he testified before the commission, Giuliani admitted that he didn’t know much about a New York Police Department system called ComStat — which he’s now saying he’d like to see extended nationwide. He was also unable to answer questions about the malfunctioning radios which caused many deaths among firefighters or about a repeater installed in the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing to amplify radio communications.

“He still wasn’t studying the response issues,” Barrett said.

The following video is from MSNBC’s COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann, broadcast on October 25, 2007

All in the (Crime) Family: Bush & Blackwater

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Like a cancer, private mercenary firm spreads influence in local communities. When the private military company Blackwater USA, a firm tied to the Bush family through marriage and to right-wing extremist and racist groups through politics and money, established its headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina in an former military reservation in the Great Dismal Swamp, just south of the Virginia border, practically no one noticed.

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former US Navy SEAL and right-wing fundamentalist Christian from Michigan. Prince’s father is Edgard Prince, who founded the Family Research Council with Gary Bauer. Erik Prince’s sister is Betty DeVos, who is married to Dick DeVos, the son of Amway co-founder and Mormon bigwig Richard DeVos. The General Counsel for Erik Prince’s Blackwater parent company, the Prince Group, is Joseph Schmitz, the Pentagon’s former Inspector General. Schmitz’s brother, John Schmitz, Jr. deputy counsel to George H. W. Bush and who is married to the sister of Columba Bush, Jeb Bush’s wife.

The father of John and Joseph was extreme right-wing Republican Congressman John Schmitz, Sr. Their sister is Mary Kay Letourneau, a former Washington State schoolteacher jailed for having sex with a thirteen year old American Samoan student who she later married.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kay_Letourneau

Safely ensconced in North Carolina and flush with money as a result of Pentagon contracts ensured by Joseph Schmitz and the Bush family, Blackwater began to expand nationally. Using stealth and guile, the company targeted small communities in order to establish regional military training centers.

http://www.oregontruthalliance.org/?q=node/344

Ruling By Decree

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By Jacob Hornberger

Image

Immediately after he denounced Fidel Castro for being a dictator, President Bush unilaterally decreed new sanctions against Iran, moving the United States closer to war against Iran.

Would someone please tell me how it is that Bush exercises such omnipotent power, without even a peep from both Congress and the mainstream press? How is he able to take such serious and ominous action against a sovereign and independent country without going to Congress for permission?

Weren’t we taught in civics classes in our public schools that Congress enacts the laws, the president enforces them, and the judiciary interprets them? How can the president now rule by decree, enacting and enforcing laws whenever he wants, especially ones that are likely to send our nation into war? How is that different from what a dictator does?

Bush also recently labeled a branch of the Iranian military, the elite Quds unit, to be a “terrorist” organization, again without congressional approval. That seems to me to be a rather ridiculous notion. Either the Iranian government is a terrorist organization or it’s not. To separate out a branch of the Iranian government for being a terrorist organization makes as much sense as saying that the CIA and the Pentagon, but not the U.S. government, are terrorist organizations.

Consider, for example, Syria. It’s a country whose regime has been labeled “terrorist” by the U.S. government. That’s why President Bush says that he won’t talk to Syria, which is itself an odd claim, given that the CIA cut a secret deal with Syria to torture a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar. The deal was cut after the CIA kidnapped Arar on American soil and whisked him off to Syria for torture pursuant to the deal that the CIA cut with Syria.

But maybe President Bush is deliberately lying when he says the U.S. government won’t talk to Syria because maybe he’s thinking the same thing about the CIA as he apparently does about Iran’s Qud unit – that the CIA is a separate and independent organization bearing no real relationship to the U.S. government.

Yet, implicitly conceding that the CIA is a core part of the U.S. government yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a congressional hearing that “We do not think the case was handled as it should have been.” According to MSNBC, “When asked whether the United States relied on diplomatic assurances from Syria that the engineer, Maher Arar, would not be tortured, Rice said she would respond later because her memory of certain details ‘has faded a bit.'”

Unfortunately, like the mainstream press, the members of Congress missed the opportunity to ask Rice the critical questions: How is it that the CIA cut a torture deal with a terrorist state that President Bush says the U.S. government hasn’t talked to?

Who was the CIA official who cut the deal? Who was the Syrian official with whom he cut the deal? Was the deal put into writing?

What were the exact terms of the deal? Were the means of torture agreed upon? Did they agree that Arar would remain incarcerated for a year?

Was President Bush aware of the deal prior to the time it was cut, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that President Bush has been lying to the American people about not talking to Syria?

What are the implications, moral and otherwise, of cutting a torture deal with a regime that President Bush says is a terrorist organization and with whom he says the U.S. government hasn’t talked to?

All this just goes to show what a fraud and a sham the “war on terrorism” is and how it is nothing more than a cover for the U.S. government’s own wrongful conduct.

Charity accused of child trafficking

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· 16 EU nationals held over planned airlift of ‘orphans’
· Jet charter company says it had permit for flight

Xan Rice in Nairobi, Dale Fuchs in Madrid and Alasdair Sandford in Paris
Monday October 29, 2007
The Guardian

Seven Spanish crew members of a plane hired to spirit 103 children out of Chad are being held by police, along with nine French citizens detained last week, it was confirmed yesterday, as international condemnation grew over a French charity’s bizarre attempt at humanitarianism.The crew were seized along with six members of the charity Zoe’s Ark and three French journalists. The charity claimed its operation “Children Rescue” sought to save the lives of Darfur orphans, aged between one and 10, by housing them with families in France who had each paid more than €2,000.

But Chad’s president, Idriss Deby Itno, who visited the children in the eastern city of Abeche on Friday, described the mission as “child trafficking” and promised severe punishment. France has signalled that it will not intervene to help its detained nationals. Its ambassador to Chad, Bruno Foucher, yesterday described the plan as “a completely illegal operation”, adding: “The members of the association who took part in this whole illegal manipulation will answer for their acts in Chad.”

Aid agencies, including the United Nations’ children’s fund Unicef have also condemned the charity’s actions.

The Chadian authorities are still trying to establish whether the children are orphans, whether some are as sick as the charity claimed, and where they come from. Aid workers suspect that many did not come from Sudan’s Darfur region, but are Chadian.

Girjet, the Barcelona-based charter airline hired to fly the children to France, said yesterday that the plane’s captain, first officer and five flight attendants, four of them women, were in police custody. The company denied any knowledge of a plan to host the children with French families, who waited at an airport near Rheims on Thursday night before learning that the flight was aborted.

“We were told that the children were injured in the conflict [in Darfur] and that we were supposed get these children to French territory to be taken care of, and then they would be taken back, one by one by a different carrier, to their territory once they were OK,” Fernando Zarza, head of Girjet’s flight coordination department told the Guardian. “When we landed, we were taken by surprise by all these questions of illegal adoptions of kids.” He claimed the company had received a permit from the Chad government authorising the evacuation for health reasons.

The case has caused a storm in France, where the authorities have known about the proposed airlift for months. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, called Mr Deby on Saturday to express “solidarity with the children”. Even the Elysée palace has been drawn into the affair, describing as “totally false” claims that Zoe’s Ark had the backing of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s estranged wife Cécilia.

Schwarzenegger: ‘Marijuana is not a drug, it’s a leaf’

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By Ciar Byrne

Already facing enough problems with the wild fires that have swept California, the state’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have stepped into a new row by claiming that marijuana is not a drug. In an interview with GQ magazine, the Hollywood star turned governor of California insisted: “I didn’t take any drugs.”

The interviewer, former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, put it to the star that he had admitted smoking marijuana in the past. In Pumping Iron, the bodybuilding documentary which launched his career 30 years ago, he was shown taking a drag on a spliff.

“That is not a drug. It’s a leaf,” said Austrian-born Mr Schwarzenegger, 60. “My drug was pumping iron, trust me,” he added.

When George Butler’s critically acclaimed 1977 documentary Pumping Iron was re-released in 2002, before Mr Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California, he was unconcerned by the scene showing him smoking marijuana, saying — in a pointed reference to former US president Bill Clinton who claimed never to have inhaled: “I did smoke a joint and I did inhale. The bottom line is that’s what it was in the Seventies, that’s what I did. I have never touched it since.” Mr Schwarzenegger said that it was not necessarily a matter of public interest whether politicians had taken class-A drugs.

He said: “What would you rather have? A politician taking the stuff and not saying, but making the best decisions and improving things? Or a politician who names the drugs he or she has taken but makes lousy decisions for the country?”

The Republican governor, renowned for his green policies, said Washington had not done enough on the environment. “So we pick up the slack and show the rest of the world America is not just Washington. There are 600 mayors in America who have joined the Kyoto treaty. For us, it is very important that America gets back the great reputation it once had.”

He said: “I think we have to do everything we can as a country to get out of the Iraq war, and to take a lead on the environment.”

Despite his insistence that the US must finish the war in Iraq, Mr Schwarzenegger included Tony Blair in a list of the greatest leaders in history, alongside Nelson Mandela, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Bush stabs America in the back

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

Ten ways to thwart Big Brother

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

By Nick Rosen

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

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

1 Buy an untraceable mobile phone

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

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

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

2 Safeguard your email

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

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

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

3 Safeguard your computer and your files

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

4 Be invisible to CCTV cameras

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

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

5 Stay off spam mailing lists

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

6 Prevent supermarkets knowing your shopping habits

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

7 Avoid utility companies’ marketing departments

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

8 Keep your car off the automatic number recognition system

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

9 Safeguard your NHS data

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

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

10 Shop outside the system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Bush Administration Planning Martial Law?

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Congressman DeFazio Denied Access to Government Documents

By David Gutierrez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School uniforms use RFID to track kids

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

By Thomas Claburn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street cleaners prepare to blast Banksy away

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

By Cole Moreton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top prices: Off the street and into the auction house

£1m

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

£288,000

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

£102,000

‘Bombing Middle England’, February 2007

£96,000

‘Ballerina with Action Parts’, February 2007

£57,600

‘Mona Lisa’, October 2006

£25,000

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

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

White House Leak: Cheney’s Plan for Iran Attack

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

By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Cordula Meyer, Der Spiegel

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

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

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

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

Grandiose Plans, East and West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheer Lunacy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it 1938 Again?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By John A Blacker
RINF Alternative News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIA resumes use of secret prisons

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2007 by UPI

Government secrecy changes promised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diana was alive after the crash: Witness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ghost prisoners’ not accounted for after held by CIA

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Rights groups wonder where the roughly 30 are being kept

By CRAIG WHITLOCK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are they going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIA resumes

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

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

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

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

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

Still in ‘proxy detention’?

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

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

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

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

Repeated queries to U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

Neocon Tells Audience To ‘Shut Up’

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Arch-Neo Con Norman Podhoretz’s book reading at a recent Barnes and Noble appearance in New York turned into a hostile affair after he told the audience that Iran should be bombed because “We were attacked by Islamofascists on 9/11,” before being bombarded with accusatory questions and eventually telling the crowd to “shut up”.

Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor was subject to walkouts by individuals disgusted at the fact that Podhoretz openly called for air strikes on Iran, labeling Podhoretz a “fascist” who would have blood on his hands.

Asked whether there should be a fresh investigation into 9/11, Podhoretz simply dismissed the suggestion as “paranoia” and refused to answer the question.

Watch the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MBzLTjVMhY

He later defended the fact that he signed the infamous Project For a New American Century documents, a Neo-Con manifesto for world domination that includes advocating the use of race-specific bio-weapons, and claimed that the PNAC had been “misrepresented”.Podhoretz then admitted that the CIA had overthrown the U.S.-friendly Iranian government of Mohammad Mossadegh in the 50’s, but called it “ancient history.”


He then went on to make a case that Iran was behind the violence in Iraq and had formed an alliance with Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that the two are Shia and Sunni respectively and as such are arch-enemies. He was then educated about how in fact it was the U.S. government that is funding Al-Qaeda affiliated groups to attack Iran. This mattered little to Podhoretz, who was then asked why we should “fight back” against Iran by bombing them when they had never attacked us?

Podhoretz’s answer was to state that, “We were attacked by Islamofascists on 9/11,” clearly implying that Iran attacked the U.S. on 9/11. Such unmitigated and bellicose propaganda might fly on Fox News, but many members of the audience were having none of it, asking why they should trust Bush and the Neo-Cons after being lied to for six years.

“Why don’t you shut up,” barked Podhoretz, seemingly having abandoned his ceaseless regurgitation of warmongering rhetoric and finally losing his temper.

Several members of the audience were kicked out of the store by cops but as Podhoretz left he was heckled again as protesters chanted “No Iran war,” before ducking into a vehicle and scurrying away.

The incident was another example of the sterling efforts of We Are Change NYC, who have made headlines this year for their prolific confrontations of numerous public figures from Hillary Clinton, to David Rockefeller, to Alan Greenspan.

We Are Change have almost single handedly ruined Rudy Giuliani’s Republican nomination campaign by repeatedly hounding him at public events and reminding that watching media that he is universally hated by New York firefighters and other 9/11 heroes while constantly invoking their names for cheap political points scoring.

Giuliani enlisted Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor back in July. In September, Podhoretz met secretly with President Bush and Karl Rove and encouraged them to bomb Iran. Podhoretz is widely considered to be one of the few remaining hardcore Neo-Con loyalists, while a sizeable majority of the rest begin to flee the sinking ship as public opinion turns ferociously against the Neo-Con’s anti-American agenda and incessant warmongering.

“Bomb Iran” Scholar: Rudy Invited Me To Discuss “World War IV”
http://www.observer.com/2007/i-podhoretz-mr-world-war-4-tutors-giuliani

Top neocon urged Bush to bomb Iran during private White House meeting
http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Top_neocon_urged_Bush_to_bomb_0924.html

Podhoretz Granted Secret Access To Lobby Bush On ‘The Case For Bombing Iran’
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/24/podhoretz-bush-meeting/

Politico: Podhoretz secretly urged Bush to bomb Iran
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5964.html

 

RINF Editors Note: Check out this awesome new site that’s also dedicated to fighting the NWO, it’s recently hit my radar and pulls news from trustworthy sources, a must for your bookmarks   

Conversations with Castro

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Aged 81, the world’s longest-serving leader is turning his thoughts to his legacy and the succession. In an exclusive extract from his autobiography, Fidel Castro talks to Ignacio Ramonet about vanity and cruelty – and reveals his salary and plans for retirement

Saturday October 27, 2007
The Guardian

Those who criticise the revolution blame you entirely – they talk about “Castro’s Cuba”.
Those people tend to personalise, to make me the representative, as though the people didn’t exist. The millions of people who have struggled, who have defended the revolution; the hundreds of thousands of doctors, of professional people; those who farm, produce, study – those people don’t exist. All that exists is this evil guy named Castro.The number of times I have to sign autographs – you can’t imagine. When I meet Americans who come here and talk to me … sometimes there are 50 people at a meeting, they give me a bouquet of flowers or something, and the number of books, cards, things I have to sign, the number of pictures I have to let them take and so many flashbulbs that you can hardly see, it’s hardly to be believed. So I guess I’m some kind of strange, unreal figure …

A star?
Yes, somebody you have to get quick, so you can say, “Look, I got a picture with so-and-so.”

But I’m very self-critical. When I say too much or something comes out of my mouth that might sound a little vain, I’m hard on myself, really hard. You have to keep a watch on yourself.

Throughout the years, influence, power, rather than gradually making me conceited, vain and all that … every day, I think, I’m less conceited, less pretentious, less self-satisfied. It’s a struggle against your instincts, you know. I believe that it’s education, or sincere and tenacious self-education, that turns a small animal into a man.

How do you think history will judge you?
That’s something it’s not worth worrying about. Napoleon talked about la gloire – he was constantly concerned with glory. Well, in lots of countries today, the name Napoleon is known more for the cognac than for all the things done by the real general and emperor. So I say, why worry?

Have you ever thought about retiring?
We know that time passes and that human energies fade. But I’m going to tell you what I told our compañeros in the national assembly in 2003, when they elected me president of the council of state. I told them: “Now I see that my fate was not to come into the world and rest at the end of my life.” And I promised them to be with them, if they wished, as long as necessary – so long as I knew myself to be useful. Not a minute less, or a second more.

Every year, I devote more time to the revolution, I think; I give it more of my attention, because one has more experience, one has meditated more, thought more. Plato said in The Republic that the ideal age for occupying ruling positions is after 55. In my opinion, according to him, that ideal age should be 60. And I imagine that 60 in Plato’s day would be somewhere around 80 today …

How is your health?
Well, I’m fine. Generally speaking, I feel fine; above all, I feel full of energy, I have great enthusiasm for things. I feel quite, quite well both physically and mentally. I’m sure the habit of exercise has contributed to that; in my opinion, physical exercise helps not just the muscles, it also helps the mind, because exercise has an effect on blood circulation, on the delivery of oxygen to all the cells, including the brain cells.

In 2005 the CIA announced that you have Parkinson’s disease. What comment do you have about that?
It must be a confession of what they haven’t been able to do for so long: assassinate me. If I were a vain man, I might even be filled with pride by the fact that those morons now say they’ll have to wait until I die. Every day they invite some new story – Castro’s got this, Castro’s got that. The latest thing they’ve come up with is that I have Parkinson’s. Well, it just doesn’t matter if I get Parkinson’s. Pope John Paul II had Parkinson’s and he travelled all over the world for I don’t know how many years.

If for some reason you should die, your brother Raul would be your undisputed successor?
If something happened to me tomorrow, the National Assembly would meet and elect him – there’s not the slightest doubt. But he’s catching up to me in years, so it’s also a generational problem. We’ve been fortunate that we who made the revolution have brought up three generations. There have always been close ties with young people and students.

I have a great deal of hope, because I see clearly that these people I call the fourth generation are going to have three or four times the knowledge that we in the first generation had.

So you think the baton can be passed on without trouble?
Right now there wouldn’t be any problem of any kind, and there won’t be later, either. Because the revolution is not based on the cult of personality. It’s inconceivable in modern society – people doing things just because they have blind faith in the leader. The revolution is based on principles. And the ideas that we defend have been, for quite some time, ideas shared by the entire nation.

You’re a man who’s admired, but others accuse you of being a cruel dictator …
I don’t understand why I’m called a dictator. What is a dictator? It’s someone who makes arbitrary, unilateral decisions, who acts over and above institutions, over and above the laws, who is under no restraint but his own desires and whims. And in that case, Pope John Paul II, who always opposed war, could be accused of being a dictator, and President Bush considered the most democratic of rulers. That’s the way the industrialised countries in Europe treat him, without realising that Bush can make terrible decisions without consulting the Senate or the House of Representatives, or even his cabinet. Not even the Roman emperors had the power of the president of the United States!

I don’t make unilateral decisions. This isn’t even a presidential government. We have a council of state, and my functions as leader exist within a collective. I have authority, of course, I have influence, for historical reasons, but I don’t give orders or rule by decree.

What about the charge of cruelty?
I really think that a man who has devoted his entire life to fighting injustice, oppression of every kind, to serving others, to fighting for others, to preaching and practising solidarity, I think all of that is totally incompatible with cruelty.

All that propaganda is based on hate and on lies. How can people say that even one man has been tortured in Cuba? Or that I’ve ordered a man tortured? Here, no one has ever been imprisoned for being a dissident or because they see things differently from the way the revolution does. Our courts sentence people to prison on the basis of laws, and they judge counter-revolutionary acts. Down through history, in all times, actions by people who put themselves at the service of a foreign power against their own nation have always been seen as extremely serious.

The idea that in Cuba we send people to prison for having a belief that’s different from the revolution’s is ridiculous. Here, we punish acts, not ideas.

Do you agree that terrorism is the biggest threat to the world today?
Cuba condemned the crime committed on September 11 in no uncertain terms. And we have reiterated our condemnation of terrorism in all its shapes and forms. The US has cynically included Cuba among the countries sponsoring terrorism, but Cuba will never allow its territory to be used for terrorist actions against the people of the US or any other country.

I agree that terrorism is a serious threat to the world today, but I believe humanity is facing other threats of equal or greater seriousness: the accelerating destruction of the environment; the deepening of poverty; the lack of health care. To all of which one would have to add the hegemonic designs of the only superpower that aspires to become the ruler of the planet, and its arrogant policy of domination.

In 2005 you declared an “all-out war” on certain problems Cuba was facing – theft from the state, the misappropriation of funds.
That’s right. We’ve invited the entire nation to take part in a great battle against any and all offences, whether petty theft or grand larceny. Because we have several tens of thousands of parasites that don’t produce anything yet are getting rich. You should see how deep-rooted some of these vices are, how much pilfering was going on, how people were diverting resources, the way things were being stolen.

Don’t you think Cuba’s one-party structure is ill-adapted to an increasingly complex society?
In many countries, the classical, traditional electoral system with multiple parties becomes a popularity contest and not, really, a competency contest. People wind up electing the most likable person, the person who communicates best with the masses, even the person who has the most pleasant appearance, the best advertising on television, or in the press or on radio. Or, in the end, and this is practically a rule, the person who has the most money to spend on advertising.

Is there corruption among the Cuban leadership?
It’s happened with some officials who were negotiating with powerful foreign businesses, and we’ve had to take measures. But it’s not easy to fix.

As for me, I honestly don’t own a thing. I have a few pesos, because after you’ve paid the amounts that have been in place since the first year of the revolution for each service, which are pretty reasonable, you may have some left over. I’m paid the same salary I always was, and out of that I have to pay the Party dues, so much per cent for housing, you pay that every month … I lack for nothing, materially speaking. I have what I need. But I don’t need much.

My salary, at the exchange rate of 25 pesos per dollar, is $30 a month. But I’ve been put on that list of the world’s richest people twice now. I have no idea why they do it, what they’re trying to achieve; it’s ridiculous. I don’t have a cent of my own.

And I’ll have the glory of dying without a penny of convertible currency. I’ve been offered millions to write memoirs and books, but I’ve never done it.

Castro on …

Cigars
It was my own father who gave me my first cigar; I must have been 14 or 15. And I remember that I smoked that first puro, and I didn’t know how it was done. Fortunately, I didn’t inhale the smoke. Although you always absorb a little of the nicotine, even if you don’t inhale at all. I’ve smoked too much in my life. Until one day, over 20 years ago, I decided to stop. Nobody made me. I just decided to make myself stop smoking. I believed that giving up that habit was a necessary sacrifice, for the good of the country’s and the people’s health.

Listening to people talk so much about the necessity of a collective fight against obesity, the sedentary lifestyle, smoking, I became convinced that the ultimate sacrifice I should make on behalf of public health in Cuba was to quit smoking.

Teach by example. I gave up tobacco, and I’ve never missed it.

Tony Blair
I saw Blair one time, in Geneva at a meeting of the World Health Organisation.

He had a swagger, he was haughty, as though he were looking down his nose at people. We had a few words – brief but sharp. He had been talking about child labour and I said to him, “Listen, I saw that you were talking about child labour throughout the world, but I understand that in England there are 2 million children who are working.”

I said it very calmly. I think he thought it was a piece of insolence from a nobody, a nit, a third-world know-nothing.

Wearing uniform
More than anything, I wear it for practical reasons, because with the uniform I don’t have to put on a tie every day … It avoids the problem of what suit to wear, what shirt, what socks, so everything goes together. I only put on a suit for very special circumstances, some international conference, or when the Pope came, or a meeting with some head of state.

My usual uniform is very simple. I also have another, more formal uniform that I wear for some occasions, with a shirt and tie.

Carrying a gun
Since those people in the CIA are always thinking things up – assassination attempts and so on – you can imagine that I carry a weapon, and a weapon ready to be used. I have a 15-shot Browning. I’ve shot a lot in my life. I’ve always been a good shot – it was just luck – and I still am.

The Third Way
I read Anthony Giddens’ book, which contains the theory out of which arose the so-called “Third Way”. There’s nothing of a third way in it – it’s the “way” taken by every turncoat in this world. Oh, I could see that it was aimed against the social-security state achieved by the Europeans: fewer resources for the retired, less aid to the unemployed, because [aid] turns [the unemployed] into a bunch of lazy bums – according to this theory – who then won’t work, you have to force them in some way. Well, I admit that you have to educate people, but you don’t have to force them.

The assassination of JFK
It’s all very strange. With the expertise I acquired in sharpshooting, I can’t imagine that with a rifle with a telescopic sight such as Lee Harvey Oswald had, you can fire, load and fire again in a matter of seconds. Because when you shoot with a telescopic sight, if the weapon moves a fraction of an inch you lose your target. Firing three times in a row, so accurately, for somebody who almost certainly didn’t have much experience – that’s very difficult. What the official version says is quite simply not possible – not just like that, bang bang bang.

The other thing that is just incomprehensible to me is that once Oswald was a prisoner, this charitable, noble soul, Jack Ruby, was so consumed with grief that right there in front of the police and the TV cameras he killed Oswald. I don’t know if anything like that has ever happened anywhere else.

Mao
I’d like to have met Mao. That wasn’t possible because of all those problems and differences that came up because of Sino-Soviet conflict. Among the great political strategists, great military leaders of any era, one would have to include Mao Zedong. I can’t forget the posthumous letter from Mao asking China and the USSR to put their rivalries aside and join forces.

This is an edited extract from My Life by Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, published by Allen Lane on November 1 at £25. © Ignacio Ramonet and Random House Mondadori, 2006, 2007. Translation © Andrew Hurley 2007. To order a copy for £23 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875

VIDEO: Bullshit 2008 – are you ready?

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Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

From “The Onion”

It’s funny, then you realize it’s completely accurate.

For a majority of likely voters, meaningless bullshit will be the most important factor in deciding who they will vote for in 2008.

VIDEO: Clips from ‘Taking Liberties’

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People will only wake up to the destruction of their civil liberties when it is too late to do anything about it.

That is the fear driving a new documentary film which aims to do for civil liberties what Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s anti-George Bush polemic, did for the anti-war movement.



EBay spends $2M lobbying gov agencies including CIA

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CBS News

Online auctioneer eBay Inc. spent almost US$2-million lobbying various departments of the federal government in the past year, including an entity rarely named on federal disclosure forms: the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to a database maintained by the Senate’s public records office, eBay is one of eight groups and companies to lobby the spy agency. The company listed the CIA on a form covering its lobbying activities for the first six months of 2007. Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said that listing was an error.

But he said the company did meet with CIA officials in the second half of 2006 to discuss amendments to a 1994 law — the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act — that required Internet phone companies to ensure their equipment can accommodate wiretaps. EBay owns the Internet phone company Skype.

Poisoned spy WAS a paid-up MI6 agent

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EXCLUSIVE by STEPHEN WRIGHT and DAVID WILLIAMS

The former Russian spy poisoned in a London hotel was an MI6 agent, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Alexander Litvinenko was receiving a retainer of around £2,000 a month from the British security services at the time he was murdered.

The disclosure, by diplomatic and intelligence sources, is the latest twist in the Litvinenko affair, which has plunged relations between London and Moscow to their lowest point since the Cold War.

On the day of the poisoning, November 1, former KGB agent Mr Litvinenko met prime suspect Andrei Lugovoy at the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square, London.

Mr Lugovoy claims that Mr Litvinenko tried to recruit him to supply information to MI6.

The businessman, another former KGB agent, also alleged that his ex-colleague asked him to find candidates for political asylum here. He left Britain for Russia soon after, and has never returned.

Mr Litvinenko had defected to Britain in 2000 and was granted political asylum the following year with his wife Marina, 44, and son Anatoly, 12.

Sir John ScarlettSir John Scarlett: Recruited Litvinenko for MI6

It is understood that Sir John Scarlett, now the head of MI6 and once based in Moscow, was involved in recruiting him to the Secret Intelligence Service.The fact that the 43-year-old ex-Russian spy was actually working for Britain when he died could provide the key to his extraordinary killing.

After an exhaustive Scotland Yard investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service announced earlier this year that there was sufficient evidence to charge Mr Lugovoy with ‘deliberate poisoning’.

Britain has called for his extradition so he can stand trial at the Old Bailey, but the Kremlin refused the request in July.

In an echo of the Cold War era, Britain then expelled four Russian diplomats from London.

Days later, Moscow responded with a tit-for-tat expulsion of four Britons.

Intelligence sources have told the Daily Mail that they do not expect a trial will ever take place.

They also said there remains a ‘perceived threat’ against Mrs Litvinenko, who lives with her son at a safe house in the Home Counties.

Mr Litvinenko died in hospital on November 23 after three agonising weeks in which his hair fell out, his skin turned yellow and his organs failed.

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Suspect number 1: Russian agent Andrei Lugovoy

A photograph taken on his deathbed shows the devastating effect the poison had on his body.

Investigators believe that a fatal dose of radioactive polonium 210 was slipped into a teapot when the two men met at the hotel.

Significant traces of polonium were found on at least one aircraft boarded by Mr Lugovoy around the time of the murder, as well as in some of the hotel rooms where he stayed.

Mr Litvinenko was very critical of Vladimir Putin, and in the days before he died he accused the Russian President – another former KGB officer – of ordering his killing.

Moscow denies the claim.

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Marina LitvinenkoStanding firm: Marina Litvinenko, 44, denies her husband was working for MI6

Mrs Litvinenko flew to Portugal last Thursday, on the eve of the EU-Russia summit, to call on European leaders to put pressure on Russia to hand over Mr Lugovoy.

‘President Putin is providing Mr Lugovoy with his personal endorsement and backing in the eyes of the world,’ she said.

‘This indicates that Russia has something to hide and adds credence to Alexander’s deathbed statement naming Mr Putin as the instigator of his murder.’

Associates of Mr Litvinenko have suggested his slow and painful death was a deliberate ‘message’ from the Kremlin to those in exile – warning them there could be no hiding place.

Moscow has accused Britain of harbouring some 16 Russian emigres including billionaire Boris Berezovsky, a fierce critic of the current Russian government.

He provided Mr Litvinenko with a home after his defection.

Mr Litvinenko fled to Britain after accusing the Russian security service of involvement in the 1999 bombings of two apartment buildings, in which 300 people died.

He had also been investigating the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who spoke out against the Putin government.

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Boris BerezovskyRussian dissident: Billionaire Boris Berezovsky gives a press conference

Mr Lugovoy has admitted meeting Mr Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the FSB, the re-styled KGB, several times in the months before his death.

But he claimed he was being made a scapegoat for the death.

He said that he believes MI6 was involved in the murder because agents had been unhappy at the way Mr Litvinenko had boasted of his links to them.

Mrs Litvinenko has dismissed the claim as ‘nonsense’ and also denied that her late husband was working for MI6.

A book about the murder, Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB, written by Mrs Litvinenko and a friend of her husband, Alex Goldfarb, was released this week. A film version is planned.

Visitors to Japan to be fingerprinted

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Mariko Sanchanta in Tokyo

Millions of visitors to Japan will be required to have their photographs and fingerprints taken from next month as part of new immigration procedures meant to help prevent terrorist attacks.

The move, which includes fingerprinting longtime permanent foreign residents, marks the first time a country other than the US has introduced such procedures. The US adopted similar measures following the September 11 attacks and the UK and European Union are considering introducing comparable requirements.

The new measures have been attacked by human rights groups, which have said the collection of biometric data could play into the hands of Japanese xenophobes and raises privacy issues.

“This will further the perception in Japan that foreigners are terrorists and at the same time rejects the idea that the Japanese could be terrorists as well,” said Makoto Teranaka, secretary-general of Amnesty International Japan. “In fact, all recent terrorist attacks have been conducted by the Japanese,” he said, pointing to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

The new procedures are part of an amendment of Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which contains measures to prevent terrorism. The measures come into force on November 20. In certain instances, Japan will be able to share its biometric data with other governments.

The move has been criticised by many foreigners living in Japan, particularly as the government has said it wants to make Tokyo an international financial centre. It also coincides with the government’s long-running Visit Japan campaign, which aims to increase the number of foreign visitors. Last year, more than 8m people visited the country, up from 5.2m in 2001.

Though Japan invited public comments on the new measure, one could only do so in Japanese.

If a foreigner refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed, he or she will not be permitted to enter the country.

Certain individuals, including “special permanent residents” (which include longtime ethnic Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Brazilian-Japanese residents), people under 16 and diplomats will be exempted from the new procedures.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Security consultant slams ID cards

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Gemma Simpson

The Home Office has defended the ID cards scheme after security expert Frank Abagnale — a one-time confidence trickster made famous by the Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can — said the scheme should be scrapped if the government cannot ensure it is secure.

Abagnale, now a security consultant, criticised the ID cards scheme and said: “You can develop all of the best security systems in the world, the most sophisticated software in the world [yet] all it takes is one weak link that is one person in the system to screw the entire system up.”

Speaking at the RSA Conference Europe 2007, Abagnale added: “So the identity card system only takes one civil servant to ruin the entire system, so if you don’t have the things in place to keep that from happening then you have no business in going there anyway.”

But a Home Office spokesman told CNET.co.uk’s sister site silicon.com: “Systems will be put in place to ensure that one person couldn’t either change information on the NIR (National Identity Register) or could break down the security measures surrounding it.”

Such security systems mean any request for NIR information will have to pass through a number of intermediate systems and filters to make sure only authenticated and authorised requests can get through and the number of people who could see a whole of a person’s identity or make changes to it will be limited and fully vetted, the Home Office said.

In terms of the penalties for abuse of access, the Identity Cards Act contains a number of criminal offences to tackle attempts to compromise the NIR internally, and any attempt to tamper (physically or technically) with the NIR can lead to a sentence of up to 10 years. Any unauthorised disclosure of information from the NIR by internal staff can lead to a sentence of up to two years on indictment, it said.

The Home Office spokesman added: “No one is saying the scheme will be a panacea but by linking unique biometric information — initially face, fingerprint and possibly in future iris too — to one set of biographical information will make the use of multiple identities, and the various nefarious activities that enables, very much harder.”

Abagnale also disagreed with the more general use of biometrics as an identification tool and said: “I support biometrics for entry to buildings, access to buildings and access to computers [but] I do not support biometrics as a device which should be on a cash point.”

He added: “Once you’ve lost your DNA, you’ve lost your identity forever.”

However, Abagnale did give his support to data breach disclosure laws, adding: “There should be laws in Great Britain that if there is a breach you have to notify the potential victim that they could be a victim. That’s just fair.”

Data breach legislation is the subject of silicon.com’s Full Disclosure campaign.

Doctor: G Bush has symptoms of presenile dementia

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It is an article of faith with millions of Americans, most of them on the left, that George W. Bush is stupid. Many reasonable people think his policies are ill-advised, but millions more insist Bush must be a moron because he sounds stupid.

The president’s tortured “Bushisms” are chronicled daily and have been collected in books. Two of the more notorious are “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family” and “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

But something doesn’t compute. Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express and a Yale pal of both Bush and John Kerry, says Bush is five times smarter than people think he is. Cynics deride what passes for scholarship at the Harvard Business School, but the course work for the two-year MBA isn’t easy. A grading curve forces a small number of students to fail, and Bush didn’t fail.

So why does Bush sound stupid? One doctor thinks he shows signs of “presenile dementia,” or an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

This summer, Joseph Price, a self-described “country doctor” in Carsonville, Mich., was reading a long article in The Atlantic about Bush’s speaking style. Author James Fallows alluded to Bush’s malapropisms and to speculation that Bush had a learning disorder or dyslexia. But those conditions generally manifest themselves in childhood. Furthermore, Fallows wrote, “through his forties Bush was perfectly articulate.”

Dr. Price’s children happened to have given him a daily tear-off calendar of “Bushisms” for Christmas. “They are horrible, but they are also diagnostic,” Price says. When he read that Bush had spoken clearly and performed well while debating Texas politician Ann Richards in 1994, Price thought: “My God, the only way you can explain that is by being Alzheimer’s.”

In a letter to be published in The Atlantic’s October issue, Price calls presenile dementia “a fairly typical Alzheimer’s situation that develops significantly earlier in life. . . . President Bush’s `mangled’ words are a demonstration of what physicians call `confabulation’ and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia.” He adds that Bush should be “started on drugs that offer the possibility of retarding the slow but inexorable course of the disease.”

Yes, I asked for a second opinion. University of Massachusetts neurology professor Dr. Daniel Pollen thinks it is bootless to speculate about Bush’s condition without a formal neuropsychological assessment. “I think it’s unfair to say somebody has or does not have a dementia as an analysis based on his public utterances,” says Pollen, who is not a Bush supporter. Noting that Bush spoke well in his debates with both Richards and Al Gore, Pollen adds that Bush’s “peak performances are not in the range I would consider for anybody to have Alzheimer’s disease in the near future.”

Suppose Price is right. What effect might his observation have on the 2004 election? Absolutely none. The White House isn’t going to start speculating about an incipient medical condition that might make the president look bad. When I forwarded Price’s comments to the White House, it sent me Bush’s 2001 and 2003 physical exams, which show normal neurological functions. “There is nothing to suggest that there has been any change from those reports,” says White House spokeswoman Erin Healy.

There is ample precedent for papering over presidents’ medical shortcomings. Stanford Medical School professor Herbert Abrams and others have argued that Ronald Reagan was incapacitated from the day he was shot in March of 1981 through the succeeding seven years of his presidency. In their 1988 book, “Landslide,” Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus report that one White House staffer considered Reagan’s condition so bad in 1987 that he suggested invoking the transfer-of-power provisions of the 25th Amendment. That idea went nowhere fast.

As for the Democrats, they have no incentive to medicalize a condition they so enjoy teeing off on: Bush’s seemingly goofy stupidity. Kerry suggests that Bush’s bicycle has training wheels; Kerry’s wife suggests that people who oppose her husband’s health schemes are idiots. The Democrats would rather feel superior to their opponents than beat them, and so far they are doing a very good job.

Alex Beam

Torture, Paramilitarism, Occupation and Genocide

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By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

On October 5, George Bush confronted a public uproar and defended his administration claiming “This government does not torture people.” Again he lied. Once secret US Department of Justice (DOJ) legal opinions confirm the Bush administration condones torture by endorsing “the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” It also condones paramilitary thuggery, oppressive occupation, and genocide. This unholy combination is the ugly face of an imperial nation run by war criminals. That’s the state of things today. First, the practice of torture.

Torture as Policy under George Bush

In a hollow posturing gesture, DOJ publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a December, 2004 legal opinion. That secretly changed after Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General in February, 2005 and authorized physical and psychological brutality as official administration policy. This continues unabated in violation of international and US laws that include fifth and eighth amendment prohibitions against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in all forms for any reason. These practices been long-standing US official policy, nonetheless, but the mask came off post-9/11 when former CIA Counterterrorism Center chief Cofer Black (now Blackwater USA’s vice-chairman) told a joint House-Senate intelligence committee hearing September 26, 2002: “There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11(on the use of torture). After 9/11, the gloves came off” and “old” standards no longer apply. They never did, and Congress knows and condones it.

Further, George Bush signed a secret September 17, 2001 “finding” authorizing CIA to kill, capture and detain “Al Qaeda” members anywhere in the world and rendition them to secret black site torture prisons for interrogation presumed to include torture.

As White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales then wrote a sweeping memorandum to George Bush January 25, 2002 calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and “obsolete” and claimed the administration could ignore Geneva international law in interrogating prisoners henceforth. He also outlined plans to try prisoners in military “commissions” and deny them all protections under international law including due process and habeas rights. DOD Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was on board as well. In December, 2002, he approved a menu of banned interrogation practices that allowed most anything short of what would cause organ failure.

A new book called “Administration of Torture,” by two ACLU attorneys, contains evidence (from FOIA requests) from over 100,000 newly released government documents. It reveals how US military interrogators carried out abuse and torture orders from their superiors on scores of prisoners. The book quotes Major General Michael Dunlavey who had DOD responsibility for interrogations of “suspected terrorists.” He and Guantanamo commander General Geoffrey Miller both told the FBI they got their “marching orders” from Donald Rumsfeld to use harsh methods at Guantanamo that presumably were meant for all other US-run torture prisons as well. It was also revealed that Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in overseeing the torture-interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani. He was falsely accused of being the 20th 9/11 hijacker, confessed under torture, and then retracted his testimony later as completely untrue.

Torture violates international law. The (non-binding) Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in 1948. The four 1949 Geneva Conventions then banned any form of “physical or mental coercion” and affirmed detainees must at all times be treated humanely. Its first two conventions protect sick and wounded forces in battle. The third one defines who is a prisoner of war and establishes “minimum standards” for POW treatment. The fourth convention applies to civilians and affords them protections during war that require they be treated humanely. All four conventions have a common thread called Common Article Three. It requires non-combatants be treated humanely at all times. There are no exceptions for any reasons and violations are grave breaches under Geneva and other international law that constitute crimes of war and against humanity.

The European Convention followed Geneva in 1950. Then in 1984, the UN Convention Against Torture became the first binding international instrument dealing exclusively with the issue of banning torture in any form for any reason. These are sacred international laws all signatories, that include the US, are bound by. No longer under George Bush’s unconstitutional “unitary executive” authority power grab Chalmers Johnson calls a “bald-faced assertion of presidential supremacy….dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo.” Condoning torture as official policy under it is Exhibit A.

In her important new book, “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Defied the law,” law professor and current National Lawyers Guild president Marjorie Cohn calls torture abhorrent and violates at least two US laws – the 1996 War Crimes Act and 1994 Torture Statute. The US is also party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that guarantees the right to life and prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

The 1996 War Crimes Act provides up to life imprisonment or the death penalty for persons convicted of committing war crimes within or outside the US. Administration memos from Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and David Addington supported dictatorial powers for the president and advised Al Qaeda and Taliban interrogators were exempt from torture laws under George Bush’s “commander-in-chief powers.” Cohn, in her book, explained “the Torture Convention permits no such exemption, even during wartime.”

Yoo and Bybee also distorted what constitutes torture by claiming psychological harm must last “months or even years.” Otherwise, it’s just harsh “enhanced interrogation” of the secret kinds George Bush authorized in a July, 2006 executive order. They reportedly include sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation and/or overload, beatings, induced hypothermia, and more that can cause irreversible physical and psychological harm including psychoses.

The October, 2006 Military Commissions Act followed, appropriately called the “torture authorization act.” It gives the administration extraordinary unconstitutional powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged terror suspects and anyone thought to be their supporters. The law lets the president designate anyone in the world an “unlawful enemy combatant,” without corroborating evidence, and order they be arrested and incarcerated indefinitely in military prisons outside the criminal justice system without habeas and due process rights. US citizens aren’t exempt. We’re all “enemy combatants” under this law. Anyone charged under it loses all constitutionally protected rights and can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment including torture.

Ironically, on the one year anniversary of the Military Commissions Act enactment, Fr. Louie Vitale and Fr. Steve Kelly were both sentenced to five months in federal prison for opposing torture. They also oppose teaching it at Fort Huachuca, Arizona and tried to deliver a letter with their views to the base commander, Major General Barbara Fast, former head of military intelligence in Iraq. Both priests were arrested for trespassing while kneeling in prayer on the base driveway in November, 2006. In an appalling miscarriage of justice, the presiding judge refused to allow any evidence of torture to be introduced. He also ruled out discussion of the illegality of the Iraq war and all references to international law.

Relief from these type abuses are nowhere in sight as leading Democrats condone them and now assure extremist Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey’s nomination won’t be challenged. He promises business as usual that’s bad news for supporters of the law. He earned his bona fides as a US District Court Southern District of New York judge by ruling Jose Padilla, a US citizen, could be imprisoned without trial and held indefinitely by the military.

Padilla spent three and a half years uncharged in a 9 by 7-foot isolated South Carolina Navy brig cell where he underwent alternating sensory deprivation and overload and was denied the right to counsel for two years. Months of beatings, mind-altering drugs, and denial of medical treatment destroyed his mind, turned him to mush, and him easy pickings to convict on all charges without evidence he broke any law. Under Bush administration justice, we’re all potential Jose Padillas in a nation where the rule of law affords no protection, and torture is the preferred means of social control.

Administration Outsourced Paramilitarism

The Bush administration believes anything government can do private business does better, so let it. And that applies to the military as well with Blackwater USA’s powerful emergence Exhibit A. Author Jeremy Scahill portrays the company as “the world’s most powerful mercenary army” in his frightening new book about it. It describes a “shadowy mercenary company (employing) some of the most feared professional killers in the world….accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences….largely off the congressional radar.” It has “remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus” with unaccountable license to practice street violence with impunity that includes cold-blooded murder.

A congressional report indicates Blackwater received more than $1 billion in mostly State Department no-bid contracts since 2001. It’s to provide security services for US diplomats, officials and others once assigned to the military at around six times the cost and can be up to $1200 per man-day. With Bush administration backing, it operates outside the law and Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and is immune from civil lawsuits like the military. Scahill calls the company the “Bush administration’s Praetorian Guard” with “immunity and impunity” to do as it pleases.

Today, around 200,000 private contractors operate in Iraq. Up to 100,000 of them are paramilitary mercenaries from companies like Blackwater, DynCorp, ArmorGroup, Erinys, Triple Canopy and others like the Australian-owned Unity Resources that murdered two Iraqi women October 9. Blackwater is the largest, is close to the Bush administration, and is cashing in big as a war profiteer from huge continuing no-bid contracts.

The company was founded in 1996 by former Navy SEAL Eric Prince who’s also closely allied to the extremist Christian Right. Blackwater came into its own post-9/11 and is now the world’s best connected, largest paramilitary army. It employs 2300 personnel in nine countries with 20,000 or more others on call as needed. The company also has its own 20 aircraft fleet that includes helicopter gunships as well as a private intelligence division and a 7000 acre Moyock, North Carolina headquarters Scahill calls “the world’s largest private military base.”

Controversary surrounding Blackwater made headlines after its mercenaries killed as many as 28 Iraqis in al-Nisour September 16 by some accounts and wounded dozens more. It was only the latest incident involving the company that has a disturbing history of instigating unprovoked violence and then falsely claim it acted in self-defense as Eric Prince told Congress saying his men act “appropriately at all times.”

A new congressional account from State Department and company documents reveals otherwise. It shows the company has been involved in at least 195 “escalation of force” incidents since early 2005 that include previously unreported Iraqi civilian killings. In at least one of them, evidence proved Blackwater personnel tried covering up what happened with a falsified report, and the State Department made no effort to hold them accountable or order the company to pay compensation to the families of the victims.

Agence France-Presse reported on September 16 Blackwater personnel shot recklessly “at everything that moved with a machine gun and even with a grenade launcher (as well as from two hovering helicopters). There was panic. Everyone tried to flee. Vehicles tried to make U-turns to escape. There were dead bodies and wounded people everywhere. The road was full of blood. A bus was also hit and several of its occupants were wounded.” Among the dead were women and children. A daughter witnessing her mother shot in the head and killed said: “They are killers. I swear to God, not one bullet was shot at them. Why did they shoot us?”

Following the incident, investigations were launched that are little more than damage control cover-up. The FBI is involved as well as a joint American-Iraqi inquiry. Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki has gone back and forth on this one. At first, he demanded Blackwater personnel leave Iraq. He then backed down under pressure. He’ll likely await the inquiry’s findings that are out in part from Iraqi investigators, but again said he wants Washington to sever all Blackwater ties, remove the company from Iraq in six months, and have it pay each family $8 million in compensation.

It won’t ever happen, even though early findings conclude Blackwater’s actions were unprovoked, the al-Nisour massacre was a deliberate crime, those involved in it should be charged, put on trial, and the families of victims fairly compensated. The findings are similar to an initial US military report that one Pentagon official confirmed saying Blackwater’s actions were “obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong. The civilians….didn’t have any weapons (and) none of the IP (Iraqi police) or any local security forces fired (on Blackwater).”

Investigations are still continuing, the State Department is in damage control mode, and an October 4 House-passed bill (not retroactive) just made US contractors accountable for felony crimes under the 2000 Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). In addition, new operating procedures have been instituted to paper over the whole affair. Nothing, in fact, will change, however. Blackwater personnel will stay in place, none of them will face criminal charges, and things are again business as usual with the company’s paramilitaries back on Iraqi streets after being banned from operating there by an impotent prime minister.

A sign of things to come came a day ahead of the October House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Blackwater hearing. It was revealed the company’s Presidential Airways subsidiary got a new government contract to supply aircraft, crew and equipment for flight operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Blackwater personnel may likely show up anywhere and currently patrol New Orleans streets for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) post-hurricane Katrina. Their presence is menacing everywhere, and they may show up soon in a neighborhood near you as the “war on terrorism” touches down at home.

Imperial Conquest and Occupation

Current rhetoric aside, even Alan Greenspan’s new book admitted what’s “politically inconvenient to acknowledge (but) everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” and it was “essential” Saddam be removed to control it. Unmentioned was Iraq’s importance that explains why Washington plans permanent occupation of the country. The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proved oil reserves; Iraq has the most untapped amounts of it; and it’s the easiest gotten, cheap to refine light sweet kind Big Oil covets. The country is also strategically located between Saudi Arabia and Iran at the top of the Persian Gulf. That makes it a perfect site for military bases sitting atop an ocean of oil worth trillions of dollars and surrounded by lots more of it.

The strategy to seize it was simply conceived but hopelessly flawed – replace the “cradle of civilization” with a newly created free market paradise with all that oil as grand prize pickings. It’s still up for grabs, but a huge supportive infrastructure is in place and still being built for permanent occupation.

By May, 2005, US forces were operating out of 106 bases around the country from an original 120 number of sites. They range in size from the huge Main Operating Base (MOB) Camp Victory complex near Baghdad airport with thousands of US troops to others for fewer numbers called Forward Operation Sites (FOS) that are still major installations. There are also many smaller Cooperative Security Locations (CSL) as well as prisons and detention facilities throughout the country plus others for Iraqi military and police units.

A sign of permanency are four to six or more super-bases built and planned, the largest of which is the huge Balad one. It’s the major Air Force facility in the country with its state of the art “Kingpin” air traffic control center (called the Common Grid Reference System) that divides the country’s airspace into “kill boxes.” The Army’s largest logistical support center and secret Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF) are also there as well as well as thousands of civilian contractors in neighborhoods charmingly called “KBR-land.”

Balad and other major bases are enormous in size and on the order of small towns. They encompass 15 – 20 square miles with double runways as long as 12,000 feet, and Balad’s air traffic operates round the clock and is comparable in number of takeoffs and landings to Chicago’s O’Hare that along with Atlanta’s Hartsfield are the world’s two busiest airports.

In addition, they have their own neighborhoods and kinds of amenities found back home. They include department store-sized post exchanges, fast food outlets, movie theaters with the latest films, swimming pools, miniature golf courses, elaborate gymnasium and sports facilities, satellite internet access, cable TV, air-conditioning, international phone service and more. All the comforts of home including takeout pizza and Monday night football in the middle of a war zone.

Other major facilities are at al-Talil near Nasiriya in the South; the largest Marine base at al-Asad in Western Anbar province; al-Qayyara, 50 miles southeast of Mosul in the North; the US military command HQ at Camp Victory/Camp Liberty near Baghdad International Airport; Camp Marez near Mosul Airport; Camp Cook north of Baghdad; and a new base near Irbil in the North. In addition, another new Forward Operating base is being built near Zurbatiya near the Iranian border to be completed in November. It’s location is provocative as the centerpiece of a new border control surveillance, monitoring and logistical support strategy called “Combat Outpost Shocker.”

Then, there’s what critics call “Fortress Baghdad” or the “ultimate gated community” inside the city’s four square mile fortress-like Green Zone. It’s surrounded by thick blast-proof concrete walls, and to enter visitors must pass through up to eight checkpoints. Inside, security is intense and includes full body searches, electronic scanners, explosive-sniffing dogs and every other human and high-tech measure imaginable for security.

The US embassy compound is there as well that when finished will be the largest in the world. It’s Vatican-sized in dimensions and hugely fortified atop 104 acres, or six times larger than the UN complex in New York. Reports vary on whether 21 or 27 buildings are planned but their cost plus all facilities and perimeter security will top $1 billion. Construction is continuing, far behind schedule, it’s reported to be shoddy, and it’s already way over budget as predicted so the final cost remains uncertain but will be plenty.

The compound has everything – its own water, electricity, sewers, apartment buildings, swimming pool, shops, Marine barracks and will house more than 1000 civilian staff plus a large private and military security contingent. For the Iraqi people, it’s a hated symbol of imperial occupation Washington intends to be permanent, but it may in the end go the way of the Saigon embassy in 1975. That’s where the last US Vietnam remnants were frenetically rooftop-helicoptered out of the country in humiliating drawdown defeat. It ended visions of permanence then the way history may one day repeat in Iraq.

Imperial Genocide in Iraq

By any estimate, the human toll in Iraq is horrific from all that happened after Saddam’s August 2, 1990 Kuwait invasion. Four days later, Operation Desert Shield was launched. It began with US-led UN-imposed economic sanctions, large US and other troop deployments to the region, and a sweeping Kuwait-funded PR campaign to win public support for Operation Desert Storm that began January 17, 1991.

Before it ended six weeks later on February 28, US forces committed grievous war crime violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions and UN and Nuremberg Charters. They included gratuitous mass killings as well as bombing and destroying essential to life facilities that included:

— power generating stations;

— dams;

— water purification capabilities;

— sewage treatment and disposal systems;

— telephone and other communications;

— hospitals;

— mosques;

— residential areas affecting 10-20,000 homes, apartments and other dwellings;

— irrigation sites;

— food processing, storage and distribution facilities;

— hotels and retail establishments;

— transportation infrastructure;

— oil wells, pipelines, refineries and storage tanks;

— chemical plants;

— civilian shelters like Al Ameriyya that was attacked February 13, 1991 by two laser-guided “smart bombs” killing around 400 civilians including 142 children;

— factories and other commercial operations;

— government offices;

— historical sites; and more in a willful malicious effort to return the country to a pre-industrial age and punish its people horrifically.

Lost was power, clean water, sanitation, fuel, transportation, medical facilities and medications, adequate food, schools, private dwellings and places of employment. Early post-war estimates placed the number of civilians killed at 113,000 (mostly children) according to the Red Crescent Society of Jordan. In addition, US CENTCOM commander, General Schwarzkopf and others, estimated 100,000 or more Iraqi military deaths plus thousands more killed gratuitously as they were retreating in disarray.

What then followed was 12 years of the most comprehensive genocidal sanctions ever imposed on a country as an act of vengeance and US-imposed imperial arrogance. They were first adopted in UN Resolution 661 four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait. They included a full trade embargo that crippled the country economically but initially allowed in food, medical and other essential humanitarian needs. UN Resolution 670 followed in September, 1990 that imposed an air blockade and measures to enforce it.

After the war in April, 1991, UN Resolution 687 was adopted. It required Saddam accept cease fire terms and comply with Geneva protocols banning biological and chemical weapons. It also affirmed Kuwait’s sovereignty, but it wasn’t good enough for US officials who wanted sanctions to remain in force until Saddam was removed.

Later on, the oil for food and medicine program was adopted under UN Resolution 986 in 1995 but was hopelessly inadequate by design. An internal UN report in 1999 revealed it delivered only $74 of food per annum per person (about 21 cents a day) and $15 worth of medicines (about 4 cents a day) with vitally needed items banned or in short supply like syringes, anesthetics, vaccines, antibiotics and other drugs. Everything with potential “dual use” was blocked – chlorine to purify water, vital medical equipment, chemotherapy and pain-killing drugs, ambulances, and anything Washington wished to deny the country punitively with horrific consequences.

Further complicating things, all Iraqi funds were frozen and administered through a US-controlled Development Fund for Iraq. In addition, UN Resolution 661 stipulated all goods entering the country had to be approved by a 15 member committee that included the five permanent Security Council members. Approval had to be unanimous with every member having veto power. The US representative abused his authority by blocking items or causing long delays in importing others. The practice became so extreme, on one occasion baby food was denied on the grounds adults might consume it. At other times, items on the World Health Organization (WHO) humanitarian priority list were blocked such as rice, school books, paper, agricultural pesticides, medical journals and catheters for babies.

The results were predictable and devastating. Normal life was impossible and became a daily struggle to survive. It became apparent by the mid-1990s many didn’t or wouldn’t:

— the UN World Food Program (WFP) reported 2.4 million Iraqi children were severely at nutritional risk in September, 1995;

— in December, 1995, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said 12% of Baghdad children were “wasted, 28% stunted and 29% under weight;”

— by year end 1995, FAO reported 567,000 Iraqi children sanction-related deaths;

— by March, 1996, WHO noted a six-fold mortality rate increase among children under five;

— in October, 1996 UNICEF reported 4500 monthly Iraqi children deaths from sanction-caused starvation and disease;

— by 1999, the under five child mortality rate rose three-fold from 1989, malnutrition doubled, and the entire young child population was affected;

— UN Secretary-General Boutras-Boutras-Ghali noted how health conditions deteriorated dramatically by the mid-1990s, and by 1997 the WHO Director General said Iraq’s health care system was systemically broken; in addition, malaria, typhoid, cholera and other life-threatening and communicable diseases were rampant.

These actions were committed willfully and are war crimes under relevant Geneva Conventions and other international law. They also constitute genocide under provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that “means any (acts like those listed above) committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the national, ethnical, racial or religious group (by) killing (its) members; causing (them) serious bodily or mental harm; (or) deliberately inflicting (on them) conditions (that may destroy them in whole or in part).”

US administrations under GHW Bush, Bill Clinton and GW Bush are criminally liable under “the genocide convention” and other relevant international law. Up to the March, 2003 attack and invasion, more than 1.5 million Iraqis, including over one million children, likely died from the combination of war and economic sanctions. Two UN heads of Iraqi humanitarian relief resigned under them in anger and frustration with Dennis Halliday saying in 1998 he did so because he “had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over one million individuals, children and adults” including 5000 Iraqi children monthly in his judgment.

To date, most members of Congress are mute on the Iraq genocide and continue funding it with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Yet on October 10, the House Foreign Relations Committee hypocritically passed a non-binding resolution calling the 1915 – 1923 Armenian holocaust (taking 1.0 to 1.5 million lives) genocide with a full House vote on the measure still scheduled for November in spite of waning support for it and uncertainty where it will go in the Senate.

Speaker Pelosi still backs the measure and in 2006 as Minority Leader pledged to support legislation “that would properly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. It is imperative that the United States recognize this atrocity and move to renew our commitment to eliminate genocide whenever and wherever it exists.” Today, Speaker Pelosi is mute on Iraq, Afghanistan and fully supports AIPAC’s agenda and its top priority of war with Iran. She’s not bothered by her own government’s genocide that far exceeds the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Turkish Armenian slaughter during and after WW I. The data below estimates as many as four million Iraqis have perished from 1990 – 2007, but speaker Pelosi’s condemnation of it is nowhere in sight.

Dr. Gideon Polya is a well-published biological scientist who’s book, “Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950,” came out this year. It “documents….non-reported (worldwide) avoidable death(s) of 1.3 billion people since 1950” including in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also published his data on millions of violent and non-violent deaths under the three most recent US administrations in articles like his October 7 one on Countercurrents.org. In it, he cites data on Iraq from the Lancet, UN and British polling firm ORB. His “Asian Wars” totals in Iraq, Afghanistan, Occupied Palestine and Lebanon are horrific, and, if correct, exceed any others published to date. A summary of his data follows.

— Eight million total violent and non-violent deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon breaking down as follows:

— 70,000 “US-backed” Israeli-caused deaths in Lebanon from 1978 – 2006, 10,000 of which were violent killings “by Israelis” or their “surrogates;”

— 300,000 1967-2007 Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) deaths plus another 10,000 violent deaths;

— 200,000 violent 1990-91 Gulf war deaths;

— 1.7 million 1990-2003 Iraqi sanctions-caused deaths including 1.2 million children under age five;

— 3.2 million 2001-2007 US Afghanistan war deaths including UN Population Division data totaling 2.5 million plus 700,000 children under age five;

— 2.0 million 2003-07 US Iraq war deaths including 1.2 million UK polling firm ORB violence-related estimates plus 800,000 children under age five from UNICEF data; and

— 500,000 2001-07 opiate drug-related deaths resulting from the resurgent Afghan opium industry under US-UK occupation; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates its output at 93% of world production.

Polya cites the failure of occupying powers to supply essential “life-sustaining requisites” as a major cause of preventable deaths. He also notes his eight million estimate exceeds the Nazi-inflicted Jewish holocaust total of about six million. And he rightly observes that major media misreporting, denying or “ignoring of this horrendous, ongoing mass” slaughter is the equivalent of Jewish holocaust denial and doing it endangers security for “both….victims and….perpetrators.”

There’s no denying the toll on victims, but consider the cost at home post-9/11:

— a nation with no outside enemies permanently at war and claims the right to wage preventive wars under the doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” using first strike nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear states;

— world stability and peace further threatened by the administration’s abandoning NPT, ending Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty protection, rescinding and subverting the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, deploying so-called “missile defense” for offense, and plans to weaponize space toward the goal of “full-spectrum (unchallengeable) dominance” of all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems plus as much of the world’s energy resources as possible;

— a military budget hugely exceeding the rest of the world combined; The Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs estimates the true FY 2007 budget exceeds $1 trillion with all defense-related items included;

— a rogue government operating outside constitutional and international laws and norms with the Congress and courts criminally complicit;

— an unprecedented wealth disparity in an omnipotent corporatist state;

— growing social decay and poverty in the richest country in the world;

— a secretive, intrusive, repressive administration under a president who disdains the public interest and is a serial liar and war criminal;

— condoning and operating secret torture-prisons around the world as a weapon of cruelty, vengeance and social control; and

— a cesspool of corruption stemming from incestuous business-govenment ties that defile democracy and mock any notion of government of, for and by the people.

The toll in Israel is evident as well. Angela Godfrey-Goldstein is an Israeli Jew, based in Jerusalem, and the Action Advocacy Officer with the Israeli Committee Against (Palestinian) House Demolitions (ICAHD). On August 30, 2007, she delivered an address at the UN Conference at the EU Parliament in Brussels commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Occupied Palestine. In it, she noted part of the toll on Israeli society caused by 40 years of Palestinian repression:

— around one million Israeli Jews “voted with their feet and left the country;”

— an estimate by some that up to 50% of Israeli youths refuse mandatory Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) service plus a “grey” Air Force refusal rate of around 30%;

— a significant recent observation from John Pilger that “something (around the world) is changing. (There’s a) swell of a boycott….growing inexorably….an important marker (may have) been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts (preceding) sanctions against apartheid South Africa” that led to the fall of its white-supremicist government; and

— her experience working with “diplomats, politicians and aid workers in Israel and Palestine (shows) that, on an individual basis, there’s enormous personal support and empathy for the Palestinian cause” because decades of abuse against them are intolerable and must end.

Push eventually will come to shove. We better hope it arrives soon. The world can’t wait much longer.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.

UAW Sellout at GM and Chrysler

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By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

The September and October United Auto Workers (UAW) GM and Chrysler agreements are just the latest examples of union leadership surrender and betrayal. It’s an ominous sign of labor’s plight and clear indication of what’s ahead – more for business, less for workers, and no relief in sight with union bosses out for themselves and more allied with business and imperial interests than their own rank and file.

American civilization and labor historian Paul Buhle sees organized labor today in a state of collapse, and labor author Robert Fitch says “American workers are like owners of a family car whose wheels fell off long ago. Each family member (must rely) on their own two feet; they scarcely remember what it was like being able to ride together.” Who can dispute it with union membership down from its post-war 1950s high of 34.7% to the lowest private sector level in over 100 years at 7.4% today. In addition, inflation-adjusted wages are stagnant or falling, benefits are being slashed, and Fitch says conditions in the garment and meatpacking industries are as bad today as the ones muckrakers like Upton Sinclair exposed a century ago in his book “The Jungle.”

He blames it on union corruption at the top in different forms – leaders on the take, siding with business, getting big salaries and fancy perks and more concerned with their own welfare than the interests of their members. Nothing on the horizon points to change with corrupted UAW leaders Exhibit A.

Back in June, the UAW reached an agreement with Delphi Corporation that signaled what would follow with the auto companies. Following months of negotiating, it allowed the company to impose pay cuts up to 50%, lay off thousands, and slash health and retirement benefits. It was a win for company and a crushing defeat for Delphi workers.

Then in July, UAW and the United Steelworkers reached an agreement with auto supplier Dana Corporation that allows the unions to take over managing worker long-term disability and retiree healthcare coverage. The deal is projected to save Dana over $100 million a year, eliminate $30 – $40 billion in long-term company liabilities, and it gives UAW leadership another chance for what it wanted for years – a VEBA (voluntary employee beneficiary association) agreement putting the union in the healthcare business for the big profit potential it represents. More on that below.

In the past, VEBAs proved costly to UAW workers. The union set one up with Detroit Diesel in 1993 that cost company retirees dearly when funds in it ran out in 2004. It happened again to Caterpillar retirees in 2005 who’ll see their out-of-pocket costs triple by 2010, and the sky’s the limit after that. As for Dana Corporation, it got more in the deal as well – the right to hire new workers at half the wages of current ones so older employees can be phased out and replaced with low-cost new ones.

The same UAW – company pattern is now in play at GM, Chrysler and Ford. GM workers struck September 24 and returned to work two days later after union negotiators agreed to huge concessions the company demanded and got without breaking a sweat. Workers accepted the proposal by a nearly two to one margin, but in doing it signed away their futures with a deal they’ll live to regret. They traded shaky job security today for big contractual givebacks later. The pact affects 73,000 hourly workers at GM’s 82 US facilities, and key to it is a VEBA agreement for the UAW henceforth to manage GM’s 400,000 retirees’ health benefits while letting the company off the hook for what it’s been providing since 1964. The GM VEBA amounts to a multi-billion dollar trust fund that will transform the union into a major health care provider, and allow it to reap huge profits by cutting its own members’ benefits.

For its part, GM is only obligated to contribute $35 billion of the $55 billion it owes retirees. But the deal is even sweeter than that. Health care costs are soaring, and the company’s have risen by nearly half since 2003. It’s clear what’s ahead. The VEBA employee experience at Detroit Diesel and Caterpillar is coming to GM. When funds in it run out, the UAW will cut benefits and hike premiums and co-pays so union profits aren’t affected. The agreement also lets GM divert pension fund money to the VEBA trust and allows for worker cost of living increases to go instead toward retiree health benefit expenses making the deal even worse.

Other terms agreed to in the contract include a two-tiered wage and benefit package. Under it, new skilled assembly-line workers will get $26 to $32 in hourly wages but less in benefits than current ones for a total compensation package of around $45 an hour compared to about $73 an hour for existing skilled workers. In addition, a new non-core worker group, comprising up to one-third of GM’s workforce, will get around $27 an hour in wages and benefits. Both core and non-core employees will henceforth receive less in active-worker-health-care benefits with GM saving billions from the arrangement.

The company told Wall Street investors October 15 its 2007 labor costs will drop from $12.6 billion last year to $10.1 billion in 2007 (45% below 2003 wages and benefits paid) with “significant” further declines from 2008 to 2011. Further, GM estimates it will reduce its long-term healthcare obligation to workers by $47 billion and expects over the next four years to retire up to 75% of its current high-paid work force (earning $78.21 in wages and benefits) and replace many of them with low-paid non-core, non-assembly line new hires (costing $25.65 in combined wages and benefits).

Employee buyouts, early retirement offers and other downsizing efforts are coming that will let the company eliminate expensive workers and replace them with cheaper new ones. The contract runs four years and includes three lump-sum bonuses but no wage increases so annual cost of living adjustments won in 1948 are ended that over time will cost workers much more.

It’s a dark new age for GM workers as well as for those at Chrysler and Ford. The days of Walter Reuther-type leadership are long gone. He led the UAW from 1946 until his death in 1970, grew the union to more than 1.5 million members, and over that time delivered for the rank and file like few other labor leaders ever did. He was a union reformer, shrewd bargainer, master strategist, champion of industrial democracy and worker rights and once said “If fighting for a more equal and equitable distribution of the wealth of this country is socialistic, I stand guilty of being a socialist.” In fact, he was pro-capitalist, opposed forming a labor party and allied the UAW to the Democrat party and its imperialist agenda.

Nonetheless, he won sizable wage increases and a historic tying of them to living costs and productivity gains. He also got his membership paid vacations, employer-funded pensions, medical insurance with defined benefits, improved safety and health measures, and supplemental unemployment benefits that guaranteed members up to 95% of their pay if they were laid off. That’s now lost today with UAW and other union bosses conspiring with business for their own self-interest at the expense of their members.

The UAW Chrysler betrayal was as cynical and self-serving as the GM deal. It was packaged around a staged six hour partial walkout of 37,000 of the company’s 49,000 work force that was more theater than strike action and another defeat for UAW members unless they reject the agreement as some locals are doing in voting so far. Some local union leaders oppose it as well as the terms agreed to are even more draconian than at GM:

— a new VEBA trust (only for current employees) with Chrysler contributing only $8.8 billion of its $18 billion long-term health care obligation to its 78,000 retirees; new hires will get no retirement health care benefits and will have to enroll in a new health care program that will increase deductibles, co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses; current retirees for the first time will have to pay out-of-pocket expenses; savings to the company will exceed $300 million a year;

— a two-tiered wage and benefit arrangement with new skilled hires getting as little as $14 an hour or half or less the current pay rate and well below the $19.62 average non-union wage in the manufacturing sector; the agreement lets the company expand the number of low-paid non-core workers as well as be able to designate “Non-Core Facilities” in which the entire workforce will get lower pay and benefits once current employees are phased out;

— new health care concessions similar to what GM and Ford got in 2005 that require retirees to pay part of their rising health care premiums; current worker pension funds will be shifted to the VEBA;

— the elimination of employer-paid pensions for new workers, replacing them with 401(k) plans in which the company will contribute one dollar to be invested in the stock market for every hour worked;

— freedom for Chrysler’s private equity firm owner, Cerberus Capital, to downsize and close as many of its plants as it wishes with early retirement offers and employee buyouts ahead so expensive current workers can be eliminated;

— workers’ wages will be frozen, and the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) benefit won in the two month 1970 GM strike is now lost;

— more flexibility for the company to outsource jobs to non-UAW workers at lower pay and benefits; these will include so-called “housekeeping functions” like janitorial and trash handling, grounds keeping, machine and booth cleaning and others;

— freedom for the company to expand the number of low-paid, low-benefit part-time workers as well as long-term temporary ones who can’t gain seniority;

— the company freed of any commitment to build vehicles at US assembly plants or guarantee the number of jobs at them plus other thus far unreported worker concessions.

The GM, Chrysler and upcoming Ford negotiations herald a new day for UAW workers in the wake of another crushing defeat affecting all working Americans. Gone are one million UAW jobs since 1978 (from 1.5 million to 520,000) along with hard-won gains that took decades to achieve. No longer do men like Walter Reuther represent workers. Today’s UAW leadership betrayed its members trust for its own self-interest, and there’s no relief in sight for change. Overall, organized labor is on its knees and Wall Street loves it. GM stock alone rose over 5% the day its deal was announced.

Looking ahead, there are no easy answers, just tough choices, and job one for working people is to join in solidarity for their own self-interest and survival. Past successes can be regained, but wishing won’t make it so. A new political movement is needed based on social equity and justice with a new breed of leaders to head it. The odds for success are long, but the alternative is intolerable. That should be incentive enough to go for it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.

Nobel Hypocrisy

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By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

Alfred Nobel was a wealthy nineteenth century Swedish-born chemist, engineer, inventor of dynamite, armaments manufacturer and war profiteer who remade his image late in life by establishing the awarding of prizes in his name that includes the one for peace. This most noted award was inspired by his one-time secretary and peace activist, Bertha von Suttner, who was nominated four times and became the first of only 12 women to be honored.

Since it was established in 1901, the Peace Prize was awarded to 95 individuals and 20 organizations. Some recipients were worthy like Martin Luther King, Jane Addams and Albert Schweitzer but too many were not including this year’s honoree. Al Gore joins a long list of past “ignoble” recipients like warrior presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and supporter of rogue regimes Jimmy Carter. He’s also among the likes of genocidists Henry Kissinger and three former Israeli prime ministers – Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin – along with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who never met a US-led war he didn’t love and support. So much for promoting peace and what this award is supposed to signify. More on this below.

Almost anyone can be nominated for the prize and look who were but didn’t get it – Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and more recently George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Rush Limbaugh laughably. In contrast, one of the most notable symbols of non-violence in the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi, was nominated four times but never won. More recently, anti-war activist Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, now known as Voices for Creative Nonviolence, got three nominations but was passed over each time for less deserving candidates. Her “reward” instead was to be sentenced in 2004 to three months in federal prison for crossing the line into Fort Benning, Georgia in protest against the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation that’s commonly called “the school of assassins.”

Peace Prize Awards to War Criminals

Henry Kissinger was likely the most noted war criminal ever to win the Nobel Prize (in 1973 with Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho who declined his award saying there was no peace in his country). The sheer scope of his crimes is breathtaking:

— three to four million Southeast Asian deaths in the Vietnam war,

— the bloody overthrow of a democratic government in Chile and support for Latin American dictators,

— backed Surharto’s takeover of West Papua and his invasion of East Timor killing hundreds of thousands,

— supported the Khmer Rouge early on and its reign of terror rise to power,

— backed Pakistan’s “delicacy and tact” in overthrowing Bangladesh’s democratically elected government causing a half million deaths, and much more around the world as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the world body he represented won their award in 2001 “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.” It wasn’t for what Annan did in his various UN roles. Early on, he had a position in the Secretariat’s services department in New York. He then got subordinate responsibility for the Middle East and Africa in the “special political affairs” department. There his support for Washington’s call for troops to be sent to Somalia in the early 1990s helped put him in charge of all peacekeeping operations in February, 1993. In that role, he prevented measures from being taken to stop the impending Rwanda slaughter he was warned about in advance that caused around 800,000 deaths on his watch. He also kept the Security Council uninformed of what was coming.

At the behest of then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright and without consulting Secretary-General Boutras-Boutras-Ghali, Annan sided with the Clinton administration’s authorization of NATO to illegally bomb Serb positions in Bosnia in 1995. It got him the Secretary-General’s job in January, 1997 in which one observer noted he “courted the wrath of the developing world by rejecting anticolonialism in favor of moral principles cherished in the West.”

Kofi Annan’s Nobel award is a testimony to hypocrisy for a man whose ten years as Secretary-General failed to fulfill the mandate he was sworn to uphold: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice….equal rights of men and women (in all nations and respect for) international law (and) social progress….to ensure….armed force shall not be used.”

During his ten year tenure in the top UN job, Annan:

— supported Iraqi economic sanctions that caused around 1.5 million deaths including over one million children under age five;

— backed the Bush administration’s illegal 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation that’s now taken an additional 1.2 million or more lives;

— supported the illegal Afghanistan war and occupation;

— remained mute on the possibility of a wider war with Iran even if it includes first strike nuclear weapons;

— made no efforts to work for peace in the Middle East including in Occupied Palestine nor did he denounce Israel’s 2006 war of aggression against Lebanon;

— remained loyal to the West and ignored the plight of his own people throughout the African continent including the immiseration of South African blacks post-apartheid;

— allowed thuggish paramilitary Blue Helmets to occupy Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sudan. More on UN peacekeeping below.

Kofi Annan’s sole achievement was his uncompromising complicity with the Clinton and Bush administrations’ worst crimes of war and against humanity. His loyalty earned him the Nobel award that signified nothing to do with peace he disdained.

UN Peacekeeping Forces got the Nobel award in 1988 for missions the UN defines as “a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace.” Blue Helmets supposedly are sent to conflict and post-conflict areas to perform multiple services that include as top priority restoring order, maintaining peace and security and providing for the needs of people during transitional periods until local governments can take over on their own.

Most often, Blue Helmets end up creating more conflict than resolution and function mainly as unwanted paramilitary enforcers or occupiers. At other times, they become counterproductive or ineffective and end up doing more harm than good. Since 1948, over five dozen peacekeeping operations have been undertaken. Most were dismal failures including the first ever UNTSO mission during Israel’s so-called “War of Independence.” The operation is still ongoing after nearly 50 years, peace was never achieved, Blue Helmets are there but play no active role, and the world community is silent in the face of Israeli crimes of war and against humanity.

The same condition is true in Haiti where for the first time in UN history MINUSTAH peacekeepers were deployed to enforce a coup d’etat against a democratically-elected president. They disdain peace and stability and function instead as paramilitary occupiers indiscriminately terrorizing and killing unarmed civilians in service to Western capital.

Three former Israeli prime ministers also got Nobel Peace Prizes – Menachem Begin in 1978 and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994. All three men committed crimes of war and against humanity as did all other Israeli prime ministers since David Ben-Gurion took office May 14, 1948 after the new State of Israel declared it independence as an exclusive Jewish state. Nonetheless, the Nobel Committee awarded them its highest honor for furthering the cause of peace they disdained by using their position to inflict on the Palestinian people what Edward Said once said was Israel’s “refined viciousness.” Menachem Begin was a particularly virulent racist and Arab hater calling Palestinians “two-legged beasts” and saying Jews were the “Master Race” and “divine gods on this planet.”

Then there’s the current Nobel Peace Prize honoree, Al Gore. CounterPunchers Alex Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair wrote the book on him in 2000 titled “Al Gore: A User’s Manual.” It’s a critical account of a “man whom his parents raised from birth to be president of the United States” and who always put politics over principle. He built his credentials for the high office around pro-business, pro-war, anti-union and phony environmental advocacy as no friend of the earth then so who can believe he’s one now.

His 1992 book “Earth in the Balance” was more theater than advocacy. In it, he assessed the forces of planetary destruction that included air and water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, overpopulation, ozone depletion and global warming. He highlighted the impact of auto emissions and need to phase out the internal combustion engine but made no effort in office to do it.

Then as vice-president he used his “green credentials” to sell the pro-business, anti-worker, anti-environmental NAFTA to the environmental movement. He also supported clear-cutting logging practices including in old-growth areas. He ignored an assessment that this practice risked the extinction of hundreds of species. He backed a 1995 spending bill “salvage logging rider” that opened millions of National Forest lands to logging and exempted sales of the harvest from environmental laws and judicial review for two years. He and Clinton further allowed South Florida’s sugar barons to devastate thousands of Everglades acres and gave away consumer Delaney Clause protection that kept carcinogens out of our food supply.

Throughout his political life, Gore supported Big Oil and was tied to Occidental Petroleum Company and its “ruthless tycoon” chief, Armand Hammer. In return for supporting company interests, he got political favors and patronage from Hammer and his successor, Ray Irani who was a major DNC contributor and got to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom as a bonus reward. He’s also been a shill for the nuclear industry that won’t solve or even alleviate global warming and the threat it poses according to nuclear expert Helen Caldicott. Commercial reactors discharge huge amounts of greenhouse gases along with hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements besides being sitting ducks for retaliatory terror attacks experts believe will eventually happen.

Earlier in the House (1977 – 1985) and Senate (1985 – 1993) and as vice-president Gore also shilled for the Pentagon and defense contractors. He “played midwife to the MX missile,” opposed efforts to cut defense spending, and backed the Reagan administration’s Grenada invasion and Central American wars. He partnered with Clinton’s Balkan wars in the 1990s that destroyed Yugoslavia so NATO could expand into Central and Eastern Europe for its markets, resources and cheap, exploitable labor. In Kosovo, he collaborated with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) paramilitary thugs against Serbia and ignored their connection to organized crime. He earlier traded his vote for the Gulf war for prime time coverage of his speech.

He then backed ousting Saddam by coup or any other means and supported the most comprehensive genocidal sanctions ever imposed on a country that killed a likely 1.5 million or more Iraqis including over one million children under age five.

Cockburn and St. Clair fill in more blanks about a political opportunist who supported Big Tobacco, “exploited his sister’s death and son’s (near-fatal) accident for….political advantage; became a soul brother of Newt Gingrich; race-baited Jesse Jackson; pushed Clinton into destroying the New Deal; plotted to stop Democrats from recapturing Congress in 1996” so “his rival Dick Gephard” wouldn’t become Speaker; “leached campaign cash from nearly every corporate lobbyist” in town, and, as already covered, lied about being a friend of the earth by disdaining environmentalism through his actions.

Does this man deserve a Nobel Peace Prize (let alone to be president) along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The Nobel Committee ignored Gore’s environmental record and went on to say “for a long time (he’s) been one of the world’s leading environmental politicians (through) his strong commitment, reflected in political activity, (that) strengthened the struggle against climate change.” Contrary to his easily accessed public record, not his posturing, The Nobel Committee blindly added “He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”

In point of fact, throughout his political life, Gore’s actions betrayed the public’s trust and still do. He and his wife live in two large energy-consuming homes: a 10,000 square foot, eight bedroom one in Nashville and a 4000 square foot one in Arlington, VA. The Gores also own a third home in Carthage, TN. In both Washington and Nashville, utility companies offer a wind energy green alternative to customers for a small per kilowatt hour premium. Gore can easily afford it, but public records show no evidence he’s does it in either residence. Alex Cockburn gets the last word on a man who shills for privilege, has plenty for himself, and like George Bush disdains the public interest: “Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party” that’s mostly indistinguishable from the other side of the aisle in a city where the criminal class is bipartisan.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.

Promised Social Change in Ecuador

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By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

Raphael Correa was elected Ecuador’s president last November and took office January 15 promising social change. He’s the country’s eighth president in the last decade including three previous ones driven from office by mass street protest opposition against their misrule and public neglect. Correa must now deliver and just got a boost from his governing Movimiento Alianza Pais’ landslide Constituent Assembly election victory to rewrite the nation’s constitution for the 177th time in Ecuador’s history hoping to get it right this time. Awaiting a final tabulation of results, it appears Correa supporters got around 70% of the vote winning 80 of the 130 Assembly seats. That’s a comfortable majority to push through change, but doing it won’t be easy, and Correa’s commitment has yet to be tested.

Longtime Latin American expert James Petras writes “Ecuador today faces great opportunities for a basic social transformation and also grave threats from imperial networks” the way states in the region always do. He notes how in recent years mobilized urban and rural popular classes ousted neoliberal regimes only to see them resurface under so-called left-center leaders (who are neither left nor center) like Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Morales in Bolivia, Vasquez in Uruguay and others. Even Hugo Chavez governs from the “pragmatic left.” He combines grassroots participatory democracy and redistributive social policies with support for business interests but on a more equitable basis than under previous Venezuelan leaders.

Petras quotes a Forbes magazine editor’s comment on former Mexican president Luis Echeverria (1970 – 1976) that’s very revealing and explains Correa’s challenge – “He talks to the Left and works for the Right.” That’s pretty common in Latin America today, and Brazil stands out as Exhibit A under former Workers’ Party co-founder and the country’s current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2002 to present).

Lula promised social change, but delivered betrayal. Even before being elected, he signed a letter of understanding with the IMF promising no change and business as usual. He agreed to full debt service and repayment terms as well as to back economic stability and neoliberal policies. He didn’t disappoint.

Once elected with a clear majority, he cut public employee pensions 30%; his agrarian policy subsidized agribusiness; his promise of land redistribution to the Landless Workers Movement (MST) was broken; spending for health and education was cut; employer rights to fire workers and cut severance pay were supported; extended privatizations of state-owned companies were backed; thuggish troops occupied Haiti; and right-wing bankers, corporate executives and free-marketeers were appointed economic ministers and central bankers. Petras sums up his record saying: “Lula fits the profile of a right-wing neoliberal politician,” not a “center-leftist” one.

Current Argentina president Nestor Carlos Kirchner is Exhibit B (in office from 2003 to the present with an October 28 presidential election ahead and the president’s wife ahead in the polls to win it). Petras notes how compared to Lula, he seems progressive. He cut unemployment from 20 to 15%, raised pensions and wages, renegotiated part of the country’s foreign debt and rescinded immunity for military torturers although with little to show for it.

In sharp contrast, “fraudulent privatizations” in Argentina’s key industrial areas weren’t reversed; inequalities remained the same or increased in some sectors; poverty levels are still almost 30%; 10% inflation diluted nominal earnings gains; the socio-economic power structure stayed the same; Argentina’s thuggish troops occupy Haiti; its central bankers and economic ministers are hard right; debt service was placed above health and education spending; and unfettered capitalism was supported following the 2001 economic collapse and subsequent uprisings. Petras calls Kirchner a “pragmatic conservative willing to dissent from the US when it” serves Argentina’s business interests. As for being a social democrat? Forget it.

Bolivia’s president and first ever indigenous head of state (2006 to present), Juan Evo Morales Ayma, is Exhibit C, and along with Lula, the greatest disappointment. Petras cites his government as “the most striking example of (a) ‘center-left’ regime” to betray its supporters and embrace neoliberalim once in office. Mass uprisings ousted two earlier presidents who defended foreign investor natural resources ownership, and Bolivians elected Morales to do what they didn’t. Instead, he rejected oil and gas expropriation, supports Big Oil interests, and embraced business as usual policies. Under nationalizations Morales-style, current contractual arrangements are effectively intact, and the country’s mineral resources have been sold off to the greatest ever number of foreign investors.

In addition, Morales broke his promise to triple the painfully low minimum wage, increased it 10% instead, and maintained previous neoliberal fiscal austerity and economic stability policies. He also tolerates the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s intrusive presence and the Pentagon’s Chapare military base; appointed hard right economic, defense and other ministers; opposed agrarian reform; supports large landowners; provides them large subsidies and tax incentives; and backs the Confederation of Private Businessmen in Bolivia by promoting foreign investment, social spending cuts, prioritization of exports, and other pro-business policies above the interests of the people who elected him. Petras says Morales “excels in public theater” by combining “political demagogy” to his base while backing neoliberal IMF austerity and business-friendly policies.

Here’s a sample of the former from Morales’ September 24 UN General Assembly speech when he said: “….each day we are destroying the future of humanity. (We must) pinpoint who our enemies are (and the) damage (they do) that may put an end to humanity….I think that capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity and if we do not change the model, change the system (our efforts here) will be totally in vain….Capitalism has twins, the market and war….This is why (we must) change economic models….particularly in the western world.” It’s lovely rhetoric from a man who, in fact, embraces the model he denounces.

He symbolizes the fantasy of “new winds from the Left” sweeping the region, but too many others do as well in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and all of Central America including Costa Rica. There, a US intimidation campaign narrowly got DR-CAFTA passed in an October 7 national referendum that still awaits a recount before confirming what pre-referendum polls predicted would go the other way.

That aside, there’s strong support for the left throughout Latin America that eventually may bubble up into change. It’s too early to know for sure where Correa stands, but his commitment will soon be fully tested. Here’s what he’s up against.

US regional dominance is still strong, and thinking otherwise is misguided. It’s not like in the 1990s “Golden Age of Pillage,” but it’s still able to keep business flourishing, including in Venezuela where it’s booming. Nonetheless, a new generation of committed leftist leaders are emerging with Correa yet to prove he’s one of them and may in the end disappoint.

His chance to prove otherwise is coming, and he won it convincingly with a 54% second round presidential electoral victory. It was followed by an overwhelming 82% referendum majority to convoke a Constituent Assembly to draft a new socially progressive constitution. Correa says it will be based on “principles not models (and) every country must decide according to its own different realities.” The Assembly will convene the end of October to begin its work with a long struggle ahead to complete it. It hopes to finish in six months, but its mandate allows more time if it’s needed.

Correa wants the constitution to “facilitate” foreign investment (especially in banking) “to force competition.” He’s against monopolies, traditional oligarchic power, and the one-sided big media opposition to his government. He’s also renegotiating the country’s debt, is assessing its legitimacy, wants a constitutional limit on its repayment, and intends to keep the dollar the official currency with eventual plans to abandon it. In addition, he favors ending the central bank’s autonomy, joined the Bank of the South (to be officially founded November 3 and headquartered in Caracas), expelled the World Bank’s representative in April, is ending relations with the IMF, and aims to transform the current neoliberal system into one that will aid “the recovery of the government’s planning capacity (and be a) beginning of the concept of a solidarity system.”

Correa’s close economic adviser and leading September 30 vote getter, Alberto Acosta, said the nation’s “economy should be based on human beings” and that capital, investment, the profit motive motive and workings of the state should be subordinate to human needs. If Correa supports that view and will back it fully, he’s off to a good start. It’s too soon to tell but early signs are promising.

He talks the talk and is starting to prove it. He promised social democratic change and a “citizens’ revolution” and said he’ll use the country’s oil revenues for the people with a positive step already taken. On October 4, he signed a decree increasing Ecuador’s share of windfall foreign oil company profits from 50 to 99% while committing to honor existing contracts. Announcing the move, Correa said: “No more plundering, no more surrender, no more waste. (Ecuador’s oil) now belongs to all Ecuadoreans” with revenues from it earmarked for social welfare and infrastructure.

Correa also indicated after a new constitution is drafted and approved by referendum, he’ll call for new elections for president, vice-president and Congress. The current legislature has no Correa party representatives in it, but he hopes overwhelming popular support will change that. The sitting Congress, according to Correa “must be tossed back into the street,” but that’s for the people to decide. Democracy, however, isn’t just about elections. It’s about what happens afterwards, and that’s for Correa, the Constituent Assembly and a newly elected Congress to decide.

The September 30 victory was Correa’s third triumph in nine months, and he hailed it saying the “Ecuadorean people have won the mother of all battles. (It was) an unquestionable victory.” Earlier he echoed Hugo Chavez’s call for a “new socialism of the twenty-first century (and that Ecuador must end) the perverse (neoliberal) system that has destroyed our democracy, our economy, our society.” He won’t have long to back that rhetoric with action, but doing it won’t be easy.

The long shadow of Washington haunts the region, and its influence pressures and subverts change from the left. At the same time, countries like Ecuador face conflicting interests – maintaining the status quo from the right and demands for real change from below through redistributive social policies and nationalizing strategic sectors like oil, gas, banks and land.

Petras is hopeful “decay and profound disintegration of all the traditional parties opens the way for (progressive) new political forces.” He sees an “historical opening” and opportunity for change through an “alliance of trade unionists, Indian militants, movement leaders and ecologists” in the newly formed Polo Democratico (PD). Its agenda calls for a “total rupture (and) transformation of the Constituent Assembly into the legislative arm of the peoples’ movement.” Its aim is bold and revolutionary – to establish “popular sovereignty” that places basic resources like oil and gas under “popular self-management” and out of the hands of local oligarchs and exploitive foreign capital. It’s a national liberation struggle to defeat imperialism and savage capitalism and return power to the people. Now it’s for Correa and his coalition to prove they’re up to the challenge. So far at least, it looks like they’ll try.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com now moved to Mondays at noon US central time.

VIDEO: The Fascist Blueprint

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It can happen here

Naomi Wolf on “The End of America”

It not only can happen here, it is happening here.

Mussolini created the blueprint (with inspiration from Lenin), Hitler elaborated on it, Stalin studied Hitler…

Here’s how it works (notice how many Bush & Co. is using now.):

 
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/177.html

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

2. Create a gulag

3. Develop a thug caste

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

5. Harass citizens’ groups

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

7. Target key individuals

8. Control the press

9. Dissent equals treason

10. Suspend the rule of law

Wolf’s conclusion? Impeachment of Bush and Cheney is not enough. Prosecuting (and jailing) them for crimes committed is the only rational solution.

Share this video widely.

Will George W. Bush Stay in Power after 2008?

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With so many political pundits in a nervous tizzy about the future political plans of Russian President Vladimir Putin, too few are scratching their thinking domes over a far more pertinent question: Will George W. Bush relinquish his presidential powers in 2008 as mandated by the U.S. Constitution, or will another national emergency, or constitutional change, keep him and his crazy corral of neoconservatives in power?

First, allow me to apologize for scribbling about politics in this column for two consecutive weeks. However, I was hit broadside this morning by news headlines that screamed irony, incompetency, lunacy and once again, vulgar stupidity.

It became easier to understand what Thomas Paine meant by “trying times” when I read on the first page of CNN: “California Wildfires Worsen, 500,000 Evacuated,” right next door to this familiar double whopper with cheese: “Bush Wants Extra $42 Billion for Wars.”

Would somebody please explain to me the Bush administration’s morbid fascination with war? Why can’t this administration – instead of sticking bayonets into wasp nests across the globe – get off page 911 and move on to more pressing issues? In its narrow-minded obstinacy, the United States is about to witness yet another pathetic Katrina scenario, with thousands of homeless evacuees seeking shelter in leaky football stadiums, complete with all of the guilt-tripping Oprah-esque handwringing to follow right after this commercial break.

Is California Governor Arnold Schwar­ze­negger terminator enough to make Washington turn its eagle beak to the West as opposed to the less negotiable Middle East? Why is Bush so gung-ho proactive when it comes to waging war on behalf of other nations, yet arrogantly passive with other far more dangerous enemies, like global warming, deteriorating inner-city infrastructure and the 50 million Americans who have no healthcare plan? Why did the neoconservatives drop out of the Kyoto Protocol coalition, but easily forged a warmongering coalition to wage an unnecessary bloodbath in Iraq?

It has almost become cliché to label these inexplicable modern events “Orwellian,” but that odd double-speak phrase, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, which adorned the Ministry of Truth in the novel 1984, threatens to become the judgement of our days.

All apologies for those conservatives who might be reading this column with tightly pursed lips and knotted brow; but don’t worry, it is not too late to join the Green Party, for example. Anything but the Democrats, please. You may have heard what Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Guardian newspaper concerning Bush and Cheney’s unconstitutional “power grab.”

“There were a lot of actions which they [the Bush clan] took that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted, or that in my view was inherent in the Constitution,” Clinton quibbled. “There were other actions they’ve taken which could have obtained Congressional authorization but they deliberately chose not to pursue it as a matter of principle.”

Asked if she would hand back some of the tempting super powers that the U.S. executive office now enjoys, Clinton feigned shock and awe when she replied, “Oh, absolutely…

I mean, that has to be part of the review that I undertake when I get to the White House, and I intend to do that.”

Yes, of course, the very first thing that any politician would do when winning ultimate power is to hand back big chunks of that ultimate power. That is why it is so vitally crucial for this two-party political game of mind-numbing table tennis to get some new players, and fast. But that would require handing over powers, Hillary, and let’s be honest here, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, who both slurp from the same contaminated teat of corporate power, are about to do such a stupid thing.

But before we even begin to speculate what may or may not happen should Hillary become the first former first lady female (oh, darn it, you know what I mean), we need to prepare ourselves for the worst-case scenario: Bush decides not to give up his cool Pennsylvania Avenue fraternity house.

During a mushroom-clouded news conference last week, where Bush actually floated the ominous specter of World War III, a journalist told the U.S. president that Vladimir Putin may become prime minister after his presidential term expires next March, “in effect keeping power.”

In response to the comment, Bush, who has 15 long months left in office, quipped: “I’ve been planning that myself.”

Wow! So there we have it: Armageddon is in the cards, Bush will become U.S. prime minister in 2009, and America will finally get that parliament the British should have given us 300 years ago. Cool!

The only problem with this scenario is that – and I don’t think I am alone here – I cannot tolerate another minute of looking at the mugshots of Bush’s cronies. As Shakespeare once commented, “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Does history know of a less attractive presidential lineup than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and last but certainly not least, Robert Zoellick! Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, yes, but…     

Now at this point, some readers may be cursing me and saying: Robert, all you do is criticize! Why don’t you do something significant instead of just bellyaching from your cubicle?

Dear reader! I did protest against the Lunacy, in perhaps the most painful way imaginable: I boycotted Disney World in June 2003. Yes, we had planned a Bridge family reunion in the land of Mickey, but when it was obvious even months before the military operation had commenced that war was inevitable,

I cancelled our attendance. My family still has not forgiven me the decision, but there was no way in the world I was going to sit through “It’s a Small World after all,” while knowing full well that bombs were dropping on innocent people in Baghdad.

Anyways, don’t get me wrong, I’m no knee-jerk liberal who automatically opposes military games. I cheered and went hog-wild on Pabst Blue Ribbon like any other redneck American when U.S. forces took out the testy Taliban in Afghanistan.

But invade Iraq? Why? Yes, Saddam did some nasty things, but so have many other politicians, some of whom are still walking upright and reproducing mini-me’s on a regular basis. Yet he [Saddam] was never found guilty of the two main charges leveled against him by the very virtual court of the United States: 1. supporting al-Qaeda, the desert warriors who moved to America, learned to fly commercial jets, and overwhelmed Fortress America to carry out the most lethal foreign attack on our soil; 2. nobody ever found so much as a hint of weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq.

Instead of giving the UN weapons inspectors the extra time they needed to prove Iraq’s guilt or innocence, the Bush administration decided to launch a unilateral and illegal ‘preemptive’ strike when it became obvious the search would not uncover the desperately cherished “smoking gun.”

Now the Bush administration is forced to talk about launching democracy in the Middle East on the wings of a cruise missile, at a time when democratic principles back home are riding precariously on three wobbly wheels.

So where is the world now? Iran has acquired an unpredictable president since hostilities in Iraq broke out, Turkey is bombing Kurdish positions along the Turk-Iraq border, while the Israeli-Palestinian issue still dominates American politics behind-the scenes.

Anybody for a trip to the Disney World in France? 

By Robert Bridge

9/11 And Other Optical Illusions

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Peter Zaza

There’s a wonderful optical illusion which involves a graphic of a ballerina spinning around on one leg. It’s called “The Spinning Silhouette Optical Illusion”

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This illusion elucidates a very important principle concerning subjective reality, and helps to illustrate a point about the vastly differing views people can hold about events such as 9/11. Some people who look at the spinning figure will first affirm that she is bouncing on her left leg while twirling in a clockwise direction. Others may avow that she is instead bouncing on her right leg and spinning in a counterclockwise direction. Indeed, you can have many people looking at this animated graphic at the same time and not agree as to what is happening. This idea is not really foreign to many people who have made the journey from one belief about 9/11 to its diametrical opposite.

First – we must try and deconstruct the illusion and find out what is going on. When you look at a silhouette of a figure it is not possible to determine if it is facing you, or facing away from you. There is no depth to the figure, it’s just an outline – our Left/Right designation of what we visually perceive will set the stage for our belief of what follows. If the human cut-out is interpreted to be facing you then you will assume it is her left foot touching the ground, and vice versa if not. The information is not sufficient when viewing a black and white silhouette, our brain makes an assumption at first glance and then proceeds toward a logical eventuality based upon that assumption.

When you first look at the optical illusion you are subjected to your own implied interpretation. It’s interesting to analyze our mindset while going through the entire process of discovery in figuring out this type of problem. I looked at it initially and told myself to concentrate on which leg she is bouncing on – I was sure it was the left, how could anyone doubt it – you can see it, can’t you? You would have to be an idiot to think otherwise – anybody who does not see it must be a lunatic. But then something happens, there is a period of thought and analysis, and then a question of our belief. As we catch ourselves seeing the right leg touching and the figure rotating in the opposite direction, there arises doubt concerning our convictions. We come to the ultimate realization that we can be fooled, and it is embarrassing to admit that those assertions we would stake our lives upon, and the derision we feel toward those who do not agree with us, are after all only based upon an illusion.

“When you change the way you look at things – the things you look at change” – Wayne Dyer

It’s just a trick – now I can look at the spinning figure and see it going either way – usually by focusing my attention below the dancer upon the movement of the shadow – yes, it’s her left leg touching the ground while going clockwise, and yes it is also her right leg touching and she’s going in the opposite direction. This understanding of the illusion cannot be achieved until we take the time to study it, as well as our part in viewing it. The key is an awareness of ourselves as witness to illusion that passes for reality, followed by a willingness to discover the nature of the phenomenon. One must in a sense step outside of oneself and watch the watcher. Now I’m ashamed that I could be so sure it was her left leg touching and everyone who disagreed must be stupid, moronic, unpatriotic, knees painted purple, whatever. If we do not take the time to study and understand the trick we will forever be stuck inside this reactive mindset that is subject to misdirection or assumption. Any guesses where I’m going with this?

Years went by and I believed it was the planes hitting the towers of the World Trade Center which caused them to fall. It’s simple isn’t it? It was those radical Muslim guys, wasn’t it? And we should be afraid of them and hate them shouldn’t we? NO – it’s a lie. If you still believe these things it is because you have not educated yourself about the event and have based your opinions entirely upon what you’ve been told. Optical illusions are fun, and when we discover the trick we can understand that it is only a matter of subjective reality – both realities being true depending on how you look at it. It is not the same thing as a real world event like 9/11. Now we must look at physical objects and dynamic processes, and more to the point, we must consider the fact that thousands of people were mass-murdered on that day. Then we made war in Afghanistan and Iraq, then a few million more were killed and displaced, now we’ve got innocent people being tortured, shoes off at the airport, Department of Homeland Criminals . . .we could go on here for a bit. You owe it to yourself and your country to find out if there is any shred of evidence to support the assertions made by the 9/11 truth movement. This is much more than a mental exercise where we can train ourselves to believe both realities depending on interpretation. There is only one reality about 9/11 – yet we have two diametrically opposite belief systems about what happened. I’m telling you that if you still believe the official “conspiracy theory” about this tragedy, it is because you have not taken the time to educate yourself and study the event and realize the trickery being foisted upon you by the US government. Ask yourself how you would react if you found out that they were truly responsible, ask what you could do about it when the mainstream media is controlled by the same people involved, as is the Congress, the military, the courts.

“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists” – J. Edgar Hoover

Jet fuel can’t melt structural steel, molten metal does not appear unless there is sufficient explosive energy involved. Freefall speed cannot be achieved unless sufficient mass is removed as in controlled demolition. NORAD does not stand down unless directed. You do not remove and destroy evidence unless you are guilty of the crime. Gag orders are not issued unless you want the truth suppressed. Video tapes are not withheld unless you are lying. Patriot Acts are not made into laws unless you want to institute a fascist state…we could go on here for quite a while. Look at the answers I get from people when I bring up these points – they tell me I’m a moron, I’m not an engineer, etc. Thanks folks, you explained the melted steel really well with that answer, and you are obviously well-versed in the sciences AND classical literature, and let me help you along with your line of reasoning – I’m also overweight, I’m getting older, balder, blinder, etc. But none of this ad hominem stuff bespeaks to any of the central incongruities being raised. It only illustrates that you are in a certain stage of understanding about the event, and would rather get angry with the messenger instead of dealing with the message, and I’m still standing here trying to explain X. I’ve been in your spot and I’ve felt the same anger, I’ve looked at myself carrying erroneous baggage contrived by others to provoke me towards hatred, and I can understand the indignation of people who are disgusted at the 9/11 truth movement. Once, I felt exactly the same way they do. Until we receive factual information about what’s going on, our first response is always going to be hostility against anyone who can’t plainly see the spinning ballerina so obviously bouncing on her left leg going clockwise. That is the critical difference between myself then and now – information.

“Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehoods school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool” – Plato

I went to pick up my child from school the other day, and while waiting outside the classroom I looked at a big mural put together by the students. This bed sheet sized piece of folk art displayed a person’s head in the middle, with all these circles around it containing one word messages like hope, understanding, curiosity, character. Inside the graphic head which occupied the centre were similar messages and aphorisms, obviously representing the dynamic of learning, growth and development, and all presented in the most positive and uplifting way. When my children were born I was awestruck with the miracle of creation and the sanctity of life. What happens to us? Why can I not feel that sense of wonder when considering most of the adults in this world? Moreover, if that mural in the school is really indicative of our society’s values and its hopes for our young – why do we witness so much deceit and corruption by our political leaders and governmental institutions. Obviously, there is a lot that happens to us between that state of being newborn and becoming an adult.

“The moment a baby is born a collective effort is made to chain him to servile dependency on various beliefs. This is all the educational systems have ever done, and yet they say their aim is to liberate man. But what really happens is that a shrewd and subtle mental slavery slowly overtakes the mind of the individual. This system does not teach people how to think, it simply pumps them full of beliefs. It does not encourage doubt, it does not allow rebellion, and the products of such an educational system are usually unable to think for themselves” – osho

The ability to think for yourself is of paramount importance in this survival game. If you allow your opinions to be formed by society through the media, you will inexorably be led down a path of moral contradiction and unconscious collusion. Everybody I know who is “switched on” about the current situation has shut off their TV a long time ago. When you unplug yourself from the daily lies and misdirection there unfolds new possibilities for awareness – when you change the things you look at, you begin to redefine what is actually important and relevant in your life. It’s a funny thing – when it comes to our personal computers we all have anti-virus programs as well as various other utilities for filtering out the steady barrage of trojans, worms, spyware and everything else that is constantly being thrown at us. We realize the importance of protecting ourselves from the harmful elements that might corrupt our personal computer – but what about our brain? What about the constant bombardment of garbage we are inundated with on a daily basis through network news, advertising, sitcoms and infotainment? One of the most significant things you can do to start the detoxification process in your life is to shut the TV off. Talk to a real person, read a book, go somewhere, build something, experience through your own senses instead of sitting there for hours at a time entertaining yourself in front of the CIA controlled electronic brain manipulator.

“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose” – Helen Keller

There’s something else that unifies many people I know within the 9/11 Truth movement. That is an awareness of a bigger reality of which 9/11 is only a part. Once you start down that road of inquiry and discovery it is truly a bumpy ride – layer upon layer of deceit and manipulation unfold until every precept we may have once held about our society and our role in it gets called into question. You begin to see a different side to many issues – it’s like your new-found ability to look at the spinning ballerina both ways and understand that it is but a contrivance. You realize that certain people will purposefully manipulate the information we receive toward an agenda, only instead of being hidden, it is so blatantly obvious to you now.

The frog who lived in a well thought that his entire world consisted of the well, himself, and the portion of the sky that he was able to see from the bottom of his home. The frog bragged and felt very proud of his home in the well – the walls, the water, the mud and all of the lowly creatures it ruled over. One day, a sparrow flew down to the well and greeted the frog. The frog boasted to the sparrow of its grand kingdom. The sparrow looked down into the well and laughed. Then she told the frog about the sky, the earth and the vast span of water. She described the miles upon miles of deserts, the lush grasslands and endless mountains. After listening to these words, the frog in the well was shocked into realization of the things he was willing to see and hear in his own small world – Ancient parable

These malevolent forces that have set upon their task of controlling humanity have always been with us. As we widen the circle of our understanding through education and awareness, the circumference of darkness also increases as we begin to imagine what we do not know, but so does the sense of fulfillment in our lives as we engage our environment and affect change toward a more dignified realization of our humanity. I haven’t met one person yet who is sorry they embarked upon that journey.

Straitjacket Bush

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The president’s warmongering remarks on the Iranian threat suggest he is psychotic. Really.

Rosa Brooks

Forget impeachment.

Liberals, put it behind you. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn’t be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment.

Because they’ve clearly gone mad. Exhibit A: We’re in the middle of a disastrous war in Iraq, the military and political situation in Afghanistan is steadily worsening, and the administration’s interrogation and detention tactics have inflamed anti-Americanism and fueled extremist movements around the globe. Sane people, confronting such a situation, do their best to tamp down tensions, rebuild shattered alliances, find common ground with hostile parties and give our military a little breathing space. But crazy people? They look around and decide it’s a great time to start another war.

That would be with Iran, and you’d have to be deaf not to hear the war drums. Last week, Bush remarked that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III . . . you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” On Sunday, Cheney warned of “the Iranian regime’s efforts to destabilize the Middle East and to gain hegemonic power . . . [we] cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.” On Tuesday, Bush insisted on the need “to defend Europe against the emerging Iranian threat.”

Huh? Iran is now a major threat to Europe? The Iranians are going to launch a nuclear missile (that they don’t yet possess) against Europe (for reasons unknown because, as far as we know, they’re not mad at anyone in Europe)? This is lunacy in action.

Writing in Newsweek on Oct. 20, Fareed Zakaria, a solid centrist and former editor of Foreign Affairs, put it best. Citing Bush’s invocation of “the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon,” Zakaria concluded that “the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. . . . Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s. . . . It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are . . . allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?”

Planet Cheney.

Zakaria may be misinterpreting the president’s remark about World War III though. He saw it as a dangerously loopy Bush prediction about the future behavior of a nuclear Iran — the idea being, presumably, that possessing “the knowledge” to make a nuclear weapon would so empower Iran’s repressive leaders that they’ll giddily rush out and start World War III.

But you could read Bush’s remark as a madman’s threat rather than a madman’s prediction — as a warning to recalcitrant states, from Germany to Russia, that don’t seem to share his crazed obsession with Iran. The message: Fall into line with administration policy toward Iran or you can count on the U.S.A. to try to start World War III on its own. And when it comes to sparking global conflagration, a U.S. attack on Iran might be just the thing. Yee haw!

You’d better believe these guys would do it too. Why not? They have nothing to lose — they’re out of office in 15 months anyway. Après Bush-Cheney, le déluge! (Have fun, Hillary.)

But all this creates a conundrum. What’s a constitutional democracy to do when the president and vice president lose their marbles?

The U.S. is full of ordinary people with serious forms of mental illness — delusional people with violent fantasies who think they’re the president, or who think they get instructions from the CIA through their dental fillings.

The problem with Bush is that he is the president — and he gives instructions to the CIA and military, without having to go through his dental fillings.

Impeachment’s not the solution to psychosis, no matter how flagrant. But despite their impressive foresight in other areas, the framers unaccountably neglected to include an involuntary civil commitment procedure in the Constitution.

Still, don’t lose hope. By enlisting the aid of mental health professionals and the court system, Congress can act to remedy that constitutional oversight. The goal: Get Bush and Cheney committed to an appropriate inpatient facility, where they can get the treatment they so desperately need. In Washington, the appropriate statutory law is already in place: If a “court or jury finds that [a] person is mentally ill and . . . is likely to injure himself or other persons if allowed to remain at liberty, the court may order his hospitalization.”

I’ll even serve on the jury. When it comes to averting World War III, it’s really the least I can do.

Tony Blair: Iran extremism like rise of 1930s fascism

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So who is BUSH – Mother Teresa??

 

By Helen Nugent

Islamist extremism is similar to “rising fascism in the 1920s and 1930s”, Tony Blair said last night in his first major speech since leaving office.

At a prestigious charity dinner in New York, the former Prime Minister said that public figures who blamed the rise of fundamentalism on the policies of the West were “mistaken”.

He told the audience, which included New York governor Eliot Spitzer and mayor Michael Bloomberg, that Iran was the biggest exporter of the ideology, and that the Islamic republic was prepared to “back and finance terror” to support it.

“Out there in the Middle East, we’ve seen… the ideology driving this extremism and terror is not exhausted. On the contrary it believes it can and will exhaust us first,” he said.

“Analogies with the past are never properly accurate, and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading but, in pure chronology, I sometimes wonder if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again.

“This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace.”

He added: “There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone.

“I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone.

“They have made their choice and leave us with only one to make – to be forced into retreat or to exhibit even greater determination and belief in standing up for our values than they do in standing up for their’s.”

Mr Blair, who represents the Quartet of the US, Europe, Russia and the United Nations on the Middle East, was speaking at the 62nd annual Alfred E Smith Memorial Foundation dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

Mr Blair went on: “I said straight after the attack of September 2001 that this was not an attack on America but on all of us. That Britain’s duty was to be shoulder to shoulder with you in confronting it. I meant it then and I mean it now.”

He added: “America and Europe should not be divided, we should stand up together.

“The values we share are as vital and true and, above all, needed today as they have been at any time in the last 100 years.”

Mr Blair received three standing ovations during the evening.

Earlier, the former Prime Minister said: “Out of this region the Middle East has been exported a deadly ideology based on a perversion of the proper faith of Islam but nonetheless articulated with demonic skill playing on the fears and grievances of Muslims everywhere.

“It did not originate from the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, of course, far from it. But this dispute is used to great effect as a means of dividing people, sowing seeds of hatred and sectarianism.

“The impact of this global ideology is now no longer felt simply in the terrorism that afflicts Lebanon or Iran or Palestine. It is there also now in Pakistan, Afghanistan, in India, of course in Europe, in Madrid and London, and in the series of failed attempts to create terror across our continent.

“And here in New York you felt it in the thousands who died and who still mourn their lost ones.”

On several occasions the dinner chairman said he would have liked to see Mr Blair run for US president in 2008.

Referring to the Middle East, Mr Blair said: “The challenge is global, therefore our response must be global.

“Either the argument will be as our enemies want it framed as Islam versus the west. Or it will be as we want it framed as moderates of whatever faith, colour or race against extremism however it manifests itself.”

The dinner, which raises millions of pounds for hospitals, nursing homes and charitable agencies, is held in honour of Al Smith, the former governor of New York who was the first Catholic to be nominated by a major political party to run for US president.

Although unsuccessful, many historians believe the presidential bid paved the way for the candidacy of President John F Kennedy.


More than 755,000 on US terrorist watch list

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AFP

The US terrorist watch list includes more than 755,000 names and continues to grow, the US Government Accountability Office said Wednesday.

The list exploded from fewer than 20 entries before the September 11, 2001 attacks to more than 150,000 just a few months later, after the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) was created in December 2003 to keep tabs on terrorist suspects, according to the GAO, the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress.

Including known pseudonyms of suspects, the list’s 755,000 names as of May 2007 represents, in fact, around 300,000 people, according to TSC estimates.

Tasked with gathering data on individuals “known or appropriately suspected to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of or related to terrorism,” the TSC gets its information from Federal Bureau of Investigation intelligence and passes it on chiefly to immigration authorities.

Since 2003, the list has been used around 53,000 times to single out individuals for possible arrest or to prevent them from entering the country, the GAO said.

More often, however, people whose names are included on the list for reasons of caution are merely questioned and released, and left to face the same annoyance each time they enter the country, GAO said.

Despite the precautionary zeal, there have been mistakes, it said, adding that many suspects have been stopped by immigration authorities on arrival at US airports when their entries in the TSC list should have prevented them from boarding their planes in the first place.

Describing the list as “quicksand” that traps innocent people for the sake of security, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has called on the US Congress to step in.

“How much safer are we when the government turns so many innocent people into suspects?,” ACLU senior legislative counsel Timothy Sparapani said in a statement.

The Politics Of Absolute Power

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The following commentary was written by Philip S. Golub and appears in the Le Monde diplomatique English-language edition for October 2007. Mr. Golub is a journalist and lecturer at the University of Paris VIII. His commentary follows:

The Bush administration is a case study in how a small elite representing minority interests can seize power and then use fear and nationalism in a political mobilisation to achieve authoritarian goals. When he came to power in 2000 Bush had no democratic legitimacy. He had lost the popular vote to Al Gore and had been given the presidency by a questionable Supreme Court decision to stop a vote recount in Florida. For manyconstitutional scholars, the Bush victory amounted to a “constitutional coup, an unlawful accession to power”.

Although Al Gore conceded to Bush to avoid a constitutional crisis, the presidency was tainted by illegitimacy. Given the balance of forces – the Republicans lost control of the Senate in July 2001 – many analysts expected political paralysis, hence a modest presidency in domestic and international policy.

The opposite happened. From the start the Bush White House strove to remove constraints on its sovereign action. In the domestic sphere, rather than governing from the center as expected, it engaged in adversarial politics designed to polarise society, and launched a sustained effort to reduce the rights secured by women and minorities during the 1960s and 1970s. Karl Rove, Bush’s political adviser who has now resigned, invented this strategy to mobilise and unify conservatives, fracture the Democrats and create a permanent Republican majority.

Internationally, the Bush administration began the methodical deconstruction of the rules-based order and of the institutions of global governance. In the months before 9/11 it announced its intention to withdraw from the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, arranged the failure of the additional Protocol on Biological Weapons that was due to be signed in July 2001, and sought to block the creation of the International Criminal Court.

There is continuity between these early actions and the attack on the United Nations, international humanitarian law and domestic civil rights after 9/11. The double agenda of the ultranationalist right was much amplified after the attacks, which lifted usual domestic constraints and opened the way for an extraordinary concentration of power and the drive for empire. Soon after 9/11 the former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that it had created the “kind of opportunity offered by World War II to refashion the world”.

Since the attacks, the administration has claimed limitless powers to overturn international law and domestic constitutionalism. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – who, like Rove, was forced to resign this September – was a key figure making the case for unbounded executive power. As White House Counsel from 2001 to 2005, Gonzales wrote the infamous torture memos, arguing that the president had the inherent authority to override international law.

The domestic and international dimensions of the authoritarian effort are inseparable: the war in Iraq, framed as part of a timeless and boundless global war on terror, sustained the White House claim for permanent emergency powers at home.

The departure of these figures highlights the weakening of the administration, which since November 2006 has lost control of both houses of Congress. Yet the White House still holds critical levers of foreign and security policy. It has suggested that the US will remain in Iraq for 50 years and has recently succeeded, yet again, in having Congress pass a bill that violates basic freedoms.

Intellpuke: You can read Mr. Golub’s commentary in context here: mondediplo.com/2007/10/05absolute
http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=14053

VIDEO: Martin Bell – Media Censorship & War Criminals

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Books by Martin Bell:
A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy

Through Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder

The Truth that Sticks: New Labour’s Breach of Trust

Martin Bell is a former television war correspondent and politician. Here he is speaking at Lancaster University on 18th October 2007.

He left the BBC in April 1997 to stand as an independent against the sitting MP for Tatton, the Tory Neil Hamilton. He won with an 11,000-vote majority, to become the first elected independent MP since 1951.

He was appointed Unicef ambassador for humanitarian emergencies in 2001. His assignments for Unicef have included Burundi, Kosovo, Tajikistan, Iraq, Malawi, Bosnia, Sudan and Sri Lanka.

Books by Martin Bell:
A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy

Through Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder

The Truth that Sticks: New Labour’s Breach of Trust

RINF thanks Lancaster University and Martin Bell.

NSA To Recruit Children

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Wonkette

Hey, kids! Have you ever wanted to listen in on the conversations of other people without them knowing it? Create codes that allow spies in the field to get information about enhanced interrogation techniques without those killjoys at Amnesty International finding out?

Dress up as a totally extreme rapping turtle and get a blow job from a sexy lady squirrel? Well now you can, thanks to the Cryptokids– the NSA’s new program for young people and furfans.

The Web site, with detailed biographies of its cadre of rad furry spies, has had so much more effort put into it than we’re comfortable thinking about.

But it’s important to recruit children into the spy apparatus, as it’s the best way to get info on the parents. We call them “nature’s hidden listening devices”! As for the furries, well: do you want that fat sweaty guy in the raccoon suit working for us … or for the terrorists?

Police to get power to spy without warrant

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Andrew Clennell

POLICE and other investigative bodies will be able to bug or track people for up to five days without needing a warrant, under legislation the State Government describes as “the biggest ever shake-up of surveillance laws in NSW law enforcement history”.

Under the Surveillance Devices Bill police will also be given warrants to use the listening and tracking devices and hidden cameras for 90 days, instead of 21, to “cut red tape”, the Premier, Morris Iemma, said in Parliament yesterday.

The president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the legislation would provide the sort of powers that “allowed police corruption in this state to grow”.

“This is about reducing oversight,” he said. “Where is the evidence this is necessary? Police have been quite easily able to obtain warrants.”

Police would be able to call for a “retrospective warrant” if there was an “imminent threat of serious violence to a person or substantial damage to property”, Mr Iemma said.

They could use the devices for five days before applying to a judge for a warrant, he said.

The legislation would cover “listening devices, optical devices, data surveillance used to record and monitor information on a computer, and tracking devices which monitor the location of a person or object”, he said.

Some new technology that has been unregulated will fall under the changes, which affect the police, Police Integrity Commission, Independent Commission Against Corruption and NSW Crime Commission.

Yesterday the Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, referred to the use of isotopes.

“Apparently, with the technology now, you can have isotopes sprayed on the person of someone and, under this legislation, you’re able to have that authorised for tracking purposes,” Mr Hatzistergos said.

“That’s a new technology. It’s just one of the examples [where] a person’s movement is able to be tracked … a lot of this kind of material is particularly familiar to the Crime Commission.”

Warrants for installing listening and monitoring devices will be simplified so police can use several devices under one warrant. At present a warrant is required for each device.

The laws will allow the use of surveillance devices on vehicles, containers and boxes that might be moved in a drug operation, and on people, and will allow someone to be monitored if they move interstate.

Mr Iemma said yesterday: “Crooks are getting smarter and technology is getting more advanced, and these laws guarantee police will remain ahead of the game.

“All other Australian states and territories are signing up to these laws. This means that law enforcement agencies in every state and territory will be working off the same book.

“All other warrants [other than emergency warrants] will also go to the Supreme Court except tracking devices, which police will be able to obtain from a magistrate.”

Mr Iemma mentioned investigations in which listening devices had helped in drug raids and arrests for murder.

Mr Murphy said some of the technology was “frightening” and asked why police would need a warrant for 90 days.

A spokeswoman for the Attorney-General said the bill had yet to be finalised and would be introduced in a fortnight.

Cannabis proven effective in treating neuropathic pain

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Debra Kain

Smoked cannabis eased pain induced in healthy volunteers, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR.) However, the researchers found that less may be more.

In the placebo controlled study of 15 subjects, a low dose of cannabis showed no effect, a medium dose provided moderate pain relief, and a high dose increased the pain response. The results suggest a “therapeutic window” for cannabis analgesia, according to lead researcher Mark Wallace, M.D., professor of anesthesiology at UCSD School of Medicine and Program Director for the UCSD Center for Pain Medicine.

The paper, to be published in the November issue of the journal Anesthesiology, is the second published study out of the CMCR. Headquartered at UCSD, the CMCR is collaboration between UCSD and UC San Francisco that was funded by a state-funded initiative in 1999 to rigorously study the safety and efficacy of medicinal cannabis in treating diseases.

The study used capsaicin, an alkaloid derived from hot chili peppers that is an irritant to the skin, to mimic the type of neuropathic pain experienced by patients with HIV/AIDS, diabetes or shingles — brief, intense pain following by a longer-lasting secondary pain. The subjects were healthy volunteers who inhaled either medical cannabis or a placebo after pain was induced. The marijuana cigarettes were formulated under NIH supervision to contain either zero, two, four or eight percent delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC.)

“Subjects reported a decrease in pain at the medium dose, and there was also a significant correlation between plasma levels of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, and decreased pain,” said Igor Grant, M.D., F.R.C.P.(C), professor and Executive Vice-Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, the director of the CMCR. “Interestingly, the analgesic effect wasn’t immediate; it took about 45 minutes for the cannabis to have an impact on the pain,” he said.

The results, showing a medium-dose (4% THC by weight) of cannabis to be an effective analgesic, converged with results from the CMCR’s first published study, a paper by UCSF researcher Donald Abrams, M.D. published in the journal Neurology in February 2007. In that randomized placebo-controlled trial, patients smoking the same dose of cannabis experienced a 34% reduction in HIV-associated sensory neuropathy pain–twice the rate experienced by patients receiving a placebo.

“This study helps to build a case that cannabis does have therapeutic value at a medium-dose level,” said Grant. “It also suggests that higher doses aren’t necessarily better in certain situations — something also observed with other medications, such as antidepressants.”

The researchers stated that more and larger studies need to be conducted to measure the efficacy of cannabis, noting that medical marijuana could play an important role in treating patients who don’t respond well to the usual pain relievers or can’t tolerate drugs such as ibuprofen or opioids used for severe pain.

“The results of this study might help guide others doing clinical research into pain management,” said Wallace.

###

Additional contributors to the study include Gery Schulteis, Ph.D., UCSD Department of Anesthesiology; J. Hampton Atkinson, M.D., professor, and Deborah Lazzaretto, M.S., UCSD HIV Neurobehavioral Research Center; Ian Abramson, Ph.D., UCSD Department of Mathematics and HIV Neurobehavioral Research Center; Tanya Wolfson, M.A., UCSD Department of Family and Preventive Medicine; and Heather Bentley and Ben Gouaux, UCSD Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

Plan to ‘hijack’ bus passes as ID cards

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 By Mark Howarth

A CROSS-BORDER spat erupted last night over new Home Office plans for compulsory ID cards in Scotland.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the UK government is considering fast-tracking the project by using the micro-chipped bus passes held by more than a million Scots. Whitehall officials have set up a working group which will look at how to piggyback the National Identity Register (NIR) on to the Executive’s entitlement card scheme.

Last night the Scottish government claimed it had been excluded from crucial discussions and warned that any data-grab attempt would be illegal.

Around one in four Scots already own one of the smartcards, currently used only for concessionary fares and access to leisure services. But Home Office interest was sparked by a report which suggested the passes could “deliver the government’s goals … quickly and perhaps at reasonable cost”.

The influential London think-tank New Local Government Network (NLGN) also claimed the cards could soon be ready for use to document citizens’ mental health and their “reporting a crime, attending an accident and emergency department or claiming benefits”.

The revelation will spark fury among ministers at Holyrood who have vowed not to link devolved public services to ID cards, a position agreed with former home secretary Charles Clarke.

Green MSP Patrick Harvie said: “It’s no great surprise that there are folk down south who see the entitlement card as an opportunity. Unfortunately, just because the majority of MSPs have never wanted to go down this route doesn’t mean Scotland won’t be dragged there eventually.”

Plans to use entitlement cards as a platform for the NIR were outlined in a NLGN report entitled Local Identity. It states that, since the Identity Cards Act became law last year, “the government has had to scale back plans for the NIR due to budgetary constraints and is exploring alternative systems. We believe that a local, council-administered scheme could be more practical, possibly cheaper, and quicker.”

Last night an NLGN spokesman said the report’s recommendations had sparked “interest” at the Home Office. Asked if ministers would now be considering the role of entitlement cards, he revealed: “The Identity and Passport Service is working closely with local authorities and the Local Government Association to ensure that the National Identity Scheme is designed to deliver benefits that matter for local services.”

He added that the Scottish government had been asked to attend the working party’s first meeting in August and a second planned for next month. But a Scottish government spokesman insisted: “We have not been invited to the November 5 meeting of the local government advisory panel. We were not present at the meeting in August.”

He added: “The Entitlement Card system has been designed to ensure that all data is handled in accordance with the Data Protection Act. Each local authority acts as the data controller for its own residents.

“Accredited local authority and passenger transport staff have secure access to the system. No-one else has access. This information could not be passed to the Home Office.”

The ID Cards Act forbids their mandatory use in the provision of free public services. In 2004, home secretary Charles Clarke assured Westminster that “the system in Scotland will decide how the cards would be used for access to services there. That decision will be made by the Scottish parliament.”

The Scottish smartcards have already provoked controversy since they were launched as a bus pass for pensioners and the disabled in 2006. Each micro-chipped piece of plastic is linked to a Citizen’s Account, a computerised register which provides an index to every public service used by the holder.

Geraint Bevan, spokesman for No2ID Scotland, said: “We have been proved right: entitlement cards are nothing more than ID cards by another name. The SNP … have to realise that when they won the election they inherited an unfolding Labour plan to introduce ID cards by stealth.”

Last year Holyrood passed a law, known as Section 57, which allows the state to use Citizen’s Accounts to hoard information about Scots on an astonishing scale. Data on everything from debt to shopping to sexuality could be legally procured, stored and passed on. Critics are fighting to have the law repealed.

La. Lawmaker Says Targeted by FBI

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By CAIN BURDEAU

A Louisiana legislator said Wednesday he is being investigated by the FBI and claimed it may be because he wouldn’t give agents information about possible wrongdoing by Rep. William Jefferson and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

State Sen. Derrick Shepherd denied any wrongdoing and said he has no evidence of wrongdoing by either Jefferson or Nagin. He has not been charged with a crime.

Earlier this week, an FBI agent testified in a court hearing that Shepherd, a Democrat from suburban Marrero, helped a convicted felon launder more than $140,000 in bogus construction bond fees last year and kept nearly half the money.

Shepherd, at a news conference, said FBI agents visited his home months ago asking if he could provide evidence of wrongdoing by Jefferson or Nagin.

“I would hate to think that this investigation of me is in any way, connected to my inability to provide any information related to the prosecution of Congressman Jefferson or any investigation of Mayor Nagin that may be under way,” Shepherd said.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who has aggressively prosecuted New Orleans corruption cases, would not comment on Shepherd’s claims. “I am not going to respond to anything Mr. Shepherd says,” he said.

An FBI spokesman had no comment on Shepherd’s claims.

Nagin, a Democrat who toyed with a run for governor this fall but did not sign up for the race, has not been linked to allegations of wrongdoing in his two terms in office. He has boasted that he has run a scandal-free administration.

“I am disappointed by the reckless allegations made today by Senator Shepherd in an apparent effort to deflect attention from his own legal problems,” Nagin said.

“I want to be clear: I am not now, nor have I ever been, the subject of any investigation of wrongdoing. I have a proven track record of transparency and have been a champion of ethics and anti-corruption during my tenure as mayor,” he said.

In August, City Councilman Oliver Thomas stepped down after pleading guilty to federal charges of taking bribes during the administration of Nagin’s predecessor, Marc Morial. Federal authorities have been investigating City Hall corruption for years, netting several guilty pleas from people connected to Morial’s administration though Morial has not been accused of wrongdoing.

Jefferson, also a Democrat, is under indictment in Virginia on bribery, racketeering and other charges connected with an alleged Nigerian business scheme.

Jefferson was re-elected last year despite the indictment. Shepherd was one of several challengers in the primary election, placing third. He later endorsed Jefferson in a runoff election, which Jefferson won over the second-place finisher, state Rep. Karen Carter.

Finally, Action! Ron Paul Introduces Bill to Defend Constitution!

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It’s not every day that there is something concrete you can do to save democracy in one powerful stroke and make sure your kids don’t come of age in an American in which we are no longer protected by the rule of law. I have been writing about the terrifying and precipitous assault on our liberties and our very system of checks and balances; I have crossed the country with this message — today I am in Boston — and I have heard across the nation that (as usual) the people are ahead of the leaders and the pundits. Americans of all backgrounds are alarmed and outraged and ready to take action against these vicious assaults on the rule of law. But what I hear again and again is: “What can we do?”

Here is what you can do, and it is big, big news. If we do this together in our millions we are safer; and if we fail to act we miss an historic opening and risk far worse to come.

There are two new organizations that are driving a grassroots push to restore the rule of law: the American Freedom Agenda was started by leaders who are conservative: Bruce Fein, who was a Reagan administration official in the Department of Justice, and others. The American Freedom Campaign was started by progressives. Both groups advance comparable 10 point legislative agendas that would stabilize democracy long enough for us to forestall the worst and regroup for more long-term reparation of the Constitution and the rule of law. Both would, if passed, protect Americans from the scary stories of abuse and recrimination I am hearing every single day — journalists intimidated, prisoners tortured, innocent citizens spied on by the State in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Both would make it illegal for any administration to commit the kinds of crimes against America and its constitution that we have seen under this one: the innocent lawyer Brandon Mayfield’s home broken into, the innocent software engineer Maher Arar kept prisoner by U.S. agents in an interrogation cell in a U.S. airport and prevented from calling his lawyer, and journalists reporting on abuses by the government threatened by the state with prosecution that could keep them in jail for a decade. Urgently it would close the horrific legal possibility for the president to call you or me an “enemy combatant” tomorrow — JUST BECAUSE HE SAYS SO — and lock us up in solitary confinement for years.

Passing the legislative agenda of either group would make it clear that American citizens — in spite of a heretofore craven and compliant Congress — refuse to stand by silently while a group of criminals systematically violates the core structure of the democracy our Founders put in place for us.

The big news is that this idea can now become a law and a law creates a reality.

On Monday, Rep. Ron Paul, the outsider Republican presidential candidate who has long upheld these values and who was an early voice warning of the grave danger to all of us of these abuses, introduced the AFA’s legislative package into Congress. (The mainstream press has an irrational habit of disparaging outsider candidates — as if corrupt money and machine endorsements equal seriousness of purpose — even though the Founders hoped that the system they established would lead citizens, ideally those unembedded in the establishment, to offer their service to the nation.) It is the American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 [PDF], and you should read it in its entirety: just as accounts of the recent abuses send chills down your spine, this beautifully argued document feels historic and has the ring of great power to correct great injustice.

What does it do? According to an alert put out by the American Freedom campaign, it would accomplish the following:

“The American Freedom Agenda Act would bar the use of evidence obtained through torture; require that federal intelligence gathering is conducted in accordance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); create a mechanism for challenging presidential signing statements; repeal the Military Commissions Act, which, among other things, denies habeas corpus to certain detainees; prohibit kidnapping, detentions, and torture abroad; protect journalists who publish information received from the executive branch; and ensure that secret evidence is not used to designate individuals or organizations with a presence in the U.S. as foreign terrorists.”

Ron Paul was the first of all the presidential candidates, red or blue, to step up in this way — and all credit is due to him for getting there first. May the others of both parties race to follow his lead. These days, as we have seen from how reluctant some candidates have been — even on the Democratic sign — even to sign a mere pledge to uphold the Constitution, it takes some courage to stand fast against the assaults of this administration — and their manipulations of the terms “patriotism” and “terror threat” — and insist with legislation on the Founders’ vision and on restoring democracy.

A groundswell of millions of Americans of all parties rising up to insist on passage of the AFA legislation means that we are awake — we get it — and that we assert that an alert citizenry, not a whipped-dog Congress or a violently abusive executive, decides what happens in this nation still. I am not a voter on his side of the ballot — but I will move heaven and earth to support the passage of this lifesaving agenda. (Interestingly when I run into Paul’s supporters — who are deeply alert to the abuses of democracy — and I demur by saying I am a Democrat, it is they who rightly assure me that these issues transcend party).

There is no way to overstate how crucial this piece of legislation is. We are at a turning point, and without the restoration of the rule of law the “blueprint” for what I have called a “fascist shift” — the closing down of democracy — calls for scarier recriminations against citizens, greater tightening of social controls — the ever-growing, disturbingly political TSA watch list is, alarmingly, due to go from the airlines’ administration to that of the TSA itself — and more corruptions of the electoral process. Blackwater is a truly terrifying wild card. Without the rule of law we will be powerless as each of these assaults on liberty continue to escalate. With it we can fight back.

This is the answer both to those who say “What we can do?” and to those who claim (actually, sometimes whine) “there is nothing we can do.” And if we don’t act on this now we will get the democracy we deserve — which is no democracy at all.

Put aside your partisan ideal world — sometimes issues simply transcend partisanship — and if ever there is an issue that is above and separate from party politics, it is the restoration of the democratic system we inherited. There are good people and passionate patriots across the political spectrum.

We at the AFC are putting out a call to pass this set of laws. Pick up the phone — every day. Email your representative — every day. Let them hear from millions of Americans a day. Let them hear from twenty. Please play hardball — the times demand it and nice girls and boys have managed to get this Congress to do literally nothing at all to protect liberty.

Congressmen and women say off the record that they can’t support liberty, much as they’d like to, because they are scared of “looking soft on terror” and they want to run out the clock — a naive and self-serving posture in a time of crisis. Make them more scared of you if they don’t. Tell them you will bombard their donors with the message that they have sold out liberty. Tell them you will denounce them as traitors to the Constitution in your local and regional letters to the editor and op-eds. Tell them they are unpatriotic to stand by while liberty is disemboweled. Tell them you will stop at nothing to ensure their future defeat unless they support this and make it the law of the land.

Let’s do it. There is no excuse now. The restoration of democracy is up to you — as the Founders intended it should be.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/finally-action-ron-pau_b_69042.html

Blair emerges as candidate for ‘President of Europe’

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By Andrew Grice

Tony Blair has emerged as a possible candidate for “President of Europe”, a new post created by the treaty approved by EU leaders at their Lisbon summit.

The former prime minister’s name was put in the frame yesterday by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, who described Mr Blair as “a very remarkable man — the most European of all Britons.” He added: “To think of him would be a good idea.”

The treaty scraps the current system under which one country holds the EU’s rotating presidency for six months. It will be replaced by the appointment of a President, who will chair EU meetings, drive through its agenda and serve for two-and-a-half years.

Gordon Brown said: “Tony Blair would be a great candidate for any significant international job.” He added: “As you know the work that he is doing in the Middle East is something that is of huge international importance.”

But he said it was premature to speculate on who might fill the post because the appointment would not be made until the treaty had been ratified by member states next year.

There remain considerable obstacles to Mr Blair securing the post. Although he is regarded as a heavyweight in EU capitals, he is also remembered as the man who divided Europe by giving George Bush such strong backing for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some EU diplomats predicted that he would not secure enough support from member states.

Friends doubt that Mr Blair would want the job. The new President would not be as powerful as the title or £200,000-a-year package suggests. He or she would help to shape the EU’s agenda and be seen as the EU’s representative on the world stage. But the key decisions would still be taken by national leaders from member states.

After standing down as Prime Minister in June, Mr Blair became the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet — the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the EU. Yesterday his spokesman did not rule out him taking up the new EU post but said: “He is focusing on his current role in the Middle East.”

Other potential candidates for the post include Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former Polish president, and Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister.

Ian Blair misled over Jean Charles de Menezes

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By John Steele

Britain’s most senior policeman was under fire last night after a scathing report revealed he was deliberately kept in the dark by his senior officers after the shooting of an innocent man on the London Underground.

 
Ian Blair misled over Jean Charles de Menezes
Sir Ian Blair was ‘kept in the dark’ by senior officers

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was left “almost totally uninformed” following the death of the Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, even though there were widespread fears among the force that he was not a terrorist, the police watchdog said.

The report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said officers heard rumours that a mistake had probably been made hours after the shooting at Stockwell Tube station.

Police watching cricket at Lord’s were said to have heard there was a “terrible mistake”. A secretary working near Sir Ian’s office believed that “they had got the wrong man” and was surprised not to hear this on the news, the report said.

Yet Britain’s terror chief, Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, deliberately did not tell Sir Ian of growing evidence that Mr de Menezes was innocent even though he had been briefing journalists that a mistake may have been made, the report said.

Unaware of the growing concerns, Sir Ian told a press conference on the afternoon of the shooting he “understood” that the electrician – shot seven times in the head by anti-terror officers – had been directly linked to the hunt for the July 21 terrorists.

Sir Ian also claimed that Mr de Menezes failed to stop when challenged by police. He was not told of the mistake until 24 hours after the incident.

The report concluded that although Sir Ian did not lie, Scotland Yard put out misleading information.

It also upheld a complaint of misconduct against Mr Hayman. Last night, representatives of the family of Mr de Menezes said Sir Ian’s ignorance of the unfolding crisis raised “shocking” questions about his command of the force on July 22, 2005.

In addition, there were calls for Mr Hayman’s resignation after the report concluded he kept the commissioner in the dark and misled the public. He faces a discipline inquiry by the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA).

The MP in whose constituency Mr de Menezes died, the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes, said: “It will not be possible for him to continue in his present post with the confidence of the people of London.” However, there was powerful support for Mr Hayman, not only from colleagues at Scotland Yard who believe he has been made a “scapegoat”.

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, said his “counter-terrorism activity has saved dozens of lives”. “It’s all very well for academics, which is largely what the police complaints people are, sitting in their office saying this is how it should have worked. You try doing it when you are waiting for the next bomb to go off.”

Sir Ian said Mr Hayman had his full support. Mr de Menezes, wrongly identified as one of the four July 21 bomb plotters, was killed at Stockwell Tube station, on July 22, 2005. An IPCC report into the death – “Stockwell One” – has not yet been released.

“Stockwell Two”, which cost £300,000 and was released yesterday, followed complaints from his family.

It offered few new facts about the killing, though it asserted that, contrary to Scotland Yard statements, Mr de Menezes did not fail to obey a clear instruction and was not dressed or behaving suspiciously.

Mr de Menezes was being watched after he walked out of a block of flats being watched by a surveillance team.

The IPCC report concluded that, as the day wore on, reports that the Met had shot a “lone Pakistani” who failed to obey an instruction had changed into suspicions that he was not a terrorist.

A wallet was found after he was shot at around 10.00am. When it was finally examined about five hours later it showed the name of Mr de Menezes.

The inquiry heard disputed evidence that one of Sir Ian’s senior aides had remarked hours after the shooting that a “Brazilian tourist” had been shot. Sir Ian allegedly walked by when this was being discussed “without saying anything and without anything being said to him”.

The report said that when the commissioner “left New Scotland Yard mid evening on July 22, 2005, he was almost totally uninformed about the post-shooting events at Stockwell.

“He did not know of the considerable information within the Met in relation to the emerging identity of Mr de Menezes.” The report considered a briefing Mr Hayman gave to the Crime Reporters Association around tea time on July 21, in which he suggested the dead man was not one of four suspects whose faces had been put out earlier.

However, in a subsequent briefing with Sir Ian, Mr Hayman did not mention these fears and a subsequent Met press release said it was not known whether he was one of the four.

The report said: “AC Hayman either misled the public when he briefed the CRA that the deceased was not one of the four or when he allowed the 18.44 July 22 press release to state that it was not known if the deceased was one of the four. He could not have believed both inconsistent statements were true.”

It is recommended that the MPA consider what action it intends to take.

The report found no evidence of misconduct against several senior officers including Assistant Commissioner Alan Brown, who was responsible for the operation. But Mr Brown, who has retired, and two of Sir Ian’s staff officers are criticised for an “error of judgment”. Sir Ian said after the publication of the report: “I have always made it clear that it was never my intention to mislead and, that if I had lied, I would not be fit to hold this office. I did not lie.

“I neither believe that my senior colleagues let me down nor that my position was unreasonable.”

But Sir Ian also admitted: “Public confidence was damaged when statements, for instance, about Mr de Menezes’s behaviour and clothing were revealed to be inaccurate, largely by a leak rather than by official clarification.”

Profile: Sir Ian Blair

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes has cast a long shadow over Sir Ian Blair’s reign as Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

He was cleared yesterday of lying about the incident in the aftermath or purposefully misleading the public.

But revelations that the head of Scotland Yard was left in the dark about the shooting of an innocent man raise questions about his leadership.

Sir Ian became Met commissioner in February 2005. In his first main test, he was praised for broadcasting a resolute message live to the nation minutes after the July 7 bombings in London.

But his subsequent, regular public appearances have led to controversy and ridicule. More recently, he has been perhaps conspicuous by his absence. Already dubbed New Labour’s favourite policeman, criticism began mounting in January 2006 when he described the media as institutionally racist for its allegedly unbalanced coverage of crimes against white people.

As an example he said “almost nobody” knew why the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was such a big story.

He later apologised after it was revealed that he secretly taped telephone conversations, most notably with the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith.

In December, speaking on Radio 4, he drew anger for saying that Islamic terrorism was a “far graver threat in terms of civilians” than either the Cold War or the Second World War.

To some senior officers, the English graduate from Oxford appears to be most comfortable as a thoughtful academic.

But it is a role that has left him dangerously out of touch.

Profile: Andy Hayman

 
Andy Hayman

The head of specialist operations at the Metropolitan Police is chalk to Sir Ian Blair’s cheese.

Assistant Commissioner Hayman is a plain-speaking son of Essex, while the Commissioner has cultivated an image of an erudite, Oxford-educated police chief.

No one in the police world, though, would equate Mr Hayman’s occasional use of the vernacular, including the phrase “cooking on gas” to describe a promising operation, with a lack of intellectual grip.

Those who know him say he will regard his current problems as a side issue compared to the “big picture” of countering the jihadi terror threat. He is known to deny categorically that he deliberately misled anyone.

Born in 1959, and having reached the third highest rank in the Met, Mr Hayman is said to have impressed Tony Blair and Government figures in July 2005 with his calm briefings to the Cobra emergency security committee.

With his deputy, Peter Clarke, Mr Hayman has overseen high-profile operations, including last year’s arrest of those involved in the alleged plot to blow up airlines.

In November 1998, Mr Hayman entered the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) when he was appointed to the rank of commander in the Met.

He left the Met to become Chief Constable of Norfolk and returned to Scotland Yard to take up his present post in February 2005.

Mr Hayman, who is married with two daughters, became a CBE last year.

CIA VETERAN: ‘YOU CAN’T MAKE UP SOME OF THE STUFF I’VE SEEN’

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CIA veteran Valerie Plame Wilson was never supposed to be famous. For 20 years it came naturally to her to lie to her friends and family about being a spy. (She says none of them were mad at her when they found out.) She used false passports and work names and disguises. WATCH VIDEO 

She was the best shot with an AK-47 in her mostly-male CIA training class.

She was good enough that, with infant girl-boy twins at home, she went back to work at the CIA, less than full time, and was chosen to be Director of Operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq. When Condoleeza Rice told the country we didn’t want the “smoking gun” in Iraq to be a “mushroom cloud,” it was Valerie Wilson’s job to mount the operations that would discover if Saddam actually did have nuclear weapons. And from time to time, she did it with two toddlers playing under the desk.

She thinks being female and blonde may have made her more effective on operations, because who expects a spy to look like that? (Obviously not her boss on her first foreign assignment, who made her come into his office, instructed her to turn around, and announced, “Great, great. You’ll do fine here.”)

She doesn’t read spy novels and laughs at shows like “ALIAS” (about a beautiful young female spy) because, as she puts it, “real life is so much better.”

But when her husband angered the Bush administration by criticizing the war in Iraq, and she was “outed,” it was tough. Wilson writes that the stress she and her husband faced almost ended their marriage. They were financially devastated when his consulting business dried up.

And scary things began to happen – scarier than being called names in the paper. She worried that al Qaeda might target her family. She got death threats and crank calls. She gives no details, but her former colleague, Larry Johnson, writes on his blog, NoQuarterUSA  “in 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame.”

Wilson knew about the threat. Yet the CIA turned down her request for security for her children. She taught her nanny counter-surveillance techniques herself.

In her book, “FAIR GAME: MY LIFE AS A SPY, MY BETRAYAL BY THE WHITE HOUSE” (Read a Book Excerpt here) she also recounts being audited by the IRS in 2005 for the first time in her life, and the mysterious but alarming discovery that the structural bolts that had connected her elevated deck to the back of her house were all missing, one year after it was completely renovated.

She also believes the CIA went after her book more aggressively than the books of other ex-spies. Roughly 10% of it is “redacted” – here on page 50 and 51, all you can see are the periods. We’ll probably never know what she wanted to tell us on that page, or many more.

That’s not all we don’t know. Valerie Wilson and her husband are still in civil court, suing Vice President Cheney, his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and others, because the one mystery this spy never unraveled is … who started it all? Someone knew her secret and told others, who told reporters, who told the world. Now the woman whose career was ended when she was “outed” now wants that someone “outed” as well.

 

BBC Boycott

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First, they axed Ozzie soap Neighbours. Then, they edited film footage of the Queen to make her look like a mardy old minnow.

Now, the BBC plans to recover a £6 billion “shortfall” by making cuts to the very departments that made it so well-respected — news, factual programming and children’s TV – resulting in up to 2,800 job losses over the next six years. Even the corporation’s world-famous broadcast journalists will not be spared in the mass cull.

As a child I hoped I’d grow up to become just like pearl-earring-wearing news correspondent Kate Adie or the late, great, crime-solving Jill Dando. Others idolized iconic Radio 4 presenters who helped to keep British culture and humour alive, or the Blue Peter presenters who pioneered educational entertainment and humanitarianism for children. It pains me that today’s equivalents, like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, are being treated with such little respect. Even more disgraceful is the fact that Beeb bosses called its big-namers into “special meetings” when the ruckus began, urging them to stay on-side with the changes whilst leaving the rest of its workforce to rot in job-loss paranoia.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s treatment of its hard-working, long-committed staff during recent talks has bought shame on one of the UK’s finest media institutions — with the company first discouraging strikes on site, then sending out template letters seeking volunteers for redundancy. Director general Mark Thompson has since become the face of blame for staff and general public alike, largely thanks to his act of coolly camouflaging a gross money-making scheme as a “cultural development” white paper.

Whilst other channels have always been twinned with the notion of soulless commerciality, the BBC has long considered itself a cut above. However, with its overpaid, outdated stars (inc. irritating one-trick pony Graham Norton) and ubiquitous desk monkey ‘executives’ being automatically saved from the big chop, this has been proven rather untrue. At the heart of the Beeb’s upcoming rebirth is NOT forward-thinking innovation as spouted by the salacious press office but a trust of rich, greedy dictators and a large sum of cash.

This, of course, begs the question: if all the BBC will be offering up from now on is second-rate news and more repeats, what exactly are us licence payers paying £100 a year for? Especially those of us who also pay to subscribe to satellite or cable packages but are still not spared from the terrestrial TV licence trap!

It’s hard to believe that the recent panic came as a result of the government announcing that the BBC’s licence fee would actually RISE, to £151.50 by 2012. Unfortunately, this was less than the Beeb had been expecting. Mr. Thompson responded by saying that the settlement figure left a “gap” of about £2bn over the six years. The BBC trust then asked Mr. Thompson to make further efficiency savings of 3% each year.

Sure, it’s a case of cause and effect – we all understand how the industry works and how the digital age has affected traditional TV – but why should cuts come from popular and informative programmes like Planet Earth and Top Gear? Short answer: money. Low-brow ‘entertainment’ such as Strictly Come Dancing is far more lucrative and thereby far more valuable to the Beeb.

Speaking of the digital age – with the BBC now launching its own online streaming service (where you can download your favourite BBC programmes directly to your computer for free) what right does the corporation have to demand an ever-rising fee for a dying medium?

It is becoming clear that the name of the once-prestigious, classically-British BBC is now permanently soiled. If the TV giant plans to ‘reinvent’ itself by pumping more big-number, no-brainer reality shows into the TV Guide, why don’t they sell out like compadres ITV, C4 and Five and charge for advertising? Could it be that penny-pinching the pockets of Britain’s television-owning population (whether they watch your rubbish channel or not) is more “cost-effective” than popping ad breaks in? More importantly, did they ask us, their financial backing and viewing audience, what we’d like to see sacrificed to profit?

It’s been a long time coming but I finally feel that it is time for us to boycott the Beeb by tuning out and switching off.

For years, this out-of-date channel has coasted along on an archaic reputation that no longer applies. Even worse — the BBC have recently used our hard-earned cash to reel off a series of sub-standard channels like BBC3 and BBC4, which have tiny viewing audiences. With no reference to its public, the BBC has cut its losses by axing the very programming that made it so excellent and unique — keeping instead the pop tart variety of television that can be found anywhere at any time.

Just like another much-disputed obligatory ‘tax’ one cannot choose to opt out of paying for the BBC – our own government enforces this by law, fining and prosecuting those who challenge it – but we can protest in another way: by refusing to watch all and any BBC programming. This way, the Beeb will pay for their blind-sighted ignorance in falling viewer figures. Since they have our money irregardless, do the Beeb really care whether we watch or not? Let’s find out!

Nobody claimed that TV wasn’t a corrupt business (just look at the movie Network for clues) but the flailing BBC should now be left to its own devices, not supported by our own governmental administration! You can damn well work for your advertising revenue, BBC, just like everyone else! We should no longer be legally forced to pay for it, especially in light of recent events that have damaged its validity, popularity and worthiness.

I urge you to press this, pass it on, link to it, or comment in support of the BBC Boycott. Switch off and switch over to C4 or ITV! Peppered with ugly, mindless commercials they may be but at least they’re not asking us to stump up for a service that should be free – like in most countries across the globe, where just buying a TV set is enough! I’d rather watch the Dairy Milk gorilla or even Carol ‘First Plus’ Vorderman than pay for something I don’t watch and – bar Spooks, Question Time and the odd nature documentary – no longer enjoy.

Only by ‘striking’ against the BBC can we actually have an input in what the company are doing with the money they steal from us without consultation. Only by refusing to watch Channels 1 and 2 can we protest against crucial job cuts in news, factual programming and children’s TV – the very backbone of the British televisual experience!

Boycott the British Broadcasting Corporation! Ban the Beeb! Turn off your BBC channels until either the government revoke obligatory TV licences or until the BBC take their cost-cutting, damage-limitation bullshit elsewhere. Here’s a hint: start with the who-cares?-comedy-crap on BBC3 and BBC4!

http://shitandspin.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/bbc-boycott/

Could a germ spraying program be back in operation?

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By J A Blacker, Science Correspondent
RINF Alternative News

Many people see streaks across the sky and think no more of it, those who remember the 50s and 60s know all too well – things may not be as they first seem.

DID you know Millions were in UK germ war tests and they were never told?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4398507,00.html

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3432894828304200783&q=chemtrails&total=2309&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1782365801478898327

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-2815320198655156407

If you need to know more or report chemtrails please see here:

http://www.carnicom.com/contrails.htm

Subscribe to RINF – Help keep us online!

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How deceitful is the BROWN Government? How about 350 tonnes worth?

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By J A Blacker, Science Correspondent
RINF Alternative News

Remember the 350 tonnes of Ultra High Explosive which Mysteriously “Disappeared” at the start of the Iraq war?

Well it’s now turned up. Apparently it is being used on a daily basis to make thousands of lethal roadside bombs, which are killing US and British troops as well as Iraqi civilians too.

The Government is now trying to both cover up their total incompetence by failing to secure the High Explosives and at the same time blame IRAN for the roadside bombs made by insurgents from the 350 missing tonnes.

Check out this news broadcast from NPR news, which was made at the time of Disappearance.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4125899

Are we now supposed to buy the story that IRAN needs to be invaded to stop the car bombings in IRAQ? DUH Hello – does anyone suppose lives would be saved by starting WW3 when it was our Government’s failure to secure the Ultra High Explosives in the first place?

The only way to save lives is to bring our troops home. Military top brass on the ground agree – there is little more the British army can achieve and indeed we may in fact be making matters worse, not better, because most of the violence is aimed at us.

SALT WATER AS FUEL, Energy from tap water- whatever next? Why use dirty oil?

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SALT WATER AS FUEL, Energy from tap water- whatever next? An Engine that runs off GRAVITY? Well – YES! Check it out.

Have you seen the sensational TV-news video running around YouTube? A test tube full of salt water is blasted with radio waves and ignites with an orange flame that powers a small sterling engine. Power from salt water, the most abundant substance on earth — Eureka! 
http://www.motortrend.com/features/editorial/112_0711_technologue/

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1894114348589876273&q=salt+water+as+fuel&total=114&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-6286475520406148302&q=energy+from+water&total=3148&start=20&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2205123808600875208&q=energy+from+water&total=3148&start=50&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=8

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6170810824086226301

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-402416601018668534

Engine that runs off Gravity?:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=8294928602279039059

DEPLETED URANIUM Outrage is Sweeping Hawai’i‏

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Lindafaye Kroll

The inhabitants and the land of the Marshall Islands and the Bikini Islands were poisoned in the forties due to nuclear testing. Look at Kaho’olawe, still polluted despite over $400 million in cleanup efforts.

“The Strykers and the legacy they would leave are not welcome on Hawai’i.”

Krisztine Samu is an outraged Hawai’i resident and tells the Army so during public testimony at the U.S. Army Stryker Brigade Public Hearings in Waimea, on September 26, 2007. She is outraged by the military’s shameless and continued contamination of her home, Hawai’i Island…

Please help us Protect Hawai’i. Write the Army before October 30, 2007. Army at:  PublicComments@aec.apgea.army.mil

No Stryker Brigade build-up in Hawai’i. Clean-up all live-fire artillery ranges. Cc comments to  tenfingers10toes@protecthawaii.ws

This statement written by Krisztine Samu and is reprinted with permission and submitted by Lindafaye Kroll RN BSN as follows…

PLEASE accept my statement of OPPOSITION to the presence of the Stryker Brigade on the island of Hawai’i. Being familiar with the U.S. military’s legacy in the Pacific Islands, there is no reason to expect anything different this time.

The inhabitants and the land of the Marshall Islands and the Bikini Islands were poisoned in the forties due to nuclear testing. Look at Kaho’olawe, still polluted despite over $400 million in cleanup efforts.

Look at the Vieques Puerto Rico where the bombing practice resulted in a bomb being dropped on a civilian by mistake; the Navy was eventually forced to leave due to public opposition.

DEPLETED URANIUM contamination is comfirmed at Schofield Barracks, Oahu and at Pohakuloa Training Area, Hawai’i Island.

The Army has admitted the presence of this toxin, and further training/detonations will simply stir more of this dust into the air, blow it downwind into Kona with serious health implications for residents and soldiers alike.

Kona already has higher than normal rates of cancer, diabetes and birth defects. We cannot allow the Strykers to aggravate the situation any further. We need cleanup, not buildup.

Private citizens on the island of Hawai’i are independently monitoring airborne radioactivity spikes and this will continue in an even greater capacity if the Strykers are stationed here.

If the radioactive spikes continue the citizens will surely not stand for it. We can guarantee a grave media backlash and local activism to stop the destruction.

The Strykers and the legacy they would leave are not welcome on Hawai’i.

Krisztina Samu
Hawi, Hawai’i

READ WHY the Stryker Brigade must not stay in Hawaii!

Ten Reasons to Oppose the Stryker Brigade in Hawaii
 http://www.dmzhawaii.org/stop_stryker_hawaii.pdf

Army Regulation AR 700-48 “Management of Equipment Contaminated With Depleted Uranium or Radioactive Commodities,” Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., September 2002, Section 2-4 of United States Army Regulation 700-48 dated Sept. 16, 2002, specifies these requirements.
 http://www.traprockpeace.org/du_pam_700-48.pdf

Hawaiian Islands Are Radioactive
 http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893755.shtml

Depleted Uranium Contamination By Strykers In Hawaii
 http://www.indymedia.org/it/2007/09/893176.shtml

Death By Breath
 http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893823.shtml

Hawaiian Islands Contaminated With Ballistic Uranium
 http://www.rense.com/general78/hawa.htm

Army’s Environmental Impact Statement for the Stryker Brigade Invasion of Hawaii:
 http://www.sbct-seis.org/

Go to Demilitarize Hawaii website:
 http://www.dmzhawaii.org

Go to Protect Hawaii website:
 http://www.protecthawaii.ws/

Amid Pakistan carnage, a ‘nightmare scenario’ for U.S. policy

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By David E. Sanger and David Rohde

The recent scenes of carnage in Pakistan conjured what one senior administration official called “the nightmare scenario” for President George W. Bush’s last 15 months in office: political meltdown in the one country where Al Qaeda, the Taliban and nuclear weapons are all in play.

White House officials insisted in interviews that they had confidence that their longtime ally, General Pervez Musharraf, would maintain enough control to keep the country stable as he edged toward a power-sharing agreement with his main rival, Benazir Bhutto.

But other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the United States forced Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. Although Musharraf seems likely to survive a multifront challenge to his authority, he is weakened.

His effort at conciliation in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda and the Taliban plot and train, proved a failure. His efforts to take them on militarily have so far proved ineffective and politically costly. Almost every major terror attack since Sept. 11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism.

Pakistan was also the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear arms technology in modern times.

After years of compromises and trade-offs, there are questions inside and outside the administration about whether Bush has invested too heavily in a single Pakistani leader, an over-reliance that may have prevented the administration from examining longer-term strategic options in dealing with a country Bush designated, somewhat optimistically, a “major non-NATO ally.”

“It never stitched together,” Daniel Markey, a State Department official who dealt with Pakistan until he left government this year, said on Friday. “At every step, there was more risk aversion – because of the risk of rocking the boat seemed so high – than there was a real strategic vision.”

Even some senior administration officials said privately, echoing views contained in recent intelligence assessments, that U.S. influence over events in Pakistan may be ebbing fast.

Some officials worry aloud that a year of unrest, violence and political intrigue in Pakistan may undercut Bush’s last chance to root out Osama bin Laden from the lawless territory where Al Qaeda has regrouped, and could cripple a renewed administration effort to turn around the war against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

If serious divisions emerge in Pakistan’s military, they could also threaten the security of the country’s potent nuclear arsenal, something that Bush administration officials worry about far more than they let on publicly.

Over the past year, the Musharraf government has quietly sent officials to Washington to assure Bush administration officials that even if the general were ousted or assassinated, the mechanisms for controlling both weapons and nuclear technology – safeguards that Pakistan acknowledges it has put together with aid from other countries – are unbreakable.

Several officials who have left the administration say they are less than sanguine about the prospect that Pakistan’s troubles will just settle down.

“We have to remember that the U.S. doesn’t have very much capability to affect internal developments” in Pakistan, said Robert Blackwill, a former U.S. ambassador to India and a senior official in the National Security Council during Bush’s first term.

“What I am struck by are the trends we see today: The North-West Province is ungovernable and a sanctuary for terrorists,” he said. “The politics are fractured and deeply unstable, Musharraf is weaker and the army is uncertain which way it will go.”

A senior administration official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issues, argued in an interview on Friday that U.S. steps to coax Musharraf toward democracy had worked. Instability and paralysis in Islamabad “is certainly one scenario, but hardly the only one,” he said.

BBC rakes in adverts cash as heads roll in cost cuts

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The corporation’s rivals and detractors are up in arms over claims of commercialisation

James Ashton

THE PARADOX will not have been lost on rebellious news heavyweights such as Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, who fear that the BBC is losing its soul.

Just as the corporation’s director-general Mark Thompson was revealing details of 2,500 job cuts that will hit hardest in news and factual programming, the BBC’s money-making arm was celebrating a windfall.

After being granted approval from its governing body, the BBC Trust, the BBC announced that its news content, due to be generated by some 370 fewer staff, will later this year be beamed online around the world � adorned for the first time with advertising.

The new commercialisation of BBC.com is very much in keeping with thrifty Thompson’s mantra of making less go further � forced on him by a shortfall of £2 billion on the licence fee. Users of BBC.co.uk will not notice any difference as banner ads will be seen only by overseas readers.

But critics fear the move puts the BBC’s hard-won international reputation for impartiality under threat � even though a portion of the new income will be ploughed back into the BBC newsroom. On top of that, the advertising will cover the loss of the £4m annual grant the international website gets from the Foreign Office. The grant is being reallocated to World Service radio.

Moreover, the BBC’s commercial rivals are again up in arms that an institution supported by a £3 billion annual bursary is chasing a slice of their income stream.

David Moody, BBC Worldwide’s director of strategy, retorted: “They should welcome this as the nature of competition. Users will get more choice. And for us this is a chance to earn money from an international business site to reinvest in the BBC’s core journalism. It seems eminently logical to me.”

This is the BBC’s second notable attempt at making money from its cyberspace operations. Its first, Beeb.com, an online shop for viewers, was shut down in 2002 because it was insufficiently different from the corporation’s free sites.

This time the BBC seems to be more confident. In April, it struck a deal with You Tube to set up a channel of television clips that can be viewed in Britain, with advertising alongside.

Commercials have also appeared since 1991 on BBC World, the international news channel that loses £15m a year.

Support for the controversial BBC.com plan is the latest development at BBC Worldwide, whose tentacles are quietly but inexorably spreading.

Not only is it Britain’s third-largest magazine publisher, with titles including the Radio Times and Top Gear, but abroad it publishes Hello! magazine under contract in India and makes television shows in Hollywood for the American networks.

There is more to come. Eyebrows were raised by the recent purchase of a controlling stake in the Lonely Planet travel-guide business, not least at Penguin, which owns the rival Rough Guide imprint.

Armed with a £350m loan facility, BBC Worldwide’s chief executive John Smith is aiming for two more such deals in the next year.

He wants to build up a clutch of online “communities” round themes such as parenting, cars and travel. As an example of what could be achieved, the Lonely Planet’s website has 4m users.

The target is to plough £200m a year back into the BBC by 2012, with 10% of income coming from digital sources.

Worldwide’s ownership was last assessed three years ago, when the corporation opted to sell off smaller, noncore divisions instead of the whole shooting-match. Of these, only BBC Resources, which owns the corporation’s studios and outside-broadcast trucks, remains. A sale process, led by Ernst & Young, has been kicked off. In addition, the corporation is selling its famous Television Centre headquarters in west London in 2013.

Meanwhile, strong exports of Doctor Who DVDs and the sale of the Strictly Come Dancing format around the world sent BBC Worldwide profits up 24% last year to £111m.

Unsurprisingly, it argues that such expansion benefits the licence-fee payer. A chunk of its profits is handed back to the corporation, in effect depressing the licence fee by £9 a year.

Moody said: “We have a very robust business that is producing a lot of profit that can be reinvested. Our shareholders want us to take a long-term view so we can deliver ever larger profits back to them.”

Perhaps he has a fair point. But as they prepare to bid farewell to hundreds of colleagues, the argument is unlikely to cut much ice with Humphrys and Paxman.

Slavery in my backyard and a thousand points of light

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Local slaves from Mexico, Russia, and…

(At the lecture) Coonan also said that it’s happening within the Chinese community as well, with traffickers promising young women a better life in America. According to Coonan, in nearby Quincy, a Chinese restaurant has Hispanic women working there and living in a small shed behind the restaurant. Many of these restaurants also have their employees living in the kitchen after hours as well.

“I think the most shocking thing is that everything is close to home,” said Danielle May, who attended the lecture. “This is not something that you see on the international news being in Cambodia, or Thailand. This issue is happening at home. I think it’s scary. Quincy is 45 minutes away and people are being enslaved. This is shocking that this is 2007 and slavery is still going on.”

According to the lecture, countries lose U.S. aid if they do not enforce trafficking laws. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, stipulates that if a victim testifies on being trafficked, they receive a Traffic Visa (T-Visa), which allows them permission to work in the U.S. for about three years and then they are eligible to apply for a green card.
Most Americans are stunned to find slavery still exists in the United States, let alone the rest of the world. Unlike the state-sanctioned, race-based crime of the past, modern-day slavery is largely an illegal, global phenomenon, fueled primarily by commercial gain.

Some are slaves in factories and farms. Others-primarily women and girls-are slaves in brothels in Mumbai, Amsterdam or Las Vegas. Still others are held in domestic servitude. Children are kidnapped as child soldiers, forced to become street beggars, or lured and abused as slaves to an underground industry known as child sex tourism.

Government alone can’t stop the international slave trade. That’s why a coalition of private citizens, nonprofit organizations and civic leaders are nurturing and leading a 21st century abolitionist movement by spotlighting the issue, increasing public awareness, pushing countries to do more, and producing programs to help throw the traffickers in jail and protect the survivors.

We are beginning to understand the tricks of today’s human traffickers, which are the same tactics as those used by the slave masters of old: deception, fraud, coercion, kidnapping, beatings and rape.

Victims obtained from a foreign country are often lured by deceptive schemes. They usually arrive indebted to their handlers, seldom know where they are, rarely speak the local language and have no one to turn to after the traffickers seize their passports and documentation.

Under the control of the traffickers, victims are subjected to overwhelming physical and mental pressures. Confined by beatings and threats against their families back home, trafficking victims surrender their dignity to poor living conditions and long hours in order to enrich their captors.

…

Trafficking victims-whether from across the ocean or the street-learn to trust no one, not even the police. Coerced to cooperate, trafficking victims become skilled at hiding in plain sight, disguising their shame from society, ever wary of discovery and fearful of retribution.

There’s a movement afoot. It asks each of us to be responsible, find out what is happening, pay attention to the signals, and insist on nothing less than abolition.

Categories of slavery are listed by the Department of State.

1-888-373-7888 is a number to call to ask for advice and report concerns:scared, foreign, unable to leave premises, demeanor is not natural might indicate employment is not voluntary.

Funding for a two year study of and help for slaves in the US under the The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 was won in 2003 in the area and then not renewed. Grants are notoriously fleeting.

The idea that there are 100,000 actual ‘domestic servitude’ slaves in the US is so stunning for most of us that in my opinion it simply slips away in denial rather than outrage, even for me.

Aside from the psychological aspects of slavery, 90% in one study of ‘freed slaves’ report that sending money home (meaning most of the money) was more important, as the perception was the money sent was needed to help avoid catastrophe at the slaves’ home of origin, or local traffickers would harm family that remained behind if trouble was caused. Powerful forces indeed.

Another point of view regarding US slavery is expressed in WAPO.

… Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million — all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States.
But the government couldn’t find them. Not in this country.
…
The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated. In addition, 148 federal cases have been brought nationwide, some by the Justice task forces, which are composed of prosecutors, agents from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and local law enforcement officials in areas thought to be hubs of trafficking.
…
“The discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the number of cases they’ve been able to make is so huge that it’s got to raise major questions,” Weitzer said. “It suggests that this problem is being blown way out of proportion.” The Department of Health and Human Services “certifies” trafficking victims in the United States after verifying that they were subjected to forced sex or labor. Only non-U.S. citizens brought into this country by traffickers are eligible to be certified, entitling them to receive U.S. government benefits.
…
Although there have been several estimates over the years, the number that helped fuel the congressional response — 50,000 victims a year — was an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst who relied mainly on clippings from foreign newspapers…

…
Yet the government spent $28.5 million in 2006 to fight human trafficking in the United States, a 13 percent increase over the previous year. The effort has attracted strong bipartisan support.
Steven Wagner, who helped HHS distribute millions of dollars in grants to community groups to find and assist victims, said “Those funds were wasted.”
“Many of the organizations that received grants didn’t really have to do anything,” said Wagner, former head of HHS’s anti-trafficking program. “They were available to help victims. There weren’t any victims.”
. . .
Few question that trafficking is a serious problem in many countries, and the U.S. government has spent more than half a billion dollars fighting it around the world since 2000.
. . .
In the past four years, more than half of all states have passed anti-trafficking laws, although local prosecutions have been rare.
…
But information was scarce, so a CIA analyst was told to assess the problem in the United States and abroad. She combed through intelligence reports and law enforcement data. Her main source, however, was news clippings about trafficking cases overseas — from which she tried to extrapolate the number of U.S. victims.
…
Bipartisan passion melted any uncertainty, and in October 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, significantly broadening the federal definition of trafficking. Prosecutors would no longer have to rely on statutes that required them to prove a victim had been subjected to physical violence or restraints, such as chains. Now, a federal case could be made if a trafficker had psychologically abused a victim.
. . .
Just as the law took effect, along came a new president to enforce it.
Bell, with Prison Fellowship Ministries, noted that when Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly in 2003, he focused on the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism and the war on trafficking.
Soon after Bush took office, a network of anti-trafficking nonprofit agencies arose, spurred in part by an infusion of federal dollars.
. . .
The CIA’s new estimate, which first appeared in a 2004 State Department report, has been widely quoted, including by a senior Justice Department official at a media briefing this year. It’s also posted on the HHS Web site.

But at a meeting of the task force this year, then-coordinator Sharon Marcus-Kurn said that detectives had spent “umpteen hours of overtime” repeatedly interviewing women found in Korean- and Hispanic-owned brothels. “It’s very difficult to find any underlying trafficking that is there,” Marcus-Kurn told the group….

The article is heavily edited to shorten to blog format and eliminated some of the history of the efforts to assess the situation, except to point out it is ‘bi-partisan’.

Of course I have a response, but am awaiting answers from experts I can contact. Stay tuned.

Angry Bear

U.S. Asserts State Secrets, Seeks to Dismiss CIA Case

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By Joel Rosenblatt

The U.S. asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit claiming a Boeing Co. unit falsified flight plans to disguise the Central Intelligence Agency’s transporting of terrorism suspects to secret prisons overseas.

The Justice Department today asked to intervene in the case to protect state secrets. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in May, claims Jeppesen Dataplan helped to transport terrorism suspects on more than 70 flights to countries where they weren’t protected by U.S. law and were tortured during interrogation.

“Although the president and other officials have acknowledged that the CIA operates a terrorist detention and interrogation program, these officials have specifically refused to confirm or deny any operational details concerning that program,” the Justice Department said in court filings. “This information remains properly classified as sources and methods of intelligence gathering.”

President George Bush acknowledged the program in 2006 and has defended its legality, ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said in a phone interview. U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose, California, who’s handling the case can separate “legitimate secrets” from other evidence in the suit and “permit the case to go forward,” he said.

`Extraordinary Rendition’

“When it suits the Bush administration they acknowledge the extraordinary rendition program and even defend it,” Wizner said. “But when they’re challenged in a court of law, they insist that the cases must be dismissed.”

The ACLU, citing a Council of Europe report, claims Englewood, Colorado-based Jeppesen, a provider of navigation charts, refueling plans and route planning, misled European officials on the flights’ destinations.

Natalya LaBauve, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Scott Schools in San Francisco, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

John Dern, a spokesman for Chicago-based Boeing, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

The ACLU sued under a law allowing non-citizens to bring claims against the U.S. government for violating laws of other nations or American treaties.

The case was filed on behalf of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni living in Indonesia who the ACLU argues was flown to, and tortured at Bagram air base in Afghanistan; Italian citizen Abou Elkassim Britel, who it claims was kidnapped in Pakistan and sent to be tortured in Morocco; and Ahmed Agiza who it says was transported to and tortured in Egypt after applying for asylum in Sweden.

The ACLU also represents Binyam Mohamed, who it argues was kidnapped in Pakistan, tortured in Morocco and sent to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Also named as a plaintiff is Bisher al-Rawi, who the ACLU claims was kidnapped in Africa, transferred to Guantanamo and released without being charged.

The case is Mohamed v. Jeppesen, 07-2798, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).

US needs more jaw and less war with Iran: analysts

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AFP

The United States must stop “posturing” and start negotiating if it wants to avert President George W. Bush’s “World War III” scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran, Middle East experts say.

The doomsday warning by Bush, and bellicose remarks by White House contenders on the campaign trail, contrasted with a newly emerging argument that the United States must find ways of living with a nuclear Iran.

That argument was put forward last month by General John Abizaid, the recently retired commander of US forces in the Middle East, who said that the Cold War containment of the Soviet Union showed a way to handle Iran.

But at a press conference on Wednesday, Bush said that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (the Iranians) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

The comments came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin became the first Kremlin chief to visit Tehran since World War II. Putin backed Iran’s right to nuclear energy and emphasized Moscow’s differences with the West.

The White House later characterized Bush’s remark as just “a rhetorical point” and not a prelude to Armageddon.

Iran, which insists it only wants peaceful nuclear energy, brushed aside the warning and announced Saturday that its top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani was being replaced by an ally of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, backed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is said to be resisting administration hardliners led by Vice President Dick Cheney who favor a military option against Iran.

Cheney was due to deliver a speech to a Middle East think tank Sunday, five months since warning from the hangar deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf that the United States would not let Iran acquire nuclear weapons.

But for Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iranian scholar at Syracuse University in New York state, Bush’s tone revealed frustration over the inability of the United States and its European allies to curtail Iran’s enrichment of uranium.

“The Bush administration has issued red lines and deadlines for Iran to meet and every single one of them has come and gone without any sort of follow-up action,” he said.

“Surely you’re not going to bring the Iranians to the table with this kind of implicit threat,” Boroujerdi said, calling Bush’s language “both unnecessary and counter-productive” but also indicative of US anger over Iran’s alleged meddling in Iraq.

“All this did was fuel speculation and anxiety. It was an unfortunate choice of words at an unfortunate time,” said John Calabrese at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

“The nub of the issue is to how to get the Iranians back to the negotiating table. The political season and the competitive posturing about who would be toughest on the Iranians is just unhelpful,” he said.

“One hopes that in the internal debate in the administration, some cooler heads like Defense Secretary Gates will prevail and the foolishness of attacking Iran will be realized.”

Campaigning for the 2008 White House nomination, top Republicans and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton insist that they will never tolerate Iran being in a position to menace its neighbors and Israel with atomic arms.

Clinton last month voted for a Senate resolution that declared Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards a terror organization — a step that Democratic rival Barack Obama said represented a “blank check” for Bush to wage war.

The United States believes that Iran has only been emboldened by its dealings with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. The alternative espoused by Abizaid and others is to contain Iran.

“But what makes this different from the Soviet situation is how to guard against the reactions of Iran’s neighbors,” Calabrese said.

He warned of the potential for a nuclear arms race involving Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and highlighted Israel’s response as a major unknown after the Jewish state reportedly bombed a Syrian nuclear site last month.

“The United States could take care of Iran militarily in short order,” said Alex Vatanka, Iran analyst at Jane’s Information Group.

“But it’s still not useful for policymakers to use this kind of alarmist talk, even if Bush feels that Iran is an urgent issue that needs to be dealt with in his remaining time in office,” he said.

Nukes Over America: All a Stupid Mistake. Sure It Was

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dlindorff

The Air Force’s Friday report on the August 29-30 nuclear weapons incident which saw six armed cruise missiles flown across the continental US in launch position on a B-52H bomber leaves all the big questions unanswered, attempting to shuck the whole thing off as an “unacceptable mistake.”

To be sure, Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Maj. Gen. Richard Newton, said that after a six-week investigation, five officers, including Col. Bruce Emig, commander of the Fifth Bomb Group at Minot AFB in North Dakota, where the flight originated, have been relieved of duty, and 65 other Air Force personnel were also removed from their duties, and both Barksdale and Minot were decertified for their strategic nuclear responsibilities. But that’s still pretty small beer for an incident so serious it’s never happened before in half a century of nuclear weapons handling.

There are, at this point, no court martials being contemplated, and nobody’s been discharged from the military.

Put simply, six 150-kiloton warheads were improperly attached to six Advanced Cruise Missiles, all loaded onto a wing launch pod, and then mounted on the wing of a B-52 H Stratofortress at Minot, along with six similar missiles with dummy warheads, which were loaded onto a launch pod on the plane’s other wing, an all 12 were improperly and illegally flown across the country to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

The Air Force, following its “investigation,” is saying the same thing it said before the investigation: it was all a big “mistake”–the result of “widespread disregard for the rules” regarding handling of nuclear weapons.

A few guys at Minot “inexplicably” screwed up and loaded the nukes and then there were a chain of mistakes because no one else treated the nuclear-tipped missiles as if they were armed with nuclear weapons.

The trouble with this theory, or story line if you will, is that while nobody at Minot, supposedly, noticed what was happening–even though ground crew workers spent eight hours laboring to get the pod with the six nuke-tipped missiles mounted on the plane’s wing. This despite the warheads are clearly visible and identifiable by the silver coating they exhibit when viewed through a little window in each nosecone cover, and because there are red coverings on the nuke nosecones–once the plane got to Barksdale, the ground crew there, which had no reason on earth to suspect it was looking at nuclear warheads, spotted them immediately upon going to the plane.
They had no reason to expect nukes because for 40 years it has been illegal for the military to carry nuclear weapons on bombers over US territory, and indeed since 1991, it has been illegal to even load nuclear weapons on a plane, period, even for training purposes on the ground.

How can it be that Air Force ground crew people at Barksdale could spot the nukes in a flash while nobody at Minot–not the workers who mounted the warheads on the missiles in the heavily guarded bunker, not the guards who are supposed to guard those weapons with their lives and prevent any unauthorized removal from the bunkers, not the ground crew that loaded them onto the plan, and not the pilot and crew of the bomber, who are supposed to check every missile before they take off–noticed they were nuclear warheads? (The weapons went unnoticed for 10 hours in Barksdale, but that’s only because no groundcrew visited the plane for that long, but when they did go to it, they reportedly spotted the nukes right off the bat.)

The Air Force, at a press conference announcing the results of its investigation, didn’t answer this question. It appears they reporters at the session didn’t ask it either.

Certainly the AP reporter didn’t ask it, because if she had, she would surely have included the Air Force’s answer, or it’s non-answer, in her story.

Nobody, apparently, asked the Air Force either about six mysterious violent deaths of Air Force personnel from Minot and Barksdale, and from a mysterious Air Force Special Commando Group, all of which occurred in the days and weeks immediately before, during and after the incident. Two of those deaths–of the Special Commando Group officer and of a Minot weapons guard–were reportedly “suicides.”

In an article in the current issue of American Conservative magazine, currently on newsstands, I report that incredibly, no federal investigators from the Pentagon or the federal government even bothered to contact the police investigators or medical examiners who investigated those six deaths–an remarkable failure of due diligence, given the seriousness of this incident.

One retired Navy officer who contacted me during my investigation, who worked in electronic warfare, told me it would be simply impossible for those weapons to have been moved out of the storage bunker. He claims to know for a certainty that all nuclear weapons in the US arsenal are equipped with high-tech tags (“like they have at WalMart and Kmart only better”) that would instantly trigger alarms when the weapons are moved, unless they were deliberately disarmed.

So what we have is pretty clearly a cover-up here.

A cover-up of what though?

Here we’re into speculation.

One thing we need to keep in mind is that Barksdale AFB, on its website, advertises itself proudly as the base that prepares B-52s for duty in the Middle East Theater.

Another thing we need to keep in mind is that Vice President Dick Cheney is trying hard to gin up a war against Iran, against the better judgment of top military leaders and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

And a third thing to remember is that these particular six warheads, called M80-1 warheads, are able to be adjusted to have a power of anywhere from 150 kilotons down to just 5 kilotons–a so-called “tactical” size.

Perfect for a tactical strike on an Iranian nuclear processing or research site, or for a “false flag” type attack that could be blamed on a fledgling nuclear power…like Iran.

Of course this is all speculation.

What we do know is that for 36 hours, six nuclear warheads went missing. Nobody at the Pentagon in authority knew they were gone or where they were. And when they were discovered, the initial Pentagon response was to cover it all up. The only reason we know about this incident is that three Air Force officers became whistle-blowers and contacted a reporter at Military Times, a private newspaper trusted by and popular with the rank-and-file military.

And what we know is that this couldn’t have been what the Air Force, six weeks and one “investigation” late, is calling a “mistake.”

VIDEO: 9/11 Truthers Disrupt Bill Maher’s Show

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Bill Maher: Corporate Media Gatekeeper and Security Guard

Activist from We Are Change LA gets under the skin of corporate shill

Kurt Nimmo

After HBO employee Bill Maher lent a hand in evicting a “rowdy protester” from his show on Friday, the Associated Press wasted no time characterizing him as a “security guard” for the effort. “Maher on Friday night helped security remove a rowdy protester from the studio during his weekly HBO show ‘Real Time with Bill Maher,’ and it was all captured on live television,” including the point made by the so-called protester. “Maher was talking science during one of his weekly panel discussions when a protester in his audience stood up, held up a smuggled-in sign reading ‘9/11 is a cover up fraud’ and shouted comments to the same effect.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5BJzEshMes

“Crazy people who still think the government brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion have to stop pretending that I’m the one who’s being naive,” Maher averred last month. “How big a lunatic do you have to be to watch two giant airliners packed with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV, igniting a massive inferno that burned for two hours, and then think ‘Well, if you believe that was the cause…’ Stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoJJIYWMZlY

In other words, for Bill and his employer, the very topic of what really happened on September 11, 2001–or simply broaching the subject–is strictly verboten. For some time now the corporate media, as a dutiful handmaiden of government–that is to say, a government purchased by multinational corporations, including HBO’s “parent,” Time Warner–has repeatedly insisted that merely asking how it is an oxygen-starved kerosene fire weakens steel and initiates the collapse of two massive buildings makes one insane, never mind that buying into the absurd Grimm Brothers story that cave-dwelling terrorists ensconced in a medieval backwater were capable of suspending the laws of physics on that day is the very definition of insanity.

On Friday, Maher was so determined to please his employer and make amends for displeasing the government in the past–when he declared the imaginary 9/11 terrorists were not cowards–he rushed from the stage to make sure the protester was man-handled and quickly ushered from the studio. “When security reached the man’s aisle and the man resisted leaving, Maher ran into the seats and helped them push him out the door, shouting ‘Out! Out! Out!’” the Associated Press continues. “Several other protesters, sprinkled throughout the audience, then stood up and shouted… ‘This isn’t the Iowa Caucus, OK, we’re not here to debate,’ Maher shouted with most of his audience cheering him on. ‘This is the problem with live television.’”

Indeed, this is “the problem with live television” and it will continue to be a problem so long as corporate shills such as Bill Maher refuse to acknowledge legitimate questions and label the questioners as mental patients.

It is not so much Bill’s refusal to address the official 9/11 fairy tale–thus rendering him a de facto neocon supporter–but rather his obvious determination to go after those who question the official fish story. Bill Maher is not so much a comedian as an apologist and advocate for the criminal cabal guilty of launching the predetermined “catastrophic and catalyzing event” cynically used as an excuse to decimate what remains of our beleaguered Constitution and foment the “clash of civilizations,” otherwise known as the neocon-neolib global domestication project, determined to reduce the planet to a slave labor gulag based on the China Model, hailed by one-worlders as a miracle.

http://noworldsystem.com/2007/10/20/bill-maher-throws-911-truth-seekers-out-of-the-audience/

VIDEO: Poison in the Mouth

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Startling documentary shows evidence of brain damage from Mercury in silver amalgam fillings.

Most dentists who deny mercury is harmful, will remove them without precautions and can cause a relapse or an equivalent of over 10 years mercury exposure in one go if they drill them out, so if you think you need to remove and replace them, be sure to search out a qualified dentist who uses correct procedures to remove & replace them with safe alternatives like ceramic fillings, or else leave them in until they need replacing if you have had them for ages, and get ceramic ones or a safe alternative to mercury amalgam.

The IAOMT gives guidelines for the removal of mercury amalgam fillings in a safe way, as you will need to go on a mercury detox program before and after taking them out to rid your body of the amount of mercury you will absorb during extraction, as no matter how many precautions taken, you will still be exposed to very high levels, so will need detox, but be careful, research this well if you decide to take action, as you can do more harm than good if you don’t know what you are doing, you have been warned.

‘Humet-R’ detox formula is used by many dentists as they say it’s a natural safe detox formula. Their website is here, and you should ask them about directions and amalgam removal advice if you feel you need and are thinking of removing mercury amalgams; http://www.fulcrumhealth.co.uk/page%201F.htm

Check the link below for dental protocals on removing mercury amalgams safely, though there is always going to be some exposure and risks which is why detox needs to be done prior to and after removals. http://www.iaomt.org/articles/category_view.asp?catid=30

It’s a very serious matter and some who have had them removed by irresponsible dentists or quacks cashing in on this, have suffered greatly!

I can’t be responsible and so assume no responsibility for people who get their mercury amalgam fillings removed and suffer serious consequences, as you must do your research, and find out, & ask questions to safeguard your health. This research is made public to help others as I can’t just sit on this stuff.  

Removing Mercury From the Body – Are You Being Poisoned?

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By Lauana Lei

Nikola Tesla Secret

Mercury is probably the most toxic non-radioactive metal in the environment. It is a poison! It is highly toxic to humans and ANY AMOUNT is harmful to the cells and tissues of human beings, according to Roy B. Kupsinel, MD, author of A Patient’s Guide to Mercury-Amalgam Toxicity – A Major Common Denominator of Degenerative Disease. The World Health Organization declared there is no safe level of mercury for human beings – in other words, mercury is so poisonous that no amount of mercury absorption is safe. (1992). Dental amalgams (fillings) are classified as a hazardous material by OSHA and recommend a “no-touch” technique in handling amalgams. A facemask should be used to avoid breathing amalgam dust, and hazardous waste instructions used for disposal!

On December 16, 1990, 60 MINUTES aired a program on dental mercury amalgam, which brought the issue forcefully to public attention. In 1992, Germany banned the use of certain forms of amalgam. In December 1992, the American Medical Association passed a resolution advocating the elimination of mercury, and benzene from all household products, citing their harmful effect on the environment and on human health. (12/92). In August 1993, a Federal Court ruled that California’s Proposition 65 is valid with regards to dental amalgam. This means that any dentist who has 10 or more employees must provide “clear and reasonable warning” to both employees and patients that amalgam is a potentially harmful substance. In February 1994, the Swedish parliament passed a bill banning all use of dental amalgam by 1997. On July 11, 1994, the BBC aired a 40-minute documentary on dental amalgam called “The Poison In Your Mouth.” In early 1995, a legal brief was discovered filed the American Dental Association in a civil lawsuit in Santa Clara, California that denies any responsibility for the safety of the general public when the public seeks and receives dental care! Practicing dentists are generally unaware that they have been inadequately informed about amalgam’s toxic properties by their professional association.

Sources of Mercury
The toxicity of mercury is not only from the major source of dental amalgams, but is also found in a natural state in soil and has been processed and used in a wide variety of industrial applications from the manufacture of wood pulp to agricultural fungicides and pesticides and is found in most plastics. Other sources of mercury contamination are from pharmaceutical medicines including vaccinations and laxatives, cosmetics, large ocean fish such as swordfish and tuna, film, plastics, and paint. We ingest or inhale inorganic mercury through our air, food, water, and soil–our bodies can even absorb it through our skin and convert it into even more highly toxic methyl mercury. Additional sources are inks, in some printing and tattoos, refined grains and seeds may test for methyl mercury, chlorine bleaches, contact lens solutions (antibacterial mercury compound is found in contact lens cleaning solutions and injectable vitamins and drugs), felt, fabric softener, floor waxes and polishes, film, broken thermometers and barometers, antiseptic creams and lotions, and nasal sprays.

“Mercury is a cytotoxin,” (The Mercury In Your Mouth, by Quicksilver Associates. “It is poisonous to all living cells. It also states in the book that it has the capacity to bond with any chemical, which contains a particular type of molecule called “sulfhydryl”, found in most proteins. The human body contains an enormous number of protein compounds; they are the building blocks for all body tissue, and many have one or more sulfhydryl groups. As a result, mercury can interfere with virtually any process or organ in the body.”

Forms of Mercury

Mercury can occur in inorganic, organic (methyl), and vapor (elemental mercury) forms. “Safe” levels of exposure have titles such as Threshold Limit Values (TLV) and Maximum Allowable Concentrations (MAC). Elemental mercury (vapor) usually is in the mouth with the vapor coming from the mercury dental/amalgams. It then mixes with the saliva and food and goes into the body forming organic mercury (methyl mercury) and settles in the tissues and organs. When mercury is left in the body for long periods of time, it has been known (according to Swedish information) to go to the spinal cord and form inorganic mercury!

There has been controversy of the toxicity of elemental mercury vapor versus methyl mercury. According to Swedish and Canadian studies and research (courtesy of Woodlands Healing Research Center, Dr. Harold Buttram, MD in Quakertown, PA). The following is some of their findings.

“Elemental Mercury Vapor is more rapidly transmitted throughout the body than other forms of mercury and has much more toxic effects on the central nervous system and other parts of the body than inorganic mercury according to the World Health Organization and other studies. Mercury vapor rapidly crosses the blood-brain barrier accumulating in the brain and pituitary gland causing neurological and endocrine system damage. Elemental mercury vapor also rapidly crosses cellular membranes including the placenta of pregnant women with inorganic mercury accumulating in the brain, pituitary gland, kidneys, etc. of the developing fetus.” The research continues to say in the situation of the fetus of the pregnant woman that,“there is evidence that indicates that mercury vapor is 10 times more toxic to the fetal brain than methyl mercury.”

The studies found that mercury vapor and organic mercury have independent and synergistic toxic and developmental effects, and that additionally conversions of the mercury occur in the body between the various forms of mercury. It was found that elemental mercury (vapor) was documented to be methylzed in the body to the organic state and was a significant source of methyl mercury.

Organic Mercury -(Methyl Mercury) “Mercury vapor is oxidized or converted to inorganic forms which bioaccumulates in the brain, the central nervous system, liver, kidneys, heart, and oral mucus. The level of mercury in the brain and heart is higher after exposure to mercury vapor than for other forms.”

Inorganic Mercury – Substantial research findings is alarming….”While mercury vapor and methyl mercury readily cross cell membranes and the blood-brain barrier, once in cells they form inorganic mercury that does not readily cross cell membranes of the blood brain barrier readily. Thus inorganic mercury in the brain or spinal cord has a very long life, often over 20 years.”

There are numerous sources stating that the major source of mercury in most people has been well documented to be coming from amalgam fillings. This is especially true for mercury in saliva. Much mercury in the saliva is organic since mouth bacteria and other organisms in the body methylate inorganic mercury to organic mercury. In the research, some people tested who do not eat fish have been found to have high levels of methyl mercury. Mercury from amalgam is methylated by bacteria and candida albicans in the mouth and intestines. Once mercury vapor or methyl mercury are converted to inorganic mercury in cells or the brain, the mercury does not readily cross cell membranes or the blood-brain barrier. The mercury has a very long life in the brain, often as much as 20 years according to the Swedish Medical Journal (1986).

Testing For Mercury

How does a person know that they have mercury? There are many ways of testing mercury through laboratory testing and in this day and age of advanced technology, through various new instruments.

Patient’s Health History
This form is one of the simplest and least expensive ways for evaluation. It helps the patient and the doctor or practitioner decide of a very good probability of a mercury hypersensitivity problem.

Laboratories
There are numerous laboratories across the country that specialize in the area of metal and chemical analysis. Great Smokies National Laboratories in Asheville, NC (1-888-891-3061 Body Balance Division EXT #5) and Dr.’s Data in Chicago (1-630-231-3649) are two popular ones. They can do hair analysis for reasonable costs and urine analysis is another way of testing. See the addresses and phone numbers listed.

Hair Analysis
The hair analysis shows effectiveness usually when the client is in the process of detoxifying the mercury. A high mercury level often indicates the unloading process, so it can indicate that the mercury is there and the body is trying to unload it.. The hair test may not show the hidden layers of mercury toxicity so that a low mercury level in the hair may not indicate the true state of the body that has a load of mercury in deeper layers of tissues and organs.

Urinalysis
Urine analysis is usually done over an 18 hr or 24 hr process. A base line mercury excretion level may be obtained from this analysis. A provocative test is with a chelating agent. The most conservative approach is with intravenous Vitamin C. It is least likely to cause detoxification illness. Other challenge tests are EDTA and DMPS and an oral one is DMSA.

DMPS – EDTA & DMSA Challenge
There has been quite a bit of controversy in recent years of the DMPS challenge as it seems to “dump” the poisonous mercury too fast and had some serious detrimental effects. The detoxification process of the poisonous substances need to be released only to the point that the client can bear. When nausea, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, etc. occur, this is a strong indication that the toxins are coming out too fast and the release of poisons perhaps need to be done more slowly! There are now organizations forming, such as DMPSBACKFIRE out of Pennsylvania, against the use of DMPS (check www.dmpsbackfire.com) before making a final decision. It is worth checking into. Another note: “DMPS excretes metals in the following order: zinc, tin, copper, arsenic, mercury,” according to, Heavy Metal Bulletin, Editor, Monica Kauppi, March 1995, issue. The EDTA challenge test works for some and not for others, while DMSA, the oral challenge test, seem to be the SAFEST of these three. Check our new product listing for the latest in this area.

Complete Blood Count
White cell elevation or depression has been found in cases of known mercury poisoning. After amalgam removal the count often levels off from 5,000 to 5,500. A CBC test may be done before and then after removal and offers a comparison. Many laboratories provide this type of test.

Jerome Mercury Vapor Analyzer.
This instrument is used by governmental agencies for mercury vapor analysis. The patient is tested before and after chewing sugarless gum without aspartame -a chemical- in it, for ten minutes. Usually this test provides some noticeable increases and give the patient an increased awareness of the mercury problem from vapor.

BIOCOMPATIBILITY & BIO-FEEDBACK Testing
Biocompatibility testing is to check out what replacement composites to use AFTER the amalgams have been removed. There are numerous safe composites used for fillings to replace the mercury. It is very important to have this test done to find out what specific composites are compatible with your body chemistry. These can be tested on instruments such as the Dermatron, Computron, Interro, Vega, Xxroid, and B.E.S.T (the latter is FDA approved).

Another way of testing is through live cell or dry cell analysis with a blood sample. The materials selected in this form of testing will be in harmony with your body. These instruments uses frequency-testing by having a person hold a device connected to the instrument that monitors their frequency rates and can check out the substances that are compatible. These instruments also can be used as BIO-FEEDBACK analysis to test which metals and chemicals are present in your body and the advanced technical machines will balance frequencies that are “out of balance”. The Xxroid instrument and the latest equipment of B.E.S.T. have the “frequency balancing” capacity.

The Patch Test
This test is a highly sensitive test for the hypersensitive patient. It will produce an exacerbation of mercury-related symptoms within 24 hours. The highly hypersensitive patient will react in an hour or less, so for this reason all patients are kept in the office for one hour after application of the patch. A reaction within one hour means that the test is over. The patch is removed, the reaction is neutralized and usually within twenty minutes the exacerbation is over. The patients that react within one hour are considered highly hypersensitive and could definitely be considered for amalgam removal.
(See Hal Huggin’s book, It’s All In Your Head, for more information.

Symptoms & Diseases Of Mercury Toxicity


The symptoms of mercury toxicity are lengthy, but we will attempt to bring you a list derived from several different sources: They include: Gastrointestinal problems, nervous system problems, fever, chills, fatigue, headache, insomnia, loss of sex drive, depression, numbness and tingling in hands, irritability, tremors, learning difficulties, irregular heartbeat, chest pains, sore and bleeding gums, immune suppression, birth defects, infertility, kidney/brain damage, anxiety, sensitive tongue, metallic taste in the mouth, allergies, dizziness, cataracts, insomnia, kidney damage, memory loss, nervousness, paralysis, seizures, vision loss, weakness, hearing loss, heart problems, chronic constipation, recurring diarrhea, parasites and fungus disorders, abnormal blood readings (MORE red blood cells than needed, lesions of the skin, hypersensitivity, restlessness, inability to relate to other people, poor coordination, brain fog (memory problems), monologue talking -sometimes for extremely long periods of time, difficulties in breathing, retinal bleeding, loss of interest in life, reduced capacity for work, vertigo, facial paralysis, a painful pull at the lower jaw towards the collar bone, joint pains, pains in lower back, weakness of muscles, pressure, pains, “needles” at lymph nodes under arms and in groin -also in the liver region, increased need for sleep, a gray ring around the cornea of the eye, feeling of being old, emotional problems, lack of concentration, a feeling of being disconnected from God.

Diseases related to mercury poisoning are: Alzheimer’s, all kinds of cancer, epilepsy, arthritis, pneumonia, bronchitis, gingivitis, neuralgia, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, lupus, lymphoma, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), leukemia, sinusitis, chronic asthma, hypertension, ADD (attention deficit disorder), Chrohn’s Disease, Candidiasis (binds to mercury), glomerulonephritis (disease of the kidneys), autism (from mercury in vaccines), SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), anemia, dermatitis, eczema, psoriaisis, Bruxism (grinding teeth), Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFIDS), insomnia, Epstein Barr.

The following is from the Journal of Advancement in Medicine, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1998 by James P. Frackelton, MD, FACAM, and R. Lyle Christensen, PhD. taken from their table,

Signs and Symptoms of Toxicity from Mercury Exposure

Acute:
Interstitial pnemonitis, bronchitis, tightness or pain in chest, coughing, metallic taste, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting diarrhea, headache, dark line of mercury sulfide on gums, teeth loosen ulcers on lips and cheeks, develop psychopathologic symptoms and muscle tremors

Chronic:
Mouth and face: inflammation, tender gums, gingivitis, teeth loosen with alveolar destruction, increased or decreased salivation, stomatitis and tongue tremors, nasal irritation, epistaxis, disturbances of taste and smell, loss of appetite, facial pallor.

Neuralgic:
tremor of eyelids and extracular muscles, fingers, arms and legs; neuralgia, paresthesias, ataxia, exaggerated knee jerks and altered plantar reflexes, vasomotor: perspiration and blushing, personality changes, erethism, irritability, irascibility, criticalness, excitability, melancholy, depression, shyness, timidity, moroseness, fatigue, weakness, drowsiness, memory defect.

Test your Mercury Levels online.



Testing for Corrosion of Amalgam:
The rate of corrosion occurring in fillings can be estimated by measuring the electrical current generated by the fillings in the mouth. The higher the electrical currents are indicated, the greater the chemical reactivity. There are some aggravating factors in the process of amalgam corrosion.

  1. High temperature from foods and drinks. Higher temperatures increase the rate of corrosion which in turn increases the vapor pressure of mercury.
  2. Salty and acidic foods. These can contribute to or accelerate chemical reactions.
  3. Rinsing the oral cavity with hydrogen peroxide. This considerably increases the oxidationrate over simple dissolved oxygen. Hydrogen peroxide can even oxidize gold.
  4. Voluntary vomiting. This is a method of weight control practiced for centuries and probably more prevalent that suspected. This leaves high HC1,SH and elevated electrical conductivity in the mouth. The resultant increased reactions (ten times greater in aerated digestive juice) produce a marked increase in corrosion even though the length of time is relatively short. It has been noticed in studies that extremely detrimental effects of voluntary vomiting on solubility of composites in these patients.
  5. Multitudinous bacteria capable of oxidation, reduction and methylation.


Mercury & Related Issues
The Domino Effect


According to Dr. Bruce Shelton, MD (H), Di.Hom, director of the Allergy Center in Phoenix, Arizona, “Mercury amalgams are as close as you can get to the center of the illness universe, their use in dentistry has set us up for most of the health problems we see today.”

In his practice, Dr. Shelton frequently observes a domino effect of illness that begins with mercury toxicity. He reports that 90% of his patients who come in with allergies have an over-growth of the yeast-like fungus, Candida Albicans. This overgrowth can be due to heavy metals in the body, principally from mercury in the teeth, continually draining in minute amounts into body tissues.”

“The next stage” he says of the domino effect, “is that patients in this predicament typically develop leaky gut syndrome. If we do not totally digest and absorb our foods before they are broken to basic chemicals, then we have a ‘leaky gut.’… He says the “leaky gut syndrome s, in turn, to food allergies.” He remarks the soon the person becomes a universal reactor, allergic to multiple chemicals, to almost everything. Environmental illness is then at hand.

“Although dental work tends to be very expensive, if you can get a patient to have their teeth corrected, they will get well,” reports Dr. Shelton. Other contributing factors that are prevelant in this domino effect can also be an under-active thyroid, which is generally associated with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He says that, “Specifically, in thyroid cases, the fifth tooth from the midline of the mouth (between the two front teeth), upper and lower, in both directions, frequently has a mercury filling or a root canal, or is in a state of degeneration in this situation. In other words, “potentially four different teeth can have a thyroid connection.”

Another situation in the domino effect is the parasites, usually associated with the yeast or fungus infection. Patients or clients can have everything from tapeworms, pinworms, hookworms, etc. and these can be expelled naturally through various supplements or frequency equipment instruments, and colonics.

“Mercury then works on the Central Nervous System and damages the myelin sheath around the nerves. Heavy metals such as mercury act as free radical which are highly reactive, charged particles that can cause damage to body tissues. This cumulative poison builds up in the body with repeated exposure having devastating effects. It then can prevent nutrients from entering the cells and wastes from leaving, and block enzymes necessary for the body’s detoxification processes,” says Dr. Shelton.

Again, he says, “Mercury can bind to the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) of cells, as well as to the cell membranes, distorting them and interfering with normal cell functions. When this happens, the immune system no longer recognizes the cell as part of the body and will attack it. This is the basis of an autoimmune disease.”

Note: “Free radicals are formed when molecules within cells react with oxygen (oxidize) as part of normal metabolic processes. Free radicals then begin to break down cells, especially if there are not enough free radical quenching nutrients, such as vitamins C and E, in the cell. While free radicals are normal products of metabolism, uncontrolled free-radical production plays a major role in the development of degenerative disease, including cancer and heart disease. Free radicals harmfully alter important molecules, such as proteins, enzymes, fats, even DNA. Other sources of free radicals include pesticides, industrial pollutants, smoking, alcohol, viruses, most infections, allergies, stress, even certain foods and excessive exercise.” Dr. Bruce Shelton, M.D.(H), Di.Hom.

Also Available is the Chart of Diseases Relating Specific Diseases to Specific Metals/Chemicals.

How Mercury Affects The Nervous System


We mentioned before how the different forms of mercury develop in a conversion process. Dr. Bruce Shelton says, “After elemental mercury from amalgam fillings is inhaled or ingested, it is converted to methyl mercury, the organic form of mercury. Methyl mercury, because it easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, has been associated with neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It is important to mention that as toxic as elemental mercury is, methyl mercury is 100 times more toxic!

Once it infiltrates the body, mercury becomes a neurotoxin, according to Dietrich Klinghardt , M.D., Ph.D. a specialist in neural therapy, a process using local injections of anesthetics, such as lidocaine or procaine, to remove interferences in the body’s electrical network and thus relieve chronic pain, reverse injury, and clear energy blockages. He says, “that a neurotoxin is a substance the nerve cells voluntarily absorb, even though it is poisonous. They do this out of curiosity.”

Nerve endings in the peripheral nervous system constantly scan their environment, engulfing foreign particles and bringing them across the cell membrane for inspection. These substances may then travel all the way up from the foot to the spinal cord and get presented to the nerve cells there,” Dr.Klinghardt says. Further, “If the substance is judged to be harmful, the body tries to produce an antitoxin to neutralize it and eliminate it from the body.”

There are two problems when it comes to mercury according to Dr. Klinghardt. “First, as it travels up the nerve, mercury destroys the body’s mechanism, a substance called tubulin, for transporting along nerves. Burning the bridges behind it, it effectively destroys the nerve. Second, he says, the body has not yet learned how to make an anti-neurotoxin against mercury.”

According to Dr. Klinghardt, mercury levels can slowly dissipate over time from body tissues and from the teeth but it takes a much longer time period to get it out of the brain and the nervous system. There it binds firmly to a specific chemical compound that happens to exist there in the body’s highest concentrations. He says, that “the main devastating effect of mercury in the nervous system is that it interferes with the energy production inside each cell”. “The nerve cell is impaired in its ability to detoxify itself and excrete the mercury and in its ability to nurture itself. The cell becomes toxic and dies, or lives in a state of chronic malnutrition. A multitude of illnesses, associated with neurological symptoms, usually results. These are usually chronic viral, fungal and bacterial infections.

These chronic diseases are not a cause of the failure of the immune system, but by a conscious adaptation of the immune system to deal with a lethal/toxic heavy metal environment. Some practitioners and doctors refer to this situation as, “environmental polluted body terrain.

Since the nerves are usually damaged or compromised by mercury, it seems necessary to find something to help repair that damage. An Ayurvedic product (an herbal formula) called, Herbal Balance, ReGen Nerve helps promote healthy growth of nerves and is available through the product list in this report. Also, lecithin is known to not only repair the nerve endings but to help with the memory and neutralize toxins as they are moving. Both of these seem essential in any detoxification process. Lecithin, a food, may be found at any health store in capsule or granulated form.

QUOTES

In his research of mercury Dr. Zamm says, “It led me to the fact that the biggest environmental poison facing our country is the river of mercury running down your throat. That’s the number one environmental problem they could do something about now.”
Dr. Alfred Zamm, M.D., F.A.C.P. practiced for many years in Kingston, New York.”

You wouldn’t take a leaky thermometer, put it in your mouth, and leave it there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Yet that’s what happens when an amalgam filling is installed in your mouth.”
Dr. Michael Ziff, D.D.S and Researcher and Publisher of BioProbe, a newsletter about dental amalgams.

“Mercury poisoning is impaired oxidation. It’s like having an invisible cord around your neck that’s strangling you, but you can’t feel that the cord is there. (The strangulations) is biochemical, but the principal is the same: mercury reduces the amount of oxygen that you get.”
Dr. Alfred Zamm, M.D., F.A.C.P. “.

“…mercury caused the smooth muscles in the walls of arteries to contract, thereby causing hypertension….Inorganic mercury caused blood vessel constriction and subsequent hypertension within minutes after exposure… minutes after exposure..”
Researchers at St. Louis’ Washington University (book, The Mercury In Your Mouth, by Quicksilver Associates.

Researchers at the Temple University Medical School and the Harvard Medical School found that “inorganic mercury caused actual pathological damage to the heart muscle tissue, which in turn severely decreased heart function to a point that results in a dramatic drop in blood pressure.”
The Mercury In Your Mouth, by Quicksilver Associates

“Slow healing” is in part a result of zinc deficiency. Mercury interferes with zinc metabolism.”
“Chronic fatigue” is a result of insufficient oxygen to the cells. Mercury interferes with the ability of hemoglobin to transport oxygen” and “…..ringing in the ears” is related to manganese deficiency. Mercury interferes with manganese metabolism.”
It’s All In Your Head, by Hal A. Huggins, DDS

“After he underwent a root canal at the age of 15, Earl suffered severe fatigue and anxiety. At 28, he had a nervous breakdown. At the age of 32, suffering from fatigue, anger, anxiety, back problems, low blood sugar, nervousness, ringing in his ears, concentration loss, and prematurely graying hair, he consulted acupuncturist. Dr. David J. Nickel, O.M.D., L.Ac. of Santa Monica, California performed a mercury vapor analysis on Earl’s teeth and found that the level of toxic fumes from Earl’s six mercury amalgam fillings was 42 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum allowable limit.
He was put on supplements and there was significant improvement in his metabolic rate and blood sugar levels, he had all six mercury amalgams and his root canal tooth removed. Earl said, “I don’t remember when I have ever felt so good.”

“Mercury is associated with 258 different symptoms and copper with over 100. Almost all my patients who had their mercury-based fillings removed show moderate to dramatic improvement in their health in usually less than one month.”
Dr. David J. Nickel, O.M.D., L.Ac of Santa Monica California (from Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia & Environmental Illness, by Burton Goldberg.

“Research has demonstrated that the body’s tissues – especially in the brain, kidneys, jaw, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and liver -absorb and store mercury.”
Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia & Environmental Illness, by Burton Goldberg

HOW AMERICA’S democracy is being stolen

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With record low approval ratings for the Bush/Cheney regime and the albatross of an unpopular war hanging from the GOP’s neck, do you think that a Democratic presidential candidate will win the White House, get us out of Iraq, and end our long national nightmare?

 http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8468131166712136810&q=caging&total=120&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

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http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6757612420128645563

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2387698570177187417

Think again — the mighty election theft machine Karl Rove used to steal the US presidency in 2000 and 2004 may be under attack, but it is still in place for the upcoming 2008 election.

With his usual devious mastery, Rove has seized upon the national outrage sparked by his electoral larceny and used it as smokescreen while he makes the American electoral system even MORE unfair, and even EASIER to rig. Thus the administration has fired federal attorneys when they would not participate in a nationwide campaign to deny minorities and the poor their access to the polls. It has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to install electronic voting machines that can be “flipped” with a few keystrokes. And under the guise of “reforming” our busted electoral system, it is setting us up for another presidential theft in 2008.

Thus it should come as no surprise that our exclusive investigations into the firings of eight federal prosecutors who refused to execute Rove’s plans for massive disenfranchisement of Democratic voters reveal a pattern of illegalities and fraud aimed at reducing the number of minority, poor and young voters at the core of Democratic support. In the wake of major news breaks, two felony convictions have come from the rigging of the illegal Ohio 2004 vote count and recount that gave George W. Bush a second illegitimate term. Stunning new admissions from county election boards that illegally destroyed voter records will almost certainly lead to new convictions. And the multi-million-dollar electronic voting machine scam that made possible the biggest electoral frauds in US history is under massive new attack, with key states moving to scrap the machines altogether in a desperate attempt to restore American democracy — but with the job far from done.

Rove, Ney and the undead

Indeed, the Rovian theft engine is far from dead. The media groundwork has already been laid out for the Republicans to claim that hordes of illegal aliens have registered to vote. The Bush administration has been caught ordering public agencies — possibly in violation of the law — to cease registering voters. In an April, 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove openly alluded to the strategy of demanding photo ID and purging voter roles of poor, minority voters just as had been done in 2000 and 2004. And, as always with Bush/Rove, there is much more beneath the surface.

All that has happened to challenge the GOP death grip on the American vote count has been reported in the pages of Hustler and on the internet at freepress.org, bradblog and elsewhere, and is being seized upon by a national grassroots movement determined to restore American democracy next year.

Nowhere has that movement been more in evidence than with the high profile firestorm surrounding Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors without legitimate cause.

Evidence continues to surface from throughout the United States about this blatant Bush abuse of executive power. But we have traced the roots of the firings to an obscure Congressional hearing held at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, on March 21, 2005, and to a shadowy GOP operative named Mark F. “Thor” Hearne.

The hearing was conducted by none other than former US Rep. Bob Ney (R-18th OH). The once-powerful Ohio Congressman (who is now behind bars) was the godfather of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the national boondoggle that mandated electronic voting machines for the American electoral process.

That the machines would cost taxpayers billions was a big plus for Ney. They would come from Diebold and other companies that poured money into Republican coffers. Thanks largely to the manipulations of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, these e-voting machine companies would help guarantee the GOP’s ability to steal elections.

Ney’s hearing featured a marquee appearance by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State responsible for delivering Ohio’s decisive 2004 electoral votes to Bush. Blackwell was a key operative for the Bush election campaign in Florida in 2000 and co-chaired the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign in Ohio.

“Haul butt!”

Congressional protocol required that Ney allow Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland) to question Blackwell. Soon Blackwell and Jones were yelling at each other in a legendary exchange that ended with Jones telling Blackwell to “haul butt” out of the chamber.

Not quite so high profile was the ensuing testimony by Hearne, who identified himself as the head of the American Center for Voting Rights. Hearne is a long-time GOP dirty trickster, with a Rovian rap sheet dating to the 1970s. He did not explain that the ACVR had a post box in a Dallas mall, but no office, few staff, a board stacked with GOP operatives, no grassroots mailing list or much else to confirm the functioning of a real organization. Nor did Ney clarify that Hearne had served as election counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and had founded ACVR the previous month, at the urging of Karl Rove.

While the press corps rushed to report the Jones-Blackwell dust-up, Hearne laid out for Ney and the few of us left listening the essential template for the new GOP strategy for disenfranchising millions of suspected Democrats from voting in future elections. In classic Rovian terms, Hearne bemoaned a litany of “voter fraud” abuses allegedly committed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Association for Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) and other multi-racial coalitions working to register millions of new voters across the United States.

Among other things, Hearne told Ney the voter registration campaigns were using “crack cocaine” as an “incentive” for registering new voters. Adding the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio to his list of evil-doers, Hearne warned that millions of “fraudulent” ballots would be cast in future elections unless something was done to curb the ability of ordinary citizens to vote without extensive identification papers.

Hearne’s testimony drew little press. But it has led directly to the national Bush/Rove push for new laws requiring voters to show picture IDs at the polls and other methods of mass disenfranchisement — and the firing of eight US prosecutors who apparently refused to go along.

The cover-up

References to Hearne’s ACVR have now mysteriously disappeared from the internet. But the McClatchy Newspapers have reported that Hearne’s ACVR and the Republican Lawyers Association have actively campaigned — with a war chest of at least $1.5 million — in at least nine battleground states. They stump for voter ID laws and rigid registration restrictions and other tactics aimed at radically reducing the ability of Democrat-leaning organizations to register new voters.

The ACVR agenda embraces the Administration’s illegal demand that public agencies stop registering new, mostly poor voters. And the pressure to rid our democracy of such voters has carried over to the offices of the nation’s federal prosecutors, even in the face of widespread investigations showing the numbers of people illegally trying to register and vote have been miniscule.

Emblematic of the firings is the case of David Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias has testified to Congress that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him to prosecute alleged vote fraud perpetrators. When he resisted, Iglesias was fired by Gonzales.

Rogers is listed as “secretary” of Thor Hearne’s American Center for Voting Rights, as well as a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed its mandate by fighting to narrow rather than broaden the voting rights of minorities, and to prosecute voter registration operations without just cause. An ACVR director, Cameron Quinn, is now the Division’s voting counsel.

A key target has been Project Vote, which registered 1.5 million voters in 2004 and 2006. Five days before the 2006 election, Bush’s interim US attorney in Kansas City issued indictments against four ACORN workers under contract with Project Vote. Prosecutions that close to election day have traditionally been discouraged by the Justice Department. Acorn officials had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms. But ACVR’s “job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem,” said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, They used “deception and faulty research” to help Rove’s GOP.

The common denominator in the firings of the federal attorneys has been an unwillingness to pursue prosecutions on the basis of such research. Iglesias, for example, told Newsweek magazine he “had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN” who were registering voters.

Media missed it again

The media has missed what DID happen when the attorneys complied with the Bush/Rove game plan. Just four days prior to the 2004 vote, Assistant Attorney-General Alex Acosta, the civil rights chief of the Bush Justice Department asked a federal judge in Ohio to sign off on policies that would disenfranchise thousands of black voters. The move almost certainly had a significant impact on Bush’s subsequent victory in the Electoral College. Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, has called the Ohio scheme “vote caging,” which is illegal.

The case arose when Republicans allegedly sent “caging” letters to thousands of registered voters in inner city districts. The letters had “do not forward” stamped on them, with a return receipt requested. When some 23,000 came back as undeliverable, GOP operatives demanded the right to get the names removed from voter rolls. Acosta argued in his letter that restricting such challenges would “undermine” the electoral process.

But an exclusive investigation by freepress.org found that at least 25% of the people being removed from the voter rolls were in fact still living at their registered address. Greg Palast has reported that the GOP deliberately targeted black soldiers still fighting in Iraq.

Acosta says his letter endorsed the GOP challenges as “permissible” as long as they were not racially motivated, and that anyone whose eligibility was challenged could still get a provisional ballot.

But due to the actions of former Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, more than 16,000 provisional ballots from the 2004 election remain uncounted. Independent observers have testified that thousands more may have been discarded right at the polling stations. (Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was less than 119,000 votes.)

Robert Kengle, who served under Acosta at the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, says Acosta’s unsolicited letter to the courts was “cheerleading” for the GOP. “It was doubly outrageous,” he said, “because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list,” precisely those whose right to vote the Justice Department was charged to protect.

Acosta was not among the attorneys fired by Bush. In fact, he is now the federal attorney in Miami.

Eyewitness testimony from throughout the state confirms that scores of GOP activists did challenge voters in numerous inner city polling stations. Many carried Blackberries and used sophisticated lists that may have included those illegally garnered caging rosters. The challenges did lead to numerous voters being turned away, and increased the long delays suffered by inner city voters throughout the state.

Surveys show it took blacks nearly an hour to vote on average in Ohio in 2004, while whites voted in less than fifteen minutes. In the inner city of Columbus, black voters waited between three and seven hours to vote, while in the nearby suburb of Bexley it took just five minutes. The delays in Columbus alone may have cost Kerry up to 60,000 votes.

Similar challenges were also endorsed by White House operative Tim Griffin, who has been widely accused of trying to cage mostly black voters in Florida. Rich says the scheme became public before the election, and the GOP apparently dropped the idea.

But as he was firing the federal attorneys who refused to cage, Bush appointed Griffin to be US attorney for Arkansas. Griffin has since resigned the post under fire. But along with Ohio, the administration used similar tactics in the key swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. Bush’s Justice Department also supported former California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson’s rejection of 20,000 voter registration forms, a move later reversed in court. And it has helped push photo ID requirements — again rejected in court — devised by Georgia to restrict black and poor voter access.

A 35-year veteran of the Justice Department’s Voting Right Sections, Rich told the McClatchey papers that he quit over political appointees who “skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of the elections.” Thus Thor Hearne’s original blueprint for disenfranchising minorities and the poor is now established administration policy, supported by Bush’s Justice Department, and backed by his firing of federal attorneys — illegal or otherwise — who refuse to go along. Whether the Democrats in Congress do anything about it, and whether the GOP successfully uses these tactics again in 2008, remain to be seen.

New cyber-thuggery

Alongside the Bush/Rove commitment to mass disenfranchisement, the key to the outcome of the 2008 election may be the rise and incomplete fall of electronic voting machines.

Unmonitorable DRE (Direct Record Electronic) voting machines have been center stage at every Bush-era stolen election. In Florida 2000, some 16,000 votes that “disappeared” from Al Gore’s tallies in Volusia County helped turn the tide for Bush at a key election night moment, even though they were later reinstated. In 2002, fraudulent electronic vote counts in Georgia almost certainly deprived Vietnam war hero Max Cleland of his US Senate seat in a race which all credible polls showed him winning by a substantial margin.

The spread of DREs is at the core of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) pushed through by then-Congressman (now jailbird) Bob Ney. High-powered studies from the likes of the Government Accountability Office, the Brennan Center on Voting Rights, the Carter-Baker Commission on Voting Rights, Princeton University and US Representative John Conyers all conclude that DRE’s can be easily manipulated, with entire elections illicitly shifted by a few keystrokes.

The GOPs HAVA means to put the nation on DREs as thoroughly as possible by 2008. But a public rebellion has slowed that plan. In Ohio, grassroots campaigners stopped Blackwell from giving Diebold an unbid $100 million contract to put virtually the entire state on DREs. Elsewhere, state and local election boards rebelled against the high cost of maintaining the machines, which often must be kept air conditioned around the clock, resulting in huge electric bills. Programming and other costs make administering elections on DREs far more expensive than doing it on paper ballots. The DREs have become infamous because of widespread testimony in Ohio that 2004 voters were pushing John Kerry’s name, only to see George Bush’s name light up, or to have their Kerry vote simply disappear moments later.

In response to nationwide opposition, US Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) proposed federal legislation that would have forced all electronic voting machines to be fitted with devices that would produce a paper trail. An accredited scientist, Holt also wanted to force manufacturers to make public the software that ran their machines.

Holt’s proposed House Bill 811 divided the election protection movement, much of which saw it as an endorsement of DREs. And as the bill progressed, the GOP gutted it, killing the software transparency requirements and settling for unworkable paper trail provisions.

The governors of Florida and Maryland have already moved to ban DREs in 2008, and to use paper ballots instead. Grassroots confrontations over how to cast and count votes will rage right up to election day.

The need for electronic safeguards has been confirmed to the hilt by an astonishing flood of revelations from Ohio. To report Ohio’s 2004 election-night vote count, Blackwell contracted with the same GOP computer programmer who created the Bush-Cheney web site in 2000. Those GOP-programmed results were then run through servers housed in the basement of a bank in Chattanooga, Tennessee which also housed the servers for the Republican National Committee (through which Karl Rove ran his off-the-record e-mails, now being sought by Congress).

Supervised by Blackwell, those results showed a substantial victory for John Kerry until about 12:20 at night, when reporting inexplicably stopped. When it resumed about 90 minutes later, Ohio’s margin — and the presidency — suddenly switched to Bush.

After the election, a citizen-based federal lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff) was filed, aimed at preserving all of Ohio’s 2004 election materials for further investigation. Those materials were protected by federal law until September 2, 2006, when Blackwell intended to destroy them. But a week prior, we won a federal court decision barring the counties from destroying any of these materials. Ohio’s new Secretary of State (SOS), Jennifer Brunner, then ordered the boards of election to deliver this evidence to her.

But in July 2007, 56 of Ohio’s 88 county BOEs admitted to illegally destroying all or some of their records. John M. Williams, Director of Elections in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) told Brunner he was “…unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled ballots” essential to an accurate audit because they “…were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system.”

In Clermont County, a key Republican stronghold permeated with election irregularities, Director Mike Keeley told Brunner that “in interviewing the staff, no one could remember the disposition of said ballots,” meaning the actual number of votes cast remains a mystery. In neighboring Butler County, Director Betty L. McGary informed the SOS on May 9, 2007 that they had lost the “ballot pages” thus making it impossible to confirm how votes were counted.

Delaware County, where the last 359 votes cast in one precinct were all counted for Bush, informed Brunner that they had 29 boxes of ballots, but then delivered only 26. The Delaware BOE initially reported 1872 provisional ballots, but the official number is now 1462, feeding suspicions the boxes were stuffed.

Two election officials in Cleveland have thus far been convicted of felonies stemming from rigged recount procedures after 2004. Now a solid majority of Ohio’s election boards face potential federal criminal action. They have made a reliable reconstruction of the true 2004 outcome virtually impossible.

Brunner has pledged to preside over a fair election in Ohio 2008. Like Debra Bowen, California’s new Secretary of State, Brunner is running extensive tests on the state’s electronic voting machines. Most or all of California and Ohio’s DREs could be gone by 2008, possibly to be replaced by paper ballots counted by electronic scanners.

But even those are not immune to fraud. In 2004, Diebold technicians provided inner city precincts with malfunctioning opti-scan machines. Throughout the state, more than 90,000 ballots were never counted because of voting machine malfunctions. At a mostly Democratic precinct in Toledo, poll workers handed out pencils whose marks could not be read by the electronic counters, thus voiding the votes cast there.

Overall, our nation’s history has been filled with stolen elections. Most have been robbed with paper ballots and stuffed ballot boxes. But under Bush/Rove, electronics are at center stage.

High tech Tammany

Bush/Rove stole the 2000 and 2004 elections by intimidation, vote caging, rigged machines, rigged recounts, and much more. Bush’s firing of the eight federal attorneys only underscores the fraud perpetrated by those who weren’t fired.

Whether Congress gets to the bottom of those firings remains to be seen. But there is little doubt the Democrats were able to retake the House and Senate in 2006 only because of the increased vigilance of a national grassroots voter protection movement.

Though Democrats carried Ohio in the off-year elections of 2006, our research indicates that the GOP still stole as much as 12% of the vote, and is still intent on disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority, poor and young voters. In a single election in Franklin County in 2006, a magistrate found that more than 83% of all the precincts were miscounted on the DRE machines.

And though DRE machines are under intense attack, their presence in 2008 will still be substantial, and will still subject the election to GOP theft.

The lessons of 2000 and 2004 are in the terror imposed on the registration process and the error perpetrated in the vote count. Only by saying “never again” can Americans hope to see a return to actual democracy.

*************
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman co-wrote How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008.

Detective questioned over honours obstruction

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By Patrick Hennessy and Andrew Alderson

The detective who led the failed cash-for-honours investigation is to be challenged by MPs over allegations that his inquiry was “obstructed” by Downing Street in an attempt to protect Tony Blair.

 
Assistant Commissioner John Yates
John Yates will face questions from MPs on Tuesday

Assistant Commissioner John Yates will be put on the spot when he appears before the all-party public administration select committee in the Commons on Tuesday.

MPs will press him on claims, first revealed in The Sunday Telegraph, that Scotland Yard was informed by sources close to Downing Street that Mr Blair would resign as prime minister if he was questioned as a suspect rather than as a witness. In the end, Mr Blair was not spoken to under caution and his status remained that of a witness during the 16-month, £1 million investigation, at the end of which no criminal charges were brought.

Downing Street initially denied the story, although it was subsequently confirmed by other sources close to Mr Blair. The police have never commented on it — and MPs will use the Commons hearing to demand answers from Mr Yates.

Paul Rowen, a Liberal Democrat member of the committee, said last night: “I want to know whether Assistant Commissioner Yates and his team got all the co-operation they were entitled to during their investigation.

“Was there obstruction from Downing Street or Mr Blair and why at the end of the day, when it was clear that Mr Blair had driven a coach and horses through the honours regulations, were they not able to do anything about it? The public has a right to know.

“Tony Blair has made a mockery of public life. We have heard allegations that he even threatened to resign if he had been forced to answer questions under caution.

“These are the things we need to ask and we are going to be asking: what pressures were put on, how co-operative was Downing Street and why did it take so long for them to get nowhere?”

Mr Yates is refusing to comment this weekend. However, his colleagues at Scotland Yard are eager to see how much he reveals about the evidence that was thrown up and, more intriguingly, about the lack of co-operation from Downing Street.

“John is keeping his own counsel but, this week’s meeting promises to be very interesting,” said one senior colleague.

“John is a guy of real integrity and he may now feel he can be open and straightforward about some of the things that he and his team found out. I don’t think he will throw accusations about loosely, but he might point out that there were unnecessary delays in obtaining some evidence.”

Those at the centre of the investigation — Lord Levy, the party’s chief fund-raiser, Ruth Turner, Tony Blair’s “gatekeeper”, and Sir Christopher Evans, the multi-millionaire Labour donor — are said to be concerned that Mr Yates’s comments to MPs might prove controversial. All three were arrested but were never charged.

During the hearing Mr Yates is expected to assert that Sir Christopher’s diaries contained evidence seen as vitally important to his investigation. They are thought to refer to alleged conversations between the biotechnology tycoon, who loaned Labour £1 million, and Lord Levy, about the possibility of an honour.

Book tells of foul-mouthed rows between Brown and Blair

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Speculation over tensions between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair before this year’s handover of power at 10 Downing Street was reignited today with the publication of a book detailing allegations of foul-mouthed rows between the two men.The book by Blair’s biographer Anthony Seldon names close Brown ally Ed Balls – now Britain’s schools secretary – as a key driving force behind the reported clashes.

Serialised in the Mail on Sunday, it claims Blair complained of being treated “like an abused and bullied wife” after one row with Balls about when he would leave No 10.

And it alleges that Balls egged Brown on to foment rebellion against the PM following Labour’s poor showing in the 2006 local elections.

After Brown failed to trigger open revolt in a radio interview, Balls supposedly told him that he had “bottled it” – something the schools secretary told the Mail on Sunday he “categorically denies”.

Seldon’s book, Blair Unbound, draws on interviews with many Blair loyalists, including ex-Cabinet ministers Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn, Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt, Lord Falconer, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett, as well as former aide Baroness Morgan.

By contrast, only a handful of Brown allies are named as sources, which will inevitably lead to speculation that it presents a partial view of events.

The timing of the serialisation is likely to frustrate Brown, who is trying to haul Labour out of an opinion poll trough following the debacle of the snap election that never was.

The book reports supposed arguments between Brown and Blair in which the then chancellor lost his temper over what he saw as attempts to undermine him.

After Milburn was put in charge of Labour’s 2005 general election campaign, Brown supposedly shouted: “You’ve appointed that f… Milburn! Is it about cooking the manifesto against me?”

And when Blair refused to stop Milburn and Byers speaking out in favour of a Blairite challenger for the succession, the book claims Brown threatened: “If you don’t do what I ask, then there’ll be big trouble.”

Seldon also asserts that Blair regretted his reduced majority after the 2005 election because it prevented him from sacking the chancellor. After one row with the Treasury, it is alleged the then PM told aides: “I’m going to take no more shit from over the road, I’m going to do it.”

The book claims that Balls regarded Blair as a “moron” and took an increasingly aggressive role in stoking up moves to oust him.

Seldon wrote: “His increasingly assertive role at the Treasury struck some as echoing the 1963 film The Servant, in which the butler, played by Dirk Bogarde, progressively takes over as the dominant force from the owner of the house, James Fox.”

LONDON

http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=29&ContentID=44152

MUST SEE VIDEO: How Television Affects Your Brain Chemistry

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Many of you believe watching TV is a harmless, entertaining activity worthy of your attention, but the video below will give you some eye-opening things to consider.

In just under four minutes you’ll learn why television is essentially a platform for elite advertisers to peddle their wares, and how the steady stream of images could be making your life in reality seem dull and slow in comparison.

If you watch TV, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

Source

Senate and Neocons Agree to Carve Up Bill of Rights

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ADE

It’s now official, the entire Senate is criminally complicit in undermining the Fourth Amendment.

“Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post.

In standard doublespeak fashion, the Post is attempting to put the best face on the fact the Senate has dealt the telecoms a get out of jail free card. It is, as well, typical that the Post characterizes the legislation as a “control” mechanism when in fact it is a blank check. Of course, this hardly matters, as the NSA has worked with the telecoms for decades to subvert the constitutional rights of Americans, who are basically none the wiser when it comes down to the fact the government is a police state, long engaged in snooping of the sort Germany’s Stasi employed.

“Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.” In other words, Democrats, who are a Senate majority, disrespect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to the same disgusting degree as the neocon Republicans, and are thus as criminal. Naturally, this is nothing new, as you can turn your garden variety Democrat upside down and he or she will look identical to a Republican, never mind the corporate media turning somersaults in an effort to get us to buy into supposed differences, the very framework of the phony left-right paradigm on Capitol Hill. Millions of Americans–from your Rush Limbaugh Republican to your MoveOn Democrat–buy into this nonsense, apparently unable to break free of the voodoo trance of the corporate media buttressed fiction of ideological differences.

Said neocon traitor and so-called House Minority leader John A. Boehner: “There is absolutely no reason our intelligence officials should have to consult government lawyers before listening into terrorist communications with the likes of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other foreign terror groups.” Translation: there is no reason the neocons should have to follow the Constitution and rule of law when snooping the phone calls and internet communication of millions of Americans. As we know, Osama is dead and “al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups” are covertly–or not so covertly–organized, financed, and unleashed by the CIA, MI6, Mossad, indeed the entire “intelligence” monolith, legendary for spinning off useful terrorist groups. Moreover, as a well-read tenth grader might tell you, the NSA engages in the vacuum cleaner approach to “intelligence gathering,” not pinpoint monitoring of “al-Qaeda” phone calls made from a pay phone in Ship Bottom, New Jersey.

More than anything, this “agreement” (criminal conspiracy) was reached in order to protect multinational telecoms, open to “pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants.” Of course, the Senate and House were long ago turned into whorehouse parlors for transnational corporations, so this really is not surprising. Question is, how long will the government continue the charade there is actually legal recourse for Americans when the Constitution is so egregiously violated? How long before we are pitched into full-fledged decider-commander guy fascism?

“Senate Democrats successfully pressed for a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court review the government’s procedures for deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance,” the CIA’s favorite fish wrapper continues. “They also insisted that the legislation be renewed in six years, Democratic congressional officials said. The Bush administration had sought less stringent oversight by the court and wanted the law to be permanent.”

In other words, treasonous Democrats want to continue the illusion that the “constitutional compromise” FISA Court is legal, when in fact is it is a long-standing violation of the Fourth Amendment, as all surveillance must follow probable cause with a court order. But then bogus “special needs” categories, mutating from the unconstitutional province of drunk driving checkpoints and random drug tests to the federal government as a whole, are the rule of the day. As previously noted, “highly intrusive and wholly discretionary warrantless wiretapping” is nothing new, as the NSA has worked with the telecoms since at least the 1940s.

Even so-called “civil libertarians” are not dedicated to the original principles held in the Bill of Rights, preferring to play footsy with “conservatives,” i.e., fascist corporatists (an admitted redundancy), and sell the Constitution out lock, stock, and barrel. “Most Democratic lawmakers and party members–backed by civil libertarians and even some conservatives–wanted the new legislation to ensure for example that future domestic surveillance in foreign-intelligence-related investigations would be overseen by the foreign surveillance court. The court was created in response to CIA and FBI domestic spying abuses unmasked in the mid-1970s.” Of course, these exposed “spying abuses” were an aberration–a sign of the times, part of the outrage over Watergate and government criminality–and the CIA and FBI are feeling much better now, knowing that there are few if any people in government willing to unmask current abuses, that is to say long term and ongoing and endemic abuses.

“But conservative Democrats worried about Republicans’ charges that the Democratic bill extended too many rights to suspected terrorists,” that is to say the American people, a few who actually believe they have an intact Constitution, as there are no “suspected terrorists” on phone lines, or rather no genuine terrorists, simply government plants and clueless patsies, programmed to exude an air of terrorist scariness, no matter how absurd as it emanates from remote caves (complete with kidney dialysis machines and internet servers) and MI6 sponsored mosques or ISI facilitated religious schools.

Finally, in order to better understand the fascistic character of our rulers, consider Rep. Louie Gohmert, who blathered: the supposed Democrat horse trading compromise “extends our Constitution beyond American soil to our enemies who want to cut the heads off Americans.” Of course, this is ridiculous, and what Gohmert intended to say is that the Constitution itself is no longer required, is in fact dangerous, as it provides black op terrorists with an excuse to cut off our heads, a colorful if entirely fallacious allusion.

But never mind, none of this matters, as the average American is wholly bereft of any sense of loss, and in fact it can be argued he or she does not need the Fourth Amendment as more than likely they will chime “I don’t got nothing to hide,” so why all the fuss? It was like this when Martin Niemoeller supposedly made his famous claim in Nazi Germany. “First they came for the Jews,” and then everybody else, but then it was too late.

Dare I say it is too late in America? Our once cherished, now ignored and largely unknown, Constitution and Bill of Rights are dead numbers. The NSA, CIA, FBI, et al, may snoop on us at will, without legal or moral hindrance, not that it matters to the masses. Most will not receive visits by the Ministry of Homeland Security, receive national security letters, or be sent packing to a FEMA camp, if it ever comes to that. Most will, however, suffer the results, as did the people of Germany–roundly fire-bombed, defeated, and reviled around the world for years to come.

The War on Afghanistan Was Wrong, Too

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By Jacob G. Hornberger

While most Americans have turned against the Iraq War, many of them still think that the war on Afghanistan was morally and legally justified. Their rationale is that the United States was simply defending itself by attacking Afghanistan and retaliating against those who had conspired to commit the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Of course, the last thing on people’s mind was that the 9/11 perpetrators themselves were retaliating for the bad things that the U.S. government had long been doing to people in the Middle East.

In fact, the irony of the attacks on both Afghanistan and Iraq is that both actions are simply a continuation of regime-change operations that have long characterized U.S. foreign policy, operations that are in large part responsible for much of the anger that foreigners have for the United States.

For example, there was the regime-change operation in Iran in 1953, where the CIA successfully ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, and replaced him with the shah of Iran, whose brutal dictatorship ultimately culminated in the Iranian revolution in 1979. Not surprisingly, Iranians are still angry about that U.S.-imposed regime change.

There was also Guatemala in 1954, where the CIA successfully ousted the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, which led to the decades-long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan citizens. There were Chile, Panama, Nicaragua, and Grenada. And, of course, there were the unsuccessful regime-change operations against Cuba.

In the Middle East, there was the U.S. support of Saddam Hussein, including the furnishing of weapons of mass destruction to him to use against Iranians, whose regime was no longer friendly to the United States after the 1979 revolution. There was the Persian Gulf intervention, which was followed by the brutal sanctions against Iraq, whose purpose was to bring about regime change after the United States turned against Saddam. There was the implicit U.S. endorsement of Madeleine Albright’s famous statement that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from the sanctions against Iraq had been “worth it.” There was the unconditional financial and military support of the Israeli government. And there was the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands, with full knowledge of the adverse effect such an action would have on Muslim religious sensitivities.

Long before the 9/11 attacks, the terrorists who had struck the World Trade Center in 1993 had cited, as had Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, those foreign policies as the basis for their grievances against the United States.

Therefore, it is ironic that U.S. officials used the 9/11 attacks to do the kind of thing they had long been already doing and which had in fact motivated the 9/11 attacks: regime-changing nations whose regimes were not inclined to obey U.S. orders. In what has become a customary perverse consequence of U.S. policies, the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan have not only produced chaos, death, and destruction, they have also ensured a steady stream of terrorist recruits to al-Qaeda and other groups that hate the United States more than ever. It is almost as if U.S. officials were saying after 9/11, “We are going to show you that your attacks will not cause us to change our ways, and our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will be our proof.”

After the 9/11 attacks, here at The Future of Freedom Foundation we recommended that the U.S. government not use the U.S. military to attack Afghanistan as a way to get bin Laden. We recommended instead that U.S. officials treat the attacks as a criminal-justice problem rather than a military problem.

After all, that’s the way that the federal government has always treated terrorism – as a criminal violation of federal statutes against terrorism. That was, in fact, how the government treated the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in which one of the perpetrators was a Kuwaiti man of Pakistani descent named Ramzi Yousef who was residing in Pakistan. Rather than invade Pakistan to capture or kill Yousef, which would have killed and maimed countless Pakistanis, U.S. officials simply bided their time until he was arrested in Pakistan and brought to New York for trial. It took time, but that’s the way the criminal-justice system often works. Sometimes a criminal is arrested immediately, sometimes much later, sometimes never. By the way, at Yousef’s sentencing, he angrily cited U.S. foreign policy as the basis for his grievances.

Recall that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and empathy all over the world for the United States. If U.S. officials had exercised wisdom, instead of reacting in a knee-jerk military fashion, they could have capitalized on those positive feelings by isolating bin Laden and the rest of his gang. Immediately after the attacks, we recommended offering a huge financial reward for the arrest of bin Laden and his cohorts and bringing them to trial. We pointed to the “letters of marque” that are authorized in the Constitution for such captures.

If President Bush had announced to the world that the United States would not kill innocent people in the quest to bring bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda to justice, the entire world would have remained sympathetic to the United States. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda would have been isolated, not knowing who would turn them in to the authorities. Compare that to the situation in the world today, where countless ordinary people all over the world are filled with rage over the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the torture and sex-abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. Moreover, even U.S. intelligence agencies are admitting that the continuous killings of Afghanis and Iraqis continue to provide al-Qaeda with a steady stream of recruits.

The Taliban and bin Laden

Another major problem with the attack on Afghanistan was the one that most U.S. presidents and, alas, most Americans, have chosen to ignore for the past several decades: that the U.S. Constitution requires the president to secure a congressional declaration of war from Congress before waging war against another country. Bush failed to do that.

Why did Bush order an invasion of Afghanistan? Not because he believed that the Taliban had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit the 9/11 attacks and not because he felt that the Taliban had committed some act of war against the United States by knowingly “harboring” a known fugitive.

Instead, Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan for one reason: the Taliban government refused to comply with his demand to unconditionally deliver bin Laden to the United States. He always made it clear that if the Taliban delivered bin Laden to the United States, such action would spare Afghanistan from a U.S. invasion. The “offer” that he made to the Taliban was not significantly different from that made to Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf, a close friend of the Taliban, after 9/11: play ball with us and you stay in power; refuse to do so, and you’re history.

So why did the Taliban refuse to turn over bin Laden? For one thing, there wasn’t any extradition agreement between Afghanistan and the United States. And there is a long tradition in Muslim countries to treat foreign visitors as guests. Nevertheless, the Taliban did express a willingness to deliver bin Laden over to the United States or to a third country if U.S. officials provided convincing evidence that bin Laden had, in fact, been complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Was the demand unreasonable? Well, it would be nothing more than any government, including the United States, would expect in any extradition proceeding.

Bush’s response was that U.S. officials would not furnish any such evidence to the Taliban government. The Taliban simply needed to follow U.S. orders and turn bin Laden over to the United States, with no guarantees of what would happen to him once he was in U.S. custody. That is, there were no assurances that bin Laden would be brought back to the United States for trial for terrorism in federal district court instead of being turned over to the CIA for torture and execution.

The Taliban refused to accede to Bush’s unconditional demand. The result was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the ouster of the Taliban from power, the installation of a U.S.-approved regime, a nation ruled by regional warlords, the deaths of countless Afghanis, the failure to capture bin Laden, and an ever-growing terrorist movement generated by ever-deepening anger and hatred against the United States.

Moreover, Bush’s conflation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda into one amorphous “terrorist” group, when each group obviously had its own reasons for resisting the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, ultimately set the stage for his “enemy-combatant” doctrine in the “war on terror” and the invasion and occupation of Iraq as part of the “war on terror,” which would later be used to justify the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, Abu Ghraib, rendition, torture, and the military power to indefinitely incarcerate Americans and foreigners.

Did the United States have the legal and moral right to invade Afghanistan upon the Taliban’s refusal to turn bin Laden over to the United States? Many Americans would undoubtedly respond, “Yes, absolutely. When a country experiences a terrorist attack, it has the legal and moral right to attack and invade a sovereign and independent country that refuses to comply with an unconditional demand to give up the suspected perpetrators.”

Venezuela’s war on terrorism

Well, if that’s true then how would such proponents respond if, say, Venezuela attacked the United States for harboring terrorists? Would the proponents say, “I’m going to fight on the side of Venezuela because in the war on terror a country has the right to attack countries that are harboring terrorists”? Not likely.

Yet the U.S. response to Venezuela’s extradition of a suspected terrorist named Luis Posada Cariles, a former CIA operative, not only provides a good example of the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s “war on terror,” it also shows how such a war leads inexorably toward endless international conflict and discord. After all, ask yourself, Can a world in which each country has the right to wage a war on terror under the principles followed by the U.S. government possibly be harmonious?

Posada is a prime suspect in the terrorist bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner whose flight originated in Venezuela in 1976. The plane crashed, killing 73 people, including several young members of a Cuban sports team. About a year ago, Posada made his way into the United States, prompting Venezuelan authorities to demand his extradition to Venezuela pursuant to the extradition agreement between the two nations.

U.S. officials, however, announced that they had no intention of returning Posada to Venezuela, extradition agreement or not, suggesting that they didn’t care how much evidence of Posada’s involvement in the terrorist attack Venezuela was able to provide. Their reason? While their stated reason for their decision is that Venezuela might torture Posada on his return, the real reason was the U.S. government’s natural sympathy toward anti-Castro Cuban exiles, including those who commit terrorist acts against the Cuban people.

But how is the U.S. government’s response to Venezuela in the Posada case different from the Taliban’s refusal to turn bin Laden over to the United States? If the U.S. government is going to refuse to turn over a terrorist suspect because of the possibility that he might be tortured, then how can it say that Afghanistan didn’t have the same right, especially since a suspected terrorist is as likely to be tortured by the United States as he is by Venezuela? Or to put it another way, if Afghanistan was “harboring” a terrorist by refusing U.S. demands to turn him over, isn’t the United States doing the same thing by refusing Venezuela’s extradition request of Posada?

In fact, the farcical, chaotic, and destructive nature of the U.S. government’s entire “war on terror” is easily exposed when one applies its principles universally to every other nation. That is, if the U.S. government has the right to wage a war on terror, then so has every other nation. That means then that every nation has the right to attack every other nation in which there are suspected terrorists. Cuba, for example, would have the right to attack the United States in order to kill or capture Posada and, for that matter, those Cuban-American citizens who are funding anti-Castro terrorist activity in Cuba.

Obviously, the only reason that the U.S. government is getting away with its “war on terror,” including regime-change operations against Third World countries and military wars of aggression on sovereign and independent nations, is that it has overwhelming military strength, especially compared with Third World countries. In the U.S. government’s war on terror, might makes right. But as the U.S. empire becomes increasingly overstretched by waging such a war, the American people are going to inevitably discover what lies at the end of that road: death, destruction, conflict, discord, terrorism, torture, rendition, and infringements on liberty.

Open Letter to the Government from an AWOL Soldier

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By James Circello, Iraq Veterans Against The War

To those Businessmen and women holding seats in Congress,
To the Highest Court of America,
To every Department within the U.S. government,
To the President’s Cabinet,
To the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
To the Vice President and President of the United States of America:

My name is James Circello. I am sure some of you already know who I am now that wiretaps and spying on American citizens has been approved.

Or maybe you’ve heard of me when you saw my name on a comprehensive list of Anti-War activists.

Or maybe you just know of me because I was a Sergeant in the United States Army and served as an Airborne Infantryman for six years, went to Iraq in March 2003 and served until March 2004, remained in the Army a little longer before refusing to take part in the Occupation of the Middle East and went AWOL.

I am writing you today, not asking for forgiveness for what I decided to do, but to give you an idea of what brought me to that decision to leave the Army and speak out against the Occupation. Though some will claim I left for other reasons and will try to force the discussion away from the facts and at the same time attempt to assassinate my character with half truths and out right lies, these are the facts. If later we wish to get into more of my personal life, we can do that: I have no fear of it.

I will first like to say that I am no longer a member of the United States Armed Forces. When I left the military on Easter morning, April 2007, I have officially resigned from service to that military. There are no ties between myself and an oppressive military regime set on occupying groups of impoverished indigenous people.

I am no longer a Sergeant or a paratrooper.

I will not respect an organization that can and does, at its own will, change entire enlistment contracts for the purpose of extending soldiers;

Gives quarterly sexual harassment courses and still allows roughly 30% of women to be sexually assaulted in some way, shape or form;

Openly discriminates against people based on homosexuality, race, gender and ethnic background;

Allows crimes against humanity and peace to occur and covers them up with internal investigations;

Actively recruits young boys and girls from low level income high schools and communities with false promises of health care, school and job experience and fails on all accounts;

Refuses to recognize conscientious objectors (C.O.), and when individuals apply for C.O. status that are administratively “punished” by their chain of command;

I refuse to be a part of a military and Administration that continue to abuse and torture, doesn’t recognize the rights of detainees and allows them to be shipped to secret detention facilities for “National Security” purposes; a military that is illegally, based on all U.S. as well as International Law, inside of Iraq; a military that is over extended, under funded in a war with no foreseeable end (because time tables give our enemy a “sense of victory”, but how can the enemy have victory when “Mission Accomplished” has been declared?); a military that watches billions of government contracts given to private military outfits, while they run through the streets of Iraq unchecked, and allows soldiers to be poorly equipped and the V.A. poorly funded.; the No Child Left Behind Act and it’s policy of making it mandatory for schools to send out the information of all students attending the school to military recruiters, or they are threatened with being cut off from Federal funding (I thought school was a place of learning, not a place of turning our youth into the:

” Veterans Against The War”.

This and many other reasons are why I tell you today, I do not recognize any of the warrants that may have been placed upon me. These warrants are merely a way to silence any opposition to this criminal war. I do not support the United States foreign policy and will not be the fool that enforces it.

The United States has a history of using the poor of this country to massacre and oppress the poor of other countries and I say to everyone that is able to read this – I am no longer a member of the United States Armed Forces.

I also say, this by no way makes me Un-American. I love this country and feel very strongly that it can be saved and that it must be saved.

I say this without a growing ego, but my acts as of now are what the Founding Fathers envisioned and wrote about. This is what Democracy looks like.

Dissent isn’t Un-American, it is what Patriotism means.
Patriotism is not blindly following a Flag waver, it is Direct Action.

I joined the Army after the towers of New York fell. Swept up in the fervor, I left college to enlist. My country was attacked – I, like many, wanted to defend it.

But here is where a majority of Americans, as well as Politicians have made their largest mistake: Defending your country does not mean destroying other Nations out of and/or for Revenge. But the People bought into the outcry that we must kill to feel better, and the Politicians sang their songs and danced their dances, in an attempt to show who was the most Patriotic of them all!

America stayed fixed to the lies from Fox News (can it really be called “News”?) and we watched the towers fall so many thousands of times until we were all ready to go kill and die for the Eagle and Red, White and Blue.

Though, I will admit, I was angry and young but it didn’t take me too long to see that this wasn’t about defending America, but creating an entirely new enemy.

It was all there.
It was almost too perfect.

They are of different color.
They speak a different language.
They are a people that have been made to be poor – not a people that are poor; there is a difference.
They follow a strange religion that Americans don’t understand! A religion so very similar to Christianity, that – get this – it recognizes almost the same individuals as being Prophets that the Bible does.
They “hate us (you) for our (your) freedom”.
They will come here and kill our women and children if we do not go there and kill their women and children first.

The Administration and all of Its men and women sold it and America bought it.

How many people got chills when the American flag was placed there at Ground Zero? Remember when there were so many flags outside of houses, and flag stores ran out of them?

So I went to Iraq and I saw their faces. People that I thought wanted to kill me, and hated me because I was free, brought me into their homes, offered me food and something to drink.

Was the food poisoned? No.

Was it a poor family that could barely afford the food they were offering, but offered it to me without charge or regret? You bet.

I was quickly disillusioned by the military. Senators and Representatives from Congress would come to visit us – and we would be told to get everything clean for the Dog and Pony Show.

We would up the security levels, to make everything look ship-shape. When it was time for the questions and answers portion, we would never be without a question, because the chain of command was always there for us – and thankfully they had come up with the questions we were allowed to ask our Representatives. This is what happens every time someone from D.C. came for a little sight seeing visit. I can only imagine what kinds of shows they put on now.

Long story short, I left Iraq feeling really uncomfortable with America’s position in this entire conflict. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t look right. And after much soul searching and researching, I discovered that it plain out just wasn’t right.

It took me a while to finally decide to leave. I wanted to leave prior to invading Iraq, while witnessing the illegal “Shock and Awe” that killed so many innocent people and destroying the infrastructure of the country that we hadn’t destroyed from the first bombings in the Gulf War and what wasn’t antiquated and useless from the illegal sanctions held over the heads of the every day Iraqi citizen.

I fell for the trap of “don’t let your buddies down”. And what a well spun web it is. I can not control the conscience of another man. I can only follow mine. And after deciding what I believe in is not consistent with the United States military and learning that “don’t let your buddies down” is just a form of domination through guilt, I left my post in Italy to return to America. I began speaking out against this Occupation. I do not fear arrest. I do not stay hidden. I go to all national events and travel the country at my own leisure.

I say this to you Congressional Democrats: you have failed us. I delayed my AWOL, because when I learned both Houses of the Congress were controlled by Democrats I was confident that the war was finally over. You ran on the platform of ending the war. I told all of my friends to just hang on, it will be over very soon. You funded the war and you continue to fund it. By no means is my hostility solely directed towards the Republican bench of the government. You lied to the American people, and more so, you failed the American people. We are finally awake and more and more are realizing that we don’t have a two party system in America, we have a single party that is not representing the will of the People.

The People say end the war. Stop funding the Occupation. The Soldiers want to come home. The insane idea of we must stay in Iraq and Afghanistan so that these thousands of soldiers will not have died in vain should never be said again! We tried saying that in Vietnam! The Iraqi people are strong and can defend themselves. They also want us out.

It took years for a G.I. Resistance to begin within the Military during Vietnam, but I am telling you right now – the feeling of resentment is there. The feeling that Politicians and Businesses are profiting off of this Occupation while we suffer through extended tours and battle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depleted uranium, losing friends and family, losing our lives through wounds.

We come home and barely have time to adjust to being home before we begin training to leave again.

Families are falling apart.
Iraqis are dying.
For what?
A red, white and blue flag that says, “I’m a Patriot”?
Dissent is Patriotic.

Open discussion is Patriotic (this to Speaker of the House Pelosi who refuses to have an open forum with the people of her district. I believe it is going on just over 2 Years now.)

And I say to you dissent is filling the ranks of the military and it doesn’t even need a charismatic figurehead to come forth and say “Dissent; Desert!”. They are doing it and will keep doing it.

And the military’s attempt to censor free speech will not contain it. Blogs, Youtube, Myspace: these sights, and others, weren’t blocked for any reason other than these are the most popular places to find out that the G.I. Resistance Movement is growing daily.

So proud Patriots of America, I ask you today for nothing. You are my Employee, never forget that. My tax dollars pay your salary, never forget that.

I do however have demands for you:

-End the Occupation Now. Not tomorrow.

-Bring home all American troops. Replace them with a true international coalition designed specifically for peace keeping operations, NOT military operations.

-Remove all U.S. contractors from the Middle East that continue to benefit off of the death of the Iraqi and Afghan people and the destruction of their countries.

-Allow the Afghan and Iraq governments the freedom to decide what kind of country they want to be in, not what kind of country we want them to have.

-Allow the Afghan and Iraq governments freedom to choose who is given reconstruction contracts – which none should be American companies, for obvious reasons.

-Fund in full all reconstruction projects in Afghanistan and Iraq: We destroyed their countries, by International Law we must pay. By Moral virtue we must pay.

-Support the Troops means take care of them when they come home, not blindly fund their continued existence in a war zone – Completely fund the V.A. Department!

-Fund the Levees; Do NOT allow another Hurricane Katrina or Rita.

-Oversight on Gulf Region reconstruction (where is it?) – I was just in New Orleans, it is still a disaster area two years later. Fix it now.

-Open Diplomatic negotiations with Iran – Do not allow another war to take place. We have Diplomats that are paid by taxpayers to do just that: to Talk and Discuss. Use Diplomats not Depleted Uranium and Cruise Missiles.

I also want to say this before I close, I wrote it in a letter, just yesterday, to the people of Italy that stand up and actively oppose more U.S. military bases in their country. And it says:

The Iraq war is a War of Aggression, led by a cry of “We Will Never Forget”; the famous quote from September 11, 2001. Well, I have something to say for the people of the World and to the People of this Administration, as well as to the members of the U.S. Congress.

We WILL never forget.

We will never forget that the men who hijacked those aircraft on September 11, 2001 were not Iraqi.

We will never forget that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (W.M.D) when we invaded.

We will never forget that the W.M.D’s that Iraq did have years before, were sold to them by the U.S. Government.

We will never forget the millions of Iraqi men, women and children who have suffered through the Dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, The Iraq-Iran War, The Gulf War, Depleted Uranium, Years of Illegal Sanctions, Shock and Awe, “Liberation” from a Tyrant only to find a new Tyrant take his place.

We will never forget the 2 million of Iraqi men, women and children who are now displaced refugees within their own country.

We will never forget the 1.5 million refugees in Syria, the 775,000 refugees in Jordan and the nearly 200,000 refugees in Egypt.

We will never forget the 1 million dead Iraqi men, women and children since March 2003.

We will never forget that nearly 100,000 Iraqis flee the country each month since 2003.

We will never forget the widows, widowers and orphans of those dead.

We will never forget the effects of depleted uranium in American ammunition that litters the countries of the Middle East.

We will never forget the increased infant mortality rate. The sewage on the streets. The sectarian violence that was never in the streets of Iraq until we installed a Pro-U.S. Government.

We will never forget the destruction of Shock and Awe that destroyed Iraq’s entire infrastructure.

We will never forget Abu Ghraib.

We will never forget the Lost men and women of Guantanamo Bay and other Secret U.S. Detention facilities.

We will never forget the every day Iraqi that is gunned down at a Traffic Control Point by a tired American teenager.

We will never forget the sounds of Improvised Explosive Devices (I.E.D) directed not at the American soldier, but at American Policy.

We will never forget the Women and Children gunned down at random after an I.E.D. explodes, because they were working the vegetable fields and were frightened and began to run.

We will never forget that War is, in fact, Terrorism. And America is the largest State Sponsor of Terrorism.

We will never forget that the Men, Women and Children of the Middle East may be of the same color as Saddam Hussein, but they do not have his face. They are not him. They do not deserve what they have been made to endure.

And we will never forget that corporations are profiting off of the death and destruction.

We will never forget that Blackwater and other private armies, which are in themselves illegal, are running around the Middle East killing at will – and are left unchecked.

We will never forget amazing photo opportunities with the soldiers, whether its walking through a market in Iraq with security all around you and Apaches in the air, or sitting on the deck of a ship under a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

We will never forget that a majority of the American population want the Occupations to end and we will keep repeating it until you do what you are paid to do – and that is, Listen to the People.

The People are United and I know that attempts will be made to have me appear a fool and soon you will have my grade school photographs, my coloring books, a list of every library book I have ever checked out, and whatever other records these incredibly large and over-funded Secret Agencies compile on Activists in America, but I do not fear you.

You have no moral authority over me.
Or any authority at all.
I do not fear you.
Any of you.

We The People,
United within The Struggle,

James Circello; Iraq Veterans Against The War

Claims of secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island to be investigated

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· Legal charity urges action on Diego Garcia claims
· Prisoners may have been held in ships off coast

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian

Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean
Diego Garcia Island in the indian Ocean. Photograph: Corbis
 

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.Lawyers from Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including several former British residents, are calling on the committee to question US and British officials about the allegations. According to the organisation’s submission to the committee, the UK government is “potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention”.

Clive Stafford Smith, the charity’s legal director, said he was “absolutely and categorically certain” that prisoners have been held on the island. “If the foreign affairs committee approaches this thoroughly, they will get to the bottom of it,” he said.

Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP for Chichester and a campaigner against the CIA’s use of detention without trial, has also urged the committee to investigate. He said: “Time and time again the UK government has relied on US assurances on this issue, refusing to examine the truth of these allegations for themselves. It is high time our government took its head out of the sand and looked into these allegations.”

Same response

A member of the foreign affairs committee said the committee would pursue the allegations as part of its inquiry into Britain’s overseas territories. Although Diego Garcia is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, it is unclear whether the British government knows whether the CIA has detained prisoners there or not.

UK officials are known to have questioned their American counterparts about the allegation several times over a period of more than three years, most recently last month. Whenever MPs have attempted to press ministers in the Commons, they have met with the same response: that the US authorities “have repeatedly given us assurances” that no terrorism suspects have been held there.

The existence of the CIA’s black site prisons was acknowledged by President George Bush in September last year. He said al-Qaida suspects or members of the Taliban who “withhold information that could save American lives” have been taken “to an environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts”.

Mr Bush did not disclose the location of any prison, but suspicion that one may have been located on Diego Garcia, some 1,000 miles off Sri Lanka’s southern coast, has been building for years. The 2,000 islanders were expelled in the early 1970s after the British government struck a secret deal to lease the 37-mile long island to the US for use as an air and naval base. Any evidence uncovered by the foreign affairs committee pointing to the existence of a secret CIA prison on the island would be hugely embarrassing for ministers.

Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general who is professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects. In May 2004 he said: “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq.” In December last year he repeated the claim: “They’re behind bars…we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

MPs on the committee may inquire into a Gulfstream executive jet which has been linked by its registration number to several CIA prisoner operations – known as extraordinary renditions – and which flew from Washington to Diego Garcia, via Athens, on September 11 2002, soon after the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected planner of the September 11 attacks the previous year.

A prison of some sort is known to exist on Diego Garcia: in 1984, a review by the US government’s general accounting office of construction work on the island reported that a “detention facility” had been completed the previous December. British ministers have also disclosed that a building on the island was redesignated as a prison after the September 11 attacks.

‘Confirmation’

Last June Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who investigated the CIA’s use of European territory and air space during prisoner operations, concluded in a report to the Council of Europe that prisoners had been held on the island.

Mr Marty, who later told the European parliament that he had received help from senior CIA officers, reported: “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.”

One possibility which the foreign affairs committee may explore is that suspects have been held on a prison ship off the coast of Diego Garcia. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said that he has heard from reliable sources that the US has held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean. There have also been second-hand accounts from detainees at Guantánamo of prisoners being held on US naval vessels.

One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve: “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

At a glance

· Diego Garcia is a 37-mile-long coral island surrounding a lagoon in the Indian Ocean, the largest such atoll in the Chagos archipelago. Discovered by the Portuguese in the 16th century, it remained uninhabited until French coconut planters shipped in slave labour 200 years later.

· Ceded to Britain after the Napoleonic wars, the archipelago was a dependency of Mauritius until 1965, when it was detached, later becoming the British Indian Ocean Territories, sovereign British territory.

· Over the next eight years the 2,000 inhabitants were forcibly removed, first to the Seychelles and then to Mauritius, where many remain economically marginalised. The atoll was leased to the US military and it later emerged that Washington made a series of secret payments, including a reported £14m discount on the Polaris nuclear missile system.

· A 50-strong group of UK military personnel act as customs officers, police and wildlife guardians, and their commanding officer is coroner. But this group is dwarfed by around 3,200 Americans.

· The Chagos islanders won a battle in their campaign to return when the appeal court ruled last May that the right to go home was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings”.

· This article was amended on Friday October 19 2007.

Bush World War III rant shows he’s really lost it now

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George W. Bush put his foot in his mouth again when he warned of the possibility of World War III breaking out.

The irresponsible remarks of the president of a country armed with nuclear weapons shocked the world.

“So I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Bush told reporters at a White House press conference on Wednesday, exactly one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran and expressed support for Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

What are we to make of the use of such language?

Either Bush has gone totally mad and now makes statements without consulting his advisors, or the neoconservatives are dreaming of a new world order and no longer feel compelled to hide their goal.

How can Bush talk this way when Iran’s nuclear activities are open to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency?

The IAEA, the UN’s only nuclear supervisory body, has announced it has found no evidence suggesting that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapons program, and Iran and the agency have taken constructive steps to clear up the remaining ambiguities one by one.

The Iraq issue should serve as a lesson to Bush and those who share his views. They attacked Iraq under the pretext that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, despite the fact that the IAEA and former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix repeatedly announced that they had not found any such weapons program in Iraq.

Now what has been the result? Over half a million deaths.

World leaders, scholars, peace activists, and U.S. Congressmen, both Republicans and Democrats, should ask Bush to explain his remarks about World War III.

And U.S. officials should put a muzzle on Bush to prevent him from giving people the impression that the United States is the main threat to world peace.

http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=155256

Man Tasered, Shot With Bean Bag Rounds For Filming Warrantless Police Search

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Acquitted Portland man sues after cops stated camera “could be used as a weapon”

Steve Watson
Infowars.net

A man from Portland Oregon is suing police for unlawful seizure with excessive force after officers fired a Taser and bean bag rounds at him when he refused to stop filming a warrantless search of his neighbour’s property last year.

According to a report in The Oregonian, Frank Waterhouse claims that on May 27, 2006 he was brutally assaulted by police when officers followed a sniffer dog onto the property in pursuit of a fleeing suspect.

Waterhouse says that the dog keyed on a car, prompting officers to break out a window which upset residents who maintain that no one ran onto the property. It was at that point that an angry resident grabbed a video camera and started to film the police search.

The Oregonian report states:

When one woman was told to stop recording, she gave the videocamera to Waterhouse. He walked to the edge of the property, climbed up a dirt embankment and continued to record. At one point, he yelled to his friend, “Yes, I got it all on film. They had no right to come on this property.”

He says in the suit that police immediately came after him, and yelled at him “put it down.” Officers moved towards him, and he said, “Don’t come after me.” Waterhouse said seconds later he was shot with a bean bag gun and a Taser and fell to the ground.

Here is the video that Waterhouse shot. It ends with a female officer approaching him and firing taser darts into his body:

Despite the video evidence that ends with Waterhouse’s painful screams, the police reports stated that Waterhouse had run away and that officers had to give chase, bean-bagging and tasering him in the process. One officer wrote, “He had refused to drop the camera which could be used as a weapon.”

So police knew Waterhouse was not a suspect and that he was merely holding a camera. Is a camera an adequate match for tasers and guns?

Police arrested Waterhouse on charges of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct, which were later dismissed in court. Now Mr Waterhouse is suing the Portland Police Department.

Filming in public is a right every American citizen has under the first and fourth amendments, there is no legal basis to seize cameras and footage.

In the past we have reported on cases in which police have seized cameras and film from innocent people under bogus charges of “wiretapping”. Earlier this year a man was charged in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with filming police officers during a routine traffic stop and faces up to seven years in prison. Last year a North Middleton Twp. man was charged in a street racing case that involved a wiretapping charge. Police claimed the man ordered associates to tape police breaking up an illegal race after officers told him to turn off their cameras. Furthermore, last June a 48-year-old man from Dover, New Hampshire was arrested for “wiretapping” for allegedly recording police while they were investigating him for driving while intoxicated.

Such charges are invalid because they flout privacy laws. Under the fourth amendment the expectation of privacy is not reasonable at such public places as automobile thoroughfares.

Furthermore, the expectation of privacy is not reasonable if there exists a vantage point from which anyone, not just a police officer, can see or hear what is going on.

See this previous report for more on the all out assault by police and city authorities on the right to film in public.

The Oregonian also reports that Waterhouse’s case is one of four similar incidents of “dirty tactics” on behalf of the police which are being heard this week.

The Portland Police Bureau have refused to comment on any of the cases.

 

WAPO fear peddler sez itzashame to peddle fear while peddling it

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Glenn Greenwald has written that pundit David Ignatius “vividly demonstrates the dishonesty and shallowness of our opinion-making elite.” (Read it here.)

At Salon, Greenwald has regularly dissected Ignatius, exposing his columns as outlets for Bush administration propaganda and lies.


The favorite image of the fear-mongering journalist. “…al-Qaeda is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature — a mushroom cloud,” writes David Ignatius.

In a column today, Ignatius takes up fear-mongering on “a nuclear al Qaeda.”

It is a topic which various pundits have regularly beaten Americans over the head with in the past year. Notably, in the pages of the Washington Post (the home of David Ignatius) and other big newspapers.

There is never a shortage of copy on al Qaeda and its plans to get the bomb. If you have passed over it be rest assured that it’s always the same 750-1000 words.

“We’ve all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime,” writes Ignatius as he takes on the job of being head fear-monger for yet another day.

“Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists’ job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy,” he continues, not honestly admitting he’s about to use the Bush administration’s favorite tool for “undermining the legal framework of our democracy.”

Many times druing the past year we have heard or read that some repellent piece of legislation — justifying torture or the granting of immunity to those involved in illegal wiretapping — must be passed because, according to the Bush administration, preventing a devastating attack from al Qaeda depends upon it.

It is the pure and simple methodology of the American fear-monger and it enhances the aim of terrorists in providing a rationale for those who are destroying our principles, trashing our once good reputation and corrosively eating away our liberties. To put it the Greenwald way, fear-mongering is used by the Bush administration and its enablers as a means to shred the Constitution and undermine the rule of law in the United States, vesting all power in an executive branch made immune from investigation.

“[It’s] worth listening to [the latest expert’s] warnings — not because they induce more numbing paralysis but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack,” writes Ignatius, parroting the nuclear-armed al Qaeda script.

There are already many experts and agencies working on preventing al Qaeda from getting bomb-grade uranium or plutonium and Ignatius surely knows this.

These warnings are numbing, not because of any paralyzing quality, but because they have been repeated so many times they have lost all civic value, becoming only blandishments used as cover for something bad being done or needing to be done behind our backs.

“[The] danger of a nuclear attack by terrorists is not only very real but disturbingly likely,” wrote Graham Allison deadeningly for the Baltimore Sun on July 2.

“Who could be planning a nuclear terrorist attack?” the man mused rhetorically.

“Al-Qaida remains a formidable enemy with clear nuclear ambitions.”

The Sun’s Harvard-expert-on-nuclear-al-Qaida continued: “Former CIA Director George J. Tenet wrote in his memoirs that al-Qaida’s leadership has remained ‘singularly focused on acquiring WMD’ – weapons of mass destruction – and willing to ‘pay whatever it would cost to get their hands on fissile material.'”

“Now that the uproar over [George Tenet’s] mistaken ‘slam dunk’ assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it’s worth rereading [his book again],” writes Ignatius, copying from the same menu. “It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions.”

“Consider the worst-case scenario: a suitcase nuclear attack at a presidential inauguration, with the outgoing and incoming president and vice president, most of Congress, and the Supreme Court present; the outgoing Cabinet scheduled to leave office; and no incoming Cabinet members yet confirmed,” wrote another fear-mongering hack, this time from the American Enterprise Institute, for the Washington Post, only in July.

Ignatius roped in the mythology of the dreaded Mubtakkar of Death, too.

The Mubtakkar of Death was an unseen instrument of catastrophe in a so-called cyanide bomb plot that was allegedly not carried out because Ayman al Zawahiri decided to spare New York City for reasons known only to the journalist, Ron Suskind, who used the tale to sell his book on the Bush administration-led war on terror, The One Percent Doctrine, to other journalists.


“Most chilling of all was Zawahiri’s decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system,” wrote Ignatius. “He told the plotters to stand down because ‘we have something better in mind.’ What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don’t know.”

The Mubtakkar of Death was terrible to behold, it was said. But because it was never used (actually, one was — in Afghanistan, where it fizzled, but no one includes that part of the story), something even more terrible had to be in the pipeline, said the fear-mongers.

If you ask someone in the street what the great threat to the nation, the Mubtakkar, was today, they won’t know.

The only people who do still know are journalists who jumped on board the publicity train for The One Percent Doctrine in June of 2006.

Your friendly neighborhood GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow punctured the story with a series of articles. (See here and here.)

“So what to do about this [nuclear] danger?” writes Ignatius. “The first requirement … is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces?”

Again and again, the same numbing details and claims on the building of al Qaeda’s bomb are delivered through the press.

They have been passed out so many times it seems they ought to be put into a required course in high school: “How Terrorists Might Build the Atomic Bomb and Your Civic Duty in Understanding the Menace which Threatens Us All (0r those of us in Washington, DC, the first address of interest to the bomb-makers.)”

“One way or another it will be no great feat to transport the stolen [bomb-grade uranium] to Istanbul where assembling it into a workable bomb will require a machine shop, a nuclear scientist, several technicians and up to four months of work,” wrote some other fear-mongering hack for the New York Times in May. (One hallmark of the script is that you can cut and paste pieces of it together, taken from any article delivering it, and the result will read fine.)

“In [one] fictional scenario … a nondescript terrorist drove a vehicle-borne explosive’ on Interstate 465 bound for downtown Indianapolis,” wrote another fear-mongering op-ed hack embarked on an alleged public service mission at the Indianapolis Star, also in May. “When the terrorist saw [a] cop, he detonated the bomb while driving.”

There. Now you know how it will be done. Again. Remember, it’s not a matter of if, but only when.

Your course — “How Terrorists Might Build the Atomic Bomb and Your Civic Duty in Understanding How an Industrious Army of Fear-Mongers are using it to help rip up the Constitution” — is complete.

 Reasonably astute readers have probably figured out that, theoretically, were al Qaeda to get the bomb and detonate it on American soil during the last months of the Bush administration, we would most certainly see the rest of our democracy killed off in the immediate government response. And its burial would be rubber-stamped and rabidly endorsed by the present Congress and judiciary. This being the case, there is no rational reason to do the terrorists’ work for them ahead of time.

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2007/10/daily-mushroom-cloud-wapo-fear-peddler.html

History will see us all as Bush’s “Good Germans”

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Six years ago France’s Le Monde titled “Nous sommes tous Américains ! – We are all Americans ! ” Six days ago the German Marshall Fund published its Transatlantic Trends 2007, making it plain that 46 percent of Europeans believe U.S.-EU relations not to improve even under a new U.S. administration, and 58 percent of French interviewees even favoring the EU to address global threats in disregard of the United States. In the collective memory of the world 9/11 lives in infamy, in the United States as an unprovoked attack and national trauma, while the majority of mankind perceives it as a killer argument employed by the Bush Administration to vindicate the crusades long decided on in advance. As diverse as they are, both views are justified. 9/11 is a date which will live in infamy, and both perpetrators, those who have committed the crime, and those who have abused it must be brought to justice for the global divide to heal.

The Bush Administration’s felonies and complete failure on all fronts can only be fully comprehended when set in historic context. On December 8, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the declaration of war against Japan on behalf of a previously deeply divided nation, the American people entered the noblest war they ever engaged in as one, and Winston Churchill noted in his diary, “Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Fifty-six years later George Bush presides over a nation more torn apart then ever, the United States, and not Iran or North Korea, are perceived as the greatest threat to world peace, and Ahmed Chalabi surely must have authored a similar diary entry.

Yet after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the premises for U.S. action were almost identical. The Japanese attack on the Pacific Fleet forced the American people to tear apart the strait jacket of isolationism and to finally adopt leadership in the epic struggle between liberalism and fascism they had tried to ignore since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and united all major powers in a grand coalition unseen since the Napoleonic Wars. Before the attack on the Twin Towers, who would have ever dreamed of Russia giving the U.S. full access to, and unconditional support in Central Asia less than ten years after the end of the Cold War, even supporting her to indefinitely occupy Afghanistan, the Kremlin’s equivalent of Vietnam? In his essay The End of History Francis Fukuyama was still deriding religious fundamentalists as “crackpot messiahs”, after 9/11 at the latest, they and the grievances of the Muslim world at large should have had had the world’s undivided attention. After WWII, it was understood that a military defeat of fascism had to be complemented by an ideological exorcism, that winning the peace and the hearts and minds of the defeated is as conditional to complete victory as aerial supremacy. With the invasion of Iraq and the incomprehensible aberration of Guantanamo, instead, George Bush has provided Osama bin Laden with a Heaven-sent PR he keeps making full use of until this very day.

The list of misconducts, crimes, and incompetences is as infinitely continuable as it is tragic. Yet, even in these times of moral decay America is no Chile, and George Bush and his cronies must not be allowed to steal away with impunity and hide behind the Augusto Pinochet-self-proclaimed-Senator-for-life-like immunity of a former head of state. They have to be hold accountable for betraying the trust the American people had placed in them in this moment of utter grief and taunting the victims of 9/11. An impeachment, as justified as it is, would only serve as a campaign tool and is unsuitable to initiate a national healing process. Such a trial is too important to let it degenerate into a farce or nothing but partisan argy-bargy. It has to be backed by a plurality of the populace, including a majority of the Republican Party and her voters, to furnish a universally accepted narrative and viable accounting of the past six years.

Even sixty years after the collapse of Nazi-Germany the accounting of the complicity of each individual in Central Europe is not satisfyingly concluded. As the Holocaust and the sixty million casualties of WWII cannot be blamed on Adolf Hitler alone, it would be too easy to rid oneself of all blame at the entrance of the White House. To some extent we are all culpable of acting as “willing executioners”, as Daniel Goldhagen titled his ’96 reckoning of virulent anti-Semitism in German pre-WWII society. Or as Gary Kamiya today put it on Salon.com:

“Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history …

“Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.”

A complete accounting of the last six years must not ignore our role in it, of each and every one of us.

“Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation’s defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character.”

We have to accept the role we played for too long, if not as Bush’s “willing executioners”, than at least as traumatized lemmings allowing an establishment to abuse our grief und paralyzation, corporate media to engage in voluntary self-censorship, blind obedience and taking every White House press briefing at face value, of Democrats too easily abandoning their designated role as an opposition whenever Karl Rove swung the national security-bludgeon, of not having stood up to our beliefs, of rather turning to prejudices than trying to engage with a complex culture far from naturally hostile to us, of too willingly buying into catchphrases and quick workarounds when deep reflection and serious contemplation would have been required.

If an accounting of George Bush’s crimes is not accompanied by an unsparing analysis of our shortcomings, forbearance and ignorance, 9/11 will always live in infamy. Not only his, not only al-Qaeda’s, but also our own.

http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2007/09/history-will-see-us-all-as-bushs-good.html

Man Hacks 911 System, Sends SWAT on Bogus Raid

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Washington man accused of faking emergency call that sent armed response to unsuspecting Lake Forest family’s home.

By SALVADOR HERNANDEZ

SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple, but found they were only a part of a false emergency call caused by a teenager who hacked into the county’s emergency response system, authorities said.

As officers swarmed the home with assault rifles, dogs and a helicopter, a Lake Forest couple and their two toddlers inside their home slept unsuspectingly.

On March 29 at 11:30 p.m., authorities allege, Randall Ellis, a 19-year-old from Mukilteo, Wash., hacked into the county’s 911 system from his home and placed a false emergency call, prompting a fully armed response to the home of an unsuspecting couple that could have ended tragically.

Thinking that a prowler was roaming his back yard, a resident of the home, identified only as Doug B. in the district attorney’s complaint filed in court, walked outside with a kitchen knife as SWAT officers from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department waited with assault rifles.

“It was just a horrifying experience,” said Doug B., who requested not to be identified further. “You think you feel safe in your own home. We had no idea what was going on.”

Doug B. and his wife did not feel safe in their home for weeks after the incident and wondered why their home was the one selected.

Doug B. was not able to go back to sleep for hours that night, and he rigged the doors and windows before he was able to go to bed.

“I thought someone was in my back yard, and they were going to get my family,” he said. “It was terrifying for months afterward.”

Officers apprehended and cuffed the resident and his wife, identified as Stacy B. It was moments later they learned the call was false, said Lt. Mike McHenry of the South County Investigations Bureau.

“The danger is significant,” said Lt. Don Barnes, chief of police services for Lake Forest. “That (situation) played out OK, although it scared the victims significantly.”

Ellis is expected to appear in an Orange County courtroom Monday to face charges of computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence, falsely reporting a crime and assault with an assault weapon by proxy.

“It’s not a prank,” Emami said. “People’s lives were in danger.”

Farrah Emami, spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, said
Ellis selected the couple’s name and address at random and electronically transferred false information into the 911 system.

Authorities believe this is not the only time that Ellis has done this. As part of their investigation, authorities believe Ellis created similar false SWAT responses in Bullhead, Ariz.; Millcreek Township, Pa.; and in his hometown of Mukilteo, Wash.

False 911 calls are placed all the time, McHenry said, but he said this is the first time someone has hacked into Orange County’s system and created a false call in this way.

“We’ve seen nothing like this,” McHenry said. “This was unique. This was pretty serious.”

Other law enforcement agencies have seen similar breaches into their 911 systems as part of a trend picked up by computer hackers in the nation called “SWATting”, Barnes said.

The purpose is to create a false 911 call that appears to be coming from the residence in question and prompt a SWAT response from local law enforcement agencies, Barnes said.

Authorities would not divulge details on how Ellis hacked into the system, stating that doing so would jeopardize the investigation and possibly create copycats. But the call that prompted a full response to the Lake Forest home started as a call to the Orange County Fire Authority as a drug overdose and progressed into a possible murder, McHenry said.

A supposed teenager stated someone had overdosed on cocaine. The teenager then stated he had been shot in the shoulder and that attackers were going to go shoot and kill his sister, he said.

Canines, a helicopter and SWAT officers responded to the false call.

“It was a pretty large response,” McHenry said.

Through electronic forensics, investigators were able to link Ellis to the false call, Emami said.

Ellis does not appear to have a criminal record, Emami said, but it looks like he’s done this before. He was taken into custody by authorities in Mukilteo on Friday. He waived extradition Monday in court and is expected to appear in Orange County Superior Court on Oct. 22 for an arraignment hearing.

Now Doug B. said he is hoping that the upcoming court proceedings can shed some light into why this happened and why his family was targeted.

“My family is my life and to feel like its being threatened is horrifying,” he said.

UN document confirms Israel hit Syrian nuclear reactor?

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Update: UN caught redacting document; Update: It was a translation error, claims UN

By Allahpundit

Via Dan Riehl, Fox News has picked up the scent of that bizarre story I linked in the Bush post this morning about the Syrian ambassador to the UN allegedly admitting during a UN committee meeting that Israel’s air raid on September 6 hit some sort of nuclear facility. And they’ve got a piece of paper to show for it:

A high-ranking Syrian official confirmed that Israel’s airstrike last month in northern Syria hit a nuclear facility, according to a document obtained Wednesday by FOX News.

“Israel was the fourth-largest exporter of weapons of mass destruction and a violator of other nations’ airspace, and it had taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria,” Syrian representative Bassam Darwish is quoted in the document as saying.

Diplomats familiar with the document cannot explain why July 6 was invoked, instead of Sept. 6, the date both countries say an incident occurred. A State Department source tells FOX News the best explanation is that Darwish misspoke…

One U.S. delegate told colleagues he could not believe his ears when the Syrian diplomat made his statement and that the resulting document was close to verbatim, and another source told FOX News the document reinforces what people heard [the Syrian representative] say in the actual debate.

Note once again that quotation in the second paragraph of the blockquote. Now here’s the problem. The Fox article links to what it claims is the document in question at the UN website. Except … that quotation doesn’t appear in the UN document. Here’s what does; it’s a paraphrase of the Syrian ambassador’s remarks:

Moreover, the entity that was the fourth largest exporter of lethal weapons in the world, that which violated the airspace of sovereign States and carried out military aggression against them, as had happened on 6 September against Syria, such an entity, with all those characteristics and more, had no right to go on lying without shame.

No mention of July and certainly no mention of anything nuclear. Unless you believe the Foxies are just making things up wholesale – and at the risk of offending our three lefty readers, I don’t – then the UN document has obviously been redacted since Fox’s story went live. The question is, assuming the ambassador did say July instead of September, are we sure he misspoke? Remember, there was a notorious “accident” in Syria in July allegedly involving the installation of chemical warheads on Syrian missiles. The “accident” supposedly killed dozens of Iranian engineers and multiple Syrian soldiers; it was significant enough that a respected intel think tank reported on it at the time. Raw Story tried to connect that incident to the September 6 air raid a few weeks ago, albeit denying all the while that there was any nuclear facility involved in the latter attack. So now I’m wondering: was there more than meets the eye to the July incident, such that the ambassador might reference that month in the context of talking about an Israeli attack? No way to tell at the moment but worth flagging in the likely event that there’s more to come on this story.

Update: As suspected, the google cache proves that the UN document was indeed redacted. Follow the link and you’ll find the paragraph quoted by Fox verbatim. Thanks to the various people who tipped us on this.

Update: Another day, another Middle Eastern fascist helped out of a tough spot by a claim of translation error.

The United Nations on Wednesday backtracked on a report that had quoted a Syrian official as saying an Israeli airstrike hit a nuclear facility in Syria, blaming an interpreter’s error for the purported comment that made headlines across the Middle East…

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA, quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry official as saying the representative was misquoted.

After more than seven hours of investigation Wednesday, U.N. officials agreed that was the case.

“There was an interpretation error made yesterday when the First Committee was in session,” U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said. “There was no use of the word nuclear.”

Do a word search in the UN document and see for yourself how many times the word “nuclear” was used during the meeting, including by Arabic-speaking diplomats from Kuwait and Lebanon. The interpreter got it right everywhere else in the document – but just happened to make a mistake at a fantastically sensitive part of the Syrian ambassador’s statement? The guy obviously let the genie out of the bottle inadvertently and now the UN is trying to put it back in before it sets people in the region even further on edge. Beyond pathetic.

More evidence the CIA is a terrorist outfit

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Mistaken identity leads to abuses that Congress should investigate

In the 1985 film “Brazil,” anti-terrorist police in a grim industrialized society burst into a modest flat and cart off a hapless man named Buttle. His family never sees him again.

The fact that the real target of the raid was supposed to be someone named Tuttle is of no concern to anyone in power because there was no one else in power looking over their shoulder. That, of course, couldn’t happen in real life.

Yes, it could. Our government did something remarkably similar, except for the part about the wrong man never being seen again, and our judicial system has shamefully refused to do anything about it.

On New Year’s Eve 2003, one Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was pulled off a bus at the Serbian- Macedonian border for no reason that he was able to fathom, questioned for 23 days and then turned over to the CIA. His clothes were torn off. He was beaten, injected with drugs and chained spread-eagle to the floor. He spent four months in a CIA prison in Afghanistan. Then someone realized that the prisoner was Khaled el-Masri, not reputed terrorist mastermind Khalid al-Masri. Without apology or even explanation, el-Masri was flown to Albania and dumped along the side of the road. At least the agents didn’t kill him.

El-Masri sued the CIA. A federal appeals court threw out his case, accepting the government argument that allowing it to go to trial would expose secrets about how our government looks for terrorists. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court, without comment, refused to take up the appeal.

Even if we don’t care about innocent people we’ve kidnapped and tortured, we darn well ought to care about an intelligence system that can be so horribly wrong about who it grabs. If it took five months of “aggressive interrogation” for our spies to figure out they were torturing someone who had nothing of value to tell them, then their usefulness to national security is less than nothing.

Not only had they further besmirched the reputation of the United States within the civilized world, they greatly increased the real Khalid al-Masri’s chances of moving about the world freely.

Congress, which has committees that can handle secrecy, won’t protect our national security if it ignores this case. It will damage it further.

Copyright 1999 – 2007 – The Buffalo News copyright-protected material.

Russian Press Blasts Anglo-Saxon Terrorist Controllers

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Webster Griffin Tarpley
www.tarpley.net

In the wake of the terrorist atrocity at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in the Russian Federation, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made remarks to the western press which expose the key role of the US and British governments in backing Chechen terrorism. Whatever Putin’s previous role in events regarding Chechnya, his current political posture is one which sharply undercuts the legitimacy of the supposed Anglo-American “war on terror,” and which points up the hypocrisy of the Bush regime’s pledge that it will make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them – since Washington and London are currently harboring Chechens implicated in terrorism. All in all, Putin’s response to Chechen events has, with the third anniversary of 9/11, brought the collapse of the official 9/11 myth measurably closer. The hypocritical terror demagogy of Bush and Blair has now been undercut by the head of state of another permanent member of the UN Security Council.

On Monday September 6, Putin spoke for three and one half hours with a group of some 30 western correspondents and Russia experts at his dacha near Novo Ogarevo outside Moscow. There is no official transcript so far, but accounts have been published in The Guardian, The Independent, and Le Monde. The Washington Post waited until Friday, September 10 to publish an article, but left out the most significant remarks. There are now signs that the Anglo-American press is beginning a new campaign against Putin as a dictator, stressing the obvious in order to silence his attacks on the US-UK sponsorship of Chechen terror.

Putin, a KGB veteran who knows whereof he speaks, told the gathering that the school massacre showed that “certain western circles would like to weaken Russia, just as the Romans wanted to destroy Carthage.” He thus suggested that the US and UK, not content with having bested Russia in the Cold War, now wanted to proceed to the dismemberment and total destruction of Russia — a Carthaginian peace like the one the Romans finally imposed at the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BC, when they poured salt into the land of Carthage so nothing would ever grow there again. (Le Monde, September 8, 2004)

“There is no link between Russian policy in Chechnya and the hostage-taking in Beslan,” said Putin, meaning that the terrorists were using the Chechen situation as a pretext to attack Russia. According to a paraphrase in Le Monde: “The aim of that international terrorism, supported more or less openly by foreign states, whose names the Russian president didn’t want to name, is to weaken Russia from the inside, by criminalizing its economy, by provoking its disintegration through propagating separatism in the Caucasus and the transformation of the region into a staging ground for actions directed against the Russian Federation.”

“Mr. Putin,” continues Le Monde, “reiterated the accusation he had launched in a veiled form against western countries which appear to use double-talk. On the one side, their leaders assure the Russian President of their solidarity in the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, the intelligence services and the military — ‘who have not abandoned their Cold War prejudices,’ in Putin’s words – entertain contacts with those the international press calls the ‘rebels.’ ‘Why are those who emulate Bin Laden called terrorists and the people who kill children, rebels? Where is the logic?’ asked Vladimir Putin, and then gave the answer: ‘Because certain political circles in the West want to weaken Russia just like the Romans wanted to destroy Carthage.’ ‘But, continued Putin, “we will not allow this scenario to come to pass.’”

Le Monde continues: “This is, according to Putin a bad calculation, because Russia is a factor of stability. By weakening it, the Cold War nostalgics are clearly acting against the interests of their own country.” In Putin’s words: “We are the sincere champions of this cooperation against terrorism, we are open and loyal partners. But if foreign services have contacts with the ‘rebels,’ they cannot be treated as reliable allies, as Russia is for them.” (Le Monde, September 8, 2004)

In Guardian correspondent Jonathan Steele’s account of the meeting with Putin, this is the Russian President’s response to the US and UK on the question of negotiating with the Chechen guerrillas of Aslan Maskhadov: “Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers?” (London Guardian, September 7, 2004)

As Michel Chossudovsky pointed out some years back, the Chechen leaders Basayev and Al Khattab were trained in the CIA-run camps for Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. In 1999, Putin rode to power on a backlash against Chechen terror which he had in all probability staged himself — thus judoing a long-standing US-UK capability. The key point is that the Russian press is now openly denouncing London and Washington as centers for terrorist control. This can blow the lid off the 9-11 hoax.

On Saturday, September 4, Putin had delivered a national television address to the Russian people on the Beslan tragedy, which had left more than 300 dead, over half of them children. The main thrust was that terrorism constitutes international proxy warfare against Russia. Among other things Putin said: “In general, we need to admit that we did not fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world. In any case, we proved unable to react adequately. We showed ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten.”

“Some people would like to tear from us a tasty morsel. Others are helping them. They are helping, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these gains.”

“What we are dealing with, are not isolated acts intended to frighten us, not isolated terrorist attacks. What we are facing is direct intervention of international terror directed against Russia. This is a total, cruel and full-scale war that again and again is taking the lives of our fellow citizens.” (Kremlin.ru, September 6, 2004)

Around the time of 9/11, Putin had pointed to open recruitment of Chechen terrorists going on in London, telling a German interviewer: “In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today – not officially, but effectively in the open – they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan.” (Focus – German weekly newsmagazine, September 2001) In addition, it is generally known in well-informed European circles that the leaders of the Chechen rebels were trained by the CIA, and that the Chechens were backed by US-sponsored anti-Russian fighters from Afghanistan. In recent months, US-UK backed Chechens have destroyed two Russian airliners and attacked a Moscow subway station, in addition to the school atrocity.

Some aspects of Putin’s thinking were further explained by a press interview given by Aslambek Aslakhanov, the Chechen politician who is one of Putin’s official advisors. A dispatch from RIA Novosti reported Aslakhanov’s comments as follows: “The terrorists who seized the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, took their orders from abroad. ‘They were talking with people not from Russia, but from abroad. They were being directed,’ said Aslambek Aslakhanov, advisor to the President of the Russian Federation. ‘It is the desire of our “friends” — in quotation marks – who have probably for more than a decade been carrying out enormous, titanic work, aimed at dismembering Russia. These people have worked very hard, and the fact that the financing comes from there and that they are the puppet masters, is also clear.” Aslakhanov, who was named by the terrorists as one of the people they were going to hold talks with, also told RIA Novosti that the bid for such “talks” was completely phony. He said that the hostage-takers were not Chechens. When he talked to them, by phone, in Chechen, they demanded that he talk Russian, and the ones he spoke with had the accents of other North Caucasus ethnic groups. (RIA Novosti, September 6, 2004)

On September 7, RIA Novosti reported on the demand of the Russian Foreign Ministry that two leading Chechen figures be extradited from London and Washington to stand trial in Russia. A statement from the Russia Foreign Ministry’s Department of Information and Press indicated that Russia will put the United States and Britain on the spot about extraditing two top Chechen separatist officials, who have been given asylum in Washington and London, respectively. They are Akhmad Zakayev, known as a “special representative” of Aslan Maskhadov (currently enjoying asylum in London), and Ilyas Akhmadov, the “Foreign Minister” of the unrecognized “Chechen Republic-Ichkeria” (now residing in the USA). (RIA Novosti, September 7, 2004)

“SCHOOL SEIZURE WAS PLANNED IN WASHINGTON AND LONDON”

This was the headline of an even more explicit unsigned commentary by the Russian news agency KMNews.ru. This analysis blames the Beslan school massacre squarely on the U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The point of departure here is that Shamil Basayev, the brutal Chechen field commander, has been linked to the attack (something that Putin advisor Aslambek Aslakhanov yesterday said was known to the Russian FSB, successor of the KGB). The article highlights the recent rapprochement of London and Washington with key representatives of Aslan Maskhadov: Britain’s giving asylum to Akhmad Zakayev (December 2003) and the USA welcoming Ilyas Akhmadov (August 2004).

KMNews: CHECHEN TERROR BOSS ON US STATE DEPARTMENT PAYROLL

KMNews writes: “In early August, … ‘Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Chechen Republic-Ichkeria’ Ilyas Akhmadov received political asylum in the USA. And for his ‘outstanding services,’ Akhmadov received a Reagan-Fascell grant,” including a monthly stipend, medical insurance, and a well-equipped office with all necessary support services, including the possibility of meetings with political circles and leading U.S. media….“What about our partners in the ‘anti-terrorist coalition,’ who provided asylum, offices and money to Maskhadov’s representatives?” asks the Russian press agency. Citing the official expressions of sympathy and offers of help from President Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, KMNews warns: “But let’s not shed tears of gratitude just yet. First we should ask: were ‘Special Representative of the President of CRI’ Zakayev or ‘Minister of Foreign Affairs of the CRI’ Akhmadov, located in Great Britain and the USA, aware of the terrorist acts that were in preparation? Beyond a doubt…. And let’s also find out, how Akhmadov is spending the money provided by the Reagan-Fascell Foundation. We note: this Foundation is financed by the U.S. Congress through the budget of the State Department! “Thus, the conclusion is obvious. Willingly or not, Downing Street and the White House provoked the guerrillas to these latest attacks. Willingly or not, Great Britain and the USA have nurtured the separatists with material, information and diplomatic resources. Willingly or not, the policy of London and Washington fostered the current terrorist acts.” “As the ancients said, cui bono? Perhaps we are too hasty with such sweeping accusations against our ‘friends’ and ‘partners’? Is there a motive for the Anglo-American ‘anti-terrorist coalition’ to fan the fires of terror in the North Caucasus?” “Alas, there is a motive. It is no secret, that the West is vitally interested in maintaining instability in the Caucasus. That makes it easier to pump out the fossil fuels, extracted in the Caspian region, and it makes it easier to control Georgia and Azerbaijan, and to exert influence on Armenia. Finally, it makes it easier to drive Russia out of the Caspian and the Caucasus. Divide et impera! – the leaders of the Roman Empire already introduced this simple formula for subjugation.”

KMNews: TERROR SUPPORTERS “ON THE BANKS OF THE THAMES AND THE POTOMAC”

KMNews continues: “Alas, it must be recognized that the co-authors of the current tragic events are to be found not in the Arab countries of the Middle East, but on the banks of the Thames and the Potomac. Will the leadership of Russia be able to make decisions, in this situation?” “Yes – if there is the political will. The first thing is that black must be called black, and white, white. It is time to admit that no “antiterrorist coalition” exists, that the West is pursuing its egotistical interests (spreading its political influence, seizing fossil fuels deposits, etc.). Our own coalition needs to be formed, with nations that are genuinely interested in eliminating terror in the North Caucasus. Finally, it is time to change the entire tactics and strategy of counterterrorism measures. It is obvious that catching female suicide bombers on the streets of Moscow or carrying out operations to free children who are taken hostage, are, so to speak, the ‘last line of defense.’ It is time to learn to make preemptive strikes against the enemy, and it’s time to carry combat onto the territory of the enemy. Otherwise, we shall be defeated.” (Source: KMNews.ru, September 7, 2004)

Izvestia stresses the probable ethnic composition of the terrorist death squad, and its likely role in exacerbating tensions in the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus. Izvestia finds the targeting of North Ossetia in the Beslan incident “not accidental,” pointing to the danger of “irreversible consequences” for interethnic relations between Ossetians, Ingushis and Chechens. “Russia is now facing multi-vectored threats along the entire Caucasus,” the paper writes. (Izvestia, September 3, 2004)

In the wake of Putin’s speech, prominent Russian commentators discussed the recent terror campaign against Russia in terms of a possible “casus belli” for a new East-West conflict. Several commentaries have reaffirmed Putin’s key statement, that international terrorism has no independent existence, but functions only as “an instrument,” wielded by powerful international circles committed (in part) to the early destruction of Russia as a nuclear-armed power.

A commentary in the widely read Russian business news service RosBusinessConsult (RBC) was entitled “The West is unleashing Jihads against Russia.” In language seldom heard since the end of the Cold War, RBC charges that the recent wave of terror attacks against Russia, beginning with the sabotage of two airplanes and a terror bombing at a Moscow subway station, and culminating so far in the Beslan attack, was immediately preceded by what RBC calls “an ultimatum from the West,” for Russia to turn over the Caucasus region to “Anglo-Saxon control.”

ANGLO-SAXON TERROR ULTIMATUM TO RUSSIA FROM THE LONDON ECONOMIST

“Some days prior to the onset of the series of acts of terrorism in Russia, which has cost hundreds of lives, a number of extremely influential Western mass-media, expressing establishment positions, issued a personal warning to Vladimir Putin, that Russia should get out of the Caucasus, or else his political career would come to an end. Therefore, when the President on Saturday spoke of a declaration of war having been made against Russia, this was not just a matter of so-called ‘international terrorism’… One week prior to the first acts of terrorism, the authoritative British magazine, the Economist, which expresses the positions of Great Britain’s establishment, formulated the Western position concerning the Caucasus, and above all the policy of the Anglo-Saxon elite, in a very precise manner,” RBC writes.

CZECH NGO BLOWS UP RUSSIAN TANK; BRITISH EXPERTS TRAIN CHECHEN GANGS

The RBC commentary goes on to cite the Economist of August 19, which contained what RBC characterizes as a virtual ultimatum to Russia. RBC notes that “the carrying out of such a series of coordinated, highly professional terrorist attacks, would be impossible without the help of qualified ‘specialists’.” RBC notes that at the end of August one such “specialist,” working for an NGO based in the Czech republic, was arrested for blowing up a Russian armed personnel carrier. Also, British “experts” have been found instructing Chechen gangs in how to lay mines. “It cannot be excluded, that also in Beslan, the logistics of the operation were provided by just such ‘specialists’,” notes RBC.

The RBC editorial concludes: “Apparently, by having recourse to large-scale terrorist actions, the forces behind that terrorism, have now acted directly to force a ‘change’ in the political situation in the Caucasus, propagating interethnic wars into Russia. “The only way to resist this, would be for Moscow to make it known, that we are ready to fight a new war, according to new rules and new methods – not with mythical ‘international terrorists’, who do not and never existed, but with the controllers of the ‘insurgents and freedom fighters’; a war against the geopolitical puppet-masters, who are ready to destroy thousands of Russians for the sake of achieving their new division of the world.” (RBC, September 7, 2004)

In a related comment, the Chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, Dmitri Rogozin, declared in an interview on Sunday September 5: “I think those behind the terrorism are those who would like to see Russia totally discredited as a power…. I think that the aim is to destabilize the political situation in the country and plunge Russia into total chaos.” (Ekho Moskvy, September 6, 2004)

Western press organs have responded to the school massacre with a campaign to blame, not the terrorists, but the Putin regime and Russian society. This disingenuous policy has further stoked Russian resentment. On September 6, Strana.ru headlined, “Western Press: The Tragedy Is Russia’s Own Fault,” commenting that “unlike official politicians, journalists do not want to admit that the bombings and hostage-takings in our country are acts of international terrorism.” Another example of this Putin-bashing was the article by Masha Lippman in the Washington Post of September 9.

A basic reason for the US-UK surrogate warfare against Russia is the great Anglo-Saxon fear of a continental bloc of the type which emerged during the run — up to Bush’s Iraq aggression. The centerpiece of the continental bloc is the German-Russian relationship. Washington and London fear that Russia will soon agree to accept euros in payment for its oil deliveries. This would not just prevent the Anglo-Americans from further skimming off oil transactions between Russia and Europe. It would represent the beginning of the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, a role which the battered greenback, weakened by Bush’s $500 billion yearly trade deficit and Bush’s $750 billion budget deficit, can no longer fulfill. If Russia moves to the euro, it is expected that the Eurasian giant may be quickly followed by Iran, Indonesia, Venezuela, and other countries. This could put an end to the ability of the US to run astronomical foreign trade deficits, and would place the question of a US return to a production-based economy on the agenda. The oil-euro question is expected to be discussed at the upcoming Russian-German economic summit.

RUSSIA TO PAY FOR OIL WITH EUROS?

In a half-page article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and headlined “Realizing the Strategic Partnership,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov predicted key progress in the energy sector. Lavrov said that numerous proposals by Moscow on how to expand cooperation in the sphere of future-shaping high-tech branches of the economy will be put on the agenda of the September 11-12 German-Russian economic summit in Hamburg. Russia calls for the development of “mutually beneficial cooperation in aerospace, information technology, telecom, biotechnology, development of new materials, laser technology, and nanotechnology. Lavrov wrote that Russia expects a breakthrough at the Hamburg talks – which will also deal with the energy sector. (Frankfurter Allgemeine, September 3, 2004)

VIDEO: The war on Iran is on

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“This path was selected a long time ago”

Today, George Bush invoked the ideaof World War III in connection with Iran… after the Russian leader Vladimir Putin declared Iran has no nuclear weapons program.




http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/171.html

Unfortunately, they can… Here is the problem:

A huge percentage of peace-loving Americans believe that Bush would never seriously consider attacking Iran.

They point to the lack of support Bush has at home, the fact that US military resources are stretched thin in Iraq and the over all insanity of the idea. Unfortunately, not only would Bush and Co.*consider* attacking Iran…they give every indication – to people with eyes that can see – that they are preparing to attack the country before the Bush administration ends its term. It is hard to protest a war you do not believecould ever happen.

Believe it.

And if you think attack Iran is a bad idea, start protesting now. There is probably no more important pro-peace and pro-Constitution action you can be involved in now.

UK government accessing telephone records

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Indymedia

At the beginning of October, the Labour government “activated” part three of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) granting various branches of the state wide powers to access telephone records without recourse to a judge.


According to some reports, up to 800 state bodies and agencies can now seek access to telephone records, including all of Britain’s local authorities and even such quasi-non-governmental organisations as the Scottish Ambulance Service Board or the Food Standards Agency.

Security and Counter-terrorism Minister Tony McNulty told BBC Radio 4 that the data could provide three levels of information, with the simplest being about the phone’s owner. The second level of data is not merely about the subscriber, “but also the calls made by that phone.

“And the third level, which is purely for the security forces, police, etc., is not just the subscriber information and the calls made, but also the calls coming in and location data–where the calls are made from.”

Since telecom operators retain geographic data about the “cells” over which calls are routed, these provide sufficient information to locate a mobile phone. In urban areas, where the cell transmitters are very densely sited, this enables a phone’s position to be calculated to within a few feet.

Further powers include demanding encryption keys that may have been used to encrypt data and emails be handed over, with failure to comply attracting a possible prison sentence of from two to five years.

Under section 49 of RIPA, the police can serve a notice requiring encrypted data to be “put into an intelligible form”–i.e., decrypted. It can force people to hand over their encryption keys, which will then be held by the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC). According to the Home Office, this is a “twenty-four hour centre operated on behalf of all the law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies, providing a central facility for the complex processing needed to derive intelligible material from lawfully intercepted computer-to-computer communications and from lawfully seized computer data that are increasingly encrypted.”

The government has sought to justify this extension of state powers mainly by citing the “fight against terrorism,” but it has also admitted that the use of encryption has grown more rapidly than it had anticipated, and that this is also a reason why it has now “activated” the powers already contained in RIPA when it was placed on the statute books in 2000.

The new powers provide a quasi-judicial veneer for the fact that various state agencies were already seeking far wider access to private data, and this is set to expand even further. A commentary by the civil liberties organisation Statewatch in 2003 had already noted that “hundreds of thousands of requests for access to communication data are already being made by agencies even though there is no legal power to do so.”

According to a report this month by the civil and human rights group Liberty, there were “nearly 440,000 authorisations for communications data traffic between June 2005 and March 2006.”

This massive extension of the state’s powers to intrude into the life of the ordinary citizen was introduced without recourse to a debate in parliament but through the mechanism of a “parliamentary instrument” signed by the home secretary, Jacquie Smith, which one press report said was “quietly approved” in July.

The government claims to have held “full consultation” on the introduction of the new measures, but this is contested by those who follow civil liberties issues closely. Writing in the Observer newspaper, Henry Porter said, “Yeah, right. When? With whom? The Welsh Ambulance Service? The Postal Services Commission? Wychavon district council? All of them can now acquire your phone records. There was absolutely no debate about this, and it is nothing but a straight lie to claim otherwise.”

“We are not intruding into people’s private lives,” a Home Office spokesperson said, going on to claim that the exercise of the new powers was consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights and UK Human Rights Act, as long as the demand for decryption is “both necessary and proportionate.”

But who decides what is “necessary and proportionate”? And what public scrutiny is there to ensure that these powers are not being abused arbitrarily?

To require judicial approval for such a level of access requests would completely swamp the court system. So authorisation has been devolved to what Statewatch has called the office of the “toothless” Interception of Communications Commissioner, “which is hardly likely to engender public confidence.”

“The holders of this post, and the Tribunal to which members of the public can complain about surveillance, were created under the 1985 Interceptions of Communications Act (now replaced by RIPA 2000), have never in the eighteen years of their existence upheld a complaint,” according to Statewatch.

In a further Kafkaesque twist, those receiving a notice under section 49 of RIPA are legally prohibited from telling anyone apart from their lawyer about it.

Since 2004, telecom and Internet service providers have voluntarily provided data when requested; now, they will be required to retain such information for one year. However, since the provisions only apply to data within the UK, large corporations could easily avoid this by keeping their data and encryption keys offshore.

By 2009, the retention of data including Internet sites visited, emails sent and VOIP (Voice over IP or Internet telephony) will be mandatory.

This will put into UK law the highly contentious European Commission Directive on mandatory data retention, adopted in 2005, and will replace the current “voluntary” code introduced in the UK in 2003. This regulation does not just cover terrorism but all crime, however minor.

Not only in Britain but throughout Europe and internationally, the rights to free speech and personal privacy are being seriously eroded, with governments habitually citing the “fight against terrorism” to justify their mounting curtailment of long-standing democratic norms.

“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear” is the false mantra repeated by ministers of every political stripe.

But the latest extension of state powers in Britain through RIPA means historically determined democratic rights such as the presumption of innocence and against arbitrary state actions are being further abrogated. Such laws, enabling almost routine trawling operations through mountains of personal data by the state, weight the balance of power overwhelming in favour of “state rights” against those of the individual citizen.

U.S. ‘Terrorologist’ Webster Tarpley Tours Britain To Reveal 9/11 Truth

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RINF Alternative News

Since 9/11, evidence has come to light that contradicts that day’s infamous terrorist attack. American historian Webster Tarpley argues that this is nothing new, serious inconsistencies have been associated with terror attacks for hundreds of years throughout the Western world.

Whilst much post 9/11 evidence has been well sourced it has trickled out, having far less impact than the official narrative which holds Islamic fanatics entirely responsible. The end result is that press and public are left confused and disorientated by a lack of resolution to one of the biggest stories of our age. Terrorology is a growing discipline that seeks to bring academic rigour and reasoned argument to analysing this highly emotive subject.

Author of two books about connections between the US state and organised crime Tarpley scours the world for answers to the growing mountain of contradictions about 9/11 and develops an alternative account which counts Islamic ‘extremists’ among the victims. He finds evidence for the roots of 9/11 in the Western establishment, what he calls a ‘rogue network’ embedded in the secret state and military apparatus.

Amongst the unanswered questions Tarpley addresses are why…

The US Air Force for up to one-and-a-half hours failed to intercept hijacked airliners.

There was no apparent wreckage of an airliner at the Pentagon.

‘Put options’ on United Airlines and American Airlines shares placed before 9/1 were traced back to the Executive Director of the CIA.

Building 7 at the WTC site in Manhattan collapsed without being hit by a plane.

And he goes on to ask is the “War on Terror” really an Orwellian programme designed to take away peoples’ hard won civil liberties?

Tarpley’s analysis comes as music to the ears of the growing number of Britons uncomfortable about the suspension of habeas corpus and the racist overtones of internment of Muslims.

Webster will be available for interview in each venue city of the tour (see below) from roughly 2pm on the appropriate day. He will be in London from about midday on Saturday 4th November and leaves Glasgow on Sunday 12th November for Milan where the Italian translation of ‘911 Synthetic Terror’ is being launched.

Tour schedule

Tickets £5.00 donation on a strictly first come-first served basis. No-one turned away due to lack of funds.

LONDON, Monday 5th November, 7pm – St. John’s Church, Waterloo Road, London, SE1 8TY. (by Waterloo Main Line Stn.) – Ticketline — 07947 593825

OXFORD, Tuesday 6th November, 7pm – Council Chamber, Town Hall, St Aldates’, Oxford, OX1 1BX, Ticketline — 07714 364140

BRISTOL, Wednesday 7th November, 7pm – QEH Theatre, Jacob’s Wells Road, Bristol. BS8 1JX – Ticketline — 07786 952037

LEEDS, Thursday 8th November, 7pm – Lecture Theatre B2, Lesley Silver Building, Leeds Metropolitan University, Civic Quarter Campus, Calverley Street, Leeds, LS1 3HE. – Ticketline —07733 323841

LANCASTER, Friday 9th November, 7pm – Hugh Pollard Lecture Theatre, St Martin’s College, Cumbria University, Bowerham Road, Lancaster LA1 3JD – Ticketline — 01524 388868

EDINBURGH, Saturday 10th November, 7pm – Friends Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh, EH1 2JL – Ticketline — 07809 365609

Biography

Webster Griffin Tarpley is an activist and historian best known for his George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), which has become an underground classic.
An expert on international terrorism with decades of experience, he directed the study Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Who Killed Aldo Moro?) which was commissioned by a member of the Italian government and published in Rome in 1978. [Aldo Moro was an ex-prime minister of Italy who was murdered by the “Red Brigades,” who were ultimately found out to be a front for a fascist state terror group.]

Against Oligarchy, a collection of Tarpley’s essays and speeches, appeared on the Internet in 1996. He also wrote Surviving the Cataclysm (1999), an analysis of the world financial crisis.

In 2005, Tarpley’s ‘9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA’ gained a following and is now going into a fourth edition. On October 7, 2006, Amazon.com’s top non-fiction book reviewer, Robert David Steele, called it “the strongest of the 770+ books I have reviewed here at Amazon.”

Tarpley has appeared on CNN Crossfire, FOX News, Charlie Rose, talk radio, and cable access television across North America.

Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are cousins

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Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are cousins

The Telegraph

The wife of US Vice-President Dick Cheney has revealed that her husband is closely enough related to the Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to call him “cousin”.

Lynne Cheney said that she had made the unlikely discovery of kinship between President George W Bush’s hawkish deputy and the charismatic black Illinois senator while researching ancestry for her new memoir, Blue Skies, No Fences.

The men are apparently eighth cousins, but Mrs Cheney said she did not include this in her memoir.

“This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor … could be responsible down the family lines for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick’s and Barack Obama,” Mrs Cheney told MSNBC television.

According to Mrs Cheney’s spokesman, Senator Obama is a descendant of Mareen Duvall.

The French Huguenot’s son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650s from England.

The Vice President’s full name is Richard B Cheney.

A spokesman for Senator Obama, who wants to be the first black US president, offered a tongue-in-cheek response.

“Every family has a black sheep,” said Bill Burton.

Bush’s approval at new low in Reuters: 24 percent

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Mark Silva

President Bush’s approval rating has reached a new low in the newest Reuters/Zogby Poll — with just 24 percent of those surveyed approving of Bush’s job performance. That is down from 29 percent last month.

It is lower than the latest register of Bush’s approval rating in the Gallup Poll — 32 percent in Gallup’s newest October survey.

The newest gauge arrives as President Bush prepares for a press conference in the West Wing this morning — at 10:40 am EDT — and as the president prepares to fend off an override of his veto of an expansion of children’s health care on Capitol Hilll tomorrow.

Public approval for the job that Congress is performing — 11 percent in the new survey — matches the all-time low that Reuters found last month.

“Deepening unhappiness with President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress soured the mood of Americans and sent Bush’s approval rating to another record low this month,” Reuters reports today.

“The Reuters/Zogby Index,” which measures the mood of the country, also fell from 98.8 to 96 — the second consecutive month in which it has dropped. The number of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track jumped four points to 66 percent.

“There is a real question among Americans now about how relevant this government is to them,” pollster John Zogby said. “They tell us they want action on health care, education, the war and immigration, but they don’t believe they are going to get it.”

Dad: Blackwater blew up son’s and wife’s ‘skulls’

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Jomana Karadsheh

Haythem could only recognize his oldest boy from his tall and slim physique as well as what was left of his shoes. His son’s head had been blown away, his body charred beyond recognition. His wife of more than 20 years was torn apart.

“Only part of her neck and jaw remained,” Haythem told CNN. The rest of her was covered by a body bag.

Choking back tears, he said, “Killing them was not enough, blowing up their skulls, they burned them and disfigured them.”

Haythem’s wife, Mahassen, and his 20-year-old son, Ahmed, were among the 17 Iraqi civilians killed and 27 others wounded in a hail of gunfire September 16 in Baghdad.

Guards working for private security firm Blackwater USA are accused of opening fire on the Iraqis.

The Iraqi government has said the Blackwater guards shot without provocation — something the U.S.-based contractor has denied, saying the guards were in a firefight with gunmen.

An Iraqi government report has accused Blackwater of “premeditated murder,” saying the company’s guards randomly fired at civilians. An Iraqi panel investigating the shootings has asked Blackwater to pay the families of each of the victims $8 million in compensation.

“Money will not compensate us for what we have lost, even if it were piles of it,” Haythem said. “No one can put a price on the lives of those killed.”

Haythem, 46, a doctor who specializes in blood diseases, spoke from his temporary home in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood where he is living with his mother and two remaining children — daughter Maryam, 18, and son Haidar, 17.

While he spoke, his mother sat in a corner of the room, moaning and sobbing, rocking back and forth on a couch. She wore all black.

All Haythem and the family know about the final moments of their loved ones is what two Iraqi police officers who witnessed the shootings have told them — that Ahmed was shot as he was driving his car in Nusoor Square and his mother clutched him tight as he was bleeding.

“Those who witnessed the incident say that my son’s head was scattered and my wife held him and hugged him,” Haythem said. “She was screaming, ‘My son, my son! Help me! Help me!’ ”

The car slowly rolled forward until Blackwater guards unleashed more shots that turned the vehicle into a fireball, according to the witnesses.

“They understood the call for help. They sprayed her with bullets,” he said.

Blackwater has not discussed specifics about the case, saying the FBI is investigating the matter. Blackwater CEO Erik Prince told CNN Sunday one of the Blackwater vehicles was damaged by small arms fire and that his guards committed no “deliberate violence.”

Haythem’s wife also was a doctor and his son was attending medical school with hopes of becoming a surgeon.

“They destroyed my family and they killed my beloved wife, my better half,” Haythem said calmly. “They deprived me of my eldest son who I have raised into a strong, young man. They deprived him of fulfilling his dream to be a doctor and a surgeon. They planted pain and misery in the hearts of my two younger kids.”

His daughter and son live in fear that he too will be slain on the streets of Baghdad, leaving them as orphans.

Maryam sat with her father throughout the interview, not wanting to leave his side. She said she and her mother were close friends — able to chat like sisters and share stories beyond most mother-daughter relationships.

“My friends would always tell me how much they noticed my mom’s love for me. She used to always talk to me about my future and her dreams for me,” she said. “I hope I live up to her expectations.”

Maryam’s last conversation with her mom was the morning of September 16. Maryam had a biology exam that day. Her mom woke her up and reviewed the material with her to make sure she was properly prepared for the test.

“She stayed for another few minutes, joking and laughing,” Maryam said, tears running down her cheeks.

Haythem was dropped off at work that day by his wife and son. They then picked up a college application for Maryam, who is hoping to enter dental school. At some point afterward they were killed.

Haythem first began worrying when his wife was late picking him up from work. Then calls to her cell phone went unanswered. In the chaotic world of Baghdad — where violence and kidnappings are common — anytime a loved one doesn’t show up on time fears of the worst begin.

He eventually made it home and began making more phone calls. The worrying intensified as news reports swirled of a deadly shooting in Nusoor Square. He called his brother, a doctor at a nearby hospital, to check the emergency room and the morgue. The brother found no signs of them.

Haythem’s brother then went to the scene and found a burned-out car. He called Haythem and asked for the license plate number.

“My brother collapsed and said, ‘The family car is burned and may God bless their souls,’ ” Haythem said.

Despite his sorrow and anguish, Haythem maintains a calm and peaceful attitude, saying he only seeks justice through the courts and that he trusts the U.S. and international judicial systems.

“All we want is the fair judiciary do us justice. We ask the judge who takes this case to think before he rules, to be satisfied with his ruling as if he were, God forbid, personally involved,” he said.

Haythem’s and Maryam’s faces light up when they speak of their loved ones. Ahmed, they said, was an achiever, an ambitious young man who not only was always at the top of his class but who also enjoyed sports and singing and had an interest in languages. He was fluent in English and was learning French and Italian.

“He was quiet and very popular and a leader. This was all wasted in a moment,” his father said. “He was guilty of no crime. What compensation is there for that? There can’t be any.”

Maryam just wishes she could turn the clock back. “I only wish I could relive last month, my family around,” she said. “But they are gone. What can we do? If we die, we will do so in Iraq and hopefully we will all meet in heaven.”

French argue over aerial robot surveillance

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Candace Lombardi

Not everyone in the French government wants to use flying robotic surveillance drones next year as part of a plan to triple police surveillance efforts.

ELSA (a French acronym for “light device for aerial surveillance”) is a 4-foot aerial robot that would be used to watch people in Paris and towns connected to Paris by the Metro subway system.

The device was demonstrated at Milipol, an exhibition of police security technology, which took place last week in Paris.

ELSA drones are slated to be part of an effort to triple the number of video surveillance devices by 2009, Michèle Alliot-Marie, France’s minister of the Interior, told the Le Monde newspaper. Some could be used in conjunction with the Paris Metro subway security system, while the rest could be monitored by individual police stations for general security and to watch over demonstrations.

Mostly made of foam and weighing no more than a water bottle, ELSA poses little physical threat to people in the event of a crash. But equipped with night vision capabilities as well as daytime surveillance cameras, it’s seen by some as a threat to personal freedom.

Some French politicians voiced protests after learning that the device had already been tested in several towns without their knowledge, according to Le Monde.

France should not be treated like a hostage-taking or civil war-torn country, Daniel Goldberg, a member of the French National Assembly (France’s lower house of Parliament), told Le Monde.

“Faced with the legitimate and pressing expectations of citizens, we might be tempted to pay for additional security with a sacrifice in terms of freedom. This much is clear: this will never be the choice of France–and it will never be mine,” he said.

VIDEO: Top Insider Confirms Bush War Crime Plan

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Former top insider states Bush had Nazi style preemptive war crime plan from day one.

Get your FBI file — and your NSA and CIA files too, while you’re at it

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Do you have an FBI file?

You might! Many people do. So let’s talk about your past. Did you …

Photo of civil rights march
… ever participate in a civil rights march? How about a Vietnam war protest?

Photo of petition signing
… ever sign an edgy political petition?

Photo of Joey
… ever know a guy named “Joey the Horse?” (Ever help him take out any heavy garbage bags?)

Photo of Manny Noreiga
… ever hang out with a third-world dictator, retired or present?

Phil says: “The Freedom-of-Information-loving folks who brought you Get Grandpa’s FBI File have just launched a sister site: Get My FBI File . This site helps you automatically generate the letters you need to send in to get your own FBI file … and while you’re at it, you can also get your NSA, CIA, DIA, DSS, Secret Service, etc. files too, just by checking a few boxes. If you throw in UnSecureFlight.Com, we’re getting perilously close to one-stop shopping for all your government security file needs.”

See: http://www.getmyfbifile.com/ and http://www.getmyfbifile.com/form.php

Who Watches the CIA Watchers?

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Katrina vanden Heuvel

In the cloak and dagger, smoke and hall of mirrors that is the CIA, we have more evidence that it’s dangerous to be a whistleblower, even if that happens to be your job. The CIA’s own inspector general, John Helgerson, is being investigated by CIA Director Michael Hayden regarding his investigations into CIA torture allegations.

According to the New York Times, “The review is particularly focused on complaints that Mr. Helgerson’s office has not acted as a fair and impartial judge of agency operations but instead has begun a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.”

Thus, the investigator into torture is being tortured by an investigation–the bureaucratic equivalent of water boarding–into his crusade against the crusaders. And ’round and ’round we go.

But if Hayden is watching Helgerson who is watching Hayden and the CIA, is anyone watching over this mess? Who would benefit from a cowed CIA? Who needs evidence that Iran is up to no good to justify another war? Dick Cheney, perhaps? Who knows? No one watches over him. Not even Google Maps.

Image database is latest technology added to border control platform

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 Ian Grant

Immigration minister Liam Byrne last week unveiled a £50,000 image-based database system that associates fingerprints, a visa and a unique passport number with an individual. The system is the latest plank in the government’s £400m e-Borders border control technology platform.

The pilot system to confirm the identity of visitors to the UK will run at Gatwick North Terminal from September 2007 to April 2008, using data from visa applicants from Sierra Leone. If successful, the government may extend it to cover up to five million visitors a year from non-European countries, excluding the US. The pilot is part of a wider biometric-based border control system for the EU called BioDev 2. The BioDev 2 consortium members are Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and the UK. A Home Office spokesman said the project is 80% funded by the EU. Britain has contributed about £28,000 to the European Commission for BioDev 2.

Motorola, Zetes and Sagem, which earlier supplied the iris recognition system for the Home Office’s “trusted traveller” scheme, are the three main suppliers to the BioDev project. Motorola supplied the Gatwick installation, and will install similar systems in other EU countries later.

Mike Lyne, assistant director at the Border & Immigration Agency, said the department is pleased with the system’s performance so far. Some 5,000 names and related images are in the pilot database.

Most come from the collection UKVisas has been building since September 2006, when giving biometric details became compulsory for visa applications from some countries.

Fred Preston, Motorola’s project leader, said the system finds a matching record in milliseconds.

NIST Admits Total Collapse Of Twin Towers Unexplainable

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Implicitly acknowledges controlled demolition only means by which towers could have fallen at free fall speed

Paul Joseph Watson

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has been forced to admit that the total free-fall collapse of the twin towers cannot be explained after an exhaustive scientific study, implicitly acknowledging that controlled demolition is the only means by which the buildings could have come down.

In a recent letter (PDF link) to 9/11 victim’s family representatives Bill Doyle and Bob McIlvaine, NIST states, “We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.”

A 10,000 page scientific study only offers theories as to how the “collapse initiation” proceeded and fails to address how it was possible for part of a WTC structure to fall through the path of most resistance at freefall speed, completely violating the accepted laws of physics.

In addition, NIST’s own studies confirmed that virtually none of the steel in either tower reached temperatures hotter than 500 degrees. The point at which steel weakens is 1000 degrees and melting point is reached at 1,500 degrees, according to NIST itself.

“NIST’S 10,000-page report purports to explain what it calls “collapse initiation” — the loss of several floors’ vertical support,” writes Kevin Barrett of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. “In order to dream up this preposterous scenario, NIST had to ignore its own tests that showed that virtually none of the steel got hotter than 500 degrees f. It had to claim that somehow the planes took out many core columns, despite the fact that only a direct hit by an engine would have been likely to do so, and that the chances of this happening even once are fairly low. It had to preposterously allege that the plane that nicked the corner of the South Tower took out more core columns than the one that hit the North Tower almost dead center. It had to tweak all the parameters till they screamed bloody murder and say that the steel was far weaker than it actually was, the fire was far hotter than it actually was, the sagging was far greater than it actually was, and so on. And so NIST hallucinated a computer-generated fantasy scenario for “collapse initiation”–the failure of a few floors.”

“But how do you get from the failure of a few floors to total collapse at free-fall speed of the entire structure? The short answer: You don’t. Anyone with the slightest grasp of the laws of physics understands that even if all of the vertical supports on a few floors somehow failed catastrophically at exactly the same moment–a virtually impossible event, but one necessary to explain why the Towers would come straight down rather than toppling sideways–the top part of the building could not fall THROUGH the still-intact, highly robust lower part of the building, straight through the path of most resistance, just as fast as it would have fallen through thin air.”

“Thus total free-fall collapse, even given NIST’s ridiculous “initiation” scenario, is utterly impossible. The probability of it happening is exactly equal to the probability of the whole building suddenly falling upward and landing on the moon,” concludes Barrett.

NIST have yet to properly address the sudden freefall collapse of WTC Building 7, which imploded on the late afternoon of 9/11 despite not being hit by a jetliner.

In August 2006, NIST promised to scientifically evaluate whether explosive devices could have contributed to the 47-story building’s collapse but no answers have been forthcoming.

In August of this year, James Quintiere, Ph.D., former Chief of the Fire Science Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, called for an independent inquiry into NIST’s investigation of the collapse of the twin towers.

Quintiere said NIST’s conclusions were “questionable”, that they failed to follow standard scientific procedures and that their failure to address Building 7 belied the fact that the investigation was incomplete.

Witness saw ‘white flash’ in Diana death crash tunnel

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By Robert Barr

A man who claimed he saw a blinding flash of light in a Paris road tunnel just before the car crash that killed Princess Diana spent hours yesterday answering questions about inconsistencies in statements he has made.

Francois Levistre, whose testimony to the British inquest differed at key points from other witnesses, testified that he saw two men on a motorcycle ahead of the princess’s car, a “major flash of light,” and then a crash.

Afterward, he said, the passenger on the motorcycle looked into the crumpled Mercedes and gave a two-hand gesture to indicate “job done.”

The inquest is investigating the deaths of the princess and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, on 31 August 1997. Henri Paul, who was driving their Mercedes car, also died in the crash.

Fayed’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, has claimed that a blinding flash may have been used by rogue British agents in a murder plot orchestrated by Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II.

Both the French and British police ruled out a conspiracy, concluding that Paul was drunk and driving too fast.

Levistre is not the only witness who claims to have seen a flash in the tunnel but was the first to testify to the inquest.

He said he was driving through the tunnel as the incident unfolded, and then stopped at the end and watched through his rearview mirror.

Other witnesses have told of seeing people running into the tunnel after the crash, and of photographers snapping pictures. Levistre said he saw only two men moving around for as long as five minutes.

Questioned repeatedly about why he had told different stories to French police and an examining magistrate, Levistre said he hadn’t read the statements that he later signed.

“You know, people ask questions and you just answer,” said Levistre, who testified from Paris via a videolink.

He confirmed that he did not call the police but did contact the Ritz Hotel, controlled by Mohamed al Fayed, and The Sunday Times newspaper in Britain.

Bernard Dertavelle, a lawyer for the Ritz, notified police, who then summoned Levistre, he testified.

Levistre said he saw the Mercedes enter the tunnel and a motorcycle pulling out to overtake it. He said he saw no other vehicles.

The bright flash, he said, was directed at the Mercedes from the back of the motorcycle.

He confirmed that he had served a jail sentence on a weapons charge, and felt he had been harassed by the French media after he and his wife were accused of offering a child to a German industrialist. Levistre said his wife acted as a surrogate mother, which led to an investigation in France but no charges.

New Film Exposes How Rudy Failed Firefighters On 9/11

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Sam Stein

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has released another explosive short documentary film about Rudy Giuliani, this time highlighting the former New York City mayor’s controversial handling of radios used by the city’s fire department on Sept. 11. Greenwald is also petitioning the New York City Council to launch an investigation into the matter.

The web video, released Monday by Brave New Films, alleges that during his administration Giuliani failed to equip the FDNY with adequate, let alone functioning, communication equipment. That in turn created massive problems on 9/11 and may have contributed to the unnecessary deaths of dozens of servicemen.

“What did Mr. Giuliani do [about faulty radios]?” Al Santora, the retired Chief of Safety for FDNY whose son died on 9/11, asks in one of the film’s most poignant moments. “He had eight years. He did nothing to correct that situation… We got people dead as a result.”

As Greenwald documents, the radios used by the FDNY on 9/11 were precisely the same ones that malfunctioned during the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Eight years after that attack, Giuliani did replace the defective equipment. But the new radios he bought under a no-bid, $14 million contract from Motorola (the previous contract was $1.4 million) were never field-tested. The “upgrade” proved disastrous. Within a week, the just-purchased radios were recalled after a firefighter’s mayday went un-heard. Giuliani was forced to reissue the old, faulty batch. And on 9/11 when a police helicopter warned that the North Tower could collapse, more than 120 firefighters remained inside.

“The radios failed them and that was Giuliani failing them,” says Roseleen Tallon, whose brother Sean was an FDNY member killed in 9/11.

In addition to releasing the film on www.therealrudy.org, Greenwald is petitioning New York City Councilman Eric Gioia to initiate a public investigation into Giulaini’s handling of the FDNY radios.

“No investigation has ever taken place,” Greenwald told the Huffington Post. “People were killed because he screwed up… and family members want questions answered.”

Giuliani’s office did not return calls requesting comment.

This is the second Giuliani film made by Greenwald. The first explored the former mayor’s decision to ignore the advise of his own security experts and locate New York’s terrorist command center at the World Trade Center, despite its centrality as a potential terrorist target.

Cynthia McKinney’s Big Issue – 9/11 Truth

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The following is a story which appeared in Big Issue No. 765, 8-15 October, 2007, pp. 6-9. John Bird, the publisher, was intent upon meeting her in person, but was off to Japan just as she was arriving in the UK. The reporter, Helena Drakakis, was one of the few British journalists who has covered the 9/11 Truth Movement, having done a story about William Rodriguez and his tour of the UK earlier this year.

Courage Under Fire

A constant thorn in the US government’ side, controversial former congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney tells Helena Drakakis why the authorities have been revealed as ‘huge liars’

Cynthia McKinney hates the word ‘conspiracy’. As a former democrat and congresswoman she is never more than one step away from controversy, and she’s in London to promote the 9/11 Truth Movement, an organisation which disputes the official version of the Twin Towers attacks in 2001.

“I am just asking for the truth,” she says as she carefully files her nails on the kitchen table of a west London flat. “I am not into conspiracy, but there has been no independent commission over the events of that day. There are explanations that don’t explain and conclusions that don’t conclude. I just want people to demand the truth.”

Whatever accusations have been levelled at McKinney (and there are many), no one could deny that she is determined. Not acting that way would betray her heritage, she says.

“I understand state-sponsored terrorism, but I am not scared. Malcolm X knew he was going to be assassinated, but on that day he told his wife to get dressed, to dress his children and he left to make his final speech. How can I ever say I am afraid of anything? That would be cowardice,” she says.

McKinney, 52, was born in Atlanta, Georgia in the same year Rosa Parks sparked the black civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat to a white bus passenger. McKinney didn’t know Martin Luther King personally, but she is close to people who did.

Her father Billy McKinney was one of Atlanta’s first black law enforcement officers, and a former Georgia state representative.

As a black single mother, she has attracted disapproval and support in equal measure — and at times she’s appeared as a lone crusader and voice on Capitol Hill.

Since her debut into public office in 1988 she has been a constant thorn in the side of consecutive US governments — always the one to ask those awkward questions government officials would rather avoid answering. Her dogmatic approach has led to her being branded a “loony”, a “loose cannon” and “dangerous” by the US media and by members of her own party.

After George Bush Snr’s departure from the White House in 1993, she was the only member of Congress to demand a hearing on his involvement with Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. She wanted wanted to know whether its Congolese mining operations had fuelled a civil war.

After 9/11 she asked why certain groups and individuals — some of them members of the Bin Laden family — escaped investigation prior to the World Trade Center attacks, even though the FBI and CIA had recognised them as suspect terrorist organisations.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina she questioned why African-Americans are still twice as likely than any other race to be paid less than the minimum wage, and why — in a report by US homeless organisations Hull House — that in a city such as Chicago it would take 200 years for black quality of life to equal that of whites.

So far, she says, she has not received any credible answers.

She hesitates when she’s asked about the PhD she’s planning at the Univeristy of California, Berkely.

“I’m not sure I want to tell people because it’s controversial,” she laughs. But, after a short pause, she can’t help herself. “I’m looking at Cointelpro — the US government intelligence programme which targeted political dissidents. There are documents dating back to 1919 proving the US government used surveillance to target the black community,” she says. Although the FBI claims Cointelpro no longer exists, McKinney is resolute that it still remains in all but name.

She also claims, in the aftermath of 9/11, that she was also under surveillance.

As was her father: “We got used to it as kids,” she says casually.

But far from seeing successive US governments through Machiavellian-tinted glasses, she’s insistent when she talks about government as capable of being “an agent of positive change.”

“In 1954, under Eisenhower, the government began to be seen acting for the people. Jimmy Carter proved state power could be used with conscience. That is why I am appalled at what happened under the Bush administration. The government was illegitimate in the first place. The election was stolen from the people,” she says. “My father taught me service without expectation of reward. That is not the motivation of those running for office.”

She admits that the efforts of the 9/11 Truth Movement in holding the government accountable, in part, attracted her to the cause. That a group of people from “different strains of outrage” can be moved enough to mobilise themselves at a grassroots level interest her even more.

“People of conscience see the government as having taken a wrong turn and they have begun mobilising for a different path. Elected officials have lost their principles and the American people need to reclaim the government for themselves,” she says.

According to McKinney, this reality did not hit home in the aftermath of 9/11 but only in the months and now years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of New Orleans. She describes the catastrophe as a “revelation for the world” and the government’s response to it as “an insult to all intelligent American people.”

“It showed the US government to be a hugely successful propagandist and a huge liar,” she says, her southern drawl suddenly reaching crescendo. “Katrina unveiled shocking statistics. Black people have known them for years but suddenly those figures meant something to white people. The pauperisation of this country at the expense of a war has moved people of conscience. It feels the same as when the American people woke up to what was happening in Vietnam.”

It is perhaps no surprise that McKinney has spent the last year being courted by the US Green Party as their next leader and 2008 presidential candidate — an offer she has gracefully bowed out from earlier this month but is thought now to be reconsidering.

Her dalliance with the Green Party came after the Democratic Party ousted her (she claims) from Congress in January before a vote over funding for the Iraq war, which she vehemently opposed. It was reminiscent of 1991 when her colleagues walked out on her after she spoke on the floor of the Georgia House of Representatives against Bush Snr’s bombing of Baghdad.

“The Greens are good people. They are idealistic, but at heart they want the best for the planet and people. Their activists have always supported me politically,” she reflects.

What McKinney will do next is unclear, but it is doubtful she will stay on the sidelines of political life for long. “I guess I am a voice people like. It has been hard for me, but I know I have to get up every morning and just keep on truckin’,” she says.

DRIVER ‘MET MI6 SPY’ ON CRASH NIGHT

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James Murray and Gordon Thomas

Renegade spy Richard Tomlinson will tell the Princess Diana inquest that he believes Ritz hotel security chief Henri Paul met an MI6 handler on the night she died.

Today we also reveal a French spy chief allegedly seen chatting to Paul on the night of the crash is refusing to give evidence at the inquest.

Mr Tomlinson, a former MI6 officer once jailed for leaking Government secrets, will make sensational claims via a videolink from his bolthole in France to the inquest in London.

He is refusing to return to Britain to give evidence in person because he fears he will be arrested and jailed. Cambridge-educated Mr Tomlinson, 40, will give evidence supporting the claim by Harrods tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed that there was an Establishment plot to kill Diana to stop her marrying his son, Dodi, a Muslim.

Private testimony that Mr Tomlinson gave earlier caused ructions within MI6, leading to him being closely monitored by the British security services. Mr Tomlinson told the French examining magistrate Herve Stephan that a Frenchman working in the security department at the Paris Ritz was on MI6’s books.

He added: “I cannot claim that I remember from reading this file that the name of the person was Henri Paul but I have no doubt with the benefit of hindsight that it was he.”

In 2001 he claimed: “Henri Paul, who was the driver at the time of the accident, was an MI6 informer and, rather interestingly, he was missing for about half an hour before the accident.

“No one knows where he was and then when he was killed he was found with a very high alcohol level in his blood and a very substantial amount of money in his pocket.

“Now putting those three pieces of circumstantial evidence together, I suspect that shortly prior to his death he was in a meeting with his MI6 handler.

“I think that MI6 should hand over his personal file as a witness statement because clearly in an inquest into his death, knowing where he was for that missing half hour, who he was with and how much alcohol he had drunk are very important factors.

“What I am saying is that there is important information in MI6 files and I think that they should be handed over to the judge in charge of the inquest.”

Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Express from his home in France, Mr Tomlinson said he will reveal discussions he had within MI6 in May 1992 with a colleague about an assassination plot.

The Sunday Express has been given the identity of the MI6 man he spoke to but we are not publishing his name on the grounds that his security may be compromised.

Mr Tomlinson said: “I was having a serious discussion with a colleague on developing and targeting operations in the Balkans. These were known as P/40s. He handed me a Y-file, identified as most restricted by the yellow stripe on the front. Inside was a document, two typed pages long, with a small yellow card attached to signify it was an accountable account rather than a draft proposal.

“Accountable meant it was in a ready to act state. It was entitled ‘The Need to Assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia’. I distributed it to senior MI6 officers.

“There were detailed discussions and the consensus was that a stun device could be used to dazzle the driver’s gaze of Milosevic’s car as it passed through the Geneva tunnel, forcing him to crash.”

Milosevic was to attend an international conference on the former Yugoslavia.

Mr Tomlinson added: “What later struck me about the deaths of Diana and Dodi was that the claims how they had died mimicked what was in the document on how to assassinate Milosevic.

“I will testify that the Y-file document shows Henri Paul could have been blinded as he drove through the Paris underpass by a high-powered flashlight.

“The Y-file proves this was a technique which, at the time of Diana and Dodi’s deaths, was consistent with MI6 methods.”

The inquest into the death of Diana and Dodi has seen CCTV footage of the couple in and around the Ritz Hotel in Paris on the night of August 30, 1997.

But the inquest has been told there were gaps in the movements of Henri Paul, the hotel’s acting head of security. He left the hotel between 7pm and 10pm, thinking his duties were over, but returned when Diana and Mr Fayed unexpectedly returned to the hotel for a meal.

Where Mr Paul went during those crucial three hours has never been fully explained. There is also a period when he went missing for eight and a half minutes from 10.22pm when he was not picked up on any CCTV cameras.

The investigation into the crash carried out by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens decided that Mr Tomlinson was unreliable and that he had embellished his accounts.

Scotland Yard detectives working for Lord Stevens carried out detailed investigations at MI6. They discovered that an MI6 officer, codenamed Fish, did write a proposal in 1993 to assassinate an extremist Balkans leader, but it was not Milosevic, and senior officers in the service said the man was acting alone and the plan would not have been sanctioned.

Mr Tomlinson said: “The two Stevens’ detectives said in their own inquiries at MI6 that it became very clear that what I had told them, and which they had confirmed in the MI6 files, would have an important influence on how the Stevens inquiry finally reported.

“There is no doubt at all there was a major intelligence presence in events leading up to the death of Princess Diana and Dodi.”

New Zealand born Mr Tomlinson joined MI6 as agent D/813317 in 1991. He worked as a “targeting officer”, serving in the Balkans and Moscow. Later he served in the East European Controllerate, one of the most important departments in the Secret Intelligence Service. It gave him access to the highly restricted Y-files.
 
He was sacked in 1995 and was jailed for a year in December 1997 for breaching the Official Secrets Act, a sentence which has left him with bitter memories.

He says he does not know why he was sacked, but admits he was depressed when he finished working in Bosnia because of the dreadful sights he witnessed. Last March the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be prosecuting Mr Tomlinson for offences under the Official Secrets Act.

The then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith decided it would not be in the public interest to continue legal action against him.

It was alleged that Mr Tomlinson had committed blackmail offences by threatening to make more disclosures because Scotland Yard would not return computers seized from him.

CCTV proves police lied: de Menezes behaved normally before being murdered

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Aftermath News

The murder scene. Jean Charles de Menezes ‘ body in a puddle of blood after police pumped seven slugs into him.

The cops claimed Jean Charles de Menezes was wearing a bulky coat to hide a bomb. But they lied. He was wearing a light denim jacket. They said he was running away, jumping turnstiles. But they lied. He walked nonchalantly like everyone else, completely unsuspecting that he was about to be murdered by a bloodthirsty gang of Israeli-trained London cops, who lie, lie and lie some more. The entire operation was a lie from it’s inception, through its execution and into its continuing subsequent whitewashing and coverup.

They could have easily detained him outside the station, which is the logical thing to do with a “suicide bomber” to prevent catastrophe, but the “controllers” purposely stalled to allow their prey to end up down in the tube where he could be properly dispatched out of the light of day. They say it was a “botched operation”, but the way these thugs operate, I doubt there was any mistake made on the part of the controllers. It was just another deception. They meant to have him killed to make an example out of him. In other words, “We have the power of life over death. We decide when you live and when you die. We are the new overlords. And best of all, we’re untouchable! hahahahaha!”

9/11 is a proven lie, another Hollywood production for an ignorant dumbed-down public. So was 7/7, yet another false-flag operation, with simultaneous drills in exactly the same three stations, designed to get people to surrender their liberties for “security” from the loving Big Brother global fascist state.

So, will you believe what they say now about Mr de Menezes? They are still lying you know, and won’t stop lying about this crime probably for the rest of their lives. And for their loyalty and devotion to the job, they will get their medals of dishonor, their elevation in the masonic lodge and maybe even knighthoods. Mmm, wouldn’t that be nice?

And since these disgusting lying cops are now the new gods, whose boots must now be licked with complete subservience, they will maintain immunity from prosecution just as murdering troops, commanders and mercenaries in Iraq keep getting off virtually scott-free for gunning down entire families in their homes, on the sidewalks and in their cars. British police now have shoot-to-kill powers of anyone suspected of being a terrorist and de Menezes will not be the last to die like this. How would you like it if this happened to your dear sweet son, or your loving brother? No matter who you are, you must see the total absurdity, criminal brutality and injustice of this heinous event and you must speak out against it. If not, then don’t cry when they kill or maim your own loved ones.

This type of garbage will just go on and on, getting worse and worse unless people wake up and realize that all of their freedoms are being stripped from them by a neofeudal elite, unrestrained by traditional values like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Stop them now, before we are all microchipped, because by then, it will be just about too late.

De Menezes officer knew he wasn’t bomber

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By Caroline Gammell

The Metropolitan Police commander who ordered the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes knew the Brazilian was not one of the wanted July 21 bombers some time before he was killed, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.

 
Jean Charles de Menezes
Jean Charles de Menezes

Surveillance officers following the 27-year-old formally identified him as not being Hussain Osman, who they were hunting over the failed suicide attempts on London’s transport network the day before.

Commander Cressida Dick, who oversaw Operation Theseus, ordered the surveillance Grey Team to stop Mr de Menezes and question him about the area in which he lived.

He had been spotted in Scotia Road in Tulse Hill, south London, which was linked to 28-year-old Osman after the terrorist’s gym card was found bearing the same address.

But despite being negatively identified “in minutes”, Mr de Menezes was followed from his home, onto a bus and into Stockwell Tube station where he was killed on July 22, 2005.

Cdr Dick ordered a “hard stop” to be carried out by firearms officers after anti-terror and surveillance teams failed to stop him, the court heard.

Details of the identification came from a surveillance co-ordinator giving evidence during the health and safety trial against the Metropolitan Police.

The officer, known only as “Owen”, told the court: “There was a point when the senior management group knew that it wasn’t Nettletip (Osman’s codename). I believe that came across on the radio.

“I can’t say what the exact words were but there was a discussion about the situation on the bus and they wanted SO13 anti-terror police to stop the subject and establish intelligence about the residents and flats at Scotia Road.

 
Cressida Dick ordered officers to stop Mr de Menezes
Cressida Dick ordered officers
to stop Mr de Menezes

“If he lived next to the subject he may have been able to tell us things of relevance. It later emerged that they (surveillance) had continued and Cressida Dick asked why the unidentified individual was still being followed if it was not Nettletip.”

Clare Montgomery, QC, prosecuting, asked: “Was he identified as positively not Nettletip?”

Owen replied: “Yes, the direction was for the surveillance teams to stop and for the anti-terror officers to gather the intelligence about the block of flats.

“After three or four minutes Cressida Dick and I were aware that the surveillance team had not pulled back and they were still following the male. Her belief was it definitely wasn’t the suspect.”

Owen said that at no time during the operation was Mr de Menezes, who came to Britain in 2002, “positively identified” as Osman.

A second surveillance officer, identified as “Pat”, told jurors how it had been difficult to communicate over the racket in the control room.

“People were shouting to make themselves heard,” he said. “I had difficulty getting people’s attention because I couldn’t leave my seat.”

He said there had been trouble with the radio link to the undercover and firearms teams: “There seemed to be problems with the system, but that is not uncommon.”

The hearing continues.

A Nuclear Nightmare — The Portland Plot

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By Captain Eric H. May

Forward and Forewarning

The satiric article below is only hypothetical, an attempt to write what could be the news on Friday, October 19, 2007, a week from now. According to official sources and official media, an attack like the one I will describe is not a matter of if, but of when. They do not present it as a possibility but as a probability, and even as an inevitability. I have often wondered — and often written — about how it is that they can be so sure of what’s in our future. Given that they are so sure, though, it seems prudent to present this plausible scenario to an interested public.

A Nuclear Nightmare — The Portland Plot

By Rosy Palmer
The Oregonist

Portland, OREGON (10/19) — Oregon City, Oregon became ground zero for the latest attack by Islamic terrorism against American freedom when its Old Oregon City Bridge on the Williamette River was shattered by a “dirty nuke” radiological dispersion device at 10:19 a.m. (PST).

Federal officials have ordered Oregon National Guard troops, supplemented by private security contracting firms, to lock down Interstate 205, to the north and west of the radiological contamination zone, which is dispersing and defusing as it travels southeast into mostly agricultural areas.

“It could have been much worse,” said Army Captain Amy Rice, a spokesperson for the US Northern Command, which has sent civil support teams to the area to do a detailed assessment of damage and estimate mortality rates. “This could have been inside the Portland city limits, or the radiation could have blown there, had it not been for the prevailing northwesterly wind, which is blowing it all to the southeast.”

“Our current estimate is that fewer than 200 Oregon City residents are dead so far,” she said, “but another 2,000 will likely die from radiation poisoning within the next 72 hours.”

“Military and contractor forces are moving into the contamination zone to extract those who are unable to move themselves to decontamination sites,” Rice added, “but we ask that the public be as patient as possible, because official personnel are wearing full protective gear to avoid becoming casualties themselves, and wearing all that equipment slows things down considerably.”

She concedes that as many as 20,000 people have been exposed to radioactive fallout, and their survivability will depend on their levels of exposure.

Vice President Dick Cheney was in nearby Portland when the catastrophic attack occurred, observing the massive federal exercises TOPOFF and Vigilant Shield, which were to conclude today. Ironically, the dual exercises were simulating exactly the kind of incident that occurred in Oregon City, 10 miles southeast of Portland.

“We’ll extend the mobilization of all federal, state, local and tribal personnel indefinitely,” Cheney said at a hastily summoned press conference early this afternoon, in which he announced the implementation of National Security Presidential Directive 51, signed into effect by the Bush administration May 9 in anticipation of the kind of terror attack we experienced today.

“We had a pretty good idea that something was up as early as the spring,” he said, “and Secretary Chertoff said as much in July when he said that he had a gut feeling we would come under attack.”

Several reporters asked the vice president whether TOPOFF and Vigilant Shield, exercises preparing for a Portland dirty nuke attack, were being held here because of advanced knowledge that the Portland area was being set up. Cheney refused to answer, citing national security considerations. In August another terror exercise, Noble Resolve, simulated a nuclear attack on the Portland area.

“I’m not going to aid and abet terrorism by letting the terrorists know how much we knew or know about what they were doing, are doing, or may still be doing,” he said. “There has been far too much conspiracy speculation already, and it’s criminal under the circumstances we face today. We are doing our best to keep things under control, to better protect the public and ensure the continuity of constitutional government.”

Portland city police are leading a newly designated “Patriot Posse,” which federal officials have tasked with carrying out a dragnet operation against terrorists and terror enablers in the city. For the most part arrests, assisted by Homeland Security, FBI and private contractors, have been orderly. In a few notable instances, though, suspects have resisted arrest by the heavily armed police forces, and as many as a dozen suspects are reported dead, along with two law enforcement officers. Anonymous insiders suggest that private contractors have been “trigger-happy,” and that the two dead police officers were shot from behind by overzealous assistants who “lack fire discipline.”

“I want to assure the public that everything we are doing is completely legal and absolutely necessary,” Cheney said, “and every one of the individuals we have arrested was first officially declared an enemy combatant by informed counter-terrorism officials.”

Military roadblocks have been set up around the city of Portland and, in the interest of public safety, no travel beyond the cordon is allowed at present. By tomorrow officials hope to have a functional system by which Portlanders can apply for permission to travel out of town, after passing through armed checkpoints.

Cheney affirmed that emergency detention centers were being set up in the area, but declined to specify where, citing national security considerations.

“Let’s just say enemy combatants will be taken care of and leave it at that,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot about what to do and not to do to ensure co-operation from terrorists and their enablers, and the public can rest assured that we’ll get to the bottom of this, one way or another.”

Conspiracy theorists are a major problem in keeping control of the catastrophic situation, according to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who just arrived in Portland this afternoon to assist Cheney in maintaining domestic order. Chertoff would not confirm rumors that Homeland Security personnel are responsible for a nationwide shutdown of Internet service providers, as well as international telephone services.

“I’m not going to dignify rumor mongering and conspiracy theory with either attention or answers,” Chertoff said. “Every front line first responder is doing everything possible to protect our American freedoms.”

Various conspiracy theory leaders in the Portland area have been rounded up, leading to speculation that they may have been involved in what is coming to be called The Portland Plot. They include Theresa Mitchell, host for KBOO public radio’s Presswatch; Patti Woodard, moderator of the Portland Nuclear Inquest; and Ginny Ross, founder of Oregon Truth Alliance. KBOO has taken over by military public affairs personnel, while PNI and OTA have been shut down for subverting public order. Members of all three groups are said to be in hiding.

At the time of the terrorist attack on Oregon City, President George W. Bush was in Texas playing golf in a charity event with his brother, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and his father, former president George H. W. Bush. Upon receiving the news, the family was immediately moved to a secure location by Secret Service personnel. Before leaving, though, the younger Bush president read a prepared statement to the accompanying media:

“Thanks to the foresight of some dedicated members of this administration, America will weather the nuclear storm. The evil-doers who will hope to enslave us with terror have only filled us with a noble resolve to free the world of them. It is our national mission — and my personal mission — to protect the American people and punish those behind The Portland Plot. We will avenge our tragic losses by attacking the terrorist governments who assisted in these attacks. I ask the public to stay informed about what is happening in our nation by turning to established and trusted patriotic media sources. I further urge the public to report to their local police any Internet terrorist enablers who try to undermine our national security by spreading outrageous conspiracy theories about this terrorist attack, which was carried out by radical Islamists. God bless America as we struggle to create a new world order in a new American century.”

Afterword and Advisory

Lest anyone think that I am encouraging a public panic on the day before TOPOFF and Vigilant Shield, be assured that the nuclear scenarios envisioned by official sources predict far worse results than those I have hypothesized. On April 15, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Meet the Press, worried aloud that we might be hit by a nuclear attack that could kill a million people. An attack against Iran, triggered by a catastrophic event in United States, has already been prepared by CONPLAN 8022, which was put into effect through the efforts of Dick Cheney in 2005. My inferences on the extent of police powers and domestic detentions are derived from NSPD 51 — the details of which have been withheld from Congress despite repeated requests to view them by Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon and the House Homeland Security Committee.

Sorry about the torture; we thought you were one of the terrorists

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By A. Barton Hinkle

Here’s the problem with Guantanamo Bay — and secret CIA prisons on foreign soil — in a nutshell: If the prisoners being held there are illegal enemy combatants, then most Americans believe they do not deserve all the procedural niceties afforded by the Constitution. But the only fair way to figure out if a prisoner qualifies as an illegal enemy combatant is to follow the procedural niceties guaranteed by the Constitution.

And the Bush administration hasn’t even come close.

Take Khaled el-Masri. He was kidnapped by American agents while he was vacationing in Macedonia in 2003. He was beaten, stripped, dressed in a diaper and sweatsuit, and then chained, spread-eagle, to the floor of an airplane. He was flown to Afghanistan — where he was held incommunicado and, he says, tortured in a secret prison for five months. By then, U.S. agents realized they had the wrong guy. Khaled el-Masri was not, in fact, Khalid al-Masri, the terrorist. Whoops, sorry about that! El-Masri was then dumped in Albania and left to find his way home.

ON TUESDAY, citing the state secrets doctrine, the Supreme Court said el-Masri could not bring a civil suit in U.S. court. Germany’s parliament continues to investigate the episode.

If el-Masri’s were an isolated case, that would be one thing. But it is not. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was kidnapped by U.S. agents and spirited to Syria, where authorities tortured him for 10 months. A subsequent inquiry by Canadian authorities determined “categorically” that there was “no evidence to indicate that Arar has committed any offense.” El-Masri and Arar are not alone.

How do Americans know the prisoners held captive in Guantanamo are not also victims of the fog of war but are, as the Bush administration claims, the “worst of the worst”? We don’t.

Take Australian David Hicks, the first Guantanamo prisoner to be convicted under the 2006 Military Commissions Act. According to press reports, “The high school dropout, Muslim convert, and al-Qaida recruit fought for two hours alongside the Taliban before he sold his rifle for taxi fare and was captured trying to escape Afghanistan in December 2001.” He was held at Guantanamo for more than five years before pressure from the Australian government led to a plea agreement — in which Hicks was sentenced to all of nine months’ imprisonment, on condition that he stop alleging that he was physically abused.

THE ADMINISTRATION has turned other Guantanamo prisoners loose. And theoretically, each of the remaining prisoners was determined to be rightfully held by the Combatant Status Review Tribunals established by the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants.

But in late July U.S. Army Reserve Col. Stephen Abraham testified before Congress that those tribunals, in which he played a key role, were a charade.

The military intelligence officer and former lead counter-terrorism analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Command told the House Armed Services Committee “there is no question that individuals who have attacked the United States should be punished, and that those who are preparing to attack the United States must be stopped. I have devoted my military career to identifying such individuals and their organizations, and to helping our country counter such threats.”

But, as he explained at length to the committee, the CSRT system “was designed to fail. This committee should place no reliance on the procedures or the outcomes of those tribunals. The CSRT panels were an effort to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the detentions, to ‘launder’ decisions already made. The CSRTs were not provided with the information necessary to make any sound, fact-based determinations as to whether detainees were enemy combatants. Instead, the OARDEC leadership exerted considerable pressure, and was under considerable pressure itself, to confirm prior determinations that the detainees in Guantanamo were enemy combatants and should not be released.”

UNDER THE Military Commissions Act, new combatant-status reviews have been ordered. But although the accused can appeal their convictions on technical grounds, actual innocence is not a basis for overturning a verdict. And statements obtained through torture before 2006 are still admissible as evidence.

President Bush himself has said Guantanamo should be closed. But what to do with the prisoners there? They cannot all simply be released — in some cases because their nation of origin will not take them back, in others because they constitute too great a threat to national security. But they cannot easily be moved to prisons in the U.S. According to Philip Zelikow, former legal counsel at the State Department, “litigation risk has been, by far, the No. 1 argument against shutting down Guantanamo.” Once on U.S. territory, the detainees would automatically gain more legal rights. And in some instances that could prove embarrassing to the U.S.

Thus the Bush administration has painted itself into a corner. It might need to keep some prisoners at Guantanamo in perpetuity — in order to avoid admitting they never should have been sent there in the first place.

A. Barton Hinkle is deputy editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editorial pages.

http://www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/opinions.apx.-content-articles-TRI-2007-10-14-0004.html

Retired Lieutenant lambasted US political leaders as “incompetent” and “corrupt‏”

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Former US commander labels Iraq ‘nightmare with no end’

A former top US military commander in Iraq says that the current White House strategy in Iraq will not achieve victory in the four-and-a-half-year war, which he described as “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

In the bluntest assessment of Iraq by a former senior Pentagon official yet, retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez also lambasted US political leaders as “incompetent”, “corrupted”, “derelict in the performance of their duty” and suggested they would have been court martialled had they been members of the US military.

“There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” Lt Gen Sanchez said, addressing a meeting of military correspondents and editors in Arlington, a Virginia suburb of Washington.

He blasted President George W Bush’s “surge” strategy that calls for maintaining more than 160,000 US troops in Iraq until the end of the year, in the hope of reducing sectarian violence and bringing about a modicum of political stability.

The strategy has since been adjusted, with the current plan calling for the withdrawal of about 21,500 combat troops by July to bring the total to the “pre-surge” level of 130,000 servicemen.

But Lt Gen Sanchez said he did not believe in these changes would prove effective.

“Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory,” he said.

“The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.”

– AFP

Warrantless wiretapping in place before 9/11

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Washington Post publishes additional details about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping, noting that the National Security Agency approached Qwest “more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” But the Body Politik’s Igor Volsky points out that President Bush has claimed that the program was put in place in response to 9/11:”

After September the 11th, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. As part of this effort, I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. [5/11/06]

Kagro X adds, “If Qwest’s competitors were already abetting this bloodless(?) coup before 9/11, then the ‘administration’s’ domestic spying not only has little if anything to do with response to terrorism, but it also objectively failed to prevent 9/11.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/13/warrantless-wiretapping-in-place-before-911/

Guards acquitted over juvenile’s death

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A Florida jury has acquitted seven guards and a nurse of manslaughter in the death of a 14-year-old boy whose beating by guards at a juvenile boot camp was caught on videotape.

Martin Lee Anderson was sent to the camp for joyriding in his grandmother’s car.

His death, initially not acted on by officials, sparked outrage when the tape was made public, leading to accusations of a cover-up against then governor Jeb Bush and the closure of Florida’s boot camps.

Florida has agreed to pay $US5 million to the boy’s family.

Copyright © 2007. The Age Company Ltd.

BBC stars keep sky high pay, yet support staff face cuts

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By Chris Hastings

The BBC’s highest-paid stars including Jonathan Ross, Terry Wogan and Graham Norton will keep their huge pay packets despite drastic cuts to the corporation’s budget.

The Sunday Telegraph understands that Mark Thompson, the director-general, has ruled out any move to slash salaries of big names for fear that they will defect to ITV.

Mr Thompson is struggling to fill a £2 billion black hole in the BBC’s finances. The loss of up to 2,800 jobs, the sale of assets and a massive reduction in programme budgets are likely.

Ross has a three-year deal worth £18 million, Norton has a £5 million contract and Wogan earns £800,000 a year. Other high earners include the Radio 1 DJs Jo Whiley and Chris Moyles who are reportedly paid £250,000 and £630,000 a year respectively.

Speculation about salary cuts emerged last week when it was claimed that Mr Thompson had called 100 of the corporation’s biggest names to a meeting this Wednesday, when the package of cuts will be signed off by the BBC Trust. Sources insisted last night, however, that only full-time staff got the summons and that most of the highest paid personalities are freelance. The sources claim the meeting is more likely to be a briefing about the cuts in general.

One source, who asked not to be named, said: “Not one of the very high earners or their representatives has been approached on pay. Any self-respecting channel controller would give up the job rather than let the director-general interfere in these kinds of negotiations.”

The last details of the cuts package are still being finalised. Mr Thompson and Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, are due to meet at 7.30am tomorrow to thrash out further details.

The news operation and the corporation’s factual progamming division are expected to be the hardest hit. Managers in BBC News have told staff to brace themselves for around 520 job cuts.

Full details of the proposals will be presented to staff on Thursday.

DIANA TRUTH WILL DESTROY BRITAIN

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By Tom Hutchison

THE truth about Princess Diana’s death could “spell the ruination of Britain”, it was claimed last night.

The allegation was made by the father of Henri Paul, who was driving Diana’s car on the night of the Paris crash.

Jean Paul says his son is being made a scapegoat by the authorities for the crash that killed him, Diana, 36, and her lover Dodi Fayed, 42.

With the six-month inquest on Diana set to continue today, Mr Paul claimed Henri, 41, had to discreetly eject a mystery intruder at the Ritz minutes before he took to the road — proving he could not have been drunk at the wheel. And he says French police are refusing to hand back some of Henri’s blood-covered possessions because they do not want him to have access to his blood from that night.

Jean Paul also says that claims his son was in the pay of secret services are rubbish as the broke security chief had asked him for a £1,000 loan for a deposit on a flat.

Mr Paul Snr, 76, said a treasured photo ID card his son was carrying in his wallet during the 1997 crash had never been returned.

He suggested the authorities did not want him to have the blood-stained card because he would be able to prove through lab tests that his son was not drunk at the wheel.

He added: “We were also told Henri had no wallet on him. I don’t believe that.”

Mr Paul said a lot of things did not add up about the whole case.

But he said: “In my heart there is a flame of hope that, one day, the truth will come out.

“And it could spell the ruination of Great Britain.”

A spokesman for Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, has urged dad-of-five Mr Paul to address the inquest with his claims.

He said: “Anyone who has relevant information must bring it before the coroner so that the jury can hear it and assess it.”

French police would not comment on his claims last night.

Fingerprint doubt over Kelly ‘suicide’

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Secret knife evidence points to murder, says MP

By Stewart Whittingham And Graham Brough

Newly released evidence adds to the theory that MoD scientist Dr David Kelly was murdered and did not commit suicide, an MP has claimed.

Norman Baker revealed that the penknife Dr Kelly apparently used to slash his wrist did not carry his own fingerprints.

Lib Dem Mr Baker said: “The angle you pick up a knife to kill yourself means there would be fingerprints.

“Someone who wanted to kill themselves wouldn’t go to the lengths of wiping the knife clean of fingerprints.

“It is just very suspicious. It is one of the things that makes me think Dr Kelly was murdered. The case should be re-opened.”

UN weapons inspector Dr Kelly, 59, was found dead near his Oxfordshire home in 2003, days after he was named as the source of a BBC story that claimed the Government had “sexed up” a dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier said Saddam Hussein could launch conventional nuclear or biological weapons within 45 minutes.

Independent doctors have said neither the cut to Dr Kelly’s wrist nor the drugs found in his body were enough to kill him.

And they claimed the official cause of death, a severed ulnar artery in the wrist, was extremely unlikely to be fatal.

Mr Baker, who is writing a book on Dr Kelly, used the Freedom of Information Act to discover from Thames Valley police that no fingerprints were on the penknife. The MoD germ warfare expert was not wearing gloves nor were any found at the scene.

An inquest ruled his death was suicide and the Hutton Inquiry exonerated then-PM Tony Blair.

Dr Kelly’s former colleague, UN weapons expert Richard Spertzel, claimed the scientist was on Saddam’s hitlist because his work in the 90s had forced Iraq to admit to a secret biological arsenal.

A Thames Valley police spokeswoman said: “There were no fingerprints on the knife.

“This, however, does not change the official explanation for his death.”

Dr Kelly’s wife Janice has said she is certain he committed suicide.

She refused to comment on Mr Baker’s murder theory.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008

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#1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”
Sources:
Consortium, October 19, 2006
Title: “Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?”
Author: Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html

Consortium, February 3, 2007
Title: “Still No Habeas Rights for You”
Author: Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html

Common Dreams, February 2, 2007
Title: “Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most
American Human Right”
Author: Thom Hartmann
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm

Student Researchers: Bryce Cook and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.

With the approval of Congress and no outcry from corporate media, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, ushered in military commission law for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in the New York Times October 19, have given false comfort that we, as American citizens, will not be the victims of the draconian measures legalized by this Act–such as military roundups and life-long detention with no rights or constitutional protections–Robert Parry points to text in the MCA that allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for “any person” arbitrarily deemed to be an “enemy of the state.” The judgment on who is deemed an “enemy combatant” is solely at the discretion of President Bush.
The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge governmental power of arrest and detention through the use of habeas corpus laws, considered to be the most critical parts of the Magna Carta which was signed by King John in 1215.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist #84 in August of 1788:

The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it [the Constitution] contains. The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious [British eighteenth-century legal scholar] Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital:

“To bereave a man of life” says he, “or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”

While it is true that some parts of the MCA target non-citizens, other sections clearly apply to US citizens as well, putting citizens inside the same tribunal system with non-citizen residents and foreigners.
Section 950q of the MCA states that, “Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter [of the MCA] who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission.”1
Section 950v. “Crimes Triable by Military Commissions” (26) of the MCA seems to specifically target American citizens by stating that, “Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct.”1
“Who,” warns Parry, “has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?”
        Besides allowing “any person” to be swallowed up by Bush’s system, the law prohibits detainees once inside from appealing to the traditional American courts until after prosecution and sentencing, which could translate into an indefinite imprisonment since there are no timetables for Bush’s tribunal process to play out.
        Section 950j of the law further states that once a person is detained, “ not withstanding any other provision of law (including section 2241 of title 28 or any other habeas corpus provision) no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions.”1
        Other constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights, such as a speedy trial, the right to reasonable bail, and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” would seem to be beyond a detainee’s reach as well.
        Parry warns that, “In effect, what the new law appears to do is to create a parallel ‘star chamber’ system for the prosecution, imprisonment, and possible execution of enemies of the state, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
        “Under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called unlawful enemy combatants, Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress effectively created a parallel legal system for ‘any person’–American citizen or otherwise–who crosses some ill-defined line.”
        In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales opined at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, 2007, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended.”
        More important than its sophomoric nature, Parry warns, is that Gonzales’s statement suggests he is still searching for arguments to make habeas corpus optional, subordinate to the President’s executive powers that Bush’s neoconservative legal advisers claim are virtually unlimited during “time of war.”

Citation
   1.    “Military Commissions Act of 2006” Public Law 109-366, 109th Congress. See http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_public_laws&docid=f :publ366.109.
UPDATE BY ROBERT PARRY
The Consortium series on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 pointed out that the law’s broad language seems to apply to both US citizens and non-citizens, contrary to some reassuring comments in the major news media that the law only denies habeas corpus rights to non-citizens. The law’s application to “any person” who aids and abets a wide variety of crimes related to terrorism–and the law’s provisions stripping away the jurisdiction of civilian courts–could apparently thrust anyone into the legal limbo of the military commissions where their rights are tightly constrained and their cases could languish indefinitely.
        Despite the widespread distribution of our articles on the Internet, the major US news media continues to ignore the troubling “any person” language tucked in toward the end of the statute. To my knowledge, for instance, no major news organization has explained why, if the law is supposed to apply only to non-citizens, one section specifically targets “any person [who] in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States.” Indeed, the “any person” language in sections dealing with a wide array of crimes, including traditional offenses such as spying, suggests that a parallel legal system has been created outside the parameters of the US Constitution.
Since publication of the articles, the Democrats won control of both the House and Senate–and some prominent Democrats, such as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, have voiced their intent to revise the law with the goal of restoring habeas corpus and other rights. However, other Democrats appear hesitant, fearing that any attempt to change the law would open them to charges that they are “soft on terrorism” and that Republicans would torpedo the reform legislation anyway. Outside of Congress, pro-Constitution groups have made reform of the Military Commissions Act a high priority. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union organized a national protest rally against the law. But the public’s lack of a clear understanding of the law’s scope has undercut efforts to build a popular movement for repeal or revision of the law.
To learn more about the movement to rewrite the Military Commissions Act, readers can contact the ACLU at https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DOA_learn
https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DOA_learn.

Comment
On June 8, 2007 the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act on an 11-8 vote. If approved, the bipartisan bill, authored by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, will restore habeas rights that were taken away last year by the Military Commissions Act. The bill will move to the full Senate for vote late June 2007.

#2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
Sources:
Toward Freedom , October 25, 2006
Title: “Bush Moves Toward Martial Law”
Author: Frank Morales
www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/911

Student Researchers: Phillip Parfitt and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Andy Merrifield, Ph.D.

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, which was quietly signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, the very same day that he signed the Military Commissions Act, allows the president to station military troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”
        By revising the two-century-old Insurrection Act, the law in effect repeals the Posse Comitatus Act, which placed strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. The 1878 Act reads, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” As the only US criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people, it has been our best protection against tyranny enforced by martial law–the harsh system of rules that takes effect when the military takes control of the normal administration of justice. Historically martial law has been imposed by various governments during times of war or occupation to intensify control of populations in spite of heightened unrest. In modern times it is most commonly used by authoritarian governments to enforce unpopular rule.1
        Section 333 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, entitled “Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law,” states that “the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service–to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (or “refuse” or “fail” in) maintaining public order–in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
        Thus an Act of Congress, superceding the Posse Comitatus Act, has paved the way toward a police state by granting the president unfettered legal authority to order federal troops onto the streets of America, directing military operations against the American people under the cover of “law enforcement.”
        The massive Defense Authorization Act grants the Pentagon $532.8 billion to include implementation of the new law which furthermore facilitates militarized police round-ups of protesters, so-called illegal aliens, potential terrorists, and other undesirables for detention in facilities already contracted and under construction, (see Censored 2007, Story #14) and transferring from the Pentagon to local police units the latest technology and weaponry designed to suppress dissent.
        Author Frank Morales notes that despite the unprecedented and shocking nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19, a lone Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) noted that 2007’s Defense Authorization Act contained a “widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order without the consent of the nation’s governors.”
        A few weeks later, on September 29, Leahy entered into the Congressional Record that he had “grave reservations about certain provisions of the fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill Conference Report,” the language of which, he said, “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law.” This had been “slipped in,” Leahy said, “as a rider with little study,” while “other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”
        Leahy noted “the implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are enormous.” “There is good reason,” he said, “for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”
        Morales further asserts that “with the president’s polls at a historic low and Democrats taking back the Congress it is particularly worrisome that President Bush has seen fit, at this juncture to, in effect, declare himself dictator.”

Citation
   1.    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law, “Martial Law,” May 2007

UPDATE BY FRANK MORALES
On April 24, 2007, Major General Timothy Lowenberg, the Adjutant General, Washington National Guard, and Director of the Washington Military Department, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on “The Insurrection Act Rider and State Control of the National Guard.” He was speaking in opposition to Section 1076 of the recently passed 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Bush quietly signed into law this past October 17. The law clears the way for the President to execute martial law, commandeer National Guard units around the country and unilaterally authorize military operations against the American people in the event of an executive declaration of a “public emergency.”
This move toward martial law, which is intended to facilitate more effective counterinsurgency measures on the home front, took place, according to Lowenberg, “without any hearing or consultation with the governors and without any articulation or justification of need.” This, despite the fact that Section 1076 of the new law “changed more than one hundred years of well-established and carefully balanced state-federal and civil-military relationships.” In other words, with one swipe of the pen, says the General, “one hundred years of law and policy were changed without any publicly or privately acknowledged author or proponent of the change.”
Its “Federal Plans for Implementing Expanded Martial Law Authority” are to be executed via the recently created domestic military command, the Northern Command or NORTHCOM. “One key USNORTHCOM planning assumption,” says Lowenberg, “is that the President will invoke the new Martial Law powers if he concludes state and/or local authorities no longer possess either the capability or the will to maintain order.” In fact, this “highly subjective assumption,” as Lowenberg puts it, has been in the works for some time now. According to the General, the “US Northern Command has been engaged for some time in deliberative planning for implementation of Section 1076 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization. The formal NORTHCOM CONPLAN 2502-05 was approved by Secretary of Defense Gates on March 15, 2007,”
Further, according to the General, the 2007 NDAA provisions “could be used to compel National Guard forces to engage in civil disturbance operations under federal control.” In that case, NORTHCOM will effectuate its move to martial law, its “CONPLAN,” by way of its very own “civil disturbance plan,” Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code-named Garden Plot. Major Tom Herthel, of the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General School, recently laid out the Rules of Engagement & Rules for the Use of Force during the implementation of “GARDEN PLOT,” which according to Herthel, is ”the plan to provide the basis for all preparation, deployment, employment, and redeployment of all designated forces, including National Guard forces called to active federal service, for use in domestic civil disturbance operations as directed by the President.” Among other things, the “rules” allow for the use of lethal force during domestic “civil disturbance operations.”
That is why many are urging Congress to repeal Section 1076 of the 2007 NDAA through immediate enactment of Senate Bill 513. Introduced in February 2007, and sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the bill seeks to repeal, or as the Congress puts it, “revive previous authority on the use of the Armed Forces and the militia to address interference with State or Federal law, and for other purposes,” through the “Repeal of Amendments made by Public Law 109-364-Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007.”
It is critical that Senate Bill 513 becomes law, and that our popular struggle succeeds in beating back the President’s attempt to further codify the immoral and criminal seizure of state control via woefully ill-advised and dictatorial moves toward martial law and military rule.
# 3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
Source:
MoonofAlabama.org 2/21/2007
Title: “Understanding AFRICOM”
Author: Bryan Hunt
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html

Student Researcher: Ioana Lupu
Faculty Evaluator: Marco Calavita, Ph.D

In February 2007 the White House announced the formation of the US African Command (AFRICOM), a new unified Pentagon command center in Africa, to be established by September 2008. This military penetration of Africa is being presented as a humanitarian guard in the Global War on Terror. The real objective is, however, the procurement and control of Africa’s oil and its global delivery systems.
        The most significant and growing challenge to US dominance in Africa is China. An increase in Chinese trade and investment in Africa threatens to substantially reduce US political and economic leverage in that resource-rich continent. The political implication of an economically emerging Africa in close alliance with China is resulting in a new cold war in which AFRICOM will be tasked with achieving full-spectrum military dominance over Africa.
        AFRICOM will replace US military command posts in Africa, which were formerly under control of US European Command (EUCOM) and US Central Command (CENTCOM), with a more centralized and intensified US military presence.
        A context for the pending strategic role of AFRICOM can be gained from observing CENTCOM in the Middle East. CENTCOM grew out of the Carter Doctrine of 1980 which described the oil flow from the Persian Gulf as a “vital interest” of the US, and affirmed that the US would employ “any means necessary, including military force” to overcome an attempt by hostile interests to block that flow.
        It is in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa that the US military force is most rapidly increasing, as this area is projected to become as important a source of energy as the Middle East within the next decade. In this region, challenge to US domination and exploitation is coming from the people of Africa–most specifically in Nigeria, where seventy percent of Africa’s oil is contained.
        People native to the Niger Delta region have not benefited, but instead suffered, as a result of sitting on top of vast natural oil and natural gas deposits. Nigerian people’s movements are demanding self-determination and equitable sharing of oil-receipts. Environmental and human rights activists have, for years, documented atrocities on the part of oil companies and the military in this region. As the tactics of resistance groups have shifted from petition and protest to more proactive measures, attacks on pipelines and oil facilities have curtailed the flow of oil leaving the region. As a Convergent Interests report puts it, “Within the first six months of 2006, there were nineteen attacks on foreign oil operations and over $2.187 billion lost in oil revenues; the Department of Petroleum Resources claims this figure represents 32 percent of ‘the revenue the country [Nigeria] generated this year.’”
        Oil companies and the Pentagon are attempting to link these resistance groups to international terror networks in order to legitimize the use of the US military to “stabilize” these areas and secure the energy flow. No evidence has been found however to link the Niger Delta resistance groups to international terror networks or jihadists. Instead the situation in the Niger Delta is that of ethnic-nationalist movements fighting, by any means necessary, toward the political objective of self-determination. The volatility surrounding oil installations in Nigeria and elsewhere in the continent is, however, used by the US security establishment to justify military “support” in African oil producing states, under the guise of helping Africans defend themselves against those who would hinder their engagement in “Free Trade.”
        The December 2006 invasion of Somalia was coordinated using US bases throughout the region. The arrival of AFRICOM will effectively reinforce efforts to replace the popular Islamic Courts Union of Somalia with the oil industry—friendly Transitional Federal Government. Meanwhile, the persistent Western calls for “humanitarian intervention” into the Darfur region of Sudan sets up another possibility for military engagement to deliver regime change in another Islamic state rich in oil reserves.
        Hunt warns that this sort of “support” is only bound to increase as rhetoric of stabilizing Africa makes the dailies, copied directly out of official AFRICOM press releases. Readers of the mainstream media can expect to encounter more frequent usage of terms like “genocide” and “misguided.” He notes that already corporate media decry China’s human rights record and support for Sudan and Zimbabwe while ignoring the ongoing violations of Western corporations engaged in the plunder of natural resources, the pollution other peoples’ homelands, and the “shoring up” of repressive regimes.
        In FY 2005 the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative received $16 million; in FY 2006, nearly $31 million. A big increase is expected in 2008, with the administration pushing for $100 million each year for five years. With the passage of AFRICOM and continued promotion of the Global War on Terror, Congressional funding is likely to increase significantly.
        In the end, regardless of whether it’s US or Chinese domination over Africa, the blood spilled will be African. Hunt concludes, “It does not require a crystal ball or great imagination to realize what the increased militarization of the continent through AFRICOM will bring to the peoples of Africa.”

Update by Bryan Hunt
By spring 2007, US Department of Energy data showed that the United States now imports more oil from the continent of Africa than from the country of Saudi Arabia. While this statistic may be of surprise to the majority, provided such information even crosses their radar, it’s certainly not the case for those figures who have been pushing for increased US military engagement on that continent for some time now, as my report documented. These import levels will rise.
        In the first few months following the official announcement of AFRICOM, details are still few. It’s expected that the combatant command will be operational as a subunit of EUCOM by October 2007, transitioning to a full-fledged stand-alone command some twelve months later. This will most likely entail the re-locating of AFRICOM headquarters from Stuttgart, Germany, where EUCOM is headquartered, to an African host country.
        In April, US officials were traversing the continent to present their sales pitch for AFRICOM and to gauge official and public reaction. Initial perceptions are, not surprisingly, negative and highly suspect, given the history of US military involvement throughout the world, and Africa’s long and bitter experience with colonizers.
        Outside of a select audience, reaction in the United States has barely even registered. First of all, Africa is one of the least-covered continents in US media. And when African nations do draw media attention, coverage typically centers on catastrophe, conflict, or corruption, and generally features some form of benevolent foreign intervention, be it financial and humanitarian aid, or stern official posturing couched as paternal concerns over human rights. But US military activity on the continent largely goes unnoticed. This was recently evidenced by the sparse reporting on military support for the invasion of Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts Union and reinstall the unpopular warlords who had earlier divided up the country. The Pentagon went so far as to declare the operation a blueprint for future engagements.
        The DOD states that a primary component of AFRICOM’s mission will be to professionalize indigenous militaries to ensure stability, security, and accountable governance throughout Africa’s various states and regions. Stability refers to establishing and maintaining order, and accountability, of course, refers to US interests. This year alone, 1,400 African military officers are anticipated to complete International Military Education and Training programs at US military schools.
        Combine this tasking of militarization with an increased civilian component in AFRICOM emphasizing imported conceptions of “democracy promotion” and “capacity-building” and African autonomy and sovereignty are quick to suffer. Kenyans, for example, are currently finding themselves in this position.
It is hoped that, by drawing attention to the growing US footprint on Africa now, a contextual awareness of these issues can be useful to, at the very least, help mitigate some of the damages that will surely follow. At the moment, there is little public consciousness of AFRICOM and very few sources of information outside of official narratives. Widening the public dialogue on this topic is the first step toward addressing meaningful responses.

# 4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
Sources:
Oxfam International, March 2007
Title: “Singing Away The Future”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703

IPS coverage of Oxfam Report March 20, 2007
Title: “Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries”
Author: Sanjay Suri
http://ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008

Student Researcher: Ann Marie O’Toole
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.

The Oxfam report, “Signing Away the Future,” reveals that the US and European Union (EU) are vigorously pursuing increasingly destructive regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements outside the auspices of the WTO. These agreements are requiring enormous irreversible concessions from developing countries, while offering almost nothing in return. Faster and deeper, the US and EU are demanding unprecedented tariff reductions, sometimes to nothing, as the US and EU dump subsidized agricultural goods on undeveloped countries (see story #21), plunging local farmers into desperate poverty. Meanwhile the US and EU provide themselves with high tariffs and stringent import quotas to protect their own producers. Unprecedented loss of livelihood, displacement, slave labor, along with spiraling degradation of human rights and environments are resulting as economic governance is forced from governments of developing countries, and taken over by unaccountable multinational firms.
During 2006, more than one hundred developing countries were involved in FTA or Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) negotiations. “An average of two treaties are signed every week,” the report says, “Virtually no country, however poor, has been left out.”
Much of the recent debate and controversy over trade negotiations has revolved around the increasingly devastating trade-distorting practices of rich countries versus the developing countries’ needs for food security and industrial development. The new generation of agreements, however, extends far beyond this traditional area of trade policy–imposing a damaging set of binding rules in intellectual property, services, and investment with much deeper consequences for development and impacts on the poor.
Double standards in the intellectual-property rights chapters of most trade agreements are glaring. As new agreements limit developing countries’ access to patented technology and medicines–while failing to protect traditional knowledge–the public-health consequences are staggering. The US-Colombia FTA is expected to reduce access to medicines by 40 percent and the US-Peru FTA is expected to leave 700,000 to 900,000 Peruvians without access to affordable medicines.
US and EU FTAs also require the adoption of plant-breeder rights that remove the right to share seeds among indigenous farmers. The livelihood of the world’s poorest farmers is thus made even more vulnerable, while profit margins of the world’s largest agribusinesses continue to climb. US FTAs are now pushing for patents on plants, which will not only limit the rights of farmers to exchange or sell seeds, but also forbid them to save and reuse seed they have grown themselves for generations. Under US FTAs including DR-CAFTA, US—Peru and US—Colombia FTAs, developing-country governments will no longer be able to reject a patent application because a firm fails to indicate the origin of a plant or show proof of consent for its use from a local community. As a result, communities could find themselves forced to pay for patented plant varieties based on genetic resources from their own soil.
New rules also pose a threat to essential services as FTAs allow foreign investors to take ownership of healthcare, education, water, and public utilities.
Investment chapters of new FTAs and BITs allow foreign investors to sue for lost profits, including anticipated future profits, if governments change regulations, even when such reforms are in the public interest. These rules undermine the sovereignty of developing nations, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms. A growing number of investment chapters and treaties further tip the scales of justice by preventing governments from screening or regulating foreign investment–banning the use of all ‘performance requirements’ in all sectors including mining, manufacturing, and services.
More than 170 countries have signed international investment agreements that provide foreign investors with the right to turn immediately to international investor-state arbitration to settle disputes, without first trying to resolve the matter in national courts. Such arbitration fails to consider public interest, basing decisions exclusively on commercial law.
Not only is the legal basis for investment arbitration loaded against public interest, so are the proceedings. Despite the fact that many arbitration panels are hosted at the World Bank and the United Nations, the investment arbitration system is shrouded in secrecy. It is virtually impossible to find out what cases are being heard, let alone the outcome or rationale for decisions. As a result, there is no body of case decisions to inform governments of developing countries when drafting investments agreements.
Oxfam notes that the only group privy to this information is an increasingly powerful select group of commercial lawyers, whose fees often place them out of reach of developing-country governments. These lawyers, according to the Oxfam report, are eager to advise foreign investors regarding opportunities to claim compensation from developing countries under international investment agreements.
Strong opposition is growing to the political asymmetry inherent in these bilateral trade and investment agreements (see stories #8, #19, and #21). As Oxfam notes, “It is in nobody’s long-term interest to have a global economy that perpetuates social, economic, and environmental injustice.”

UPDATE BY LAURA RUSU OF OXFAM INTERNATIONAL
While real progress toward achieving a development-friendly outcome in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round is still quite elusive, the negotiation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) that would undermine development continues at an unabated pace.
        In the United States, the new Democratic leadership in Congress recently negotiated changes in the areas of labor, environment, and intellectual property in regard to access to medicines that are to be incorporated into the completed FTAs awaiting Congressional ratification. If implemented as agreed, these changes would mean important progress in enforcing core International Labor Organization standards and multilateral environmental agreements, and in promoting public health over private profits by reducing onerous protections for pharmaceutical monopolies. Still, more must be done in these areas, and harmful provisions remain in several other areas that will adversely affect developing countries, particularly the poor.
        Without further changes, the FTAs create a profoundly unfair situation in which the US provides massive domestic agricultural supports and subsidies that allow products to be exported below their cost of production, while developing country trading partners are left with no means of protection. With large portions of their populations dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods, the FTAs provide no effective safeguard to protect poor farmers from unfair competition. In addition, investment rules in the FTAs will hinder local and national governments from directing foreign investment so that it contributes to sustainable development. The investment chapter will give foreign companies leeway to challenge investment regulations, such as laws to protect the environment and public health. These and other provisions would deny developing countries the policy space needed to further their own development. 
        The US Administration hopes to bring FTAs with Peru, Panama, Colombia and Korea to a vote this year, although it remains doubtful whether there would be sufficient Congressional support to move the latter two. Congressional leadership is insisting that Colombia must also address its serious problems of violence and impunity, particularly as suffered by trade unionists, and has raised market-access concerns with regard to South Korea.
        In a similar vein, the European Union has proceeded with FTA negotiations with African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries by pushing forward negotiating texts that will undermine the ability of poor countries to effectively govern their economies, protect their poorest people, improve livelihoods, and create new jobs. Going beyond the provisions negotiated at a multilateral level, the EU is making requests that would impose far-reaching, hard-to-reverse rules in the areas of market access, agriculture, services and intellectual property. At the same time, the EU is proceeding to open formal negotiations with Central American countries for an FTA that would impose similar rules that undermine development. A similar agreement with Andean countries is expected to follow, and plans have been announced to open negotiations with ASEAN, India, and South Korea. In all of these negotiations, the EU, like the US, is failing to put development first.
For more information, please see http://www.oxfamamerica.org.
#5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq
Source:
CorpWatch, October 17, 2007
Title: “A US Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy” 
Author: David Phinney
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173

Student Researcher: Kristen Kebler and Angela Purcaro
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.

The enduring monument to US liberation and democracy in Iraq will be the most expensive and heavily fortified embassy in the world–and is being built by a Kuwait contractor repeatedly accused of using forced labor trafficked from South Asia under US contracts. The $592 million, 104-acre fortress equal in size to the Vatican City is scheduled to open in September 2007. With a highly secretive contract awarded by the US State Department, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting has joined the ranks of Halliburton/KBR in Iraq by using bait-and-switch recruiting practices. Thousands of citizens from countries that have banned travel or work in Iraq are being tricked, smuggled into brutal and inhumane labor camps, and subjected to months of forced servitude–all in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone, “right under the nose of the US State Department.”
Though Associated Press reports that, “The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy are far more numerous than at any other US mission worldwide,”1 there is no mention in corporate media of the 3,000 South Asian laborers working for contractors in dangerous and abysmal living and working conditions.
One such contractor is First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. FKTC has procured several billion dollars in US construction contracts since the war began in March 2003. Much of its work is performed by cheap labor hired from South Asia. The company currently employs an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in theaters of war.
American FKTC employees report having witnessed the issuance of false boarding passes to Dubai, and passport seizure from planeloads of South Asian workers, who were instead routed to war-torn Baghdad. Former US Embassy construction manager for FKTC, John Owen, disclosed to author David Phinney that the deception had all the appearance of smuggling workers into Iraq.
On April 4, 2006, the Pentagon issued a contracting directive following an investigation that officially confirmed that contractors in Iraq, many working as subcontractors to Halliburton/KBR, were illegally confiscating worker passports, using deceptive bait-and-switch hiring practices, and charging recruiting fees that indebted low-paid migrant workers for many months or even years to their employers.
Section 1. (U) of the Pentagon directive states, “An inspection of contracting activities supporting DoD in Iraq revealed evidence of illegal confiscation of worker (Third Country National) passports by contractors/subcontractors; deceptive hiring practices and excessive recruiting fees, substandard worker living conditions at some sites, circumvention of Iraqi immigration procedures by contractors/subcontractors and lack of mandatory trafficking in persons awareness training. This FRAGO [fragmentary order] establishes responsibilities within MNF-1 for combating trafficking in persons.”
An April 19, 2006 memorandum from Joint Contracting Command in Baghdad to All Contractors again states that, “Evidence indicates a widespread practice of withholding employee passports to, among other things, prevent employees ‘jumping’ to other employers. All contractors engaging in the above mentioned practice are directed to cease and desist in this practice immediately.”
The Pentagon has yet to announce, however, any penalty for those found to be in violation of US labor trafficking laws or contract requirements.
In a resignation letter dated June 2006, Owen told FKTC and US State Department officials that his managers at the US Embassy site regularly beat migrant workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security. He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers, recruited from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan lived. Those workers, Owen noted, earned as little as $10 to $30 for a twelve-hour workday.
Rory Mayberry, a medic subcontracted to FKTC to attend construction crews at the Embassy, shares similar complaints about treatment of migrant laborers. In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army, and FKTC, Mayberry called for the closure of the onsite medical clinic, listing dozens of serious safety hazards, unsanitary conditions, as well as routine negligence and malpractice. He furthermore called for an investigation into deaths that he suspected resulted from medical malpractice. Mayberry is not aware of any follow-up on his allegations.
Owen says that State Department officials supervising the US Embassy project are aware of abuse, but apparently do nothing. He recalls, “Once when seventeen workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in virtual lockdown.”
Phinney says that more FKTC employees are stepping forward to say that Owen’s and Mayberry’s testimonies “only begin to scratch the surface” of the conditions workers are forced to endure in building this monument to US liberation and democracy in Iraq.

Citation:
   1.    Associated Press, “New US Embassy in Iraq Cloaked in Mystery,” MSNBC, April 14, 2006.

UPDATE BY DAVID PHINNEY
When I first heard that Project Censored would recognize this story on the low-wage migrant laborers from South Asia building the US embassy in Baghdad, I admit I felt the story was a failure. Allegations of forced labor, lousy treatment of workers and beatings struck me as something that should rise to the level of torture at Abu Ghraib. Despite what appears to be a whitewash review of the embassy project by the State Department Inspector General that exonerated the contractor–even though more than a dozen sources on the site say conditions were abysmal–I am now encouraged by a recent effort at the US Justice Department to investigate allegations of labor trafficking and other matters. But the problem of labor abuse has been found to be “widespread” among contractors in the theater of war in Iraq. Unfortunately, not one contractor has been penalized–in fact, many are being rewarded with new US-funded contracts. That is a crime to humanity that may haunt the United States for years to come.

#6 Operation FALCON Raids
Sources:
SourceWatch, November 18, 2006
Title: “Operation Falcon”
Author: Brenda J. Elliot
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON

Ukernet, February 26, 2007
Title: “Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State”
Author: Mike Whitney
http://uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1

Student Researcher: Erica Haikara and Celeste Winders
Faculty Evaluator: Ron Lopez, Ph.D.

Under the code name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. The operations directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local, and federal) and were the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and US Marshal’s Director Ben Reyna. The DoJ supplied television networks government-shot action videotape of Marshals and local cops raiding homes and breaking down doors, “targeting the worst of the worst criminals on the run,” emphasizing suspected sex offenders. Yet less than ten percent of the total 30,150 were suspected sex offenders and less than two percent owned firearms. The press has not asked, “Who were the others?” And to date, the US Marshal’s office has issued no public statement as to whether the people arrested in Operation Falcon have been processed or released. Author Mike Whitney cautions that Attorney General Gonzales has little interest in the petty offenders who were netted in this extraordinary crackdown. This action is instead, he warns, a practice roundup in the move toward martial law.
        Altogether, there were three FALCON Operations, each netting roughly 10,000 criminal suspects. Between April 4—10, 2005, FALCON I swept up 10,340 fugitives in the largest nationwide mass arrest (to that date) in American history. Alberto Gonzalez proudly announced on April 15 through corporate media, “Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime. This joint effort shows the commitment of our federal, state, and local partners to make our neighborhoods safer, and it has led to the highest number of arrests ever recorded for a single initiative of its kind. We will use all of our Nation’s law enforcement resources to serve the people, to pursue justice, and to make our streets and Nation safer.”
        Operation FALCON II, carried out the week of April 17—23, 2006, arrested another 9,037 individuals from twenty-seven states mostly west of the Mississippi River. Operation FALCON III, conducted during the week of October 22—28, 2006, netted another 10,733 fugitives in twenty-four states east of the Mississippi River.
        The US Marshals Service has not yet disclosed the names of the people arrested in these massive sweeps nor of what crimes they were accused. We have no way of knowing whether they were provided with due process of law, where they are now, or whether they have been abused while in custody.
        SourceWatch contributors further ask for clarification, “Although Attorney General Gonzales stated on April 15, 2005 that Operation FALCON was ‘an excellent example of President Bush‘s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime,’ where is the connection between the Operation FALCON roundups and catching terrorists? Why did police wait for federally orchestrated raids to arrest known sex offenders and suspected murders? Why were state and federal agencies integrated with local law enforcement to simply carry out routine police work?”
        The media played an essential role in concealing the important details of the Operation. In fact, the non-critical “cookie cutter” articles which appeared in newspapers across the country suggest that the media may have collaborated directly with the Justice Department. (see Chapter 9, Fake News) Whitney notes that nearly identical “news” segments and articles put the best possible spin on a story that most Americans might find deeply disturbing, and perhaps frightening.
        While mass militarized police roundups make little sense as a method of apprehending fugitives, the FALCON program does make sense as a means of effectively setting up a chain-of-command structure that radiates from the Justice Department and relocates the levers of control to Washington where they can be manned by members of the administration. Whitney warns that the plan behind the FALCON program appears to have been devised to enhance the powers of the “unitary” executive by putting state and local law enforcement under federal supervision, ready for the institution of martial law (see story #2.)

Update by Mike Whitney
Operation FALCON presents the first time in US history that all of the domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government. The implications for American democracy are quite profound.
Operation FALCON serves no purpose except to centralize power and establish the basic contours of an American police state. It is not an effective way of apprehending criminals.
For the most part, the media completely ignored FALCON. In fact, these extraordinary police-state sweeps did not elicit even one editorial or one column-inch of commentary from any journalist in the country. Following the government’s version of events, the story was simply brushed aside as trivial. For those who care to explore the media’s true role in undermining the fundamental rights of Americans; FALCON is probably a good place to begin. It illustrates how the media deliberately obscures facts that do not serve the overall interests of the state.
The last FALCON operation was carried out on October 28, 2006. Since then, the project has been put on “hold,” presumably until some time in the future when it will be reactivated by presidential decree. The precedents have now been established for law enforcement agencies across the nation to be taken over by the chief executive at a moment’s notice. If there is another terrorist attack within the United States, or the outbreak of an epidemic, or a natural disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina; we can expect that President Bush will consolidate his power by asserting direct control over all of the various federal, state, and local police agencies. Eventually, we will see that FALCON was organized with that very purpose in mind.
Recent changes to the Insurrection Act of 1807 as well as to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 allow President Bush to declare martial law at his own discretion and to take control of the National Guard from the state governors. That means that Bush now has a complete monopoly on all the means of organized violence in the country.
With the aid of the corporate media and an alliance of far-right organizations, Bush has successfully removed all the traditional obstacles to absolute power. The groundwork has been laid for an American dictatorship. FALCON is just one small part of that much larger plan.

UPDATE BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A more recent and less publicized sweep was made March 7, 2007, in Baltimore, with the arrest of about two hundred fugitives. The rationale for this sweep is more puzzling, perhaps, as it was the only city involved. This sweep received only local media attention.
Numerous questions, as stated in the Operation FALCON article, remain unanswered. The mainstream press does not appear to be interested in exploring beyond the initial sweep events.
Both House and Senate committees on the judiciary and government oversight are digging into DoJ operations due to the US attorney firings and politicization of the Department, with all roads leading to the White House. It is not unreasonable to expect that these sweeps may eventually come under investigation as well.
The mainstream press, to my knowledge, has not responded at all to my SourceWatch coverage of this story. The press coverage that Operation FALCON received appears to be limited to DoJ and USMS news releases with the addition of an occasional local interest story. Information on the fate of the 30,000 plus who were arrested is conspicuous by its absence.
Additional information on this story should be available from both the DoJ and USMS. In reality, it most likely will not be, as neither has provided any updates. The SourceWatch article will continue to be updated when or if additional information becomes available.
#7 Behind Blackwater Inc.
Source: Democracy Now! January 26, 2007
Title: “Our Mercenaries in Iraq: Blackwater Inc and Bush’s Undeclared Surge”
Author: Jeremy Scahill
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232

Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne, Ph.D.

The company that most embodies the privatization of the military industrial complex–a primary part of the Project for a New American Century and the neoconservative revolution is the private security firm Blackwater. Blackwater is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, with 20,000 soldiers, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and a private intelligence division. The firm is also manufacturing its own surveillance blimps and target systems.
        Blackwater is headed by a very right-wing Christian-supremist and ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family has had deep neo-conservative connections. Bush’s latest call for voluntary civilian military corps to accommodate the “surge” will add to over half a billion dollars in federal contracts with Blackwater, allowing Prince to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against Muslims and others.
        One of the last things Dick Cheney did before leaving office as Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush was to commission a Halliburton study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That study effectively created the groundwork for a continuing war profiteer bonanza.
        During the Clinton years, Erik Prince envisioned a project that would take advantage of anticipated military outsourcing. Blackwater began in 1996 as a private military training facility, with an executive board of former Navy Seals and Elite Special Forces, in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. A decade later it is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, embodying what the Bush administration views as “the necessary revolution in military affairs”–the outsourcing of armed forces.
        In his 2007 State of the Union address Bush asked Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years. He continued, “A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer civilian reserve corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.”
        This is, however, precisely what the administration has already done–largely, Jeremy Scahill points out, behind the backs of the American people. Private contractors currently constitute the second-largest “force” in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, 48,000 of which work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll. With Prince calling for the creation of a “contractor brigade” before military audiences, the Bush administration has found a back door for engaging in an undeclared expansion of occupation.
        Blackwater currently has about 2,300 personnel actively deployed in nine countries and is aggressively expanding its presence inside US borders. They provide the security for US diplomats in Iraq, guarding everyone from Paul Bremer and John Negroponte to the current US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. They’re training troops in Afghanistan and have been active in the Caspian Sea, where they set up a Special Forces base miles from the Iranian border. According to reports they are currently negotiating directly with the Southern Sudanese regional government to start training the Christian forces of Sudan.
        Blackwater’s connections are impressive. Joseph Schmitz, the former Pentagon Inspector General, whose job was to police the war contractor bonanza, has moved on to become the vice chairman of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company, and the general counsel for Blackwater.
        Bush recently hired Fred Fielding, Blackwater’s former lawyer, to replace Harriet Miers as his top lawyer; and Ken Starr, the former Whitewater prosecutor who led the impeachment charge against President Clinton, is now Blackwater’s counsel of record and has filed briefs with Supreme Court to fight wrongful death lawsuits brought against Blackwater.
        Cofer Black, thirty-year CIA veteran and former head of CIA’s counterterrorism center, credited with spearheading the extraordinary rendition program after 9/11, is now senior executive at Blackwater and perhaps its most powerful operative.
        Prince and other Blackwater executives have been major bankrollers of the President, of former House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and of former Senator, Rick Santorum. Senator John Warner, the former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Blackwater, “our silent partner in the global war on terror.”

#8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
Sources:
Democracy Now! December 13, 2006
Title: “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the US-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India”
Author: Vandana Shiva with Amy Goodman
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229

Global Research, October 9, 2006
Title: “Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India Take on Monsanto”
Author: Arun Shrivastava
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427

SciDev.Net
Title: “Sowing Trouble: India’s ‘Second Green Revolution’”
Author: Suman Sahai
http://www.scidev.net/content/opinions/eng/sowing-trouble-indias-second-green-revolution.cfm

Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.

Farmers’ cooperatives in India are defending the nation’s food security and the future of Indian farmers against the neoliberal invasion of genetically modified (GM) seed. As many as 28,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the last decade as a result of debt incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops, yet when India’s Prime Minister Singh met with President Bush in March 2006 to finalize nuclear agreements, they also signed the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Wal-Mart. The KIA allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.
Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field.
In one of very few public statements by a US government official regarding KIA, Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, states, “While the civilian nuclear initiative has garnered the most attention, our first priority is to continue giving governmental support to the huge growth in business between the Indian and American private sectors. Singh has also challenged the United States to help launch a second green revolution in India’s vast agricultural heartland by enlisting the help of America’s great land-grant institutions.”
Vandana Shiva translates, “These are twin programs about a market grab and a security alignment.” Burns announced that while the nuclear deal is the cutting edge, what the US is really seeking is agricultural markets and real estate markets, “to take over the land of people, not through a market mechanism, but using the state and an old colonial law of land acquisition to grab the land by force.”
Through KIA, Monsanto and the US have asked for unhindered access to India’s gene banks, along with a change in India’s intellectual property laws to allow patents on seeds and genes, and to dilute provisions that protect farmers’ rights. A combination of physical access to India’s gene banks and a possible new intellectual property law that allows seed patents will in essence deliver India’s genetic wealth into US hands. This would be a severe blow to India’s food security and self-sufficiency.
At the same time KIA has paved the way for Wal-Mart’s plans to open five hundred stores in India, starting in August 2007, which will compound the outsourcing of India’s food supply and threaten 14 million small family venders with loss of livelihood.
“This is not about ‘free trade,’” Shiva explains, “Today’s trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It’s become a genocide.”
Farmers are, however, organizing to protect themselves against this economic invasion by maintaining traditional seed banks and setting up exemplary systems of community agrarian support. In response to the flood of debilitating debt tied to GM/hybrid seeds and the toxic petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides these crops depend on, one woman in the small village of Palarum says, “We do not buy seeds from the market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically engineered or terminator seeds.” Instead village women save and trade hardy traditional seeds that have evolved over centuries to produce low-maintenance, nutritious “crops of truth.”
Each village in this rural area of India has formed its own community-based organization called a sangham. Seventy-two sanghams are part of a regional federation. These sanghams form an informal social security network that, through the maintenance of seed banks, will come to the rescue of individuals or entire villages in times of crop failure. Every member of the community has access to food and is assured of some work even if landless. The federation furthermore trains students in skills such as carpentry, computing, pottery, bookbinding, veterinary science, herbal medicine, sewing, farming, waste management, and agro-forestry.
Author Arun Shrivastava comments that, “These seventy-two villages were once horizontally and vertically stratified along caste, class, and religious lines. Food scarcity was endemic, people were malnourished, the majority worked as unskilled day wagers. Today they are cohesive, interdependent. I did not see one malnourished person. Rarely do people go to urban centers to seek work.” Shrivastava continues, “The community is the most important entity that can help us ensure food and nutrition security. The right of access to natural resources–land, rivers, forests, air, and everything that Nature has given us, including seeds, is the fundamental right of the communities, not of the corporations or the state or the individual. No corporation has the right to expropriate what Nature gave us.”
Professor of genetics Suman Sahai concludes, “India must be cautious that it does not become the dumping ground for a technology and its controversial products that have been rejected in many parts of the world and whose safety and usefulness remain questionable. Food security is an integral part of national security. All India’s efforts in the nuclear arena to shore up its national security goals will be undermined if it allows itself to become insecure in the matter of food.”

Citation:
   1.    Nicholas Burns, “‘Heady Times’ For India And the US,” Washington Post, April 29, 2007.

UPDATE BY Arun Shrivastava
Nature has given us seeds and ‘crops of truth’ that do not require any tending but give us nutrition at no or low-cost. This knowledge needs to be rapidly disseminated; soon our lives may depend on it.
With current farming and food distribution systems it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to transport one calorie of food from farm to fork. That is unsustainable now; the era of cheap oil is effectively finished. Since we are already past peak oil, we all must learn to ensure food and nutrition security for our family and community. We will have to learn basic skills like conserving seeds, growing nutritious food, and medicinal crops without chemicals and machines. We will need more cohesive and interdependent local communities, like the women of Zaheerabad have shown.
The women of Zaheerabad save seeds in community-held seed banks and grow nutrition-dense food through a system that ensures health and livelihood for all. They have established how self-sufficient, sustainable communities might live in a post-carbon world.
A handful of multi-national corporations are patenting seeds. These genetically modified (GM) seeds neither increase yield nor reduce costs nor enhance nutritive content of foods, nor reduce dependence on oil. The seeds of deception have destroyed farmers in India, the US, and elsewhere.
Patenting ensures monopoly control while subverting farmers’ right to save seeds; it is antithetical to natural rights of local communities. The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture covertly seeks to gain access and control over community-held seeds.
Since publication of the article, Deccan Development Society (DDS) has extended the model to twenty-six more villages but the community FM radio station remains silent.
At People’s SAARC (South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation) summit in Kathmandu (March 2007) participants voted for a “GM-free South Asia,” community control over seeds and protection of South-Asian biodiversity. Over six million farmers requested the Supreme Court of India (April 2007) to ban open field trials of GM seeds because of the dangers of irreversible contamination of community-held seeds and adverse impact on health.
The mainstream media is silent. They don’t have space for disseminating information that will save us from disease and starvation. These are unglamorous issues.
For more information on growing crops of truth and the need for a new social order, the following are ideal sources:

1.        The Web site of Deccan Development Society (DDS), initiator and facilitator of the sanghams, is http://www.ddsindia.com/www/default.asp. Contact PV Satheesh, Director of Zaheerabad Project.

2.        Beej Bachao Andolan (BBA, Save the Seeds Movement) is a well-known movement of farmers who save traditional seeds of the Himalayan region. Contact Biju Negi, negi.biju@gmail.com.

3.        For information on growing food for health and personal freedom, go to www.soilandhealth.org.

4.        For information on threats posed by multinational seeds firms, go to www.gmwatch.org and www.mindfully.org.

5.        The Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith discusses how GM foods, introduced in the US in 1993 without proper biosafety assessment, endanger our health. It is available at www.seedsofdeception.com. See also the research of Dr. Irina Ermakova at http://irina-ermakova.by.ru/eng/articles.html/, and of Dr. Arpad Pusztai: http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai/.

6.        “Heartless in the Heartland” is the ghastly story of how Monsanto blackmailed US farmers not to save their seeds. See www.mindfully.org.

7. For an excellent summary, watch The Future of Food, a documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, downloadable from www.mindfully.org.

8.        For discussions on peak oil and food security, see Richard Heinberg’s Fifty Million Farmers, published on November 17, 2006, available athttp://www.energybulletin.net/22584.html. Also visit the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, managed by Dr. Colin Campbell, one of world’s leading oil experts, at http://www.peakoil.net.

9.        My two recent papers also shed light on the subject: “The attack on our seeds,” a related article published by Farmer’s Forum in India (contact the editor at bksnd@airtelbroadband.in), and “The Silent War on the People of India,” which can be found at http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/03/22/the_silent _war_on_the_people_of_india.

UPDATE BY Vandana Shiva
The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture impacts 650 million farmers of India and 40 million small retailers and it is redefining the relationships between people in the two biggest democracies in the world.
        A new movement on retail democracy has begun in India that is bringing together small shopkeepers, street hawkers, trade unions and farmers unions. On August 9, 2007, which is Quit India Day, the movement will be organizing actions across the country telling Wal-Mart to leave India.
        For more information, visit our website at www.navdanya.org.

 #9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure
Sources:
Mother Jones, February 2007
Title; “The Highwaymen”
Author: Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html

Human Events, June 12,2006
Title: “Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway”
Author: Jerome R. Corsi
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497

Student Researcher: Rachel Icaza and Ioana Lupu
Faculty Evaluator: Marco Calavita, Ph.D.

We will soon be paying Wall Street investors, Australian bankers, and Spanish contractors for the privilege of driving on American roads, as more than twenty states have enacted legislation allowing public-private partnerships to build and run highways. Investment firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the Carlyle Group are approaching state politicians with advice to sell off public highway and transportation infrastructure. When advising state officials on the future of this vital public asset, these investment firms fail to mention that their sole purpose is to pick up infrastructure at the lowest price possible in order to maximize returns for their investors. Investors, most often foreign companies, are charging tolls and insisting on “noncompete” clauses that limit governments from expanding or improving nearby roads.
        In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which called for the federal and state governments to build 41,000 miles of high-quality roads across the nation, over rivers and gorges, swamps and deserts, over and through vast mountain ranges, in what would later be called the “greatest public works project in human history.” Eisenhower considered the interstate highway system so vital to the public interest that he authorized the federal government to assume 90 percent of the massive cost.
        Fifty years later, states are selling off our nation’s enormous, and aging, infrastructure to private investors. Proponents are celebrating these transactions as a no-pain, all-gain way to off-load maintenance expenses and increase highway-building funds without raising taxes. Opponents are lambasting these plans as a major turn toward handing the nation’s valuable common asset over to private firms whose fidelity is to stockholders–not to the public transportation system or the people who use it.
        On June 29, 2006, Indiana’s governor Mitch Daniels announced that Indiana had received $3.8 billion from a foreign consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm Cintra and the Macquarie Infrastructure Group (MIG) of Australia. In exchange the state handed over operation of a 157-mile Indiana toll road for the next seventy-five years. With the consortium collecting the tolls, which will eventually rise far higher, the privatized road should generate $11 billion for MIG-Cintra over the course of the contract.
        In September 2005, Daniels solicited bids for the project, with Goldman Sachs serving as the state’s financial adviser–a role that would net the bank a $20 million advisory fee. When Goldman Sachs, one of the nation’s most active and most profitable investment banks, with deep connections to Washington, began advising Indiana on selling its toll road, it failed to mention the fact that, even as it was advising Indiana on how to get the best return, its Australian subsidiary’s mutual funds were ratcheting up their positions in MIG–becoming de facto investors in the deal.
        Many are suspicious that governors like Daniels across the nation are taking questionable advice from corporate investment banks–and from Washington.
        Despite public concerns, privatization of US transportation infrastructure has the full backing of the Bush administration. Tyler Duvall, the US Department of Transportation’s assistant secretary for transportation policy, says the DoT has raised the idea with “almost every state” government and is working on sample legislation that states can use for such projects. Across the nation, there is now talk of privatizing the New York Thruway to the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey turnpikes, as well as of inviting the private sector to build and operate highways and bridges from Alabama to Alaska.
        In Texas, Governor Rick Perry still refuses to release details of a $1.3 billion contract his administration signed with Cintra for a forty-mile toll road from Austin to Seguin, or of an enormous $184 billion proposal to build a 4,000-mile network of toll roads through Texas.
        It is known, however, that the Bush administration is quietly advancing the plan to build a huge ten-lane NAFTA Super Highway through the heart of the US along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minnesota, financed largely through public-private partnerships. The Texas Department of Transportation will oversee the Trans-Texas Corridor as the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, which will be leased to the Cintra consortium as a privately operated toll road. Construction is slated to begin in 2007.
        Authors Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway warn that, just as the creation of a National Highway system promised to “change the face of America,” in Eisenhower’s words, so too could its demise.

# 10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief
Source:
BBC Newsnight, February 14, 2007
Title: “Vulture Fund Threat to Third World”
Author: Greg Palast with Meirion Jones
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17070.htm

Student Researcher: Jenifer German
Faculty Evaluator: Robert Girling, Ph.D.

Vulture funds, otherwise known as “distressed-debt investors,” are undermining UN and other global efforts to relieve impoverished Third World nations of the debt that has burdened them for many decades.
Vulture funds are financial organizations that buy up debts that are near default or bankruptcy. The vulture fund will pay the original investor pennies on the dollar for the debt and then approach the debtor to arrange a better repayment on the loan, or will go after the debtor in court.
In the private financial world, these funds, like the birds they are named for, provide a useful function for investors who are unable to follow up on defaulted debts and are themselves facing financial ruin if the debtor reneges entirely.
Under normal circumstances, distressed-debt investing–like day trading–is risky business. It is a gamble and the company knows that going in. The vulture fund may get nothing for its investment if the debtor continues to default and has no assets to attach. However, if there is still meat on the bones (the debtor has considerable assets to liquidate) the vulture fund can make millions.
A problem has arisen in recent years, however, as vulture funds have begun inserting themselves into an increasingly globalized “free market”–where no distinction is made between an irresponsible and defaulted company and a destitute and impoverished nation.
In the case of nations, the actions of vulture funds are corrupting the process begun in 1996 to provide debt relief for Third World nations struggling to emerge from the heavy debt laid upon them by previous corrupt rulers and colonial masters.
In one recent case, the poverty-stricken nation of Zambia was negotiating with Romania to reduce a $40 million debt still owed from a 1979 loan to buy Romanian tractors. In 1999, Romania had agreed to liquidate the entire loan for $3 million. Zambia planned to use the debt cancellation to invest in much-needed nurses, teachers, and basic infrastructure. Just before the deal was finalized however, investors at the England-based vulture fund Donegal International convinced the Romanian government to sell them the loan for just under $4 million–not much more than Zambia had offered. Donegal then turned around and sued Zambia (where the average wage is barely a dollar a day) for the full $40 million.
Throughout the lawsuit, global NGOs have pleaded with the English High Court to void the new contract and allow Zambia to honor the original agreement of $3 million. But on February 15, 2007, an English court ruled that Donegal was entitled to much of what it was seeking–at least $15 million, perhaps more.1
In a last desperate plea, global NGOs working to relieve Third World debt (such as Oxfam and the Jubilee Debt Campaign) turned to Donegal directly, asking them to forgive the debt. Donegal knows that, as a national entity, even a cash-poor country like Zambia has access to considerable resources; in this case copper, cobalt, gem stones, coal, uranium, marble, and much more. Public works and other civic improvement projects can also be liquidated.
Also, Donegal has no history of mercy toward impoverished nations. In 1996 it paid $11 million for a discounted Peruvian debt and threatened to bankrupt the country unless they paid $58 million. Donegal got its money. Now they’re suing Congo Brazzaville for $400 million for a debt they bought for $10 million. Donegal and other vulture funds have teams of lawyers combing the world for assets that can be seized.
Even worse, many of these vulture funds have influential ties to powerful world leaders like the Bush administration. The risk normally faced by distressed-debt investors is virtually eliminated when they have political influence that is greater than the poor nation they are suing. They raise most of their money through legal actions in US courts, where lobbying and political contributions hold influence. And many vulture fund CEOs have close links to top officials both in the US and England.
President Bush has the power to block collection of debts by vulture funds, either individual ones or all of them, if he considers it to be at odds with US foreign policy–in this case debt relief for poor countries.2 According to Congressman John Conyers, “It’s our position that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the comity doctrine brought from our constitution allows the president to require the courts defer in individual suits against foreign nations. And so, we’re conducting a couple of things. First of all, we want to know where these practices are going on at the present time, and, two, how we can get this information to President Bush so that he can, as he indicated to us, stop it immediately.”3
Chancellor Gordon Brown, now the prime minister of England, calls the vulture funds perverse and immoral. Oxfam and Jubilee have urged the chancellor to use his influence as chair of the International Monetary Fund’s key decision-making committee to make sure that new regulations are devised that prevent private companies from bypassing international debt rules and pursuing debts from very poor countries.

Citations
   1.    Ashley Seager, “Court Lets Vulture Fund Claw Back Zambian Millions,” The Guardian, February 16, 2007.
   2.    Ashley Seager, “Bush Could Block Debt Collection by ‘Vulture’ Funds,” Guardian Unlimited, February 22, 2007.
   3.    “Conyers Confronts Bush On Vulture Bonds,” an interview with Democracy Now!, February 16, 2007.
# 11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan
Sources:
Tomdispatch.com, August 27, 2006
Title: “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan”
Author: Ann Jones
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=116512

CorpWatch, October 6, 2006
Title: “Afghanistan Inc: a CorpWatch Investigative Report”
Author: Fariba Nawa
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13518

Student Researchers: Madeline Hall and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.

A report issued in June 2005 by the non-profit organization Action Aid reveals that much of the US tax money earmarked to rebuild Afghanistan actually ends up going no further than the pockets of wealthy US corporations. “Phantom aid” that never shows up in the recipient country is a scam in which paychecks for overpriced, and often incompetent, American “experts” under contract to USAID go directly from the Agency to American bank accounts. Additionally, 70 percent of the aid that does make it to a recipient country is carefully “tied” to the donor nation, requiring that the recipient use the donated money to buy products and services from the donor country, often at drastically inflated prices. The US far outstrips other nations in these schemes, as Action Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of American aid is phantom.
        Authors Ann Jones and Fariba Nawa suggest that in order to understand the failure and fraud in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, it is important to look at the peculiar system of American aid for international development. International and national agencies–including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and USAID, that traditionally distribute aid money to developing countries–have designed a system that is efficient in funneling money back to the wealthy donor countries, while undermining sustainable development in poor states.
        A former head of USAID cited foreign aid as “a key foreign policy instrument” designed to help countries “become better markets for US exports.” To guarantee that mission, the State Department recently took over the aid agency. USAID and the Army Corps of Engineers now cut in US business and government interests from the start, making sure that money is allocated according to US economic, political, strategic, and military priorities, rather than according to what the recipient nation might consider important.
        Though Afghans have petitioned to allocate aid money as they find appropriate, donor countries object, claiming that the Afghan government is too corrupt to be trusted. Increasingly frustrated and angry Afghan communities meanwhile claim that the no-bid, open-ended contracts being awarded to contractors such as Kellogg, Brown, and Root/Halliburton, DynCorp, Blackwater, and the Louis Berger Group are equivalent to licensed bribery, corruption, theft, and money laundering.
        The Karzai government, confined to a self-serving American agenda, has delivered little to the average Afghan, most of whom still live in abject poverty. Western notions of progress evident in US-contracted hotels, restaurants, and shopping malls full of new electronic gadgets and appliances are beyond the imaginations or practicalities of 3.5 million war torn Afghan citizens who are without food, shelter, sewage systems, clean water or electricity.
        Infrastructure hastily built with shoddy materials and no knowledge or respect for geologic or climatic conditions is culminating in one expensive failure after another. USAID’s website, for example, boasts of its only infrastructure accomplishment in Afghanistan–the Kabul-Kandahar Highway–a narrow and already crumbling highway costing Afghanis $1 million a mile. The highway was featured in the Kabul Weekly newspaper in March 2005 under the headline, “Millions Wasted on Second-Rate Roads.” The article notes that while other bids from more competent construction firms came in at one-third the cost, the contract went to the Louis Berger Group, a firm with tight connections to the Bush administration–as well as a notorious track record of other failed and abandoned construction projects in Afghanistan.
        Former Minister of Planning, Ramazan Bashardost, complained that when it came to building roads, the Taliban had done a better job. “And,” he also asked, “Where did the money go?” Now, in a move certain to lower President Karzai’s approval ratings and further diminish US popularity in the area, the Bush administration has pressured Karzai to turn this “gift from the people of the United States” into a toll road, charging each driver $20 for a road-use permit valid for one month. In this way, according to American “experts” providing highly paid technical assistance, Afghanistan can collect $30 million annually from its impoverished citizens and thereby decrease the foreign aid “burden” on the United States.
        Jones asks, “Is it any wonder that foreign aid seems to ordinary Afghans to be something only foreigners enjoy?”
UPDATE BY Fariba Nawa
Afghanistan, Inc. is a thirty-page report that digs deep into the corruption involved in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The report focuses on US government-funded companies contracted to rebuild Afghanistan. The importance of this report is that it’s the first serious look at corruption of aid money spending from a grassroots level. It includes an emphasis on various projects in villages and the cities and it covers all sides of the issue. It shows how big money is spent on bad work.
        The report was first published in English through CorpWatch, a watchdog of corporations, on May 2, 2006. It was translated into the Persian languages of Dari and Pashto in September 2006. The companies investigated in the report continue to receive millions of dollars in contracts from the US government despite their incompetence and wasteful spending. Louis Berger, Bearing Point, Chemonics, and DynCorp are still taking American taxpayers’ money and showing minimum results in Afghanistan.
        Some of the mainstream press gave the report coverage, including NPR’s Morning Edition, KRON Channel 4 news in San Francisco when it was first published, and later on, BBC radio and many other European outlets continue to call and ask the author about the report. However, that’s a limited response to the fact that this was a groundbreaking report with important information for policy change. The report has been a source for many others researching the subject. If you’d like more information on corruption on reconstruction in Afghanistan, please refer to CorpWatch’s website www.corpwatch.org. Integrity Watch Afghanistan is another organization that monitors corruption in the country and produces various reports.
UPDATE BY ANN JONES
Nine months later the conundrum I described–no peace, no security, no development–still pertains, and Afghan hopes sour.
The US still looks for a military solution. In the first five months of 2007, seventy-five coalition troops were killed (compared to fifty-three in the same period last year), including thirty-eight Americans. Civilian casualties were variously reported–some sources said “almost 1,800”–including 135 killed by US or NATO forces.
The US position on military “progress” against the Taliban, expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on June 4, 2007, as he prepared to visit Afghanistan, remained “guarded optimism.” Gates told reporters a goal of his trip was to insure close coordination of combat operations and development and reconstruction efforts. That’s a switch, suggesting some clue that reconstruction may be a better way to “kill” the Taliban, but leaving unanswered the question of how to coordinate war and peaceful activity.
The real importance of “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan” lies behind the front page military coverage–in what it reveals of the systemic scams and should-be scandals of American aid. The story makes news now and then when billions “disappear” from reconstruction projects in Iraq, but to my knowledge it has yet to be investigated by media or congress. What’s discussed is the occasional budgetary black hole that suggests some random malfeasance, in much the same way that torture at Abu Ghraib was discussed as the work of a few “bad apples.”
Maybe reporters don’t want to take up the story because it’s complicated. It’s about numbers. Like Enron. Dreary, ho-hum, life-shattering stuff. I don’t know. But one curious thing: when my book Kabul in Winter appeared in 2006, a very long section on this topic was the one part no reviewer touched.
Now bigger voices than mine speak out. Abdullah Abdullah, the distinguished former Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, recently complained that of every $100,000 promised to Afghan development, less than a third reaches the country. Matt Waldman, head of Afghanistan policy for Oxfam, one of the most respected humanitarian NGOs in the world, wrote in The Guardian (May 26, 2007) that “America is bankrolling Afghanistan” but “as in Iraq, a vast proportion of aid is wasted.” And more to the point, “Close to half of US development assistance goes to the five biggest US contractors in the country.” Waldman argues that too much aid money is lost to high salaries and living costs of international experts, purchase of non-Afghan resources, and corporate profits. He figures the cost of the average expat (read “American”) expert at half a million dollars a year.
So why is it left to representatives of foreign governments, foreign humanitarian organizations, and foreign press to expose this fraud?

To keep up with news about Afghanistan see news@afghanistannewscenter.com, a daily roundup of stories from the world’s English language press. For policy issues see the Web site of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (www.cic.nyu.edu) or that of the Center’s senior fellow and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin (brr5@nyu.edu). To keep an eye on the corridors of power see the website of the Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org), and specifically for information on corporate scams see www.corpwatch.org.
Journalists should also be advised that several professional organizations are protesting the increasing difficulty of covering Afghanistan because of interference by US, Afghan, and ISAF forces. They include IFJ (International Federation of Journalists), AIJA (Afghan Independent Journalists Association), and CPAJ (Committee to Protect Afghan Journalists). Currently Afghan journalists are also boycotting the Afghan Wolesi Jirga (lower house of Parliament) to protest its enactment of repressive media laws and the consequent imprisonment of journalists.

# 12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops
Sources:
HaitiAction.net, January 21, 2007
Title: “UN in Haiti: Accused of Second Massacre”
Authors: Haiti Information Project
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html

Inter Press Service
Title: “Haiti: Poor Residents of Capital Describe a State of Siege”
Authors: Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36772

Student Researcher: William Leeming
Faculty Evaluator: Dianne Parness

Eyewitness testimony confirms indiscriminate killings by UN forces in Haiti’s Cité Soleil community on December 22, 2006, reportedly as collective punishment against the community for a massive demonstration of Lavalas supporters in which about ten thousand people rallied for the return of President Aristide in clear condemnation of the foreign military occupation of their country. According to residents, UN forces attacked their neighborhood in the early morning, killing more than thirty people, including women and children. Footage taken by Haiti Information Project (HIP) videographers shows unarmed civilians dying as they tell of extensive gunfire from UN peacekeeping forces (MINUSTAH).
        A hardened UN strategy became apparent days after the demonstration, when UN officials stated they were entering Cité Soleil to capture or kill gangsters and kidnappers. While officials of MINUSTAH have admitted to “collateral damage,” in the raids of December 2006, they say they are there to fight gangsters at the request of the René Préval government.
        But many residents and local human rights activists say that scores of people having no involvement with gangs were killed, wounded, and arrested in the raids.
        Although MINUSTAH denied firing from helicopter gunships, HIP captured more than three hours of video footage and a large selection of digital photos, illustrating the UN’s behavior in Haiti.
        An unidentified twenty-eight-year-old man, filmed by HIP, can be seen dying as he testifies that he was shot from a circling UN helicopter that rained gunfire on those below. HIP film also shows a sixteen-year-old, dying just after being shot by UN forces. Before dying he describes details of the UN opening fire on unarmed civilians in his neighborhood. The wounded and dying, filmed by HIP, all express horror and confusion.
        IPS observed that buildings throughout Cité Soleil were pockmarked by bullets; many showing huge holes made by heavy caliber UN weapons, as residents attest. Often pipes that brought in water to the slum community now lay shattered.
        A recently declassified document from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince reveals that during a similar operation carried out in July 2005, MINUSTAH expended 22,000 bullets over several hours. In the report, an official from MINUSTAH acknowledged, “given the flimsy construction of homes in Cité Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings, striking unintended targets.”
        Frantz Michel Guerrier, spokesman for the Committee of Notables for the Development of Cité Soleil based in the Bois Neuf zone, said, “It is very difficult for me to explain to you what the people of Bois Neuf went through on Dec. 22, 2006–almost unexplainable. It was a true massacre. We counted more than sixty wounded and more than twenty-five dead, among [them] infants, children, and young people.”
        “We saw helicopters shoot at us, our houses broken by the tanks,” Guerrier told IPS. “We heard detonations of the heavy weapons. Many of the dead and wounded were found inside their houses. I must tell you that nobody had been saved, not even the babies. The Red Cross was not allowed to help people. The soldiers had refused to let the Red Cross in categorically, in violation of the Geneva Convention.” Several residents told IPS that MINUSTAH, after conducting its operations, evacuated without checking for wounded.
        Following the removal of Haiti’s elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide government (see Censored 2005, story #12), up to one thousand Lavalas political activists were imprisoned under the US-backed interim government, according to a Miami University Human Rights study.
        A study released by the Lancet Journal of Medicine in August 2006 estimates that 8,000 were killed and 35,000 sexually assaulted in the greater Port-au-Prince area during the time of the interim government (2004-2006). The study attributed human rights abuses to purported “criminals,” police, anti-Lavalas gangs, and UN peacekeepers.
        HIP Founding Editor Kevin Pina commented, “It is clear that this represents an act of terror against the community. This video evidence shows clearly that the UN stands accused, once again, of targeting unarmed civilians in Cité Soleil. There can be no justification for using this level of force in the close quarters of those neighborhoods. It is clear that the UN views the killing of these innocents as somehow acceptable to their goal of pacifying this community. Every demonstration, no matter how peaceful, is seen as a threat to their control if it includes demands for the return of Aristide to Haiti. In that context it is difficult to continue to view the UN mission as an independent and neutral force in Haiti. They apparently decided sometime ago it was acceptable to use military force to alter Haiti’s political landscape to match their strategic goals for the Haitian people.”

Update by Kevin Pina
Since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas political party were ousted from power on February 29, 2004, accusations of gross human rights violations have persisted in Haiti. While the Haitian National Police (HNP) received training and assistance from the UN following Aristide’s ouster, they were also accused of summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators. The actions of the Haitian police became so egregious that even UN police trainers (CIVPOL) began to question the motives of their commanders and the mission’s objectives. The Haiti Information Project (HIP) received the following correspondence in response to a May 8, 2005 article “UN accommodates Human Rights Abuses by police in Haiti.”1 This is the first publication of that correspondence:

Just want to reinforce your observations as all being accurate.
I am one of the 25 US CIVPOL here on the ground in Haiti, having arrived last November. As a group we are frustrated by the UN’s and CIVPOL’s unwillingness to interpret their mandate aggressively. I have been pushing them to conduct investigations into all the shootings and other significant Human Rights violations with no success. The Police Commissioner and command staff shows little interest and claim the mandate does not allow them to do this. Unfortunately I have countless examples.
The corruption in the HNP is massive with little interest in addressing the problem. Just keep up the pressure, I don’t know what else to do.

Stephen MacKinnon
Chief, Strategic Planning Unit
CIVPOL-MINUSTAH

Chief MacKinnon provided HIP with information and documents that painted a disturbing picture of a UN operation more obsessed with political embarrassment caused by mounting demonstrations for Aristide’s return than interest in reigning in human rights abuses committed by the HNP.2
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) now stands accused of having itself committed several massacres in the seaside shantytown of Cité Soleil. This area of the capital served as a launching site for massive demonstrations demanding the return of President Aristide and for an end to what they called the foreign occupation of their country.
The Brazilian military has responsibility for leadership of the UN military forces in Haiti and is authorized to use deadly force. They are at the top of the command structure and their influence on the overall mission should not be understated. More importantly, there is a direct parallel between Brazilian military tactics utilized by UN forces in Haiti and similar military-style assaults used by the police in their own country.
The Brazilian military police have been accused of firing indiscriminately in the poor slums of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro called favelas. This was highlighted in an Amnesty International report “Brazil: ‘They come in Shooting’: Policing socially excluded communities,” released on December 2, 2005.3
This is similar to the tactics authorized by the Brazilian generals in Haiti. It has resulted in several high-profile massacres committed in the poor slum of Cité Soleil where protestors challenged the UN’s authority by continuing to launch massive demonstrations demanding Aristide’s return and condemning the UN’s presence in Haiti. In each instance, the UN and the elite-run Haitian press demonized the entire community as being criminals and gangsters and/or collaborators of criminals and gangsters. While it is true that armed “gangs” operated in the neighborhood and a few claimed they were aligned with Aristide’s Lavalas movement, these military raids had a clear correlation to the ongoing demonstrations and opposition to the UN presence in Haiti.
Cité Soleil was terrorized on July 6, 2005 when Brazilian commanders authorized a raid by UN forces with the stated aim of routing gangs in the area.4 For Aristide supporters, the raid was a preemptive strike by the UN to dampen the impact of protests on Aristide’s birthday, planned to take place only nine days later on July 15. It also represented the first time UN forces purposely sought to assassinate the leadership of armed groups claiming allegiance to Aristide’s Lavalas movement.5 By the time UN guns stopped firing, countless unarmed civilians lay dead with many having been killed by a single high-powered rifle shot to the head. Since then, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the US Embassy and various intelligence agencies, were aware of the excessive use of force by UN forces in Haiti on July 6, 2005.6 Despite being heavily censored by US officials, what emerges is clear evidence of the disproportionate use of force by UN troops in Cité Soleil.
December 16, 2006 saw another large demonstration for Aristide that began in Cite Soleil and only six days later on December 22, Brazilian commanders would authorize a second deadly raid that residents and human rights groups say resulted in the wholesale slaughter of innocent victims. The unspoken parallel of Brazil’s role in leading the UN’s military strategy in Haiti is the fact that terror tactics such as these have been their modus operandi in their own country.
In the early morning hours of Feb. 2, UN forces entered Cité Soleil firing indiscriminately and their victims were two young girls killed as they slept in their own home.7 Massive demonstrations were scheduled to take place five days later demanding the return of Aristide throughout Haiti on Feb. 7. While these demonstrations went largely unreported by the international corporate media, this stood in contrast, to the avalanche of news stories filed two days later on Feb. 9, when UN forces launched yet another deadly military operation in Cité Soleil.8 Although these raids were ostensibly to rid the neighborhood of gangs, they followed the same pattern and relationship to demonstrations for Aristide’s return and military tactics used by Brazilian commanders in previous UN operations.
The only rights organizations documenting the loss of life and destruction of property resulting from the UN raid on December 22, 2006, as well as previous and subsequent UN military operations, were the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI).9 HIP, the organization originally authoring the article being recognized by Project Censored, is a news agency that has extensive video evidence and interviews from Cité Soleil taken the same day these attacks by UN forces were executed. HIP offers any human rights organization the opportunity to view the documentary footage and evidence supporting the claims of Cité Soleil residents that massacres by UN forces have been committed against them. Unfortunately, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States have remained conspicuously disinterested and silent about this evidence.
For further information and updates about Haiti, please visit www.haitiaction.net, www.ijdh.org, www.HaitiInformationProject.net, www.haitianalysis.com, www.canadahaitiaction.ca, and www.ahphaiti.org.

Notes
    1.      Haiti Information Project,”UN accommodates Human Rights Abuses by police in Haiti,” May 8, 2005. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/5_8_5/5_8_5.html.
    2.      Internet correspondence received from Steve McKinnon to HIP May 12, 2005.
    3.      Amnesty International Report, “Brazil: ‘They come in Shooting’: Policing socially excluded communities” December 2, 2005. See http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e &id=ENGAMR190252005
    4.    Haiti Information Project, “Evidence mounts of a UN massacre in Haiti,” July 12, 2005. See http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html.
    5.    Haiti Information Project,”The UN’s disconnect with the poor in Haiti,” December 25, 2005. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_25_5/12_25a_5.html.
    6.    Haiti Information Project, “US Embassy in Haiti acknowledges excessive force by UN,” January 24, 2007. Article based on FOIA documents obtained by College of DuPage Geography Professor Keith Yearman. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_23_7/1_23_7.html.
    7.    Haiti Information Project–February 2, 2007. UN terror kills Haiti’s children at night http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_2_7a/2_2_7a.html.
    8.    Haiti Information Project, “Massive demonstrations in Haiti catch UN by surprise,” February 9, 2007. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_9_7/2_9_7.html.
    9.    Haiti Information Project,”The UNspoken truth about gangs in Haiti,” February 15, 2007. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_15_7/2_15_7.html.
    10.      Video images documenting UN military operations on July 6, 2005 and December 22, 2006 were taken by HIP videographer Jean-Baptiste Ristil.

UPDATE ON HAITI by Jeb Sprague and Wadner Pierre: Poor Residents of Capital Describe a State of Siege
Initially neither one of us thought of ourselves as journalists, but we were so shocked by events on the ground in Haiti (which were rarely being covered) that we felt compelled to write about them. In the dominant rhetoric of donor groups and corporate media coverage we found that the voices of grassroots civil society were absent. Of any country in the western hemisphere, Haiti’s culture is filled with a vitality for democracy, personal interaction, and dialogue. Radio is the most popular form of communication partially because of economic accessibility and partially because it encourages discussion and debate. From researching our stories we’ve come to see that two civil societies exist, one tightly connected with foreign donors, the foreign embassies present in Port-au-Prince and the large media outlets; and another civil society, a pulsating grassroots that is usually ignored by foreign journalists and donors.
The testimonials and opinions of the donor and foreign government backed elite or middle class based civil society groups are propelled in the media spotlight as unbiased and independent, the Haitian civil society. These are the groups that have bilingual language skills, often higher education, and the technological tools to communicate their programs to a transnational audience. Aid groups fly them abroad to make presentations or provide them with training seminars in the Dominican Republic or Washington, DC.
In the slum- and rural-based communities another civil society exists outside of the international limelight. The members of this civil society are often broke and rarely make a profit from their positions. They are relatively unknown and unheard of by the outside world. These groups, popular and well organized on the ground, have broad participation. They carry out large mobilizations, they fill the streets with friends and family, they organize strikes, they are on the radio, and they organize co-ops, literacy centers, and community programs.
So in our articles we have tried to provide as many direct quotes and testimonials as possible from this grassroots civil society. At the same time we try to place this along side the official rhetoric, holding the official organs responsible, confronting them and asking them the hard questions (which they are often shocked to hear). But most important are the voices of the victims of violence, the wife and husband who lost their children, the unemployed man wounded on the side of the street; these are the people that are rarely heard in the mainstream media. Part of this is because corporate journalists choose to spend their time with elites, especially in developing countries, and part is because editors are dependent on their advertisers and don’t see these stories as viable.
MINUSTAH’s operations in Cité Soleil, since writing our article, have continued. But in recent months the killings have lessened (although a man just last week was shot and killed by UN troops/ early June 2007). Over the months that followed our article, MINUSTAH was able to arrest one of the most well-known gang leaders, Evens Jeune, along with many of those within his group. MINUSTAH has claimed to have set up hospital clinics in the buildings used by the gangs, but on-site visits have revealed empty houses with no hospital clinics and no UN staffers. Haitian government promises of job programs have been slow to materialize in Cité Soleil. UN officials have purposely downplayed or ignored the protests of the poor demanding reparations. However, a number of community schools and health organizations, such as the Lamp Foundation, continue to do good work in Cité Soleil. Some human rights groups, such as the GDP, BAI, CONODH, and AUHMOD, continue to be active in the neighborhoods, but other locally formed groups such as the HNVNPC have gone back to their jobs, mostly in churches and schools.
The population of Cité Soleil has suffered horribly, either caught in the crossfire or purposely targeted. The socio-economic situation and dire poverty in Cité Soleil is a direct result of the prolonged polices of wealthy countries and donor institutions; forcing and destabilizing out of power those elected Haitian governments that have advocated key policies of sovereignty and social investment, while opposing privatization and neoliberal adjustments whenever they can. Rarely told is how Haiti’s police throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s were systematically manipulated by the US embassy, CIA, and Haitian elites–this had a direct result on the security situation in Haiti. Economic instability heightened by coups and prolonged political crises–promoted by elites unhappy with the popular electoral choice–have cost Haiti jobs and development. All of this has pushed Haiti further into the abyss.
When international institutions and governments are busy coordinating these kinds of egregious activities, we felt it the responsibility of journalists, activists, and academics (especially those lucky enough to have the resources) to investigate; all while speaking with the poor and finding out their concerns. From this experience we founded a website, haitianalysis.com, to connect foreign young journalists with young Haitian journalists in poor communities–with the specific purpose of covering poor communities and grassroots organizing. Soon after our IPS article appeared, members of the Haitian diaspora in New York were able to raise thousands of dollars to help in the funeral expenses of the two young Lubin daughters, Stephanie, seven, and Alexandra, four, killed by UN ammo according to their parents. Wadner’s photos of the young girls have appeared in numerous Haitian newspapers and websites of various languages. The Lubin parents, distraught, wanted everyone to know about what had occurred on that night of February 1st 2007. To our knowledge, the United Nations has never launched an investigation into the killing of the two Lubin daughters. We will continue asking that they do.
For more information, we suggest that readers view websites such as ijdh.org, hurah.revolt.org, haitianalysis.com, pih.org, haiti.quixote.org, jubileeusa.org, and haitilabor.org.
# 13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants
Sources:
Truthout, January 27, 2007
Title: “Which Side Are You On?”
Author: David Bacon
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012907L.shtml

The Nation, February 6, 2007
Title: “Workers, Not Guests”
Author: David Bacon
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020607LB.shtml

Foreign Policy in Focus, February 26, 2007
Title: “Migrants: Globalization’s Junk Mail?”
Author: Laura Carlsen
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022

Student Researcher: Fernanda Borras
Faculty Evaluator: Diana Grant, Ph.D.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with cheap subsidized US agricultural products that displaced millions of Mexican farmers. Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs and 700,000 industrial jobs, resulting in deep unemployment throughout the country. Desperate poverty has forced millions of Mexican workers north in order to feed their families.
The National Campesino Front estimates that two million farmers have been displaced by NAFTA, in many cases related to the increase in US imports. In 1994, the first year of the agreement, the United States exported $4.59 billion of agricultural products to Mexico, according to the Department of Agriculture. By 2006 the figure had risen to $9.85 billion–an increase of 114 percent. US exports of corn, Mexico’s staple crop and largest source of rural employment, alone doubled to over $2.5 billion in 2006.
This combination of unemployment in Mexico, the huge gap between salaries in the United States and Mexico, and US demand for cheap labor to compete on global markets has created the current situation. The demand for undocumented labor in the US economy is structural. It is not just a few companies seeking to cut corners. These are not just jobs that “US workers won’t take.” Migrants work in nearly all low-paying occupations and have become essential to the US economy in the age of global competition.
The meatpacking industry provides a good example. The US meat industry as it went global shows a fast slide in working conditions over the past decades as a result of de-unionization, erosion of wages and benefits, and increasing safety and health hazards. Part and parcel of that slide has been the replacement of unionized US workers with migrants.
Aside from traditional employment in agriculture, another major use of migrant labor has been through the advent of subcontracting. This practice, well in place since the early 1980s, has contributed to the de-unionization of the workforce. It conveniently releases employees from direct responsibility for the legal status and treatment of workers in their employment.
In the wake of 9/11, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted workplace and home invasions across the country in an attempt to round up “illegal” immigrants. ICE justifies these raids under the rubric of keeping our homeland safe and preventing terrorism. However the real goal of these actions is to disrupt the immigrant work force in the US and replace it with a tightly regulated non-union guest-worker program. This policy is endorsed by companies seeking permanent low-wage workers through a lobby group called Essential Worker Immigrations Coalition (EWIC). EWIC’s fifty-two members include the US Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods, American Meat Institute, California Landscape Contractors Association, and the Association of Builders and Contractors.        
ICE now has Operation Return to Sender, a program, supposedly designed to target fugitive aliens. The program has resulted in the indiscriminate roundup of over 13,000 undocumented immigrants in cities throughout the United States.
Immigrant rights organizations have noted that the crackdown has led to serious human rights violations. Families are separated. Hearings are slow, and often families do not know for long periods of time where their loved ones are being held. A January 16 report from the Homeland Security Department’s Inspector General of conditions at five detention centers identified frequent violation of federal standards, overcrowding, and health and safety violations.
The firings and raids highlight the vulnerability of immigrant workers under current US law. In 1986 Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, making it a federal crime for an employer to hire a worker without valid immigration documents. While few employers have ever faced penalties, in reality the law made it a crime for undocumented workers to hold a job. No current law requires employers to fire workers whose Social Security numbers don’t jibe. But President Bush proposed a new administrative rule, which would tell employers to fire anyone with a no-match. The regulation has never been officially issued, but many companies claim they’re already complying with it.
Both the enforcement and the agenda behind this crackdown are alarming many unions. In 1999 the AFL-CIO called for the repeal of employer sanctions, as well as for a generous legalization program, greater chances for family reunification, and enforcement of workplace rights. The federation was already on record opposing new guest worker programs. The Service Employees, and the two garment unions were among the first to push for this position. “We still call for the repeal of employer sanctions, as we have from the time it was passed,” says Bruce Raynor, UNITE HERE president. “There are 12 million undocumented people living here, who are important to the economy,” he fumes. “They have a right to seek employment, and employers have a right to hire them. The only way to deal with this is to give workers rights and a path to citizenship.”

UPDATE BY DAVID BACON
“Which Side are you On?” and “Workers, not Guests” expose the way US immigration law is being transformed into a mechanism for supplying labor to some of the country’s largest corporations. Immigration law is creating a two-tier society, in which millions of people are denied fundamental rights and social benefits, because they are recruited to come to the US by those corporations on visas that condemn them to a second-class status. Those guest workers face increased poverty and exploitation, and their status is being used to put pressure on wages, benefits and workplace rights for all workers. 
“Workers, not Guests” describes the way that the Bush administration uses immigration raids to attack union organizing campaigns and efforts by immigrant workers to enforce basic workplace rights and protections. Further, the administration uses the raids to pressure Congress into adopting new, vastly expanded guest worker programs.
Both articles describe the way some groups have abandoned their historic opposition to contract labor programs. Instead, the National Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Forum, and other labor and religious organizations have developed a political alliance with some of the country’s largest corporations, with the objective of passing new guest worker legislation. This legislation also includes provisions that will make future immigration raids much harsher and more widespread.
Since publication, the Bush administration and both Democratic and Republican senators have announced new proposals that go even further. They would end the ability of immigrant families to reunite in the US, and instead institute a corporate-driven point system intended to supply skilled labor to big companies. Raids and enforcement would become even harsher, with huge detention centers built on the border. The proposals would allow corporations to recruit as many as 600,000 contract guest workers a year.
The use of immigration policy to funnel labor to corporate employers is growing at the same time that Congress is debating new corporate trade legislation, including the renewal of fast track negotiating authority for the administration, and four new trade agreements–with South Korea, Peru, Panama, and Colombia. These bills would all increase the displacement of workers and farmers in other countries, sending many of them into the migrant stream to the US. This displacement is being coordinated with Congress’s immigration proposals, which would then channel displaced workers into industries where their labor can be used profitably, and ensure that they can only remain in the US in a status vulnerable to exploitation.
The mainstream press has carried many articles about the proposals and raids. There has been very little coverage of the corporate backing for the immigration bills in Congress, however. Many reporters refer to the guest worker bills as “pro-immigrant” and “left.” This has not only been inaccurate reporting, but has actually covered up the corporate domination of the immigration agenda in Congress. There has been virtually no coverage of the connection between US trade policy and immigration policy.
For more accurate information, readers can contact the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, www.nnirr.org. Global Exchange organized a national speaking tour on trade and immigration policy by David Bacon and Juan Manuel Sandoval, a leading Mexican critic of NAFTA and US immigration policy. The presentations made during that tour are available on the Global Exchange website, www.globalexchange.org.

# 14 Impunity for US War Criminals
Source:
Congressional Quarterly, November 22, 2006
Title: “A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive–and Its Practitioners Free”
Author: Jeff Stein
http://public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html

Student Researcher: Marley Miller
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.

A provision mysteriously tucked into the Military Commission Act (MCA) just before it passed through Congress and was signed by President Bush on October 17, 2006 (see story #1), redefines torture, removing the harshest, most controversial techniques from the definition of war crimes, and exempts the perpetrators–both interrogators and their bosses–from prosecution for such offences dating back to November 1997.
        Author Jeff Stein asks, “Who slipped language into the MCA that would further exempt torturers from prosecution?”
        The White House denies any involvement or knowledge regarding the insertion of such language, leaving the origin of adjustments to this significant part of the MCA a mystery.
        Motivation for this provision, however, leads clearly to leadership in the Bush administration, as the passage effectively rewrote the US enforcement mechanism for the Geneva War Crimes Act, which would have, upon sworn testimonies of Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, Major General Mike Dunlavey, and US Brigadier General Commander, Janis Karpinski, held former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George Bush guilty of active roles in directing acts of torture upon detainees held at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib (see Censored 2007, Story #7) .
        A spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights comments, “The MCA’s restricted definitions arguably would exempt certain US officials who have implemented or had command responsibility for coercive interrogation techniques from war crimes prosecutions. This amendment is designed to protect US government perpetrators of abuses during the ‘war on terror’ from prosecution.”
        Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch adds that the effect of this provision of the MCA is “that perpetrators of several categories of what were war crimes at the time they were committed, can no longer be punished under US law.”
        As a whole, the MCA evolved out of the need to override the June 2006 Supreme Court declaration that the administration’s hastily assembled military commissions were unconstitutional. That momentous Supreme Court decision confirmed that all prisoners in US custody had to be held in accordance with the Geneva Convention’s Article 3, which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” Through passage of the MCA, Congress and the President negated the corrective role of the courts in checking and balancing executive power.
        A Senate aide involved in the drafting of the Senate version of the bill that was agreed upon by John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, said, “We have no idea who [the extended impunity provision] came from or how it came to be.” White House spokesperson Dana Perrino said the stealth changes didn’t come from the counsel’s office, “It could have come from elsewhere in the White House or Justice Department,” she said, “but it didn’t come from us.”
        Whatever the source, the amended provision was passed and is now a part of US law.

# 15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”
Source:
Rachel’s Democracy & Health News, October 12, 2006
Title: “Some Chemicals are More Harmful Than Anyone Ever Suspected”
Author: Peter Montague
http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/ht061012.htm

Student Researchers: Kristen Kebler and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Gary Evans, M.D.

Research suggests that, contrary to previous belief, our behavior and our environmental conditions may program sections of our children’s DNA. New evidence about how genes interact with the environment suggests that many industrial chemicals may be more ominously dangerous than previously thought. It is increasingly clear that the effects of toxic exposure may be passed on through generations, in ways that are still not fully understood. “This introduces the concept of responsibility into genetics and inheritance,” said Dr. Moshe Szyf, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, “This may revolutionize medicine. You aren’t eating and exercising just for yourself, but for your lineage.”1
        The new field of genetic research, called epigenetics, involves what scientists are referring to as a “second genetic code” which influences how genes act in the body. If DNA is the hardware of inheritance, the epigenetic system is the software. The epigenetic system determines which genes get turned “off” or “on” and how much of a certain protein they produce.
        It is this switching system that allows the genetic material in each cell to influence the creation of proteins–which ones are manufactured, in what sequence, and how many. Proteins are the building blocks of our bodies. The chemicals and hormones in our bodies are proteins. They determine, in large part, how we look, how we feel, even how we act.1
        Now, it seems that this chemical switching system may also act in reverse. In most cases, epigenetic changes (changes to DNA from current environmental conditions) are not passed from parents to their offspring. Scientists are still not sure how–but genes seem to be “wiped clean” after a sperm fertilizes an egg. Based on the recent data, however, researchers are intrigued by the notion that some of the genetic changes influenced by our diet, our behaviors, or our environment, may be passed on from generation to generation.
        On average, 1,800 new chemicals are registered with the federal government each year and about 750 of these find their way into products, all with hardly any testing for health or environmental effects. The bad news about chemical contamination is steadily mounting, while the number of new chemicals is steadily increasing. Many critics of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are renewing their admonitions that government agencies practice the “precautionary principle”–the rule of “do no harm first” in the approval of new drugs and chemicals.
        In 2005, the European Union responded to this situation by trying to enact a new law called Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH), which requires that chemicals be tested before they are sold–not after. As they say in Europe, “No data, no market.” At the same time, US and European chemical industries–and the White House–began working overtime to subvert the European effort to enact REACH. Their efforts failed, however, and the REACH act was adopted by the European Union in December, 2006.2 Chemical companies throughout the US and Europe are still struggling with how they will respond to the new requirements.

Citations
   1.    Anne McIlroy, “Chemicals and Stress Cause Gene Changes That Can Be Inherited,” Globe & Mail, March 11, 2006. See http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/prn_code_2.060311.htm.
   2.    “European Parliament OKs World’s Toughest Law on Toxic Chemicals,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2006.

UPDATE BY PETER MONTAGUE
Basically this story tells us that environmental influences (like our mother’s diet and her exposure to toxic chemicals) are far more important to us than anyone suspected just a decade ago.
It turns out that environmental influences shape us from the moment of conception onward, and the earliest months and years of life are the most important ones. It is called “fetal programming” and it means our first environment (the womb) can determine what sorts of diseases will afflict us later in life. Furthermore, some of these early influences can be inherited by our offspring and even by their offspring. So your personal pattern of disease may have been set by your grandmother’s diet, or by her exposure to toxicants.
These findings imply that keeping toxic industrial chemicals out of the environment is far more urgent than anyone has previously thought. With more than 1,000 chemicals presently entering commercial channels each year with almost no health or safety testing, this is not welcome news.
In May 2007, a group of two hundred scientists from five continents issued strongly worded consensus statement (the “Faroes Statement”) saying that early exposure to common chemicals leaves babies more likely to develop serious diseases later in life, including diabetes,

attention deficits, certain cancers, thyroid disorders, and obesity, among others.
Notably, the scientists urged governments not to wait for more scientific certainty but to take precautionary action now to protect fetuses and children from toxic exposures.
Most of the mainstream press continued to tiptoe around this story, with a few important exceptions, until May 2007 when the Faroes statement blew the story open. Now that it is out in the open, we’ll have to see if the mainstream press has what it takes to explain the far-reaching ramifications of these findings.
The best source of information on this topic (and many others) is http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org. Search for “epigenetics,” “fetal programming,” or “gene expression.”

e concerns, warns Parry, over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category of “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.

In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the U.S. and has been in place since shortly after the September 11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order Number One, which empowered him to detain any noncitizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant. Today that order extends to U.S. citizens as well.

Farrell ends her article with the conclusion that while much speculation has been generated by KBR’s contract to build huge detention centers within the U.S., “The truth is, we won’t know the real purpose of these centers unless ‘contingency plans are needed.’ And by then, it will be too late.”

UPDATE BY PETER DALE SCOTT
The contract of the Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build immigrant detention facilities is part of a longer-term Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.” In the 1980s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed similar emergency detention powers as part of a super-secret program of planning for what was euphemistically called “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster. At the time, Cheney was a Wyoming congressman, while Rumsfeld, who had been defense secretary under President Ford, was a businessman and CEO of the drug company G.D. Searle.

These men planned for suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any “national security emergency,” which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” Clearly September 11 would meet this definition, and did, for COG was instituted on that day. As the Washington Post later explained, the order “dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans.”

What these managers in this shadow government worked on has never been reported. But it is significant that the group that prepared ENDGAME was, as the Homeland Security document puts it, “chartered in September 2001.” For ENDGAME’s goal of a capacious detention capability is remarkably similar to Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 “readiness exercise” for COG in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary “refugees,” in the context of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.

UPDATE BY MAUREEN FARRELL
When the story about Kellogg, Brown and Root’s contract for emergency detention centers broke, immigration was not the hot button issue it is today. Given this, the language in Halliburton’s press release, stating that the centers would be built in the event of an “emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S.,” raised eyebrows, especially among those familiar with Rex-84 and other Reagan-era initiatives. FEMA’s former plans ‘for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps’ added to the distrust, and the second stated reason for the KBR contract, “to support the rapid development of new programs,” sent imaginations reeling.

While few in the mainstream media made the connection between KBR’s contract and previous programs, Fox News eventually addressed this issue, pooh-poohing concerns as the province of “conspiracy theories” and “unfounded” fears. My article attempted to sift through the speculation, focusing on verifiable information found in declassified and leaked documents which proved that, in addition to drawing up contingency plans for martial law, the government has conducted military readiness exercises designed to round up and detain both illegal aliens and U.S. citizens.
How concerned should Americans be? Recent reports are conflicting and confusing:

  • In May, 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began “Operation Return to Sender,” which involved catching illegal immigrants and deporting them. In June, however, President Bush vowed that there would soon be “new infrastructures” including detention centers designed to put an end to such “catch and release” practices.
  • Though Bush said he was “working with Congress to increase the number of detention facilities along our borders,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he first learned about the KBR contract through newspaper reports.
  • Fox News recently quoted Pepperdine University professor Doug Kmiec, who deemed detention camp concerns “more paranoia than reality” and added that KBR’s contract is most likely “something related to (Hurricane) Katrina” or “a bird flu outbreak that could spur a mass quarantine of Americans.” The president’s stated desire for the U.S. military to take a more active role during natural disasters and to enforce quarantines in the event of a bird flu outbreak, however, have been roundly denounced.

Concern over an all-powerful federal government is not paranoia, but active citizenship. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” From John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, the land of the free has held many contradictions and ironies. Interestingly enough, Halliburton was at the center of another historical controversy, when Lyndon Johnson’s ties to a little-known company named Kellogg, Brown and Root caused a congressional commotion–particularly after the Halliburton subsidiary won enough wartime contracts to become one of the first protested symbols of the military-industrial complex. Back then they were known as the “Vietnam builders.” The question, of course, is what they’ll be known as next.

Additional links:
“ Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://fpiarticle.blogspot.com/2005/12/front-page-miami-herald-july-5-1987.html

“Foundations are in place for martial law in the US,” July 27, 2002, Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/ 1027497418339.html

“Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy: Cheney’s Ties to Company Reminiscent of LBJ’s Relationships,” NPR, Dec. 24, 2003, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483

“Critics Fear Emergency Centers Could Be Used for Immigration Round-Ups,” Fox News, June 7, 2006, http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,198456,00.html

“U.S. officials nab 2,100 illegal immigrants in 3 weeks,” USA Today, June 14, 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-14-immigration-arrests_x.htm

#16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
Source:
The Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006, and Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006
Title: “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’”
Author: Ed Haas
http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html

Student Researcher: Bianca May and Morgan Ulery
Faculty Evaluator: Ben Frymer, Ph.D.     

Osama bin Laden’s role in the events of September 11, 2001 is not mentioned on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” poster.
  On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.
  Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
  Haas pauses to ask the question, “If the US government does not have enough hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11, how is it possible that it had enough evidence to invade Afghanistan to ‘smoke him out of his cave?’” Through corporate media, the Bush administration told the American people that bin Laden was “Public Enemy Number One,” responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to “root out” bin Laden and the Taliban, yet nearly six years later, the FBI said that it had no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11. 
  Though the world was to have been convinced by the December 2001 release of a bin Laden “confession video,” the Department of Defense issued a press release to accompany this video in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “There was no doubt of bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks even before the tape was discovered.”
  In a CNN article regarding the bin Laden tape, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that “the tape removes any doubt that the US military campaign targeting bin Laden and his associates is more than justified.” Senator Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “The tape’s release is central to informing people in the outside world who don’t believe bin Laden was involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shelby went on to say “I don’t know how they can be in denial after they see this tape.”
  Haas attempted to secure a reference to US government authentication of the bin Laden “confession video,” to no avail. However, it is conclusive that the Bush Administration and US Congress, along with corporate media, presented the video as authentic. So why doesn’t the FBI view the “confession video” as hard evidence? After all, notes Haas, if the FBI is investigating a crime such as drug trafficking, and it discovers a video of members of a drug cartel openly talking about a successful distribution operation in the United States, that video would be presented to a federal grand jury. The participants identified in the video would be indicted. The video alone would serve as sufficient evidence to net a conviction in a federal court. So why, asks Haas, is the bin Laden “confession video” not carrying the same weight with the FBI? 
  Haas strongly suggests that we begin asking questions, “The fact that the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11 should be headline news around the world. The challenge to the reader is to find out why it is not. Why has the US media blindly read the government-provided 9/11 scripts, rather than investigate without passion, prejudice, or bias, the events of September 11, 2001? Why has the US media blacklisted any guest that might speak of a government-sponsored 9/11 cover-up, rather than seeking out those people who have something to say about 9/11 that is contrary to the government’s account?” Haas continues. “Who is controlling the media message, and how is it that the FBI has no ‘hard evidence’ connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of September 11, 2001, while the US media has played the bin Laden-9/11 connection story for [six] years now as if it has conclusive evidence that bin Laden is responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon attack, and the demise of United Flight 93?”
UPDATE BY ED HAAS
On June 6, 2006 the Muckraker Report ran a piece by Ed Haas titled “FBI says, ‘No hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’” Haas is the editor and a writer for the Muckraker Report. At the center of this article remains the authenticity and truthfulness of the videotape released by the federal government on December 13, 2001 in which it is reported that Osama bin Laden “confesses” to the September 11, 2001 attacks. The corporate media–television, radio, and newspapers–across the United States and the world repeated, virtually non-stop for a week after the videotape’s release, the government account of OBL “confessing.”
  However, not one document has been released that demonstrates the authenticity of the videotape or that it even went through an authentication process. The Muckraker Report has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, and CENTCOM requesting documentation that would demonstrate the authenticity of the videotape and the dates/circumstances in which the videotape was discovered. CENTCOM has yet to reply to the FOIA request. After losing an appeal, the FBI responded that no documents could be found responsive to the request. The Department of Defense referred the Muckraker Report to CENTCOM while also indicating that it had no documents responsive to the FOIA request either.
  The CIA however claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the request. According to the CIA the fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, the Agency has denied your request pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).
  Many people believe that if the videotape is authentic, it should be sufficient hard evidence for the FBI to connect bin Laden to 9/11. The Muckraker Report agrees. However, for the Department of Justice to indict bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks, something the government has yet to do, the videotape would have to be entered into evidence and subjected to additional scrutiny. This appears to be something the government wishes to avoid.
  Some believe that the video is a fake. They refer to it as the “fat bin Laden”video. The Muckraker Report believes that while the videotape is indeed authentic, it was the result of an elaborate CIA sting operation. The Muckraker Report also believes that the reason why there is no documentation that demonstrates that the videotape went through an authenticity process is because the CIA knew it was authentic, they arranged the taping.
  It is highly probable that the videotape was taped on September 26, 2001–before the US invaded Afghanistan.

# 17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations
Sources:
Environment News Service, March 24, 2006
Title: “Factories, Cities Across USA Exceed Water Pollution Limits”
Author: Sunny Lewis
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-24-05.asp
AlterNet, August 4, 2006
Title: “Military Waste in Our Drinking Water”
Authors: Sunaura Taylor and Astor Taylor
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/39723/
   
Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen, Adrienne Magee, and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Sasha Von Meier, Ph.D. and Steve Norwick, Ph.D.

Water is essential to life, contributing to blood circulation, digestion, metabolism, brain activity, and muscle movements. Yet reliably pure water is growing scarce, even in the United States. Despite the federal government’s avowed commitment “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,”1 corporations, municipalities, and the US military pollute our waters–often with little or no accountability.
  “Polluters are using America’s waters as their dumping ground,” said US PIRG’s Clean Water Advocate Christy Leavitt. (US PIRG is the national lobby office for the state Public Interest Research Groups, nonprofit public interest advocacy organizations.) “Troubled Waters: An Analysis of Clean Water Act Compliance,” released by US PIRG in March 2006 shows that, between July 2003 and December 2004, over 62 percent of industrial and municipal facilities across the country discharged pollution into US waterways at rates above limits established by the Clear Water Act (CWA).
  Using the Freedom of Information Act, US PIRG investigated major facilities’ compliance–or lack of it–with established federal limits on pollution discharges. The average facility discharged pollutants in excess of its permitted limit by over 275 percent, nearly four times the legal limit. Nationally, 436 major facilities exceeded their limits at least half of the time during the study’s timeframe. Thirty-five facilities exceeded their permits during every reporting period. Seven states allowed more than one hundred violations of at least 500 percent (Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Massachusetts). The study could not analyze facilities in California, Oregon, or Washington due to unreliable data.
  Corn farming–think ethanol–is the crop most likely to leach chemical contaminants into waterways.2 Atrazine, which several European nations have banned, is an herbicide widely used in agribusiness, especially on major crops such as corn. The EPA identifies atrazine as the second-most common herbicide in drinking wells. Maximum safe levels of atrazine in drinking water are three parts per billion, but scientists have found up to 224 parts per billion in Midwestern streams, and 2,300 parts per billion in Corn Belt irrigation reservoirs.
  Today more than 40 percent of US waterways are unsafe for swimming and fishing, and, as shown by the PIRG study, industrial pollution of the nation’s waters persists–despite the goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act to make all US waters safe for fishing, swimming, and other uses by 1983, and to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into waterways by 1985.
  One reason for these ongoing failures is the Bush administration’s consistent efforts to shortchange the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and to gut the Clean Water Act. In 2003, the Bush administration significantly weakened protections for small streams, wetlands, and other waters, despite Bush having declared 2002-2003 the Year of Clean Water.
  However, opposition to environmental protection for clean waterways stems from not only the Bush administration but also the US military, whose pollution poisons the very citizens it is supposed to protect in the name of national security. Weapons production, by the US military and its private contractors, generates more hazardous waste annually than the five largest international chemical companies combined, accounting for one-third of the nation’s toxic waste. Furthermore, the US military is among the most frequent violators of environmental laws.
  The Department of Defense (DoD) has sought and received exemptions from a number of crucial public health and environmental laws. Dramatic increases in the amounts of trichloroethylene (TCE) in public aquifers have been one fatal consequence of these exemptions. TCE, a known carcinogen, is used commercially as a solvent. It is the most widespread industrial contaminant in US drinking water. Since the Korean War, military contractors, such as Hughes Missiles Systems (purchased by Raytheon in 1997), have used TCE to degrease airplane parts, and to clean fuel lines at missile sites.
  Consequently, TCE contamination is especially common around military facilities. The Pentagon is responsible for the TCE contamination of over 1,400 properties. In 2001, the EPA sought to force the government to require more thorough cleanups at military sites, by lowering the acceptable limits on TCE from five parts per billion to one part per billion. In response, the DoD joined the Department of Energy and NASA in blocking the EPA’s proposed action. The Bush administration charged the EPA with inflating TCE’s risks, and called on the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the EPA’s claims. The Academy’s 2003 report confirmed the EPA’s assessment, linking TCE to kidney cancer, impaired neurological function, reproductive and developmental damage, autoimmune disease, and other human ailments. The Bush administration and the DoD have ignored these inconvenient findings. As a result, citizens, who pay for the military budget with their tax dollars, are also paying with their health and sometimes their lives.

Citations
1. Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 USC. 1251 et seq), Section 101(a).
2. Sasha Lilley, “Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret,” CorpWatch, June 1, 2006.

UPDATE BY SUNNY LEWIS
Compliance with the Clean Water Act on the part of industrial and municipal water facilities and land developers is of utmost importance to the quality of America’s waters–from wetlands, ponds, and small streams to mighty rivers and the Great Lakes.
  The US Public Interest Research Group, US PIRG, which discovered the failure of 62 percent of facilities to comply with the law based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, intends to do more work on this subject later this year.
  Christy Leavitt of US PIRG, quoted by ENS in the original article, says the group will issue another report based on updated figures obtained in May from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
  As ENS reported, US PIRG recommended that all US waters be protected by withdrawal of what the group called “the Bush administration’s 2003 No Protection” policy which excludes many small streams and wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act.  
  Since the ENS report was published, the US Supreme Court handed down a ruling on the scope of the Clean Water Act that many water and environmental experts as well as Members of Congress believe has muddied the legal waters and made new legislation necessary.
  In June 2006, the high court ruled in the case Rapanos et ux., et at. v. United States that there are limits to the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands under the Clean Water Act, but failed to agree on the confines of that power.
  The consolidated case involved conflicts between developers who wanted to build condos and stores on wetlands and federal regulators, who refused to allow the developments under the authority of the Clean Water Act. The waters at issue were wetlands adjacent to ditches and drains that connected to “navigable waters” of the United States.
  For a full discussion of the ruling, please see the ENS report, “US Supreme Court Decision Fails to Clarify Clean Water Act,” at http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2006/2006-06-19-10.asp.
  In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in another case, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Corps of Engineers, SWANCC, that non-navigable, isolated, intrastate waters do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
  On May 25, 2007, a bi-partisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that attempts to clarify the original intent of Congress in the 1972 Clean Water Act in the wake of these two decisions.
  To achieve clarification, the new measure, the Clean Water Restoration Act, replaces the term “navigable waters of the United States” with the term “waters of the United States.”
  The Clean Water Restoration Act has 158 original cosponsors, and the endorsement of more than three hundred organizations representing the conservation community, family farmers, fishers, surfers, boaters, faith communities, environmental justice advocates, labor unions, and civic associations.
  It replaces a bill mentioned in the original ENS report, the Clean Water Authority Restoration Act, that was not approved during the 109th Congress.
  As ENS reported in March 2006, US PIRG recommended that the Clean Water State Revolving Fund be fully funded to help communities upgrade their sewer systems.
  The Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund guarantees loans for cities and towns so they can borrow for sewer projects at a lower interest rate, saving local taxpayers billions of dollars nationwide.
  On March 8, 2007, ENS reported that the Bush administration’s budget proposal to cut some $400 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund budget came under fire by members of both parties in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
  On March 9, 2007, ENS reported that the US House of Representatives passed the Water Quality Financing Act of 2007. For the first time in twenty years, the measure H.R. 720, would reauthorize the Clean Water State Revolving Funds. At press time, this measure had not come before the US Senate.
  For its part, the US EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, OECA, says its actions to enforce Clean Water Act requirements in FY 2006 resulted in more than 283 million pounds of pollutants reduced.
  Most of these reductions are the result of the EPA’s “national priority efforts” to control overflows from combined sewer overflows and sanitary sewer overflows and contamination caused by surface runoff from stormwater and concentrated animal feeding operations, the agency said.
  Working in partnership with states, OECA says it concluded major legal settlements with dozens of cities to bring critical sewer systems back into compliance.
  The settlements require comprehensive plans to improve the maintenance and operation of systems to reduce overflows, and long-term capital construction projects to expand treatment capacity to ensure that sewage is properly treated before being discharged, the OECA said in the “EPA Fiscal Year 2006 Accomplishments Report.”
  The settlements concluded in FY 2006 will reduce overflows of untreated or inadequately treated sewage by 26 million pounds, with an estimated investment of $930 million in sewer system upgrades and improvements.
  To find out more about the scope of the Clean Water Act and compliance with this law, visit:

US Public Interest Research Group: http://www.uspirg.org/

US EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/

US EPA Clean Water Act Compliance Assistance:
http://www.epa.gov/compliance/assistance/bystatute/cwa/index.html

Clean Water Act State Revolving Fund:
http://www.epa.gov/owm/cwfinance/cwsrf/index.htm

Stormwater Authority: http://www.stormwaterauthority.org

# 18 Mexico’s Stolen Election
Sources:
AlterNet, August 2, 2006
Title: “Evidence of Election Fraud Grows in México”
Author: Chuck Collins and Joshua Holland
http://www.alternet.org/story/39763

Revolution, September 10, 2006
Title: “Mexico: The Political Volcano Rumbles”
Authors: Revolution Newspaper Collective
http://revcom.us/a/060/mexico-volcano-en.html

Researchers: Bill Gibbons and Erica Haikara
Faculty Evaluator: Ron Lopez, Ph.D.

Overwhelming evidence reveals massive fraud in the 2006 Mexican presidential election between “president-elect” Felipe Calderón of the conservative PAN party and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the more liberal PRD. In an election riddled with “arithmetic mistakes,” a partial recount uncovered evidence of abundant stuffing and stealing of ballots that favored the PAN victory.
  Meanwhile, US interests were significantly invested in the outcome of Mexico’s election. Though neither candidate had any choice but to cooperate with the US agenda, important differences existed around energy policy, specifically with regard to foreign privatization of Mexican oil and gas reserves.
  Though the energy sector of Mexico is already deeply penetrated by US capital, as it stands, the Mexican government owns and controls the oil industry, with very tight restrictions on any foreign investment. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the fifth largest oil company in the world, exports 80 percent of its oil to the US. Sixty percent of its revenue ($30 billion per year) currently goes to the Mexican government, accounting for more than 40 percent of the Mexican government’s annual revenues.
  Calderón promises a more thorough and streamlined exploitation of Mexico’s oil, demanding that Mexico remove barriers to private/foreign investment (which are currently written into the Mexican Constitution). Obrador, on the other hand, insisted on maintaining national ownership and control of the energy sector in order to build economic and social stability in Mexico.
  In June 2005, Mexico signed an accord called Alliance for the Security and Prosperity of North America (ASPAN) with Canada and the US. The point was made that this accord would be binding on whoever became president of Mexico in the upcoming elections. Included in ASPAN is a guarantee to fill the energy needs of the US market, as well as agreements to forge “a common theory of security,” allowing US Homeland Security measures to be implemented in Mexico.
  Five months later, in November 2005, an “audition” was held with Mexican presidential candidates before members of the US Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City. All candidates were asked whether they would open the energy sector in Mexico, especially the nationalized oil company, Pemex, to US exploitation.
  Felipe Calderón received resounding applause when he answered that he is in favor of private investment in Pemex, and of weakening the labor unions. He also received applause when he stated that he supported George Bush’s guest worker program and that he agreed the border needed to be secured or militarized. Obrador said that he would not allow risk capital investment in Pemex–but hastened to add that other sectors would be opened to investment.
  Calderón won the audition, Obrador was granted the role of understudy. Former US Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow told Obrador, “If you win the election, we will support you.” But when Obrador appeared to be the front-runner in the election, PAN allied with forces in the US to launch a feverish campaign against him.
  Though US laws prevent US influence in other countries’ elections, anti-Obrador ads airing on Mexican TV were designed by US firms and illegally financed by business councils that included such transnationals as Wal-Mart and Halliburton. US election advisers Rob Allyn and Dick Morris were contracted to develop a media campaign that would foment fear that Obrador, with ties to Chavez and Castro, posed a dangerous Socialist threat to Mexico.
  Outgoing president Vicente Fox violated campaign law by making dozens of anti-Obrador speeches during the campaign, as the PAN party illegally saturated airwaves with swift-boat style attack ads against Obrador. Under Mexican law, ruling party interference is a serious crime and grounds for annulling an election.
  While Obrador’s campaign and hundreds of independent election observers documented several hundred cases of election fraud in making their case for a recount, most Mexican TV stations failed to report the irregularities that surfaced. Days after the election The New York Times irresponsibly declared Calderón the winner, and Bush called to personally congratulate Calderón on his “win,” even though no victor had been declared under Mexican law. Illegal media campaigns combined with grand-scale fraud had had their effect.
  Dominant forces in the US thus had a strong presence behind the scenes of the 2006 Mexican election. As a consequence, Washington looks forward to working with Calderón, who promises tighter (repressive) control and cooperation on all matters of interest to the US, in an accelerated plan to put Mexico more directly under US domination.
  Mexico has thus been denied the democratic election of a president who might have joined Latin America in standing up to aggressive US neoliberal policies.

 

# 19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda
Sources:
Trade Matters, American Friends Service Committee, May 3, 2006
Title: “Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?”
Author: Jessica Walker Beaumont
http://www.afsc.org/trade-matters/trade-agreements/LosingSteam.htm

International Herald Tribune, December 28, 2006
Title: “Economic Policy Changes With New Latin American Leaders”
Author: Mark Weisbrot
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=773&Itemid=45

International Affairs Forum, March 31, 2007
Title: “Is Hugo Chavez a Threat to Stability? No.”
Author: Mark Weisbrot
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1102&Itemid=45

Student Evaluator: Toni Catelani
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.

The US Free Trade model is meeting increasingly successful resistance as people’s movements around the world build powerful alternatives to neoliberal exploitation.
  This is particularly evident in Latin America, where massive opposition to US economic domination has demanded that populist leaders and parties take control of national governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
  Latin American presidents are delivering on promises to fix the mistake of twenty-five years of neoliberal reforms that resulted in the region’s worst economic collapse in more than one hundred years. In the two decades preceding World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies, 1960-1980, the region’s income per person grew by 82 percent. By comparison it grew just 9 percent 1980—2000, and only 4 percent 2000—2005.
  Strong ties between Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, along with cooperative relationships with major economies including Argentina and Brazil, are creating the real potential for autonomous alternatives to US-dictated economic policy in the Western Hemisphere.
  In the past year alone several leaders have announced plans to cut ties with the World Bank and IMF. After a sweeping reelection in December 2006, Chavez announced April 30, 2007 that, having paid off debts to the World Bank and the IMF, Venezuela would cut ties with both institutions.1 Chavez has been able to put his nation on a path of solid growth by fulfilling his 1998 campaign promise to renationalize Venezuela’s oil industry (PDVSA). Though fierce US opposition to his move to end foreign privatization led to a failed US-backed military coup in 2002, nationalized oil is now the source of nearly half the Venezuela government’s revenues and 80 percent of the country’s export earnings. Venezuela’s economy has grown 38 percent in the last three years.
  Chavez plans to set up a new lending institution run by Latin American nations and has pledged to support it with Venezuela’s booming oil revenues.1 Venezuela’s $50 billion in foreign exchange reserves is providing financial support to countries in the region without the exploitive policy conditions attached to WTO and World Bank lending. Leaders are thus able to deliver on promises to their people, contributing not only to stability but to the strengthening of Democracy in the region.
  In April 2006, Evo Morales announced his rejection of the IMF and any future FTA with the US. He instead launched the Bolivian Peoples Trade Agreement (PTA), a socialist alternative to the neoliberal free trade model. The PTA emphasizes support of indigenous culture, reciprocity, solidarity, and national sovereignty. Above all the PTA emphasizes improved living conditions for the whole population as a result of international trade and investment. Bolivia’s 2005 passage of a Hydrocarbons Law raised the royalties paid by foreign gas companies to the government of Bolivia. While infuriating US corporations, the resulting tens of millions of dollars in revenue have enabled Bolivia to pay off its IMF debt and begin to build social programs and national reserves.
  In December 2006, Rafael Correa, who recently won the presidential election in Ecuador on an anti-privatization, anti-US military base platform, announced plans to restructure Ecuador’s foreign debt in order to increase spending on crucial social programs. Ecuador has since paid its debt to the IMF and announced plans to sever ties to the institution. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has also announced negotiations toward an IMF exit.
  Argentina was one of the IMF’s most publicized “successes” turned-crushing-failure at the end of the last century. From 1991 to 1998 the country adopted a host of IMF-recommended reforms including large-scale privatizations. The economy grew substantially during this period but went into a terrible downward slide beginning in mid-1998. At the end of 2001 the whole experiment fell apart, with the country defaulting on more than $100 billion of debt. The currency collapsed soon thereafter, and the majority of people fell below the poverty line in a country that had previously been one of the richest in Latin America.2
  When Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner finally refused the IMF’s debilitating repayment mandates, Argentina’s economy began to rebound–and it hasn’t stopped growing. In a remarkable expansion, which was never supposed to have happened according to IMF predictions, Argentina’s economy has grown by 47 percent in the past few years, making it the fastest growing economy in the Western Hemisphere, and pulling more than nine million people (in a country of 36 million) out of poverty.2 Argentina decided to make its break with the IMF in January 2006 by paying off its remaining $9.9 billion debt.
  As of December 2005, Brazil is also free to make its own decisions, free from IMF interference, after paying off its debt two years ahead of schedule. “We repaid the money to show the world that this country has a government and it is the owner of its own nose,” Lula said at the time, adding, “Brazil has been able to decide that it does not want another IMF deal.”3
  While it is an expanding reality that many strong and growing people’s movements have not been so fortunate as to have representative governments–the people of India (see story #8), Mexico (see story #18), and Niger (see story #3) are but a few examples–more and more elected leaders in Latin America are providing models of true democratic leadership that is of, for, and by the people.

Citations
1. Jorge Rueda, “Venezuela Pulling Out of IMF, World Bank,” Associated Press, May 1 2007.
2. Mark Weisbrot, “IMF’s Fall From Power,” Washington Post.com, April 13, 2007.
3. Xinhua, “Early Debt Payment Enables Brazil to Make Own Budget Decisions,” Peoples Daily Online, December 16, 2005.

UPDATE BY Jessica Walker Beaumont
Written a year ago, the American Friends Service Committee article “Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?” accurately predicted a growing resistance among Latin American and African leaders to the current “one-size-fits-all” US trade policy model.
  Proponents of the current US free trade model seem willing to do whatever it takes to keep the free trade train moving down the track. However their time is literally running out, in part due to the looming July 1 expiration of “fast track” authority that gives the Bush administration the power to negotiate free trade agreements on behalf of Congress.
  Although Bolivia, Ecuador and Southern Africa stand firm against US Free Trade Agreements (FTA), there remains a “coalition of the willing” lining up to get their trade agreements. Pending trade pacts for Congressional consideration include those with Colombia, Peru, Panama and Korea. Greasing the wheels to pass these FTAs is a new “breakthrough trade deal” with the Bush administration announced by Democratic leadership on May 10, 2007.
  It is said that the deal would improve new free trade agreements by requiring that they include labor and environmental standards, and by insuring better access to essential medicines. Sounds good right? Well, the deal was negotiated in secret with only a handful of Congressional members, the legal text is still not released, and high-powered big business groups are supporters. The official outline of the deal reveals all that is excluded, ignoring a cry for substantial rethinking of US trade policy.
  Meanwhile Bolivia continues to advance its People’s Trade Agreement. In April, 2007 Bolivia (along with Venezuela and Nicaragua) decided to withdraw from the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) housed at the World Bank. This came out of the social movement started in 2001 against the US multinational Bechtel that sued Bolivia under the ICSID for $25 million after it was thrown out during the Cochabamba Water War. Dropping out of the ICSID sends a clear message that protecting private investment at the expense of the rights of the people will not be tolerated.
  Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, elected into power on an anti-FTA and anti-US military base agenda, is considering doing the same. In April Correa expelled the World Bank’s representative in Quito, accusing him of withdrawing funds in protest over the government’s oil sector reforms.
  Costa Rica offers a new beacon of hope as they have yet to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Huge resistance to CAFTA grew as people learned it would require the dismantling of Costa Rica’s public telecommunications sector that is funding education. On April 12, 2007 the Supreme Electoral Court approved a measure calling for a binding referendum on CAFTA, likely to take place in August or September. The CAFTA referendum will be Costa Rica’s first public referendum since it gained independence from Spain in 1821 (Inside US Trade, May 4, 2007).
 

# 20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists
Sources:
Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, March 9, 2007
Title: “The AETA is Invidiously Detrimental to the Animal Rights Movement (and Unconstitutional as Well)”
Authors: David Hoch and Odette Wilkens
http://www.vjel.org/editorials/2007S/Hoch.Wilkens.Editorial.htm

Green is the New Red, November 14, 2006
Title: “US House Passes Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act With Little Discussion or Dissent”
Author: Will Potter
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/2006/11/13/aeta-passes-house-recap/

Earth First! Journal, November, 2006
Title: “22 Years for Free-Speech Advocates”
Author: Budgerigar

Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Scott Suneson, MA

The term “terrorism” has been dangerously expanded to include acts that interfere, or promote interference, with the operations of animal enterprises. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law on November 27, 2006, broadens punishment present under the Animal Enterprises Protection Act (AEPA) of 1992. One hundred and sixty groups, including the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Humane Voters, Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the New York City Bar Association, oppose this Act on grounds that its terminology is dangerously vague and poses a major conflict to the US Constitution.
  The broad definition of an “animal enterprise,” for example, may encompass most US businesses: “any enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products.” The phrase “loss of any real or personal property,” is elastic enough to include loss of projected profit. Concerns deepen as protections against “interference” extend to any “person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with an animal enterprise.”
  A letter from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to Congress dated March 6, 2006, “on behalf of hundreds of thousands of activists and members and fifty-three affiliates nationwide,” explains their opposition to AETA based on the concern that First Amendment activities such as demonstrations, leafleting, undercover investigations, and boycotts may be punishable as acts of terror under the overly vague and open-ended law.
  The ACLU letter maintains, “Lawful and peaceful protests that, for example, urge a consumer boycott of a company that does not use humane procedures, could be the target of this provision because they ‘disrupt’ the company’s business. This overbroad provision might also apply to a whistleblower whose intentions are to stop harmful or illegal activities by the animal enterprise. The bill will effectively chill and deter Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights to advocate for reforms in the treatment of animals.”
  Author Will Potter argues that the harsher amendments that AETA brings to its predecessor, AEPA, are hardly necessary, as AEPA was successfully used to disproportionately prosecute the SHAC 7–six animal rights activists organized to expose the illegal and inhumane operations of Huntingdon Life Sciences–for “animal enterprise terrorism.” Budgerigar of Earth First! recounts that three of the defendants were charged under AEPA in September of 2006 with interstate stalking and conspiracy to commit interstate stalking for organizing demonstrations and running a website that published names and addresses of those involved in the vivisection industry. The group was collectively sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. “The supreme irony of this case,” notes Budgerigar, “rests in the fact that these activists were convicted of conspiracy to damage the profits of an animal enterprise, but not of actually damaging it. Even so, the ever-so-honorable judge ordered the defendants to pay a total of $1,000,001 in restitution fees.”
  Yet Congress deemed that AEPA was not a serious enough tool for going after animal rights “extremists.” David Hoch and Odette Wilkens of Equal Justice Alliance ask, “How did this bill [AETA] pass the House?”
  Hoch and Wilkens explain that in spite of the fact that one hundred and sixty groups opposed its passage, the House Judiciary Committee placed AETA on the suspension calendar, under which process bills that are non-controversial can be passed by voice vote. The vote on the bill was then held hours earlier than scheduled, with what appears to have been only six (out of 435) Congresspersons present. Five voted for the bill, and Dennis Kucinich, who said that “[t]his bill will have a real and chilling effect on people’s constitutionally protected rights,” voted against it. Kucinich went on to say, “My concern about this bill is that it does nothing to address the real issue of animal protection but, instead targets those advocating animal rights.”
  Budgerigar concludes, “The message could not be more clear: run an effective activist campaign, and you will be vilified, criminalized, and imprisoned.”

UPDATE BY DAVID HOCH AND ODETTE WILKENS
The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), whose recent passage received virtually no media coverage, will chill the first amendment rights of animal advocates and serve as a template for future limitations on the free speech of all activists. The Act subjects anyone who (1) uses interstate commerce, (2) with the intent to damage or interfere with an “animal enterprise” or with any person or entity associated with an animal enterprise, and (3) causes any economic damage or corporate profit loss or bodily injury or fear of bodily injury, or (4) conspires or attempts to do any of the foregoing, to prosecution for “animal enterprise terrorism.”
  AETA expands the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), under which six animal activists were convicted and imprisoned for publicly advocating animal protection activities. The new law requires less serious conduct than the “physical disruption to…an animal enterprise” called for in AEPA, provides stiffer penalties for economic damage and subjects violators who cause no economic damage, bodily harm or fear of serious bodily harm, to as much as one year in prison, while also serving as a predicate for wiretapping.
  AETA serves animal enterprises wishing to brand animal activists as criminals and treating dissent as terrorism, and indicates a trend toward treating dissent as terrorism, as evidenced by the Justice Department’s current attempt to increase sentences up to twenty years through the application of a concept called “terrorism enhancement.”
  AETA violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by proscribing formerly protected modes of expression and invidiously discriminating against animal activists through the imposition of harsher sanctions than those applied to similar or even more serious crimes under the 2005 federal sentencing guidelines. The Act is also unconstitutionally vague, due to the indecipherable ambiguity of statutory terms such as “interfere with” or “profit loss.” That vagueness extends to declared exemptions for lawful boycotts and peaceful protests, which could involve the same conduct that would subject one to prosecution under AETA. A lawful boycott is, by definition, the intent to interfere with and cause economic damage to some enterprise.
  Furthermore, an animal enterprise need not be acting lawfully to be protected under the Act. Illegal animal enterprise is not an affirmative defense for activities such as whistle-blowing or undercover investigations into animal cruelty, labor conditions, or environmental violations.
  To pass AETA, the House invoked a technicality that allows non-controversial bills to be approved by a voice vote, and then voted when only six members were present, although the bill was highly controversial, with approximately one hundred sixty organizations opposing its passage. The Act is unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional and the honorable thing would be for Congress to repeal it, but without public knowledge and pressure that is unlikely. Therefore, a more prudent strategy would be to increase public awareness until a critical mass convinces Congress to rescind the Act.
  To learn more about AETA or become involved in the effort to repeal it, visit the Equal Justice Alliance website at http://noaeta.org/index.htm.
UPDATE BY WILL POTTER
Shortly after passage of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the Fur Commission USA distributed an announcement to supporters proclaiming “Mission Accomplished!” Corporations have been eager to appropriate much of the “War on Terrorism” rhetoric against activists, but this was an interesting PR choice. Bush stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” in 2003, only to be dogged by that hubris months, and now years, later.
  It looks like corporations may be haunted by similar ghosts in this domestic front of the “War on Terrorism.” Not only has the legislation not deterred illegal activity by underground activists, it may have actually added fuel to their fire. On January 5, 2007, the Animal Liberation Front–considered by the FBI to be the “number one domestic terrorist threat”–distributed an anonymous communiqué related to vandalism at the home of a University of Utah animal researcher. It concluded: “PS. To all the vivisectors we have yet to visit: don’t bask in your recent legislative victory for too long. This new animal enterprise law means NOTHING. –ALF”
  It wasn’t an isolated incident. Just two days after the president signed the law, another communiqué claimed credit for vandalizing the windows of a pharmaceutical company, and underground activists signed it: “Dedicated to the SHAC 7!” (The SHAC 7 are a group of activists convicted under the original legislation. They were never accused of anything like breaking windows: they “conspired” to violate the law by running a website and vocally supporting both legal and illegal tactics against companies doing business with a controversial lab).
  If the purpose of AETA is to go after underground activists, that mission is far from accomplished. And if the purpose of AETA is to go after “the above ground,” activists are organizing to challenge that mission as well. Just a few weeks after the legislation passed, student activists protested outside the offices of US Rep. James P. McGovern in Massachusetts, naming and shaming him for not being present for a vote. McGovern’s staff quickly stated publicly that he does not support the law, he would have voted against it if he had known about a vote, and he would advocate for repeal.
  And then there were dozens of community events around the world to raise awareness about labeling activists as “ecoterrorists,” from South Africa to Greece to Minneapolis, MN.
  “Mission Accomplished”? Ahem.
  To be clear, in some ways the mission of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act has been accomplished: it has instilled a level of fear in mainstream, above-ground, legal activists that they may one day be hit with the T-word in this ever-expanding “War on Terrorism.”
  But through my reporting I’ve found that an interesting thing happens when people learn about this “Green Scare” and the corporate and political interests behind it: that fear easily turns to rage. More than 140 comments have been posted on the article I wrote about the legislation passing the House. Some of them express fear and a bit of hopelessness. Many share the tenor of “Jersey” who wrote: “do they really think everyone is going to crawl into the woodwork and stand for this?”
  Since the law passed, I have been speaking regularly in public forums like the New York City Bar Association, Yale Law School, activist conferences, and with both mainstream and alternative press, and I’ve been able to see that phenomenon over and over again: questioning and investigating the legislation, and the money behind it, demystifies the law. It declaws it.
  That knowledge is what ultimately worked against Senator Joseph McCarthy, succeeding where the “loyalty oaths” and the “naming names” failed. It can work now, too. If reporters do their jobs, and expose these issues to the general public, people can stop being afraid and start being pissed.
  For more information, please visit www.GreenIsTheNewRed.com.
 

# 21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payments
Sources:
Oxfam International, June 29, 2006
Title: “US Seeks ‘Get-Out Clause’ for Illegal Farm Payments”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060629_wto_geneva

Financial Times UK, January 9 2007
Title: “Canada Launches WTO Case on US Subsidies”
Author: Eoin Callan
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5debac74-9f9b-11db-9e2e-0000779e2340.html

Student Researcher: Cedric Therene
International Business Evaluator: Tim Ogburn

On July 24, 2006, after nearly five years of global trade negotiations, talks at the meetings of the World Trade Organization collapsed–perhaps permanently, say some economic analysts. In January of 2007, trade ministers from the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Japan, and Australia said they remained hopelessly stalemated, mostly on the contentious issue of farm trade. US negotiators blamed the breakdown on E.U., India, and Japan for balking at the unrestricted opening of markets to agricultural products.1
What went uncovered in mainstream news sources was any analysis of the content of the negotiations–what exactly the countries involved were offering, and what they expected in return.
  Of utmost importance to the Bush Administration was that the US receive immunity from lawsuits by poor countries before Bush’s special “fast track” trade negotiating powers expired at the end of June, 2007.
In a last-minute proposal, one not included on the original agenda, the US suddenly insisted that all trade agreements include a special clause called a “Peace Clause” that would make its use of illegal farm subsidies immune from prosecution by the countries affected. Between 1994 and 2003, such a Peace Clause had denied developing nations any legal recourse in the face of the “dumping” of cheap foreign products that had devastated their agricultural communities.
According to international NGOs such as Oxfam International, the Peace Clause gives rich countries like the US and the European Union free rein to provide huge subsidies to their farmers. Such practices benefit the economies of already-wealthy nations, while damaging the agricultural communities of poorer nations. According to a 2003 Oxfam report, thirty-eight developing countries have suffered from unfair competition as a result of illegal subsidies in the US and EU.
Events following expiration of these legal protections make it clear why the US was so eager to reintroduce a new version of the Peace Clause (and why it was done so slyly). Following its expiration in 2003, Brazil took the US to the WTO court charging that US cotton subsidies had depressed world prices, hurting cotton producers in Brazil and around the world–and Brazil won! In 2005, the WTO agreed with Brazil’s charge, ordering that the US immediately discontinue its distribution of illegal agricultural subsidies. Fearing that other developing nations would follow suit, US negotiators were driven to reintroduce the proposal for protections they had enjoyed under the Peace Clause.
More recently, following the July 2006 collapse of the Doha trade talks, Canada has asked the WTO to review charges that the US is continuing to use illegal and “trade-distorting” agricultural subsidies. The charges focus on payments made to American corn farmers, but also challenge the total level of US agricultural subsidies. This is the most significant challenge to the structure of US agricultural subsidies since the landmark WTO ruling in favor of Brazil in 2005.
In June of 2007, The Canadian government asked the WTO to establish a dispute settlement panel to investigate the allegation.2 Under WTO rules, the United States can provide up to $19.1 billion annually in subsidies that are considered trade-distorting. Canada says the United States broke the rules every year from 1999 to 2005 except for 2003.
Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the US trade representatives, parroted the position taken previously by US officials addressing the Brazil dispute. She said, “Negotiation, not litigation, is the path to removing trade distortions in agriculture and improving opportunities for farmers and producers all around the world.”2 The US says that it needs the Peace Clause renewed in order to protect itself from litigation while it “is in the process of reducing its trade-distorting subsidies.” But Oxfam notes that, proposals included in the new Peace Clause would actually allow the US to increase its farm support from under $20 billion to almost $23 billion. The EU proposal would allow an increase in farm subsidies from $23 billion to $33 billion. Poor countries, with no surplus to supplement their farmers’ income shortfalls, would have nothing to respond with–no global support, no economic power, and no legal appeals.

Citations
1. Paul Blustein, “Trade Talks Fail After Stalemate Over Farm Issues; Collapse Comes With Finger-Pointing,” Washington Post, July 25, 2006.
2. Phillip Brasher, “Canada attacks US subsidies at WTO,” Des Moines Register, June 8, 2007.

 

# 22 North Invades Mexico
Source:
TomDispatch.com, September 19, 2006
Author: Mike Davis
Title: “Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122537

Student Researcher: Rachel Icaza and Erica Haikara
Faculty Evaluator: Francisco Vazquez, Ph.D.

The visitor crossing the Mexican border from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately confronted by a huge sign, “Stop the Border Invasion!” Sponsored by allies of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minutemen, the same signs insult Mexican citizens at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas. The ultimate irony is that a crisis invasion is indeed occurring, but the signs, it seems, may be pointed the wrong direction.
  Author Mike Davis points out that, in a “reality stood on its head,” few people–at least outside Mexico–have bothered to notice that while all the nannies, cooks, maids, and gardeners have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate republicans, the Gringo masses have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes in Mexico.
  The number of North Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (one-quarter of all US expatriates) in the past decade. With more than 70 million American baby-boomers expected to retire in the next two decades, experts predict “a tidal wave” of migration to warmer–and cheaper–climates. Baby-boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property and gated communities, complete with Hooters, Burger King, and Starbucks. The land rush is sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only to face increasing “invasion” charges.
  The Gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation.
  Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast’s major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of Longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.
  Secondly, tens of thousands of US retirees and winter-residents are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real estate conference at UCLA boasts that “there are presently over fifty-seven real estate developments with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3 billion all of them geared for the US market.”
  Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a US expatriot enclave has emerged in the twenty-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo. Los Cabos has become an archipelago of real-estate hot spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values pull in speculative capital. Judging from the registration of private planes at the local airport, Cabos has essentially become a resort suburb of Orange County–the home of the most vehement Minutemen chapters.
  Davis points out that many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction between fuming over the “alien invasion” with one’s conservative friends at the Newport Marina one day, and flying down to enjoy their Cabos investment properties the next.
  One of several multi-billion dollar real estate projects being developed for the US market is the Villages of Loreto: another 6,000 homes for expatriates in colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez. The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage. It will, coincidently, balloon Loreto’s population from its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.
  One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape, as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula’s small towns and fishing villages.
  However, thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation. The problem is, as Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch points out, “Fences don’t work if you’ve got your own plane.”

# 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq
Source:
North Bay Bohemian, January 24, 2007
Title: “Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict”
Author: Peter Byrne
http://www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html

Student Researcher: David Abbott, Amanda Spigut, and Ann Marie O’Toole
Faculty Evaluator: David McCuan, Ph.D.

Dianne Feinstein–the ninth wealthiest member of congress–has been beset by monumental ethical conflicts of interest. As a member of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 to the end of 2005, Senator Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions of dollars to her husband’s firms.
  From 1997 through the end of 2005, Feinstein’s husband Richard C. Blum was a majority shareholder in both URS Corp. and Perini Corp. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were, or subsequently became, URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such projects.
  In 2000, Perini earned a mere $7 million from federal contracts. After 9/11, Perini was transformed into a major defense contractor. In 2004, the company earned $444 million for military construction work in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for improving airfields for the US Air Force in Europe and building base infrastructures for the US Navy around the globe. In a remarkable financial recovery, Perini shot from near penury in 1997 to logging gross revenues of $1.7 billion in 2005.
  It is estimated that Perini now holds at least $2.5 billion worth of contracts tied to the worldwide expansion of the US military. Its largest Department of Defense contracts are “indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity” or “bundled” contracts carrying guaranteed profit margins. As of May 2006, Perini held a series of bundled contracts awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers for work in the Middle East worth $1.725 billion. Perini has also been awarded an open-ended contract by the US Air Force for military construction and cleaning the environment at closed military bases.
  In 2003 hearings, MILCON approved various construction projects at sites where Perini and/or URS are contracted to perform engineering and military construction work. URS’s military construction work in 2000 earned it a mere $24 million. The next year, when Feinstein took over as MILCON chair, military construction earned URS $185 million. On top of that, the company’s architectural and engineering revenue from military construction projects grew from $108,726 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, more than a thousand-fold increase in a single year.
  Beginning in 1997, Michael R. Klein, a top legal adviser to Feinstein and a long-time business partner of Blum’s, routinely informed Feinstein about specific federal projects coming before her in which Perini had a stake. The insider information, Klein said, “was intended to help the senator avoid conflicts of interest.” Although Klein’s admission was intended to defuse the issue, it had the effect of exacerbating it, because in theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military construction budget–until Klein told her.
  Feinstein’s husband has profited in other ways by his powerful political connections. In March 2002, then-Governor Gray Davis appointed Blum to a twelve-year term as a regent of the University of California, where he used his position as Regent to award millions of dollars in construction contracts to URS and Perini. At the time, he was the principal owner of URS and had substantial interests in Perini. In 2005, Blum divested himself of Perini stock for a considerable profit. He then resigned from the URS board of directors and divested his investment firm of about $220 million in URS stock.1
Citation
1. Peter Byrne, “Blum’s Plums” North Bay Bohemian, February 21, 2007.
UPDATE BY PETER BYRNE
Shortly before my expose of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s conflict of interest was published in January 2007, Feinstein, who had declined to substantively comment upon serious allegations of ethical misconduct as reported in the story, resigned from the Military Construction Subcommittee. I then wrote three follow-ups, including a news column on her resignation, an expose of her husband Richard Blum’s conflict of interest as a regent of the University of California, and an expose of Blum’s business partner, Michael R. Klein. With Blum’s financial backing, Klein, a war contractor, operates a non-profit called The Sunlight Foundation that awards millions of dollars to reporters and government watchdog groups to research government ethics.
  In March, right-wing bloggers by the thousands started linking to and commenting upon these stories–agitating for a Congressional investigation of Feinstein. In just two days, the stories got 50,000 online hits. Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh did radio segments on my findings. I declined to appear on their shows, because I do not associate with racist, misogynist, homophobic demagogues. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly invited me to be on his national TV show, but quickly uninvited me after I promised that the first sentence out of my mouth would frame Feinstein as a neoconservative warmonger just like O’Reilly.
  As the storm of conservative outrage intensified, Joe Conason, from The Nation Institute, which had commissioned the Feinstein investigation, asked to have the tag thanking the Nation Institute for funding removed from my stories because, he said, Katrina vanden Heuval, The Nation’s editor and publisher, did not want the magazine or its non-profit institute to be positively associated with Limbaugh. I told Conason that not only was I required to credit The Nation Institute under the terms of our contract, but that The Nation’s editors should be proud of the investigation and gratified by the public reaction.
  The back story to that encounter is that, in October, vanden Heuvel had abruptly killed the Feinstein story, which had been scheduled to run as a cover feature before the November 2006 election in which Feinstein was up for reelection. The Nation’s investigative editor, Bob Moser, who worked closely with me on the project from start to finish, wrote that I had done a “solid job,” but that the magazine liked to have a political “impact,” and since Feinstein was “not facing a strong challenge for reelection,” they were not going to print the story. Moser added that there was no “smoking gun,” which amazed me, since Klein’s admission that he was funneling defense contracting wish lists developed by Feinstein’s husband’s company directly to the senator, who was in a position to make those wishes come true, was a hot and smoking fact pointing toward corrupt practices. Subsequently, vanden Heuval wrote an editorial praising women leaders of the newly-empowered Democratic Party, including Feinstein: go figure.
  I then sold the story to Salon.com, who abruptly killed it right before publication, too. This time the editor’s explanation was that “someone talked to the Sunlight Foundation” and that Salon no longer saw the matter as a serious conflict of interest. So, I pitched the story to Slate, The NewRepublic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times and, by way of experiment, to the neoconservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard. Most of the editors praised the reporting, but turned down the story. I cannot help but believe that, considering the precarious balance of power in the post-election Senate, some of these editors were not eager to critique the ethics of a Democrat. As for rejection by the neoconservatives, I theorize that they secretly adore Feinstein, who has consistently supported Bush’s war and homeland security agenda and the illiberal Patriot Act.
  So I sold the tale to the North Bay Bohemian, which, along with its sister papers in San Jose and Santa Cruz ran it on the cover–complete with follow-ups. After it appeared, the editors and I received a series of invective-filled emails from war contractor Klein (who is also an attorney) but, since he could show no errors of fact in the story, he did not get the retraction that he apparently wanted. In March, the story crested a Google tidal wave generated by left- and right-wing bloggers wondering why the mainstream media was ignoring the Feinstein scandal. After two dozen newspapers ran a McClatchy wire service article in April observing that no one had found any factual faults in my reporting, the lefty group Media Matters attacked me on its Web site as a right-wing pawn, without even calling me for comment, nor finding any errors in my reporting. I parried their fact-free insults with facts and they were compelled to correct the inaccurate rant.
  On April 30, The Hill newspaper in Washington D.C. ran a highly-visible op-ed by a conservative pundit quoting from my story and comparing Feinstein (unfairly) to convicted felon and former Congressman, Duke Cunningham. As the Feinstein investigation gained national traction, mostly outside the realm of the mainstream media, one of Klein’s employees at the Sunlight Foundation posted a “critique” of my story, which was loaded with personal insults, but contained no factual substance. Not coincidentally, Feinstein’s press office distributes, upon request, a similarly-worded “rebuttal,” which insults my personal integrity, finds no factual errors, and does not address the damning fact, reported in the story, that four non-partisan ethics experts based in Washington D.C. found the senator had a conflict of interest after reviewing the results of my investigation.
  Also, in April, CodePink and The Raging Grannies held a demonstration in front of the Feinstein-Blum mansion in San Francisco demanding that she return her war profits to the Iraqi people. That was my proudest moment.
  Five months after the story was printed, opinion-floggers across the political spectrum continue to loudly ask why the mainstream media has not reported on Feinstein’s ethical problem. Some say that the hurricane of opinion raised by the investigation has killed Feinstein’s chance for a spot on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket in 2008. Klein has continued to send me e-mails full of verbal abuse, misspellings, and implied threat of lawsuit.
  Blissfully, I delete them.

# 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President
Sources:
Global Research, January 20, 2007
Title: “Wiped Off The Map–The Rumor of the Century”
Author: Arash Norouzi
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527

Information Clearing House, May 9, 2006
Title: “Full Text: The President of Iran’s Letter To President Bush”
Translated by Le Monde
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12984.htm

Student Researchers: Becky Bazell
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.

Across the world a media story has spread that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has threatened to destroy Israel, by saying that, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Contrary to general belief, this statement was actually a misinterpretation. However, it was the Islamic Republic News Service in Iran that first mistranslated the quote. Iran’s Foreign Minister attempted to clarify the statement, but the quote ended up having a life of its own in the corporate media.
Amid heated wrangling over Iran’s nuclear program and the threat of preemptive strikes by the US, the quote has been continually used to reinforce the idea that Iran is being run by extremists seeking the total destruction of Israel.
So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:
“Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”
Rezhim-e is the word “regime,” pronounced just like the English word with an extra “eh” sound at the end. Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the landmass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map. Ahmadinejad did not even refer to Israel by name, he instead used the specific phrase “rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods” (regime occupying Jerusalem).
A similar statement by Ahmadinejad in December 2006, “As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated,” has also been misinterpreted.
In May of 2006 President Ahmadinejad published an open letter to President Bush clearly asking for peace and the mutual respect of human rights. He warns that Western media, through contrived and deceptive information, has intensified the climate of fear that leads to attacks on innocent peoples. The letter was not reported in the US news media. Ahmadinejad began the letter writing, “Mr. George Bush, For some time now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena. Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the great Messenger of God, Feel obliged to respect human rights, Present liberalism as a civilization model, Announce one’s opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and WMDs, Make “War on Terror” his slogan, And finally, Work towards the establishment of a unified international community–a community which Christ and the virtuous of the Earth will one day govern, But at the same time, have countries attacked; The lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed and on the slight chance of the … of a … criminals in a village city, or convoy for example the entire village, city or convey set ablaze.”

Evaluator Comment
Ahmadinejad declared that Zionism is the West’s apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the “Zionist regime” was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. This position is viewed as threatening to many in the West. While threats and counter-threats escalates tensions in the Persian Gulf, I believe it is important for the media to publish both sides of issues and be as accurate as possible by seeking to build understanding rather than fear and anger.
–Peter Phillips

UPDATE BY Arash Norouzi
In May 2007, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution calling on the U.N. Security Council to charge Ahmadinejad with the crime of inciting genocide “because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel”–a violation of the U.N.’s 1948 Genocide Convention–specifically citing the false “wiped off the map” quote from October 2005. It also called for the U.N. to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, with the “potential means to the end of carrying out President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel.”
This misquote has become a key component of the push for war with Iran, a war that would make Iraq look like the cakewalk it was predicted to be. Attacking Iran would result in massive death and destruction, affect world oil supplies, provoke terrorism, could initiate the next World War, and might even include the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since WWII. In this heated atmosphere, an accurate narrative is essential in averting the next cataclysmic Mideast intervention. When President Bush emphasizes the importance of taking the words of America’s enemies seriously, that process begins with first determining just what exactly those words are.
Yet my article is about more than just clarifying a mistranslated statement. It’s about the media, propaganda, plagiarism, language, false assumptions …Functioning much like a puzzle, it engages readers by allowing them to deconstruct the quote and its meaning themselves. This self-verification process adds a compelling aspect in which credibility becomes largely obsolete. The article’s ’punchline’ demonstrates undeniably that members of the mainstream media knowingly spread this rumor, and readers are challenged to check for themselves by comparing linked sources proving this claim. 
The idea is not merely to contest a single misquote, but to also promote skepticism about all pre-war intelligence. If this quote is false, then it’s logical to assume that other accusations against Iran could be wrong too–just as they were with Iraq.
The overwhelming ubiquity of this misquote has deterred others from correcting what they probably view as a lost cause. Yet my article alone has been viewed by millions, translated into at least half a dozen languages, garnered radio interviews, inspired videos on YouTube, and become the subject of an entire article in The Bangkok Post. It got the attention of people at the BBC, Washington Post, IAEA, State Department, United Nations, and the Islamic Republic itself. It’s been quoted by numerous journalists, authors and academics, in published letters to the editor, and on call-in TV shows such as on C-SPAN. The Associated Press has now begun citing the “vanish from the page of time” phrase, adding that “independent analysts” have refuted the “map” quote; and Dennis Kucinich was prepared to correct the rumor when asked about the subject on TV recently.
These are hopeful signals that underscore the importance of alternative voices in the media, and their potential effectiveness in influencing the discourse. If the first casualty of war is the truth, then it’s up to the truth tellers–whomever they may be–to enlighten us.

# 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?
Source:
LiP Magazine, June 5, 2006
Title: “Native Energy Futures”
Author: Brian Awehali
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featawehali_nativefutures.htm

Student Researchers: Ioana Lupu and Mayra Madrigal
Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel, Ph.D.

Energy on Native American land is becoming big business. According to the Indigenous Environmental Network, 35 percent of the fossil fuel resources in the US are within Indian country. The Department of the Interior estimates that Indian lands hold undiscovered reserves of almost 54 billion tons of coal, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 5.4 billion barrels of oil. Tribal lands also contain enormous amounts of alternative energy. “Wind blowing through Indian reservations in just four northern Great Plains states could support almost 200,000 megawatts of wind power,” Winona LaDuke told Indian Country Today in March 2005, “Tribal landholdings in the southwestern US…could generate enough power to eradicate all fossil fuel burning power plants in the US.”
The questions to be answered now are: what sort of energy will Indian lands produce, who will make that decision, and who will end up benefiting from the production?
According to Theresa Rosier, Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, “increased energy development in Indian and Alaska Native communities could help the Nation have more reliable homegrown energy supplies.” This, she says, is “consistent with the President’s National Energy Policy to secure America’s energy future.”
Rosier’s statement conveys quite a lot about how the government and the energy sector intend to market the growing shift away from dependence on foreign energy. The idea that “America’s energy future” should be linked to having “more reliable homegrown energy supplies” can be found in native energy-specific legislation that has already passed into law. What this line of thinking fails to take into account is that Native America is not the same as US America. The domestic “supplies” in question belong to sovereign nations, not to the United States or its energy sector.
So far, government plans to deregulate and step up the development of domestic (native) energy resources is being spun as a way to produce clean, efficient energy while helping Native Americans gain greater economic and tribal sovereignty. Critics charge, however, that large energy companies are simply looking to establish lucrative partnerships with tribal corporations, which are largely free of regulation and federal oversight.
For example, in 2003, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota, in partnership with NativeEnergy, LLC, completed the first large-scale native-owned wind turbine in history. The project was billed as a way to bring renewable energy—related jobs and training opportunities to the citizens of this sovereign nation, who are among the poorest in all of North America.
NativeEnergy’s President and CEO Tom Boucher, an energy industry vet, financed the Rosebud Sioux project by selling “flexible emissions standards” created by the Kyoto Protocol. These are the tax-deductible pollution credits from ecologically responsible companies (or in this case, Native American tribes), which can then be sold to polluters wishing to “offset” their carbon dioxide generation without actually reducing their emissions.
Since the Rosebud test case proved successful, NativeEnergy moved forward with plans to develop a larger “distributed wind project,” located on eight different reservations. NativeEnergy also became a majority Indian-owned company in August 2005, when the pro-development Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (COUP) purchased a majority stake in the company on behalf of its member tribes.
The COUP-NativeEnergy purchase just happened to coincide with the passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act. The act contains a number of native energy—specific provisions in its Title V, many of which set alarming precedents.
Most outrageously, it gave the US government the power to grant rights of way through Indian lands without permission from the tribes–if deemed to be in the strategic interests of an energy-related project. Under the guise of “promoting tribal sovereignty,” the act also released the federal government from liability with regard to resource development, shifting responsibility for environmental review and regulation from the federal to tribal governments. Also, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network, the act “rolls back the protections of…critical pieces of legislation that grassroots indigenous peoples utilize to protect our sacred sites.” Some critics have derided the 2005 act as a fire sale on Indian energy, characterizing various incentives as a broad collection of subsidies (federal handouts) for US energy companies.
America’s native peoples may attain a modicum of energy independence and tribal sovereignty through the development of wind, solar, and other renewable energy infrastructure on their lands. But, according to Brian Awehali, it won’t come from getting into bed with, and becoming indebted to, the very industry currently driving the planet to its doom.
UPDATE BY Brian Awehali
I believe the topic of this article was important and urgent because sometimes all that glitters really is gold, even if the marketing copy says it’s green. The long and utterly predictable history where indigenous peoples and US government and corporate interests are both concerned shouldn’t be forgotten as we enter the brave new green era. Marketing for-profit energy schemes on Indian lands as a means of promoting tribal sovereignty is both ludicrous and offensive, as are “green” development plans intrinsically tied to the extraction of fossil fuels in the deregulated Wild West of Indian Country. Energy companies are only interested in native sovereignty because it means operations on Indian lands are not subject to federal regulation or oversight. This is why I included a discussion in my article about the instructive example of the Alaska tribal corporations and the ways they’ve mutated into multi-billion dollar loophole exploiters. (My brief examination of Alaska tribal corporations drew heavily from an excellent Mother Jones article, “Little Big Companies,” by Michael Scherer). It’s also my belief that the probably well-intentioned idea of “green tags,” carbon offset credits, and market-enabled “carbon neutrality” should be examined very closely: Why are we introducing systems for transferring (or trading) the carbon emissions of “First World” polluters to those who contributed least to global warming? I would argue that this is merely a nice-sounding way for the overdeveloped world to purchase the right to continue its pathologically unsustainable mode of existence, while doing little to address the very grave ecological realities we now face. 
  It’s very hard to know what the impact of this story was, or to gauge mainstream response to it. In my experience, the so-called mainstream has a difficult time absorbing and understanding Native American issues, not least because this mainstream tends to think of indigenous peoples in North America in historical, rather than contemporary, terms. I am, however, encouraged by the number of journalists and writers who are beginning to ask critical questions about greenwashing, and I see my story as adding to that collective body of work. 
  For more information about energy policy and its impact on indigenous communities of North America, I recommend visiting the Indigenous Environmental Network (www.ienearth.org), and checking out their Native Energy Campaign.

http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2008/index.htm

Uproar: Bush official’s quip on black voters

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John Byrne

Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) rebuked a Justice Department voting official Friday night who said Ohio’s African American voters faced long lines in the 2004 presidential election because blacks tend to vote at night.

Justice Department Voting Section Chief John Tanner’s “investigation of the 2004 election in Ohio concluded that long lines and late voting precincts were due to the fact that white voters tend to cast ballots in the morning (i.e., before work) and black voters cast ballots in the afternoon (i.e., after work),” Conyers said in a release.

Why did African American voters suffer long lines in Ohio?

Tanner wrote in a letter TPM Muckraker uncovered that “…the principal cause of the difference appears to be the tendency in Franklin County for white voters to cast ballots in the morning (i.e., before work), and for black voters to cast ballots in the afternoon (i.e., after work). We have established this tendency through local contacts and through both political parties, and it accords with our considerable experience in other parts of the United States. Morning voters may wait in line several hours, as happened in white precincts, without keeping the polls open after 7:30 am; this is not the case, however, at sites where voters arrive after 5:30 p.m.”

The comments were reported by TPM Muckraker Friday.

Voters in black counties faced far longer lines than those in the more white Ohio suburbs. Investigations showed that Ohio officials had deliberately placed fewer voting machines in some areas and in some instances even kept voting machines out of service. The resulting lines generally resulted in less individuals voting because the lines were so long.

“I am concerned about the extreme lengths Mr. Tanner went to in order to justify the reasons African-Americans were not treated equally in the 2004 Ohio election,” Conyers said. “The committee needs to consider this matter. I am aware of no precedent for the Department acting in this capacity in the past.

“The Department of Justice — since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — has a responsibility to thoroughly investigate allegations of voter suppression and discrimination, like those made in Ohio in 2004,” the Michigan Democrat added. “I look forward to hearing more from Mr. Tanner in our committee later this month as he testifies about his work as chief of the voting section. The 2004 election exposed serious deficiencies in this section’s failure to adequately investigate and prosecute voter suppression efforts nationwide and I hope he is prepared to address this issue head on.”

Conyers wrote a detailed report while in the House minority which detailed Ohio’s voting discrepancies, What Went Wrong in Ohio.

“We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters,” he wrote in the January 2005 report. “Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.”

Among the irregularities in voting, Conyers listed insufficient voting machines in predominately minority and Democrat districts, provisional ballots that disenfranchised thousands, voter registrations that were rejected because of paper weight, efforts by Republicans to engage in “caging” tactics that targeted 35,000 mostly minority voters for intimidation and the use of voting “challengers,” who could challenge voters’ rights to have their vote counted.

The challengers, he said in his report, were “concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges ‘can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.'”

CCTV to outwit Jason Bourne

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By Jasper Copping

A closed circuit television (CCTV) system to outwit even the most elusive secret agent or criminal has been devised by scientists.

The flaws in the present systems were revealed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Bourne Ultimatum.

In the film, Jason Bourne, a rogue CIA agent played by Matt Damon, tells another character, via a mobile phone, how to evade the searching eyes of CCTV cameras while charting his way across the concourse of Waterloo Station in London.

The new system plugs the surveillance gap by enabling an operator to choose a suspect and follow him through dense crowds, and any subsequent changes in appearance.

It works by attaching about 30 “tags” on small clusters of pixels on the footage, fixing them on different parts of the subject. It then “locks on” to these tags, and as the subject is filmed, the computer is able to follow his or her exact progress on the film, as the target moves about.

The system has been developed by scientists at the defence company BAE Systems, the University of Reading and Sagem, a French telecoms company.

Andrew Cooke, the project manager, said: “This kind of technology would allow us to track someone like Bourne.”

Present CCTV surveillance “hits a brick wall” when a suspect mingles in a crowd or even takes off his jacket. The new system will even be able to pass information from one CCTV camera to another and can be programmed to pick out potential criminals by detecting suspicious body language.

Police officers will be able to use the technique to trace an individual’s movements on recorded footage after a terrorist attack or serious crime.

The project has been funded partly by the European Commission and is already being tested by a British store chain.

Lockerbie witness ‘given £2m reward’

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MARCELLO MEGA

DAMNING new evidence that a key witness in the Lockerbie case was paid a £2m reward by US investigators will form part of the court appeal by the Libyan convicted of the attack.

Sources close to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) have revealed that the cash was paid to Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci as a direct reward for giving crucial prosecution evidence but was disguised as “compensation”.

Scotland on Sunday can also reveal that another key plank in the appeal will be new evidence that the type of timer used in the bomb was available “all over the place” and not just sold to Libya as claimed in court.

The reward and timer evidence can today be confirmed as the two “missing” appeal grounds submitted by the SCCRC. The Commission said earlier this year it had discovered six grounds of appeal but only gave details of four.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi has been granted a second appeal against his conviction for the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people died. The Libyan, who is serving life in Greenock Prison, is expected to have his case heard next year.

The SCCRC spent three years examining Megrahi’s conviction and earlier this year referred the case back for appeal after concluding there could have been a miscarriage of justice.

Tony Gauci was an absolutely crucial witness at the original trial, giving “reliable” evidence that Megrahi bought clothes in his shop that were later used to wrap the bomb. Gauci’s evidence has long been considered controversial and there have already been claims that he received rewards and treats from investigators.

Now, a source close to the SCCRC has provided the first confirmation that Gauci received a substantial reward and that it formed part of the grounds for appealing the case.

The Commission has thoroughly checked out the claims and found he received ‘a phenomenal sum of money’ from the US. Sources close to Megrahi’s defence put the sum at $4m, or approximately £2m at current exchange rates.

The source close to the SCCRC told Scotland on Sunday: “It [the reward] has been dressed up as compensation for the impact on his life and business of his close involvement in the case.

“But it clear that it is actually a reward. The US and UK governments needed a conviction in the case and the fact that the key witness was rewarded for his testimony casts doubts on its value.

“It is not acceptable to pay a witness as that practice is likely to make him anxious to please.”

Gauci is understood to be planning to use his newfound wealth to fund a move to Australia with his brother, Paul, who was also on the witness list but was not called to give evidence.

Maltese sources have also revealed that Gauci has stepped up security at the home in Swieqi which he shares with his brother. He rarely ventures out other than to the shop.

One source said: “He used to like the feeling of importance that being a major witness in such a big case gave him, but now he realises he could be a target for some people. He knows doubts have been expressed about his evidence. He gets very jumpy when anyone he doesn’t know approaches, and if the press call him he hangs up.”

The source claimed the reward had caused a split in the Gauci family.

The brothers have five surviving siblings, as well as one who died, and the others have a stake in the shop, Mary’s House, which was founded by their father. Although other family members had little or nothing to do with the investigation, the fact that it was presented as ‘compensation’ which related in part to the impact on the business has led the other siblings to demand a share.

The family split has further reinforced the determination of the brothers to seek a new life.

Another source, a Scottish investigator who worked with the brothers over a number of years, said: “Paul was always going off to Australia and it became a bit of a dream for them that they would move there.”

Contacted at their home, Paul Gauci said: “We are under very heavy pressure here. The press want to photograph us, everybody wants to interview my brother, we have no privacy. When we step out the door, there are people with cameras. Our lives are intolerable here.”

The second “missing” appeal ground relates to a fragment of timer found in a shirt collar and later confirmed as part of the mechanism which detonated the bomb above Lockerbie. The original court case heard evidence the Swiss-made MST13 timers were only supplied to Libya.

At a preliminary hearing on Thursday, Megrahi’s lawyers demanded the release of a document in the possession of the Crown and believed to have come from a foreign intelligence agency they believe will disprove that part of the case.

Much has been made of the importance of that document since its existence was leaked to the media by Megrahi’s legal team. But informed sources close to the SCCRC have confirmed that an abundance of evidence has already emerged to show the MST13s, made by the Swiss firm Mebo, ‘were all over the place’.

It was established long ago that they were also supplied to the Stasi, the East German secret police, but it has now emerged that they had a much wider penetration than the Crown’s case implied.

Henri Paul’s father raises dramatic new questions over Diana’s death crash

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DENNIS RICE and TIM FINAN

The father of Henri Paul, the driver who was killed alongside Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed has raised disturbing new questions about his son’s death.

In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Jean Paul claimed his son ejected a mystery intruder from the Ritz Hotel in Paris shortly before he drove off in the Mercedes carrying the couple.

And he said there were baffling irregularities in his son’s finances and speculated about why the police had failed to return some of Henri’s personal effects to the family.

As the inquest into Diana and Dodi’s death enters its third week, Mr Paul, 76, said: ‘We’ve had it up to here with this affair. The whole world has made an arch scapegoat of our son.

‘In my heart, though, there is a flame of hope that one day the truth will out. But I think if the truth does come out, it could spell the ruination of Great Britain.

‘They have looked constantly for a scapegoat. It was easy enough to blame the small-time French driver — my son.’

Henri Paul escorted a man from the Ritz shortly before driving the Princess of Wales and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed to their deaths, his father claimed.

He said his son was interrogating the intruder away from the prying eyes of the paparazzi.

This does not explain, however, why there is no footage of the incident on any of the Ritz’s 31 security cameras.

But it may shed light on why the inquest was told last week that not all of Paul’s movements on the night of the crash can be accounted for.

Paul, 41, who was also the Ritz Hotel’s deputy head of security, was recorded on CCTV leaving the front entrance at 10.34pm before returning again at 10.46pm. For eight-and-a-half of those minutes he vanishes from security cameras.

Mr Paul said his son was alerted to the man’s presence by a member of the hotel staff.

His claim raises questions such as: was the intruder a member of the security services whom Dodi’s father Mohamed Al Fayed maintains caused the crash, then covered up the murders?

Or was the mystery man someone Paul had planned to meet that night and who he had to pretend to throw out after being spotted by another member of staff?

Or could it have been one of the paparazzi he was seen signalling to later?

The inquest has been shown CCTV footage of Paul waving at members of the paparazzi, raising the possibility that he was being paid to tip them off about Diana’s movements.

Jean Paul is adamant that his source at the Ritz is telling the truth.

Speaking from his home in Lorient, Brittany, he said: ‘Shortly before the Mercedes left the Ritz, Henri had someone ejected from the Ritz because they were not behaving properly.

‘This man was not a customer, he was a curieux [nosy parker] and it was Henri’s job to have him ejected. Henri had this taken care of quietly. This was told to me by someone at the Ritz and there were two witnesses.

‘A report had been made to the reception desk about this man and Henri had been called in to deal with the matter.’

Mr Paul argued that this was further proof that blood tests after the crash, showing that his son was two times over the drink-drive limit when he died, were flawed. He said: ‘If Henri had been drunk, would he have been able to deal with this intruder so properly and so discreetly?

‘Do you think the staff at the Ritz would have allowed him to go about his duties?’

The inquest has been shown CCTV footage of Paul at the Ritz that night, and he shows no sign of being drunk.

One camera did reveal, however, that he drank two glasses of Ricard, which contains 45 per cent alcohol, in the hotel bar.

His father added: ‘Last week was the first time I had seen these images, the last of my son before he died.

‘It tore my heart but also gladdened my heart because these pictures showed he was not drunk. The images show Henri working. He acted smartly and looked smart. That’s the way he was.’

Questions have already been raised about how Paul, a modestly paid bachelor, came to have £170,000 stashed away in 15 different bank accounts, as well as £1,200 in his pocket on the night he died.

His former employer, the Ritz’s owner Mr Al Fayed, has claimed that the cash shows Paul was in the pay of MI6 or another foreign security service.

But his father rubbished Mr Al Fayed’s allegation and posed another intriguing question about his son’s behaviour.

Namely, why did Paul ask his parents for a small loan of £1,000 a few months before his death when he had so much money hidden away?

According to his father, Paul said he needed the cash to help him pay for the deposit on a flat he wanted to buy in Paris’s Chatelet district.

‘I was as surprised as anyone about the mysterious bank accounts and I have been hurt by the insinuations that my son was paid money by the secret services,’ said Mr Paul.

‘It doesn’t add up, because in the months leading up to his death he asked us to lend him some money to buy a flat in Paris.

‘If he had that amount of money in his bank accounts, would he have come humbly cap-in-hand to his old dad asking for a loan of about ten thousand francs [£1,000]?

‘He had found a flat he liked in the Rue Sainte Anne in the Second Arrondissement. I remember Henri actually showed us some plans, so it was a definite idea on his part. It was in the Chatelet area which was convenient for his work.

‘We inherited all the money he had. If he had known about it, would he have come asking for a loan to buy a property? No.

‘It’s another anomaly, another mystery. It doesn’t add up but a lot of things don’t add up in this case.’

Tips that Paul received while working at the Ritz are said by friends to be the reason why he had a small fortune tucked away.

His father said: ‘Of course, he often got large tips and he put the money in savings accounts. Once Madonna gave him 1,700 francs [£170] because he was part of the Ritz and he handled security. He told me about it.

‘I asked him what Madonna was like. He said she was a petit boudin — a little sausage.’

Mr Paul has spent the ten years since the crash unsuccessfully asking the French authorities to return his son’s ID card.

Mr Paul said: ‘A lot of things we have asked for have never been given to us. Henri always carried a wallet and in his wallet he had a carte d’identité. I wanted the wallet because the card was in it.

‘I wanted the photograph because I liked it. The card was never given to us and we were told that it was covered in blood.

‘We were also told that Henri had no wallet on him. I don’t believe that. We were given things like keys and small change and his watch, which was still working, but there was no wallet and that I find suspicious.

‘Maybe it was something to do with the blood on the carte d’identité — there has been much controversy about Henri’s blood.

‘We are certain that the blood which was analysed, containing excess alcohol and high levels of carbon monoxide, was someone else’s. That is why we think they do not want to give us the card.

‘Do you think Prince Charles or Mr Al Fayed were treated the same way? No.’

Mr Paul said three families had lost loved ones in the crash. Two were rich and powerful while his own was treated like ‘microbes’.

He also recalled the moment when he was told his son had died — and how he was unaware until the next day that Princess Diana had perished as well.

‘It was about 4.30am,’ said Mr Paul. ‘I got a phone call and it was someone from the Ritz. They said there had been an accident and Henri was dead. I mumbled something and I think I put the phone down, and then I told Henri’s mother Gisele.

‘At the time I was unaware that the Princess and Dodi were dead, too.

It was only the following morning when I heard the news on the radio and put two and two together that I understood what had happened.

‘You know, we have lost three of our five sons. We know all about grief. Pascal died of cancer aged just 34 and Jean-Luc died of a heart attack in 2005.’

Last night a spokesman for Mr Al Fayed said: ‘Anyone who has relevant information must bring it before the coroner so that the jury can hear it and assess it. That includes the bereaved father of Henri Paul.’

Philippe Lancelin, the spokesman for Judicial Police in Paris, said: ‘I cannot comment as the French investigation is closed.’

A spokeswoman for Operation Paget, the British police team assisting the coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker, said: ‘It would be inappropriate to comment at this stage.’

9/11 TRUTH: ICELANDIC SCHOLAR ELIAS DAVIDSSON’S UK TOUR

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ABOUT ELIAS

Elias Davidsson is an Iceland-based musical composer, human rights campaigner and researcher. He was born in Palestine in 1941 to Jewish refugees from Germany and grew up in Jerusalem in a neighbourhood where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in peace together, which as he says has permanently coloured his outlook on current Middle Eastern problems. Although he has no university background he describes himself as an “independent scholar in international law and human rights”, with the emphasis on ‘scholar’. His articles in the fields of international law and human rights have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, International Journal of Human Rights and Florida Journal of International Law and International Legal Theory (published by the American Society of International Law). He is among the very few Icelanders, including tenured professors, whose articles have been published in such periodicals.

In recent years Elias has turned his attention to the events of 9/11 and to the broader issue of the ‘war on terror’, examining these issues from a criminological, legal and moral perspective and applying his customary scholarly rigour to his investigations. He believes citizens from all countries of the world need to be engaged in questioning the events of 9/11, to which end he has been active in promoting the growth of the European 9/11 Truth movement, and runs its website www.911truth.eu.  

For articles by Elias see www.aldeilis.net
  
INTRODUCTION TO ELIAS’ LECTURES ON 9/11:
On 11 September 2001 approximately 3,000 people were killed in the United States in what was variously designated as a terrorist attack, an act of war or a crime against humanity. The events of this day were used to justify two wars and increased militarisation and constitute a grave assault on both international law and human rights.

Contrary to popular belief, however, the US authorities have not positively identified the perpetrators, nor their accomplices, nor the tools of the murder. Yet the victims and society as a whole are entitled, under human rights law, to know the truth about the events of 9/11.

In his lectures, Elias will outline the moral and legal foundations for the right to the truth, the obligations of states to thoroughly investigate mass murder, and will illustrate the extent to which US authorities have violated their international obligations to establish the truth about what happened on 11 September 2001.

Elias’ empirical approach, devoid of speculation, provides powerful conceptual tools to those who are committed to defend democracy and the rule of civilised law at both the domestic and international level.

Print-outs of Elias’ recent articles on 9/11 issues will be available at the lectures and their duplication and distribution in particular to lawyers, academics and politicians is actively encouraged.

TOUR ITINERARY
Elias’ tour schedule is still in process of finalisation but dates/locations so far are as follows. Please revisit this site as of 16/17 October for final details or phone the local organisers.
Admission at each location will be free, but donations towards the cost of room-hire and the speaker’s travel may be requested.  

LONDON
Monday 22nd October, 19.00 CONFIRMED
Indian YMCA, Fitzroy Square, London W1

IPSWICH
Wednesday 24th October, 20.00 CONFIRMED
Friends’ Meeting House, Ipswich

SKIPTON
Thursday 25th October, 19.00
Venue t.b.a.

LEEDS 
Friday 26th October, 19.00
Venue t.b.a.

BIRMINGHAM  
Saturday 27th October
Venue t.b.a., possibly Birmingham Central Mosque

LIVERPOOL 
Sunday 28th October
Venue t.b.a

LONDON (TV appearance)  CONFIRMED
Monday 29th October, 19.00
The Agenda TV program, Islam Channel, with Yvonne Ridley

Fight Over Court Role In U.S. Wiretapping

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By Peter Grier

While Bush Seeks To Limit Court OKs For Spying, Democrats Fight For More Judicial Oversight

To what extent should courts become involved in the oversight of sensitive U.S. eavesdropping operations?

That is one of the most crucial items at issue in the developing struggle between congressional Democrats and the White House over new legislation to extend the government’s surveillance authority.

Key House Democrats say judges should look over the National Security Agency’s shoulder more often. Under a bill approved by two House committees Wednesday, if the NSA wants to listen in on foreigners outside the United States but a possibility exists that these targets might communicate with Americans, then the government needs to get a blanket court order approving the effort for up to a year.

The Bush administration says that provision could hobble American intelligence. In practical terms, it’s always possible that foreign targets might call the U.S., say U.S. officials. Thus, the NSA might have to get court approval even for wiretapping operations aimed at foreign-to-foreign communications.

“That is something that gives us a lot of concern, that we would have to go to a [court] to get these approvals in an area where we really need flexibility,” said Kenneth Wainstein, assistant attorney general for the national security division, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “We need to be nimble, and we need to be able to move around to get these surveillances.”

The battle over the wiretap bill promises to be one of the most difficult and protracted legislative efforts of the current Congress.

That’s partly because of politics. Democrats on Capitol Hill are under pressure from civil liberties advocates and others who believe lawmakers gave intelligence agencies too much latitude in a temporary bill hastily passed before Congress’s summer break.

Meanwhile, the White House has not been shy about invoking the specter of possible future terrorist attacks in its defense of the status quo.

Powers granted by the temporary legislation – which expires in February 2008 – have allowed intelligence professionals “to gather critical information that would have been missed with this authority,” said President Bush Wednesday. “Keeping this authority is critical to keeping America safe.”

House leaders defended their effort as one that strikes an appropriate balance between civil liberties and national security concerns.

“What the terrorists fear most is our constitution and our values, and that is what this bill protects,” said Rep. John Conyers (D) of Michigan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

But the struggle over the bill is also complex, because the law is unusually dense – and because the pace of technological change has made electronic espionage more involved.

Last year’s temporary update, for example, closed what all involved labeled a dangerous gap in intelligence authority, by allowing the NSA to snoop on communications between foreigners even if those communications pass through U.S. electronic networks, as many e-mails do.

Plus, the underlying activity here is classified, which does not make consideration of the bill easier.

Lawmakers outside the circle of Intelligence Committee members may not fully know the extent of NSA’s wiretapping – or how important it is or is not – when they vote on the program. Take legal immunity for telecommunications firms – another controversial part of this legislation.

The Bush administration badly wants Congress to approve legal immunity for any past actions private utilities undertook to aid NSA spying. Currently, AT&T and Verizon, among other firms, face a number of lawsuits brought by privacy advocates who claim that, by allowing the government access to their data streams, the companies have participated in illegal eavesdropping.

NSA officials have gone so far as to worry that these suits could bankrupt the firms. Bush says he will not sign any new eavesdropping bill that does not provide immunity.

Currently such a provision isn’t in the bill. But Democratic leaders say they’d be glad to discuss immunity – if the administration turns over internal records detailing exactly what the communications firms did.

Otherwise Congress would be in the position of providing “blind immunity,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland, House majority leader.

Civil liberties proponents bitterly oppose the amnesty effort.

“Why is the president of the United States trying to get the telecommunications companies off the hook for their illegal activity?” says Caroline Frederickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “He is supposed to be upholding laws, not encouraging companies to break them.”

Other aspects of the legislation which the White House wishes to change include its expiration date. The bill sunsets in 2009, while the administration wants a permanent extension.

© 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

911 tapes: Airport police hide woman’s death from husband

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David Edwards and Muriel Kane

CNN is reporting that 911 tapes from the night Carol Gotbaum died in custody at the Phoenix airport show that her husband was frantically trying to warn airport workers that his wife was alcoholic, suicidal and deeply depressed, but neither the airport dispatcher nor the police told him his wife had died an hour earlier.

“I want somebody who’s professional to be talking to him and not just blow it to him over the phone because I don’t know how he’ll react,” said one individual speaking on the tapes.

Phoenix police insisted to CNN that Noah Gotbaum was not informed of his wife’s death because their protocol is to finish a preliminary investigation before notifying next of kin.

The distraught Gotbaum became disorderly after being told she could not make her flight to a treatment center on September 28. She was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by airport police, who left her alone in a holding cell, where she was found dead a short while later. Gotbaum’s brother-in-law called her treatment “inhumane.”

Phoenix police initially claimed Gotbaum must have strangled herself while trying to get out of the handcuffs, but the actual cause of death is still unknown.

The following video is from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast on October 12, 2007.

Congress pledges to support CIA probe

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By PAMELA HESS

Key members of Congress vowed Friday to defend the independence of the CIA’s inspector general and to put an end to the agency’s probe of its own internal investigator.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell in a letter to terminate the investigation of the conduct of CIA Inspector General John Helgerson.

“I just don’t want to see the intimidation of inspector generals in Washington, D.C., and I’m of the view that people who know that they’re doing the right thing aren’t afraid of oversight,” Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“The initiation of this investigation, if accurately reported, is troubling,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said in a statement.

Congress overhauled the inspector general’s office to be an independent watchdog for the agency nearly two decades ago, Reyes noted, saying it would now “very aggressively preserve” that independence.

The CIA confirmed Thursday that its director, Gen. Michael Hayden, had ordered the internal review. In a series of reports on the agency’s conduct before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, Helgerson has criticized senior figures at the spy agency, including former Director George Tenet and officers involved in the CIA’s detention of terrorist suspects.

Wyden has been among the legislators pressuring the CIA to release those IG reports.

“Hayden fought me every step of the way in doing that,” he said. “When it came out Hayden basically said the IG was all wet, he was wrong on key points but he didn’t even say why he didn’t agree with the work of IG,” Wyden said.

Word of the probe touched off a bipartisan wave of concern among the agency’s congressional overseers that the CIA is trying to muzzle one of its sharpest critics and the only officially independent voice inside the secretive agency.

The Senate panel’s top Republican, Kit Bond of Missouri, said he also would “make sure that nothing is done to restrain or diminish” the inspector general’s office. Bond said in a statement that the CIA “has a track record of resisting accountability.”

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., a House intelligence committee member whose district includes the National Security Agency, said CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden made a mistake in launching the inquiry.

“When you are working in the clandestine arena you need to make sure the CIA is following the law and procedures set in place. That’s the purpose of the IG. It makes the agency stronger,” Ruppersberger said in an interview.

Reyes is to meet with the CIA leadership next week to discuss the matter. The House intelligence committee had been unaware of the investigation until it was reported Friday in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, said committee spokeswoman Kira Maas. Wyden said he also was not briefed.

CIA spokesman George Little said Friday concerns about the independence of the office are unfounded.

“This is a straightforward management review, nothing more. The authorities and independence of the Office of Inspector General are not in question. Taking a fresh look at the vital work that office does, and, if need be, offering constructive suggestions for the OIG itself to consider, can only strengthen oversight at the CIA. It’s ridiculous to suggest that this is in any way an attack on the concept of a vigorous system of inspection and investigation.”

The CIA review is being led by Robert Deitz, senior counsel to Hayden and the general counsel at the National Security Agency when Hayden was NSA director.

Helgerson has been highly critical of the CIA. In a report in August, for example, he concluded that Tenet and other senior leaders never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to the Sept. 11 attacks. Under congressional orders, the agency recently declassified portions of the embarrassing findings.

Helgerson has also been highly critical, in classified reports, of the agency’s treatment of detainees.

The newspaper reports said the review was focusing on complaints that Helgerson’s office has not been impartial and has assumed guilt on the part of agency operatives, particularly those who participated in the agency’s detention programs.

Hayden’s probe is highly unusual because it deviates from normal government processes. When agencies have issues with the conduct of their inspectors general, the standard procedure is to file a complaint alleging “gross misconduct” with a special panel at the White House Office of Management and Budget. If that panel finds merit in the complaint, it refers it to an inspector general at another federal agency for full investigation.

Hayden also could have taken his objections to President Bush, who appointed Helgerson, Ruppersberger said.

“Now that this is out in the media it doesn’t look good for anybody,” Ruppersberger said.

VIDEO: 9/11 Survivor Anthony Saltalamacia Speaks Out – Confirms Explosions

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Anthony Saltalamacia was with Rodriguez on the basement. First time after 6 years , they meet and his recollection taped.

Anthony Saltalamacia states that 6 years on, we still do not know the truth of 9/11.

Media Covering Up For Clinton

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Prorev

AS it did for her husband in his first run for the presidency, the mainstream media is busy covering up for Hillary Clinton. We’re talking history here – although there is plenty in the past that should be in the news and isn’t. What we’re talking about is current stories that are being suppresses. Three examples:

– HRC is using national secrets thief Sandy Berger as a major advisor. Berger’s outrageous lifting of government documents never got the attention it deserved and he never got the punishment he deserved, but one might have imagined that he at least would not be on the fast track back to the White House again. Why Berger stole the documents remains a mystery although a reasonable assumption is that they were originals with embarrassing notations on them by HRC’s husband.

– A lawsuit concerning HR Clinton’s claims of non-involvement in a major fundraising scandal has been kept from view by most of the major media. While we don’t know the outcome of the case, we do know that there is an allegedly smoking gun video and the possibility of criminal charges should HRC lose the case. Whatever the outcome, this is news right now.

– HRC just withdrew her strange baby bond scheme less than a month after presenting it. Buried in an AP account is this: “Clinton first mentioned a so-called ‘baby bond’ last month in an appearance before the Congressional Black Caucus, saying it was just an idea and not a policy proposal. The idea was criticized by Republicans, and she told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Tuesday that it’s off the table.” As John Edwards’ spokesman Chris Kofinus said, “Apparently, new polling data seems to have pressured the Clinton campaign to throw out the baby bond with the bathwater.” We can’t recall another major issue being dropped by a candidate so quickly. Again, that’s news, but you’d only rarely know it from following the big media.

Chicago Bans Free Newspapers

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By Mark Fitzgerald

CHICAGO A Chicago law passed unanimously last winter to bar the indiscriminate door-to-door distribution of menus, brochures, and other advertising flyers also bans many circulation practices for free newspapers.

The provision applying the ban to newspapers was discovered by Ron Roenigk, the publisher of two free community papers on the city’s Northwest Side, Inside, and Inside Lincoln Park. “It passed 50 to nothing — and I’m sure 49 of (the aldermen) didn’t even read the legislation,” he said in a telephone interview Monday.

Roenigk did read the law, however — and became alarmed at its implications. Chicago is awash in free papers, including dailies published by the city’s biggest newspaper, the Chicago Tribune.

Tucked into the 35th page of the 48-page law is a provision declaring, “It shall be unlawful for any person to distribute or to cause others to distribute…newspapers, periodicals and directories of any kind on any public way or other public place or on the premises of any private property in the city in such a manner that is reasonably foreseeable that such distribution will cause litter.”

Among the offending manners, the law continues, is “leaving stacks of paper on the ground without any means of securing them” — the common “dumped bundle” method used by many free publications.

The law specifies some acceptable means of distribution — including poly-bagging copies — that could exempt home delivery of the bigger free dailies such as Tribune’s Spanish-language Hoy. However, both Hoy and the commuter/youth daily RedEye are also distributed in open bundles in many places.

Fines range from $200 to $1,000 for each violation. And after three tickets for dumping stacks, the law provides, a company’s business license can be pulled by the city. So far, there does not appear to have been any enforcement of the law against newspapers, although there have been crackdowns in some neighborhoods on the distribution of handbills and menus.

Ironically, the clauses extending the litter bill to newspapers were added by an alderman in the distribution area for one of Roenigk’s papers. Ald. Manuel “Manny” Flores of the First Ward now wants to rewrite the section, and has invited Roenigk and other publishers to advise him on better language, Roenigk said.

“I think he’s afraid he’s going to be called out on this more than he already has been by me,” said Roenigk, whose newspapers carried an account of the law’s reach in last Thursday’s editions.

A spokesman for Flores did not immediately return a message seeking comment Monday.

In another irony, Roenigk changed the 20,000-distribution Inside Lincoln Park newspaper to home delivery when an anti-litter ordinance that was limited to certain neighborhoods took effect two years ago. “It’s our answer to a TMC (total market coverage) product,” he said. “We figured we could use it as the delivery vehicle for the pizza menus, flyers, etc.” that could no longer be slipped under doors or left on stoops.

Police chief calls for drugs legalisation

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icWales

Controversial police chief Richard Brunstrom has called for the legalisation and regulation of all drugs in a report published today.

Mr Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, described the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 as “not fit for purpose” and “immoral” and urged its repeal.

Mr Brunstrom, in a report to North Wales police authority, described the current UK drugs strategy as “unwinnable”.

He said: “The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 should be repealed and replaced by a new Substance Misuse Act based upon the legalisation and careful regulation of all substances of abuse in one consistent manner.”

Mr Brunstrom urged his authority to support the stance in its response to the Government’s Drugs: Our Community, Your Say consultation paper.

In a 30-page document — Drugs Policy, A Radical Look Ahead — Mr Brunstrom said: “UK drugs policy for the last several decades has been based upon prohibition with a list of banned substances placed into three classes — the ABC system – and draconian criminal penalties for the possession or supply of controlled drugs.

“This system has not worked well. Illegal drugs are now in plentiful supply, and have become consistently cheaper in real terms over the years.

“The number of users has increased dramatically. Drug crime has soared equally dramatically as a direct consequence of the illegality of some drugs and the huge profits from illegal trading have supported a massive rise in organised criminality.

“Most importantly, the current system illogically excludes both alcohol and tobacco.

“A new classification system, a ’hierarchy of harm’ encompassing all substances of abuse and based upon identified social harms, should, in my opinion, be at the centre of a new substance misuse regime — one based upon evidence, not moralistic dogma.”

The chief constable, who was appointed in 2001, has often attracted criticism for his support of speed cameras and his tough stance against speeding motorists.

Earlier this year he authorised a road safety campaign which included a picture of a dying father of three, Mark Gibney.

It later emerged that Mr Brunstrom had not obtained permission from Mr Gibney’s relatives to use the images.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission’s investigation into the use of the pictures is due to conclude this month.

A Downing Street website petition urging the Prime Minister to sack Mr Brunstrom has gained more than 3,500 signatures.

Mr Brunstrom also urged the North Wales Authority to adopt an “affiliation” status with the charity Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

Danny Kushlick, a director of the organisation, said: “We are absolutely delighted at Mr Brunstrom’s paper.

“The Chief Constable has shown great leadership and imagination in very publicly calling for a drug policy that replaces the evident failings of prohibition with a legal system of regulation and control for potentially dangerous drugs.

“Mr Brunstrom’s call is less surprising when you consider that prohibition, and the illegal markets it creates, is the single largest cause of crime in the UK, generating £100 billion in crime costs alone over the last ten years.

“As a senior policeman he has witnessed first hand the counter productive effects of abdicating responsibility for this dangerous trade to unregulated and often violent criminals.

“His call for drug markets to be brought back within the sphere of Government control stands in enlightened contrast to the populist law and order posturing of our Prime Minister, who recently announced that ’drugs are never going to be decriminalised’.

Mr Kushlick added: “The current Government consultation on the drug strategy has inexplicably ruled out any discussion of alternatives to prohibition, despite the policy’s systematic failure over a number of decades.

“Mr Brunstrom’s paper puts these pragmatic alternatives firmly back on the table, where they should be, if a meaningful debate about ’what works’ is to be entertained.

“It is to be hoped that the Police Authority support the Chief Constable’s recommendations and that other Police Authorities seriously examine the impact of enforcing prohibition.”

Mr Kushlick set up Transform 10 years ago after working with recovering drug addicts.

He said by becoming affiliated with Transform, the Police Authority would be signing up to the goals of the organisation — “to progressively move forward to end the war on drugs”.

He said: “We are not a pro-drugs charity and we do not condone or promote the use of drugs in any way.

“We do know from experience with chaotic drug users that criminalising them and sending them to jail is expensive and does not work.”

Tory MP for Clywd West and shadow Deputy Secretary of State for Wales, David Jones said: “Mr Brunstrom has been touting these ideas for some time but I hope the Police Authority will see sense and robustly reject his proposals.

“I have read the report and what he says is drug takers and suppliers are subject to ’immoral’ policy.

“It is not a question of morality, it is a question of the pernicious effect which drug taking has on society.

“He says the way to control the situation is not to prohibit but to regulate. But in the same document he calls for cigarettes and alcohol to be brought into the classification system.

“Regulation of cigarettes and alcohol has failed to control the problems they cause, so why should regulation control the problems associated with cannabis, heroin and cocaine?

“What Mr Brunstrom should be doing is enforcing the law, aggressively and vigilantly.

“And the Government should be ensuring the resources are there to win the war on drugs.”

Councillor Ian Roberts, Liberal Democrat chairman of the Police Authority, said: “The matter will be considered in detail by the Police Authority on Monday and it would be unfair to pre-empt the debate.”

Jimmy Carter: U.S. Tortures Prisoners

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AP

The U.S. tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday, adding that President Bush makes up his own definition of torture.

“Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights,” Carter said on CNN. “We’ve said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime.”

Bush, responding to an Oct. 4 report by The New York Times on secret Justice Department memorandums supporting the use of “harsh interrogation techniques,” defended the techniques Friday by proclaiming: “This government does not torture people.”

Carter said the interrogation methods cited by the Times, including “head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures,” constitute torture “if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored – certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

“But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don’t violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don’t violate them,” Carter said.

In an interview that aired Wednesday on BBC, Carter ripped Vice President Dick Cheney as “a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military.”

Carter went on to say Cheney has been “a disaster for our country. I think he’s been overly persuasive on President George Bush.”

Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell declined to speak to Carter’s allegations.

“We’re not going to engage in this kind of rhetoric,” she said.

In the CNN interview, the Democratic former president disparaged the field of Republican presidential candidates.

“They all seem to be outdoing each other in who wants to go to war first with Iran, who wants to keep Guantanamo open longer and expand its capacity – things of that kind,” Carter said.

He said he also disagreed with positions taken by Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who have declined to promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq over the following four years if elected president next year.

Blackwater faces war crimes inquiry after killings in Iraq

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By Anne Penketh

The American firm Blackwater USA has been served notice that it faces investigations for war crimes after 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed in a hail of bullets by its security guards in Baghdad.

The killings last month put the spotlight on the private security firms whose employees are immune from prosecution, unlike professional soldiers who are subject to courts martial. In the second such incident in less than a month, involving the Australian contractor Unity Resources Group this week, two Armenian Christian women were shot dead after their car approached a protected convoy. Their car was riddled with 40 bullets.

Ivana Vuco, the most senior UN human rights officer in Iraq, spoke yesterday about the shootings by private security guards, which have provoked outrage among Iraqis. “For us, it’s a human rights issue,” she said. “We will monitor the allegations of killings by security contractors and look into whether or not crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed.”

An Iraqi who was wounded in the 16 September shooting, and the relatives of three people killed in the attack, filed a court case in Washington yesterday accusing Blackwater of violating American law by committing “extrajudicial killings and war crimes.”

Iraq says there are more than 180 mainly US and European security companies in the country, with estimates of the number of American contractors running at 100,000. Many Iraqis see the firms as little more than trigger-happy private armies, and the latest incidents have strained relations between Iraq and the US, which has ordered a full security review.

Iraqi authorities have accused Blackwater of the “deliberate murder” of Iraqi civilians in the shooting in a crowded city square, and are demanding millions of dollars in compensation and the removal of the company from the country within six months. The security firm says its guards returned fire at threatening targets and responded lawfully to a threat against a convoy it was guarding.

Ms Vuco said human rights laws applied equally to contractors and other parties in a conflict. “We will be stressing that in our communications with US authorities. This includes the responsibility to investigate, supervise and prosecute those accused of wrongdoing,” she said at the launch in Baghdad of the latest UN human rights report, covering the period from April to June. It described the human rights situation in Iraq as “very grim”.

Said Arikat, the UN mission spokesman, urged the Bush administration to hold accountable those involved in indiscriminate shooting; “to apply the rules of engagement and prosecute them”. He added: “There cannot be rogue elements that are above the law. Definitely, we will be driving that point home time and again.”

In the most recent shooting, on Tuesday, a woman taxi driver, Marany Awanees, and her front-seat passenger were killed. Unity Resources Group said its guards feared a suicide attack and fired only after issuing several warnings. The guards were protecting financial and policy experts working under contract for the US Agency for International Development.

Private security firms benefit from immunity under a 2004 law promulgated by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Gina Dowding wins ballot for chance to become first Green MP

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The Green Party has selected former Lancaster City Councillor Gina Dowding as the prospective parliamentary candidate for the new Lancaster and Fleetwood constituency.

Gina has lived in Lancaster for twenty years and was a member of Lancaster City Council’s cabinet until she stood down in May this year.

Eight years ago Gina was one of the very first Green Party councillors to be elected to local government. Gina found herself in the national news in 2002 when she blew the whistle on Lancaster City Council’s secret decision to grant rate relief to Heysham nuclear power station. A very popular local councillor, Gina was re-elected with a huge majority – receiving nearly 60% of the votes in a five-way race for her city centre seat.

Gina has previously worked for 12 years in public health development for the NHS. She currently cares for her elderly disabled parents, and her two children. She lives with her partner and sons in central Lancaster.

Gina said: “I am very excited about standing for the Greens again in the general election and am very optimistic about our prospects in this new constituency. After our recent local election successes, we hold 12 district council seats in the constituency, the same number as Labour, and one more than the Tories. The Green Party has positive polices which will protect our quality of life now and protect our planet for our children.

“We will be fighting this campaign on issues that are important to people in North Lancashire. In Lancaster this means ensuring that development is appropriate to the size and scale of Lancaster and an improved plan for the Canal Corridor which provides local jobs; improvements in local services, particularly for older people; and more young people-friendly places and activities in town; and real involvement of local people in decisions that affect them.”

Open letter to Popular Mechanics – Prove your ludicrous 9/11 theories in public

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Open letter to Popular Mechanics – Prove your ludicrous 9/11 theories in public

By J A Blacker, Science Correspondent
RINF Alternative News

Editor James Meigs

POPULAR MECHANICS
300 West 57 Street New York, NY 10019-5899

  

Mr J A Blacker MSc IMI

Physical Systems

Lancaster England

LA2 6JJ

Saturday, 06 October 2007

Direct challenge to “Popular Mechanics” – Show us the Physics & Maths to back up your ludicrous & “physically impossible” 911 gravity collapse assertions – PHYSICAL SYSTEMS (Lancaster England) 

Here are the clear facts of the ~ 417 m tower destruction: 

Physics Proof showing 9/11 was a Demolition. 

by J A Blacker MSc IMI (Physical Systems) (Lancaster England) 

First we must identify what we already know as FACT: –

Twin towers 1 & 2 were 1,368 ft and 1362 ft respectively. Let us take the taller to be conservative. We know near the surface of the earth at sea level we can use  g = 9.81 m/s2 (metres per second per second), which is a scientifically accepted approximation. We know the towers fell in 10 Seconds due to the siesmic records and the copiouse video evidence.  Secondly we must convert to SI units: g is measured in metres per second per second, d must be measured in metres, t in seconds. Distance fallen  d = 416.97 Metres.  g = 9.81 m/s2 .   t  = 10 Seconds    Let us find out how much time it would take to fall the actual hight 417 m in an ideal vacuum.  We know that air resistance always slows a falling body, we will disregard air resistance & other slowing effects so as to keep the maths simple whilst at the same time giving a realistic accurate conservative value. 

j-a-blacker-11-10-07.gif

————————————————————–

It is physically impossible for the strongest, heaviest and (3 times working design load) bottom 80+ floors to offer near zero resistance to the falling floors except when there is a controlled demolition. Period!

 

Popular mechanics claims in public literature that on 911 it is perfectly acceptable for a falling body to take, what is, the path of greatest resistance.

 

Physical Systems (Lancaster England) openly and publicly challenges “Popular Mechanics” magazine New York, to demonstrate one single experiment, which shows a falling body taking the path of greatest resistance (Reproducibly), or they remove and recant their ludicrous & physically impossible gravity destruction scenario from the public record.

If 6 months from the date of this formal public challenge (Saturday, 06 October 2007) “Popular Mechanics” Magazine can not reproducibly demonstrate a falling body taking the path of greatest resistance as a result of Gravity alone, then it is Ample evidence to everyone that the Popular Mechanics Magazine assertion that Gravity alone could destroy the twin towers and building 007 at near freefall speed IS PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE “Popular Myth” & deliberate “Popular Mechanics” DECEPTION or indeed honest misunderstanding Re the laws of Physics.

Physical Systems (Lancaster England) can demonstrate that a falling body ALWAYS, without exception, takes the path of least resistance (Reproducibly). In the case of controlled demolition the path of least resistance is often within the building footprint as seen with the destruction of WTC001, WTC002 & WTC007 on Sep 11 2001 and many other such demolitions.

 

Kind regards

 

J A Blacker MSc IMI (Physical Systems)(Lancaster England)

New Evidence that the Official Story about 9/11 is Indefensible

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David Ray Griffin

Early in 2007, Interlink Books published my Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. The stimulus for my writing this book was the appearance in August 2006—just before the fifth anniversary of 9/11—of four publications intended to bolster the official account by debunking the alternative view, according to which 9/11 was an inside job. The most explicit and well-known of these publications was a book by Popular Mechanics entitled Debunking 9/11 Myths.

My book’s introduction and conclusion dealt with the irresponsible way the press, including the left-leaning press, has dealt with this issue. One of their failings, I showed, was simply to accept the official reports — especially The 9/11 Commission Report and the report on the World Trade Center put out by the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) — as neutral, scientific reports. They thereby ignored the fact that the 9/11 Commission was run by Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a member of the US. Bush administration, and that NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce and hence of the Bush administration (which has distorted science for political purposes to an unprecedented extent).

The book’s four chapters then demonstrated that none of the documents of August 2006 actually served to debunk the claims of the 9/11 truth movement. The first two chapters dealt with two documents—including a new book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission — that tried, by creating a completely new story, to debunk the claim that the U.S. military’s failure to intercept four hijacked airliners could have occurred only if there had been a stand-down order. I argued that this new story was too inherently implausible, as well as too contradictory of previous statements by the military, to be worthy of belief.

The third chapter dealt with NIST’s reports on the Twin Towers, showing that they are political, not scientific, documents, because they ignore all evidence not consistent with NIST’s theory, such as testimony showing that massive explosions had occurred and that steel had melted—even though the fires could not have gotten even close to the temperature needed to melt steel (which means that there had to have been another source of energy).

The fourth and longest chapter dealt with the Popular Mechanics book, which discusses all the issues (the failures to intercept, the WTC, the Pentagon, and United 93). My critique showed this book to be filled with distortions and outright lies. Although the Popular Mechanics book has been used as the basis for two TV specials intended to bolster the official story—one on the BBC and one on the History Channel in the USA (which is partially owned by the Hearst Corporation, which puts out Popular Mechanics) — the fact that the public is increasingly seeing through this book’s deceptions is shown by recent reviews on Amazon.com.

My book, although it has yet to be reviewed by a single mainstream publication in the United States, has been supported by well-respected political commentators from the left and the right. Howard Zinn wrote: “Considering how the 9-ll tragedy has been used by the Bush administration to propel us into immoral wars again and again, I believe that David Ray Griffin’s provocative questions about 9-ll deserve to be investigated and addressed.” Paul Craig Roberts, who was the assistant secretary of the US Treasury during the Reagan administration, wrote: “Professor Griffin is the nemesis of the 9/11 cover-up. This new book destroys the credibility of the NIST and Popular Mechanics reports and annihilates his critics.”

My book was even endorsed by a former senior official of the CIA, Bill Christison, who had for the first five years after 9/11, he admitted, studiously avoided looking at the evidence that it might have been an inside job. He called my book “a superb compendium of the strong body of evidence showing the official US government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.”

Book reviewers in mainstream publications were evidently not moved even by Publishers Weekly. Although it had dismissed my first two books about 9/11 as “ridiculous” and “pure speculation,” it said of Debunking 9/11 Debunking: “All but the most dogmatic readers will find Griffin’s evidence — from the inconsistencies between NORAD tapes and the 9/11 Commission Report to rigorous exploration into the physics of the collapse–detailed and deeply unnerving.”

Another source widely used to determine whether a book is worthy of review is Choice, put out by the American Library Association. It has recently spoken, saying: “Griffin exhibits exceptional skill in detailed scholarly analysis. He concludes with a call to the reader, and all of us, to bring these issues into full public discussion and to expose the truth about 9/11, whatever it may be. Indeed, such ‘truth’ has certainly not yet been revealed due to extensive gaps and contradictions in official theories that he documents in detail.” Whether this endorsement will lead to any reviews remains to be seen.

In any case, I was motivated to put out the Revised and Updated Edition primarily because of new information about the alleged phone calls from passengers on the flights to relatives, through which reports of hijackers on the airplanes reached the public.

In the first edition, I presented extensive evidence that reported cell phone calls from the airliners, including the approximately 10 reported cell phone calls from United 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania), could not have occurred, because the cell phone technology at the time did not allow calls to be made from airliners flying at a high altitude (Flight 93 was at 34,300 to 40,700 feet when the calls were reportedly made). I argued not that the relatives of the passengers had lied about receiving the calls but that they had been duped—by means of voice morphing, which is now perfected to the point that, advertisers brag, you can fool your spouse.

Even after my book appeared, Popular Mechanics continued to claim, on the basis of very weak evidence, that high-altitude cell phone calls were indeed possible (see the History Channel special, “9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction”). However, as I reported in the Revised and Updated Edition of my book, the FBI had in 2006 presented, as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (sometimes called “the 20th hijacker”), a report on phone calls from the four airliners. According to this report, there were only two cell phone calls from United 93, and they were made at 9:58, shortly before the plane crashed, when it was down to 5,000 feet. When the FBI had to present evidence in a court of law, therefore, it would not claim that any high-altitude cell phone calls had occurred. (These two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were, according to the FBI report, the only two cell phone calls made from all four flights).

The most well known of the reported cell phone calls from Flight 93 were four calls that Deena Burnett reported receiving from her husband, Tom Burnett. She knew that he had used his cell phone, she reported on several TV shows and later in her book, because she saw his Caller ID number. However, as I reported, there are now devices, such as “FoneFaker,” that will produce the person’s Caller ID as well as his or her voice. Deena Burnett and the others, I believe, were not lying; they were duped.

The most famous of the reported calls from the flights supposedly came from Barbara Olson, the well-known commentator on CNN who was married to Ted Olson, who was then the US solicitor general. Olson reported that his wife had called him twice from American Airlines Flight 77, stating that hijackers with knives and boxcutters had taken over the plane. Besides providing evidence of hijackers, this call also provided the only evidence that Flight 77 was still aloft (it had disappeared from radar and there had been reports of an airliner crash nearby). Although Olson went back and forth on the question of whether his wife had used a cell phone or an onboard phone, he finally settled on the latter.

In the first edition, I challenged this claim on the basis of evidence from American Airlines that their Boeing 757 (which is what Flight 77 was) had no onboard phones. After publishing the book, however, I became worried, because of some new evidence, that that statement from American Airlines, made in 2004, had referred only to their 757s at that time — that their 757s in 2001 may well have had onboard phones. So I published a retraction, saying that the claim was uncertain.

That retraction, however, evoked new evidence, including a statement made by American Airlines in 2006 that their 757s in 2001 had had no onboard phones, so that anyone calling out from Flight 77 had needed to use a cell phone. Barbara Olson, therefore, could not have used a passenger-seat phone. That left open, of course, the possibility that Ted Olson was correct when he said that his wife had used her cell phone.

However, the evidence from the Moussaoui trial ruled out this possibility. In its report on AA 77, it listed one attempted call from Barbara Olson, which was “unconnected” and hence lasted “0 seconds.”

This was an astounding discovery. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. And yet it had undercut the testimony of the DOJ’s former solicitor general, saying in effect that the two calls that he reported had never happened. The implication is that unless Ted Olson had, like Deena Burnett, been duped, he had lied. Although this should have produced front-page headlines, it has thus far not been reported by any mainstream publication.

The Revised and Updated Edition of “Debunking 9/11 Debunking” provides the documentation for these reports from American Airlines and the FBI, which pretty thoroughly undermine the idea that any of the reported calls were genuine: If the cell phone calls were faked, why should we believe that the reported calls from onboard phones were genuine?

This new edition also contains more quotations from former military officers calling the official conspiracy theory impossible.

It also contains a report on Rudy Giuliani’s problematic response to a group of activists who asked him, with camera running, how he knew that the Twin Towers were going to collapse. (He had told Peter Jennings on ABC News on 9/11 itself that he had been warned.) Given the fact that he Giuliani is currently the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, evidence that he had inside information on the collapse of the towers—an event for which there was no historical precedent—should certainly be investigated.

This new edition has garnered some further endorsements. I was especially pleased to get one from former CIA case officer Robert Baer (the author of See No Evil, which inspired the movie Syriana), because he had written a critical review of my first book, The New Pearl Harbor. Having more recently, like Bill Christison, become convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, he wrote: “Until we get a complete, honest, transparent investigation–not one based on ‘confession’ extracted by torture — we will never know what happened on 9/11. David Griffin will never let this go until we get the truth.”

Also, hoping that my new book would be found even more convincing than my earlier ones, I was very pleased to see that John Whitbeck, an international law specialist, had written: “After reading David Ray Griffin’s previous books on the subject, I was over 90% convinced that 9/11 was an inside job. Now, after reading Debunking 9/11 Debunking, I am, I regret to say, 100% convinced.”

The implications of this conclusion are, of course, enormous. But will you see the evidence for this conclusion discussed in the mainstream press? Don’t hold your breath.

Reviewing James Petras’ “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire”

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By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

James Petras is Binghamton University, New York Professor Emeritus of Sociology whose credentials and achievements are long and impressive. He’s a noted academic figure on the left, a well-respected Latin American expert, and a longtime chronicler of the region’s popular struggles as well as being an advisor to the landless workers (MST) in Brazil and unemployed workers in Argentina. Petras is also a prolific author. He’s written hundreds of articles and 63 books (and counting), published in 29 languages, including his latest one and subject of this review – “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire.”

The book is information rich on a core issue of our time. It discusses the US empire’s “systemic dimensions,” evolving changes in its ruling class, its corporatist system, myths about its coming collapse, contradictions in the current debate on immigration and market liberalization policies, the use of force and genocidal carnage, corruption as a market penetrating tool, the Israeli Lobby’s power and influence, Latin American relations and events in the region, social and armed resistance, and much more in four power-packed parts under 17 subject chapter headings.

It’s all covered below giving readers a detailed sampling of Petras’ thoroughly documented, powerful and insightful account of his subject – who rules America, who’s ruled, the US imperial role in the world economy and politics, and challenges to it in China, Latin America and the Middle East. This is another must-read book by a distinguished intellect and major figure on the left who writes dozens of them. This is his latest.

Part I: The US Empire As A System

Petras distinguishes between who sets policies and rules America and whose interests are served. He defines the ruling class as “people in key positions in financial, corporate and other business institutions” with rules “established, modified and adjusted” as the composition and “shifts in power” within the ruling class change over time. One example is manufacuring’s decline (from outsourcing to low cost countries) as a “multidimensional financial sector” (finance capital) rose in prominence with Wall Street’s influence especially dominant.

Petras defines “finance capital” to include investment banks, pension funds, hedge funds, saving and loan banks, investment funds and many other “operative managers” of a multi-trillion dollar economy they’ve all benefitted hugely from. They’ve been the driving force powering real estate and financial markets speculation, agribusiness, commodity production and manufacturing. Petras calls “finance capital” the “midwife” of wealth and capital as well as a “direct owner of the means of production and distribution.”

He stratifies it into three sub-groups from top to bottom in importance: big private equity bankers and hedge fund managers, Wall street executives, and senior officials of private and Wall Street public equity funds as well as major figures in top law and accounting firms. Political leaders are drawn from their ranks with Wall Street in the lead and one firm in particular standing out – Goldman Sachs. Today, its former CEO Henry Paulson is the de facto US economic czar in charge of proving doomsayers wrong about the US economy with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s money creation power partnered with him. Both of them must also navigate around the powerful Israeli Lobby and its pro-war agenda that could lead to catastrophic consequences if the US and/or Israel attack Iran and the Middle East explodes and disrupts oil flows.

Petras sees an inevitable split between wealth-first financial ruling class objectives and militarists in the Bush administration, their counterparts in Israel, and the Lobby representing Israeli interests with a stranglehold on most of Congress. The battle lines shape up over Israeli Middle East dominance at the cost of imperial overreach, an escalating trade deficit, a ballooning national debt, decreasing capital inflows to offset it, and a declining dollar as other nations move to euros, yen and pounds sterling. Something has to give, says Petras, as both sides support opposing agendas that only a crisis-provoking widespread backlash may resolve.

For now, however, things couldn’t be better for the ruling class (despite their disrupted plans in Iraq and Afghanistan) with the top 2% of adults in the world owning half its wealth, the top 10% with 85% of it, and the bottom half with just 1%. The result is an unprecedented wealth disparity with corporate CEO’s on average earning over 400 times the median income of wage and salaried workers, and for top-earning speculators and hedge fund managers the ratio is 1000 to one with some having incomes topping a billion dollars a year. In addition, corporate wealth was at a record 43% of 2005 national income accruing to profits, rents and other non-wage/salary sources compared to a declining percentage of it to individuals, except for those at the top gaining hugely.

Petras states: “The growth of monstrous and rigid class inequalities reflects the narrow social base of an economy dominated by finance capital” with the US redistributing far less to its people than other developed nations like those in Western Europe. Democrats are as culpable as Republicans with both parties tied to big monied interests through campaign funding and the power of lobbies. It makes everyone in the political power structure unwilling to change things so they don’t. The result is working Americans suffer hugely while those at the top never had it so good. It signals warnings of a potential worker backlash ahead that for now have gone unheeded. Elitists ignore it at their peril, so far without negative consequences to their dominance, but watch out.

Capitalism or US Workers in Crisis?

Petras notes how for years many on the left and some in the financial community have been predicting the “coming collapse, decline or demise of capitalism” as though (for some) wishing would make it so. They’re still predicting, but it hasn’t happened, and Petras explains why not. It’s because business and government partnered (especially since the 1980s) to let workers take the pain so business could gain and prosper. It’s done it hugely and continues to despite the resurgent summer doomsday predictions still ongoing.

In a letter to clients, noted investment manager Jeremy Grantham explained why business is resilient by comparing the global financial system (with its US anchor) to a giant suspension bridge. Thousands of bolts hold it together, so when some of them fail, even a lot of them, it’s not enough to bring it down. Short of “broad-based….financial metal fatigue,” even more bolts may fail, but he’s betting the bridge will hold, supported by amazing “animal spirits,” at least for now.

Grantham is likely right in the near term, while Petras takes a longer view, and his arguments are compelling. He sees labor today in crisis with living standards declining the result of reduced or eliminated business benefits, government services and stagnating wages. He also lists popular myths predicting doom ahead – the growing budget and current account deficits; ballooning national debt; excess speculation; weakening dollar; high energy costs; outsourcing of jobs at all levels, and more. Petras maintains these problems aren’t as serious as claimed because:

— budget deficits declined in 2006 as tax revenues rose from high-end earners’ greater income at the expense of labor getting less;

— foreign investment in the US remains high;

— the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency; over time, it weakens and strengthens based on interest rates, political events, and the overall level of economic activity; nonetheless, the dollar weakened considerably after the Fed cut interest rates and depreciated to an all-time low against a basket of six of its major peer currencies that include the euro, pound and yen; in addition, the New York Board of Trade index hit its weakest level since it came out in 1973, and the same is true for the Fed’s trade-weighted dollar index since its creation in 1971; what’s ahead? Likely more of the same until everyone believes the dollar is dead; then, watch out;

— a decade-long trade deficit hasn’t caused apocalypse;

— strong economic underpinnings (Grantham’s giant suspension bridge) offset excess speculation, and workers, not capital, take the pain;

— high energy profits overseas are recycled back into dollar-based investments and have been for years although countries like Iran, Venezuela and others are moving away from the dollar at least for now;

— the potential of new technologies is underestimated;

— corporate profits have had their longest ever run of double-digit gains; the number of millionaires and billionaires is growing; the rich are becoming super-rich; and the beneficiaries are largely in North America, Western Europe (plus Russia) and Asia.

Petras concludes that as long as worker exploitation continues, the fundamental law of “casino capitalism” applies – the house never loses, or in this case the neighborhood (of developed nations) with some in it doing better than others and the US their anchor. The weakness of US labor and its history of overpaid, underperforming, corrupted leaders explains why with only 7.4% today in the private sector organized compared to 34.7% in the 1950s. Unless new social and political movements surface under activist leaders, Marx’s “dirty secret” and Adam Smith’s “vile maxim of the masters of mankind” will continue proving “the wealth of all nations” depends on the rich taking it “all for ourselves and (leaving) nothing for” the working class.

Market Liberalization and Forced Emigration

Migration and so-called illegal immigrants make headlines but never the reasons why that are two-fold: fleeing political strife (as in Iraq) or for economic reasons that the imperial globalized market system causes horrifically. The latter forces millions of Mexicans el norte because of NAFTA. Its disastrous effects on their lives leaves them no choice – emigrate or perish.

Petras explains when protective trade barriers come down, millions of small farmers and entrepreneurs are no match for the power of subsidized agribusiness, big manufacturers and corporate service providers. They’re displaced when their livelihoods are lost, and that creates a huge surplus army of labor on the move and an opportunity for business to exploit for profit. It affects all skill types and levels (farm workers to computer specialists to doctors), undermines unions, and allows management to replace higher-paid US workers with low-wage immigrants at their mercy and getting little. Pay is kept low, benefits few or none, working conditions unsafe, unions weakened, and dare complain and be sent home.

Petras notes that as imperial power grows, “the massive movement of dislocated workers toward the imperial center multiplies,” and there’s no end in sight nor will there be as long as highly exploitative sectors like agriculture, construction and low-end manufacturing and services thrive on it. Workers lose and so do “sender” countries. They bore the costs of raising, educating, training and providing services for millions with “receiver” nations getting the benefits. It amounts to multi-billions in the form of critically needed skilled areas lost that include professionals like doctors, nurses, teachers and others. This won’t ever change unless worker movements unite against it.

Empire-Building and Corruption

Petras notes how empire-building “is the driving force of the US economy (especially post-9/11),” corruption a key corporate predator tool to re-divide the world, and nations with the greatest firepower get the choicest slices. Business profit growth depends on exploiting overseas opportunities for their resources, markets and cheap reserve armies of labor with four so-called “BRIC” countries especially targeted:

— China for its cheap labor and opportunities in finance, insurance and real estate;

— India for its low cost information technology services;

— Brazil for its high interest rates that hit 19.5%, were then greatly cut, but are still around 11%; and

— Russia for its high profit oil and gas reserves, transport and luxury goods markets with booming opportunities in real estate once political leaders are bought off in a country rife with corruption as is China.

Petras notes that today over half the top 500 transnational corporations earn most of their profits overseas, and for many it’s 75% of it. This trend will continue, he says, as these companies shift most of their operations abroad for greater cost savings. In addition, “political corruption, not economic efficiency, is the driving force of economic empire-building (with) the scale and scope of Western pillage of the East….unprecedented in recent world history.” It’s from business-friendly legislation on low wages, pensions, job tenure, land use, worker safety and health, all designed for maximum profit. Political leaders are bought off to get state-owned businesses privatized, markets deregulated, wages kept low, with a huge reserve army of exploitable labor the payoff for “the US Imperial System.”

Hierarchy of Empire and Use of Force

Petras explains the US imperial system in terms of its “hierarchy of empire” rankings. Imperial powers top it (the US, EU and Japan) followed by emerging powers (China, Russia, India), semi-autonomous client regimes (Brazil, South Korea, South Africa), and collaborator regimes on the bottom (Egypt, Mexico, Colombia). Then come independent “revolutionary” (social democratic) states like Venezuela and nationalist ones like Iran as well as “contested terrain and regimes in transition (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestine).” Client regimes provide “a crucial link in sustaining imperial powers” by allowing them to project and extend their state and market reach.

One “anomaly” in the hierarchy is Israel. It’s a colonialist and nuclear power and world’s fourth largest military power and arms exporter that’s breathtaking for a country of 7.1 million and 5.4 million Jews. It’s influence over US Middle East policy, however, inordinately outweighs its size with Iraq exhibit A and Iran moving up fast. More on this below.

Petras notes the constant flux within the imperial system the result of wars, national struggles and economic crises. They bring down regimes and elevate others with examples like Russia, the Eastern European states, South Africa and Venezuela. It shows “no singular omnipotent imperial state….unilaterally defines the international or….imperial system (that in the case of the US) proved incapable of….defeating popular….resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Even in Somalia, a US proxy war is in trouble, but it’s too early to predict the outcome. The easy 2006 overthrow of the popular Islamic Courts Union (ICU) put an unsupported warlord regime in charge (that plundered the country from 1991 – 2005) with predictable results – strong resistance against the US puppet regime and its deeply corrupted Transitional Federal Government (TFG) “president,” Abdullahi Yusuf.

Washington backed a hated regime and an equally detested Ethiopian government that’s been “prop(ping) up its Somali puppet” with a lift from US-supported force. Earlier in 1993-94, the Clinton administration’s intervention failed. It spawned mass opposition, took thousands of Somali lives in retaliation, and ended in defeat and a humiliating US pullout. That may repeat despite Washington’s establishing an African Command (AFRICOM) to solidify its hold on the continent and its strategically important Horn. So far, it’s very much up for grabs with US presence in the region unwelcome and greatly destabilizing. The “empire” never learns, so it’s on to the next target that looks like Iran. More on that below.

Imperialism and Genocide

Petras explains how Korea, Vietnam and other wars hid their true cost in lives, devastation and human wreckage. It’s the way of all empires sweeping over populations like crabgrass. It becomes “an accelerating predisposition to genocides to accomplish political aims,” and in an age of “shock and awe,” it can come with “awesome” speed. An example is from the latest O.R.B. British polling data reporting 1.2 million Iraqi deaths since March, 2003 alone plus another 1.5 million up to that date. The true toll may be even higher with huge uncounted numbers of daily violent and non-violent deaths that one estimate by Gideon Polya places at 3.9 million from 1990 to the present. No one knows for sure, and his estimate may be as good as any other. All of them are horrific.

Petras notes the “quantity” of killings elsewhere – six million Jews and 20 million Soviet civilians in WW II as well as 10 million Chinese civilians in Asia. He explains genocide as policy from a “state (promoted) racialist-exterminationist ideology (as well as from) an historical antipathy of one culture to another.” This allows ruling classes to legitimize their ideology and achieve “uncontested dominance” and ability to economically exploit domestic and overseas markets. An omelet requires breaking eggs. Mass human slaughter is the frequent fallout from consolidating empires with living beings having no more worth than egg shells.

Genocides also result from revolutionary challenges to unpopular puppet rulers with Korea, Indo-China and Iraq Exhibits A, B, and C. Up to eight million perished in Asia, and three (or maybe four) million could be reached in Iraq in 2008 at the present pace. There’s no end to it in sight with billions funding it, and no reporting on the carnage in the mainstream.

Petras reviews examples of imperialism becoming genocide with the Reagan administration alone responsible for its share. It committed multiple proxy genocides in Africa, Afghanistan and Central America, but you’d never know it from reports at the time about a president being prepped for Mount Rushmore with a spot for George Bush beside him until Iraq got him in trouble.

Another unreported genocide is Israel’s six decade-long crusade against the Palestinians with predicable results. It caused many thousands of deaths, mass population displacement, and excessive use of detentions and torture to deny a people freedom and justice in their own land. The policy continues because Israel has a powerful ally in Washington and an even more influential Lobby working on its behalf. More on that below.

Petras notes genocides are “repeated, common practices,” impunity for committing them the norm, and no effective international order is in place to stop them. Victors justice prevails so victims face kangaroo tribunals like the ICTY for Yugoslavia and the equally corrupted one for Iraq. Genocides will only end when imperial powers are defeated and their leaders held to account for their crimes, but that goal is nowhere in sight.

The Global Billionaire Ruling Class

The number of world billionaires reached 946 in March, 2007, they have an estimated combined wealth of $3.5 trillion, and over half of them are in three countries – 415 in the US, 55 in Germany and 53 in Russia where never did so many people lose more so a handful of others could gain so hugely in so short a time. India ranks high as well with 36 billionaires with China next in the region at 20. The number of millionaires exploded as well with close to 10 million in 2007, and in 2006 their numbers grew by an estimated 8.3%.

Balzac was right saying behind every great fortune is a crime (and most often a small fortune as seed money) but likely nowhere more rapaciously than in Russia. Petras notes “Without exception, the transfers of (state) property were achieved through gangster tactics – assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts.” They strip mined over a trillion dollars of Russia’s wealth into private predatory hands who, in turn, stuffed them in offshore accounts. It happens everywhere with the US exhibit A. The Rockefellers, Morgans, Fords and Carnegie’s didn’t amass wealth by being neighborly or nice. They got it the old-fashioned way – by strong-arming and stealing.

In developing countries, it came faster under Washington Consensus rules favoring capital over people with billionaires coming out on top. Latin America has 38 of them, mostly in Brazil (with 30) and Mexico (with industrialist Carlos Slim Helu now the world’s third richest man). These “two countries…. privatized the most lucrative, efficient and largest public monopolies,” and benefitted hugely from regressive taxes, tax exemptions, deregulation, big subsidies, and the ability to hike prices and make vital services unaffordable to millions who can’t pay for them.

“How to become a billionaire,” Petras asked. No need for an MBA or market savvy when the “interface of politics (aka friends in high places) and economics” works much better. The road to super-riches came from privatized state assets that began with bloody military coups in Latin America. In countries like Chile, Colombia and Argentina, results were always the same – great riches at the top, stagnant economies, vast poverty, high unemployment, two-thirds of the region’s population with “inadequate living standards,” and the long shadow of US involvement backing military dictators, business elites, and neoliberal politicians to assure lucrative ties to corporate interests in America. More on this below.

Part II – The Power of Israel and Its Lobby in the US

Petras covered how the Israeli Lobby defeated the Jim Baker Iraq Study Group’s (ISG) proposal released December 6, 2006. Its alternative US Middle East agenda lost out to the Israeli Lobby’s influence on Congress, a massive supportive propaganda campaign in the major media, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert being as able to “have the US president under our control” as Ariel Sharon once boasted.

For a time it looked like the ISG plan would prevail with top Bush advisors recommending dialogue with Iran; high-ranking military, active and retired, wanting a phased withdrawal for a failed effort; and the Army, Navy and Marine Corps weekly publications wanting Defense Secretary Rumsfeld sacked shortly before he resigned. Even Big Oil interests backed Baker because stable conditions favor business more than conflict (at least to pump oil), and that won’t happen without a change of course now off the table.

Iran wants rapprochement as well but not on the usual US terms – making demands and offering nothing in return. Iran’s objectives are simple and reasonable – normalized relations and an end to Washington’s confrontational stance and military threats. They’re off the table because the “Israel-First power structure (Lobby-Congress-Mass Media-Democratic Party Donors)” reject them. Syria is just as compliant, but its overtures are also rebuffed for the same reason.

Petras explained that AIPAC wants war with Iran as its top priority objective. In addition, the publications, conferences and press releases of the Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO) asked their members “to go all-out to fund and back candidates (mostly Democrats) who supported Israel’s military solution to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program” even though IAEA agrees it’s in total compliance with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rules while Israel violates them with impunity.

In the end, Prime Minister Olmert co-opted George Bush, got him to reject the ISG proposal and ally with Israel’s aim to solidify its Middle East dominance by removing a non-existent Iranian threat with Syria also targeted. In many respects, this flies in the face of logic as many influential US figures know. Petras believes Iran is a key interlocutor for a Middle East settlement that might let Washington retain its strategic Arab allies. Tehran is willing to cooperate but not when its government is lumped with Al-Queda, the Taliban and Iraqi resistance and is being threatened with war. That’s the current condition with renewed Bush administration efforts to prep the public to accept more of it if it comes.

Hamas also has been conciliatory. Its leaders made two peace proposals as a show of good faith, is willing to recognize Israel if Palestinians get justice, pledged a cease-fire in the face of Israeli attacks, and was rebuffed with rejection and an Israeli blockade of Gaza along with frequent hostile incursions. Conflicts rage in Iraq and occupied Palestine, more war threatens in Iran, and the road to peace in the region runs through Jerusalem providing Washington concurs. But it’s not possible, in Petras’ judgment, unless foreign military bases are closed, there’s public control or nationalization of the region’s resources, and Israel ends its colonial occupation of Palestine. So far, those objectives are nowhere in sight.

The Lobby and Media on Lebanon

In Petras’ powerful 2006 book, “The Power of Israel in the United States,” he documented how this power derives from a vast pro-Israel Lobby in the country supporting all aspects of its agenda. It’s position is firm – “Israel is always right, Arabs and Muslims are a threat to peace,” and the US should unconditionally support Israel across the board. In Petras’ view, that’s the main reason why the Bush administration attacked Iraq and may now target Iran and Syria. Israel perceives these countries as threats, Washington seems willing to remove them, and a chorus of media-driven propaganda approves.

They always support Israel and jumped right in last summer backing “Operation Change of Direction” against Hezbollah and “Operation Summer Rain” against Hamas that caused many hundreds of deaths and mass destruction. It was all papered over in the major media and characterized as Israel’s “defensive, existential war for survival against Islamic terrorists.” It was pure baloney. In fact, and unreported, Israel launched dual long-planned aggressive wars with Hezbollah’s capture of three IDF soldiers in Lebanon the pretext and Hamas taking one Israeli corporal the justification in occupied Palestine. Never mentioned are the many thousands of Palestinians illegally abducted, imprisoned and tortured, and that unprovoked aggressive wars and their fallout are war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Also unmentioned is that if Hezbollah and Hamas hadn’t provided the pretexts, Israel (as it’s often done) would have manufactured them to launch its summer aggression. With full US support and backing from its Lobby and dominant media, these type actions continue at the expense of their victims with US taxpayers duped into funding them generously.

US Empire and the Middle East

Petras notes key factors help explain US Middle East policy that in his judgment are “challenged from within and without, are subject to sharp contradictions,” and are likely to fail.

First, is the influence of the Israeli Lobby he documented powerfully as have Mearsheimer and Walt in their work. It’s likely the most potent lobby in Washington and can practically mobilize the entire Congress, every administration and the dominant media to back pro-Israeli policies even when they run counter to US corporate interests that in Middle East means those of Big Oil primarily.

The Lobby wanted war with Iraq and got it. Now its top priority is stiff sanctions and war on Iran, and if the orchestrated media hate frenzy targeting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Columbia University address September 24 is an indication, it may get it. As Petras notes, the Lobby’s fanatical support for Israel is so extreme and uncompromising, it’s even willing to risk world war and economic collapse to get its way.

Another key factor is the US ability to enlist and co-op client states and proxy forces to serve our interests – the Kurds in Northern Iraq; the Abbas-Dahlan Fatah militants in Palestine; the Sinoria-Hariri-Jumblat pro-US/Israel, anti-Syria/Hezbollah/Hamas alliance in Lebanon; Mubarak in Egypt; King Hussein in Jordan; pro-US regimes in Turkey; the Saudis and others.

Petras then explains how the Israeli Lobby’s influence runs counter to the US “Arab agenda.” It shows up in Washington’s failure to construct a NATO-style power-sharing alliance in the region, except for Turkey and Israel, and the former may not prove solid. The Iraq policy has been disastrous, each tactic tried failed, resistance is unabated, the Arab street overwhelmingly rejects occupation, and Arab leaders offer tepid support.

Petras calls Washington’s permanent war strategy (next targeting Iran and Syria) “an irrational gamble comparable to Hitler’s attack on Russia” that doomed him. Today in the Middle East, attacking these two countries may only compound the Iraq failure with “greater defeats, greater domestic rebellion” and still more wars without end promising gloomy prospects ahead.

Part III – The Possibility of Resistance

Petras discusses China and the “general consensus (it’s) emerging as the next economic superpower” to challenge US dominance. Petras expresses doubts that can only be summarized briefly. He notes Chinese capitalism not only depends on growth and the ability to generate jobs, but also on “the social relations of production, circulation and reproduction.” They come at a high price – ferocious labor exploitation, rampant corruption and nepotism, mass small farmer displacement, firing millions of workers from state-owned and bankrupt enterprises, ending social services, and higher living costs increasing class warfare in the streets against billionaire kleptocrats and foreign investors profiting hugely at the expense of most Chinese.

Petras then distinguishes between “made in China” and Chinese-owned and whether the former enhances China’s growth or foreign investor profits instead. He sees China taking on “features of both a neo-colony and an emerging imperial power,” but mostly the former. He notes the standard of living for most Chinese “declined precipitously;” air, water and ground pollution greatly increased; the quality of life for most Chinese suffers; class inequalities are vast; and gains from a consumerist society for a minority of the population are offset by dirty air, loss of leisure, job security, near rent-free housing, state-provided health care and education, deteriorated working conditions and more. Paradise it’s not, at least for workers, and conditions aren’t improving.

Petras then discusses China’s transition from state to “liberal” capitalism. As it deepened, trade barriers were dismantled; protective labor laws abolished; price controls lifted; the countryside ravaged; a massive new army of unemployed workers created; and an export-driven market strategy followed. The result today is a new class of billionaires and about 2900 former party “princelings” who control around $260 billion of wealth. In addition, property, real estate and construction boomed, an export strategy concentrated development on coastal regions, and domestic consumption is relatively constrained.

In contrast, “millions of construction workers, miners, domestic servants and assembly-line workers (labor) under the most abominable conditions” – long hours, low pay, awful sanitary conditions and little regard for safety in an unregulated environment structured for maximum profit. China today is a “magnet for capitalists and investors worldwide,” a free market paradise that’s hell on workers paying hugely for the country’s marketplace “success.”

Petras envisions China’s capitalism deepening and mainly benefitting foreign investors. He sees their “initial beachheads as minority shareholders” extending into production, distribution, transport, real estate,
telecommunications, consumer goods and services, entertainment, finance and more and eventually gaining more control. As a result, he believes China’s next great leap forward will be from liberalism to neoliberalism, the country will lose its national identity, it will become a “territorial outpost” for foreign-owned transnationals, and the country’s bid for world power status will be subverted.

Petras sees 21st century China emerging as a “gigantic proxy for imperial powers,” but China won’t be one of them. Its “Great Leap Backwards” will be consummated when the nation’s “share of profits shifts from the national bourgeoisie” to foreign investors in a process now accelerating.

But it won’t come easily as a new generation of China’s leaders may stop or curtail it. In addition, growing mass resistance has now emerged for obvious reasons cited above. Already, close to 100,000 mass demonstrations have occurred involving millions of Chinese protesting a workers’ hell. Social crisis is deepening, class struggle has returned, and the government has taken note. It’s beginning to address concerns but giving back pathetically little considering China’s massive population. Petras calls these remediating actions “too little and too late.” Ahead he sees decentralized protests becoming organized urban worker movements that when joined with displaced farmers may set off a new rebellious period. This may then blossom into “a new revolutionary struggle” that will determine China’s future and its climate for investors.

The US and Latin America

Petras has studied Latin America for decades and knows the region as well as anyone. Here he dispels notions of a revitalized regional populism with US dominance waning. His case is compelling as he argues Washington’s influence has increased in recent years (though not to the level of the 1990s) despite the success of Hugo Chavez and his ability to thwart US efforts to unseat him.

The Bush administration lost out on FTAA but has had other successes:

— bilateral trade agreements with numerous Latin American states from the Caribbean to Chile;

— an expanded number of military bases despite the possible loss of one in Ecuador ahead;

— US business interests in the region flourishing, including in Venezuela where they’re booming; and

— neoliberal free market policies intact despite campaign rhetoric promising change.

Aside from Venezuela and maybe Ecuador (where it’s too soon to tell), the left’s appraisal of progressive change is nowhere in sight, so what are they seeing that’s not there.

Petras assesses the current state of things in the region after reviewing its recent history readers can get from the book. He notes signs of Washington’s declining influence that’s had no adverse affect on corporate interests except in Venezuela where taxes are now fair compared to earlier when they were too low. He also explains so-called center-left regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and elsewhere tamed mass social movement demands while embracing 1990s neoliberalism. In Brazil, if fact, President Lula da Silva actually deepened and extended the privatization and restrictive budget policies of the preceding Cardoso regime, and despite his Workers Party background, demobilized mass movements and trade unions instead of supporting them as people expected. Many now see him for what he is – a traitor, but sadly, he’s got company, too much of it.

Of great significance is the way Petras explains four competing regional power blocs representing varying degrees of accommodation or opposition to US policies and interests.

1. The Radical Left

It includes:

— the FARC guerillas in Colombia (active since 1964); some trade union sectors; and peasant and barrio movements in Venezuela;

— the labor confederation CONLUTAS and sectors of Brazil’s Rural Landless Movement (MST);

— sectors of the Bolivian Labor Confederation (COB) and the Andean peasant movements and barrio organizations in El Alto;

— peasant movement sectors (CONAIE) in Ecuador;

— teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas, Mexico;

— nationalist-peasant-left sectors in Peru;

— trade unionist and unemployed sectors in Argentina; and

— other Central and South American social movements and some Marxist groups in several countries.

2. The Pragmatic Left

— Hugo Chavez in Venezuela who combines grassroots participatory democracy and redistributive social policies with support for business interests;

— Evo Morales in Bolivia;

— Fidel Castro in Cuba;

— various large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in the region; leftist parties including the PRD in Mexico, FMLN in El Salvador, CUT in Colombia, Chilean Communist Party, Peru’s nationalist parliamentary party, sectors of Brazil’s MST, Bolivia’s MAS governing party, CTA in Argentina, and PIT-CNT in Uruguay.

3. The Pragmatic Neoliberals (the most numerous political block)

— Lula in Brazil;

— Kirchner in Argentina;

— the major trade union confederations in Brazil and Argentina;

— business and financial elite sectors providing subsistence unemployment doles and food aid; and

— similar groups in Ecuador, Nicaragua (the Sandinistas and their split-offs), Paraguay and other countries.

4. The Doctrinaire Neoliberal Regimes

— Calderon in Mexico;

— Uribe in Colombia;

— Bachelet in Chile (in spite of her being imprisoned and tortured under Pinochet);

— the Central American countries: El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala;

— Garcia in Peru;

— Paraguay with the region’s largest military base;

— Uruguay’s ex-leftist regime now rightist;

— US-occupied Haiti through proxy thuggish paramilitary UN peacekeepers; and

— the Dominican Republic.

The notion that populism swept Latin America in the new century is pure fantasy. In fact, there’s a “quadrangle of competing and conflicting” regional forces with Washington having less market leverage than in the 1990s “Golden Age of Pillage” but still enough to be dominant and able to keep business flourishing.

Petras continues his analysis with detailed examples of key center-left regimes in Brazil under Lula, Argentina under Kirchner, Uruguay under Vazquez, Bolivia under Morales plus some comments on Peru and Ecuador under leaders preceding their current ones. Each case substantiates the fantasy that these regimes represented “new winds from the Left” sweeping the region. Hot air maybe, but little, if anything, in the way of progressive change despite the beliefs of many intellectuals on the left.

However, that’s not to say leftist forces aren’t strong enough to bubble up and bring change. Insurrectionary forces brought Evo Morales to power in Bolivia and can take him down if he fails them as he’s now doing. The same is true in other countries with Hugo Chavez their model. He challenged US imperialism, brought real social change, has mass public support and thus far withstood US efforts to oust him. In Cuba, Fidel Castro thwarted every Washington effort against him since 1959 and is still in charge, larger than life, although frail and weak following his protracted illness from which he’s still recovering. Petras sees a new generation of young committed leaders emerging in the region. “They are the ‘Left Winds’ of Latin America,” and it’s in them that hope lies.

Foreign Investment (FI) in Latin America

Petras demystifies FI’s impact, explains the risks in attracting it, and exposes six myths about its benefits.

Myth 1.

It’s untrue FI creates new enterprises, market opportunities and more. Most, in fact, aims to buy privatized and other enterprises while crowding out local capital and public initiative.

Myth 2.

FI doesn’t increase export competitiveness. It buys mineral resources for export with little done to create jobs or stimulate the local economy.

Myth 3.

It’s false to think FI provides tax revenue and hard currency. An FI export model creates more indebtedness and a net loss.

Myth 4.

It’s false believing debt repayments to international lenders is key to a good financial standing. Much foreign debt is odious and repaying it harms borrower countries.

Myth 5.

It’s false believing FI provides developing countries needed capital. It’s used instead to buy local companies and control a country’s markets.

Myth 6.

It’s false believing FI attracts further investment. Capital freely moves to wherever it gets the best returns and is anchored nowhere.

Developing countries benefit most by relying less on FI and more on national ownership and investment. The former is predatory. The latter accrues profits to the national treasury and grows the country’s economy. FI demands conditions favoring capital over labor that results in a widening economic gap and greater inequalities in political and social power. The 20 year (1980 – 2000) record of Latin American FI is socially disastrous. Living standards plunged while unemployment and poverty soared. Hardly reasons to attract it and clear ones to stay away or restrict it.

Part IV – An Agenda for Militants

Petras considers FI economic alternatives and ways to buck its strategic countermeasures. FI generally threatens disinvestment when a country wants to enhance its own economy and benefit popular living standards. Hardball tactics cut both ways, and the state can use its own effectively to counter capital flight threats as well as adopt policies in advance serving its needs first ahead of those FI wants to have things its own way.

Petras notes that FI “is incompatible with any notion of an independent, socially progressive country” even though at times it can be useful in a regulated environment controlling it. He explains a country’s own financial and economic resources can be used instead of FI to enhance its internal development and technological advance by reinvesting profits from export industries; controlling foreign trade to increase retention of foreign exchange; investing pension funds productively; imposing a moratorium on debt payments; recovering stolen public treasury funds and unpaid taxes; maximizing under-employed labor, and more.

Most countries can avoid FI by relying on multiple sources of its own capital. They can also employ alternative effective strategies when outside help is needed by minimizing its ownership, employing short-term contracts on favorable terms, imposing stiff penalties on capital flight, and barring it from returning if it leaves. Petras concludes: “The historical and empirical evidence demonstrates that the political, economic and social drawbacks of (FI) far exceed any short-term benefits perceived by its defenders.”

The Middle Class and Social Movements in Latin America

Petras observes that middle class attitudes in the region depend on the “political-economic context” confronting it. It’s attracted to the right under expanding right-wing regimes and to the left in times of economic crisis. On the other hand, under a “popular, anti-dictatorial, anti-imperialist populist government, the middle class supports democratic reforms” but not radical policies harming it for the benefit of the working class. Three examples make his case – in Brazil under Lula when it took over his Workers Party; in Argentina when it benefitted under Menem and Cardoso and later under Kirchner; and in Bolivia under Morales who combines “political demagogy” to his base and neoliberal IMF austerity in his policies attractive to middle class and business interests.

Petras notes social movements failed by not developing political leadership or a program for state power and depended instead on “electoral politicians of the upwardly mobile professional middle class.” The Left’s key challenge, he believes, is to “convert the public sector middle class from anti-neoliberalism to anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, and to combine urban welfare (with) agrarian reform.”

Iraq and Afghanistan’s Importance in Defeating the Empire

Petras concludes by noting Washington’s imperial wars were stopped in their tracks in Iraq and Afghanistan by resistance too powerful to contain. A “shock and awe” blitzkrieg failed when Iraqis wanted a say in running, rebuilding and transforming their country and rejected its US-installed puppet regime. The country is a wasteland, the nation creation project bankrupt, and the prospect for success bad and worsening with multi-billions expended and nothing gained except huge profits for administration favored contractors that always benefit whoever wins or loses.

The same situation holds in Afghanistan. An easy five week walkover turned into an endless debacle with no end in sight. Washington planned successive wars for unchallengeable world dominance, but local resistance in two countries stopped it cold (so far), may defeat its proxies in Somalia, and resilient opposition in Palestine and South Lebanon may prove equally formidable as well.

The US is now over-extended and its “imperial grand strategy” weakened. It’s made preemptive wars against Iran and Syria and trying again to topple Hugo Chavez less likely, but none of these possibilities are off the table. Cornered and facing defeat, rhetoric is heated making anything possible, and the September 20 Lieberman-Kyl “Sense of the Senate” (no legal force) resolution/amendment to the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill ratchets up the possibility of attacking Iran and its regional “proxies” with potentially catastrophic fallout the risk.

For now, emboldened resistance and strong anti-war opposition are matched against an administration desperate to turn things around and willing to try anything to do it. How this may end is a crapshoot, the stakes on its outcome too great to risk but may be waged anyway, and the world trembles as it waits and watches. Stay tuned and hope Petras is right believing Iraq and Afghanistan thwarted the empire and prevented further aggression against Iran and beyond, now off the table. Or maybe not. When wounded and cornered, desperate animals and politicians may try anything with nothing to lose. Keep a close watch.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays (moved from Saturdays) at noon US central time.

The human cost of secrecy

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Even if the Supreme Court turned away a torture victim’s case, El-Masri deserves an apology and compensation

With no explanation, the Supreme Court has denied a day in court to a German citizen of Lebanese descent who says he was kidnapped by the CIA and imprisoned and tortured, all because he was mistaken for a terrorist with a similar name. The justices on Tuesday refused to review a decision by a federal appeals court that Khaled El-Masri couldn’t sue former CIA Director George J. Tenet for damages because a trial might reveal “state secrets.”

It’s disappointing that the court, which repeatedly has reproached the Bush administration for cutting legal corners in the war on terror, decided to remain on the sidelines in this case. Perhaps the justices thought El-Masri’s lawsuit against Tenet was not the best vehicle for a pronouncement on the state secrets privilege asserted by the government. They may prefer to address the scope of that privilege, first announced by the high court in 1953, in a different case. One possibility is a lawsuit involving the administration’s electronic surveillance program that is now before a federal appeals court in California.

Whatever the explanation, the court’s refusal to hear El-Masri’s appeal shouldn’t be the end of the story. This country has an obligation to apologize to — and compensate — victims of an anti-terrorist operation gone awry. And judicial inaction actually strengthens the case for action by Congress to prevent the CIA from committing such outrages in the future. Even when there is no case of mistaken identity, the United States shouldn’t be spiriting suspects away to secret prisons abroad where they can be subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Aside from its inhumanity, this so-called rendition policy has blackened America’s image abroad and complicated relations with allies. The El-Masri case has been a source of friction between the Bush administration and Germany. Meanwhile, Canada’s prime minister has pleaded with the administration to “come clean” about the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was sent to his native Syria by the United States after erroneously being placed on a watch list by Canadian officials. Arar, who says he was tortured in Syria, filed a lawsuit against former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft that also was dismissed on state secrets grounds. Ashcroft’s successor, Alberto R. Gonzales, defended the transporting of Arar to Syria, calling it a deportation, not a rendition.

It may be that it would be impossible for these lawsuits to be tried without the exposure of national secrets, though judges should do their utmost to make such trials possible. But the courts aren’t the only remedy for the outrageous rendition policy. As with so many aspects of the war on terror, Congress has been just as compliant as the courts, allowing the administration to persist with a double standard that allows the CIA more leeway in interrogations than the U.S. military. It must be more assertive in the future.

For the moment, however, the need is simpler. El-Masri deserves an apology from the president and compensation from Congress. Just because the courts can’t help him does not mean that the government doesn’t owe him at least that.

Source

Biometrics trial at Gatwick

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Checking of visas from Sierra Leone will continue until April

By Computing

A government trial of fingerprint systems is underway at London’s Gatwick airport as part of plans to use biometric technology to address immigration issues.

Applicants for UK visas from across the world are already required to provide a fingerprint with their application. Under the BioDev project, which runs until April, biometrics from visitors from Freetown, Sierra Leone will be checked again when they reach the UK.

Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said: “New fingerprint visas are fast becoming our first line of defence against illegal immigration. By establishing people’s identities beyond any doubt before they enter the UK we can stamp out multiple applications and identity fraud – ensuring entry only to those who are welcome.

“Biometric technology is transforming the way we protect our borders. Through projects like the BioDev trial we are creating a triple ring of security: identifying individuals before they travel to the UK through a biometric visa, then checking it at the border, and finally, from 2008, rolling out ID cards for foreign nationals in the UK.”

Cost of ID cards blasted by MPs

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ID card

ID cards costly?

People face paying twice for ID cards and electronic passports — and MPs want to know why.

The public should pay just one charge for both, a report by the Public Accounts Committee says today.

Under present plans, people will be charged about £33 each for ID cards from 2010. This will be in addition to buying new biometric passports, which now cost £66 after an inflationbusting price rise last year.

The two could be bought for a combined £93, the Government has said.

The committee said it was baffled by ‘why citizens need an identity card as well as an ePassport, particularly as the ePassport offers broader utility in terms of global travel’.

Chairman Edward Leigh said: ‘At the very least that the Identity and Passport Service should reduce areas of overlap and make sure the combined fee for the two documents is minimised.’

But IPS, the firm tasked with chipping the cards, said: ‘We only issue British passports to British citizens — the National Identity Scheme will cover all adult residents , including foreign nationals.’

Britain Is Now A Surveillance Society

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Colcam.Image

I recently suggested in this post that the fingerprinting of young children in schools was an easy and convenient way of fostering meek acceptance of identity cards, government databases and loss of civil liberty, by getting kids used to submitting to fingerprinting and biometric scans in schools at an early age.

A handy technique indeed, for those beaurocrats and state officials who would control a surveillance society.

Now, in Scotland alone, it appears that fourteen educational authorities have already introduced biometric ID systems, with at least two others planning them.

Despite assurances that information is retained only on local secure servers, not shared with any external bodies, and that the data will not be compiled on any national database, all the systems are potentially compatible. Given access to the biometric data it could potentially be used by government, police and security services ten years down the line.

The government has already ensured that the UK’s population is the most spied on and databased in the western world, with CCTV cameras – one for every fourteen of us at the last count and growing – car journeys monitored with numberplate recognition cameras, our web habits monitored, and phone calls, mobile and landline, recorded and kept so that ‘they’ know where we have been, who we have called at any time.

DNA is being gathered at a frightening pace from innocent people and kept for life and beyond on a national database, the ID card scheme and, more importantly, the national database that accompanies it is well on its way and the NHS is busy uploading all our medical files to a central database.

People applying for their first adult passport will have to attend their nearest interrogation centre where they will be subject to background checks, questioning to test their story against official records, photographs, and, eventually, fingerprinting.

Now, The Sunday Herald shows us UK 2017: Under Surveillance, described by Neil Mackay as: A chilling, dystopian account of what Britain will look like 10 years from now: a world in which Fortress Britain uses fleets of tiny spy-planes to watch its citizens, of Minority Report-style pre-emptive justice, of an underclass trapped in sink-estate ghettos under constant state surveillance, of worker drones forced to take on the lifestyle and values of the mega-corporation they work for, and of the super-rich hiding out in gated communities constantly monitored by cameras and private security guards.

A frightening glimpse into the country the children who are today being fingerprinted for access to the school library are being trained to accept as normal.

And a frightening number of parents are letting it happen.

LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE

Lib Dems demand end to ‘surveillance society’

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The “surveillance society” must be rolled back, Liberal Democrats said today.

The party called for the immediate abandonment of the government’s ID card scheme, better regulation of CCTV and for DNA samples taken from people who have not been charged or convicted to be destroyed.

Debating surveillance and information at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton, MPs and delegates condemned the government’s attempts to recede liberty in the name of security.

Backing the motion, justice spokesman David Heath argued the government appeared to be realising the Orwellian nightmare. He borrowed from Benjamin Franklin to argue those who sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither.

He said politicians must not pass legislation that could be exploited by a less benign future government, warning not every home secretary would be that “nice Jacqui Smith”.

Mr Heath said Britons were already among the most surveyed people on earth, with around 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras trained on British streets.

Liberal Democrats expressed concern over the collection of biometric data, through schools fingerprinting pupils and the National DNA Database.

While supporting the database’s crime fighting potential, delegates said only people found guilty of an offence should have their details recorded.

In a further swing at the government, Mr Heath said Britain was not, however, a police state as rural areas struggle to see any presence on the street.

The Liberal Democrats have attacked Gordon Brown’s commitment to ID cards throughout this year’s conference.

Prior to taking over at Number 10, Mr Brown seemed at one point poised to tone down the ID card scheme, but he has since embraced Tony Blair’s security agenda, including the extension of detention without charge.

Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said today: “Gordon Brown has attempted to make considerable political gain by striking a new tone on civil liberties, but in reality he remains wedded to an unchanged Blairite agenda that has seen an extraordinary erosion in the liberty of the British people.”

He continued: “Britain has long distinguished itself by its liberal belief in the rights of the individual against the powers of the state.

“By stealth, this government has given the state unprecedented snooping powers that affect each and every one of us. It is time that these powers were rolled back.”

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Parliamentary watchdog not convinced about separate e-passports and ID cards

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Antony Savvas

The parliamentary public accounts committee (Pac) has praised the way e-passports have been rolled out, but says the government has some work to do to convince the public about the need for separate ID cards as a result.The Pac says the information held on e-passports is similar to the information contained in the proposed ID cards, and the government’s plans for a separate ID card may be unwarranted.

Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the Pac, said, “The introduction of the first generation of e-passports was an excellent example of successful project management and procurement by the Identity and Passport Service.

“The introduction from 2009 of second generation e-passports, digitally storing holders’ fingerprints as well as their photographs, will present an even more demanding implementation challenge.”

The Pac is also concerned about the reliability of the chip in the passports. Leigh said, “The best manufacturer’s warranty that the Identity and Passport Service could get for the electronic chip embedded in the passport was for only two years, even though passports are valid for ten years.

“The public will want to be told just how durable the chip is and, if it stops working, who will pay for a replacement. The prospect of e-passport failures contributing to yet further delays at border controls is not an enticing one.”

Leigh says, “Most of us are going to have to have both an e-passport and an identity card. The Home Office needs to explain why an e-passport could not serve both purposes. At the very least, the Identity and Passport Service should reduce areas of overlap as the identity card project progresses and make sure that the combined fee for the two documents is minimised.”

A Pac report examines how lessons learnt from the introduction of e-passports will be incorporated into future projects, the cost of authenticating applicants’ identities, passport fee trends, the measures being taken by the Identity and Passport Service to hold down passport fees, and working with others to reduce costs and improve border security.

Surveillance Society – the future now

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Indymedia

IT is a chilling, dystopian account of what Britain will look like 10 years from now: a world in which Fortress Britain uses fleets of tiny spy-planes to watch its citizens, of Minority Report-style pre-emptive justice, of an underclass trapped in sink-estate ghettos under constant state surveillance, of worker drones forced to take on the lifestyle and values of the mega-corporation they work for, and of the super-rich hiding out in gated communities constantly monitored by cameras and private security guards.

This Orwellian vision of the future was compiled on the orders of the UK’s information commissioner – the independent watchdog meant to guard against government and private companies invading the privacy of British citizens and exploiting the masses of information currently held on each and every one of us – by the Surveillance Studies Network, a group of academics.

On Friday, this study, entitled A Report on the Surveillance Society, was picked over by a select group of government mandarins, politicians, police officers and academics in Edinburgh. It is unequivocal in its findings, with its first sentence reading simply: “We live in a surveillance society.” The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, endorses the report. He says: “Today, I fear that we are, in fact, waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us.”

The academics who compiled the study based their vision of the future not on wild hypotheses but on existing technology, statements made about the intentions of government and private companies and studies by other think tanks, regulators, professional bodies and academics.

The report authors say that they believe the key theme of the future will be “pervasive surveillance” aimed at tracking and controlling people and pre-empting behaviour. The authors also say that their glimpse of the future is “fairly conservative. The future spelled out in the report is nowhere near as dystopian and authoritarian as it could be.”

Here’s how 2017 might look…

BorderGuard The Jones family are returning to Britain from holiday in America. “It’s hard to know the difference between the two countries by what the family experience at the border,” say the Surveillance Report authors. Britain, America, all EU countries and all members of the G10 have outsourced their immigration and border control services to massive private companies. In this vignette, the futurologists give the company the name BorderGuard.

Thanks to the never-ending war on terror, these governments have developed “smart borders” using hidden surveillance technologies. Cameras and scanners at passport control monitor faces, irises and fingerprints checking them off against records of biometric passports, or the British ID card system. BorderGuard has access to state and transnational databases and can also data-mine information on individuals – such as consumer transactions – via a paid-for service provided by specialist companies trading in information held on every individual in the land.

For families like the Joneses, crossing borders is relatively swift and painless. The wealth of information held on them means they can be quickly identified and processed. But citizens of nations not signed up to the BorderGuard scheme face hostile and lengthy investigations while crossing frontiers.

Racial profiling is now the norm. Asian features inevitably mean being pulled to one side – whether or not you carry a biometric passport or ID card.

Brandscapes Retail chains and mega-malls now use huge shared databases – which began with data-mining reward card information – to create a “brandscape” for every shopper.

Smart tags buried in a shopper’s clothing “talk” to scanners in shops. The system then connects to consumer databases, revealing where the clothing was bought and by whom and what other purchases the person has made. The system knows who you are, where you live, what you like and don’t like. Intelligent billboards at eye level then immediately flash up adverts dove-tailed to the consumer profile of the individual.

The wealthiest consumer-citizen can even become a “cashless shopper”. For £200, a chip can be implanted in the human body which is loaded with a person’s bank and credit details. From then on, it’s their arm that will be scanned in a shop, not their credit card. “Cashless shoppers” also get first-class service in mega-malls, with special lounges, spas and massage facilities reserved only for them. Urban myths, however, are springing up that muggers are targeting these elite consumers and cutting the chip from their arms. There are also concerns about hackers being able to upload viruses to the chip or empty the chipholder’s account.

Tagged Kids Scandals about child abductions and murders during school hours mean teachers prefer tagging a child to facing legal liability for their injury in a court. Drug testing in schools has also become an accepted part of life following pressure by the government to identify problem children earlier and earlier in life. What children eat in schools is also monitored by parents, as boys and girls are required to swipe their school card every time they visit the canteen. The card contains information on school attendance, academic achievement, drug-test results, internet access and sporting activities. The card’s records are used to assess whether the child has passed or failed their citizenship programme.

Shops are also monitoring children in order to tap into the lucrative youth market.”Children,” the report says, “are gradually becoming socialised into accepting body surveillance, location tracking and the remote monitoring of their dietary intake as normal.”

Elites and Proles Most cities are divided between gated private communities, patrolled by corporate security firms (which keep insurance costs to a minimum) and high-crime former council estates. On most estates, private companies are tasked to deal with social evils.

Offenders have the option of having a chip voluntarily implanted in their arm so they can be monitored at home using scanners and sensors. Estates can be subject to “area-wide curfews”, following outbursts of antisocial behaviour, which ban anyone under 18 from entering or leaving the estate from dusk until dawn.

Community wardens armed with Tasers enforce the law. CCTV cameras can be viewed by residents at home on their television’s security channel.

In gated communities, meanwhile, no-one can get in or out unless their car’s number plate is authorised by the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) devices located on gates. There are now so many ANPR cameras across the land that it’s almost impossible to drive the length of a street without details of your car being logged by the state.

The aesthetics of surveillance Security has been “aestheticised” – incorporated into the design of architecture and infrastructure – so that it is almost unnoticeable now. “It is ubiquitous but it has disappeared,” the report authors say. Anti-suicide-bomber bollards outside embassies and government buildings are secreted in the ground, only being activated in an emergency when passers-by breach the range of security sensors.

Anti-government protesters are monitored by small remote-control spy-planes, which were introduced for the 2012 London Olympics but remained a permanent fixture.

CCTV is now embedded at eye level in lamp-posts to enable the use of facial recognition technology.

Protest and virtual surveillance Following protests, individual demonstrators can be monitored by camera until private security contractors for the local authority in which the demo took place get a chance to question them. Helmet-mounted cameras scan the biometrics of anyone being questioned. All guards and police are also now monitored by surveillance devices in their handheld computers. Ironically, this has triggered civil liberties concerns within the police union.

The report uses two “protesters”, Ben and Aaron, as an example of how police might treat dissenters. When they are taken into custody by private security guards in Westminster, Ben undergoes the usual DNA swab, which is analysed instantaneously, and hands over his ID card for scanning. ID cards are still theoretically voluntary, but not having one makes life almost impossible. Aaron is a refusenik and doesn’t own a card. That means he can’t apply for a government job or claim benefits or student loans. He can’t travel by plane or even train. To make matters worse, Aaron is a young black man – meaning he is deemed a “high category suspect” and is routinely stopped and brought in to the nearest police station for questioning.

Once Ben is released, police monitoring systems piggy-back on his hand-held device to track him as he travels across the city. He’s also been put on a communications watchlist which means all his internet and e-mail traffic is saved by his ISP and passed to police. As most phone calls are online now, police also get access to these communications as well.

Call centre drones Call centres monitor everything that staff do and surveillance information is used to recruit staff. Potential employees are subjected to biometric and psychometric testing, as well as lifestyle surveys. “Their lives outside work,” the authors say, “and their background, are the subject of scrutiny. It is felt to be increasingly important that the lifestyle profile of the employee match those of the customers to ensure better customer service.” Recruitment consultants now frequently discard any CV which does not contain volunteered health information.

Once hired, staff are subjected to sporadic biometric testing which point to potential health and psychological problems. Thanks to iris-scanning at a gym connected to the company, employees can be pulled up at annual assessments for not maintaining their health. Periodic psychometric testing also reveals if staff attitudes have changed and become incompatible with company values.

Big Brother is looking after you Homes in the ever-growing number of retirement villages are fitted with the “telecare” system, with motion detectors in every room, baths with inbuilt heart monitors, toilets which measure blood sugar levels and all rooms fitted with devices to detect fire, flood and gas leaks. Panic buttons are also installed in every room. Fridges have RFID scanners which tell the neighbourhood grocery store that pensioners are running short on provisions. The goods are then delivered direct to the doorstep.

Huge databases in hospitals are able to compare tests on patients throughout the country. This allows doctors to red-flag risk factors earlier than ever before, meaning that a patient’s statistical risk of suffering, for example, a heart attack, are predicted with much greater accuracy. The NHS will be locked in a battle with insurance companies who want access to health information for commercial purposes. The temptation for the NHS is the large amounts of money on offer. The authors point out that Iceland sold its national DNA database to private companies for research and profit in 2004.

The data shadow Those rich enough can sign up to “personal information management services” (Pims) which monitor all the information that exists about an individual – a person’s so-called “data shadow”. The Pims system corrects incorrect information held by government or private companies.

Those who can’t afford Pims have to live with the impact that incorrect data can have on their lives, such as faulty credit ratings. “Some are condemned to a purgatory of surveillance and an inability to access information,” the report authors say.

But for other people total surveillance has become an accepted way of life. Some voluntarily carry out surveillance on their whole lives – so-called “life-logging” where an individual uploads online details in realtime about everything they do.

VIDEO: This is What a Police State Looks Like

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Cop Pepper Sprays, Punches, Nearly Breaks Girl’s Arm During Curfew Arrest

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Another shocking example of police brutality has been caught on camera showing a cop nearly breaking a girl’s arm, punching her and then pepper spraying her in the face as she cries after being arrested for violating a city curfew.

Watch the dramatic video of the incident which occurred in Fort Pierce, Florida.

The cop twists the 15-year-old’s arm right up behind her back to almost breaking point before the girl appears to bite the officer, upon which the cop punches the grl and pepper sprays her directly in the face.

Descriptions of the video on mainstream news websites strongly emphasized the fact that the girl bit the officer without even mentioning the fact that he would have probably snapped her arm out of the socket had the brutality continued.

Last week, a video showing a school security guard arresting and breaking a girl’s arm for dropping cake made national headlines.

The last couple of months have produced an epidemic of police and security guard brutality which seems to be spiraling out of control as cops are trained that the public is their enemy.

Lancaster anti-supermarket protest camp

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Angry residents occupy proposed supermarket site  

This morning Lancaster residents moved on to council owned land in Scotforth –
the site of a proposed supermarket, rumoured to be Tesco’s. Locals are shocked
by secret moves in the Council’s Cabinet to sell off land at Lawson Bridge, off
the A6. Their message: they will not allow the council to sell off their town
for what they call “dodgy development”.

Says local resident Deirdre Mason: “The council may love the idea of Tesco’s,
Centros Miller and the Bailrigg Science Park, but local residents are concerned
about the threat to local businesses and the unique character of the city!
These developments will be the death of Lancaster. Time to say ENOUGH! to all
these sordid schemes. Let’s send a clear message to all these developers: they
are not welcome in our town.”

The occupation will last for 24 hours and will be followed by a protest outside
the Cabinet meeting tomorrow (Tuesday 9th Oct) at Lancaster Town Hall from
9.30am onwards.

Residents are concerned about the way the Council is selling off Lancaster
piecemeal, leading to a town crippled by gridlock, and having only “clone town”
shops that are to be found in any high street in the country. “The council is
blinkered when it comes to recognising the historical value of our town, the
vibrancy and high quality of the local traders.” says Stephen Dickinson of
Scotforth. “They sold off our market – it’s now half dead. Now they want to see
off the rest of the town centre with Centros Miller’s proposed monstrosity and
this mega supermarket in Scotforth. The time has come to say ‘Enough!’. It’s
time for our councillors to listen to us!”

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For further information please contact Deirdre Mason at the protest camp on:
07798 745613

Photo opportunities:
Mon 1pm at the protest camp, Lawsons Bridge, Scotforth Road, Lancaster
Tuesday 10am at Lancaster Town Hall

Notes for the Editor:
1 The land threatened by supermarket development and currently under occupation
is near Lawson’s Bridge, between the railway line and the A6 (Scotforth Road).
Lancaster City Council owns about 5.5acres there, immediately to the south of
Ray’s Drive.

2 The land is currently rented to a farmer for use as pasture. It is also well
used by Scotforth residents for dog-walking and other kinds of recreation, and
there is a community woodland area at the northern end which is threatened by
the development.

3 Lancaster Council Cabinet will be discussing the proposed sale in their
Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, 9th October. The meeting takes place at Lancaster
Town Hall at 10am.

VIDEO: Dead in the Water

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BBC Documentary on the USS Liberty:
“Dead in the Water”

Cover-Up Alleged in Probe of USS Liberty

A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.

In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy’s inquiry to “conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

It was “one of the classic all-American cover-ups,” said retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigating the attack as part of an independent panel he formed with other former military officials. The panel also included a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins.


Torpedo hole in USS Liberty
“Why would our government put Israel’s interests ahead of our own?” Moorer asked from his wheelchair at the news conference. He was chief of naval operations at the time of the attack.

Moorer, who has long held that the attack was a deliberate act, wants Congress to investigate. [Newsday]

Israel claims the USS Liberty was mistaken for the out-of-service Egyptian horse carrier El Quseir – can you spot the difference?


El Quseir


USS Liberty

According to a 1981 NSA report on the incident, the El Quseir “was approximately one-quarter of the Liberty’s tonnage, about one-half its length, and offered a radically different silhouette.”

Photos of attack on USS Liberty
Click images for full sized photos

The assault was initiated by French-built high performance Mirage jets armed with cannons and rockets

After the ship was disabled by aircraft cannon, rockets and napalm, Israeli torpedo boats were sent in

Crews mess hall used as an emergency room

Liberty deck crew resting after recovering bodies of shipmates

30mm cannon holes
GTR 5 USS Liberty

30mm cannon holes
GTR 5 USS Liberty

Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested.

Later, a dual-citizen Israeli major told survivors that he was in an Israeli war room where he heard that pilot’s radio report. The attacking pilots and everyone in the Israeli war room knew that they were attacking an American ship, the major said. He recanted the statement only after he received threatening phone calls from Israel.

The pilot’s protests also were heard by radio monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Then-U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter has confirmed this. Porter told his story to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and offered to submit to further questioning by authorities. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. government has any interest in hearing these first-person accounts of Israeli treachery. [Washington Report]

“Then, inexplicably, at 2 p.m., unmarked Israeli aircraft began attacking the ship.” [Ledger Enquirer]

Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel’s story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt.

Moorer, who as top legal council to the official investigation is in a position to know, agrees that Israel intended to sink the USS Liberty and blame Egypt for it, thus dragging the United States into a war on Israel’s behalf. This seems to be a common trick of Israel. Starting with the Lavon affair, through the USS Liberty, to the fake radio transmitter that tricked Reagan into attacking Libya, to potentially 9-11 itself, Israel’s game is to frame Arabs and set them up as targets for the United States.

The official US investigation is discredited. And with it, every claim of innocence for Israel that relied on the official investigation as a source.

The real question facing the American people is why the US Government seems more concerned with protecting Israel after they are caught playing these dirty tricks, rather than doing something to convince Israel not to kill any more Americans.

“Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” — US official quoted in Carl Cameron’s Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring and its connections to 9-11.

Thanks to What Really Happened

VIDEO: Using Depleted Uranium as a Weapon

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“Using Depleted Uranium as a Weapon” with the subtitle :
“Putting our Troops and the Rest of the World at risk.”
A talk by Dr. Doug Rokke, member of U.S. Army Medical Command’s Special Operations during Gulf War 1, Produced February 23,2003 but as retinent to our time as ever.

http://gavinovz.vox.com/library/post/using-depleted-uranium-as-a-weapon.html?_c=feed-atom

VIDEO: Preparation for Martial Law

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We support our military because we know there is good in you. You are our family. Our brothers, sisters & cousins. You are our sons. You are our daughters. Our fathers. Here is a letter to you from Robert M. Bowman, PhD, Lt. Col., USAF, ret.

Dr. Bowman, who describes himself as “an old fighter pilot (101 combat missions in Vietnam , F-4 Phantom, Phu Cat, 1969-1970) who’s now a disabled veteran with terminal cancer from Agent Orange.” has your letter posted here under the title:
“Duty, Honor, Country 2007: An Open Letter to the New Generation of Military Officers Serving and Protecting Our Nation”

Ahmadinejad says Iran won’t negotiate over its “nuclear rights”

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TEHRAN, Iran: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed that Iran will not negotiate over its “nuclear rights” but said the government was prepared to answer questions from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.

The comments Friday came as French diplomatic officials said Iran is set to run almost 3,000 centrifuges by the end of the month, nearing the threshold for industrial-scale uranium enrichment.

Ahmadinejad said Iran has already achieved proficiency in the whole nuclear fuel cycle, from extracting uranium ore to enriching it, and that Tehran has removed any hurdles in the way of its nuclear progress.

“The Iranian nation favors talks but it won’t negotiate over its definite and legal nuclear rights. They (world powers) have to know this,” Ahmadinejad said in comments before Friday prayers in Tehran.

He added he believed the nuclear issue was over and Iran will ignore attempts by the United States and its European allies to further politicize the issue.

“From our point of view, Iran’s nuclear issue has been closed. The fact that these powers are screaming tells us the case is closed. This is a great victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.

Two rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions have failed to persuade Iran to halt enrichment, a process that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or materials needed for nuclear weapons.

The United States, France and Britain are seeking a third round of sanctions against Iran but in a setback for the U.S., Iran won a two-month reprieve from new U.N. Security Council sanctions over its nuclear program last month.

The Bush administration and its European allies ceded to Russian and Chinese demands to give Tehran more time to address international concerns.

The U.S. and some of its allies accuse Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons but Tehran has denied the charges saying its nuclear program is merely geared towards generating electricity, not bomb.

Iran says it will never give up its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel.

Meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush denied in an interview with Arab television that the U.S. is gearing up to attack Iran and said he remains committed to working diplomatically to resolve the standoff with Tehran over its nuclear program.

The president, in an hour-long interview with Al-Arabiya, also reiterated his pledge to negotiate with Iran once it gives up its nuclear program.

“I have said that if they suspend their nuclear program, we will be at the table,” Bush said, according to a transcript of the interview the White House released on Friday. “But they have so far refused to do that.”

Bush brushed off as “gossip” reports in the Arab press that he has issued orders to senior U.S. military officials to prepare for a major, precise strike on Iran during the end of January or February.

“I would call that empty propaganda,” Bush said.

The Iraq Occupation and the Coming War Against Iran

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The Iraq Occupation and the Coming War Against Iran: Political Wickedness and Moral Bankruptcy

“Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.”Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [Iran will react to a bombing attack by the Bush-Cheney administration] “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Jimmy Carter “Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, [Ariel] Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel’s security problems.” Robert (Bob) Novak, veteran American reporter “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chairman 1987-2006 “There are people in Washington … who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they’re looking for ten, 20, 50 years into the future … the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that ten years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.”Jimmy Carter, former American President (February 3, 2006)


How do you get out of a hole?  First of all, you stop digging. –This is the simple lesson that the Bush-Cheney White House has so much trouble understanding. For Bush and his neocon crowd, they are militarily occupying Iraq and they intend to remain there, no matter what. It doesn’t matter that this immoral and illegal occupation has caused the death of more than one million Iraqis and killed more than 3000 American soldiers. And now, they want to escalate the Iraq war into a wider Middle East conflict involving Iran, thus making sure the United States will be involved militarily in that region of the globe for the next twenty years. In 2002, immoral neocon officials in the Defense Department considered Iraq to be a “low-hanging fruit“, ripe for picking for its huge oil reserves, for the opportunity to displace French and Chinese oil companies, for increasing Israel’s security, for moving American military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq and for pleasing politically the end-times religious right in the U.S.–thus killing five birds with one stone. According to former CIA Director George Tenet–and this has been confirmed by former Secretary Paul O’Neill and many other insiders–the very idea of taking control militarily of Iraq was improvised and was unjustified because “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” Nevertheless, the Bush-Cheney-Libby-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle team, and their allies at the American Enterprise Institute  and at the neocon Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), thought it was a win-win situation. They had decided they wanted a war under the clouds of 9/11, and nothing–truth, morality, reason or facts–could deter them from it. They were ready to lie a thousand times to achieve their goal. And they got it. But now the apprentice sorcerers do not know how to stop the infernal machine of destruction they have set in motion. They only know how to push forward and make a larger mess of it. That type of improvisation and political wickedness is all too well confirmed by newly released transcripts of talks George W. Bush had with then-Spanish Prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, in February 22, 2003, a few weeks before the onset of the March 20, 2003 Iraq war. In these transcripts, it is shown that Bush had a criminal intent to launch a war of aggression against Iraq, no matter what, and that he turned down every Iraqi offer that would have avoided a murderous war that has killed more than one million people so far. This includes Saddam Hussein’s offer to go into exile, and for Iraq to hold free and internationally-supervised elections as well as allowing armed foreign troops to conduct unfettered inspections for weapons of mass destruction. –But the Bush-Cheney regime of Neocons wanted war, and nothing could stop them. They wanted, above all, to put their hands on Iraq’s oil wealth. This is a prime example of historical grand theft, political wickedness and moral bankruptcy. Thus, this war has nothing to do with the morality of the “Just War” theory. In fact, it violates all the canons of a just and unavoidable war.Confronted with the abysmal cowardliness, moral corruption and incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration, Americans, on the whole, are more intelligent and more moral than their current leaders, and a large majority of them (63%) think it’s time for the United States to stop occupying illegally the country of Iraq and to stop murdering its citizens. Moreover, a good majority of them (54%) reject the blanket Bush-Cheney policy of aggression abroad, under the pretext of “preventive war”. Similarly, the U.S. Congress, the only government branch empowered by the U.S. Constitution to declare war, is officially on record as being against maintaining American troops in Iraq. First, the House of Representatives, on July 12, passed a bill, by a vote of 223 to 201, to withdraw American combat troops from Iraq by next April 1st. Second, in a July 18 vote, a majority of U.S. Senators voted 52 to 47 to bring home most American combat troupes from Iraq by May 1, 2008. –So, both the American people and the American Congress want this war to end, and soon. But the truth is that Bush II does not give a hoot about American democratic opinion, as he openly demonstrated recently. And, he does not much care for the U.S. Congress either, or the courts for that matter. In fact, Bush has a deeply ingrained tendency to disregard the truth, the law and the U.S. Constitution.In Iraq, the Bush-Cheney regime is still building “enduring” military bases in order to occupy Iraq militarily for decades to come. They even talk openly about the half-century American military presence in South Korea, as if this were a useful analogy.At the end of the day, as Bush has said: “I do not need to explain”. As the British magazine The Economist has warned, the world should beware of a President “who has little left to lose,” the more so if he has hardly any moral principle and is indifferent to the opinions of the majority of Americans.It is doubtful that a George W. Bush in denial and his delusional neocon advisors for permanent war will ever listen to reason and morality. To the contrary, the lame-duck president is still firing anybody who does not agree with him, while listening to chief Neocon Dick Cheney. The American people see that, and that is why nearly half of them want President George W. Bush to face impeachment, while about 54 percent of American adults now want the US House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney, because he is seen as the chief spreader of lies to launch the illegal Iraq War. As of now, there are twenty-one Congressmen who support the articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney contained in bill H Res 333 –If and when American troops leave Iraq, there will be fewer deaths because there will be fewer killers, both official soldiers and mercenaries. The latest victim of Bush’s pigheaded approach to foreign policy is General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Having started a war of aggression on his own, against the advice  of most thinking people within the military, political, legal and intelligence communities, and having placed himself squarely against international law, George W. Bush is reduced to shifting the blame for his failures to others. Bush is afraid of having honest people around him, especially a man of the caliber of General Pace, who is a moral man. General Pace, in the spirit of the Nuremberg Charter, has publicly said, “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral” (Feb. 17, 2006). And since General Pace thinks it is immoral to be the first to use nuclear weapons, one wonders if Bush has fired General Pace because he intends to use nuclear weapons in the coming months.The U.S. Congress should wake up before it is too late. When armaments are in the hands of immoral people, the danger is high that a nuclear war could be launched. Indeed, people in power who have no morality and no judgment can be expected to do anything, including killing millions of people, to save face.In the book “The New American Empire“, I asked this fundamental question: Why is the Bush-Cheney administration so bent on using lies and distortions in order to justify a war whose end result would be predictably to eliminate from power the Iraqi Sunnis in favor of Shi’ites allied with Shi’ite Iran, thus automatically making Iran the dominant power in that unstable region? One has to remember that Sunnis make up 85 percent of all Muslims around the world and are dominant in the Arab world. –Now that they have realized their error in creating a Shia-dominated Iraq, the Neocons behind the Bush-Cheney team want them to up the ante and to attack Iran, thus turning the Middle East into an even larger murder scene than it is now.The American people have never received an answer to that simple question. That is why they are so dissatisfied with George W. Bush, but also with the Republicans and the pro-war neocon Democrats in Congress. This indicates that there is a huge void of leadership in the United States today. On this score, the most moral Democratic 2008 candidate for president is, by far, former senator Mike Gravel from Alaska. The very fact that the mainstream media boycott him should be a good indication that this man stands on the side of the people.According to polls, Americans are very dissatisfied with both major political parties because of their inability or their unwillingness to reflect the wishes of the people and to stop the immoral and illegal occupation of Iraq. In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track, but nothing is being done about it. In fact, average Americans are losing hope that they will ever be heard by the Washington D.C. political nomenklatura that runs the government while paying scant attention to the people.Rodrigue Tremblay is a Canadian economist who lives in Montreal; he can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.comVisit his blog site at:
www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog. Author’s Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/

Check Dr. Tremblay’s coming book “The Code for Global Ethics” at:
www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

The ‘Silent’ 9/11 Settlement

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By Shaun Mullen

 01pentagonn.jpg
Four of the comparatively few families who declined to participate in the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund have settled claims against the airline and other companies involved with American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.The families assert that they opted for litigation to learn more about what went wrong.

Said Irene Golinski of Columbia, Maryland, whose husband, Ronald was aboard Flight 77 and one of 125 people to die at the Pentagon:

“I really didn’t go into it for the money, I went into it for the answers.”

The families, however, will be unable to share those answers because of a broad gag order that is part of the settlement, the financial terms of which also are confidential. It therefore is not known if the families received more than they would have from the compensation fund set up by Congress after the terror attacks.

Participants in the fund, administered by attorney Kenneth Feinberg, had to agree to not sue the airlines.

Feinberg was appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be Special Master of the fund, who worked for 33 months pro bono.

In a Herculean task, Feinberg had to decide how much each family would receive based on how much each victim would have earned in a full lifetime. He personally presided over more than 900 of the 1,600 family hearings and eventually awarded a total of $7 billion to 97 percent of the families. The average payout was $1.8 million.

I’m with blogger Ed Morrissey in having problems with the hold-out families, who to put the most charitable face on their litigation saw their seemingly altruistic intentions undercut by their not being able to get paid if they talked.

Captain Ed writes that:

“This bothers me more than most settlements of this nature. The families who sued, who opted out of the VCF to do so, insisted that the money was not important to them. They wanted answers to how the failures occurred, and decided that their separate lawsuits could provide more answers than government investigations. Apparently they have somehow been satisfied as a result of that process – but can’t tell us why. They agreed to remain silent as a condition of the settlement.

“Why? If truth was that important to them, why do they now choose silence and a payoff instead of revealing the deficiencies of the system that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people? Given their statement of mission, it makes it seem as though they either learned nothing more than what the official investigations revealed and took the money rather than admit it, or that they let the airlines off the hook for a substantial amount of cash.”

Some 13 other non-victims fund cases are still pending.

BBC controller quits over ‘crowngate’ scandal

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BBC1 controller Peter Fincham resigned today in the wake of a damning report into misleading footage of the Queen.

The most high-profile casualty in a string of TV fakery scandals, he was forced to go after the independent inquiry revealed a catalogue of “misjudgements, poor practice and ineffective systems” at the Corporation.

The trailer for forthcoming series ‘A Year with the Queen’ appeared to show the monarch storming out of a photoshoot after photographer Annie Leibovitz suggested she remove her crown.

Fincham aired it to an audience of journalists at a press launch on the morning of July 11 and said it showed the Queen “walking out in a huff”.

By 7pm that night he was aware that the trailer had been misleadingly edited by production company RDF — footage of the Queen apparently walking out of the shoot was actually of her walking in.

But a decision was taken to delay issuing a correction until the following day.

An apology was eventually made at noon on July 12, only after the story had made headline news and caused serious embarrassment to the BBC.

BBC director-general Mark Thompson was kept in the dark about the episode.

The independent inquiry by former BBC executive Will Wyatt was highly critical of the BBC and of RDF.

Stephen Lambert, head of RDF and the man personally responsible for editing the footage, also resigned today. The report said his behaviour had been “cavalier”.

Fincham had resisted calls to quit in the days after the affair and said the director-general was behind him.

But this afternoon he announced “with great sadness” that he was leaving the post he had held for the past two years.

The Wyatt report said the fiasco had strained the “vital relationship” between the BBC and the Royal household.

And it said the BBC’s reputation was “tarnished further in the eyes of the licence fee paying public”, coming after a string of incidents which had damaged viewers’ trust.

The report decided there had been no conscious effort to defame or misrepresent the Queen.

But it went on: “That said, the incident reveals misjudgments, poor practice and ineffective systems as well, of course, as the usual helping of bad luck that often accompanies such sorry affairs.

“A fuse was inexcusably lit when RDF edited footage of the Queen in a cavalier fashion for a promotional tape.”

The report concluded that the BBC was “slow to appreciate the magnitude and import of the mistake” and “naive” in the hope that the story would blow over.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying it was a matter for the BBC.

However, the report revealed the Palace agreed a statement retracting the story at 9.44pm on the day the trailer was shown. But both they and the BBC decided to hold it overnight to “check the temperature of the story”.

Mr Thompson said he accepted the inquiry findings and repeated the BBC’s apology to the Queen.

“It is important that the BBC learns all the lessons from this matter and take steps to ensure that nothing of this kind is repeated.

“Although I take some comfort from Will Wyatt’s conclusion that no one consciously set out to defame or misrepresent the Queen in respect of the BBC’s preparation for the BBC1 launch, the fact is that serious mistakes were made which put misleading information about the Queen into the public domain.

“That is why we are determined to take all necessary steps to address the shortcomings set out in this report.

“When this matter first came to light, we unreservedly apologised to Her Majesty the Queen. I repeat that apology again today without hesitation.”

Mr Thompson praised Fincham as an “outstanding controller” and accepted his resignation “with real sadness”.

The BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons said it was clear from the report that “serious errors of judgements” had been made and proper controls were not applied.

RDF has already accepted responsibility for the editing of the trailer.

The report said it demonstrated “a cavalier way of treating any footage, let alone of the head of state going about her duties.”

In his resignation statement, Lambert said: “My action, which I accept in the words of the inquiry was ’cavalier’, was the first step in a chain of carelessness and misunderstandings which had very serious consequences. It was therefore right that I should go.”

It is not known whether the five-part documentary planned for this autumn will ever be shown.

The trailer showed the Queen walking into a room wearing a tiara and Order of the Garter robes.

Photographer Leibovitz said: “I think it will look better without the crown because the garter robe is so…”

A stony-faced Queen replied: “Less dressy? What do you think this is?” while pointing to what she was wearing. The trailer then cut to her apparently storming out.

But the report revealed that, far from being irritated by Leibovitz’s suggestion, the Queen paused after her “less dressy” comment, then chuckled and carried on with the photoshoot.

This was caught on film but left out of the trailer.

RDF told the inquiry it was not clear in the original sequence why the Queen was in a bad mood and edited it so that it “made more sense”.

Following Fincham’s resignation, BBC2 controller Roly Keating will take over as acting controller of BBC1.

There is speculation that he may take on the role full-time.

Other names in the frame include former Endemol boss Peter Bazalgette.

US denies breaking torture laws after memos exposed

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Kim Landers

In the United States, the Bush Administration is again under fire for secretly authorising torture tactics during the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Although the White House is insisting that the US does not injure prisoners, two separate, secret memos endorsing the harsh techniques have previously been exposed.

And there are also reports that secret CIA prisons holding terrorism suspects are still being run around the world.

Democrats are demanding that the Justice Department turn over the two secret memos, which explicitly authorise painful physical and psychological tactics – things like head-slapping, simulated drowning and freezing temperatures.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of the 2005 memos, which were apparently written months after the Justice Department withdrew an earlier legal opinion approving harsh methods.

Anonymous officials say the opinions remain in effect, yet Congress has prohibited cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of terrorism suspects.

But the White House is insisting that the Bush Administration has not violated America’s anti-torture laws.

Fran Townsend is President’s George W Bush’s homeland security adviser.

“The United States does not torture. Do we have a program? Yes we do. People who participate in that program are carefully trained with more than 250 hours of training,” she said.

“The average age of an interrogator is 43. They’re not just interrogators who are part of the team, there are also subject matter experts and individuals who are there to monitor the health and psychological wellbeing of the detainee himself.”

Ms Townsend will not confirm whether the specific interrogation techniques being reported by The New York Times are being or have ever been used.

She says detainees are only subjected to a harsh interrogation if they can provide timely information about the location of Al Qaeda leaders, or about an imminent threat to the US.

“There have been fewer than 100 CIA detainees in any type of program,” she said.

“Less than a third of those have ever had techniques used against them; I will say to you though, that [group of] less than a third produced 8,500 intelligence reports on threat information.”

‘Shameful’ secret

The New York Times reports that the secret interrogation memos were approved by then attorney-general Alberto Gonzales – over the objections of his deputy James Comey, who reportedly told colleagues that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Human Rights Watch spokesman Tom Malinowski says the memos are significant.

“What these opinions show is that the Justice Department was still trying to authorise the use of torture, even when Republicans and Democrats in Congress led by Senator McCain were trying to outlaw it once and for all,” he said.

Democrats are promising a congressional inquiry into the two Justice Department legal opinions. They say that the alleged content and the fact that they have been kept secret from Congress are extremely troubling.

And while the White House skirts around whether the CIA has resumed using secret prisons to detain and interrogate suspects, an anonymous US counter-terrorism official has confirmed that the program is still active.

Asked if the CIA is currently holding anyone, an agency spokesman said, “We do not comment on this question as a matter of course”.

Stop the Depleted Uranium Poisoning of America

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By Cathy Garger

DU is being blasted, burned, fired, and spewed all over our indigenous peoples, suburbanites, and city dwellers alike. It is being dispersed -in nanoparticle form – all over our wild lands, harming innocent people as well as animals, birds, fish, and plants. We must each take a stand now and help to stop this radiation poisoning madness via the weaponized ballistic Uranium!

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du_explosion_yuma_proving…

How You Can Help Stop the Depleted Uranium Poisoning of America

How can we, dear friends, allow the use of “Depleted” Uranium inside the US (or anywhere, for that matter) to continue? Ballistic “Depleted” Uranium is weakening, sickening, and killing our own citizens right here at home.

As we speak, DU is being blasted, burned, fired, and spewed all over our indigenous peoples, suburbanites, and city dwellers alike. It is being dispersed -in nanoparticle form – all over our wild lands, harming innocent people as well as animals, birds, fish, and plants.

So-called “Depleted” Uranium is making us sick, radioactively contaminating our air, water, and soil. DU mutates our genetic material forevermore. To get a concept of the permanency of DU use? Please consider for a moment that in 4.5 Billion years, one-half of the daughter products of “Depleted” Uranium that have decayed and are even *more* radioactive that the US government (Dept. of Defense and Dept. of Energy) has been using since the 1940s will still remain in our environment!

What can we do, you may ask? We must each take a stand now and help to stop this radiation poisoning madness via the weaponized ballistic Uranium that is not Depleted of radiation – despite what the Military Spin-Masters want us to believe!

It matters not whether you choose to help those being “dosed” by Ballistic “Depleted” Uranium in: Los Alamos, New Mexico, or in Hawaii, or near San Francisco, or in other areas, such as Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, off the California Coast, and in Aberdeen, outside Baltimore, Maryland, too.

And – this is important to know – Ballistic “Depleted” Uranium oxide does not stay neatly in one area, but, rather has been show to travel in the winds from Iraq to England – a total of 2,400 miles – within only nine (9) days.*

The important thing is that each and every one of us learn more about this – and decide to take a stand today and get busy! We must educate and inform all those who do not know. We must also take a stand to help Hawaiian Islanders now – * before October 30 * – to stop the Stryker Brigade from further contaminating Hawaiian Paradise!

If you were not previously aware of this… please know you are in good company. Less than three years ago I had no idea whatsoever that any of this was going on, either! It is Uncle Sam’s most insidious, “hot” and “dirty” secret – hidden well from public awareness. The practice of using “Depleted” Uranium on many of our military facilities and national nuclear weapons “laboratories” is, in effect, the “nuking” of our very own citizens… yes, America itself.

So many people have written to ask me, “Since when did WE, the American People, become our own enemy?!” The answer seems to be sometime in the 1940s, although many argue that this all started way, way back, even before then…

Won’t you please read the following information and join me in taking a stand against what is truly the radiation aerosol/gas poisoning of Americans – by use of ceramic Uranium oxide, a poison gas – by our very own government?

Volunteers are needed now to help keep DU out of Hawaii. To become involved in volunteering to help keep the Stryker Brigade out of Hawaii (they would greatly appreciate even a small amount of your time!) please write to them at: NoDUHawaii [at] yahoo.com .

If all you can do is forward this along to everyone you know and take 5 minutes of your time to write a public comment against the Stryker Brigade being permanently stationed in Hawaii,
http://www.sbct-seis.org/ please know that would mean a whole lot to a great number of people who want nothing more for themselves and their children than to simply breathe clean air and drink clean water and eat healthy food that has not been radiologically contaminated.

Really, if you think about it, isn’t the right not to be radioactively poisoned by one’s own government a basic human right that has been persistently violated inside the United States for the past 60-plus years?

Thank you so much in advance for your help!

Warm best wishes,

Cathy Garger
http://www.mytown.ca/garger

HAWAII – Important Note! Please, everyone, send your public comment before
October 30 to: PublicComments [at] aec.apgea.army.mil.

“Hawaii At War – Stop the SuperLie”
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893476.shtml or

“Hawaii Residents Say No Stryker Brigade In Hawaii”
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893619.shtml or

“Hawaiian Islands are Contaminated with Ballistic Uranium”
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2007/10/893492.shtml or

“Depleted Uranium Contamination by Strykers in Hawaii”
http://www.indymedia.org/pt/2007/09/893176.shtml

Army Plans to Bring 2/25th Stryker Brigade Combat Team to Hawaii
http://www.sbct-seis.org/

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

“Dust Up” and “Uranium Dust”
http://john-upton.com/lab.htm

“Livermore Nuclear Weapon Lab’s 200 Executioners Ready”
http://www.rense.com/general75/hyd.htm

“Depleted Uranium Poison Targets US Citizens”
http://axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=151&num=23826

“Livermore to Poison San Francisco Area – On Purpose”
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/04/18344023.php

LOS ALAMOS, NM

“Native Women Mark Autumn in Nuclear Shadows”
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/100407WA.shtml

Laura Paskus for Women’s eNews reports on a gathering of women from
six native communities near Los Alamos National Laboratory to discuss
their concerns about nuclear contamination, type-II diabetes and the
near-extinction of traditional midwifery.

Thanks goes to Lisa, a veritable Angel…
http://angelsfortruth.com/Welcome.html

*DU Travels 2,400 miles in only 9 days report:
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2006/DU-Europe-Contamination1jan06.htm

To learn more about what “Depleted” Uranium is, do a Google Video search for Leuren Moret or Rosalie Bertell.

Or you can visit: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2007/Moret-Aishah-Ali1aug07.htm

http://mytown.ca/moret/

http://lonestaricon.com/2006/Archives/09/news03.htm

http://www.iicph.org/

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/DUuse+hazard.html

http://www.protecthawaii.ws/

Countdown: Wounded vet calls Limbaugh’s comparison of him to suicide bomber ‘repugnant’

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Keith Olbermann reported on Wednesday’s Countdown that Rush Limbaugh has responded to criticism of his remark describing anti-war veterans as “phony soldiers” by comparing a real soldier who criticized him to a suicide bomber.After Limbaugh’s initial statement — which he now claims was taken out of context — Sgt. Brian McGough, a wounded combat veteran, appeared in a VoteVets.org ad saying that many troops in Iraq “believe George Bush’s military policy has been a disaster” and telling Limbaugh, “Until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face stop telling lies about my service.”

Limbaugh’s response to the VoteVets ad — which he admitted he hadn’t seen — was to call it “a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said and then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out in the media … Whoever pumped him full of these lies about what I said and embarrassed him with this tv ad has betrayed him.”

Olbermann then welcomed McGough to his program to address Limbaugh’s comparison of him to a suicide bomber, noting that Limbaugh had not been willing to allow McGough on his own show to confront him directly.

McGough — who served in Kosovo, earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, and was seriously wounded in Iraq — described his initial reaction to Limbaugh’s statement as “disgust” and stated, “I’ve seen the after-effects of a suicide bomb. I’ve had friends that were hurt in suicide bombs. It makes me mad down to a place where I can’t even think to describe. It’s just repugnant.”

McGough further explained that he agreed to do the VoteVets ad because it expressed his own sentiments, and that “for Rush Limbaugh to say that an American soldier like me can’t think for myself because I speak out against the Iraq War is preposterous.”

WATCH VIDEO

“[Speaking out] is my right, that I fought for, I bled for,” McGough asserted. He also appealed repeatedly for Limbaugh to invite him or any other member of VoteVets.org on his own show to discuss the issue directly.

The following video clips are from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast on October 3, 2007. (story continues below)

Thanks to his dad, George W. Bush was saved from the horrors of Vietnam

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 It is documented that the current U.S. president was partying in Alabama while 58,000 of his contemporaries were dying in that country – This truth that he was forced to deny cost CBS commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD

WHILE the number of victims among U.S. soldiers condemned by George W. Bush to die in Iraq continues to rise, the truth of the circumstances in which the president himself avoided being sent to the war on Vietnam, like thousands of young men of his generation, are still censored.

Thanks to his dad, George W. Bush was saved from the horrors of VietnamCirculating information on that issue in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections cost CBS journalist and commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation. Rather has just filed a million-dollar claim against his former employer for having punished him in order to calm down the furious White House occupant.

At that time, Rather was forced by his bosses to apologize in the middle of the top U.S. news program for having “used apparently false documents” on the military service record of President George W. Bush during the war in Vietnam… although he knew perfectly well that they were authentic.

In an article just published on this controversy, Greg Palast, the British-based investigative journalist revealed how Bush’s notorious cowardice has been an open confirmed secret since 1999.

Palest recalls that on September 8, 2004, Rather presented his report in which he explained how in 1968, then Congressman George Bush — father of the current president — had arranged things so that his son was not called up for the war in Vietnam, as he should have been, but did his military service in an aviation unit of the National Guard. Something totally unusual when that military corps demanded of its pilots three years’ previous experience in a regular National Air Force unit.

George junior was thus spared from the war in order to defend Houston from a Vietcong attack, the journalist ironically commented.

Bush Sr. maneuvered that solution just 12 days before his son was to be formally recruited.

The BBC had disclosed that information one year previously, Palast noted, and never had to retract it.

23 MILLION TO SAVE HIS BOY

The BBC report, Palast says, was based on a confidential Justice Department document that states how Ben Barnes, lieutenant governor of Texas, who made the arrangements to have Bush junior removed from the U.S. Army registers, received his reward 35 years later.

In 1997, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush, acting irregularly, granted a state lottery contract worth more than one million dollars to a company linked to Barnes, who received a commission of $23 million.

Barnes confessed how, in 1968, he received a call from businessman Sid Adger, a buddy of the Bush family, asking him to do him the favor of moving Bush junior’s name up the waiting list for the National Guard. The current president has always falsely claimed that there was a shortage of candidates to join that military corps whose members are not usually deployed outside national territory.

Barnes then called General James Rose, the local National Guard commander, who sorted out “W”’s registration in a unit of the Ellington airbase where he hooked up with other daddies’ sons.

Bush rapidly rose to the rank of second lieutenant while his less privileged counterparts had to wait years to gain such recognition.

Bush always distinguished himself for his unjustified absences and delays in completing the tasks ascribed to him. Over time, he learned to pilot an F-102, an obsolete aircraft that was not even being used in the South East Asia conflict.

From Ellington, he asked for a transfer to Montgomery, Alabama, where he never showed up. But he was seen taking part in maneuvers surrounding the Senate electoral campaign of Winton “Red” Blount, a buddy in his clan. And enjoying himself at parties where his excessive inclination to alcohol could already be seen. Marijuana and cocaine consumption was in fashion then in get-togethers of moneyed youth and his former buddies have affirmed that the future president was happy to indulge in that pleasure.

A number of documents that would make it possible to confirm the activities or lack of activities of George W. Bush in the war years have mysteriously disappeared from the National Guard files.

In 1972 (the year of Watergate), “W”, then aged 26, decided to extract himself from the masquerade; as it happened, at a time when the National Guard began to impose doping tests. He was then assigned to civilian tasks in Denver where he never showed up.

Meanwhile, 58,000 compatriots of his age lost their lives in Vietnam, in another useless war of a decadent empire.

Despite his documented cowardice, Bush has never hesitated to show himself off in the same Air Force uniform worn by those who never returned from the conflict.  

Just like now he is resolutely maintaining more than 150,000 young soldiers in Iraq. More than 3,800 have already died in this war of occupation and thousands have been mutilated… as have one million-plus Iraqis, victims of the lessons in ‘democracy’ of this Texan cowboy who was so afraid of war.

Bush aide has denial down pat

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Allegations of torture dismissed

Sheldon Alberts

Say this much for Dana Perino, the White House press secretary — she faced the braying media hounds yesterday with her talking points down pat.

“The policy of the United States is not to torture,” she told reporters at the daily press briefing.

Then again, a moment later, “I will reiterate to you once again that we do not torture.”

And finally, for good measure, “The bottom line is that we do not use torture.”

Seven times in all, the spokeswoman for U.S. President George W. Bush denied her boss was the fingernail-pulling, waterboarding bad guy The New York Times made him out to be in yesterday’s editions. It was tough work.

Her semantic gymnastics aside, Perino confirmed the existence of a secret February, 2005, memo approved by then-attorney-general Alberto Gonzales that gave a green light to the toughest interrogation tactics in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The memo, signed just after Gonzales took control of the Justice Department, explicitly authorized the use of head-slapping, simulated drowning and exposure to frigid temperatures against detainees, sometimes in rapid succession.

According to a front-page story in the Times, he did so against the specific objections of his then-deputy, James Comey, who warned colleagues they would be “ashamed” if the details became public.

Not only did Gonzales ram the memo down the throats of concerned Justice Department employees, he did so less than two months after they had publicly forsaken torture as “abhorrent” and contrary to U.S. law.

The Bush administration has been playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Congress over acceptable methods of interrogation since the 9/11 terror attacks.

Bush has said Geneva conventions prohibiting the mutilation, cruel treatment and torture of detainees do not apply to al-Qaeda members.

Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel seemed to agree. In a 2002 memo to Gonzales, then White House counsel, it claimed Bush was not bound by federal anti-torture laws and argued that anyone using tactics authorized by the President could not be prosecuted.

Moreover, the memo argued cruel and degrading treatment was not illegal so long as it did not produce physical pain equivalent to organ failure or death or mental pain causing lasting psychological damage.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal triggered a marked shift in public — and congressional — opinion. In 2005, U.S. lawmakers passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which explicitly banned “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners.

Word of the new memo is significant because critics say it reveals a deliberate Justice Department attempt to sidestep the congressional legislation.

Even before the Detainee Treatment Act was passed, officials there were looking for a way out by contending none of the approved CIA tactics violated provisions in the law.

“It appears that under attorney-general Gonzales, [officials at the Justice Department] reversed themselves and reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret,” said Patrick Leahy, the Democratic senator who is chairman of the Senate judiciary committee.

Brian Roerhkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, denied any clandestine attempt to bypass broader prohibitions against torture.

“Neither attorney-general Alberto Gonzales nor anyone else within the department modified or withdrew that opinion,” he said.

But the Justice Department and the White House are treading in murky water here. Is there a difference between “waterboarding” — pouring water over the hooded head of a prisoner –and the “simulated drowning” authorized in the classified memo?

Perino declined to offer details of what that particular tactic entailed. “What I can tell you is that any procedures that they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful,” she said.

 

© National Post 2007

PETER HITCHENS: North Korea, the last great Marxist bastion, is a real-life Truman show

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A rare and remarkable dispatch from inside the secret world of Kim Il Sung

Last week’s summit between the leaders of North and South Korea was hailed as a step towards world peace because North Korea is portrayed as a member of the “Axis of Evil” with plans to develop nuclear weapons.

But, as Peter Hitchens found when he evaded the Marxist state’s ban on foreign journalists, it is a nation to be pitied rather than feared…

Insider’s view: Peter Hitchens saw a sinister country verging on collapse

If this is a showcase, then what can it be like in the parts they do not want us to see? North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, is closed to all but the most favoured citizens. Only friends of the regime may live here.

Yet in this citadel of privilege, every face I see is thin, every belt tight, every garment worn and faded, every child and adult under-sized, most windows unlit.

For the ordinary poor, who cannot even leave their towns without a permit, Pyongyang is almost as inaccessible as New York or Paris. How thin and ragged are they?

Those considered unreliable must live out their chilly, pinched lives amid the dreary spoil-heaps and miserable townships of the coalfields. How wretched can they possibly be?

As for those who offend the regime, a chain of labour camps, stretching from Yongchon on the west coast to Onsong in the far north east, is hidden in the northern mountains, where no foreigner penetrates and where people die of hunger and despair, unrecorded.

I am not sure how we can live our prosperous lives, knowing these wretches exist. Here in the alleged paradise city of Pyongyang, the buildings are blistered and stained, the paint faded and cracked. Except for a few main processional ways — and even here there are signs of decay — the shabbiness and gloom are overwhelming.

At dusk, when a normal city would begin to sparkle, an almost total darkness falls in the long interval before the first lights come on.

Later, when the government considers bedtime has arrived, the power is cut off from a million homes, whose occupants will be wakened at 5am by plonky music leaking from loudspeakers, and ordered to work by a siren at 7am, every day but Sunday (and sometimes even then).

Now, in the early evening, silence is almost complete. I can hear a drunken man singing from what feels like half a mile away. Yet we are at the heart of a city of perhaps three million people.

And the lights, when they do come on, are so feeble that I am suddenly reminded — poignantly — of the austere British townscapes of my own childhood in the early Fifties.

Except that even they were never as austere as this. Nor were they sinister and mad, as this place is.

North KoreaEmpty gesture: A glamorous police officer directs almost non-existent traffic

If all politics is a sort of mental illness that gets worse as the politicians’ power increases, then this is the locked ward where absolute power has brought absolute insanity.

Brooding over the deranged cityscape is the ugliest building in the universe, a 1,000ft pyramid, already a ruin though it has never been finished and never will be, perhaps because the money has run out, perhaps because it is so jerry-built that nobody would ever have dared stay in it.

Official guides pretend not to notice it though it is by far the tallest structure in Pyongyang.

This symbol of overweening ambition is by a strange coincidence the exact shape and size of the Ministry of Truth, the chief source of official lies in George Orwell’s prophecy of just such a state, and just such a city, in 1984.

It is almost as if North Korea’s rulers have taken Orwell’s novel as a handbook rather than a warning.

But where Orwell’s ministry was a glittering white, the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel is a dingy dun-brown, its hundreds of glassless windows like sockets gazing at what its maker, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, has wrought.

And what he has wrought is hopeless failure, a long, grim joke that has yet to reach its punchline.

Kim’s city is the capital of a state that is far more of a danger to its own people than it is to the rest of the world.

It may be — I think the evidence is sketchy — that North Korea has a nuclear bomb. What is certain is that it has almost nothing else.

It cannot any longer even fake success at its very heart. Its great propaganda festival, the Arirang Games where thousands of young Koreans create vast pictures with eerily synchronised movements, is a pathetic remnant.

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North KoreaStalin meets Disney: The Arirang Games often descended into farce

It is the only show I have ever been to where the cast is far bigger than the audience. The colossal May Day Stadium was three-quarters empty the night I went.

The performance, in which Joseph Stalin meets Walt Disney, was less confidently militaristic than in past times and most of the “soldiers and sailors” were attractive young women in pert skirts, none looking very menacing.

Sometimes it descended into circus, with platoons of dancing children dressed as boiled eggs, and a motorbike on a tightrope.

Every machine in the country is close to breakdown. This even affects parts of the system that are on show.

I was there as a tourist, arriving in a Soviet-built Tupolev from the age of Yuri Gagarin, which shuddered and strained into the sky and was prudently kept clear of terminal buildings at the Chinese airport from which I began my journey.

My tour bus failed (its fuel tank sprang a leak that the driver tried to plug with chewing gum) on the way to a museum of gifts given to Kim Il Sung.

Our guide pedalled off for help on a borrowed bike but the bus that eventually rescued us also breathed its last, forcing us to walk the final few hundred yards to an unscheduled break for lunch.

We never arrived at the museum.

While the first bus was broken down, we were prevented from moving more than a few yards away from it — probably because we would then have been able to look closely at the nearby lorryload of runt-sized troops, part of the supposedly fearsome North Korean army.

The weapons they carried were ancient, probably more dangerous to their users than to their targets.

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North KoreaCasting a shadow: Peter walks alongside the immense bronze statue of the country’s Great Leader Kim II Sung

Enlarge the image

Vehicles everywhere were decrepit, clothes shabby and faded from much washing, in the greys, browns and greens that dominated our streets in the years before cheap and colourful fabrics.

I never saw anyone in jeans or a baseball cap.

The soldiers looked universally undersized and underfed, usually with prominent cheekbones. And the ‘military-first’ policy means that they get better food supplies than most civilians.

How do the ordinary people fare? We cannot tell.

But here is one possibility. Some years ago, the leading American expert on North Korea, Bradley Martin, had an accidental and obviously unintended glimpse, in a remote district, of a train bearing ordinary North Koreans: “They were a ghastly sight.

“Their clothing was ragged and filthy, their faces darkened with what I presumed to be either mud or skin discolourations resulting from pellagra. There was no glass in the windows of their train.”

Yet much of the country is hauntingly lovely, willow-fringed fields in which peasants stagger under heavy sheaves, villages that are picturesque from a distance but squalid at closer quarters.

This month the roads are lined with flowers growing riotously in the verges, a hint that beneath the weight of despotism, Koreans seek freedom in ordinary things.

One of my five days in the country was a public holiday, an ancient festival of ancestor worship too powerful to be suppressed, when the whole country went picnicking in hilltop country graveyards.

But on a working day, in a 200-mile drive, I saw just two tractors in operation in the fields — probably because there is no fuel for them.

In five days of travelling by road, I saw miles of electrified railway, but only four moving trains, and they were rolling slowly and hauled by diesel locomotives, suggesting the current is erratic or just switched off.

My allegedly luxury hotel in Pyongyang had its power cut off each morning as soon as the tour parties had set off on their various pilgrimages to the many shrines of the Great Leader.

Sometimes it was if we were witnessing a sort of Truman Show, in which even the casual passers-by might easily have been rehearsed actors pretending to be real people.

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History lesson: A North Korean officer gives Pyongyang’s version of the Korean War. The conference chamber is where representatives of the North and South sometimes meet

A promised visit to Pyongyang’s underground railway consisted of a trip between two stations, during which ordinary travellers were cleared from our carriage.

Many passengers stared at us with shock that we were there at all. Even in Pyongyang, a foreigner is an event.

As we descended the immensely deep escalators, a party of women on the upward staircase were singing a song about how they couldn’t manage without their Dear Leader.

A similar hymn drifted from the loudspeakers.

Genuine? Accidental? Or staged?

But not everything could be arranged or controlled. A number of incidents lifted the veil without meaning to.

Richard Jones, the intrepid photographer who accompanied me, raised his camera towards an ancient, 5ft gentleman in a Mao cap, trimming the grass on a Pyongyang boulevard.

The old man, possibly a veteran of the Korean War, snarled and raised his sickle as if to strike.

Having been taught from childhood that Westerners are wolves in human form, he intended to defend the fatherland against the imperialist spy.

On another occasion, we arrived at our pre-booked restaurant to find a drunk — or possibly a corpse — sprawled outside.

Seeing us approaching, loyal citizens immediately formed a human barrier to shield the sight from alien eyes.

The trouble is, even if everything we saw was what we were meant to see, the impression given is of a society in an advanced stage of decomposition, held together by a fragile web of lies.

The cult of the Great Leader is much like that of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito before 1945.

In fact it is probably modelled on it, since all Korea was under Japanese rule until 1945 and the people were compelled to worship the emperor as a god.

But it has other elements, too. Confucianism demands respect for ancestors, perhaps the origin of the red-and-white obelisks in every town proclaiming that the Great Leader is “always with us”.

But there may be other roots for this. Kim Il Sung as a teenager played the organ in his father’s Protestant church and seems to have liked it. When American soldiers captured his offices in the Korean War, they found a sizeable organ, of all things, installed there.

Kim was bored by Christianity, preferring (by his own account) to go fishing than to church. But he was paying attention, and many have wondered if the worship of father and son — Kim Il Sung and present leader Kim Jong Il — is a blasphemous copy of Christianity.

In any case, it seems to work. As we barrelled down the long, straight, empty motorway that leads to the closed border with South Korea, our guide asked merrily if we knew how the Korean War had started.

I said, cautiously, that our imperialist history books said that it had been started by the North.

The poor man’s face fell as if I had wounded him. It is an essential part of North Korea’s founding myth that the war was started by the Americans and the South.

Even a mention of any other version of history upset him, an intelligent person with a sense of humour, judging by his behaviour the rest of the time.

He took it as a British person of my generation might take a claim that Britain was the aggressor in 1939.

It was to avoid upsetting or scandalising him that I later made a shameful obeisance to the Kim Il Sung image, laying flowers and offering a perfunctory bow.

I feared that if I didn’t, I would be treading on a real, living personal faith, not just showing disrespect to a cold, dead cult.

And I think I was correct in this judgment. For this really is — as Eastern Europe and Russia never were — a wholly closed country where a large majority more or less believe the state propaganda.

East Germany tried to stop its people watching West German TV, but abandoned the effort because it was just too difficult.

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North KoreaShow and tell: A mural proclaims the country’s determination to resist western ‘imperialism’

Powerful transmitters — the BBC, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe — broadcast to Russia and her empire so successfully that in Prague in the Seventies people would come up to me in trams to pass on their thanks for the existence of the BBC Czech service.

But not here. Every radio and television has its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only North Korean signals.

Inspectors visit frequently to check that nobody has tampered with this mental barricade. And, while a few brave souls defy this (resoldering the dials when an inspection is due), most are too frightened, or so loyal, that it would never occur to them to do so.

In Cold War days South Korea used to float radios across the border on balloons, but few dared use them even when they got through.

There is no internet access here for ordinary beings. On a trip round a vast “people’s study centre”, we were shown North Koreans supposedly working at computers.

But when one of us tried to reach the Google search site, he could get nowhere. The screens had no link to the outside world.

A librarian boasted of her stock of English-language books but, asked if she had a copy of 1984, had plainly never heard of it.

A supposed economics expert, likewise, did not seem to have heard of the free-market economist Milton Friedman — and there was much consternation among the guides when I asked about these things.

North Koreans live under a thick blanket of darkness, with a hopelessly distorted or restricted picture of the outside world.

They have never seen pictures of the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre.

They are vaguely aware of The Beatles (I was proudly offered the chance to listen to a rare tape of Ob La Di, Ob La Da in the People’s Study Hall).

One of my guides claimed to have heard of The Rolling Stones, but couldn’t name any of their songs.

It is easy to understand why North Korea does not want “I can’t get no satisfaction” echoing round its darkened avenues.

But this skewed, half-blind view of the world has its serious side. It is a judicious mix of truth and outrageous lies.

Heaven knows what is taught in schools (we were not allowed near any) but the authorities have produced an English-language version of a propaganda pamphlet called US — The Empire Of Terrorism, which is the local answer to American accusations that North Korea sponsors terrorist groups, and to George W. Bush’s accusation that North Korea belonged to an ‘Axis of Evil’.

Some of its charges against America are truthful. But these are mingled with unhinged fantasies and lies.

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North KoreaOn message: This mural praises the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. His cult is a sort of national religion and many seem to be genuine believers

After a relatively factual attack on the United States’ treatment of the Native Americans, and on seizure of Mexican territory, the pamphlet declares: “In April 1968, the US administration organised the assassination of Martin Luther King, a black Baptist leader who advocated freedom and equality of the blacks.

“Enraged by this, the blacks rose in a revolt that swept across 46 cities simultaneously. It was an act in self-defence. However, the administration retaliated by going on a spree of white terror…

“Black survivors of white hooliganism and terror are now confined to Detroit, Appalachia and the delta of southern Mississippi, where they live a dispirited life. For fear of racist terrorism, the 22million black population hesitate to go to schools, theatres, restaurants and even public lavatories…”

I am not making up this rubbish, nor did anyone try to conceal it from me.

The bookstall attendant, in a pleasant mountain resort, who sold it to me (for $1) was delighted by my purchase.

One of Pyongyang’s unexpected treasures is an American warship, the spy vessel USS Pueblo, which is moored as a trophy on the Taedong River, and is perhaps the last place on Earth where the Cold War is kept alive.

It is extraordinary to walk into the most secret rooms of this ship, where the ultimate espionage technology of 40 years ago is on open display (including decoding machines marked ‘NOFORN’, which means that their products could not be shared with the British MI6).

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North KoreaDaily struggle: Grinding poverty is the reality for all apart from the ruling elite

It still looks surprisingly modern.

An angry propaganda video records the ship’s capture in January 1968, and the dismal humiliation of her captain and crew in an incident rather similar to (but much nastier than) Britain’s recent experience in the Persian Gulf.

If only, the North Korean government must wish, the Cold War could be brought back. As a Soviet ally, Pyongyang received the aid that allowed it to build this concrete show city and sustain its unyielding regime with food for the loyal and brute force for the rebellious.

Now the concrete crumbles and there is no money for food or bullets. North Korea, desperate and destitute, is accused of everything from drug-running and money-laundering to forging dollar bills to stay alive.

It reluctantly seeks food aid from the outside (and gives most of it to friends of the regime).

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North KoreaMuch more typical of real life than the grandiose Metro shown proudly to visitors

Last October’s supposed nuclear blast (which experts still dispute) may well have been the leadership’s infuriated response to the freezing of its accounts in a Macau bank, accounts allegedly used to buy luxuries for the loyal elite who dwell behind police barriers in tree-shaded Changgwang Street near the old Soviet Embassy, venturing out in black 4x4s with tinted windows.

Certainly the unfreezing of these accounts has been a key part of the talks that reopened after the bomb went off.

Here, too, is “office Building No 15”, headquarters of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il who took over from his father in 1994.

The younger Kim, short, podgy and unimpressive, has spoken in public only once and has been careful not to usurp too much of his father’s prestige.

The old man was, after all, a guerrilla leader in the war against the Japanese and is revered by older citizens who remember their country rising out of the flattened ruins of the Korean War before it was surpassed economically by the capitalist south.

Much effort was devoted to keeping him alive, for fear that his successors would fail to maintain his magical hold over the people.

Doctors at the Kim Il Sung Institute of Health and Longevity prescribed a special diet of extra-long dog penises (minimum length 2.8in) to keep the Great Leader well.

Maybe it was this regime that kept him going until he was 82, perhaps helped by the “Happy Corps” and the “Satisfaction Corps” of attractive young women recruited to serve in the chain of secret palaces and mansions inhabited by Kim Il Sung and his far-less-impressive son and heir, Kim Jong Il. Female beauty is a passport to preferment in North Korea.

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North KoreaCult viewing: Throughout the country, images of the benign leadership are pressed home

The Dear Leader is still rumoured to choose Pyongyang’s famously attractive traffic policewomen who, clad in fetching uniforms, control the sparse traffic with strangely provocative robotic gestures.

But the succession, a laughable breach of Marxist dogma, surely cannot go any further. The Younger Kim was 65 in February and is said to suffer from diabetes and to have recently undergone unnamed major surgery.

He looked unwell when he appeared in public for Tuesday’s summit with the South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun. His eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, is an unlikely heir, though he is already 36 and was educated in Switzerland and China. Inconveniently, he was caught in 2001 travelling to Japan on a false Dominican Republic passport, with two women (neither of them his wife) and a suitcase full of cash.

The passport was in the name Pang Xiong, Chinese for “fat bear”, a name that rather suits him.

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North KoreaThe same shape and size as the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, the 1,000ft tall PyongYang hotel looms, unfinished and crumbling, over Pyongyong

The world needs to work out — quickly — how this murderous black comedy can be brought to an end that is not too painful. The obvious answer would be reunification with South Korea.

But South Korea and North Korea alike are terrified by the example of Germany, where unity devastated the East and nearly bankrupted the West.

It also left the old East German elite jobless and humiliated, and pursued by the courts.

Economic experts believe a merger of the two Koreas would ruin the South. As for the Dear Leader, he presumably thinks it safer to cling on than risk being strung up like Saddam, locked up like Slobodan Milosevic or hounded to death like Augusto Pinochet.

North Korea’s new version of nuclear blackmail is just that, crude extortion by people who have no honest way of supporting themselves.

Give us aid and money, they demand, or we may do something terrible. If they do fulfil their threats, it is hard to know who will be most badly hurt.

Pyongyang’s Taepodong rockets are wildly unreliable and as likely to fall into the sea or strike the wrong country as to hit their intended targets.

Their nuclear technology is crude and possibly faked.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of emaciated North Koreans are fleeing across the Chinese border or working abroad.

The long-hidden truth about the outside world filters back from them to their friends and families.

And the Dear Leader and his loyalists have no idea how they can secure the succession of the world’s first Marxist-Leninist hereditary monarchy, a problem that looks rather urgent.

Quite soon, it will have to be admitted that neither Kim Il Sung nor Kim Jong Il are the godlike beings they are made out to be.

Quite soon, the entombed, defrauded North Koreans will realise their fatherland is not a great power and that it is bankrupt and backward.

It will be a hard moment for them and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It is our responsibility to try to see that there is nothing worse.

Pretending that North Korea is a terrifying great power, when it is in truth a crippled nation stranded between two worlds by the end of the Cold War, and made increasingly irrational by poverty and pain, will not help.

It is a country to be pitied rather than feared.

Will A False Flag Be Pinned On Iran?

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By Justin Walker

I’ve just seen David Cameron’s impressive speech – impressive not by the content but by the way he delivered it. However, we will know next week if Cameron has bought himself extra time and prevented a General Election campaign from being called.

But if an election is called, the chances of a false flag operation the size of 9/11 will have gone up dramatically because Gordon Brown, being a NWO/Illuminati stooge with knowledge of the much bigger game plan, will know that if such an attack were to take place during the election campaign, his ‘Churchillian’ presbyterian no nonsense gravitas approach (as he has already displayed with the Foot and Mouth and the ‘botched’ London/Glasgow ‘terrorist’ attacks) would ensure him a sizeable majority, given to him by the gullible electorate in need of ‘leadership’. With such a majority, and with the prevailing climate of fear, he will force through ID Cards and other draconian security measures as well as Britain’s surrender to the EU and the Euro.

It is looking increasingly likely that by the end of this month some sort of false flag op will occur that will justify an immediate attack on Iran. Over the past few days we have had neocons like John Bolton talking up the need of a regime change in Iran and we know that a ‘cover’ anti terrorism exercise, Vigilant Shield ’08 is taking place between October 15th and the 20th, involving not only the US but Britain, Canada and Australia as well. We also know that the US, NATO and Israel have deployed nukes which can be used against Iran if necessary.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6918

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article255 8296.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/30/wiran2 30.xml

What may happen could be an ‘attack’ on a ‘vulnerable’ US carrier in the Persian Gulf area, a ‘dirty’ bomb or even a small nuclear device in an American city, or a ‘clever’ attack on a major but vulnerable piece of infrastructure which will fill the civilian population with fear (water resevoirs etc.). It could even be a surprise attack by Israel, which has been mooted for some time, on Iran’s nuclear installations. It is certainly worrying that the Russians have suddenly pulled out their staff from the Bushehr nuclear reactor in the last week. They obviously know something.

Of course, a sudden war with Iran would also probably speed up the demise of the US Dollar as oil producing countries, disgusted by America’s bully boy behaviour, switch to other currencies to buy and sell oil. The ‘Amero’ is waiting in the wings as is the proposed North American Union. The Hidden Hand is behind with its agenda and ‘Problem, Reaction, Solution’ events must happen soon if their schedule towards world domination is to be maintained.

We will find out next week if Mr Brown will be playing his part. I just hope I’m wrong again!

Ultimate Video WMD Lies From Bush

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Ultimate Video WMD Lies From Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell to Sell Attacking Iraq …is Iran Next?

Thanks to Jim Gregorich for submitting this video. And now for an old favorite:

http://salonesoterica.wordpress.com/category/911/

Measuring BBC bias reporting‏

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Not a sheep

I blogged yesterday about the blatant bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Labour and Conservative party conferences. In amongst that article was the following analysis of the BBC news “reaction to” each of the speeches, I think this worth highlighting and expanding upon.

Here are the links to the BBC reaction to the three main party leaders’ speeches for Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Menzies Campbell.
As you can see, the reaction to Gordon Brown comprises 5 Labour MPs, 6 Union Leaders, a representative each from Greenpeace and CND but no opposition MPs and just 3 of those reactions were in any way less than completely positive about the speech. The reaction to David Cameron’s speech comprises 3 Conservative MPs, 3 Labour MPs, representatives of Greenpeace, the Green Party, Greenpeace, the SNP, IPSOS MORI, 2 Conservative bloggers and 1 Lib Dem blogger and 8 of the reactions were negative about the speech. The reaction to Menzies Campbell comprised of 6 entirely positive comments from Liberal Democrats.

Even the lines that introduce the reactions are interestingly constructed:

“Union leaders, ministers and delegates give their reaction to Gordon Brown’s first speech to Labour’s annual conference as prime minister”
Gordon Brown’s speech requires only reactions and they will be almost entirely positive.

“Politicians give their verdict on David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool”
David Cameron’s speech requires verdicts and the BBC will make sure that the verdicts are balanced.

“Lib Dem delegates give their opinions on Sir Menzies Campbell’s closing speech to their annual conference”
Menzies Campbell’s speech is only of interest to Lib Dems so we will only ask them.

The BBC just do not care any more, the bias is blatant. Either it is directed by the Labour Government or the bias is institutionalised.

Democrats Want to See Torture Memo

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 By LARA JAKES JORDANAssociated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – House Democrats demanded Thursday to see two secret memos that reportedly authorize painful interrogation tactics against terror suspects – despite the Bush administration’s insistence that it has not violated U.S. anti-torture laws.

White House and Justice Department press officers said legal opinions written in 2005 did not reverse an administration policy issued in 2004 that publicly renounced torture as “abhorrent.”

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., promised a congressional inquiry into the two Justice Department legal opinions that reportedly explicitly authorized the use of painful and psychological tactics on terrorism suspects.

“Both the alleged content of these opinions and the fact that they have been kept secret from Congress are extremely troubling, especially in light of the department’s 2004 withdrawal of an earlier opinion similarly approving such methods,” Conyers, D-Mich., and fellow House Judiciary member Nadler wrote in a letter Thursday. Their letter to Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler requested copies of the memos.

The two Democrats also asked that Steven Bradbury, the Justice Department’s acting chief of legal counsel, “be made available for prompt committee hearings.”

The memos were disclosed in Thursday’s editions of The New York Times, which reported that the first 2005 legal opinion authorized the use of head slaps, freezing temperatures and simulated drownings, known as waterboarding, while interrogating terror suspects, and was issued shortly after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took over the Justice Department.

That secret opinion, which explicitly allowed using the painful methods in combination, came months after a December 2004 opinion in which the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” and the administration seemed to back away from claiming authority for such practices.

A second Justice opinion was issued later in 2005, just as Congress was working on an anti-torture bill. That opinion declared that none of the CIA’s interrogation practices would violate the rules in the legislation banning “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees, The Times said, citing interviews with unnamed current and former officials.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said neither of those memos overruled the December 2004 legal opinion that he said remains in effect.

“Neither Attorney General Gonzales nor anyone else within the department modified or withdrew that opinion,” Roehrkasse said in a statement. “Accordingly, any advice that the department would have provided in this area would rely upon, and be fully consistent with, the legal standards articulated in the December 2004 memorandum.”

“This country does not torture,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters. “It is a policy of the United States that we do not torture, and we do not.”

Perino would not comment on whether the 2005 opinions authorized specific interrogation practices, such as head-slapping and simulated drowning. She initially said the first classified opinion was dated Feb. 5, 2005, but White House spokesman Tony Fratto corrected Perino’s statement later Thursday to say the memo was dated months after February 2005. Another administration official later said it was dated May 2005.

The dispute may come down to how the Bush administration defines torture, or whether it allowed U.S. interrogators to interpret anti-torture laws beyond legal limits. CIA spokesman George Little said the agency sought guidance from the Bush administration and Congress to make sure its program to detain and interrogate terror suspects followed U.S. law.

“The program, which has taken account of changes in U.S. law and policy, has produced vital information that has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives,” Little said in a statement. “The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists.”

Congress has prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror suspects. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said several extreme interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, are specifically outlawed.

“As some may recall, there was at the time a debate over the way in which the administration was likely to interpret these prohibitions,” McCain said in a statement. McCain added that he was “personally assured by administration officials that at least one of the techniques allegedly used in the past, waterboarding, was prohibited under the new law.”

The American Civil Liberties Union called for an independent counsel to investigate the Justice Department’s torture opinions, calling the memos “a cynical attempt to shield interrogators from criminal liability and to perpetuate the administration’s unlawful interrogation practices.”

The issue quickly hit the presidential campaign trail.

“The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security,” Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said in a statement.

The 2005 opinions approved by Gonzales remain in effect despite efforts by Congress and the courts to limit interrogation practices used by the government in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Gonzales resigned last month under withering criticism from congressional Democrats and a loss of support among members of his own party.

The authorizations came after the withdrawal of an earlier classified Justice opinion, issued in 2002, that had allowed certain aggressive interrogation practices so long as they stopped short of producing pain equivalent to experiencing organ failure or death. That controversial memo was withdrawn in June 2004.

^—

Associated Press reporters Deb Riechmann and Pamela Hess contributed to this report.

Mercury poison in vaccine, Aids and bugs in blood, white collar crimes go unpunished

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The Canadian Press

Toronto – Activists and lawyers for victims of the worst public-health disaster in Canadian history lashed out in anger Monday after an Ontario judge acquitted the former national medical director of the Canadian Red Cross and three other doctors of criminal charges in the tainted-blood scandal.

Critics called it “ludicrous” that the court acquitted Dr. Roger Perrault, 70, along with the three doctors and a New Jersey pharmaceutical company for their alleged roles in the blood scandal that left thousands of Canadians infected with HIV or hepatitis C.

Dr. Perrault’s lawyer, however, called the ruling an “absolute vindication” and a “complete exoneration.”

Dr. Perrault had been facing four charges of criminal negligence causing bodily harm and one charge of common nuisance for allegedly giving hemophilia patients an HIV-infected blood-clotting product in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Noella Baker, whose husband died of a blood transfusion, holds back her emotions after the verdict in the tainted blood case was handed down Monday in Toronto. 

Noella Baker, whose husband died of a blood transfusion, holds back her emotions after the verdict in the tainted blood case was handed down Monday in Toronto.

Also acquitted were Dr. John Furesz and Dr. Donald Wark Boucher, formerly of Canada’s Health Protection Branch, and Dr. Michael Rodell, a former vice-president of New Jersey-based Armour Pharmaceutical.

Armour, which had also been facing charges, was acquitted as well.

“There was no conduct that showed wanton and reckless disregard,” Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto said in delivering her verdict.

“There was no marked departure from the standard of a reasonable person. On the contrary, the conduct examined in detail for over one-and-a-half years confirms reasonable, responsible and professional actions and responses during a difficult time.”

Silence fell over the courtroom as Judge Benotto delivered the acquittals.

“The events here were tragic,” she said. “However, to assign blame where none exists is to compound the tragedy.”

John Plater of the Canadian Hemophilia Society could barely contain his bewilderment at the verdict.

“We’re going to be reading it carefully to understand how she possibly could have suggested that what they were doing at the time, the decisions they were making, were somehow professional and reasonable,” he said.

“If you, on the one hand, have a study that says there’s a problem, and on the other hand have a study that says maybe there isn’t a problem, any reasonable person takes the product off the market. They didn’t. People were infected, and people died.

“How that could be considered reasonable behaviour is beyond us.”

James Kreppner, a lawyer who contacted both HIV and hepatitis C from tainted blood, shared Mr. Plater’s incredulity.

“I find it distressing,” Mr. Kreppner said, his failing health evident from his gaunt appearance and hunched stance. “To call that professional conduct, you just can’t justify that.”

Dr. Perrault, the three doctors and the drug company all pleaded not guilty. Lawyers for the three doctors alleged the Crown didn’t present enough evidence to prove its case.

“Today’s absolute vindication and (Perrault’s) complete exoneration is something we’ve been hoping for and actually expected,” said Dr. Perrault’s lawyer, Eddie Greenspan.

“A very intelligent, careful trial judge found not one wit of evidence against any of the accused. … The bottom line was there was no criminal conduct by anyone who was in charge.”

The counts of criminal negligence focused specifically on four victims – who cannot be named under a court order – who contracted HIV from tainted blood. Three of them have died.

The victims of common nuisance represented people living in Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba and Alberta.

A second trial for Dr. Perrault is set to begin later this year in Hamilton, where he will face several more criminal charges stemming from allegations that the Red Cross and senior officials failed to take adequate measures to screen donors.

Mike McCarthy, a long-time activist on behalf of victims of the tainted-blood tragedy who himself contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in 1984, said the fight is far from over.

“For hemophiliacs like myself and others and those who have died before, this isn’t the end of the line,” said Mr. McCarthy, who’s now pinning his hopes on the Hamilton trial.

“This is just a bus stop to justice.”

More than 1,000 Canadians became infected with blood-borne HIV, and up to 20,000 others contracted hepatitis C after receiving tainted blood products.

It’s not clear how many people have died as a result, but the death toll was 3,000 as of 1997.

Steven Fletcher, the parliamentary secretary to Health Minister Tony Clement, didn’t comment on the ruling but said the government has done “everything it can in this regard.”

“The victims of tainted blood will start receiving compensation, which varies from the tens of thousands of dollars to $400,000, so the government will be processing those applications as well,” Mr. Fletcher said.

In May 2006, the Canadian Red Cross apologized to tens of thousands of Canadians infected with AIDS or hepatitis C.

In exchange for a guilty plea under the federal Food and Drugs Act, the Crown withdrew charges of criminal negligence causing bodily harm and common nuisance against the charity.

The Red Cross accepted responsibility and said it would pay a $5,000 fine and dedicate $1.5-million to a scholarship fund and research project aimed at reducing medical errors.


In addition prior to 1997 there has been other solutions such as the RIFE machine which uses high voltage and low current frequencies to specifically target unwanted body micro organisms including viruses.

Readers are advised to Goggle search & Google Video search without restrictions,  RIFE machine, BOB BECK & also US patent US5188738 & related patents

see the following Evidence for yourself, you will be amazed –

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2095786730805958061&q=bob+beck&total=276&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-234247273689402090&q=bob+beck&total=276&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3807238317495330586&q=RIFE&total=516&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-661201775015095955&q=RIFE&total=516&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

PATENTED Cure for all Viruses & Bacteria patent Feb 23 1993 – US 5188738         (link to the enclosed full patent file please)


useful links:

http://www.rifehealth.com/

http://educate-yourself.org/be/beckelectrifierinfo.shtml

Cancers can be greatly reduced and in some cases cured using B17 Apricot Kernels – see here how the B17 works:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=4312930190281243507&q=world+without+cancer&total=188&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Media propaganda against Iran

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Farsi: “Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”

Translation: “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.

Word by word: Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).

Words not used: Israel, wiped off, wipe out, map, world, Earth, face.

The western phrase, ‘wiped off’ or ‘wiped out’, were not used in the quote, nor was the “state” of Israel. ‘Nagsheh’, the word for map was not there either.

Essential reading:
http://tinyurl.com/348fuk
(orignal unedited article)

must read update:
http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news…

Iranian President Ahmadinejad DID NOT threaten to “wipe Israel off the map.”
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…
“There is no new policy,” Ahmadinejad said. “They created a lot of hue and cry over that.” Ahmadinejad added, “It is clear what we say: Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.i…
http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news…

Experts confirm that Iran’s president did not call for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’. Reports that he did serve to strengthen western hawks.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showartic…

What has been confirmed by human rights groups has also been observed directly by journalists.
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…
Israel Does Target Civilians and Always Has
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…

Fabricated Bellicose Statements
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…

see another video on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN2Jrw…

President Ahmadinejad was talking about the occupying regime which is a form of government. On Feb 20, 2006 Iran’s foreign minister said, “He is talking about the regime.”

President Ahmadinejad also said in his speech that the issue with Palestine would be over “the day that all refugees return to their homes [and] a democratic government elected by the people comes to power.”

In his letter to Bush (see Text of Iranian President’s Letter to President Bush:
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…
), he asks, “are we to understand that allowing the original inhabitants of these lands – inside and outside Palestine – whether they are Christian, Muslim or Jew, to determine their fate, runs contrary to principles of democracy, human rights and the teachings of prophets?”

President Ahmadinejad Calls for Democracy, Free and Fair Elections and a Durable Peace.
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…
Mike Wallace Interviewed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes. At the request of the Iranian President Ahmadinejad, the FULL UNEDITED version was shown on C-SPAN. “The cable public affairs net will air the 60 Minutes edited version, followed by the full 90-minute interview, to give viewers a window on what is left on the cutting room floor.” – John Eggerton — Broadcasting & Cable, 8/11/2006
We can see what they cut out, a call for democracy.

Please read these links, don’t let them trick us into another war:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/2006…
http://representativepress.blogspot.c…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/

See these other videos:
Bush Threats and Actions Risk Accidental War with Iran
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ1REG…

Bush is Ignorant and Extremely Dangerous
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSZXWD…
Above is the video that Viacom/CBS got pulled until I successfully disputed their false copyright claim. It is a VERY important video. Bush is crazy wrong! Look at it and send it to others.
transcript:
Now they are selling a war on Iran. Mainstream media is helping sell another illegal war. The way they do this is mainly by not reporting things or under-reporting things. So important facts don’t reach the majority of the American people.

Most people are are relying on the mainstream media to learn what is going on in the world. Most people rely on TV news and TV news is not telling them what they need to know. Most people don’t hunt around the internet for vital information, most people aren’t learning about Dr. ElBaradi’s recent statements. Dr. ElBaradei is the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and he recently said “we have not seen any undeclared facilities operating in Iran”. Did you know Iran is permitted under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to have facilities for civilian nuclear power? it’s their right. Here is something else the most people are not hearing from the mainstream media: The U.S. is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

You have to watch independent media like Democracy Now to find out what the mainstream media isn’t telling you.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed IAEA is warning no military action should be taken against Iran, and that threats of war are premature and counterproductive.

ElBaradei also said that there are rules on the use of force.
The public needs to hear these statements. People should know that military action against Iran would be a violation of International law. Mainstream media isn’t reporting that. People should know that threats of war against Iran are violations of international law. Mainstream media isn’t reporting that.

Mainstream media is not making this clear to the public.

Questions Raised on Terror Exercise

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The nation is preparing for its biggest terrorism exercise ever later this month when three fictional “dirty bombs” go off and cripple transportation arteries in two major U.S. cities and Guam, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

Yet even as this drill begins, details from the previous national exercise held in 2005 have yet to be publicly released – information that’s supposed to help officials prepare for the next real attack.

House members demanded answers Wednesday, including why the “after-action” report from 2005 hasn’t been made public. Congress has required the exercise since 2000, but has done little in the way of oversight beyond attending the actual events.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, did not get a direct answer to why it has taken the department two years to finish the after-action report.

“I’m just wondering how much of that information you gleaned is actually current enough to move forward with,” Thompson, D-Miss., told Dennis R. Schrader, a preparedness official at the Department of Homeland Security. Wednesday was Schrader’s 45th day on the job at the department, and he did not have most of the answers lawmakers were seeking on the $25 million exercise.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., suggested the department might be hiding something by not releasing the report. “Is it so sensitive because there was a lot of failures in this exercise?” he asked. “You know Katrina wasn’t exactly a home run.”

The fourth Top Officials exercise – dubbed TOPOFF – takes place during the week starting Oct. 15. The program costs about $25 million a year and involves the federal government’s highest officials, such as top people from the Defense and Homeland Security departments.

“The challenge with TOPOFF is not the exercise itself. It’s to move as quickly as possible to remedy what perceives to be the problems that are uncovered,” former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in an interview with AP this week.

Ridge, who launched his own security consulting company on Monday, said he’s a big fan of the TOPOFF exercises. But he said “it’s not acceptable” that the review from the 2005 exercise is still not released publicly.

The House Homeland Security emergency communications, preparedness and response subcommittee was holding a hearing Wednesday on the terrorism exercise program.

This year’s TOPOFF will build on lessons learned from previous exercises, according to the Homeland Security Department, which runs the program. The agency said the Oct. 15-19 exercise would be “the largest and most comprehensive” to date.

According to an internal department briefing of the coming exercise obtained by AP, a dirty bomb will go off at a Cabras power plant in Guam; another dirty bomb will explode on the Steel Bridge in Portland, Ore., impacting major transportation systems, and a third dirty bomb will explode at the intersection of busy routes 101 and 202 near Phoenix.

Local hospitals and law enforcement agencies will be involved in the “attacks” by the dirty bombs, which are conventional explosives that include some radioactive material that would cause contamination over a limited area but not create actual nuclear explosions.

“Lessons learned from the exercise will provide valuable insights to guide future planning for securing the nation against terrorist attacks, disasters and other emergencies,” according to the department’s Web site.

The after action report from TOPOFF 3, which deals with issues that came up in the 2005 exercise, is supposed to identify areas for improvement. That report is still going through internal reviews.

According to a brief summary of the 2005 exercise – marked For Official Use Only, but obtained by AP – problems arose when officials realized the federal government’s law for providing assistance does not cover biological incidents.

The exercise involved a mustard gas attack from an improvised explosive device in Connecticut and the release of the pneumonic plague in New Jersey. This caused certain federal disaster programs to be unavailable to some residents suffering from the attack, according to the summary.

A 2005 Homeland Security inspector general report suggested the department start tracking the lessons learned from these exercises.

And a 2006 White House report on Hurricane Katrina criticized the department for not having a system to address and fix the problems discovered in the TOPOFF exercises.

“The most recent Top Officials (TOPOFF) exercise in April 2005 revealed the federal government’s lack of progress in addressing a number of preparedness deficiencies, many of which had been identified in previous exercises,” according to the White House.

Previously, a more detailed version of lessons-learned from TOPOFF 2, held in 2003 was not released to states for security reasons.

An Open Letter to the US Marine Corps about 9/11

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Major General Smedley Butler, among the most celebrated of all Marines, wrote WAR IS A RACKET, complaining about the abuse of the military for the benefit of corporations. A former USMC artillery officer, who founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, submitted this article to the Marine Corps GAZETTE, which it would not publish. This is a lesson every Marine, even every American, deserves to know about the profit motive driving wars.
Madison, WI (OpEdNews) 12 September 2007 – Smedley Butler didn’t like for the Marine Corps to be abused, and neither do I. Indeed, I can’t think of a more serious issue than whether or not Uncle Sam is taking advantage of us to benefit the profit margins of American corporations, the very charge alleged in his book, War is a Racket. Today those corporations even include Halliburton, whose former CEO is well-positioned to benefit it from the inside as Vice President of the United States. Is there any reason to think that history is repeating itself and the Corps is being abused once again?

The fuse that ignited the conflagrations in Iraq and in Afghanistan was 9/11, which, according to the official account presented in The 9/11 Commission Report, was carried out by 19 Islamic fundamentalists, who hijacked four commercial airliners and outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world in order to commit these atrocities under the control of a man in a cave in Afghanistan. If you don’t want to believe in a conspiracy theory, you had better reject the official account, because it only takes two persons acting in concert to commit an illegal act to qualify as a ‘conspiracy’. This is one.

After resigning my commission as Captain, USMC, in 1966, I earned a Ph.D. in the history and the philosophy of science. I would spend 35 years teaching courses in logic critical thinking, and scientific reasoning. Along the way, I would become deeply involved in research on the assassination of JFK and publish three collections of studies by experts on that case. Then, in 2005, I would found a non-partisan society of students, experts, and scholars devoted to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about 9/11, which is known as Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Our membership includes aeronautical engineers, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, pilots, physicists, and even some philosophers and theologians committed to the truth.

Anyone who doubts the breadth and depth of interest in 9/11 from many professionals should visit http://patriotsquestion911.com, where you can find bio sketches and statements from 110+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials, 200+ Engineers and Architects, 50+ Pilots and Aviation Professionals, 150+ Professors, 180+ Survivors and Family Members, and 90+ Entertainment and Media Professionals. Anyone who tells you that the 9/11 truth movement is a ‘lunatic fringe’ does not know what they are talking about. Check it out for yourself!

If the official account of the events of 9/11 were true, of course, then it should be very difficult or even impossible to disprove it. That would require using biased or manufactured evidence, for example, to create a false impression. It would be very odd if much or most of what we have been told about 9/11 were false. It may come as some surprise, therefore, to learn that members of Scholars, building upon prior research by earlier students of 9/11, have established more than a dozen disproofs of the official government account, the truth of any one of which is enough to show that the government’s account — in one or another of its multiple guises — cannot possibly be correct. Consider the following points:

o The impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes that hit were very similar to those they were designed to withstand, and they continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.

o The melting point of steel at 2,800F is about 1,000F higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800F under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt, which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down.

o Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000F for three or four hours before it would even significantly weaken, where these fires burned too low and too briefly at an average temperature of less than 500F — about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North — to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt.

o If the steel had melted or weakened, the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt, and total demolition that was observed.

o William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the subbasements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a 50-ton hydraulic press and ripping the skin off a fellow worker, a report corroborated by the testimony of more than two dozen other custodians.

o Willie reported that the explosion occurred prior to the airplane’s impact, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross in their “Seismic Proof: 9/11 was an Inside Job”, which demonstrates that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds prior to the airplanes impacts.

o Heavy steel construction buildings like the Twin Towers, built with more than 100,000 tons of steel, are not even capable of “pancake collapse”, which normally only occurs with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in “redundant” welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has pointed out to me.

o The destruction of the Twin Towers in approximately 10 seconds apiece is even faster than free fall with only air resistance, which would have taken at least 12 seconds, which, as Judy Wood, a former professor of mechanical engineering, has emphasized, is an astounding result that would have been impossible without extremely powerful explosives.

o The towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where the floors do not move, a phenomenon that Judy Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the concrete, the official account cannot possibly explain.

o WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM/ET after owner Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to ‘pull it’, displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions, including a complete, abrupt, and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, and so forth, an event so embarrassing to the government it is not even mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report.

o The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44 feet above the ground; the kind and quantity of debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!

o The Pentagon’s own videotape does not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when it was shown on “The O’Reilly Factor”; but at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and visible; it was not, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!

o Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed black box data allegedly from the Pentagon plane and discovered that it contradicts the official account in direction, approach, and altitude: it was 300 feet too high to have taken out the lampposts and 100 feet too high to have hit the building itself.

o The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory — flying at high speed barely above ground level — physically impossible; and if it had come it at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater; but there is no crater and the government has no way out, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!

o If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, then there would have been a debris field of about a city block in size, but in fact the debris is distributed over an area of about eight square miles, which would be explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed as required by the government’s official scenario.

When you stop to think about it, the differences between the temperatures at which these fires burned and the duration of their burning means that it is not even physically possible that the steel weakened, much less melted. And the aerodynamics of flight make it impossible for a Boeing 757 to have taken the official flight path toward the Pentagon. Those of us who have investigated the official account and discovered that it cannot possibly be true, I would suggest, are not conspiracy theorists but conspiracy realists.

Indeed, no steel structure, high rise building ever fell as a result of fire either before 9/11 or after 9/11 — nor, if our research is well-founded, on 9/11. While we cannot rebuild the Twin Towers to conduct experiments, history did that for us. In February 1975, a huge fire broke out on the 11th floor of the North Tower. Its temperatures reached 2,000 degrees and it consumed 2/3 of the floor, including enveloping the core. It burned for three hours. And yet none of the steel had to be replaced.

There are more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly the planes; that their names were not on the passenger manifests; that they were not subject to autopsy; that several have turned up alive and well; that the cell phone calls could not have been made; on and on. You will have heard so many contrary reports through the mass media, however, that I cannot expect you to believe what I am telling you without checking it out. Try http://www.911scholars.org or our new book, The 9/11 Conspiracy, for a start.

Most Americans, including most Marines, are unaware that George W. Bush, in response to a reporter’s question about Saddam Hussein’s connection to 9/11, answered with the single word, ‘Nothing!”’Or that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the administration’s claim that Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaeda and discovered that he was actually tracking down its leaders to incarcerate or even kill them!

Better yet, did you know tha Ed Hass of The Muckraker Report discovered that the FBI’s ‘wanted’ poster for Osama bin Laden did not include any reference to the crimes of 9/11? When he inquired, he was told by Rex Tomb that the reason the FBI’s ‘wanted’ poster for Osama bin Laden did not include any reference to the events of 9/11 is because the FBI has ‘no hard evidence’ that connects him to the events of 9/11.

Our thought is that, if Saddam was not responsible for 9/11 and if Osama was not responsible for 9/11, then exactly who was responsible for the death of 3,000 civilians? We believe it is the highest form of respect to those who died and their survivors to determine how and why they died, which our government has not told us. And, as a former Marine Corps’ officer, I am also motivated by the same concerns that affected Smedley Butler. We are entitled to know the real reasons we are asked to risk our lives. Corporate profits are not enough.

James H. Fetzer
Founder
Scholars for 9/11 Truth

Militarizing US police

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As the US government becomes more aggressive overseas, it’s also developing its military capacity to repress American citizens at home.


http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/163.html

Prince Philip ‘told MI6 to murder Diana and lover’

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By Andrew Vine

SENSATIONAL claims that Princess Diana was murdered on the instructions of the Duke of Edinburgh after she expressed fears of an attempt on her life dominated the opening of the inquest into her death yesterday.

The jury heard allegations that Prince Philip was at the heart of a conspiracy to murder Diana and her lover, Dodi Fayed, after ordering MI6 to prepare a report on them for the Royal Family. The car crash that killed them both in Paris on August 31, 1997 was then engineered, the jury heard.

The claim of murder by Dodi’s father, Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed, was at the heart of coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker’s opening statement to the jury at the inquest at the High Court in London yesterday.

And the jury was told how Diana had expressed fears that she would be the victim of an arranged accident if, as she believed, the Queen abdicated and Prince Charles succeeded to the throne, saying that would create a need to “get rid of her, via some accident in her car such as prepared brake failure”.

The judge told the jury of six women and five men that many had come to believe something “sinister” may lie behind the crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in which Diana, 36, and 42-year-old Dodi were killed with their driver, Henri Paul.

He added that Mr al-Fayed also believes MI6 had been commissioned to write a special report on his family to be presented to the Royal Family.

The judge said: “It is his belief that a decision was taken at that time to kill Diana and Dodi. He places Prince Philip at the heart of the conspiracy, you will have to listen carefully to the witnesses you hear to see whether there is any evidence to support this assertion.”

Mr al-Fayed believes that Diana was carrying Dodi’s child and that they would have announced their engagement on September 1 that year, the day after the crash, but the Royal Family “could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be stepfather to the future King of England”.

He is convinced that Henri Paul was in the pay of MI6 and French secret services, and the crash was caused by a combination of a collision with a mystery white Fiat Uno and a blinding flash from a stun gun deliberately fired. Two official inquiries concluded that Paul had been drinking and lost control of the car whilst driving too fast. But the inquest heard that Diana had written a note to her ex-butler, Paul Burrell, saying Prince Charles wanted her dead so he could marry their nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Diana also claimed Ms Legge-Bourke had undergone an abortion.

The jury was told of a note written by one of Diana’s lawyers, Lord Mishcon, following a meeting at Kensington Palace in October 1995.

In the note, Lord Mishcon said: “Her Royal Highness said that she had been informed by reliable sources whom she did not wish to reveal … that (a) The Queen would be abdicating in April and the Prince of Wales would then assume the throne and (b) efforts would be made if not to get rid of her (be it by some accident in her car such as prepared brake failure or whatever) between now and then.”

Lord Justice Scott Baker also said Mr al-Fayed had claimed Diana had told him she believed her life was in danger.

He said: “Mohamed al-Fayed says during the summer holiday she often told him she would be murdered by the Royal Family.

“She would go up in a helicopter and never come down alive.”

He went on: “It is clear that there are many members of the public who are concerned that something sinister may have caused the collision in which Diana and two others died.

“One of the purposes of the inquest is to investigate the incident thoroughly so that the public suspicion is either dispelled or substantiated.”

He said there would be a “vigorous and searching” investigation of the evidence to find the truth.

Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury: “Most, if not all, of you will remember where you were when you heard about the subsequent death of the Princess of Wales.

“None of you would for a moment have thought that over 10 years later you might be in a jury investigating the events related to that tragic August night.”

The inquest is set to continue for up to six months.

“Capitalism and Freedom” Unmasked

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By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

An era ended November 16, 2006 when economist Milton Friedman died. A torrent of eulogies followed. The Wall Street Journal mourned his loss with the same tribute he credulously used when Ronald Reagan died saying “few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom.” Economist and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called him a hero and “The Great Liberator” in a New York Times op-ed; the UK Financial Times called him “the last of the great economists;” Terence Corcoran, editor of Canada’s National Post, mourned the “free markets” loss of “their last lion;” and Business Week magazine noted the “Death of a Giant” and praised his doctrine that “the best thing government can do is supply the economy with the money it needs and stand aside.”

Rarely had so much praise been given anyone so undeserving in light of the human wreckage his legacy left strewn everywhere. He believed government’s sole function is “to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies….and from our fellow-citizens.” It’s to “preserve law and order (as well as) enforce private contracts, (safeguard private property and) foster competitive markets.” Everything else in public hands is socialism that for free-wheeling market fundamentalists like Friedman is blasphemy. He said markets work best unfettered of rules, regulations, onerous taxes, trade barriers, “entrenched interests” and human interference, and the best government is practically none at all as anything it can do private business does better. Democracy and a government of, by and for the people? Forget it.

He preached public wealth should be in private hands, accumulation of profits unrestrained, corporate taxes abolished, and social services curtailed or ended. He believed “economic freedom is an end to itself….and an indispensable means toward (achieving) political freedom.” He thought state laws requiring certain occupations be licensed (like doctors) a restriction of freedom. He opposed foreign aid, subsidies, import quotas and tariffs as well as drug laws he called a subsidy to organized crime (which it is as well as to CIA and money laundering international banks earning billions from it) and added “we have no right to use force….to prevent (someone) from committing suicide….drinking alcohol or taking drugs,” while saying nothing about major banks and CIA partnering for profit with drug lords.

He favored a constitutional amendment requiring Congress balance the budget because deficits “encourage political irresponsibility.” He claimed taxes were onerous and was “in favor of cutting (them) under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever possible….” and make corporations entirely exempt from them. He opposed the minimum wage, supported a flat tax favoring the rich, and believed everyone should have to buy his or her own medical insurance like any other product or service. Can’t afford it? Too bad. Get sick? Let the market heal you.

He opposed public education, supported school vouchers for privately-run ones, and believed marketplace competition improves performance even though voucher amounts are inadequate and mostly go to schools emphasizing religious education or training. Further, evidence shows teaching quality suffers in for-profit schools except in elitist ones. Most others stress cost-cutting and fewer services for bigger returns on investment.

He ignored the fact that Christian fundamentalist schools harm democracy and violate the constitutional separation of church and state. They also threaten public education’s future that’s been the bedrock of primary and secondary schooling throughout our history until Friedman first proposed vouchers in the 1980s as one of his core free choice objectives.

He was a vocal opponent of trade unions, claimed they were “of little importance (historically in advancing) worker (rights and gains) in the United States,” and ignored clear evidence to the contrary in spite of corrupted union officials who could and should have done more for their rank and file and still don’t. He also claimed “the gains that strong unions win for their members are primarily at the expense of other workers (and believing otherwise) is a fundamental source of misunderstanding.” It all came down to supply and demand for him – “the higher the price of anything, the less….people will….buy.”

Sounds reasonable up to the examples he gave: “Make labor of any kind more expensive and the number of jobs of that kind will be fewer. Make carpenters more expensive, and fewer houses….will be built (and the ones that are will) use materials and methods requiring less carpentry. Raise the wages of airline pilots (and) there will be fewer jobs for them (because) air travel will (cost more and) fewer people will fly.”

Bottom line for Friedman – high union wages harm everyone, including union members. They make consumer products and services more expensive, he believed, notwithstanding the fundamental law of pricing every marketing executive knows but Friedman ignored. It’s to charge what the market will bear, no more or less so, costs aside, prices reflect what buyers will pay, no more.

Friedman also opposed government-run Social Security that he called “The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on Earth” in an article with that title. He described the current system as “an unholy combination of two items: a flat-rate tax on earnings up to a maximum with no exemption and a benefit program that awards subsidies that have….no relation to need (forgetting it’s our most successful poverty-reducing program) but are based on (criteria like) marital status, longevity and recent earnings.”

He wanted it privatized, abhorred the “tyranny of the status quo,” and agreed with Barry Goldwater that it be voluntary which, of course, would kill it. He added it’s “hard to justify requiring 100% of the people to adopt a government-prescribed straitjacket to avoid encouraging a few (many millions, in fact) ‘lower-income individuals to make no provision for their old age deliberately (even though most cannot), knowing they would receive the means-tested amount.’ ” Addressing only eligible retirees, he ignored millions of others getting Social Security benefits. They include disabled workers and spouses and children of deceased, retired or disabled workers. They comprise around 37% of all recipients, are left out of Friedman’s calculation, and would get nothing under a privatized system.

For Friedman, we’re on our own, “free to choose,” but unequally matched against corporate giants and the privileged with their advantages. The rest of us are unequally endowed and governed by the principle, “To each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces,” in a savage world where economic freedom trumps all other kinds. This was right from Friedman’s 1962 laissez-faire manifesto, “Capitalism and Freedom,” that’s long on free market triumphalism and void on its effects on real people.

He opposed social or any market-interfering democracy, an egalitarian society, government providing essential services, workers free from bosses, citizens from dictatorship and countries from colonialism. Instead, he perversely promoted economic freedom as a be-all-and-end-all, limited government, and profit-making as the essence of democracy. He supported unfettered free markets with political debate confined to minor issues unrelated to the distribution of goods and services he wanted left to the free-wheeling marketplace.

This was Friedman’s best of all possible worlds with people in it no different than disposable commodities and government not obligated to fulfill its minimum constitutionally-mandated function as stated in the Preamble and Article I, Section 8. It’s that “The Congress shall have power to….provide….for (the) general welfare of the United States” – the so-called welfare clause Friedman believed conflicted with “capitalism and freedom” and our “freedom to choose” that ranked above the law of the land for him.

The School of Thought in the University of Chicago’s Economics Department

Friedman grew up in New York, got his BA at Rutgers, an MA at the University of Chicago, and his doctorate at Columbia. Surprisingly, he was a Keynesian early on, but Friedrich Hayek’s teachings changed him into a free market fundamentalist who’d become what the Economist called “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century (and) possibly all of it.” He returned to the University of Chicago Economics Department in 1946 and became its charismatic leader on a mission to revolutionize his profession and the world.

The doctrine was simple at its core – unfettered free market pure capitalism works best, and Friedman and his colleagues set out to prove it scientifically in a set of mathematical equations and computer models they developed. They promised that left on their own, markets are magical. They produce the right amount of products and services, at the right prices, by the right number of workers earning the right amount of wages to buy what’s produced. In short, a win-win for everyone….paradise. There was only one problem. It’s voodoo science, sounds good mathematically and doesn’t work. Friedman and his “Chicago Boys, however, believed it did but needed a real life “Chicago School state” to prove it.

He got many, called them models of free market magic, and justified repression believing ends justify means and free choice offered “more room for individual initiative….a private sphere of life (and a greater) chance (authoritarian regimes he supported would in the end make it possible) to return to a democratic society.” He countered his critics claiming “economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom” and that transitional pain was worth it for the free market paradise he promised would emerge. He and his mentor, Friedrich Hayek, called social democracy, collectivism, socialism and welfare state economics the “road to serfdom” producing “bondage and misery” and “coercion rather than freedom.”

It was pure baloney, but who could argue in the face of huge corporate backing, heavy funding and the dominant media in tow calling market fundamentalism the new orthodoxy and repression freedom. On the ground, it was different. The record of Chicago School fundamentalism is in the human wreckage it left everywhere.

The Human Toll of Chicago School Fundamentalism

Every nation Friedman’s ideology touched took pain, but it wasn’t the well-off who suffered, just ordinary working people targeted for profit in pursuit of “economic freedom.” Early on, his dogma was considered quirky, on the margins of mainstream economics, and out of step with the Keynesian post-war golden age of capitalism. It lasted until the 1970s when recession, stagflation and high unemployment changed everything. Keynesian economics was unfairly blamed, and Friedman got his chance to prove government intervention is the problem and unfettered free markets the solution. It was pure nonsense and about as scientific as alchemy, but long ago people thought that worked until they finally understood they couldn’t make gold out of lesser metals.

The First Test Case in Chile

Chile under Augusto Pinochet became Friedman’s first test case to prove what we now know is flimflam. The results were disastrous and Chileans to this day haven’t recovered from the September 11, 1973 coup d’etat and aftermath that ended the most vibrant democracy in the Americas and ushered in Friedman’s magic.

The playbook promised paradise but delivered the junta’s “Caravan of Death,” hyperinflation, the economy contracting 15%, wages cut, unemployment at 20%, labor unionism destroyed, social services gutted, severe poverty, ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure, out-of-control corruption and cronyism, a massive transfer of public resources to private hands, and a repressive military and secret police targeting dissenters with detention, torture and death. It was hell for Chileans but nirvana for the privileged and foreign investors reaping big profits from the masses they took it from. It was just the beginning with Friedman-style “shock treatment” on to the next target.

One of many was Bolivia with predictable results and Friedman unrepentant. Food subsidies were ended, social services gutted, price controls lifted, wages frozen, oil prices hiked 300%, deep government spending cuts imposed, unrestricted imports allowed, and state-owned companies downsized costing hundreds of thousands of jobs before privatizing them.

There was more. Real wages dropped 40%, poverty soared, but a privileged elite got rich. Public anger grew with repression the antidote. Tanks rolled in the streets against striking workers, and police targeted dissenters in union halls, a university and factories. “Freedom” for Friedman was hell for Bolivians. It would soon get worse.

The Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia

The Berlin Wall’s fall should have been a triumph but instead was tragic for Russia’s people. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March, 1985 with political and social change in mind but wasn’t around long enough to lead it. He liberalized the country, introduced elections, and favored a Scandinavian-style social democracy combining free market capitalism with strong social safety net protections. He envisioned “a socialist beacon for all mankind,” an egalitarian society, but never got the chance to build it.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, he was out, Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s president, he supported a corporatist state and adopted Chicago School fundamentalist “shock therapy” masquerading as “reform.” Its former apparatchiks cashed in big along with a new class of “nouveaux billionaires” (called “the oligarchs”) who strip-mined the country’s wealth and shipped it to offshore tax havens. For the Russian people, it was another story. They didn’t know what hit them in what was one of the greatest ever crimes by a government against its own people who still today are crushed by it. The toll was devastating and pandemic:

— 80% of Russian farmers bankrupt;

— about 70,000 state factories closed causing an epidemic of unemployment;

— 74 million Russians (half the population) impoverished; for 37 million of them conditions were desperate, and the country’s underclass remains permanent;

— alcohol, painkilling and hard drug used soared, and HIV/AIDS threatens to become epidemic with a 20-fold increase in infections since 1995; suicides also rose and violent crime as well more than fourfold; and

— Russia’s population is declining by around 700,000 a year; unfettered capitalism has already killed off 10% of it; it’s a startling condemnation of Chicago School orthodoxy and the man who triumphantly spread it in the name of freedom that’s fake, ferocious and fatal.

The Curse of Predatory Capitalism in South Africa

As in Russia, opportunity for progressive change became tragedy under neoliberal Washington Consensus policies far worse than apartheid repression. Nelson Mandela pledged to support black economic empowerment and seemed poised to lead it when ANC candidates swept the 1994 elections and he became president. Instead, political power came at the expense of economic surrender. The former white supremacist government and industrialists secured their wealth and privilege by keeping unfettered capitalism unchanged under harsh shock medicine rules.

It was unforgivable from a man like Mandela with charisma and political capital enough to have prevented it. Instead, he chose not to and brushed off later criticism saying “….for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy.” The toll on his people was horrific:

— double the number of people living in desperate poverty on less than $1 a day from two to four million;

— the unemployment rate doubling to 48% from 1991 – 2002;

— two million South Africans losing their homes while the government built only 1.8 million others;

— nearly one million South Africans evicted from farms in the first decade of ANC rule; as a result, shack dweller population grew by 50%, and in 2006, 25% of South Africans lived in them with no running water or electricity;

— the HIV/AIDS infection rate at about 20%, and the ANC government denies its severity and does little to alleviate it; it’s a major reason why average life expectancy in the country declined 13 years since 1990;

— 40% of schools with no electricity;

— 25% of people with no access to clean water and most with it can’t afford the cost;

— 60% of people with inadequate sanitation, and 40% no telephones.

Freedom for black South Africans came at a high price with political empowerment traded for economic apartheid and no relief in sight for the millions affected. It’s more evidence of Chicago School economics failure and the human wreckage it leaves everywhere.

Free Market Repression in Haiti

Haitians enjoyed a brief interregnum of freedom in the 1990s up to 2004 under Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Rene Preval in his first term. Haitians were only once earlier free when the first ever independent black republic was established January 1, 1804, but it didn’t last.

Freedom again was lost for one of the longest ever oppressed people anywhere. It ended February 29, 2004 when US Marines abducted Aristide, in a shocking middle of the night coup d’etat, and flew him against his will to the Central African Republic. Haiti is small, around three times the size of Los Angeles, with a population around eight million. It has some oil, natural gas and other mineral wealth, but it’s main value is its human resource that corporate giants want as an offshore cheap labor paradise for Wal-Mart’s “Always Low Prices.”

Under President Aristide and Preval in his first term in office, impressive social gains were achieved, but they’re are now lost in the wake of the 2004 coup. Haiti is once again a free market paradise with freedom sacrificed (despite an elected president) and real reforms gutted for the poorest people in the hemisphere:

— thousands of public sector workers were fired;

— many more thousands killed, jailed, disappeared or forced into hiding;

— many thousands of small businesses burned and destroyed as well as homes for large numbers of the poor;

— unemployment and underemployment rampant with up to two-thirds of workers without reliable jobs; destruction of the country’s rural economy an enormous problem with displaced poor people migrating to urban areas but finding no work;

— the lowest public sector employment in the region at less than .7%;

— education and health care greatly deteriorated and mostly provided by NGOs, including church-based ones;

— life expectancy at only 53 years; the death and infant mortality rates the highest in the western hemisphere;

— the World Bank places the country in its bottom rankings with its deficient sanitation systems, poor nutrition, high malnutrition, and inadequate health services;

— the country is the poorest in the hemisphere with 80% of its population living below the poverty line; it’s also the least developed with lack of infrastructure, severe deforestation and heavy soil erosion;

— half its population is “food insecure” and half of all children undersized from malnutrition;

— less than half the population with access to clean drinking water;

— the country ranks last in the hemisphere in health care spending with only 25 doctors and 11 nurses per 100,000 population and most rural areas having no access to health care;

— the highest HIV/AIDS incidence outside Africa;

— the World Bank estimates Haiti’s per capita income at under $450; the prevailing sweatshop wage is around 11 – 12 cents an hour; the official minimum wage is about $1.70 a day (with most Haitians getting less) with no benefits and inadequate help from weak unions;

— restructuring and privatizations, like what’s intended for the state-owned telecommunication company, Teleco, cost thousands of jobs from downsizings;

— human rights repression is severe under a UN paramilitary MINUSTAH occupation masquerading as peacekeepers; they were illegally sent for the first time ever to support and enforce a coup d’etat against a democratically elected president; political killings, kidnappings, disappearances, torture and unlawful arrests and incarcerations are common forms of repression so real Haitian democracy can’t emerge under its elected president, Rene Preval, in his second term; he’s impotent against the power of US-orchestrated plunder under Chicago School fundamentalist rules. Another Friedman legacy of failure, this one close to home.

Free Market Fundamentalist Destruction in Afghanistan

September 11 erased the familiar world, created mass disorientation and regression, and made anything possible under collective shock that didn’t take long to unfold. The “war on terror” was launched in a climate of fear with Afghanistan first targeted. It inaugurated a brave new post-9/11 world. Its horror continues. War rages, its ferocity intense, and no end is in sight for a people and nation journalist John Pilger describes as having been “abused and suffered more (with less help than any other) in living memory.”

War and conquest were planned well in advance with 9/11 the pretext to launch it. It was part of a grand strategic plan to control Central Asia’s vast oil and gas reserves, then on to the grand prize in the Middle East with Iraq its epicenter. It began October 7, 2001, continues, and has now intensified at an enormous cost to the Afghan people who’ve been torn by endless war and internal turmoil for over two decades. The toll is horrific and rising:

— half the population unemployed with no improvement in sight nor is any planned under fundamentalist market rules;

— half the population earning around $200 a year with those in the booming opium trade doing marginally better;

— poverty soared post-invasion, one-fourth or more of the population needs food aid, and regional famine risks remain;

— life expectancy is one of the lowest in the world at 44.5 years;

— the infant mortality is the highest in the world at 161 per 1000 births;

— one-fifth of children die before age five;

— an Afghan woman dies in childbirth every 30 minutes;

— an estimated 500,000 homeless are in Kabul alone including people living in collapsed and unsafe buildings;

— only one-fourth of the population has access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation;

— only one doctor is available per 6000 people and one nurse per 2500 people;

— 100 or more people are killed or wounded by unexploded ordnance each month and rising violence kills many more;

— children are kidnapped, sold into slavery or murdered for their organs bringing high prices in the “free market” where everything is for sale including body parts;

— less than 6% of Afghans have electricity only available sporadically;

— women’s literacy rate is about 19%, conditions for them are very harsh, they’re forced to beg on the streets or turn to prostitution to survive; many must remain veiled;

— schools are burned and teachers beheaded in front of their students;

— basic services don’t exist and essential ones like schools, health clinics and hospitals are in deplorable condition with no aid provided to improve them as all of it goes for profit;

— as in Iraq, occupying forces operate outside the law with impunity that includes the use of indiscriminate force, arbitrary arrests, indefinite detentions and free use of the harshest types of torture unreported in the mainstream;

— under military occupation, democracy in the country is pure fantasy; the puppet president is a caricature of a man and willing US stooge with no support or mandate outside Kabul;

— lawlessness is rampant, war raging, violence increasing, the drug harvest and trafficking uncontrolled, corruption massive, Sharia law reinstated, and life overall intolerable in this free market fundamentalist paradise.

The Epicenter of the “War on Terror” in Iraq for Market Fundamentalist “Freedom”

Iraq has the misfortune of lying at the heart of the oil rich MIddle East where two-thirds of proved reserves are located and the greatest potential amount of them untapped for lack of development. Its potential remained frozen in time the result of intervening wars since 1980, economic sanctions until 2003, and now occupation and conflict for the most sought after real estate on earth and a no-brainer why it was targeted.

At its core, the plan was simple – a bold new experiment to erase a nation and create a new one by invasion, occupation and reconstruction for pillage. It would transform the nation into a fully privatized free market paradise with blank check public funds for profit but none for Iraqis for essential needs, a sustainable economy or critical local infrastructure.

The record of unfettered capitalism is consistent. It leaves mass human wreckage everywhere. In Iraq, it turned a bold new experiment into a horrific disaster:

— an inferno of uncontrolled violence throughout the country with new British O.R.B. independent polling data estimating over 1.2 million Iraqi deaths since March, 2003 on top of about 1.5 million deaths from the Gulf war and economic sanctions in place until the current war; the true toll may be even higher with huge uncounted numbers of daily violent and non-violent deaths that one estimate by Gideon Polya places at 3.9 million from 1990 to the present; no one knows for sure;

— the International Rescue Committee and UNHCR estimating four million displaced Iraqis, including those internally displaced, with 40,000 additional Iraqis fleeing their homes each month; these figures may be conservative with true numbers much higher;

— a near-total breakdown of essential services like electricity, drinking water, sanitation, medical care, education, security and food for many;

— mass unemployment and extreme poverty in what was once “the cradle of civilization” now erased for profit;

— an overall humanitarian disaster of epic proportions that continues to worsen with a July Oxfam International and NCCI network of aid organizations report of other grim findings:

— eight million Iraqis needing emergency aid – one-third of the population;

— four million without enough food;

— 70% of Iraqis with no adequate water supply;

— 80% lack adequate sanitation;

— 28% of children malnourished;

— underweight baby births tripled;

— 92% of Iraqi children with learning problems due to fear; and

— a mass exodus of around 80% of doctors, nurses, teaching staff at schools and hospitals and other vitally needed professionals.

In addition, local Iraqi industry collapsed, kidnapping for ransom is a growth industry, the country is a wasteland, its nation creation project bankrupt, and Iraq today more closely resembles hell than “the cradle of civilization.”

Iraq above all other nations today is a ghoulish testimony to the myth of free market magic, but it’s even worse than that. It proves Friedmanomics a crime against humanity and the man who led it a Nobel prize-winning fraud whose legacy is failure. His real time record is so horrific, it’s unrevealed in the mainstream to suppress it.

It’s endless foreign wars, mass killing and destruction, detentions and torture, contempt for international law, and total disregard for human rights and social justice everywhere. At home, it’s just as bad short of open warfare:

— democracy is a fantasy in a corporatist state placing profits over people;

— the prison-industrial complex is a growth industry;

— social decay is increasing as well as real human need;

— social justice, civil liberties and human rights are non-starters;

— an unprecedented wealth disparity exists in a rigid class society with growing poverty in the richest country in the world that’s also the least caring;

— government is the most secret, intrusive and repressive in our history;

— the rule of law is null and void;

— a cesspool of uncontrolled corruption prevails with no accountability;

— a de facto one party state exists with no checks and balances or separation of powers and a president claiming “unitary executive” powers to do as he pleases and does with impunity;

— suppression of all dissenting ideas and thoughts;

— an out-of-control military-industrial complex bent on world dominance; and

— a mainstream media serving as national thought control police gatekeepers glorifying wars, defiling democracy and supporting imperial conquest and repression.

This is the legacy of the man The Economist called “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century (and) possibly all of it.” Once anointed, well funded and nurtured, he could never admit he was wrong or apologize to millions of victims who proved his ideology was hokum. Never have so many suffered so much to reveal the flimflam of one man and the movement he led until his death. That’s the dark side of “capitalism and freedom” unmasked that his torrent of eulogies left out.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com this Saturday at noon US central time but moving to Mondays at the same time October 8.

European Union – The Grand Experiment

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By Ivan Simic

The European Union (EU) is a multinational union, established in 1993. The
EU is made up of twenty-seven Member States. First, the EU was established
as the European Economic Community in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome and has
since undergone many changes. The EU has a single market between member
states with common trade policy. Important EU institutions and bodies
include the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of
the European Union, the European Court of Justice and the European Central
Bank, among others.

The end of War World II brought the idea for the unification of Europe, now
known as the EU, but some individuals or groups also known as world rulers
needed to conduct an experiment before the formation of an important super
power such as the EU. And soon, they succeeded; the right person for them
was Josip Broz Tito leader of Communist Party and lifetime President of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ). With the Royal family in
exile and a post war atmosphere in Europe, Tito became famous, an ideal
partner for this experiment.

Many will wonder why Yugoslavia? The answer is very simple; besides the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which was too powerful, to play
with, she was the only post war country in Europe with multiethnic and
multicultural population, and Member Republics.

In 1945, from the remains of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; the Democratic
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed, headed by Tito. Tito becomes
Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The experiment begins; one State with six republics, one army, one currency,
one federal police, one federal Government and Law, one passport, no borders
and a visa regime among republics, and most of all: every Republic had their
own Government with all vital institutions. Still, one very important thing
for this experiment was the fact that Yugoslavia had different cultures and
religions among State members, such as: Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim. The
way the population is going to live in these circumstances was essential for
the future of the EU.

In 1948, Tito makes one interesting move, highly motivated; he becomes the
first socialist to defy Stalin’s leadership in COMINFORM also known as
Information Bureau (Inform biro). This move by Tito gains him good positions
with all Western powers, of course his old friends, but bad relations with
the USSR. For good results and loyalty to the West, In London in 1954,
Yugoslavia gets zone B from Free Territories of Trieste by treaty based on
the “Memorandum of Understanding”.

On the other side, with the first results of the experiment, formation of
the future European Union begins with European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC) in 1952. Let us not forget that coal and steel were, and still are,
very important in war and industry. A very important founding member of this
Community was West Germany. A few years later, the Treaties of Rome in 1957
created two more communities: the European Economic Community (EEC) and
European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or EURATOM). The EEC and EAEC later
merge into EEC in 1967.

Strangely, but as previously arranged, Tito is chosen for SFRJ to be free
Eastern European country, independent from the USSR, and neither member of
Warsaw pact nor NATO, but in 1961, Tito puts Yugoslavia to be a founding
member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Membership in NAM did not affect
the experiment since Yugoslavia was the only European country in the
Movement at that time, but it did affect future of Yugoslavia.

Time is running, and in the beginning of eighties, Tito dies, but the
experiment continues. The West needs a few more years before final
announcement of new European Union. Europe is rapidly altering, many
countries have joined EEC.

At the beginning of nineties, Europe is about to change forever. In
Yugoslavia a new government is forming headed by Slobodan Milosevic, the
experiment is about to end, mission is about to be accomplished. World
rulers are entering the final phase before the formation of the EU. With the
USA battling Gulf War in Middle East, in Europe, history has been written;
Germany’s reunification takes place in 1990, followed by; dissolution of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, dissolution of Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, dissolution of Czechoslovakia in
1992, and wide spread fall of communist monopoly.

As planned, the new Europe comes into being in the year 1993, and with no
threats on the way, a new star was born, European Union. Just a few months
after termination of the USSR in which America had a big influence, the USA
got a new rival; the EU. This rival will become more influential and
powerful than any other country or Union in the world, more powerful than
the old USSR.

Two questions arise from this: First, did world rulers decide to put
European Union instead of the USA as a leader of a free world and first
super power? Second, who are those rulers and where were they coming from?

Answer for the first question is yes, they did, and as always, the USA was
used. Second: We will never know who they are, but they are definitely
coming from Germany, they are not Jews as many think, if they were Jews then
they would have had their own State long time ago.

If we turn back and look through European history, Germany was not defeated
as many thought, they played very smart; waited and planned to return
stronger than ever and they did through the EU, as leader and strongest
Member State. Germany was, and still is the Union’s biggest net contributor;
with the biggest economy, she is responsible for about 23% of the EU budget.
Same is with Japan and the USA; it looks like Japan was also not defeated in
the USA-Japan war. Now, Japan is the strongest independent economic and
industrial power on the earth, most Japanese products is represented in the
USA. In contemporary days, power is not measured through weapons, rather
through strongest industry.

Will the EU have an equal rival in the future?

It will; a true rival for the EU will be a future Union with lots of money
and same religion among member States as an advantage (maybe, Union of
Islamic countries?).

However, maybe we are being deceived with the EU; perhaps the EU is just
another world experiment before the launch of another giant global Union.

Mauritanian in Guantanamo ‘abuse’

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Mohamed Lemine Ould Sidi Mohamed (Screen grab from Al-Alam TV)

Mr Mohamed spent more than four years in captivity

A Mauritanian man freed from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay says he suffered “physical and psychological torture” during his years in jail.

Mohamed Lemine Ould Sidi Mohamed spoke to the media as he was welcomed back to his family home by his mother.

He described how US guards forced prisoners to watch them “urinating on the Koran”, AFP news agency reports.

Mr Mohamed was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan. He told AP news agency he had never had any connection to al-Qaeda.

He was released without charge by a US tribunal and arrived back in Mauritania last week where the authorities questioned him for several days.

“Other prisoners, simple innocent Muslims were also tortured, humiliated in their beliefs and their human dignity,” AFP news agency quotes him as saying about his experiences.

“After that [the desecration of the Koran] we decided to no longer take it to our cells and only recited from memory,” he said.

Mr Mohamed, who is reported to be in his mid 20s, told AP news agency that he was “subjected to forced feeding after the hunger strike” demanding “justice or liberty”.

Correspondents say two other Mauritanians remain in custody in Guantanamo Bay alongside more than 300 detainees.

The US set the camp up in 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects captured during the war against the Taleban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7025955.stm

Tories reaffirm anti-ID card stance

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David David opposes ‘expensive white elephant’

Tash Shifrin

Shadow home secretary David Davis restated the Conservatives Party’s plan to scrap the government’s ID card scheme in a speech to the party’s conference in Blackpool yesterday.

“We’ll scrap ID cards, that expensive white elephant. Put some of the early savings into extra prison places,” he told the party faithful.

In February, Davis wrote to ministers and companies expected to bid for the plan, warning that his party would axe the project if it came to power, in an unprecedented move that sparked anger from suppliers. Trade body Intellect said the Tories announcement would cast doubt over the future of other public procurement plans.

But Davis’s conference speech comes as the main parties gear up in anticipation of a possible general election in November, adding extra spice to the Conservatives’ threat.

The party also launched an electronic petition as part of its ‘Bad IDea’ campaign, arguing that ID cards would not prevent terrorist attacks or identity fraud, in an indication that ID cards are seen as a likely election battleground.

It also attacked the cost of the plan, rubbishing government estimates that it would cost £5.4bn and instead citing figures from the London School of Economics that suggest the price tag could reach £20bn.

A campaign statement aimed at voters says: “According to Government estimates, you will pay at least £93 for a combined ID card and passport package but, given this government’s appalling record of implementing IT projects, this figure is likely to go up.”

The party also warned that the ID cards “could hold almost 30 separate pieces of personal information” on individuals.

Record 22C temperatures in Arctic heatwave

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By Steve Connor

Parts of the Arctic have experienced an unprecedented heatwave this summer, with one research station in the Canadian High Arctic recording temperatures above 20C, about 15C higher than the long-term average. The high temperatures were accompanied by a dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice in September to the lowest levels ever recorded, a further indication of how sensitive this region of the world is to global warming. Scientists from Queen’s University in Ontario watched with amazement as their thermometers touched 22C during their July field expedition at the High Arctic camp on Melville Island, usually one of the coldest places in North America.

“This was exceptional for a place where the normal average temperatures are about 5C. This year we frequently recorded daytime temperatures of between 10C and 15C and on some days it went as high as 22C,” said Scott Lamoureux, a professor of geography at Queen’s.

“Even temperatures of 15C are higher than we’d expect and yet we recorded them for between 10 and 12 days during July. We won’t know the August and September recordings until next year when we go back there but it appears the region has continued to be warm through the summer.”

The high temperatures on the island caused catastrophic mudslides as the permafrost on hillsides melted, Professor Lamoureux said. “The landscape was being torn to pieces, literally before our eyes.”

Other parts of the Arctic also experienced higher-than-normal temperatures, which indicate that the wider polar region may have experienced its hottest summer on record, according to Walt Meir of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

“It’s been warm, with temperatures about 3C or 4C above normal for June, July and August, particularly to the north of Siberia where the temperatures have reached between 4C and 5C above average,” Dr Meir said.

Unusually clear skies over the Arctic this summer have caused temperatures to rise. More sunlight has exacerbated the loss of sea ice, which fell to a record low of 4.28 million square kilometres (1.65 million square miles), some 39 per cent below the long-term average for the period 1979 to 2000. Dr Meir said: “While the decline of the ice started out fairly slowly in spring and early summer, it accelerated rapidly in July. By mid-August, we had already shattered all previous records for ice extent.”

An international team of scientists on board the Polar Stern, a research ship operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, also felt the effects of an exceptionally warm Arctic summer. The scientists had anticipated that large areas of the Arctic would be covered by ice with a thickness of about two metres, but found that it had thinned to just one metre.

Instead of breaking through thicker ice at an expected speed of between 1 and 2 knots, the Polar Stern managed to cruise at 6 knots through thin ice and sometimes open water.

“We are in the midst of a phase of dramatic change in the Arctic,” said Ursula Schauer, the chief scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, who was on board the Polar Stern expedition. “The ice cover of the North Polar Sea is dwindling, the ocean and the atmosphere are becoming steadily warmer, the ocean currents are changing,” she said.

One scientist came back from the North Pole and reported that it was raining there, said David Carlson, the director of International Polar Year, the effort to highlight the climate issues of the Arctic and Antarctic. “It makes you wonder whether anyone has ever reported rain at the North Pole before.”

Another team of scientists monitoring the movements of Ayles Ice Island off northern Canada reported that it had broken in two far earlier than expected, a further indication of warmer temperatures. And this summer, for the first time, an American sailing boat managed to traverse the North-west Passage from Nova Scotia to Alaska, a voyage usually made by icebreakers. Never before has a sail-powered vessel managed to get straight through the usually ice-blocked sea passage.

Inhabitants of the region are also noticing a significant change as a result of warmer summers, according to Shari Gearheard, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. “People who live in the region are noticing changes in sea ice. The earlier break-up and later freeze-up affect when and where people can go hunting, as well as safety for travel,” she said.

Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: “We may see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer within our lifetimes. The implications… are disturbing.”

The North-west Passage: an ominous sign

The idea of a North-west Passage was born in 1493, when Pope Alexander VI divided the discovered world between Spain and Portugal, blocking England, France and Holland from a sea route to Asia. As it became clear a passage across Europe was impossible, the ambitious plan was hatched to seek out a route through north-western waters, and nations sent out explorers. When, in the 18th century, James Cook reported that Antarctic icebergs produced fresh water, the view that northern waters were not impossibly frozen was encouraged. In 1776 Cook himself was dispatched by the Admiralty with an Act promising a £20,000 prize, but he failed to push through a route north of Canada. His attempt preceded several British expeditions including a famous Victorian one by Sir John Franklin in 1845. Finally, in 1906 Roald Amundsen led the first trip across the passage to Alaska, and since then a number of fortified ships have followed. On 21 August this year, the North-west Passage was opened to ships not armed with icebreakers for the first time since records began.

MI6 men were in Paris when Diana died

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By Robert Verkaik

 

MI6 agents were operating in Paris at the time of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed, the jury hearing the inquest into their deaths was told yesterday.

The presence of the secret intelligence officers has been used by MohamedAl Fayed to support his allegation that his son and Diana were murdered by MI6 as part of a conspiracy involving the Royal Family. Mr Al Fayed believes MI6 officers used stun guns in the Paris road tunnel on the night of 31 August 1997 to blind the driver of the car carrying Dodi and the princess, causing him to crash into one of the pillars.

Britain’s ambassador to Paris in 1997, Sir Michael Jay, is expected to attend the inquest to deny any links between MI6 and a conspiracy to murder the couple.

The coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, told the jury: “The UK has maintained from the outset that it was entirely unaware of Diana’s presence in Paris.”

He also told the jury that Sir Michael had said no officers working for the security or intelligence services were involved in a conspiracy to cause the death of Diana. But the coroner said it was up to the six women and five men jurors to make their own minds up about the reliability of the evidence relating to the alleged involvement of the British secret intelligence services.

Mr Al Fayed also claims the driver of the Mercedes in which the couple were travelling was an agent working for MI6 and evidence was tampered with to portray him as a drunk driver. This, said the coroner, was one of the 10 parts of Mr Al Fayed’s conspiracy theory.

Lord Justice Scott Baker said CCTV footage of M. Paul working in the Ritz hotel on the night of the crash showed him to be acting soberly although medical evidence later found him to be twice over the UK legal drink driving limit.

French police twice searched M. Paul’s home but found more alcohol on the second visit than they claimed to have found on the first. The coroner said there was “no obvious explanation for this” and told the jury: “You must consider whether there is any sinister implication”.

The judge added: “Members of the jury, you will have to decide if indeed samples analysed came from Henri Paul or whether they came from a completely different person.” He said the CCTV film showed Mr Paul bending down and tying his shoe laces while working at the Ritz. “There is no indication that his movements were affected by alcohol,” he said.

It became clear yesterday that questions of Diana’s supposed pregnancy would become a central theme of the inquests.

Mr Al Fayed alleges that the princess was pregnant and this was covered up by the British Government to avoid causing embarrassment to the Royal Family. He claims an unlawful embalming took place in Paris shortly after her death to hide the fact that Diana was expecting a baby.

The coroner said the allegation was important in the context of the Fayed conspiracy theory because it provided a motive for her murder and an explanation for the embalming. But he said there was “no indication given by Diana” either to her close friends and family or her doctor that she was pregnant. In fact, the coroner said the jury would hear evidence later that showed Princess Diana was taking the contraceptive pill. He also reminded the jury that two Home Office pathologists who had examined the body had found no “physical features” supporting that suggestion.

The coroner said that for an embalming to be lawful under French law, authority was required from a French mayor or from French police as well as a member of the deceased’s family. But in the case of the princess no family member appeared to have given consent. Instead, it appears that a decision was taken in Paris shortly after her death by her private secretary and Paul Burrell, her butler.

He went on: “It is likely the pregnancy is a matter that cannot be proved one way or the other in scientific terms. You will of course consider the scientific evidence such as it is but you will also hear evidence from several sources about what Diana had said to her friends and intimate details of her personal life.”

The coroner said he hoped Mr Burrell would give evidence. He said: “Paul Burrell has made a number of witness statements… I hope that he will come here to give evidence… Paul Burrell, you may think, was in an unrivalled position to know about her and give insight into various aspects of Diana’s life. But I am not going to anticipate what his evidence may be.”

Another matter for the jury to consider – the whereabouts of private letters sent by the Duke of Edinburgh to Diana — was raised by the coroner, who said that, if indeed they had existed, it seemed they were now “missing”. He added that, although Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, was “certain” no such correspondence had existed, Mr Burrell insisted it had. The hearing continues.

How the princess’s final evening with Dodi Fayed was caught on camera

5.40pm: Dodi Fayed is pictured leaving the Ritz hotel to go to choose a ring. Mohamed al-Fayed claims this was to be an engagement ring that his son intended to give the princess on 1 September.

5.50pm: The pictures show him returning to the hotel.

4.00pm: CCTV coverage also captured the mid-afternoon scenes outside the Ritz as the paparazzi begin gathering in the square.

6.53pm: The jury is also shown images of the couple’s aborted attempt to leave the hotel when they fail to shake off the paparazzi.

9.49pm: A distressed-looking princess is seen being chased into the hotel through the revolving doors by members of the press. The couple have a meal at the Ritz restaurant. Afterwards Diana and Dodi return with their bodyguard, Trevor Rees Jones, to the imperial suite.

Today, the jury will be shown pictures of the couple leaving the hotel for the last time.

WANTED – Who killed the anti-war movement?

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By Gabriele Zamparini

After the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington — and in spite of nationalist propaganda of unprecedented levels coming from the warmongers and their bowing and scraping servants in the media — the hopes for a global, really internationalist anti-war movement for peace and justice were very promising. Many objective factors contributed to those hopes: the most despicable American citizen was co-opted to be the White House’s resident by his father’s friends sitting at the Supreme Court; a well known gang of bloodthirsty psychopaths formed his infamous Junta; important parts of the American establishment were critical or very critical of the Bush Junta’s criminal plans and many governments voiced their opposition to those plans, which would bring to the unprecedented 2003 UN tsunami.

Even though the brainwashing for the war of aggression against Afghanistan worked very well, there was a very high and organized opposition in the US and in the UK for the coming war of aggression against Iraq. That opposition was much higher in the rest of the world and possibly for the first time in history, thanks also to the Internet, we experienced a real internationalist movement connected and mobilized against the World’s warlords. On 15 February 2003 millions of people took the streets of the world to denounce their opposition to the mass murderers’ plans; where the United Nations failed, the United Nations’ Peoples claimed their democratic sovereignty: DON’T ATTACK IRAQ — NOT IN OUR NAME.

Four and half years later, the anti-war movement is just a shadow of itself while in Iraq the genocide of a whole People and the annihilation of the whole country is business as usual; the banality of evil in XXI Century flavour.

What happened?

Of course, everybody agrees with Howard Zinn, “there is no magical panacea, only persistence.” But in these past few years the anti-war movement’s establishment has taken all the wrong decisions and the worst directions.

In the US especially, the anti-war planners wanted to go mainstream.

The oldest, most experienced and committed segments of the movements have been isolated because too “old fashioned” and not presentable to the “new friends”, the generous foundations linked to the Democratic Party. Socialism and Marx can’t really be welcomed at fundraising dinners and cocktail parties.

In spite of the many anti-war planners’ claims that the Israel Lobby has no real power to influence the US government’s policies, that Lobby is so very powerful to influence even the anti-war movement from within. The Palestine issue needed to be downplayed and many Palestine’s supporters and campaigners have been marginalized.

That part of the movement who would keep asking questions about the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington (please, note: questions doesn’t mean conspiracy theories) have also been isolated and now whoever dares to question the official truth of those events is labeled as conspiracy nut.

We all rightly criticized that most of the mainstream media journalists have been embedded to the US Army, but at the same time the anti-war movement’s establishment has been in bed with the Democratic Party. In both cases, the show hasn’t been pretty.

Continuously lecturing about democracy, the anti-war movement’s planners have taken the most important decisions in name of the anti-war movement without consulting with anybody, let alone a real democratic process where those guidelines were discussed and chosen or rejected.

While Iraq was being consciously brought into a civil war by the occupation, who decided the support given by the anti-war movement to the infamous political process and the outrageous Welcome given to Maliki?

Who decided the shameful, complete silence of the anti-war movement when the legitimate president of Iraq was being illegally lynched by that scandalous trial and then finally brutally assassinated by those sectarian collaborationists who were also carrying out mass murdering and ethnic cleansing against innocent people? Who decided the almost unanimous support for Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement while its militia, the Mahdi Army, has been carrying out atrocious crimes against humanity? Why has there been such a complicit silence, when not an active defense, toward the notorious Iraq Body Count. Who decided that the anti-war movement couldn’t express sympathy to the Iraqi resistance?

All these and many other important decisions, important also for the anti-war movement’s directions, were taken by a very tiny minority of intellectuals and planners, in the solitude of their Ivory Tower. No open debate was allowed. The result has been a complete catastrophe, when not associating the anti-war movement with ethnic cleansing in Iraq, as in the case of the shocking support to Moqtada al-Sadr and the silence around his murderous Mahdi Army, a support and a silence that still persist, in spite of tons of documents, reports, testimonies, denounces, articles and an ocean of blood. (Just read one of the latest of those documents, the recently published Amnesty International’s report, Iraq: human rights abuses against Palestinian refugees).

The anti-war movement’s elites have barred any open debate on many fundamental questions, imposing to the anti-war movement a direction decided in other quarters and leaving the millions of people with the only choice to take it or to leave it. Millions have left.

Iraq body count: BBC and other mainstream media use misleading figures

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The mainstream media are continuing to use figures provided by the website Iraq Body Count (IBC) to sell the public a number for total post-invasion deaths of Iraqis that is perhaps 5-10% of the true death toll.

As we recently reported, only a handful of media outlets covered a new ORB poll revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since the 2003 invasion. BBC Online provided a rare example:

“A UK-based polling agency, Opinion Research Business (ORB), said it had extrapolated the figure by asking a random sample of 1,461 Iraqi adults how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

“The results lend weight to a 2006 survey of Iraqi households published by the Lancet, which suggested that about 655,000 Iraqi deaths were ‘a consequence of the war’.

“However, these estimates are both far higher than the running total of reported civilian deaths maintained by the campaign group Iraq Body Count which puts the figure at between 71,000 and 78,000.” (BBC Online, ’US contractors in Iraq shootout,’ September 17, 2007; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6998458.stm)

BBC’s Newsnight programme used IBC’s figures in the same way:

“More than a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003, according to the British polling company ORB. The study’s likely to fuel controversy over the true, human cost of the war. It’s significantly up on the previous highest estimate of 650,000 deaths published by the Lancet last October… The independent Iraqi [sic] Body Count group puts the current total at closer to 75,000.” (Newsnight, BBC2, September 14, 2007)

These reports again raise serious issues about what IBC’s figures actually mean, how they are being used and misused to cast doubt on higher numbers, and about what IBC is doing to promote or reduce the confusion. (See our 2006 Media Alerts archive for previous analysis, beginning with: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060125_paved_with_good.php)

Just “Care And Literacy” – No Extrapolations Required

In its latest press release, ‘The State of Knowledge on Civilian Casualties in Iraq,’ IBC explains ‘What IBC Does’:

“Provides an irrefutable baseline figure”

Similarly in 2006, IBC wrote: “We are providing a conservative cautious minimum.” (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/qa/ibc-in-context/)

These both describe laudable objectives involving little more than accurate data collection. IBC co-founder John Sloboda made the point in a BBC interview in response to criticism that he and his colleagues were “amateurs” in the field of mortality studies:

“Our position is, and always has been, that reading press reports, which is what this job is, requires nothing other than care and literacy. The whole point about it is that it doesn’t require statistical analysis or extrapolations.”
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm)

And yet in their latest press release (September 3, 2007), under the title, ’How plausible is 600,000 violent Iraqi deaths?’, IBC devote five pages to wide-ranging criticism of the 2006 Lancet study which estimated 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq. IBC’s conclusion:

“Our own view is that the current death toll +could+ be around twice the numbers recorded by IBC and the various official sources in Iraq. We do not think it could possibly be 10 times higher.” (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/state-of-knowledge/7)

In similar vein, the Toronto Star quoted IBC co-founder John Sloboda as saying:

“The death toll could be twice our number, but it could not possibly be 10 times higher.” (Haroon Siddiqui, ‘How many civilians have died?’ Toronto Star, September 20, 2007; http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/258511)

This last comment was reported less than a week after the publication of ORB’s poll revealing 1.2 million Iraqi deaths.

Two questions arise: Why is it important for IBC – providing an “irrefutable baseline” based on data collection – to challenge the methodology and conclusions of epidemiological studies published in the Lancet which go far beyond data collection and which do not in any way challenge their baseline as a “cautious minimum”?

Secondly, while IBC’s self-described task does indeed require only “care and literacy”, does not the task of challenging peer-reviewed science published by some of the world’s leading epidemiologists require very much more? Does it not, in fact “require statistical analysis or extrapolations,” and much else besides?

In a 2006 addition to their website, IBC wowed visitors with scientific jargon:

“Our data is very rich, because it provides a large subset of what is happening.

“It has high spatiotemporal specificity. Post-event interviews are always hampered by the fact that people tend to move on, and may not remain in the area or even in the country. Our data is recorded as close to the time and place of death as possible, and so has ‘forensic’ elements.” (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/qa/ibc-in-context/10)

It seems that IBC have used their credibility as data collectors to ‘cross sell’ their credibility as commentators on peer-reviewed epidemiology to the media community. But this second task is unrelated to their task as data collectors, and is an area in which, to our knowledge, none of the co-authors of their press releases have any research record or publication history in any relevant scientific discipline.

In a 2006 BBC interview, John Sloboda said of the 2004 Lancet study:

“Some critics of the Lancet study have said it’s like a drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard. It’s going to go somewhere, but who knows if that number is the bulls eye.

“Unfortunately many many people have decided to accept that that 98,000 figure is the truth – or the best approximation to the truth that we have.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm)

Sloboda was here endorsing a claim based on a failure to comprehend even the basic meaning of the Lancet study’s range of figures – the “drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard” analogy was and is absurd. No qualified epidemiologist would countenance making such a comment.

Unsurprisingly, most journalists reporting on international affairs appear unable to distinguish between the task of “reading press reports” on the one hand, and engaging in “statistical analysis or extrapolations”, on the other. Reporters naturally assume that, given its “high spatiotemporal specificity”, IBC’s credibility is on a par with the world’s leading experts in the field published in the world’s leading scientific journals and subject to an exacting system of peer review.

Certainly IBC do nothing to discourage, and everything to encourage, such a view. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable for IBC to point out in commenting on the Lancet studies to highly influential media that they are in fact +not+ especially qualified to comment on the science of epidemiology?

The Problem Of Relying On The Journalistic Record

IBC also move far beyond data collection in this latest addition to the site:

“Those who suggest that the IBC data-base is likely to contain only a tiny minority of actual deaths generally argue three things. First, they say that IBC only records deaths in areas where Western journalists are present; second they propose that there have been at least seven credible studies which suggest up to ten times as many deaths as we have recorded; and third they assert that an alternate media world exists containing a professional Arab-language press which continually reports far more deaths than the sources we monitor in English.

“We have dealt with the first two claims in detail on the public record and will be happy to answer questions about them in the discussion. IBC in Context (Feb 2006)”
(http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/state-of-knowledge/)

IBC omit to mention the most obvious and telling criticism: that the credibility of their database as an approximate guide to levels of violence in Iraq – i.e., “The death toll could be twice our number, but it could not possibly be 10 times higher” – is undermined by the fact that conditions in Iraq are so lethal that journalists are unable to discover many violent deaths of civilians.

Consider that a study of deaths in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996 by Patrick Ball et al at the University of California, Berkeley (1999) found that numbers of murders reported by the media in fact decreased as violence increased. Ball described the “problem of relying on the journalistic record” in evaluating numbers killed:

“When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence.” (Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer, ‘State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection’, 1999; http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/chap7.html)

Ball added:

“Throughout the 1980 to 1983 period newspapers documented only a fraction of the killings and disappearances committed by the State. The maximum monthly value on the graph [see link above] is only 60 for a period when monthly extra-judicial murders regularly totaled in the thousands.”

Ball explained that “the press stopped reporting the violence beginning in September 1980. Perhaps not coincidentally, the database lists seven murders of journalists in July and August of that year”.

The significance is indicated in a Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) report (September 7, 2007), which described how the number of journalists and media workers killed in Iraq since the start of the 2003 invasion had reached 200. According to RSF, 73 per cent of journalists killed had been directly targeted, a figure which was “much higher than in previous wars”. RSF also reported that more journalists had been taken hostage in Iraq than anywhere else in the world. A total of 84 journalists and media workers had been kidnapped in the previous four years. (http://electroniciraq.net/news/themedia/Media_Worker_Death_Toll_Reaches_200-3197.shtml)

Lancet study co-authors Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham wrote recently:

“A study of 13 war affected countries presented at a recent Harvard conference found over 80% of violent deaths in conflicts go unreported by the press and governments.” (Roberts and Burnham, ‘Ignorance of Iraqi death toll no longer an option,’ http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2613)

We contacted the author of the study, Ziad Obermeyer, for details. Demonstrating a level of scientific caution that is absent from some of IBC‘s bold pronouncements, Obermeyer responded that because his manuscript was progressing through the peer review process he could not provide anything for “formal citation”. He added:

“It is safe to say, however, that our estimates of violent war deaths, based on nationally representative surveys, are substantially higher than those commonly cited for most of the 13 countries we study.” (Email to Media Lens, September 24, 2007)

Roberts and Burnham continued:

“City officials in the Iraqi city of Najaf were recently quoted on Middle East Online stating that 40,000 unidentified bodies have been buried in that city since the start of the conflict. When speaking to the Rotarians in a speech covered on C-SPAN on September 5th, H.E. Samir Sumaida’ie, the Iraqi Ambassador to the US, stated that there were 500,000 new widows in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton Commission similarly found that the Pentagon under-counted violent incidents by a factor of 10.” (Roberts and Burnham op. cit)

IBC’s methodology was devised by Marc Herold, a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire. Herold has tracked deaths in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion of 2001. It was Herold’s Afghan Victim Memorial Project that inspired John Sloboda to set up IBC. Herold’s “most conservative estimate” of Afghan civilian deaths resulting from American/NATO operations is between 5,700 and 6,500. But, he cautions, this is “probably a vast underestimate”. (Haroon Siddiqui, ‘Counting the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ Toronto Star, September 23, 2007; http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/259269)

There is no reason to believe that the application of the same methodology in Iraq is generating very different results. But IBC has never, to our knowledge, accepted that their own count is “probably a vast underestimate” of the total death toll.

In the past, IBC’s response to the suggestion that violence prevents journalists from capturing many deaths has been, in effect, ‘Prove it!’ Well, the bureau chief of one of three Western media agencies providing a third of IBC’s data from Iraq sent this email to a colleague last year (the latter asked us to preserve the sender’s anonymity):

“iraq body count is i think a very misleading exercise. We know they must have been undercounting for at least the first two years because we know that we did not report anything like all the deaths we were aware of… we are also well aware that we are not aware of many deaths on any given day.” (Email sent October 25, 2006)

Despite IBC’s claims, nowhere in their discussion do they deal with the problem that journalistic reporting of violent deaths can decrease as violence increases, particularly when that includes violence against journalists, as is very much the case in Iraq.

More to the point, as data collectors, IBC are not in a position to comment authoritatively on the impact of violence on the capacity of journalists to report accurately from Iraq. As data collectors, they have no more insight, no deeper understanding, than anyone else.

The reasonable response to the question of political impacts on their database is not for IBC to authoritatively suggest that they “have dealt with” the problem of lack of journalistic coverage – to conclusively declare: “The death toll could be twice our number, but it could not possibly be 10 times higher” – but to openly acknowledge that their task is limited to the monitoring of media reports.

For leading mainstream journalists, and for IBC themselves, to present IBC as an informed and credible source on political realities on the ground in Iraq is highly inappropriate.

A good example of this distortion was provided on September 7 by Michael Gordon of the New York Times. Gordon offered positive spin on the ‘progress’ of the ‘surge’:

“The most comprehensive and up-to-date military statistics show that American forces have made some headway toward a crucial goal of protecting the Iraqi population.” (Gordon, ‘Assessing the “Surge” – Hints of Progress, and Questions, in Iraq Data,’ New York Times, September 8, 2007)

In assessing evidence for this humanitarian “headway”, Gordon turned to IBC:

“Iraq Body Count, a British-based nongovernmental group that monitors civilian deaths, notes that the number of civilians who were killed by shootings, executions and bombs has declined from January through July.”

He quoted IBC:

“’Levels of violence reached an all-time high in the last six months of 2006… Only in comparison to that could the first half of 2007 be regarded as an improvement.’”

The last caveat was unimportant, the word supporters of the occupation were looking for was “improvement”.

But there is a problem with IBC’s evidence and with Gordon’s analysis of its significance. In fact, IBC have not at all found that “the number of civilians who were killed by shootings, executions and bombs has declined”. The website has found fewer +reports+ of deaths of civilians killed by shootings, executions and bombs in “information gathering and publishing agencies, principally the commercial news media who provide web access to their reports”. (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/about/methods/2)

While a significant proportion of the deaths recorded or corroborated by IBC come from “cumulative totals reported by official Iraqi sources, in particular the Medico-Legal Institutes (morgues) and, for corroboration purposes, the Ministry of Health”, IBC describes the commercial news media as their “main sources”. (Ibid)

And Les Roberts has commented:

“Media and government reports catch only the tip of the iceberg.” (Siddiqui, op. cit; http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/261722)

For IBC to emphasise that “the first half of 2007 [could] be regarded as an improvement” on the basis of their data collection is therefore misleading. Indeed the whole basis of IBC’s comment was misleading:

“Levels of violence reached an all-time high in the last six months of 2006.”

In fact, levels of media +reporting+ of civilian deaths was at an all-time high in the last six months of 2006 – that is not the same thing. As a consequence, and as the material cited above from Patrick Ball and RSF makes clear, IBC are in a position to comment +only+ on numbers of media reports of deaths, not on the inferred significance of those numbers for political realities on the ground.

The Failure To Challenge Media Distortions

What is so disappointing is that while IBC are willing to stray radically beyond merely “reading press reports” with “care and literacy” to challenge scientific studies that do not in any way challenge their “irrefutable baseline figure”, they are apparently not willing to challenge media reports that in effect do challenge that figure. The New York Times report above was a good example. Another appeared in the Financial Times on September 10:

“The war has already cost the lives of 3,760 US troops, and wounded 28,000 more. Iraq Body Count, a group that monitors Iraqi deaths, estimates that 70,000 Iraqis have been killed. It says there has been a ‘modest improvement’ in security compared with the bloody second half of 2006….” (Demetri Sevastopulo, ‘Echoes of Westmoreland and Vietnam,’ Financial Times, September 10, 2007)

But IBC is +not+ “a group that monitors Iraqi deaths”; it is a group that monitors media reports of Iraqi deaths. And IBC does not monitor “Iraqi deaths”; it monitors media reports of Iraqi +civilian+ deaths as a result of violence. IBC does not monitor reports of war-related deaths due to disease, lack of food, water and medicine, and so on. IBC also does not collect reports of Iraqi military deaths.

Because IBC’s “irrefutable baseline” figure refers only to violent deaths of civilians reported by the media, the Financial Times in effect challenged that baseline by asserting that 70,000 Iraqis – i.e., civilians and military – had died. Readers might well have construed that some of these “Iraqi deaths” must have been military deaths, for example, and therefore will have come away from the article believing that many less than 70,000 civilians had died from violence.

The Financial Times could hardly be a more prestigious, influential and high-profile media outlet. And this kind of distortion has been repeated innumerable times, globally, since 2003. Notice, again, the complete inappropriateness of quoting IBC as an authoritative source reporting “a ‘modest improvement’ in security” on the basis of its data collection. As the Guatemala study above indicates, the drop in media reporting could be interpreted as indicating a +worsening+ of security, not least for journalists, leading to a drop in reporting of violent deaths.

Whereas IBC have responded vigorously, indeed tirelessly, in responding to the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies (and to our criticism), to our knowledge they have all but ignored these actual challenges to their baseline figure – a figure which seeks to establish a “cautious minimum” for violent deaths of Iraqi civilians +alone+, not for “Iraqi casualties” in toto, as the Financial Times report suggests.

Indeed, far from exposing these abuses of their work, under ‘Press and media uses of IBC’ (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/qa/used-how/1.php), IBC provide not a single word of criticism of media use of their work. Instead, one of the examples they choose to highlight is an Independent article from July 2005. The first sentence of the article reads:

“Almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the two years of war and insurgency that began with the US-led invasion in March 2003. More than a third have died as a result of action by allied forces.” (Terry Kirby and Elizabeth Davies, ‘Iraq conflict claims 34 civilian lives each day as “anarchy” beckons,’ The Independent, July 20, 2005; http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article300368.ece)

It is striking that IBC link to a high-profile media report that so badly misrepresents its figures. As so often, this opening sentence gave the impression that IBC are recording the total number of civilian deaths, rather than merely recording deaths from violence as reported by the media. The extreme gravity of this distortion in downplaying the true extent of Iraqi casualties to the British public is clear enough, given, for example, Patrick Ball’s work.

Elsewhere, IBC write:

“A large number of press and media reports have cited our figures, discussed and assessed our work. Nearly all mentions have been in the context of drawing attention to the human cost of the war.” (John Sloboda, February 17, 2006; http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/qa/ibc-in-context/13)

Again, this is not mere data collection; it is political analysis of media performance. Having ourselves studied media reporting on Iraq closely over the last four years, we arrive at a very different conclusion: media reports have often cited IBC’s figures in the context of +burying+ the human cost of war.

As numerous studies over many decades have shown, it is quite simply the structural role of the corporate media to defend established power by minimising, as far as possible, public perception of the costs to civilians of US-UK state violence. This role has not suddenly changed in regard to Iraq. On the contrary, media performance on Iraq has been a text book example of a corporate propaganda system acting to protect allied elite interests.

Finally, the danger of moving beyond data collection is emphasised in this comment on IBC’s website in response to media reports of the “surge”:

“Despite any efforts put into the surge, the first six months of 2007 was still the most deadly first six months for civilians of any year since the invasion.” (‘The Baghdad “surge” and civilian casualties’; http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/baghdad-surge/)

This was also highly politicised analysis. IBC’s framing of the issue exactly matches that found in the pro-war Observer:

“Despite the surge, violence remains roughly at the same levels.” (‘Iraq benchmarks,’ The Observer, September 2, 2007)

Imagine what Western journalists would have made of a Soviet organisation observing that a particular period of time had been “the most deadly” for civilians in Afghanistan in the 1980s “despite” a massive surge in Soviet military activity.

And yet this is currently the standard line in mainstream reporting, part of a wider attempt to present the occupation as a well-intentioned effort to achieve peace and democracy, rather than conquest and control.

To their credit, IBC have made an improvement to their website. Their “counter”, which previously recorded “Minimum” and “Maximum” deaths in Iraq, has been changed. Viewed alongside the name Iraq Body Count, visitors were likely to assume that the “Maximum” category referred to the maximum possible number of civilian deaths in Iraq – the full body count – rather than the maximum number of deaths recorded in media reports. The counter now reads:

“Documented civilian deaths from violence 74,432 — 81,120” (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/)

IBC comment:

“The change to a simple unlabeled range is intended to help avoid misinterpretation or misrepresentation of these numbers as (for example) the ‘maximum possible’ death toll, or IBC’s ‘estimate’ of it.”

This is a welcome change. However, the very name of the website remains misleading. IBC is, in truth, an Iraq Reported Body Count – nothing more.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you decide to write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to Iraq Body Count
Email: comment@iraqbodycount.org

Raise the issues covered in this alert with the following journalists:

Write to Katherine Butler, foreign editor of the Independent:
Email: k.butler@independent.co.uk

Write to Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor at the Observer:
Email: peter.beaumont@observer.co.uk

Write to Ian Black, Middle East editor at the Guardian
Email: ian.black@guardian.co.uk

Write to Paul Reynolds at BBC Online:
Email: Paul.Reynolds3@bbc.co.uk

http://medialens.org/alerts/index.php

Britain ‘no longer closest Bush ally’

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By Toby Harnden

The White House no longer views Britain as its most loyal ally in Europe since Gordon Brown took office and is instead increasingly turning towards France and Germany, according to Bush administration sources.

“There’s concern about Brown,” a senior White House foreign policy official told The Daily Telegraph. “But this is compensated by the fact that Paris and Berlin are much less of a headache. The need to hinge everything on London as the guarantor of European security has gone.”

 
US president George W Bush and French president Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy is seen by many as the man Bush can best do business with in Europe

With Tony Blair departed, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, is seen by many as the man George W Bush can best do business with in Europe. Although Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has not lived up to initial expectations in Washington, she is still seen as far preferable to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder.

The White House official added that Britain would always be “the cornerstone” of US policy towards Europe but there was “a lot of unhappiness” about how British forces had performed in Basra and an acceptance that Mr Brown would pull the remaining 4,500 troops out of Iraq next year.

  • Speedy Sarkozy named and shamed
  • Britain has become a ‘permissive’ environment for terrorists
  • Analyisis: Brown’s numbers game in Iraq

    “Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra,” said the official. “Maybe it’s best that they leave. Now we will have a clear field in southern Iraq.” Another White House official described Mr Brown as “challenging” and far less close to the US than Mr Blair.

    There has been a notable reduction in contact between Downing Street and the White House since Mr Blair left and US officials have remarked on how few British ministers have visited Washington in recent months.

    • Mr Brown and Mr Bush are understood to have spoken twice by telephone in three months since they met at Camp David in June, whereas Mr Blair and Mr Bush held video-link conferences, often weekly.

    Kurt Volker, a senior State Department official with responsibility for Europe, disagreed with the White House official’s view, arguing that the British withdrawal to the airport in Basra was a “tactical” decision and that the predicted chaos “hasn’t happened”.

    He told The Daily Telegraph that Mr Brown had shown “a lot more steadiness than maybe people expected” and while his style had been very different from that of Tony Blair there had been “a lot of consistency” over policy.

    But Mr Volker emphasised that “things are changing in Europe” and paid tribute to Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, both for visiting Iraq and for warning over Iran that the world had to “prepare for the worst and the worst is war”.

    “Kouchner’s comments were very helpful because what he is indicating is that this is serious. It’s not just a matter of playing out diplomacy forever with no result. It’s got to provide a result.”

    Privately, White House aides accept that Mr Brown would not support military action against Iran. There is also disquiet about what US officials view as double dealing by special advisers briefing an anti-White House message in London and a more favourable one in Washington. “That sort of manoeuvring is not appreciated,” said one diplomatic source.

    The wariness about Mr Brown could open doors to the Conservative Party.

    Owen Paterson, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, recently met several key White House officials, including Barry Jackson, who recently took over many of Karl Rove’s duties as a policy adviser to Mr Bush.

    A British diplomatic source said: “In the White House there’s a sense of enormous change from Blair. They used to be on the phone to Blair all the time and that’s no longer the case because Brown clearly wants to be the unBlair.

    “At the Pentagon, there’s a feeling that Britain is letting the side down on Iraq. The new best friend is Sarkozy and that means Brown taking a step back doesn’t matter as much. In White House eyes, Sarkozy is taking up the slack from Blair. “When things get tough, however, they’re likely to turn to Britain again.”

    Why is Rudy Giuliani basing his campaign on 911?

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    By Geezer Power

    Mayor Giuliani was warned that the WTC tower was going to collapse.

    Rudy Giuliani is interviewed by ABC News 12:01 pm 9/11/01 where he mentioned that he was told that the WTC tower was going to collapse.
    He didn’t say it was going to fall or that it was going down. He specifically used the word “collapse”. The Mayor of New York knew that the building was going to collapse. Wouldn’t this indicate that he allready knew that there would be an event? An event that he is now using as a platform for his run for the presidency.

    Video complements of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

    Republican Opponents Afraid To Attack Giuliani On 9/11

    Huffington post

    Sam Stein September 28, 2007 12:10 PM

    Rudy Giuliani has made his performance on Sept. 11 the dominant pillar of his campaign, a strategy that has proved at once effective and controversial. While the former New York City mayor finds himself atop national polls and well-positioned to capture the Republican nomination, he has also exposed himself to criticism that he is overstating his terrorism credentials and crassly politicizing the issue.

    Yet just three months before the first primary vote is cast, none of Giuliani’s top-tier primary opponents have taken the bait.

    Despite privately acknowledging that there is ample ammunition to attack Giuliani for his handling of and work after 9/11, the GOP presidential frontrunners have been either too cautious or afraid to speak out. Their silence underscores a strategic calculation that Giuliani’s 9/11 record will be picked apart by Democrats, and other foes of Rudy; but also a fear that bringing up the terrorism issue could backfire.

    Read More:

    BBC DJ apology over ‘fake’ phone-in – yet more and more BBC Total deceit uncovered

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    The Press Association

    Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley is due to make an on-air apology following the revelation that a staff member posed as a caller during a phone competition.

    In the latest fakery row to hit the BBC, the employee pretended to be an audience member for a pre-recorded segment of the show in which a number of CDs were up for grabs.

    Whiley, a former Sony Radio Awards DJ of the Year, is said to have been unaware of the deceit.

    It took place in April last year, but only came to light following the BBC’s publication of editorial breaches within the corporation.

    The corporation said on Tuesday that a number of staff members had been disciplined as a result of the incident.

    A statement from the BBC read: “A pre-recorded section of Radio 1’s Jo Whiley Show on April 20 2006 featured a phone competition in which a member of BBC staff posed as a caller from the audience.

    It added: “We would like to make clear that Jo Whiley was unaware that the caller was not a genuine member of the public.”

    The “competition” was broadcast during a pre-recorded two-hour section of Whiley’s three-hour show.

    She pre-recorded two thirds of her show to attend a reception for the opening of the newly refurbished Broadcasting House, the BBC’s radio headquarters in London, an event which was attended by the Queen.

    All the show was presented to listeners as though it was live.

    Revealed: CIA offered $2m to Lockerbie witness and brother

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    By LUCY ADAMS

    The CIA offered $2m (£1m) to the Crown’s key witness in the Lockerbie trial and his brother, sources close to the case have told The Herald.

    Recently discovered papers show Scottish police officers investigating the 1988 bombing were aware the US intelligence service had discussed financial terms and witness protection schemes with Tony Gauci and his brother, Paul.

    They documented the talks and it would have been standard practice for such information to have been relayed to the prosecution team before the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan serving 27 years for the bombing.

    However, his defence team was never told of the CIA offer, in what critics say is another example of non-disclosure that undermines the credibility of Mr Gauci and, in turn, the Crown’s case against Megrahi.

    It has not been confirmed that the brothers accepted any money, but the fact that an offer was made is directly relevant to the credibility of Tony Gauci, who became the lynchpin of the case. Paul was never called as a witness.

    The latest remarkable twist comes a day after The Herald revealed a top-secret document vital to the truth about Lockerbie was obtained by the Crown but never disclosed to the defence.

    The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found that document during its three-year investigation, which concluded earlier this year that Megrahi should have a fresh appeal.

    The document, thought to be from the CIA, contains highly classified information about the MST13 timer which allegedly detonated the bomb. The Crown, for national security reasons, is still refusing to hand the material over to the defence.

    An offer of remuneration by the US agency could be explained by the political imperative then for the US and Britain to secure a conviction for Lockerbie. At the time, Libya was very much a hostile nation, unlike the more relaxed links between Tripoli and the West which now prevail.

    Yesterday in Edinburgh, the defence lodged its case with the appeal court and a preliminary hearing has been set for a week tomorrow.

    The defence team also lodged a specification of documents order, demanding the Crown release the classified document. Prosecutors are expected to challenge the appeal, despite the weight of new evidence.

    A source close to the case said: “We understand the commission found new documents which refer to discussions between the US intelligence agency and the Gaucis and that the sum involved was as much as $2m.

    “Even if they did not receive the money, the fact these discussions took place should have been divulged to the defence.”

    The Herald has also seen copies of an agreement with the US government and signed by a senior member of the Crown Office, agreeing not to disclose certain material.

    Norman McFadyen, then one of the leading members of the prosecution team and now the Crown Agent, signed the non-disclosure agreement on June 1, 2000.

    James Chalmers, a senior lecturer in law at Edinburgh University, said if a member of the Crown agreed not to disclose material shown by a foreign government, it called its worth into question.

    “This would raise questions about whether the right to a fair trial has been breached. And if a witness were offered money before giving evidence, this could undermine their credibility.

    “It would certainly need to be put to the witness under cross-examination. If such information was not disclosed to the defence, that could give rise to a miscarriage of justice. It is an issue of credibility.”

    Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the tragedy, said: “It is shocking to me that if after 19 years of trying to get to the truth about who murdered my daughter, national security is being used as an excuse.”

    A spokesman for the Crown Office has previously declined to comment on the case saying it would be “wholly inappropriate” while it is before the appeal court.

    Diana jury told to consider multiple conspiracy theories

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    By Robert Verkaik

    The jury at the inquests into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed will explore 10 key elements supporting the conspiracy theory that the couple were murdered on the express orders of the Royal Family.

    Lord Justice Scott Baker, the coroner presiding over the six-month-long inquiry into the fatal car crash in a Paris underpass 10 years ago, said yesterday that it was important that the court “got to the truth”.

    This, said the judge, would mean that the six women and five men jurors must consider not just Mohammed al Fayed’s allegations that Diana and his son were killed because the establishment did not want them to marry, but other conspiracies that might come before the court.

    Addressing the jury, the coroner said: “You may think that all the evidence largely points to the collision being a tragic accident… and that the cause was driver error.” But he said that, from the night of the crash, Mr Fayed had “not accepted” that explanation and had not wavered from that conclusion.

    The judge said that Mr Fayed was not alone in his suspicions. “There are many members of the public who are concerned that something sinister may lie behind circumstances surrounding the events of that night. What we are going to get to is the truth… so we will look at some allegations which have publicly been advanced in support of various conspiracy theories, even if they are not supported by Mr Fayed.”

    The coroner has isolated what he described as 10 key issues for the jury to consider relating to the alleged Fayed conspiracy. These include that the driver of the Mercedes, Henri Paul, was an informant working for MI6 and the French security services and that “there was a determination to wrongly portray him as a drunk driver”. Other central issues include the suggestion that the crash was caused by stun guns fired by MI6 agents in the underpass. The jury will also investigate Mr Fayed’s contention that Diana was pregnant when she died and that this fact was concealed by the embalming process.

    Later in the inquest, the court will hear evidence of the princess’s state of mind shortly before her death.

    The coroner said: “There is no doubt that Diana expressed fears from time to time about her personal safety, including the possibility of a staged car accident.” But he added that “expressions of these fears ” predated her relationship with Dodi Fayed.

    Setting out the background to the events leading up to her death, the coroner said that “they took place in a time of Diana’s life when things must have been very traumatic and stressful for her. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the breakdown of her marriage, her emotions may have been overriding her more logical thoughts!”.

    The jury was told Mr al Fayed had said the princess had directly told him of her fears about being murdered by the Royal Family, saying that one day she would “go up in a helicopter and never come down alive”.

    Building the WTC

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    The WTC was built to be indestructible, withstand Huge wind speeds, multiple fires and even JET crashes. The WTC twin towers were the jewel in the crown and were 110 floors, 500,000 tonnes, 200,000 tones of steel and 300,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete. Everything about the towers was massive, the towers were built with 3 times working loads in mind. A square steel outer cylinder with an “Indestructible” steel core was its construction. All other tall buildings followed and improved upon the WTC design style, it was the strongest, tallest structure of its day, a significant achievement using only the most high quality steel.

    So, JUST HOW many security systems failed on 911? All of them!!‏

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    The following list is from Jim Marrs book Inside Job.

    – A wide variety of standard defense mechanisms designed to prevent such an attack systematically failed on 9/11. Especially notable are the atypical failures which occurred simultaneously within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Military Command Center (NMCC), and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), all charged with protecting US airspace.

    – Interceptor jets were not scrambled for more than thirty minutes after it was obvious that four airliners had gone off course and were presumably hijacked. In the case of Flight 77, which reportedly slammed into the Pentagon, an hour and forty-five minutes elapsed with no interception.

    – Missile batteries designed to protect Washington, DC, failed to stop the strike on the Pentagon, one of the world’s most protected structures, and fighter jets on constant alert at Andrews Air Force Base just twelve miles away were never scrambled.

    – By a “bizarre coincidence,” two government homeland defense agencies (NORAD and the NRO) were practicing war games on the morning of 9/11. The games simulated responses to a scenario in which hijacked planes were crashed into buildings. This fact could explain the government’s lack of rapid response to the real hijackings, yet this plausible alibi has never been brought to public attention. One also wonders: How did the hijackers know the time and date of these war games in order to time their attacks to coincide with them?

    – President Bush proceeded with a photo op at a Florida elementary school even after he and his aides knew that three planes had been hijacked. He lingered in the classroom for nearly twenty minutes after being informed that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center (WTC).

    – Not one steel-framed high-rise building in history has collapsed solely due to fire. The free-fall speed collapse of the Trade Center towers, with attendant melted steel and powdery dust, exhibited all the characteristics of a controlled demolition.

    – Just such a controlled demolition apparently occurred about 5 p.m. that same day when, according to the leaseholder of the WTC complex, the 47-story Building 7 was “pulled,” i.e., intentionally demolished.

    – Vital evidence, including the buildings’ structural steel, was destroyed through rapid removal and destruction by US government officials with no investigation. This is only one of the many reasons why Fire Engineering magazine called the official investigation “a half-baked farce.”

    – An eight-mile-long debris trail indicated that Flight 93 was destroyed in the air rather than in the Pennsylvania crash reportedly caused by an onboard struggle between the hijackers and passengers.

    – More than a dozen countries firmly warned US authorities that an attack on American soil was imminent, some only days before the events.

    – Strong evidence points to complicity in the attacks by senior intelligence operatives from Israel and Pakistan who are closely aligned with American intelligence agencies.

    – A classified Congressional report incriminates senior officials in the Saudi Arabian government, showing that they had close ties to the hijackers. The Saudis enjoy long-term business and social ties to the Bush family and close political ties to the US government.

    – The US government expedited the swift departure of over 100 Saudis from the country, even as the American public had been denied the right to fly. Two dozen members of bin Laden’s own family, presumably potential witnesses, were allowed to leave the country without interrogation.

    – Insiders with foreknowledge of the events to come engaged in massive and highly profitable short-selling of shares in American Airlines and United Airlines, as well as other stocks readily affected by the disaster. The public has still not been presented with the final results of official investigations into these transactions-if there are any.

    – A growing number of whistleblowers from within the federal government have pointed to evidence that various agencies were well aware of the possibility of attack, and were prevented by seniors officials from mounting full investigations.

    – Far from being a mere reaction to 9/11, evidence now proves that the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were the culmination of long-standing plans which only awaited a provocation such as 9/11.

    – The official explanations for the invasion of Iraq, such as the need to capture weapons of mass destruction, and to “bring democracy” to the country, have proven false.

    – Within a few hours, the FBI released names and photos of the suspected hijackers although later many of those named turned up alive in the Middle East.

    – Also within hours of the attacks, FBI agents were scouring the houses, restaurants, and flight schools they frequented. If no one had foreknowledge of the hijackers or their activities, how did they know where to look?

    – Far from ordering a full and objective investigation to determine who was responsible for the 9/11 tragedies, the Bush administration dragged its feet and actually took actions to impede a swift and truthful probe into the events of that day. It was nearly two years after the events that mounting pressure from the public, led by families of 9/11 victims, finally forced the creation of an “independent” investigatory commission.

    – No one in government has been reprimanded or even scolded for what we are told was the greatest intelligence and homeland-defense failure in US history. In fact, the very agencies which failed the nation watched their budgets increase dramatically, and some of the officials ostensibly at fault were actually promoted.

    – No person in government, other than former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, has felt the need to apologize to the American people for the 9/11 security failure.

    – President Bush himself declined to apologize for the 9/11 tragedy to either the American public or to victims’ families during an April 2004 press conference, despite being presented with the opportunity to do so at least three times.

     What follows now is from www.911proof.com (posted here without permission)

    WAR GAMES ON SEPTEMBER 11TH

    On the very morning of 9/11/01, five war games and terror drills were being conducted by several U.S. defense agencies, including one “live fly” exercise using REAL planes. Then-Acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, admitted to 4 of the war games in congressional testimony – see transcript here or video here (6 minutes and 12 seconds into the video).

    Norad had run drills for several years of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, and “numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft”. In other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were run. See also official military website showing 2000 military drill, using miniatures, involving a plane crashing into the Pentagon.

    Indeed, a former Los Angeles police department investigator, whose newsletter is read by 45 members of congress, both the house and senate intelligence committees, and professors at more than 40 universities around the world, claims that he obtained an on-the-record confirmation from NORAD that ON 9/11, NORAD and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack exercise which involved government-operated aircraft POSING AS HIJACKED AIRLINERS.

    On September 11th, the government also happened to be running a simulation of a plane crashing into a building.

    In addition, a December 9, 2001 Toronto Star article (pay-per-view; reprinted here), stated that “Operation Northern Vigilance is called off. Any simulated information, what’s known as an ‘inject,’ is purged from the screens”. This indicates that there were false radar blips inserted onto air traffic controllers’ screens as part of the war game exercises.

    Moreover, there are indications that some of the major war games previously scheduled for October 2001 were MOVED UP to September 11th by persons unknown.

    Interestingly, Vice President Cheney was apparently in charge of ALL of the war games and coordinated the government’s “response” to the attacks. See this Department of State announcement; this CNN article; and this previously-cited essay.

    And while the government has consistently stated that it did not know where the aircraft were before they struck, this short video clip of the Secretary of Transportation’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission shows that Cheney monitored flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon. How could one of the most heavily-defended buildings in the world have been successfully attacked, when the Vice President of the United States, in charge of counter-terrorism on 9/11, watched it approach from many miles away?

    Moreover, a former air traffic controller, who knows the flight corridor which the two planes which hit the Twin Towers flew “like the back of my hand” and who handled two actual hijackings says that that planes can be tracked on radar even when their transponders are turned off, and that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon tracked three of the four flights from the point of their hijacking to hitting their targets (also, listen to this interview).

    Additionally, this diagram shows that the hijacked planes flew over numerous military bases on 9/11 before crashing. See also this essay regarding the stand down of the military; and see this war game proposal created before 9/11 revolving around Bin Laden and including “live-fly exercises” involving real planes, later confirmed by this official Department of Defense website.

    Which scenario is more likely from a strictly logistical perspective:

    (1) An outsider sitting in a cave defeating the air defense system of the sole military superpower; or

    (2) Someone like Cheney – who on 9/11 apparently had full control over all defense, war game and counter-terrorism powers – rigging and gaming the system?

    Remember that for the attacks to have succeeded, it was necessary that actions be taken in the middle of the war games and the actual attacks which would thwart the normal military response. For example, Cheney watched flight 77 approach the Pentagon from many miles out, but instructed the military to do nothing (as shown in the testimony of the Secretary of Transportation, linked above). Could Bin Laden have done that?

    Fighter jets were also sent far off-course over the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the attacks (testimony of Senator Mark Dayton), so as to neutralize their ability to intercept the hijacked airliners. Could Osama Bin Laden and his sent-from-the-cave band of followers have exercised this degree of control over the military? Obviously not.

    And air traffic controllers claim they were still tracking what they thought were hijacked planes long after all 4 of the real planes had crashed. This implies that false radar blips remained on their screens after all 4 planes went down, long after the military claims they purged the phantom war-game-related radar signals. Could Bin Laden have interfered with the full purging of false radar blips inserted as part of the war games? In other words, could Bin Laden have overridden the purging process so that some false blips remained and confused air traffic controllers? The answer is clear.

    Therefore, it is statistically much more likely that Cheney and/or other high-level U.S. government and military officials pulled the 9/11 trigger than that Bin Laden did it. At the very least, they took affirmative steps to guarantee that the hijackers’ attacks succeeded.

    As discussed previously, a former air force colonel and director of the Star Wars program stated “If our government had merely done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the twin towers would still be standing, and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive. [T]hat is treason” 

    PRIOR WARNINGS OF PLANES CRASHING INTO BUILDINGS

    The administration’s claim that terrorists crashing planes into buildings was not foreseeable is contradicted by numerous sources:

    Initially, the CIA Director had warned congress shortly before 9/11 “that there could be an attack, an imminent attack, on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected” according to a broadcast on National Public Radio

    And the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was “not surprised there was an attack (but) was surprised at the specificity . . . . (he was only) shocked at what actually happened – the extent of it”

    But let’s go back and look at the facts chronologically:

    Initially, the CIA Director had warned congress shortly before 9/11 “that there could be an attack, an imminent attack, on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected” according to a broadcast on National Public Radio

    And the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was “not surprised there was an attack . . . .”

    But let’s go back and look at the facts chronologically:

    According to MSNBC, “There have been a slew of reports over the past decade of plots to use planes to strike American targets”.

    In 1994, the government received information that international terrorists “had seriously considered the use of airplanes as a means of carrying out terrorist attacks” (see also this article).

    In 1998, U.S. officials received reports concerning a “Bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, areas.” Officials received reports that al Qaeda was trying to establish an operative cell in the United States and that bin Laden was attempting to recruit a group of five to seven young men from the United States to travel to the Middle East for training in conjunction with his plans to strike U.S. domestic targets. Indeed, the report concluded that “a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane . . . into the World Trade Center”.

    A 1999 report for the National Intelligence Council warned that fanatics loyal to bin Laden might try to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the Pentagon..

    Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.

    The Pentagon tracked the hijackers before 9/11.

    And the U.S. received warnings from numerous foreign intelligence services about planned attacks, many of them quite detailed. Indeed, America’s closest ally apparently tracked the hijackers’ every movement prior to the attacks, and may have sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers.

    According to the New York Times, “Foreign [intelligence service] agents had infiltrated
    Osama bin Laden’s network and were carefully tracking its moves”    , and – in January 2001 – the French intelligence services gave a report to the CIA entitled “Plan to hijack an aircraft by Islamic radicals”.

    There were extraordinarily high terrorist attack threat levels in the summer of 2001, involving threats of attack within the U.S., and the U.S. government knew there were Al-Qaeda cells within the U.S. (or watch the video here).

    In July 2001, a briefing prepared for senior government officials warned of “a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties … (it) will occur with little or no warning.”.

    FBI agents recommended to FBI headquarters, in July 2001, an urgent nationwide review of flight schools regarding terrorism, and mentioned Bin Laden by name.

    A pre-9/11 National Intelligence Estimate was entitled “Islamic Extremists Learn to Fly”, and was apparently about Islamic people taking classes at U.S. flight schools.

    President Bush was told in August 2001 that supporters of Bin Laden planned an attack within the U.S. with explosives and that they wanted to hijack airplanes.

    A month before 9/11, the CIA sent a message to the Federal Aviation Administration warning of a possible hijacking “or an act of sabotage against a commercial airliner”.

    The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief was entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”.

    U.S. intelligence officials informed President Bush weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks that Bin Laden’s terrorist network might try to hijack American planes, and that information prompted administration officials to issue a private warning to transportation officials and national security agencies.

    It was widely known within the FBI shortly before 9/11 that an imminent attack was planned on lower Manhattan.

    An employee who worked in the Twin Towers stated “How could they let this happen? They knew this building was a target. Over the past few weeks we’d been evacuated a number of times, which is unusual. I think they had an inkling something was going on”

    And a guard who worked in the world trade center stated that “officials had recently taken steps to secure the towers against aerial attacks”

    On September 6, 2001, Condoleezza Rice was warned that a terrorist attack inside the United States was imminent

    Also on September 6th, author Salman Rushdie is banned by US authorities from taking internal US flights; the FAA told his publisher the reason was that it had “intelligence of something about to happen”

    The former FBI translator who the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups have claimed is credible says that the government was provided with information about the planned attacks, including the fact that the attacks would be carried out using airplanes, and some information about date ranges and targets. She says that – after 9/11 – the FBI translators were ordered to “keep quiet” regarding this information.

    The National Security Agency and the FBI were both independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls. The day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls. (The NSA claims that it did not translate the intercept until September 12th; however, the above-mentioned FBI translator said that she was frequently ordered to falsify dates of translations regarding 9/11)

    Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls from Bin Laden’s chief of operations to the United States.

    The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years.

    Indeed, two days before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

    Newsweek stated “On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns” (pay-per-view; cached version of article here)

    Indeed, the military had actually drilled for aerial attacks with planes:

    The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the military air defense agency responsible for protecting the U.S. mainland, had run drills for several years of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, and “numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft”. In other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were run.

    And the military had conducted numerous drills of planes crashing into the Pentagon. For example, see this official military website showing a military drill conducted in 2000 using miniatures; this article concerning a May 2001 exercise of a plane crashing into the Pentagon (see also this article and this one); and this article about yet another drill of a plane hitting the Pentagon from August 2001.

    (Indeed, many of the drills appear to have included warning alarms and evacuation of the building.)

    The military had also run war games involving multiple, simultaneous hijackings (first paragraph), so this aspect of 9/11 was not as overwhelming as we have been led to believe.

    There are literally hundreds of other lines of evidence that prove that the government had substantial foreknowledge concerning the attacks (see this website). A former Lieutenant Colonel for the Air Force and former Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at the Defense Language Institute summarized the feeling of many when he stated “Of course Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism.”

    Overview of New 9/11 Research (from scholarsfor911truth.org)

    1. The impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes that hit were very similar to those they were designed to withstand, and they continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.
    2. The melting point of steel at 2,800*F is about 1,000*F higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800*F under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt, which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down.
    3. UL certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000*F for three or four hours before it would even significantly weaken, where these fires burned too low and too briefly at an average temperature of around 500*F—about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North—to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt.
    4. If the steel had melted or weakened, the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt, and total demolition that was observed.
    5. William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the subbasements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a 50-ton hydraulic press and ripping the skin off a fellow worker, a report corroborated by the testimony of around three dozen other custodians.
    6. Willie reported that the explosion occurred prior to the airplane’s impact, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, “Seismic Proof: 9/11 was an Inside Job”, which demonstrates that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds prior to the airplanes impacts.
    7. Heavy steel construction buildings like the Twin Towers, built with more than 100,000 tons of steel, are not even capable of “pancake collapse”, which normally only occurs with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in “redundant” welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, as Charles Pegelow has pointed out to me.
    8. The destruction of the Twin Towers in approximately 10 seconds apiece is even faster than free fall with only air resistance, which would have taken at least 12 seconds, which, as Judy Wood has emphasized, is an astounding result that would have been impossible without extremely powerful explosives.
    9. The towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where the floors do not move, a phenomenon that Judy Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the concrete, the official account cannot possibly explain.
    10. WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM/ET after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to “pull it”, displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions, including a complete, abrupt, and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, and so forth, an event so embarrassing to the official account that it is not even mentioned in THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT.
    11. The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44 feet above the ground; the kind and quantity of debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
    12. The Pentagon’s own videotape does not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when it was shown on “The Factor”; but at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 71-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and visible; it was not, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
    13. Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed black box data allegedly from the Pentagon plane and discovered that it contradicts the official account in direction, approach, and altitude: it was 300 feet too high to have taken out the lampposts and 100 feet too high to have hit the building itself.
    14. The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory—flying at high speed barely above ground level—physically impossible; and if it had come it at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater; but there is no crater and the government has no way out, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
    15. If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, then there would have been a debris field of about a city block in size, but in fact the debris is distributed over an area of about eight square miles, which would be explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed as required by the government’s official scenario.There are more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly the planes; their names were not on any passenger manifest; they were not subject to any autopsy; several have turned up alive and well; the cell phone calls appear to have been impossible; on and on. The evidence may be found at 911Scholars.org.

    9/11: moral imperative (spread the word)

    The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater

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    Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm has long ties to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken Starr.

    By Ben Van Heuvelen

    When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 “escalation of force incidents”; in 163 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents.

    On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will hold a hearing on the U.S. military’s use of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the hearing last week, the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any information or testimony without its signoff. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

    But the attempt to shield Prince was apparently not the first time State had protected Blackwater. A report issued by Waxman on Monday alleges that State helped Blackwater cover up Iraqi fatalities. In December 2006, State arranged for the company to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a Blackwater employee to write State’s initial “spot report” on the Sept. 16 shooting incident — a report that did not mention civilian casualties and claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a convoy.

    The ties between State and Blackwater are only part of a web of relationships that Blackwater has maintained with the Bush administration and with prominent Republicans. From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than $1 million to more than $500 million, all while employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the security company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater’s luminaries with their professional — and political — résumés.

    Erik Prince, founder and CEO: How did Blackwater go from a small corporation training local SWAT teams to a seemingly inseparable part of U.S. operations in Iraq? Good timing, and the connections of its CEO, may be the answer.

    Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11, has connections to the Republican Party in his blood. His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince’s widow, Elsa, who remarried after her husband’s death, has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian-right organization, Dobson’s Focus on the Family. She currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a vice president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus on the Family.

    Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.

    The former Betsy Prince — Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister — married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (“I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,” Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006.

    Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees. Through his Freiheit Foundation, he also gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000. In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. During college, he interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House, and also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Rep. John Doolittle have visited Blackwater’s Moyock, N.C., compound, on a trip arranged by the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then House Majority Leader Tom Delay. ASG partner Paul Behrends is a longtime associate of Prince’s.

    Prince’s connections seem to have paid off for Blackwater. Robert Young Pelton, author of “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror,” has reported that one of Blackwater’s earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid $5.4 million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came after Prince made a call to then CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard. What’s more, Harper’s Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters and “meets with senior people” inside the CIA. But Prince’s most important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert L. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government in Iraq. In August 2003, Blackwater won a $27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer. In charge of the Blackwater team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal security for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s.

    By 2005, Blackwater was earning $353 million annually from federal contracts. Blackwater’s benefits from government largess haven’t ended with Iraq. The company was recently one of five awarded a Department of Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as $15 billion. Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and profited handsomely. According to Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” Blackwater had made roughly $73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year after the hurricane hit.

    Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel: In 2002, President Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon’s military contracts as the Defense Department’s inspector general. Schmitz presided over the largest increase of military-contracting spending in history: As of 2005, 77 companies were awarded 149 “prime contracts” worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions going to Blackwater. Unlike previous I.G.s, Schmitz reported directly to the secretary of defense — a setup that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers objected to, given Schmitz’s oversight responsibility. Schmitz even carried Rumsfeld’s “12 principles” for the Pentagon in his lapel pocket. The first principle read, “Do nothing that could raise questions about the credibility of DoD.”

    Schmitz has many ties to the Republican Party establishment. His father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman, and his brother, Patrick Schmitz, served as George H.W. Bush’s deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993. Joseph himself worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese.

    Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight. According to an October 2005 article in Time magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his staff’s multiyear investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them, then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the decision before sending the final report to Congress. Schmitz informed his staff on Aug. 26, 2005, that he was leaving the Pentagon; in September of that year, he went to work for Blackwater.

    J. Cofer Black, vice chairman: Black spent most of his 28-year CIA career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where he worked with Rob Richer (below). At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. There he was former CIA Director George Tenet’s ace in the hole when it came to convincing Bush that the CIA should lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Black is, according to published accounts, a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of briefer President Bush likes. In one briefing, according to several reports, Black told the president, “When we’re through with [terrorists in Afghanistan], they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” (Black also ordered CIA field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden’s head packed in dry ice so Black could show it to Bush.) Black’s Afghanistan presentation earned him “special access” to the White House, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest reported in December 2005.

    Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush administration’s interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies. In a famous moment, Black told Congress in 2002, “After 9/11, the gloves came off.” And the group within the CIA responsible for extraordinary renditions — operations in which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret prison facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as torture — fell under Black at the CTC, Priest has reported.

    Black later went to the State Department, where one of his roles was to begin coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In 2003, the State Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security teams.

    In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of what Harper’s Silverstein termed a “revolving door to Blackwater” from the CIA. In addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total Intelligence Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior advisor for counterterrorism and national security.

    Rob Richer, vice president for intelligence: Richer was head of the CIA’s Near East division — and the agency’s liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan — from 1999 to 2004. In 2003, he briefed President Bush on the nascent Iraqi insurgency. In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking official for clandestine operations. He left the agency for Blackwater in the fall of 2005, effectively taking the agency’s relationship with Abdullah with him. The CIA had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan’s intelligence services. There was an obvious quid pro quo: In exchange for the training, Jordan would share information. Jordan has now hired Blackwater’s intelligence division — headed by Richer — to do its spy training instead. The CIA isn’t happy, writes Silverstein: “People [at the agency] are pissed off,” said Silverstein’s source. “Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly and he thinks that’s the same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer is still the man.”

    Fred Fielding, former outside counsel: After four Blackwater employees were tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, their families brought a wrongful-death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the company had not provided adequate arms, armor and backup. Blackwater feared that if it was found liable for its employees’ deaths, a floodgate of future litigation could be opened. To fight the suit, Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican insider. Dan Callahan, a lawyer representing the families, told Salon he was shocked when he learned Fielding would be representing the company. “How the hell,” Callahan says he wondered at the time, “did I draw Fred Fielding on this case?”

    Fielding has had a long career as a lawyer to prominent Republicans. From 1970 to 1972, he was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon administration; from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that administration as deputy White House counsel. Under President Reagan, he served as White House counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel named John Roberts, now the chief justice of the United States. After the 2000 election, he served the current administration as transition counsel, and he also held a spot on the 9/11 Commission. In January 2007, Bush chose him as White House counsel.

    Ken Starr, outside counsel: According to Callahan, Fielding represented Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in February 2005. After Fielding left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount, represented Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired another high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials — Ken Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine Law School in California. Starr was appointed to the federal bench by Reagan, was U.S. solicitor general under George H.W. Bush and was on Bush’s shortlist to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court. He is best known, however, as the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton. He revealed the intimate details of Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton’s impeachment by Congress.

    Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks jurisdiction in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the security firm. On Oct. 18, 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of Blackwater, asserting that the company was “constitutionally immune” to the lawsuit. “If companies such as Blackwater must factor the defense costs of state tort lawsuits into [their] overall costs,” argued Starr, “Blackwater will suffer irreparable harm.” Roberts denied the petition on Oct. 24. In December, Starr filed a motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court. The motion was denied in February.

    Additional reporting by Tracee Herbaugh.

    Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton … Who Needs Elections?

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    Suddenly – and FINALLY – people are talking about the problem of presidential dynasties here in America. The possibility of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton (up to 28 years of 2-family rule) is looming with Hillary on the rise. (Add to that 8 run-up years of Bush the Father as VP to Reagan.)

    I hate to sound like a smarty pants. But why not? Here is a commentary I taped for CBS Sunday Morning a year and a half ago on this subject. (Hence the references to Jeb Bush as candidate.) Forgive the over-enunciation and the annoying billowy shirt. I was new on the job:

    http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/09/28/bush-clinton-bush-clinton-who-needs-elections/

    Greenspan’s Dark Legacy Unmasked

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    By Stephen Lendman
    RINF Alternative News

    After retiring as the Federal Reserve’s second longest ever serving chairman, Alan Greenspan is now cashing in big late in life at age 81. He chaired the Fed’s Board of Governors from the time he was appointed in August, 1987 to when he stepped down January 31, 2006 amidst a hail of ill-deserved praise for his stewardship during good and perilous times. USA Today noted “the onetime jazz band musician went out on a high note.” The Wall Street Journal said “his economic legacy (rests on results) and seems secure.” The Washington Post cited his “nearly mythical status.”

    Stanford Washington Research Group chief strategist Greg Valliere called him a “giant,” and Bob Woodward called him “Maestro” in his cloying hagiography (now priced $1.99 used on Alibris and $2.19 on Amazon) that was published in 2000 as the Greenspan-built house of cards was collapsing. The book was an adoring tribute to a man he called a symbol of American economic preeminence, who the Financial Times also praised as “An Activist Unafraid to Depart From the Rule” – by taking from the public and giving to the rich.

    Others joined the chorus, too, lauding his steady, disciplined hand on the monetary steering wheel, his success keeping inflation and unemployment low, and his having represented the embodiment of prosperity in compiling a record of achievement his successor will be hard-pressed to match.

    In 2004, William Greider in The Nation magazine had a different view. He’s the author of “Secrets of the Temple” on “how the Federal Reserve runs the country.” He wrote Greenspan “ranks among the most duplicitous figures to serve in modern American government (who used) his exalted status as economic wizard (to) regularly corrupt the political dialogue by sowing outrageously false impressions among gullible members of Congress and adoring financial reporters.”

    They were front and center in the New York Times for the man who “steer(ed) the economy through multiple calamities and ultimately….one of the longest economic booms in history….(He earned his bona fides) weather(ing) the Black Monday stock crash of 1987 (and in 18 and a half years in office) achieved more celebrity than most rock stars” and may now approach them in earnings.

    The new book of his memoirs “The Age of Turbulence” is just out for which his reported advance exceeded $8.5 million (second only to Bill Clinton’s $10 for his memoirs) plus additional royalties if sales exceed 1.9 million copies. They may given the amount of high-impact publicity it and he are getting nonstop. And that’s not all. He’s in great demand on the lecture circuit at six figure fees, has his own consulting firm, Greenspan Associates LLC, and his lawyer, Robert Barnett says “virtually every major investment-banking firm” in the world wants to hire him for his rainmaking connections.

    They have value, not his market advice, best avoided for the man who engineered the largest ever stock market bubble and bust in history through incompetence, timidity, dereliction of duty, and subservience to the capital interests he represented at the expense of the greater good and a sustained sound economy he didn’t worry about nor did Wall Street.

    For firms on the Street and big banks, he could do no wrong and was above reproach for letting them cash in big and then get plenty of advance warning when to exit. Most ordinary investors weren’t so fortunate. They’re not insiders and were caught flat-footed by advice from market pundit fraudsters and the most influential one of all in the Fed Chairman. Just weeks before the market peak in January, 2000, he claimed “the American economy was experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which propelled forward productivity, output, corporate profits and stock prices at a pace not seen in generations, if ever.”

    It was hype and nonsense and on a par with famed economist and professor Irving Fisher’s remarks just before the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression when he claimed economic fundamentals in the country were strong, stocks undervalued, and an unending period of prosperity lay ahead. It took a world war a decade later, not market magic, for them to arrive, but before it did Fisher kept insisting in the early 1930s recovery was just around the corner. It’s the same way Wall Street touts operate today on gullible investors who even after they’ve been had are easy prey again for the next con.

    And they’re really in trouble when it comes from the “Maestro,” who at the height of the stock market bubble said: “Lofty equity prices have reduced the cost of capital. The result has been a veritable explosion of spending on high-tech equipment…And I see nothing to suggest that these opportunities will peter out anytime soon….Indeed many argue that the pace of innovation will continue to quicken….to exploit the still largely untapped potential for e-commerce, especially the business-to-business arena.”

    One week later, the Nasdaq peaked at 5048 and crashed to a low of 1114 on October 9, 2002. It lost 78% of its value, the S&P 500 stock index dropped 49%, and retail investors lost out while Greenspan was busy engineering another bubble with a tsunami of easy money for Wall Street and big investors. It’s now unwinding as he gets a big payday for his memoirs and a chance to rewrite history. He aims to raise himself to sainthood and at the same time distance himself from the very costly policies he implemented on top of trillions he helped scam in the greatest modern era wealth transfer from the public to the rich. More on that below.

    Greenspan’s Background and Tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman

    Alan Greenspan grew up in New York, got his B.A. and M.A. in economics from New York University and later was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia without completing a dissertation the degree usually requires. In a highly unusual move, Columbia made an exception in his case.

    Early on, he became enamored with free market ideologue Ayn Rand, wrote for her newsletters and authored three essays for her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” It expressed her views on capitalism’s “moral aspects” and her attempt (with Greenspan’s help) to rescue it from its “alleged champions who are responsible for the fact that capitalism is being destroyed without a hearing (or) trial, without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning.”

    That was in 1966 when Rand, a staunch libertarian as is Greenspan, believed fundamentalist capitalism was being battered by a flood of altruism in the wake of New Deal and Great Society programs she (and Greenspan) abhorred. She defended big business, made excuses for its wars, and denounced the student rebellion at the time and the evils of altruism. Greenspan concurred, maintained a 20 year association with Rand (who died in 1982), and never looked back.

    From 1948 until his 1987 Federal Reserve appointment, he served as Richard Nixon’s domestic policy coordinator in his 1968 nomination campaign and later as Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers Chairman. He also headed the economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Company, from 1955 – 1987. Its forecasting record was so poor it was about to be liquidated when he left to join the Fed. A former competitor, Pierre Renfret, noted: “When Greenspan closed down his economic consulting business to (become Fed Chairman) he did so because he had no clients left and the business was going under (and we found) out he had none (of his employees left).” That made him Reagan’s perfect Fed Chairman choice, and Renfret added it was Greenspan’s failure in private business that got him into government service in the first place.

    He wouldn’t disappoint as Wall Street’s man from the start. He bailed it out in 1987 after the disastrous October black Monday. It was the same way he did in it later in 1998 following Long Term Capital Management’s collapse and again after the dot-com bubble burst. It was by his favorite monetary medicine guaranteed to work when taken as directed – floods of easy money followed by still more until the patient is healed, unmindful that the cure may be worse than the disease. No matter, it’s a new Chairman’s problem with Greenspan claiming no culpability for his 18 and a half year tenure of misdeeds, subservience to capital, and contempt for the public interest.

    His new book claims the opposite. It’s a breathtaking example of historical revisionism that’s become standard practice for the man Sydney Morning News’ Political and International Editor Peter Hartcher calls “Bubble Man” in his new book by that title. In it, he quotes Bob Woodward saying Greenspan “believed he had done all he could” to contain over-exuberance when, in fact, he let it get out of control. He now claims:

    — he didn’t support George Bush’s regressive tax cuts for the rich (that helped create huge budget deficits). In fact, he did, and in 2001 wholeheartedly endorsed this centerpiece of the administration’s economic policy in his testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. At the time, he cited the economic slowdown saying: “Should current economic weakness spread….having a tax cut….may….do noticeable good.”

    — he’s “saddened (in his book) that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” In his typical obfuscating way to confuse and have things both ways, he tried clarifying his position in a September interview claiming: “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive. I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, are we fortunate in taking out Saddam? I would say it was essential.” He failed to say he supported the Bush administration agenda across the board, including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, with reasons given at the time he’s now distancing himself from.

    — no responsibility for the 2000 stock market bubble. He falsely claimed he never saw it coming while providing generous amounts of liquidity to fuel it. After citing the market’s “irrational exuberance” in a December, 1996 speech, he failed to curb it and could have by raising interest rates, margin requirements, and jawboning investors to cool an overheated market to restore stability for long-term economic growth. Instead, he did nothing. He failed to take away the punch bowl, created a bubble, and allowed it to burst causing investors (mostly retail ones) to lose trillions.

    — no responsibility for the housing and bond bubbles he created by cutting interest rates aggressively to 1% and flooding the markets with liquidity. As things got out of hand, timely responsible action could have avoided the summer, 2007 credit crisis. Again, he allowed a bad situation to get worse to keep the party going and allow lenders to profit hugely. In the unprecedented run-up in house prices to an $8 trillion wealth bubble, he derided critics claiming anything was wrong. He even encouraged homebuyers to take out adjustable rate mortgages, approved of very risky no down payment purchases, created the subprime mess as a consequence, and isn’t around to address buyers faced with $1.2 trillion in mortgage resets later this year and next that will cause many thousands of painful foreclosures.

    Affected homeowners won’t likely be cheered by his speech-making bunkum that bubble level asset prices proved his monetary policies worked by getting investors to demand lower risk premiums. They also won’t be calmed by his arrogant claim that it’s “simply not realistic” to expect the Fed to identify and deflate asset bubbles when it’s real role is to champion flexible and unregulated markets leaving everyone unprotected on our own.

    — no responsibility for allowing outstanding US debt to more than triple to around $40 trillion on his watch that one analyst calls his “most conspicuous achievement.” Those having to pay it off won’t thank him.

    Greenspan’s Role in the Greatest Modern Era Wealth Transfer from the Public to the Rich

    Greenspan was a one-man wrecking crew years before he became Fed Chairman, and his earlier role likely sealed the job for him as a man the power elite could trust. He earned his stripes and then some for his role in charge of the National Commission on Social Security Reform (called the Greenspan Commission). He was appointed by Ronald Reagan to chair it in 1981 to study and recommend actions to deal with “the short-term financing crisis that Social Security faced….(with claims the) Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund would run out of money….as early as August, 1983.”

    There was just one problem. It was a hoax, but who’d know as the dominant media stayed silent. They let the Commission do its work that would end up transfering trillions of public dollars to the rich. It represents one of the greatest ever heists in plain sight, still ongoing and greater than ever, with no one crying foul to stop it. The Commission issued its report in January, 1983, and Congress used it as the basis for the 1983 Social Security Amendments to “resolve short-term financing problem(s) and (make) many other significant changes in Social Security law” with the public none the wiser it was a scam harming them.

    The Commission recommended:

    — Social Security remain government funded and not become a voluntary program (that would have killed it);

    — $150 – 200 billion in either additional income or decreased outgo be provided the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds in calendar years 1983 – 89;

    — the actuarial imbalance for the 75 year Trust Funds valuation period of an average 1.80% of taxable payroll be resolved;

    — a “consensus package” to fix the problem by raising payroll taxes on incomes but exempting the rich beyond a maximum level taxed. Also a gradual increase in the retirement age and various other possible short and longer range options for consideration. The result today is low income earners pay more in payroll than income tax. For bottom level earners, the burden is especially onerous. They pay no income tax but aren’t exempt from 6.2% of their wages going for Social Security and Medicare.

    — coverage under OASDI be extended on a mandatory, basis as of January 1, 1984, to all newly hired civilian employees of the federal government and all employees of nonprofit organizations;

    — state and local governments that elected coverage for their employees under the OASDI-HI program not be allowed to terminate it in the future;

    — the method of computing benefits be revised to exclude benefits that can accrue to individuals from non-covered OASDI employment and only be for the period when they became eligible – to eliminate “windfall” benefits;

    — 50% of OASDI benefits should henceforth be taxable as ordinary income for individuals earning $20,000 or more and married couples $25,000 or more;

    — in addition, other recommendations concerning cost of living adjustments, the law pertaining to surviving spouses who remarry after age 60, divorced spouses, disabled widows and widowers, and for scheduled payroll tax increases to move up to earlier years up to 1990 after which no further change be made with the wage base rising and is now at a level of $97,500 in 2007 at a tax rate of 6.2% matched by employers;

    — self-employed persons beginning in 1984 pay the combined employer-employee rates now at 12.4% with half considered a business expense;

    — in addition, a number of other changes recommended that in total would penalize the public to benefit the most well-off that was the whole idea of the scheme in the first place.

    The public was told the Commission recommendations of 1983 were supposed to make Social Security fiscally sound for the next 75 years. They weren’t told there was no problem to fix and the changes enacted were to transfer massive wealth from the public to the rich. It was one part of an overall Reagan administration scheme that included huge individual and corporate tax cuts that took place from 1981 to 1986. The rich benefitted most with top rates dropping from 70% in 1981 to 50% over three years and then to 28% in 1986 while the bottom rate actually rose from 11 to 15%.

    It was the first time US income tax rates were ever reduced at the top and raised at the bottom simultaneously. But it was far worse than that. In only a few years, Reagan got enacted the largest ever US income tax cut (mostly for the rich) while instituting the greatest ever increase entirely against working Americans earning $30,000 or less.

    Alan Greenspan engineered it for him by supporting income tax cuts and doubling the payroll tax to defray the revenue shortfall. He also recommended raiding the Social Security Trust Fund to offset the deficit, and who’d know the difference. His scheme helped make the US tax code hugely regressive as well as for the first time transform a pay-as-you-go retirement and disability benefits program into one where wage earner contributions subsidize the rich as well as support current beneficiaries.

    As a consequence, the wealth gap widened, continued under Clinton but became unprecedented under George W. Bush with Greenspan at it again. He supported the administration’s wealth transfer scheme to the rich and outsized corporate subsidies with the public getting stuck with out-of-control deficits, deep social service cuts, and a new Treasury Department report just out promising more of the same.

    It claims Social Security faces a $13.6 trillion shortfall “over the indefinite future,” “reforms” are needed, delaying them punishes younger workers, and the program “can be made permanently solvent only by reducing the present value of scheduled benefits and/or increasing the present value of scheduled tax increases.” Translation: cut benefits deeply, raise payroll taxes, and privatize Social Security so more public wealth goes to Wall Street and big investors.

    Already the top 1% owns 40% of global assets; the top 10% 85% of them; the top 1% in the US controls one-third of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80% just 15.3%; and the top 20% 84.7%. In contrast, the poorest 20% are in debt, owe more than they own, and it’s getting worse.

    A generation of financial manipulation devastated working Americans, but it’s even worse than that. Added are the effects of globalization, automation, outsourcing, the shift from manufacturing to services, deregulation, other harmful economic factors plus weak unions just gotten far weaker in the wake of the UAW September membership sellout to General Motors. The tentative agreement reached (for members to vote on) amounted to an unconditional surrender by a corrupted leadership after a two day walkout that was likely orchestrated in advance to cause GM the least pain. If the package is approved as is likely, it will encourage other companies to offer similar deals, take it or leave it. Organized labor suffered another grievous blow, corporate giants gained, and are more empowered than ever to win out at the expense of workers’ futures.

    The whole scheme was kick-started under Ronald Reagan. Between his tax cuts for the rich and the Greenspan Commission’s orchestrated Social Security heist, working Americans lost out in a generational wealth transfer shift now exceeding $1 trillion annually from 90 million working class households to for-profit corporations and the richest 1% of the population. It created an unprecedented wealth disparity that continues to grow, shames the nation and is destroying the bedrock middle class without which democracy can’t survive.

    Greenspan helped orchestrate it with economist Ravi Batra calling his economics “Greenomics” in his 2005 book “Greenspan’s Fraud.” It “turns out to be Greedomics” advocating anti-trust laws, regulations and social services be ended so “nothing….interfere(s) with business greed and the pursuit of profits.”

    It won’t affect the “Maestro.” He’s getting by quite nicely on his six figure retirement income that’s just a drop in the bucket supplementing the millions he’s making as payback for the trillions he helped shift to the rich and super-rich. They take care of their own, and Greenspan is one of them.

    Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

    Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

    RACE HATE: I hate all Iranians, US aide tells MPs

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    By SIMON WALTERS

    Britsh MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America’s stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush’s senior women officials: “I hate all Iranians.”

    And she also accused Britain of “dismantling” the Anglo-US-led coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon.

    The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month.

    Scroll down for more…

    Hard line: Debra Cagan stunned the MPs with her comments

    The six MPs were taken aback by the hardline approach of the Pentagon and in particular Ms Cagan, one of Mr Bush’s foreign policy advisers.

    She made it clear that although the US had no plans to attack Iran, it did not rule out doing so if the Iranians ignored warnings not to develop a nuclear bomb.

    It was her tone when they met her on September 11 that shocked them most.

    The MPs say that at one point she said: “In any case, I hate all Iranians.”

    Although it was an aside, it was not out of keeping with her general demeanour.

    “She seemed more keen on saying she didn’t like Iranians than that the US had no plans to attack Iran,” said one MP. “She did say there were no plans for an attack but the tone did not fit the words.”

    Another MP said: “I formed the impression that some in America are looking for an excuse to attack Iran. It was very alarming.”

    Tory Stuart Graham, who was on the ten-day trip, would not discuss Ms Cagan but said: “It was very sobering to hear from the horse’s mouth how the US sees the situation.”

    Ms Cagan, whose job involves keeping the coalition in Iraq together, also criticised Britain for pulling out troops.

    “She said if we leave the south of Iraq, the Iranians will take it over,” said one MP.

    Another said: “She is very forceful and some of my colleagues were intimidated by her muscular style.”

    The MPs also saw Henry Worcester, Deputy Director of the Office of Iranian Affairs, who said he favoured talks with Iran.

    The Pentagon denied Ms Cagan said she “hated” Iranians.

    “She doesn’t speak that way,” said an official.

    But when The Mail on Sunday spoke to four of the six MPs, three confirmed privately that she made the remark and one declined to comment. The other two could not be contacted.

    USA terror bombs civilian neighbourhood for several hours

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    dora_baghdad_leg_amputated.jpg

    The Americans bombarded a civilian apartment block at No: 139 60th street, Al Saha in Dora (South Baghdad) on Friday morning. They started at around 1 a.m. continuing for several hours. Aswat Al Iraq’s official source said that they killed eight people and wounded seven others. Residents told Aswat Al Iraq that the Americans killed ten and wounded ten others. All of the dead and wounded were civilians. While an official at Al-Yarmouk hospital told AFP that 13 people – seven men, two women and four children – were killed and 10 men and a woman were wounded in the air strike. He said all the casualties were civilians. The American military said they “regretted” if women and children were killed. That’s the headline that AFP gave their report.

    US regrets if women and children killed in Baghdad raid

    Photo 1: All of the dead and wounded caused by the American bombing of Al Saha in Dora were civilians. Among the civilians wounded by the American bombing was this boy. The doctors in Al Yarmouk told Reuters they had had to amputate his leg.

    Photo 2: Ahmed Omar’s father was one of the civilians killed by the American bombardment of the civilian residential complex around sixtieth street. He is seen here crying on his father’s coffin.

    Outside view of apartment bombed by Americans

    Photo 3: Outside view of apartment bombed by Americans in Dora. The body of one of the civilians killed by the Americans was recovered from this apartment.

    Reporting the same American bombing of a civilian district Reuters (Arabic) say that their television report showed clips from Al Yarmouk of two men and three boys who had been wounded in the American attack and that doctors had amputated the left leg of one of the boys. – The boy you see in the first photograph in this article.

    There is no question of “if” here.

    The Americans have once again deliberately bombed a civilian area from the air knowing, and not caring, that they were going to kill and maim women and children.

    There is no “if” about these dead children.

    There is no “if” about the dead women.

    There is no “if” about these dead men.

    And there is no “if” about who killed them. The Americans killed them.

    As usual when they kill Iraki civilians the Americans displayed their contempt for the civilians whom they kill and maim by not bothering to put out even a preliminary a statement about it until well after the event.

    The American forces in Irak care nothing for the lives of civilians, women, children, the elderly, “men of military age” – which as far as the Americans are concerned means any child over the age of 12. They care nothing.

    For the Americans the people of Irak are a resource to be exploited just like our oil except that we are worth less than our oil. The only thing they require of us is obedience that we must be made to understand that it is the American who is holding the whip and that he has every intention of using it.

    The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.

    It is the American way of war to make war against the civilians of the country they are trying to subjugate.

    Their failed “surge” was never intended to bring peace to Baghdad. And it hasn’t. What it has done is to turn vast swathes of the city into gigantic open air prisons where the Americans can do as they want.

    The Americans routinely bomb civilian homes Sadr City, Shula, Dora, al Fadil, the list goes on and on and on. Since January hundreds of civilians have been slaughtered by criminal cowards in American uniforms using American weapons sent here by the American government and nobody in the green zone government dares say a thing to them about it. They dare not say a thing about it because they survive at the will and pleasure of American gunmen and they know it.

    And always when they do finally get around to making a statement they tell the tired old stupid American lie that they were fighting Al-Qaeda. In that part of Dora? I can only suppose that a large part of the American Army’s publicity machine is actually some sort of care institution for the feeble-minded. And that these feeble-minded buffoons think that everybody is as stupid as they are.

    Then comes the second tired old American lie. That they “regret” the deaths of the civilians they shot down. They do not. Sometimes the mask slips and the viciousness and the evil of the Americans in Irak shows its true colours:

    The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.

    They do not regret the civilian deaths they cause any more than those who send out the suicide bombers regret the women and children cut down in their innocent blood that they have caused. They feel not the slightest regret. My dictionary defines the word regret as follows:

    “a feeling of sadness about something sad or wrong or about a mistake that you have made, and a wish that it could have been different and better:”

    The only thing the Americans regret is that more than four years since they first invaded our country that we still resist their detestable presence.

    Irak is my home not yours Americans are not welcome here.

    Mohammed Ibn Laith.

    Bush steps up anti-Iran rhetoric

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    By Barney Porter

    It is being reported the US may have moved a step closer to military action against Iran, but there has also been a change in the potential target.

    A new report suggests the target of any attack would be Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, rather than the country’s nuclear facilities.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has been writing about the possibility of a US strike on Iran for the past 18 months.

    In his latest article for The New Yorker magazine and in a TV interview, he has gone on to claim that Australia has “expressed interest” in the concept.

    Public unconvinced

    In his latest article for The New Yorker he argues the Bush administration has acknowledged the American public is not convinced Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat.

    At the same time, he says there is a renewed focus on the increasing number of attacks on coalition forces in Iraq, and claims that Iranian munitions are playing a key role.

    This was part of a speech by President George W Bush in late August.

    “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian supplied munitions have increased in the last few months, despite pledges by Iran to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq,” Mr Bush said in the speech.

    “I will take actions necessary to protect our troops, I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

    Mr Hersh cites this rhetoric as evidence of the changing tone coming out of the Bush administration.

    “The name of the game used to be that they’re a nuclear threat, Iran is going to have a bomb soon, we have to do it, sort of the same game we had before the war in Iraq,” he said.

    “What’s happened is that in that last few months they’ve come to the realisation that’s it’s not selling, the American people aren’t worried about Iran as a nuclear threat, certainly as they were about Iraq, there’s just some scepticism.

    “So they’ve switched, really.”

    Mr Hersh says he believes there is now a consensus within the American public that if the Iranians are actively pursuing plans to develop a nuclear weapon, they are at least five years away from their goal.

    He says that has tipped the shift in the administration’s approach.

    “Instead of trying to sell it, not only to the American people but to its allies, the notion of a massive bombing against the infrastructure, what they call counter-proliferation against the infrastructure of the Iraqi bomb, hitting the various facilities that we know exist – instead, they’ve now decided that they’re going to hit the Iranians, payback for hitting us,” he said.

    “They’re going to hit the Revolutionary Guard headquarters and facilities, they’re going to tone down the bombing, they’re going to shift it. It’s going to be more surgical.”

    Mr Hersh says the new strategy involves a subtle change of targets.

    “We’re threatening Iran, we’ve been doing it constantly, but instead of saying to the American people and instead of saying internally, ‘It’s going to be about nuclear weapons’, it’s now going about getting the guys that are killing our boys,” he said.

    “We’re going to hit the border facilities, the facilities inside Iraq that we think are training terrorists, we’re going to hit the facilities we think are supplying some of the explosive devices into Iraq.

    “This is the administration’s position.”

    Australia on board?

    He also claims the Bush administration’s new focus is getting support from its allies, including Australia.

    “The Brits are interested in this idea, there have been expressions of interest from Australia, other countries, the Israelis of course have gone bananas, they’re very upset about the idea of not going,” he said.

    “If you’re going to go into Iran, the Israeli position is very firm, they want us to go, and they want us to hit hard. … An Israeli told me, if you run into a lion, you either shoot it, or ignore it, you don’t pluck out its eyebrows.

    “Going in and taking out the Revolutionary Guard and not taking out the nuclear facilities, for the Israelis is it a non-starter.

    “But that’s the plan, the plan is to be more surgical, more careful, and they’re getting some of their allies on board.”

    Last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer said he called on Iran to stop supplying weapons to militias in Iraq during a recent bilateral meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister.

    A spokesman for the Minister’s office declined to respond to Mr Hersh’s latest claims.

    ‘The opening gambit’

    Dr Michael McKinley, a senior lecturer in International Relations and Strategy at the Australian National University, says a US attack would lead to war.

    “If the United States was to engage in surgical strikes, as some people are once again talking about, you would have to say that Iran could very well behave in such a way, and there’d be a broad scope of possibilities here, where a widely escalated war would need to ensue after that, because I cannot imagine that Iran would just allow itself to be attacked without taking some sort of forceful reaction,” he said.

    He is unconvinced an attack on Iran would stop with ‘surgical strikes’.

    “You have to challenge the logic of it, because if you attack Iran because it seems to be supporting activities inside Iraq, then by the logic that everybody in the decision-making framework seems to have, Iran would then speed up its alleged nuclear weapons program,” he said.

    “That would be the logical way of regarding an Iranian reaction, which would then of course require a further and much stronger reaction on its nuclear sites from the United States.

    “So this would appear to be only the opening gambit, rather than a one-off, if you take everybody’s logic at face value.”

    Dr McKinley says he believes there there is a disposition in the US administration to take some form of military action against Iran.

    “I would be more surprised rather than less surprised if there was not an attack sometime before the Bush administration leaves office,” he said.

    Mr Hersh agrees.

    “What I do know, is he wants to do something,” he said.

    “He will not leave Iran in a position to be a nuclear power and a position to be a threat.”

    Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report

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    9-11.png

    Official Account of 9/11 a “Joke” and a “Cover-up”

    September 23, 2007 — Seven CIA veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and have called for a new investigation. “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke,” said Raymond McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates during the seventies. “There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions. And the reason they’re unanswered is because this administration will not answer the questions,” he said. McGovern, who is also the founder of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), is one of many signers of a petition to reinvestigate 9/11.[1]

    During his 27-year CIA career, McGovern personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. Upon retirement in 1990, McGovern was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medallion and received a letter of appreciation from then President George H. W. Bush. However, McGovern returned the award[2] in 2006 in protest of the current George W. Bush Administration’s advocacy and use of torture.

    In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote[3]: “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception. This book hence confronts the American people–indeed the people of the world as a whole–with an issue second to none in importance and urgency. I give this book, which in no way can be dismissed as the ravings of ‘paranoid conspiracy theorists,’ my highest possible recommendation.”

    William Christison, a 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis also describes the 9/11 Commission Report as a “joke” and offers even more outspoken criticism. In a 2006 audio interview[4] he said, “We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all.”

    Earlier this year, in an endorsement of David Ray Griffin’s book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Christison wrote[5], “[There’s] a strong body of evidence showing the official U.S. Government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” And in an online essay[6] in late 2006, he wrote, “I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. … An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. … The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them.”

    Prior to his retirement from the CIA in 1979, Christison served as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, overseeing 200 analysts who collected intelligence and provided analysis on all regions and every country in the world. Prior to that, he served as one of only a handful of NIO’s in the intelligence community. NIO’s are responsible for the intelligence community efforts in a particular area and are the principal advisors to the Director of Central Intelligence. Christison was NIO for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa.

    Melvin Goodman, PhD, is another former senior CIA official who calls the 9/11 Commission Report a “coverup” and who signed the petition to reinvestigate 9/11.[7] Goodman was the Division Chief of the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs and served as Senior Analyst from 1966 – 1990. He also served as Professor of International Security at the National War College from 1986 – 2004.

    In testimony before a 2005 Congressional briefing on the 9/11 Commission Report[8], Goodman said, “I want to talk about the [9/11] Commission itself, about the flawed process of the Commission and finally about the conflict of interest within the Commission that is extremely important to understand the failure of the Commission. … The final report is ultimately a coverup. I don’t know how else to describe it.” Goodman is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and Adjunct Professor of Government at Johns Hopkins University.

    Robert Baer is another well known CIA veteran who has questioned the official account of 9/11. A 21-year CIA veteran and specialist in the Middle East, Baer was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal upon his retirement in 1997. After retirement, he wrote two best-selling non-fiction books about the CIA, See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil, the former of which was the basis for the Academy Award-winning movie Syriana, starring George Clooney. Baer was also the writer and on-camera commentator for the Emmy Award-nominated documentary Cult of the Suicide Bomber.

    Baer has repeatedly questioned whether al-Qaida could have accomplished 9/11 alone. The 9/11 Commission Report categorically found al-Qaida to be entirely responsible for 9/11, stating, “Similarly, we have seen no evidence that any foreign government – or government official – supplied any funding.” However, this 9/11 Commission finding directly contradicts the earlier finding of the Joint House-Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s 2002 Report[9] (p.415) of “sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers.”

    In a 2002 essay[10] for The Guardian, Baer wrote, “Did bin Laden act alone, through his own al-Qaida network, in launching the attacks? About that I’m far more certain and emphatic: no.” In subsequent interviews, Baer has suggested that support for the attacks could have come from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

    In 2006, during an interview by Thom Hartmann[11], Baer, after commenting on the financial profits being made from 9/11, was asked: “What about political profit? There are those who suggest that … someone in that chain of command … had pretty good knowledge that 9/11 was going to happen – and really didn’t do much to stop it – or even obstructed efforts to stop it because they thought it would lend legitimacy to Bush’s … failing presidency.” Baer replied: “Absolutely.” Hartmann then asked, “So you are personally of the opinion … that there was an aspect of ‘inside job’ to 9/11 within the U.S. government?” To which Baer replied, “There is that possibility, the evidence points at it.” When Hartmann continued, “And why is it not being investigated?” Baer replied, “Why isn’t the WMD story being investigated? Why hasn’t anybody been held accountable for 9/11? We held people accountable after Pearl Harbor. Why has there been no change in command? Why have there been no political repercussions? Why has there been no – any sort of exposure on this? It really makes you wonder.”

    In his blurb for the revised and updated edition of David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Baer wrote[12]: “Until we get a complete, honest, transparent investigation …, we will never know what happened on 9/11.”

    “I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war,” wrote well-known intelligence analyst Robert David Steele in 2006 in a review of the book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley[13]. Steele is the author of numerous books on the intelligence services and is currently the CEO of OSS.net, a proponent of Open Source Intelligence. Steele has 25 years of combined service in the CIA and the U.S. Marine Corps. He also served as the second ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 – 1992 and was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. Steele continued, “I have to tell anyone who cares to read this: I believe it. I believe it enough to want a full investigation that passes the smell test of the 9/11 families as well as objective outside observers.”

    In a subsequent interview on the Alex Jones Show[14], Steele said, “The U.S. government did not properly investigate this [9/11] and there are more rocks to be turned over,” and added, “I’m absolutely certain that WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition and that, as far as I’m concerned, means that this case has not been properly investigated. There’s no way that building could have come down without controlled demolition.”

    In late 2004, a group of 25 intelligence service and law enforcement veterans sent a joint letter to Congress[15] expressing their concerns about “serious shortcomings,” “omissions,” and “major flaws” in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation. Their letter was apparently entirely ignored. Among the signers were four CIA veterans; Raymond McGovern and Melvin Goodman (both mentioned above) and Lynne Larkin and David MacMichael.

    Lynne Larkin was a CIA Operations Officer who served in several CIA foreign stations before being assigned to the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence Center. There, she co-chaired a multi-agency task force, which, among other functions, provided direction to other federal agencies for coordinating intelligence efforts among the many intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

    David MacMichael, PhD, is a former Senior Estimates Officer at the CIA with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Prior to joining the CIA, he served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer for ten years and for four years as a counter-insurgency advisor to the government.

    Their letter read:

    “We the undersigned wish to bring to the attention of the Congress and the people of the United States what we believe are serious shortcomings in the report and its recommendations. …

    Omission is one of the major flaws in the Commission’s report. We are aware of significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the commission by those of us with direct knowledge, but somehow escaped attention. …

    The omission of such serious and applicable issues and information by itself renders the report flawed, and casts doubt on the validity of many of its recommendations. …

    The Commission, with its incomplete report of “facts and circumstances”, intentional avoidance of assigning accountability, and disregard for the knowledge, expertise and experience of those who actually do the job, has now set about pressuring our Congress and our nation to hastily implement all its recommendations. …

    We the undersigned, who have worked within various government agencies (FBI, CIA, FAA, DIA, Customs) responsible for national security and public safety, call upon you in Congress to include the voices of those with first-hand knowledge and expertise in the important issues at hand. We stand ready to do our part.”

    And they and thousands of dedicated, loyal, and experienced military officers, intelligence service and law enforcement veterans, and government officials still stand ready to provide assistance for a thorough, impartial, and honest investigation into the terrible acts of 9/11.

    Statements questioning the official account of 9/11 and calls for a new investigation by hundreds of credible individuals can be found at http://PatriotsQuestion911.com

    [1] Petition to Reinvestigate 9/11. Oct. 26, 2004 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633

    [2] I Do Not Wish to be Associated with Torture by Ray McGovern March 2, 2006 http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/58/18096

    [3] Ray McGovern’s blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott. March, 2007 http://www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?products_id=1545&osCsid=5a22b94fffd724962a118f454c5d7194

    [4] William Christison interviewed by George Kenney on Electric Politics. Sept. 29, 2006 http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2006/09/the_case_for_intellectual_inte.html

    [5] William Christison’s blurb for David Ray Griffin’s book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking March 2007 http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-11-Mechanics-Defenders-Conspiracy/dp/product-description/156656686X

    [6] Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11 by William Christison Aug. 16, 2006 http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Christison14.htm

    [7] Petition to Reinvestigate 9/11. Oct. 26, 2004 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633

    [8] The 911 Commission Report — One Year Later, a Congressional Briefing July 22, 2005 http://www.vt911.org/McKinneyReport20050722transcript.pdf

    [9] Congressional Reports: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 December, 2002 http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/911.html

    [10] See No Evil (part 2) by Robert Baer in The Guardian January 12, 2002 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,631434,00.html

    [11] Robert Baer interviewed on The Thom Hartmann Show June 9, 2006 http://www.911blogger.com/2006/06/former-cia-member-robert-baer-comments.html

    [12] Robert Baer’s blurb for the revised and updated edition of David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking March 2007 http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-11-Mechanics-Defenders-Conspiracy/dp/product-description/156656686X

    [13] Robert David Steele’s review of the book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley Oct. 7, 2006 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0930852370

    [14] Robet David Steele interviewed on The Alex Jones Show Oct. 27, 2006 http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2006/271006googlecia.htm

    [15] Letter to Congress signed by 25 intelligence service and law enforcement Sept. 13, 2004 http://www.pogo.org/m/hsp/hsp-911commission-040913.pdf

    Take action – click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
    Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report

    Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

    www.PatriotsQuestion911.com

    Alan Miller is author of the website http://www.PatriotsQuestion911.com

    http://dissidentnews.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/seven-cia-veterans-challenge-911-commission-report/

    Iranian university dean invites Bush to address professors, students

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    TEHRAN, Iran: The dean of a northeastern Iranian university has invited U.S. President George W. Bush to address professors and students and answer their questions on human rights, terrorism and the Holocaust, state television reported Monday.

    The invitation from Ferdowsi University came a week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial visit to New York, where he faced tough questioning and received a combative introduction from Columbia University’s president at the campus forum.

    “The dean of Ferdowsi University has invited the U.S. president to address professors and students and answer their questions about human rights, terrorism and the Holocaust,” the television reported. The broadcast did not give further details including saying how or when the invitation was issued by the prestigious Iranian university in Mashhad.

    Late last week before he left New York, Ahmadinejad invited Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic. The hardline leader was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

    Ahmadinejad’s appearance a week ago at Columbia University caused an uproar after a blistering introduction from university President Lee Bollinger who said Ahmadinejad was exhibiting “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” who was “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated” for his denials of the Holocaust.

    Bollinger’s lashing offended Iranians especially in regard to the region’s hospitality traditions that a host should be polite to a guest, no matter what he thinks of him.

    In response, the chancellors of seven Iranian universities last week issued a letter to Bollinger saying his “insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with … a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.”

    They invited Bollinger to Iran, adding, “You can be assured that Iranians are very polite and hospitable toward their guests.”

    Back home, Ahmadinejad said the negative reception he received at Columbia University failed to damage Iran’s image and instead hurt America’s prestige abroad.

    Tensions are high between Iran and the U.S. over Washington’s allegations that Tehran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and supplying Shiite militias in Iraq with deadly weapons that kill U.S. troops. Iran denies both claims.

    Iran and the U.S cut off diplomatic relations in 1979 after Iranian militant students seized the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

    http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/01/africa/ME-GEN-Iran-Bush.php

    Election Fraud special

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    Where’s the US news media?

    George Bush was not elected president in 2004.

    Greg Palast discovered the smoking gun.

    Karl Rove and at least one of the federal prosecutors appointed by Alberto Gonzales engaged in a criminal conspiracy to deny hundreds of thousands of American citizens their right to vote.

    This is a felony. It’s a jailable offense. It undermines the results of the 2004 election and calls the results of the 2000 election into question.

    George Bush is not the legitimate president and the White House is full of unindicted felons (or at least it used to be until they all resigned.)

    http://www.brasschecktv.com

    How to Foil a Terrorist Plot in Seven Simple Steps

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    Nora Ephron

    1. In order to foil a terrorist plot, you must first find a terrorist plot. This is not easy.

    2. Not just anyone can find and then foil a terrorist plot. You must have an incentive. The best incentive is to be an accused felon, looking at a long prison term. Under such circumstances, your lawyer will explain to you, you may be able to reduce your sentence by acting as an informant in a criminal case, preferably one involving terrorists.

    3. The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you. Necessity is the mother of invention: if you can find the right raw material — a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States — you can make your very own terrorist.

    4. Now the good part begins. Money! The FBI will give you lots of money to take your very own terrorist out to lots of dinners where you, wearing a wire, can record yourself making recommendations to him about possible targets and weapons that might be used in the impending terrorist attack that your very own terrorist is going to mastermind, with your help. It will even buy you a computer so you can go to Google Earth in order to show your very own terrorist a “top secret” aerial image of the target you have suggested.

    5. More money!! The FBI will give you even more money to travel to foreign countries with your very own terrorist, and it will make suggestions about terrorist groups you can meet while in said foreign countries.

    6. Months and even years will pass in this fashion, while you essentially get the FBI to pay for everything you do. (Incidentally, be sure your lawyer negotiates your expense account well in advance, or you may be forced — as the informant was in the Buffalo terrorist case — to protest your inadequate remuneration by setting yourself on fire in front of the White House.)

    7. At a certain point, something will go wrong. You may have trouble recruiting other people to collaborate with your very own terrorist, who is, as you yourself know, just an ordinary guy in a really bad mood. Or, alternatively, the terrorist cell you have carefully cobbled together may malfunction and fail to move forward — probably as a result of sheer incompetence or of simply not having been genuinely serious about the acts of terrorism you were urging it to commit. At this point, you may worry that the FBI is going to realize that there isn’t much of a terrorist plot going on here at all, just a case of entrapment. Do not despair: the FBI is way ahead of you. The FBI knows perfectly well what’s going on. The FBI has as much at stake as you do. So before it can be obvious to the world that there’s no case, the FBI will arrest your very own terrorist, hold a press conference and announce that a huge terrorist plot has been foiled. It will of course be forced to admit that this plot did not proceed beyond the pre-planning stage, that no actual weapons or money were involved, and that the plot itself was “not technically feasible,” but that will not stop the story from becoming a front-page episode all over America and, within hours, boilerplate for all the Republican politicians who believe that you need to arrest a “homegrown” terrorist now and then to justify the continuing war in Iraq. Everyone will be happy, except for the schmuck you shmikeled into becoming a terrorist, and no one really cares about him anyway.

    So congratulations. You have foiled a terrorist plot. Way to go.

    Police ‘failure’ in Menezes murder

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    Police firearms officers killed Jean Charles de Menezes and risked the lives of Londoners in a catalogue of errors, the Old Bailey has been told. It heard the Brazilian was shot seven times because of “fundamental failures” in Metropolitan Police planning.

    One armed officer put a gun into a colleague’s chest and a Tube driver was chased down a tunnel.

    The force denies breaking health and safety laws when it mistook Mr de Menezes for a suicide bomber in 2005.

    Opening the unprecedented trial of the force at the Old Bailey, Clare Montgomery QC, prosecuting, said that the Metropolitan Police was subject to the same health and safety obligations as any other employer or public body in the UK.

    These laws were there to ensure public safety, she said, but a “shocking and catastrophic” failure to stick to a clear strategy to apprehend one of the 21 July 2005 bombers had left the public at risk of being blown up and ultimately led to Mr de Menezes’ avoidable death.

    “It was the police operation itself that invited the disaster that occurred,” she said.

    “We say that the police planned and carried out the operation so badly that the public was put at risk and Jean Charles was killed.”

    Ms Montgomery said that in fast moving events, detectives had identified one of the suspected 21 July suicide bombers, Hussain Osman, within hours of the botched attacks.

    They linked him to a small block of flats in Tulse Hill, south London which was also the home of Jean Charles de Menezes.

    But when Mr de Menezes left his home and was followed, neither the officers on the ground, nor those in operational control at Scotland Yard, were certain of his identity.

    One spotter told commanders it was “ridiculous” to ask him for a “percentage certainty” that the target was Osman.

    “By comparing the photo of Jean Charles with a photo of Hussain Osman, you may understand why some of the officers at least thought Jean Charles might be Osman,” said Ms Montgomery. “None of them said he was definitely Osman.”

    This uncertainty continued until the very last moments of his life when commanders at Scotland Yard and firearms officers on the ground make a series of rapid decisions which dictated who was going to try to arrest the electrician, the court heard.

    Scotland Yard’s operation room was noisy and staffed by tired and drained staff, the court heard. More and more officers were crowding in as news of the operation spread.

    As surveillance officers sat near Mr de Menezes on the tube, firearms officers “burst” onto the platform, said Ms Montgomery. One surveillance officer, codenamed ‘Ivor’, alerted them to Mr de Menezes’ position.

    Terrified driver

    “As the armed officers entered the train, Jean Charles stood up,” said the lawyer. “He was grabbed by ‘Ivor’ and pushed back into his seat.

    “Two firearms officers leant over Ivor who was holding Jean Charles and [one] put his pistol against Jean Charles’ head and fired. He was shot seven times and died immediately.”

    At the same time, one of the armed officers physically dragged ‘Ivor’ onto the platform while holding a gun against his chest. Ivor shouted he was a policeman and heard more shots in the carriage.

    Terrified, the tube driver fled his cab – but was chased by another armed officer into the tunnel.

    Ms Montgomery said: “You may think, members of the jury, that the fact the police ended up pointing a gun at another police man and mistaking a terrorised train driver for a bomber gives you a clue as to just how far wrong the operation had gone.”

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7021401.stm

    Ten Most Amazing Pictures Taken by Hubble

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     Astronomers Select Top Ten Most Amazing Pictures Taken by Hubble Space Telescope in Last 16 Years

    …they illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but also almost impossibly beautiful.”
    Michael Hanlon/AH (Nov 25th, 2006)

    After correcting an initial problem with the lens, when the Hubble Space Telescope was first launched in 1990, the floating astro-observatory began to relay back to Earth, incredible snapshots of the “final frontier” it was perusing.

    Recently, astronauts voted on the top photographs taken by Hubble, in its 16-year journey so far. Remarking in the article from the Daily Mail, reporter Michael Hanlon says the photos “illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but also almost impossibly beautiful.”

    Hubble telescope’s top ten greatest space photographs.

     

     

    The Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth – was voted best picture taken

    by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as
    spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.
     

     

    The Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles

    an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes. The nebula lies within our
    galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth.
     

     

    In third place is Nebula NGC 2392, called Eskimo because it looks like a face

    surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is, in fact, a ring of comet-shaped objects
    flying away from a dying star. Eskimo is 5,000 light years from Earth.
     

     

    At four is the Cat’s Eye Nebula

     

     

    The Hourglass Nebula, 8,000 light years away, has a pinched-in-the-middle

    look because the winds that shape it are weaker at the centre.
     

     

    In sixth place is the Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years in
    length (the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the Moon).

     

     

    The Perfect Storm, a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500 light years away,

    described as ‘a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts of oxygen, sulphur
    and other elements’.
     

     

    Starry Night, so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting.
    It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way.
     

     

    The glowering eyes from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of two
    merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163 in the distant Canis Major constellation.
     

     

     

    The Trifid Nebula. A ‘stellar nursery’, 9,000 light years from here, it is where new stars are being born.

    Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

    http://cph-theory.persiangig.com/2031-ehubblepics.htm

    Leave my dad alone, says Jenna Bush

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    By Sarah Baxter

    ONE of the twin daughters of President George W Bush has spoken of the heartbreak she feels about the Iraq war and the criticism of her father. “He is a totally different person to me than what they portray him as,” said Jenna Bush. “I mean, he’s my dad.”

    The party girl who stuck her tongue out at reporters and was charged with underage drinking publishes a book this week called Ana’s Story, about an HIV-positive teenage mother whom she encountered on her travels in Central America with Unicef.

    She said she had met Ana and her baby in Panama, where the young woman had declared: “We are survivors.”

    Jenna, 25, who is known as the “blonde one” of the Bush twins, has found her sober side. Asked about Unicef’s report that 4m Iraqis had fled their homes since the invasion of Iraq, she said: “Nobody wants war. I definitely, and my father doesn’t want war. But it’s a horribly complicated situation.” She added: “I can say it’s devastating . . . I think everybody can agree on that . . . Obviously, all of this breaks my heart.”

    Among the experiences that affected her deeply was visiting wounded veterans of the war with her father. “I’ve gone with him to Walter Reed hospital and I’ve seen his face after he’s left the hospital. He would have to be inhuman not to feel it. I mean, of course things weigh on him. Of course they do.”

    Matt Damon, the actor, once suggested the Bush daughters should serve in Iraq, but according to Jenna, it would put too many people in danger. “I hope that I serve by being a teacher,” she said. She worked at a Washington primary school after college.

    Jenna is now engaged to Henry Hager, a former White House aide. He proposed to her after a 90-minute hike up a mountain in Maine.

    “I did not want to go hiking at 4am in the morning,” she said. “But we got up, and we hiked in the dark . . . and then when we got to the top, with the sunrise, he asked me.”

    She remains close to her sister Barbara � “We’ve gone through every single thing together, you know, from the womb on” � and mother Laura Bush, who helped to correct her drafts.

    “Former librarian and schoolteacher,” said the first lady of her involvement in the book. “I couldn’t help it.”

    Robert Barnett, the lawyer and agent who acts for Tony Blair and Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, helped Jenna to find a publisher. Profits from the book will go to Unicef.

    Ana’s Story offers advice to teenagers about avoiding HIV, which mentions abstinence but says the best way is to “be faithful to your partner and use a condom every time”.

    Get active or become radioactive‏

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    Here is a printable flyer for a DU conference to be held Tuesday and Wednesday of this week in New York.


    Link to full size image is here

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    Contact: International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons
    Telephone: +44 (0)161 273 8293 / 8283
    E-mail: info@bandepleteduranium.org
    Web: www.bandepleteduranium.org
    Tara Thornton: tarathrnt@fairpoint.net; (207) 268-2108;

    CONFERENCE TO TARGET DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS

    NEW YORK, New York – A coalition of environmental, anti-nuclear and environmental organizations will conduct a conference in New York City, at the UN Church Center, 777 UN Plaza, 8th Floor; October 2nd and 3rd, to confront the proliferation of so-called “depleted” uranium (DU) weapons, and to consider steps towards their abolition.

    Registration for the conference: “Uranium Weapons: Contributing to a Dangerous World,” costs $25 via Paypal (office@bandepleteduranium.org). Same day registration at the door is encouraged. Pre-register at: info@bandepleteduranium.org.

    To register in the U.S. contact: Tara Thornton: tarathrnt@fairpoint.net (207) 268-2108.

    The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons, based in Manchester, England, will bring together scientists, combat veterans, legal scholars and community activists to discus the toxic and radioactive hazards of uranium munitions – hazards posed to troops, to civilians in target areas and to environmental health — and a campaign to see the poisoned weapons banned internationally.

    Sessions set for Tues., Oct. 2 include: An introductory “Overview” of the global anti-DU campaign; “DU and the Law;” and “The Contaminated and the Contaminators.”

    Wednesday, Oct. 3: “Science and DU” (DNA Damage, Health Effects, Civilian and Military Victims); and “Steps Toward Eliminating DU Weapons.”

    Some key presenters — who are available for interviews – include: * Toronto epidemiologist, Rosalie Bertell, PhD, (rosaliebertell@greynun.org ; 215-968-4236) * Dr. David Carpenter, MD, Institute for Health & the Environment, Univ. at Albany, SUNY (Carpent@uamail.albany.edu; 518-525-2660) * Professor Manfred Mohr, of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (+49+173+576 84 10; mohrm@gmx.net) * Staff Sergeant Herbert Reed (Ret.), U.S. Iraq war veteran (Reed herbert_reed@msn.com) * Els de Groen, a Member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, and will unveil a new book, “The Human Cost of Uranium Weapons.”(Contact: +32 (0) 2 284 5480; edegroen@europarl.europa.eu)

    Uranium weapons are armor-piercing munitions made of waste uranium-238, an extremely hard metal left in great quantities from the production of reactor fuel and nuclear weapons.

    The United States and Britain used uranium weapons extensively in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the NATO bombing of Bosnia in 1995, its 1999 intervention in Kosovo, the ongoing bombardment of Afghanistan and during the 2003 attack on Iraq.

    When the uranium shells smash and burn through hard targets, they turn to fine powder which can be spread long distances by the wind. If ingested or inhaled the toxic, radioactive character of the uranium-238 can cause cancer, kidney disease and a host of nervous system and immune system disorders. — end —

    –
    NUKEWATCH
    PO BOX 649
    LUCK WI 54853
    715-472-4185
    www.nukewatch.com

    BBC cooks up more TVdeceit‏

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    By Roya Nikkhah

    Nigella Lawson, the celebrity television chef, has been criticised for misrepresenting elements of her new cookery show.

    Producers on the show have admitted that a London bus which Miss Lawson rode on during a trip to the shops was, in fact, hired by the BBC and filled with extras pretending to be normal passengers.

    A BBC spokesman, said: “We chose to hire a bus for the day of filming rather than disrupt customers on a normal bus route. This series is a factual entertainment cooking show, not an observational documentary and it is perfectly normal procedure.”

    The BBC also admitted that several of the people who appeared on the show as Miss Lawson’s “friends” to sample her cooking, were actually “invited guests”.

    Report claims proof of secret CIA jails in Europe

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    A Council of Europe report made public June 9 said that investigators have found proof that the CIA ran clandestine prisons for terrorist suspects in Europe with the full cooperation of government leaders, especially in Poland and Romania.
    A European commission spokesman told journalists that the commission was in the process of studying the report and will make assessment in due course of time as it did not want to make any hasty comments. He, however lamented that in the absence of any investigative powers, the commission could not go into the matter on its own.
    The report, prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who is heading the investigation, said, “There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.
    “We have also had clear and detailed confirmation from our own sources, in both the American intelligence services and the countries concerned, that the two countries did host secret detention centres under a special CIA programme established by the American administration in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, to ‘kill, capture and detain’ terrorist suspects deemed to be of ‘high value’,” the report claimed.
    For example, Marty’s report stated that investigators had received confirmation, “from more than one source,” of eight names of “high-value detainees” that were held in Poland between 2003 and 2005. CIA sources told Marty’s investigators that Poland was the “black site” where both Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were held and questioned using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which is usually a euphemism for torture.
    Abu Zubaydah was a leading member of Osama bin Laden’s brain trust and the operations chief of al-Qaeda. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has admitted planning the September 11 attacks on the United States.
    The report states that these secret prisons “were run directly and exclusively by the CIA” and that local staff performed only “purely logistical duties.”
    However, investigators had “sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories.” The report said that former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski as well as the former and current presidents of Romania, Ion Iliescu and Traian Basescu, “could be held accountable for these activities” because they “knew about and authorized” them.
    The report noted that the “rendition, abduction and detention of terrorist suspects” have always taken place outside US borders because they would have been “ruled unlawful and unconstitutional” by American courts.
    “Obviously, these actions are also unacceptable under the laws of European countries, who nonetheless tolerated them or colluded actively in carrying them out,” the report said.
    “This export of illegal activities overseas is all the more shocking in that it shows fundamental contempt for the countries on whose territories it was decided to commit the relevant acts,” it said.
    In addition, the fact that these measures applied only to non-US citizens reflected “a kind of legal apartheid,” the report said. The blame does not lie only with Americans, but also, “above all, with European political leaders who have knowingly acquiesced in this state of affairs.”
    Marty’s report also criticised Germany and Italy for having “obstructed the search for the truth and continuing to do so by invoking the concept of ‘state secrets’.”
    In an interview published in the French daily Le Figaro, Marty said, “The United States wanted to impose a war without rules against terrorism. This policy ended in disaster.”
    The European Parliament which has been in the forefront of unmasking these facts about renditions flights by CIA and allied subjects was quick to respond.
    MEP Sarah Ludford of the United Kingdom, vice-President of the former committee of enquiry on CIA activities in the EP said: “The new Marty report confirms what had been found by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. Any new evidence confirming that CIA prisons existed, as we alleged, in Europe, would be damning and shameful. As MEPs demanded, we must expose the secret agreements between US intelligence services and some European governments. These illegal, undemocratic and unacceptable actions must be accounted for and punished.”
    MEP Ignasi Guardans of Spain, former Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) coordinator in the CIA committee declared: “The release of this new report by the Council of Europe rapporteur will help to maintain the spotlight on what happened in the name of the ‘war on terror.’ The EP too must maintain its scrutiny of this rendition practice in the coming months and continue to push the Member States to reveal the true facts of the matter.” As an immediate reaction, EU and NATO member Poland denied the findings of the report alleging it had hosted secret US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisons for terror suspects.
    According to the report, Poland’s former president Aleksander Kwasniewski had known about the covert CIA activities on Polish soil.
    “Poland maintains its position on the issue of the alleged CIA prisons on the territory of our country – There were no secret bases in Poland,” Polish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Robert Szaniawski was quoted by the Polish PAP news agency last Friday.
    Szaniawski added Polish officials were waiting for the Council of Europe to produce more details and evidence to support its claims. “Up to now the evidence presented on this issue has been worth very little,” he said.

    http://www.neurope.eu/articles/74870.php

    On return, veterans face financial ruin

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    Physical, mental injuries prove costly for families and loved ones

    By Jeff Donn and Kimberly Hefling

    TEMECULA – He was one of America’s first defenders on Sept. 11, 2001, a Marine who pulled burned bodies from the ruins of the Pentagon. He saw more horrors in Kuwait and Iraq.

    Today, he can’t keep a job, pay his bills, or chase thoughts of suicide from his tortured brain. In a few weeks, he may lose his house, too.

    Gamal Awad – the American son of a Sudanese immigrant – exemplifies an emerging group of war veterans: the economic casualties.

    More than in past wars, many wounded troops are coming home alive from the Middle East, a triumph for military medicine. But they often return hobbled by prolonged physical and mental injuries from homemade bombs and the anxiety of fighting a hidden enemy along blurred battle lines.

    These troops are just starting to seek help in large numbers, more than 185,000 so far. The cost of their benefits is already testing resources set aside by government and threatening the future of these wounded veterans for decades to come, say economists and veterans’ groups.

    “The wounded and their families no longer trust that the government will take care of them the way they thought they’d be taken care of,” says veterans advocate Mary Ellen Salzano.

    How does a war veteran expect to be treated? “As a hero,” she says.

    In Awad’s case, he needs to think of a reason each morning not to kill himself.

    He can’t even look at the framed photograph that shows him accepting a Marine heroism medal for his recovery work at the Pentagon after the terrorist attack.

    It might remind him of the burned woman whose skin peeled off in his hands when he tried to comfort her.

    Denise Mettie kisses her son, Evan, after a physical therapy session. Mettie, of Selah, Wash., has been living paycheck to paycheck while she helps in the recovery of her son.
    (Mike Derer / Associated Press)

    He tries not to hear the shrieking rockets of Iraq either, smell the burning fuel, or relive the blast that blew him right out of bed. The memories come steamrolling back anyway.

    “Nothing can turn off those things,” he says, voice choked and eyes glistening.

    He stews alternately over suicide and finances, his $43,000 in credit-card debt, his $4,330 in federal checks each month. They bring the government’s compensation for total disability from post-traumatic stress disorder. His flashbacks, thoughts of suicide, and anxiety over imagined threats – all documented for six years in his military record – keep him from working.

    The disability payments don’t even cover the $5,700-a-month cost of his adjustable home mortgage and equity loans. He owes more on his house than its market value, so he can’t sell it and may soon lose it to the bank.

    “I love this house. It makes me feel safe,” he says.

    Awad could once afford it. He used to earn $100,000 a year as an experienced Marine with a master’s degree in management who excelled at logistics. Now, he can’t even manage his own life.

    There’s another twist. This dedicated Marine was given a “general” discharge 15 months ago for an extramarital affair with a woman, also a Marine. His military therapists blamed this impulsive conduct on PTSD aggravated by his Middle East tours.

    Luckily, his discharge, though not unqualifiedly honorable, left his rights intact to medical care and disability payments – or he’d be in sadder shape.

    Divorced since developing PTSD, Awad has two daughters who live elsewhere.

    He spends much of his days hoisting weights and thwacking a punching bag in the dimness of his garage. He passes nights largely sleepless, a zombie shuffling through the bare rooms of his home in sunny California wine country, not too far from his old base.

    High price of caring

    Few anticipated the high price of caring for Awad and other Middle East veterans with deep, slow-healing wounds.

    Afghanistan seemed quiet and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq one year after the Sept. 11 attacks. That’s when the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs guaranteed two years of free care to returning combat veterans for virtually any medical condition with a possible service link.

    Later, few predicted such a protracted war in Iraq, one in which Iraqi insurgents would rely on disfiguring bombs and bombardment as chief tactics. Better armor and field medicine have kept U.S. soldiers alive at the highest rate ever, according to one study based on government data. However, many are returning with multiple amputations or other disabling injuries.

    The Pentagon counts more than 29,000 combat wounded in the Middle East since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Tens of thousands more got hurt outside of combat or in ways that only surface later.

    There was no mistaking the injuries of Cambodian-American Sgt. Pisey Tan. Eight months into his second tour in Iraq, a makeshift bomb blasted his armored vehicle and took both his legs.

    Still, Tan has had to rely on private donations and family, as well as government. The government treated him and paid for his artificial legs. But his brother, Dada, left college to live with him at a military hospital for almost a year.

    “That’s how our family is,” says the Woodlyn, Pa., veteran. “We always take care of our own.”

    The government says it does too, and with some truth. Of 1.4 million U.S. forces deployed for Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 185,000 have sought care from the VA – a number that could easily top 700,000 eventually, predicts one academic analysis.

    But many also need to help themselves. Iraq veteran John Waltz, of Hebron, Ky., sought treatment for PTSD but ran up about $12,000 worth of medical bills while his condition and claim were evaluated, he says.

    “We have to be really frugal, as far as what groceries we buy,” Waltz says. “I think we’re down to just a couple dollars now, until the next time we get paid.”

    On a national scale, the costs of caring for the wounded certainly won’t crush the immense American economy or the VA. But the price tag will challenge budgets of governments and service agencies, adding another hungry mouth within their nests.

    Economic forecasts vary widely for the federal costs of caring for injured veterans returning from the Middle East, but they range as high as $700 billion for the VA. That would rival the cost of fighting the Iraq war. In recent years, the VA has repeatedly run out of money to treat sick veterans and had to ask for billions more before the next budget.

    “I wouldn’t be surprised if these costs per person are higher than any war previously,” says Scott Wallsten, of the conservative think tank Progress and Freedom Foundation.

    Federal officials generally defend the quality of care. At a recent ribbon cutting, the Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard Cody, trumpeted a new rehab center for amputees as “proof that when it comes to making good on such an important promise, there is no bottom line.”

    White House budget spokesman Sean Kevelighan says medical spending for all veterans has risen by 83 percent during President Bush’s time in office. “The president has made his dedication very clear to troops in the field and after,” Kevelighan says.

    The VA didn’t respond to several requests for comment. Recently, though, outgoing chief Jim Nicholson acknowledged trouble keeping up with the pace of disability claims.

    But earlier this year, he also insisted that veterans “will invariably tell you they are really getting good care from the VA.”

    Not invariably.

    The VA takes the lead in treating wounds and paying for disabilities of veterans. And it usually does a good job of handling major, known wounds, especially in the early months, by many accounts.

    However, many veterans and families say the VA often restricts rehabilitation or cuts it off too quickly.

    Veterans groups sued the VA a few months ago, saying the agency has descended into a “virtual meltdown.”

    Many recommendations for fixes involve quicker and heftier disability benefits. And nearly everyone begs for more VA money and staff for medical treatment.

    But it may be too late for veterans like Awad, as he nervously awaits the approach of imagined enemies around what was once his castle.

    Iran’s parliament votes to call CIA, U.S. Army ‘terrorist’ groups

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    Report from Xinhua:

    Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Sunday that he supported the recent Majlis (parliament) statement to brand the U.S. army and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as terrorist groups.

    “Terrorist is a proper label for the military and security forces of the United States,” Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters at his weekly press conference.

    When asked about the recent approval of the U.S. House of Representative which put the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)on the list of terrorist organizations, Hosseini said “placing the armed forces of the UN member states on the list of terrorist groups is unprecedented.”

    Iranian lawmakers on Saturday branded the U.S. troops and the CIA as terrorist groups, apparently a sharp reaction tit-for-tat over the decisions of their U.S. counterparts.

    More than 200 Iranian MPs said in a statement that “the U.S. army and the CIA themselves are terrorists since they support terrorism.”

    “They support Israel’s state terrorism in its crackdown on Palestinian and Lebanese people, trained al-Qaida and Taliban, and established secret prisons in Europe, torture prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” the MPs said.

     They also demanded the United Nations to intervene in the “global problem of U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret jails in other countries.”

    The statement was released just three days after the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives called on the U.S. State Department to brand Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

     Washington has accused Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program. Iran denied the U.S. charges and insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

     Report from Al Jazeera:

    Depleted uranium

    The parliament said the two organisations were terrorists for a number of reasons.

    It said they were involved in dropping nuclear bombs in Japan in World War II and used depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

    It also said they supported the killings of Palestinians by Israel, bombed and killed Iraqi civilians and tortured terror suspects in prisons.

    The resolution urges Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s, the Iranian president, government to treat the two as terrorist organisations.

    It also paves the way for the resolution to become legislation which, if ratified by the country’s constitutional watchdog, would become law.

    Awaiting reaction

    The government is expected to remain silent over the parliament resolution and wait for US reaction before making its decision.

    On Wednesday, the US senate voted 76-22 in favour of a resolution urging the state department to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organisation.

    While the proposal attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, a small group of Democrats said they feared labeling the state-run organisation a terrorist group could be interpreted as a congressional authorisation of military force in Iran.

    The Bush administration had already been considering whether to blacklist an elite unit within the Revolutionary Guard, subjecting part of the vast military operation to financial sanctions.

    London Paper Issues RFID Card

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    By Mary Catherine O’Connor

    Selling newspapers in London is a tough game, but The Evening Standard is using RFID to gain a competitive edge. The popular daily paper, targeted at commuters who ride the London Underground subway system, sells between 200,000 and 300,000 copies per day, at a cost of £0.50 ($1.12) apiece. It must compete, however, with a bevy of free dailies (known as “freesheets”) with a combined daily circulation of around 900,000.

    In an effort to expand its readership, entice readers to buy the paper more frequently and gather insights into the buying habits and interests of its readers, the Standard has launched an RFID-based loyalty/debit card. The paper’s managing director, Andrew Mullins, hopes readers will become enamored with the Eros Reward Card because of the discounts it offers on the newsstand price (the paper does not offer home delivery), as well as other perks, such as free song downloads from iTunes.

    The card was rolled out this week at London’s Waterloo Underground station, Mullins says. Staffers have been signing up users, providing new enrollees an Eros card and using Web-enabled wireless PDAs to record their names and e-mail addresses. By the time the commuters reach their home or office, an e-mail message should already have arrived from the Standard, providing a link to a registration page where they can use their bank or a credit card account to load value on their Eros account.

    The discount is determined by the specific amount loaded onto the card. For instance, loading £4 ($8.10) on the card provides a savings of £1 ($2.02), with the cardholder paying £0.40 ($0.81) apiece for 10 copies of the paper. Loading £34 ($68.82) on the card yields a per-paper cost of £0.34 ($0.69), a savings of £16 ($32.39) on 100 copies.

    In addition to getting free music downloads, the card user also qualifies for discounts at select area restaurants and merchants. In exchange for the deals, readers must provide some personal information and agree to receive promotional e-mail messages from the Standard, but Mullins considers this a quid pro quo arrangement.

    “There is a value exchange and a trust exchange,” Mullins explains. “You only give someone your information if you trust them, and the value exchange here is considerable. We might send an e-mail to cardholders that alerts them when they are running low on credits, and then also suggest that they buy the paper the next morning because we have a great feature on so-and-so.”

    “We won’t start spamming [Eros card holders] from a whole bunch of advertisers,” Mullins adds, “which is tempting in the short term but disastrous in the long term.”

    The Eros card employs the same technology as the Oyster card, an RFID-based fare payment card used by more than 10 million British commuters in the city’s subway and bus system. The high-frequency (13.56 MHz) passive inlay inside the Eros card contains a Mifare chip from NXP Semiconductors. The card contains a magnetic stripe onto which the customer’s account ID number is encoded; that number is also printed on the face of the card.

    Unlike the Oyster card, however, the financial transaction is performed remotely with Eros. That is, the amount of money in the Eros account is stored on a server, and the transaction is performed through a payment network, via a message sent from the reader terminal containing the account ID encoded to the card’s RFID chip. In contrast, when a commuter uses an Oyster card, the interrogator deducts the fare’s value from an amount stored on the card.

    The Evening Standard worked with several technology vendors to develop the card, Mullins says. TS3 Services Ltd., its lead integration partner, provided the application software that enables online registration and maintains the database card IDs and the value assigned to each card. TS3 Services also installed the RFID-enabled payment terminals–manufactured by Sagem–at the 15 newspaper vendors accepting the Eros cards, in and around the Waterloo station.

    The company worked with Conchango, a business consultancy in the financial services industry, to develop an interface between the Eros software and the payments network to process transactions when cardholders load value onto their cards. Starting next month, the Standard plans to roll out the service to more than 30 subways stations and surrounding vendors.

    According to Mullins, the Standard hopes the discounts will entice readers to use the Eros card to purchase the paper with a quick pass of the card over the reader, rather than buying another periodical using a MasterCard or Visa contactless card. Both credit card organizations are rolling out their respective RFID payment cards (PayPass and payWave), which banks in the United Kingdom are beginning to issue (see MasterCard Rolls Out Contactless Carpet in the U.K.). These cards are heavily marketed to commuters as a method of paying for inexpensive items, such as newspapers or coffee, without having to dig for bills or coins.

    Brown’s State – Watching You, Watching Everyone

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    Colcam

    Blair and New Labour turned the British into the most spied-on people in the western world.

    What then, is life going to be like for the UK’s citizens given a further five or ten years of ‘Brown’s Britain’ when DNA samples are likely to be collected, by force if necessary, from everyone, and we are all obliged to carry ID cards – “Papers please” – linked to the National Information Register?

    Gordon Brown - Watching You

    Already children as young as five are being fingerprinted and having biometric eyeball scans taken.

    Gordon Brown - Watching Everyone

    Make no mistake, this is the Britain Gordon Brown wants for us all, and those sheep, and there are frighteningly many of them, who bleat “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” are in for a terrible shock – when it is too late.

    This is not the sort of country I want to live in, and I despair for my grandchildren and the future they face in Britain.

    http://colcam.blogspot.com/2007/09/browns-state-watching-you-watching.html

    A Culture of Violence

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    By Stephen Lendman
    RINF Alternative News

    What do you call a country that glorifies wars and violence in the name of peace. One that’s been at war every year in its history against one or more adversaries. It has the highest homicide rate of all western nations and a passion for owning guns, yet the two seem oddly unconnected. Violent films are some of its most popular, and similar video games crowd out the simpler, more innocent street play of generations earlier. Prescription and illicit drug use is out of control as well when tobacco, alcohol and other legal ones are included.

    It get’s worse. It’s society is called a “rape culture” with data showing:

    — one-fourth of its adult women victims of forcible rape sometime in their lives, often by someone they know, including family members;

    — one-third of them are victims of sexual abuse by a husband or boyfriend;

    — 30% of people in the country say they know a woman who’s been physically abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year;

    — one in four of its women report being sexually molested in childhood, usually repeatedly over extended periods by a family member or other close relative;

    — its women overall experience extreme levels of violence; an astonishing 75% of them are victims of some form of it in their lifetimes;

    –domestic violence is their leading cause of injury and second leading cause of death;

    — statistically, homes are their most dangerous place if men are in them as millions experience battering by husbands, male partners or fathers;

    — for most women with children, there’s no escape for lack of means and because male assailants pursue them causing greater harm;

    — adding further injury, its society is often unsupportive; it affords women second class status, privileges and redress when they’re abused so many suffer in silence fearing coming forward may cause more harm than help;

    — its children are abused as well; millions suffer serious neglect, physical mistreatment and/or sexual abuse; many get relief only through escape to dangerous streets; they end up alone, more vulnerable and at greater danger away than at home where there, too, families act more like strangers or predators forcing young kids to flee in the first place.

    What country is it where things like these are normal and commonplace; where peace, tranquility and safety are illusions; where they’re crowded out by foreign wars and violence at home in communities, neighborhoods, schools, throughout the media and in core families.
    What kind of country glorifies mass killing, assaults and abuse; one that looks down on pacifist non-violence as sissy or unpatriotic, yet claims to be peace loving. It’s not in the third world, under dictatorship or controlled by religious extremists. It’s the “land of the free and home of the brave, America the Beautiful” where human rights, civil liberties, common dignity and personal safety are more illusion than fact. More on this below.

    War As “the Ultimate Economic Shock Therapy”

    Mahdi Nazemroaya writes in his August 29 “War and the ‘New World Order’ ” article on Global Research.ca that war is “the ultimate (and most effective) economic shock therapy (that can) change societies and reshape nations,” and that America today is embarked on achieving a long-standing vision for “global ascendancy” and supremacy. For the Trilateral Commission of “powerful” US, EU and Japanese “elites,” its operative 1973 founding goal was a “New International Economic Order.” For George HW Bush it became the “New World Order,” and for GW Bush a permanent state of war for global hegemony.

    Nazemroaya writes America’s “foreign policy is based on economic interests” with military might used to enforce them. He states various US administrations have pursued “An (unbroken) agenda of perpetual warfare and violence (for) global domination through economic means.” George Bush’s current “war on terrorism” in the Middle East and Central Asia are just “stepping stones” toward that “global order” unipolar Pax Americana vision under which no nation is exempt.

    It’s nearly always been this way in a nation addicted to war and a culture of violence that’s as commonplace at home as in foreign conflicts. It’s in our DNA, our schools and reinforced through the media with seductive symbols and slogans glorifying wars for peace, their warriors, and righteousness of waging them. They’re packaged as liberating ones, promoting democracy, and spreading the benefits of western civilization.

    We’re taught our essential goodness and what Edward Herman calls our status as an “indispensable state” that lets us do what no other nation may – wage perpetual wars for an elusive peace in the name of freedom and justice for all we preach but don’t practice. We manipulate false notions of exceptionalism and moral superiority giving us the right to spread our ways to others while hiding our darker imperial side delivered through the barrel of a gun. It shames the notion of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

    Expansionism and Militarism: An American Tradition

    Expansionism has always been our way and militarism our method. It’s been since winning the West meant taking it from the millions there thousands of years earlier. No matter. “Manifest Destiny” meant a divine right for settlers only to enjoy the nation’s “spacious skies….amber waves of grain….and purple mountain majesties….from sea to shining sea.” Others already there had to go, and mass slaughter was the method.

    Our forefathers loathed Native Indians, and George Washington showed it in his language. He called them “red savages,” compared them to wolves and “beasts of prey,” and aimed to exterminate the Onieda people who aided him in his darkest hours at Valley Forge. He also dispatched General John Sullivan and 5000 troops against the noncombatant Onondaga people with orders to destroy their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds, orchards and then annihilate them and seize their land.

    Hitler modeled his “Final Solution” on the “American Holocaust.” He targeted Untermenschen (subhumans) and Slavs he called “redskins.” We know what happened. Raphael Lemkin called it “genocide” as he first defined it in 1944 to mean:

    “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” that corresponds to other terms like “tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc.” Genocide “does not necessarily mean the….destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings….It is intended….to signify a coordinated plan (to destroy the) the essential foundations of the life of national groups” with intent to destroy them. Genocidal plans involve the disintegration of….political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion….economic existence, personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and” human lives.

    Throughout our history, it’s been our way, and since 1990, three US Presidents waged genocidal war in Iraq to erase the “cradle of civilization” and remake it in our own image. Two and a half million are dead and counting from it, the country is plagued by out-of-control violence, one-third of its people need emergency aid, millions go hungry, and a once prosperous nation is now a surreal lawless occupied wasteland with few or no essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel and most everything else needed for sustenance and survival. That’s the ugly face of “genocide” in real time.

    Native peoples were its earlier victim. Puritans saw them as “brutes, devils” and “devil-worshippers” in a godless, howling wilderness filled with evil spirits and “dangerous wild beasts.” They were targeted for removal as settlers moved west. They cleansed the land through violence, bloodletting and 40 Native Indian wars from 1622 – 1900 to win the West, North and South. Wars became our national pastime, and we’ve waged them like sport ever since in an endless unbroken cycle.

    We fought four imperial ones as well from 1689 to 1763 with England, France, Spain and Holland. Throughout the period, numerous settler outbreaks and insurrections arose that were also put down along with dozens of riots. Then there were the major wars we know by name. First was the American War of Independence (or Revolutionary War) from 1775 – 83. A minority of colonists supported it, little changed, and the outcome repackaged Crown rule under new management.

    The so-called War of 1812 (to early 1815) was more about American expansionism than Brits impressing our seamen. “Manifest Destiny” then became a catch phrase when Jacksonian Democrats proclaimed it in 1845 as the nation’s “destiny” for all the land “from sea to shining sea.” It was packaged as a noble mission, propagated as ruling orthodoxy, and used to justify other acquisitions.

    We then headed south of the border from 1846 – 1848 in what Mexicans called “la invasion estadounidense” that easily self-translates as the US invasion. It was our Mexican War that began after the annexation of Texas and ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It forced Mexico to cede half its country to avoid losing it all in what’s now Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Utah. The country is still cursed the way former Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, meant when he said: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Today that holds for all nations with a rogue superpower on the march and liberty and justice nowhere in sight.

    Nor was it earlier when wars had similar aims as now with one exception. The Civil War from 1861 – 1865 was sort of a family squabble. Some squabble. Before it ended, it was our bloodiest ever. Three million were in it and over 600,000 died at a time the total population was 31 million, including 4 million slaves. That was double the battle deaths from WW II when 12 million fought from a population of 132 million, and if the same proportionate number had perished it would have been around 2.5 million.

    Next came the Spanish-American War against Spain. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt (as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and later 1906 Nobel Peace Prize laureate) wrote a friend….”I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,” and the next year it began. We won, they lost and America had its coming out party on a world stage. A half century later, we control much of it, want the rest, and plan, as a birthright, to take it as disdainfully as our forefathers.

    The war with Spain was quick and little more than a skirmish for three and a half months. It was our first offshore imperial foray netting us control of Cuba as a de facto colony for starters. Following the war, Congress passed the Platt Amendment in 1901. It granted us jurisdictional right to intervene freely in Cuban affairs and ceded Guantanamo Bay (as a coaling or naval station only) to the US in perpetuity (provided annual rent is paid) unless later terminated by mutual consent of both countries. It was just the beginning.

    We also took the Philippines (slaughtering 200,000 of its people), Hawaii, Haiti, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Samoa, assorted other territories later and the Canal Zone from Colombia to fulfill Theodore Roosevelt’s dream to link the Atlantic and Pacific with a canal across its isthmus.

    Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on a campaign promise: “He Kept Us Out of War.” He lied. He wanted war and established the Committee on Public Information under George Creel in 1917 to get it. It turned a pacifist nation into raging German-haters, America declared war in April, 1917 and was in it until it ended in November, 1918. This writer’s dad fought in France and returned unharmed. The US empire was on a roll.

    Today, mainstream historians perceive Wilson as a liberal Democrat. He was quite opposite, and his imperial record alone proves it. He occupied Haiti in 1915 beginning 20 hellish years for its people until Franklin Roosevelt withdraw US forces in 1934. He sent US troops to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and in 1914 invaded Mexico, occupying its main seaport city of Veracruz. It was a dress rehearsal for WW I and might have become a full-scale war had Wilson not pulled US forces out ahead of the greater conflict he aimed for in Europe.

    The defining event of the 20th century was WW II from which the US emerged the only dominant nation left standing. We became the world’s unchallengeable superpower as though we planned it that way, which we did. From it emerged our “imperial grand strategy” under the Truman Doctrine as well as a plan for US global military and economic dominance. The Cold War began with “containment” the policy. The US empire was on a roll and would never look back.

    US Imperialism Post-WW II

    When the Cold War ended in 1991, George HW Bush’s Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz were tasked to shape a new strategy that emerged in 1992 as the Defense Planning Guidance or Wolfowitz Doctrine. It was so extreme, it was kept under wraps, but not for long. It was leaked to the New York Times causing uproar enough for the elder Bush to shelve it until the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) revived it in a document called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century.” It was an imperial plan for global dominance for well into the future to be enforced with unchallengeable military power. It became the blueprint for the “war on terror” and all the hot ones planned to wage it.

    WW II was more a beginning than an end to war. The US kept Korea and Vietnam divided and targeted independent-minded leaders. It was part of our imperial designs on East Asia that included containing Soviet Russia as well as China. It led us to incite civil wars in Korea and Vietnam expecting both times to prevail but were stalemated in one and lost the other.

    North Korea’s Fatherland Liberation War began June 25, 1950 when the DPRK retaliated in force following months of US influenced Republic of Korean (ROK) provocations. It ended in an uneasy cease-fire July 27, 1953 and is still unresolved to this day. The North and South are technically at war, the US refuses to negotiate an honorable peace, and 57 years later 37,000 American forces are in the South with no intention to leave.

    Korea taught us nothing. Vietnam was next, and now we’re embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan with a potentially disastrous war looming against Iran. It proves Ben Franklin right that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.” Adventurism in Vietnam began under Truman and Eisenhower supporting France. It expanded full-blown under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before ending in a humiliating final pullout from the US Saigon Embassy rooftop April 30, 1975.

    The 1980s brought more conflict with Ronald Reagan’s war against “international terrorism.” He invaded tiny Grenada in 1983 against a left-leaning regime for a pro-western one we installed. Scorched earth proxy wars then upped the stakes in Central America, Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East. We tread lightly nowhere, and these conflicts left hundreds of thousands dead and immiserated in the name of democracy, humanitarian intervention, and the benefits of western civilization by our method of choice – gun barrels blazing.

    GHW Bush then followed with Panama his prey. He deposed its leader, then targeted Saddam for the only crime that mattered – disobeying the lord and master of the universe and its rules of imperial management, especially Rule No. 1: We’re boss, and what we say goes.

    The Gulf war followed with 12 crushing years of sanctions its legacy. They left 1.5 million Iraqis dead and the living devastated. The current cycle of permanent wars began post-9/11 in October, 2001. First came the Taliban with Iraq ahead as the prime target of choice. It’s huge oil reserves made it the most sought after real estate on earth with a plan to seize them simple at its core – a bold new experiment to erase a nation and create a new one by invasion, occupation and reconstruction for pillage. It would transform Iraq into a fully privatized free market paradise with blank check public funding for profit but none for Iraqis for essential needs, a sustainable economy or critical local infrastructure.

    It’s been a disaster with the toll on Iraqis horrific – an inferno of uncontrolled violence throughout the country with new British O.R.B. independent polling data estimating 1.2 million Iraqi deaths since March, 2003 on top of the 1.5 million others since 1990. The war is now longer in duration than WWs I or II and will likely exceed the latter one in inflation-adjusted cost before it ends. It’s not in sight thanks to a complicit Democrat-led Congress that’s long on theater but short on action it can take but won’t. Allied with the administration, it flaunts public demands to end the war, bring home the troops, and will shortly accede to another Bush supplemental request for billions more in funding.

    Public sentiment might be stronger if Jeff Nygaard’s June, 2007 Z Magazine article titled “The Secret Air Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” got wider play, so here’s hoping this article gives it some. He explained US Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) posts its daily “airpower summaries” online that makes for horrifying reading “aside (from) the blatant propaganda.” Nygaard explained “relentless” air attacks against Iran and Afghanistan have gone on for years – on average 75 – 100 each day against both countries. It’s a huge unreported story in the dominant media. The death toll is unknown, he says, “but a reasonable estimate” is between 100,000 – 150,000 in Iraq alone, and it’s anyone’s guess in Afghanistan. That’s on top of all other war-related deaths estimated in both countries.

    Further, these attacks exclude “guided missiles and unguided rockets fired….cannon rounds (and) munitions used by some Marine Corps and other ‘coalition’ aircraft or any of the Army’s helicopter gunships (plus) munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many ‘private (mercenary hired gun) security contractors’ flying their own missions in Iraq.” If the true human toll were known, it might be shockingly above the most gruesome current estimates and growing daily.

    The public has a right to know this, and Congress is obligated to find out, tell them, cut off all funding and end two illegal wars of aggression. Instead, Democrats and Republicans back a further administration aggression against Iran in spite of silenced high level opposition to it. It may come from two large nuclear-armed US carrier strike groups conducting provocative exercises near Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Medditerranean.

    Washington makes no secret it wants regime change in Iran, and time is running out for the Bush administration to get it. For months, covert black operations have been ongoing inside the country. It’s aimed to incite internal ethnic and political opposition, and CIA operatives have also been sending Baluchi tribal warriors from neighboring Pakistan on terror raids into neighboring Iranian areas. Now 350 British forces have been provocatively sent from Basra to the volatile Iranian border, and the Pentagon announced it’s building a US base and fortified checkpoints nearby as well. General Petraeus also implied to Congress he’ll act inside Iranian territory to stop its “proxy war” against US Iraqi forces. In the meantime, Iran claims Washington backs Israeli-trained Kurdish Party for Free Life (PJAK) as well as Arab, Azeri and Baluchi incursions inside their territory to undermine its leadership, provoke a response, and provide cover for a US attack.

    Without a touch of irony, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi held four hours of face-to-face talks in Baghdad in May that was the first official bilateral meeting between the countries in almost three decades. It amounted to nothing more than the usual US duplicity that pointed to what’s now happening and likely to escalate. Earlier, George Bush demanded and will soon get harsher US-imposed sanctions through the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007 that’s designed to strangle the country economically. He earlier signed off on a commitment of economic destabilization through media-driven propaganda, now heightened, as well as manipulation of Iran’s currency and international transactions. That, in turn, just prompted Tehran in response to demand foreign energy companies do business in euros and yen.

    So far, it’s anyone’s guess what’s ahead with war a real possibility. The Bush administration is pounding Iran with menacing claims of meddling in Iraq and covertly advancing a nuclear weapons program despite having no proof of either. Whatever’s planned could be devastating to the region (and world economy if oil shipments are disrupted), and the kinds of options being considered may cause dire unintended consequences if the worst of them involving nuclear weapons are used.

    Bill Clinton’s 1990s Balkan wars took their toll earlier at a time most people shamefully bought the US-led NATO propaganda of a good war against a demonized enemy and a well-intentioned intervention to remove him. It divided and destroyed a country under the guise of humanitarian intervention that provided cover for naked imperialism. Most observers on the left got it wrong and still don’t know NATO (meaning the US) committed illegal aggression to expand into Central and Eastern Europe.

    The Balkan wars kept predatory capitalism on a roll for more new markets, resources and cheap exploitable labor by the same ugly methods of choice – wars, subversion or coercion with “uncooperative” leaders like Slobadon Milosevic playing fall guy. He ended up abducted to the Hague and hung out to dry by the ICTY US-run kangaroo court that silenced him (like Saddam in Baghdad) so his secrets went to the grave with him.

    So much for democracy in a nation stained by a near-unblemished record of illegal aggression throughout its history and in every post-WW II conflict fought. The only exception was the so-called 1991 Gulf war. It was authorized, as required, by the Security Council but only through bribes and coercion. The US public opposed it until a lot of Kuwaiti government PR massaging turned it around, and the rest is history.

    The Harmful Effects of Imperialism at Home

    The price at home has been high as well with democracy here just as fake as wherever we leave our imperial footprint. Ordinary Americans are the losers. Repressive laws and crumbling social services are their reward for patriotism. Then there’s the military and what’s diverted to fund it. Annual Pentagon budgets are soaring with the FY 2008 DOD one calling for an astonishing $648.8 billion plus an additional $147.5 billion war supplemental and around $50 billion or more now requested. The final total will likely top out over $850 billion with the usual pork factored in and Congress ready to authorize whatever more is needed.

    Then come the 16 US spy agencies and their secret off-the-books budgets. CIA, NSA and the others get tens of billions more without accountability. The CIA is an especially out-of-control, rogue agency accountable only to the President. Post-WW II, it began intervening throughout the world covertly and overtly. No dirty trick is off the table, and CIA invented their fair share of them. It uses them spying, fomenting and supporting wars, deposing foreign heads of state, and now they’re in play on US soil against American citizens. Noted academic and administration critic, Chalmers Johnson, calls the agency “the president’s private army” serving in the same capacity as imperial Rome’s praetorian guard.

    The agency is secret and lawless, unaccountable to the public, Congress or the courts with intelligence gathering a sideline operation at most. Since it was created in 1947, but especially now, CIA has an appalling record of toppling democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and other key officials, propping up friendly dictators, and now snatching targeted individuals for “extraordinary rendition” to secret torture-prison hellholes from which many won’t emerge or ever get justice.

    It takes lots of cover-up and myth-building to create the illusion America wants peace, is “beautiful,” and respects the law and rights of people everywhere. The truth is quite opposite abroad and at home where essential needs go unmet and violence is a way of life.

    It recently showed up in the newly launched Global Peace Index’s (GPI) ranking of 121 nations. It was prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an international panel of peace experts from peace institutes and think tanks, and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. It aims to “highlight the relationship between Global Peace and Sustainability (stressing) unless we can achieve” a peaceful world, humanity’s major challenges won’t be solved. GPI ranked nations by their relative internal and external “peacefulness” using 24 indicators. They include its:

    — military expenditures as a percent of GDP and number of armed service personnel per 100,000 population;

    — number of external and internal wars including the estimated number of deaths from them externally and internally;

    — relations with other countries;

    — respect for human rights;

    — potential for terrorist acts;

    — number of homicides per 100,000 population including infanticide;

    — level of violent crime;

    — aggregate number of heavy weapons per 100,000 population and ease of access to small arms and light weapons;

    — number of jailed population per 100,000 population; and

    — number of internal security officers and police per 100,000 population.

    The US was a shocking 96th in the overall rankings – to the naive and innocent, that is. Norway, New Zealand and Denmark scored best in that order while Iraq ranked lowest followed by Sudan and Israel, that should be a wake-up call for its supporters.

    Violence in America – A Way of Life at Home and Abroad

    This article began with a snapshot account of our violent history and culture. So much is in our communities and homes that it’s easy selling foreign wars to people used to settling disputes confrontationally, not calmly. It may start with bloody noses in school yards or playgrounds. It’s then made to seem commonplace in films and on prime time TV where assaults, violent crime, murder and even torture are everyday forms of entertainment. Then there’s sports. The most popular ones involve contact, often brutal, with one played on ice once described as a fight with occasional hockey breaking out.

    Television features sports of all kinds, the more violent the better. Studies show nearly every home has at least one TV set, and 54% of children have their own in their bedrooms. They spend 28 hours a week on average watching, double the time spent in school, so they learn more about life through the media than anywhere else. Before age 18, the average American child sees 200,000 acts of violence on TV including 16,000 murders, and studies show homicide rates doubled 10 – 15 years after television was introduced.

    They also link the following potential adverse effects to excessive media exposure:

    — increased violent behavior;

    — impaired school performance;

    — increased sexual activity and use of tobacco and alcohol; and

    — decreased family communication among other negative influences unrelated to violence.

    A National Television Violence Study showed two-thirds of children’s programming had violence, three-fourths of it went unpunished, and most often victims weren’t shown experiencing pain. Even more disturbing, the study identified nearly half the violence children see is in TV cartoons. They’re most often portrayed in humor with victims hardly ever experiencing long-term consequences. There’s more:

    — Unsurprisingly, it’s no different on the big screen as film studios produce entertainment for theater viewing and at home.

    — There’s a great, but unmeasurable, amount of different types of violence online, including pedophile cyber-seduction on unsuspecting, vulnerable children leading to sexual assaults.

    — Studies show violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Mortal Kombat can increase aggressive thoughts, beliefs and behavior both in laboratory settings and real life. They’re even worse than TV or films because they’re interactive and engrossing. They get players to identify with aggressors since they act like them while playing. These games teach violence. Many young people play them often and parents allow it. It’s no wonder they become aggressive and continue the same behavior later as adults for real.

    — Music also teaches violence. The Parents Music Resource Center reports teenagers hear an estimated 10,500 hours of rock music between grades 7 and 12 alone or nearly as much time as they spend in school. Entertainment Monitor reported three-fourths of popular CDs sold in 1995 included profanity or lyrics about drugs, violence and sex with some popular rap artists’ music glorifying guns, rape and murder.

    With this as backdrop after 500 years of belligerency, it’s no wonder violence in the country and attitudes toward it are out of control. The record includes harsh private and government homeland crackdowns against dissidents, labor, minorities, street protesters, rioters, ethnic or religious groups and others plus all the one-on-one confrontations as well. For centuries, violence was monstrous against our Native peoples and nearly exterminated them all. It was used against black slaves as well with whippings, other beatings, rapes, mutilations, forced family separations and even amputations as punishment for runaways. Post-slavery, the pattern continued, mostly in the South, under forced Jim Crow segregation that enforced white supremacy over blacks that played out violently for those “stepping out of line.”

    A snapshot of recent data on violent crimes provides more evidence. It comes from the Department of Justice (DOJ), other sources, and shows the following:

    — 960,000 violent acts against a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend and up to three million women physically abused by their husband, male partner or boyfriend annually;

    — in 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner;

    — intimate violence is mainly a crime against women accounting for 85% of these incidences;

    — women are up to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner;

    — in 2001, 20% of violent crimes against women were by intimate partners;

    — up to 324,000 women experience intimate partner violence during pregnancy;

    — women of all races are about equally vulnerable to intimate partner violence;

    — women are up to 14 times more likely than men to report suffering severe physical assaults from an intimate partner;

    — 20% of female high school students report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner and 40% of 14 – 17 year old girls report knowing someone their age struck or beaten by a boyfriend;

    — in a national survey of 6000 American families, 50% of the men who frequently assaulted their wives also abused their children;

    — studies show up to 10 million children witness some form of domestic violence annually;

    — over half a million women report being stalked annually by an intimate partner while 80% stalked by former husbands are physically assaulted and 30% sexually assaulted by that partner;

    — the FBI divides violent crime into four categories: “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.” It uses the International Association of Chiefs of Police Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s definition of violent crime as involving force or threat of force. The annual data show these crimes topped one million in 1975 and from the mid-1980s ranged from around 1.5 – 1.9 million annually;

    — since 1975, annual violent crimes of murder and reported rape ranged from around 100,000 – 130,000;

    — Every year over the past century, 10% or more of all crimes committed were violent ones; and

    — More Americans killed other Americans at home than the total death toll from all foreign wars in our history combined.

    Violence, of course, becomes ingrained in the culture. It leads to crackdowns against society’s least “worthy” victims of state-sponsored repression. It made America the incarceration capital of the world with over 2.2 million in our homeland “gulag” prison system today, a greater number than in China with four times our population and a history of governments not known for gentleness toward those breaking its rules. Here 1000 new inmates weekly join others locked in cages, most for non-violent offenses. They’re brutalized by prison guards and other inmates while there and become more likely to exact revenge on release for society’s unjust treatment. Many, in fact, do and end up back in prison for longer sentences.

    This kind of information and our national predilection for violence isn’t taught in schools or explained in the media. Instead we accept the illusion of “American exceptionalism,” moral superiority, and innate goodness in a nation chosen by the Almighy to lead the world. That’s provided it’s by rules made in Washington with people everywhere told accept them, or else. Going to war, we’re told, is a last resort choice and one never taken lightly. It’s to liberate the oppressed, bring democracy when we arrive, and target “national security” threats too great to ignore. It takes powerful propaganda persuasion convincing people to accept this, but it’s made easier if they’re already predisposed to violence and receptive to more of it.

    Five centuries at home and abroad add up to potent conditioning, but the dangers were less threatening earlier than now. Today’s super-weapons make older ones look like toys. They leave no margin of error, and if we slip up we’ll endanger what Noam Chomsky calls “biology’s only experiment with higher intelligence.” Unless we confront the threat to our survival from foreign wars and a violent culture accustomed to them, we face what Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell warned 50 years ago saying: “Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war” and a culture of violence and live in peace because no other way is possible.

    Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

    Also, visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

    Fayed lawyers to ask for Queen’s evidence

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    Jamie Doward
    The Observer

    Lawyers acting for Harrods chairman Mohamed al-Fayed want the Queen to give evidence at this week’s inquest into the death of Princess Diana.By law, the Queen cannot be forced to testify, but she could choose to do so. Fayed’s lawyers say her evidence is crucial to establishing the truth about the deaths of Diana and Dodi Fayed, which an extensive investigation has already concluded were the result of a ‘tragic accident’. Lawyers want to ask about a conversation after the 1997 Paris crash in which the Queen is alleged to have told Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell there were ‘powers at work about which we have no knowledge’. Fayed’s press director, Katharine Witty, said that it was important that the coroner called all witnesses.

    US Navy To Redesign ‘Swastika’ Base

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    The U.S. Navy will redesign a base that resembles a swastika from the air.

    The Anti-Defamation League, which had complained about the suggestive shape formed by the four L-shaped buildings that make up the San Diego naval installation, said this week that military authorities agreed to order $600,000 worth of landscaping and architectural changes.

    “The Navy came to realize that this is a symbol that thousands of people died to defeat and it was inappropriate to have that shape on a military base,” said ADL regional director Morris Casuto.

    The base was built in the 1960s but theories about its shape were spawned only recently by the advent of easily accessible satellite imagery from Google Earth.

    http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/104398.html

    Big Brother Britain: Government and councils to spy on ALL our phones

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    By JASON LEWIS

    Officials from the top of Government to lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of every phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow.

    The new rules compel phone companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos.

    The move, enacted by the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will give police and security services a right they have long demanded: to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and businesses.

    Scroll down for more…


    The Government will be given access to details of every phone call in Britain. (Posed by model)

    But the same powers will also be handed to the tax authorities, 475 local councils, and a host of other organisations, including the Food Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission. The initiative, formulated in the wake of the Madrid and London terrorist attacks

    of 2004 and 2005, was put forward as a vital tool in the fight against terrorism. However, civil liberties campaigners say the new powers amount to a ‘free for all’ for the State snooping on its citizens.

    And they angrily questioned why the records were being made available to so many organisations. Similar provisions are being brought in across Europe, but under much tighter regulation. In Britain, say critics, private and sensitive information will inevitably fall into the wrong hands.

    Records will detail precisely what calls are made, their time and duration, and the name and address of the registered user of the phone.

    The files will even reveal where people are when they made mobile phone calls. By knowing which mast transmitted the signal, officials will be able to pinpoint the source of a call to within a few feet. This can even be used to track someone’s route if, for example, they make a call from a moving car.

    Files will also be kept on the sending and receipt of text messages.

    By 2009 the Government plans to extend the rules to cover internet use: the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls made over the net.

    Jacqui Smith
    Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has spearheaded the move to give police and security services access to the phone records of British citizens and businesses.

    The new laws will make it a legal requirement for phone companies to keep records for at least a year, and to make them available to the authorities. Until now, companies have been reluctant to allow unfettered access to their files, citing data protection laws, although they have had a voluntary arrangement with law enforcement agencies since 2003.

    Many of the organisations granted access to the records already have systems allowing them to search phone-call databases over a computer link without needing staff at the phone company to intervene.

    Police requests for phone records will need the approval of a superintendent or inspector, while council officials must get permission from the authority’s assistant chief officer. Thousands of staff in other agencies will be legally entitled to retrieve the records once the request is approved by a senior official.

    The new measures were implemented after the Home Secretary signed a ‘statutory instrument’ on July 26. The process allows the Government to alter laws without a full act of Parliament.

    The move was nodded through the House of Lords two days earlier without a debate.

    It puts into UK law a European Directive aimed at the ‘investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime’. But the British law allows the information to be used much more widely to combat all crimes, however minor.

    The huge number of organisations allowed to access this data was attacked by Liberty, the civil liberties campaign group. Other organisations allowed to see the data include the Royal Navy Regulating Branch, the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary, the Department of Trade and Industry, NHS Trusts, ambulance and fire services, the Department of Transport and the Department for the Environment.

    A spokesman for Liberty said: ‘Hundreds of bodies have been given the power to look at this highly sensitive information. It is yet another example of how greater and greater access is being given to information on our movements with little debate and little public accountability.

    ‘It is a free for all. There is a lack of oversight of how and why public bodies are using these records. There is no public record of what they are using this information for.’

    Tony Bunyan, of civil liberties group Statewatch, said: ‘The retention of everyone’s communications data is a momentous decision, one that should not be slipped through Parliament without anyone noticing.’

    Last year, the voluntary arrangement allowed 439,000 searches of phone records. But the Government brought in legislation because the industry did not routinely keep all the information it wanted.

    Different authorities will have different levels of access to the systems. Police and intelligence services will be able to see more detailed information than local authorities. And officials at NHS Trusts and ambulance and fire services can obtain the records only in rare cases when, for example, they are trying to save a patient’s life.

    The new system will be overseen by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, who also ensures security and intelligence services’ phone taps are legal.

    The commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, reports to the Prime Minister and already carries out random inspections of some agencies legally allowed to see phone records under the existing voluntary scheme. Last year inspectors visited 22 councils already making ‘significant’ use of their powers’ to access phone records. A report said the results were ‘variable’, but within the law.

    Privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner, which has responsibly for protecting personal information and policing the Data Protection Act had virtually no role in the new laws.

    A spokeswoman said its only function was to ensure ‘data security’ at the phone companies, adding: ‘We have no oversight role over the release of this information.’

    The Home Office said there were safeguards to ensure the new law was being used properly. Every authority had a nominated senior member of staff who was legally responsible for the use the phone data was put to, ‘the integrity of the process’ and for ‘reporting errors’.

    A spokesman said: ‘The most detailed level of data can be accessed only by law enforcement agencies such as the police. More basic access is available to local authority bodies such as trading standards and environmental health who can only use these powers to prevent and detect crime.’

    A spokesman for the Local Government Association, which represents councils across England and Wales, said: ‘Councils would only use these powers in circumstances such as benefit fraud, when the taxpayer is being ripped off for many thousands of pounds.’

    He added that it was ‘very unlikely’ the powers would be used against non-payers of council tax or for parking fines ‘as the sums involved are not sufficient to justify the use of this sort of information or the costs involved in applying it’.

    Surveillance state: Is Uncle Sam the new Big Brother?

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    If you’ve traveled out of the country, the government may have a file with your name on it.
       Names, addresses, credit card information. Itineraries, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. The cars that you rented and the names of the hotels where you stayed. Even the books that you read, the people you traveled with and the type of bed you requested in your hotel room.
       And that’s just some of the information that is gleaned by our government when ordinary citizens come into contact with border agents and transportation safety officials, or give personal information to airlines and companies that make travel reservations. The data is downloaded to the government’s Automated Targeting System, which links electronically to border points and reservation systems.
       Why? Inquiring minds in the Department of Homeland Security want to know. Since 2002, they’ve updated the system by bringing more border checkpoints online, as well as mandating that airlines provide data.
       Security officials claim it’s for our own good, of course. They say they need to know all they can about people who enter our country, including law-abiding Americans, in order to detect patterns and protect us from terrorists.

    But privacy advocates and civil liberty activists correctly label it as an unnecessary and dangerous intrusion into the lives of regular people; another step in our evolution toward a surveillance society. The Identity Project, a group of civil liberties advocates, requested their Automated Targeting System files, and were shocked by what they found.
       John Gilmore of San Francisco carried a book about marijuana laws on an overseas trip, a fact that was illegally recorded in his file. And Edward Hasbrouck, a travel consultant, found information about his travel companions, another constitutional no-no. These and other cases are apparent violations of federal privacy laws, which prohibit the government from violating your First Amendment rights by collecting data about the books that you read and the people you choose to associate with.
       It’s just another example of how the eavesdropping Bush administration has used the events of Sept. 11 to wage war on our civil liberties.
       Forget Big Brother. Americans who value privacy and freedom have a bigger concern, one based on fact and not fiction. Uncle Sam is watching.

    http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_7030637

    Big Brother Bins – This Time It’s CCTV

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    Requests to place cameras on new wheelie bins were among some of the queries submitted following the announcement of Spelthorne’s new waste collections.

    The new alternate weekly collections have now been rolled out across the borough with pick-ups of recyclables one week and non-recycable waste the other.

    Since Spelthorne Council announced it would be changing to the new system in March it has been inundated with enquires about the new scheme which has seen about 120 calls a day, 9,500 hits on the council’s website specifically related to waste, 260 face to face inquires, 155 letters and 600 emails. It hads received just 38 complaints.

    The council also received some more unusual requests such whether cameras could be placed on to the containers to photograph people dropping litter into the bins. Something which is not being considered.

    Anyone with questions about the new scheme should call a hotline on 01784 451 2199.

    Child health program blasted by Bush

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    By Catherine Dodge

    Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) — President George W. Bush said a plan by Congress to expand a children’s health insurance program is “irresponsible” and chided lawmakers for failing to pass spending laws to fund government.

    “Congressional leaders have put forward an irresponsible plan that would dramatically expand this program beyond its original intent,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. “They know I will veto it.”

    Bush also signed today a stopgap spending measure that continues funding federal agencies, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other programs at current levels until Nov. 16, buying time for lawmakers to act on regular spending bills.

    Congress this week sent Bush legislation supported by Democrats and many of his fellow Republicans that would more than double the funds for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as Schip. The measure would add $35 billion over five years to the $25 billion program. To pay for the expansion, the federal tobacco tax would be raised to $1 a pack of cigarettes from the current 39 cents.

    Democrats enlisted a 12-year-old boy who received life- saving care through U.S.-subsidized health insurance to deliver their response to Bush’s radio address today. Supporters of the measure say it is needed to add about 3.8 million needy children to the 6 million now covered.

    Political Advantage

    Bush has said he would veto the legislation because it would provide subsidized health care to middle-class children whose families can afford private insurance. Democrats see political advantage in Bush’s veto vow.

    The president criticized the Democratic-controlled Congress for failing to pass any of 12 spending bills to fund government operations in fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1.

    “Congress failed in its most basic responsibility,” Bush said.

    The Republican-controlled Congress last year also had to send Bush a stopgap measure after failing to complete work on spending legislation.

    Since 1977, Congress has only three times approved all its spending measures by the Sept. 30 deadline, according to the Concord Coalition, a Washington-based research group.

    High resolution aerial images of 9/11 clearly show effects of explosive demolition

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    Image13  In the weeks and months following 9/11 the world was slowly awoken to the possibility all was not as the Bush regime had spoken. Exclusive real pictures of that day have now come to light. (Thanks Lightshadow 4)

    View the rare pictures

    It is a simple and as clear minded as this: A gravitational collapse could not cause the effects seen in these exclusive real photos.

    Image5High explosives and lots of them were needed to do what is seen here, combine that with the 10 second freefall destruction and the only possible explanation is DEMOLITION.

    Judge For yourselves – could Gravity turn thousands of tonnes of concrete to dust in an instant?

    View the rare pictures

    The Bush-Aznar tapes: glimpse of a gangster preparing for war

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    By Bill Van Auken

    The transcript of February 2003 discussions between US President George W. Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar published Wednesday by Spain’s largest daily, El Pais, provides fresh documentary confirmation of what is already a widely known historical fact. That is: the Bush administration was determined to wage a war of aggression to conquer Iraq and was not about to allow international law or compromise settlements to interfere with its long-planned invasion.

    The contents of the conversation, transcribed by Spain’s ambassador to Washington, Javier Ruperez, had been kept secret by Madrid–both under Aznar’s right-wing government and under that of his successor, Socialist Party (PSOE) Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero–before someone leaked them to El Pais.

    The document provides one more piece of irrefutable evidence that the Bush White House launched the invasion of Iraq on the basis of lies fabricated to further a predetermined policy. A significant component of this web of lies was the repeated claims made by Washington and its allies in the period leading up to the invasion that war was a last resort, and that they were determined to exhaust all diplomatic and peaceful alternatives.

    As Bush told his Spanish counterpart, whatever the UN might decide, “In two weeks we will be ready militarily…. We will be in Baghdad by the end of March.”

    The White House failed to deny the authenticity of the document. White House spokesperson Dana Perino described the conversation as a “private meeting” and dismissed questions about its exposure of the Bush administration’s deception of the American people and the world during this period. “There are some people who think we never should have gone into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein,” she said. “And there is nothing we are going to be able to do that’s going to change their minds.”

    The transcript records a conversation that took place on February 22, 2003–less than a month before the invasion–at Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch. The discussion centered on the final pre-war diplomatic maneuvers aimed at ramming a resolution through the United Nations Security Council providing a rubberstamp for the US plans to attack Iraq.

    It also reveals that Saddam Hussein had indicated through the Egyptian government that he was prepared to go into exile, provided he could take with him $1 billion and documents on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, presumably including records proving US backing for Baghdad’s weapons programs, particularly under Bush senior’s administration.

    In addition, it touches on plans for the Iraqi leader’s possible assassination and the campaign of intimidation initiated against countries represented on the Security Council that opposed a war.

    The meeting also came just one week after massive worldwide demonstrations that brought millions of people into the streets in opposition to the war, including huge crowds in both Spain and Britain, Washington’s two principal supporters in preparing the aggression. In Spain, polls showed 90 percent of the population opposing an invasion, and Aznar’s principal concern was to convince Bush to use the UN to provide some form of pseudo-legal cover for war to help him with massively hostile public opinion at home.

    In addition to Aznar and Bush, then US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice also joined in the discussion, together with another White House advisor on European affairs, Aznar’s chief advisor on international policy, Alberto Carnero, and the Spanish ambassador.

    According to the transcript, Bush told Aznar he was willing to go to the Security Council for another resolution that would be crafted so that it could be used to claim authorization for military action, without actually saying so. He said that the document should not include any demands upon Iraq–with which Baghdad could potentially comply–and should “not mention the use of force.” Bush added, “A lot of people could vote for a resolution like that.”

    Both Bush and Aznar made it clear that they expected the resolution to be vetoed–France, Russia and China, all permanent members of the Security Council with veto power, opposed it. But they hoped to get a majority of the council’s members to support it, giving them a propaganda victory. In the end, they were forced to withdraw the resolution after it became clear that it would have gone down to overwhelming defeat without any veto having to be cast.

    The US president continued: “Saddam Hussein will not change and he will keep playing around. The time has come to get rid of him. That’s the way it is. I, for my part, will try from now on to use the most delicate rhetoric possible while we try to get the resolution approved.”

    Bush repeatedly expressed frustration over the failure of other European governments to fall into line behind Washington’s war plans. Singling out French President Jacques Chirac, Bush said, “The problem is that Chirac thinks he’s Mister Arab, and in reality he’s making life impossible.” The US president continued by expressing his contempt for public opinion in Europe, declaring, “The more the Europeans attack me, the stronger I am in the United States.”

    When Rice reviewed a schedule for the presentation of reports to the Security Council by UN weapons inspectors–reports that would subsequently affirm Iraq’s substantial compliance with disarmament–Bush erupted in frustration.

    “This is like Chinese water torture,” he said. “We have to put an end to it.”

    Aznar said he understood Bush’s annoyance, but they had to get more support. “Have a little patience,” he begged.

    “My patience has run out,” Bush replied. “I don’t plan on going beyond the middle of March.”

    Referring to the non-permanent members on the Security Council that were voicing opposition to a resolution authorizing a US war, Bush declared: “Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola and Cameroon should know that what’s at stake is the security of the US and act with a feeling of friendship towards us.”

    The imperialist arrogance is breathtaking. Mexico, which historically has been the victim of multiple US invasions, Angola, a country that saw more than half a million of its people killed in a CIA-instigated civil war and Chile, which was the victim of a US-orchestrated coup that imposed a quarter century of fascist-military dictatorship, should all subordinate any concern for international law or the rights of nations to the security concerns of the US.

    Bush went on to spell out the kind of gangster-style threats being made behind the scenes. “Lagos [the Chilean president] should know that the free trade agreement with Chile is facing confirmation in the Senate and that a negative attitude on this issue could put its ratification in danger,” he said. “Angola is receiving funds from the Millennium Account and they too could be compromised if they don’t take a positive approach. And Putin should know that with his attitude he is putting relations between Russia and the United States in danger.”

    Referring to differences with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on how soon to put the resolution before the Security Council, Bush commented, “This is like the bad cop, good cop game. It doesn’t bother me being the bad cop and Blair being the good one.”

    Also appalling–given the one million Iraqi dead and the country’s total devastation–is Bush’s conception of the coming war’s impact. “We can win without destruction,” he said. “We are already planning out the post-Saddam Iraq, and I believe there are good foundations for a better future. Iraq has a good bureaucracy and a relatively strong civil society. It could be organized in a federation. Meanwhile, we’re doing everything we can to attend to the political needs of our friends and allies.”

    Aznar himself was somewhat taken aback by Bush’s sanguine approach to the upcoming slaughter.

    “The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism,” said the Spanish prime minister.

    Bush replied: “I am optimistic because I believe I am in the right. I am at peace with myself.”

    The dialogue between the US president and the Spanish prime minister sounds more like a meeting between a Mafia godfather and one of his obsequious gangster captains than a discussion of international relations and policy between two heads of state. What they were cold-bloodedly planning, however, was not any run-of-the-mill crime, but a mass killing of world-historic proportions.

    The ultimate significance of the Bush-Aznar transcript is that it constitutes one more piece of evidence for the prosecution of Bush and all those who conspired to launch the war of aggression against Iraq for war crimes.

    Revealed: Saddam ‘ready to walk away for $1bn’

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    By Leonard Doylein

    A transcript of an eve-of-war conversation between President George Bush and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has revealed a previously undisclosed initiative to avert war in Iraq by spiriting Saddam Hussein out of the country.

    “Yes, it’s possible,” Mr Bush told the Spanish leader. “The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein … He seems to have indicated he would be open to exile if they would let him take one billion dollars and all the information he wants on weapons of mass destruction.”

    But Mr Bush seems to shrug off the idea, saying “it’s also possible he could be assassinated”, and he makes made clear that the US would in any case give “no guarantee” for Hussein. “He’s a thief, a terrorist and a war criminal. Compared to Saddam, Milosevic would be a Mother Teresa.”

    The conversation, recorded by Spain’s ambassador to the US, Javier Ruperez, and published this week in El Pais, offers a unique insight into Mr Bush’s brusque interaction with one of the few foreign leaders he trusted. Here was a leader already on the march towards war, expressing impatience and anger at those that disagreed with him.

    Mr Bush does admit that averting war would be “the best solution for us” and “would also save us $50bn,” greatly underestimating the cost to the US treasury of nearly five years of warfare. But he also talks of how he planned to exact revenge on countries, that did not back the US in its drive to war.

    “We have to get rid of Saddam. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we’ll be ready militarily,” Mr Bush told Mr Aznar.

    It was February 2003 at Mr Bush’s Crawford Texas ranch, less than a month before the invasion. Almost 150,000 US troops and their British allies were sitting in the Kuwaiti desert. The troops were well within range of any weapons of mass destruction, military analysts have pointed out.

    US administration officials had already prepared public opinion for war by raising fears of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programme and his ability to create “mushroom clouds.” But the transcript reveals the two leaders were more concerned about getting a fig leaf of international approval for the war, than any imminent threat from Saddam.

    The transcript revolves around Washington’s frustrations at failing to get UN Security Council approval for war — the now-famous second resolution.

    At the time, both Tony Blair and President Bush were officially open to a diplomatic resolution of the Iraq crisis — including a negotiated exile of Saddam – but the Spanish Ambassador’s notes reveal peace was never really an option.

    With public opposition to the war in Europe in full swing, Washington’s two strongest allies, Mr Aznar and Tony Blair were under intense anti-war pressure.

    President Bush needed to appear to be serious about diplomacy to “help us with our public opinion,” pleaded Mr Aznar. The hope was that by being seen to looking for alternatives to war, the growing anger against US policy and Europe would be assuaged.

    “I’m not asking for infinite patience,” Mr Aznar said, but “simply that you do what’s possible to get everyone to agree”.

    Pointing to the internal rows within the White House, where Vice President Dick Cheney was leading the drive to war, Mr Bush said he had gone to the United Nations “despite differences in my own administration” adding that it would be “great” if the proposed second resolution authorising war was successful.

    “The only thing that worries me is your optimism,” said Mr Aznar who is now a visiting scholar at Georgetown University. “I’m optimistic because I believe I’m right,” the President replied. “I’m at peace with myself.”

    Mr Bush also chastised Europeans for being insensitive to “the suffering that Saddam Hussein has inflicted on the Iraqis” adding rather oddly: “Maybe it’s because he’s dark-skinned, far away and Muslim — a lot of Europeans think he’s okay.”

    He then attacked Jacques Chirac, who had publicly challenged the US drive to war, saying the Frenchman “sees himself as Mr Arab.”

    It was at a time when the US right was trying to orchestrate a boycott of French wines and other goods. Restaurants across the US began using the name Freedom Fries instead of French Fries.

    In one of the most chilling insights into the hardball politics Mr Bush was playing in order to get his way, he warned that countries which opposed him would pay a price, mentioning the Free Trade Agreement with Chile that is waiting for Senate confirmation and Angola’s grants from the Millennium Account.

    What is Common Purpose and why should you care?

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    Although it has 80,000 trainees in 36 cities, 18,000 graduate members and enormous power, Common Purpose is largely unknown to the general public.  It recruits and trains “leaders” to be loyal to the directives of Common Purpose and the EU, instead of to their own departments, which they then undermine or subvert, the NHS being an example. 

    Common Purpose is identifying leaders in all levels of our government to assume power when our nation is replaced by the European Union, in what they call “the post democratic society.” They are learning to rule without regard to democracy, and will bring the EU police state home to every one of us.  Common Purpose is also the glue that enables fraud to be committed across these government departments to reward pro European local politicians.  Corrupt deals are enabled that put property or cash into their pockets by embezzling public assets. 

    It has members in the NHS, BBC, the police, the legal profession, the church, many of Britain’s 7,000 quangos, local councils, the Civil Service, government ministries, Parliament, and it controls many RDA’s (Regional Development Agencies).  Cressida Dick is the Common Purpose senior police officer who authorised the “Shoot to kill” policy without reference to Parliament, the law or the British Constitution. Jean de Menezes was one of the innocents who died as a result. Her shoot to kill policy still stands today. 

    Common Purpose trained Janet Paraskeva, the Law Society’s Chief Executive Officer. Surprising numbers of lawyers are CP members. It is no coincidence that justice is more expensive, more flawed and more corrupt. And no surprise the courts refused to uphold the law, when a challenge was made to the signing of the six EU treaties, which illegally abolish Britain’s sovereignty.  Common Purpose is backed by John Prescott’s “Office of the Deputy Prime Minister” (ODPM), and its notional Chief Executive is Julia Middleton. The Head of the Civil Service Commission is a member 

    It is close to controlling Plymouth City Council, where is has subverted the democratic process. Local people cannot get CP’s corrupt activities published, because the editors of local papers are in CP, and refuse to let journalists publish the articles.  CP started in 1985; in the 1990’s, with its members’ cross departmental influence, it was involved with what then became the disasterous New Millennium Dome Company and the squandering of £800 million; it appears £300m of this was diverted into the web of quangos set up by CP. There is a fraud case over this, stalled in the courts thanks to CP’s influence in the legal profession. 

    Over £100 million of our money has been spend on CP courses alone, and its been hidden from the public, and members names are a guarded secret. It charges substantial figures for its courses. Matrix for example costs £3,950 plus VAT, and courses for the high flying ‘leader’ can be as much as £9,950 plus VAT. This money is ours, paid by government departments financing senior staff to become agents for CP, instead of loyal to their own jobs.  Common Purpose (Ltd by guarantee, No. 2832875) is registered as charity No. 1023384. It describes itself as being involved in Adult education. Given it preys on the rich and powerful, charges expensive fees, and its aims are clearly power and control, its charity status stinks and should be revoked.  

    Potential Common Purpose subjects are selected for training. Are they susceptible to being converted; are they in the right job, with the right colleagues and friends? Do they have power, influence and the control of money? If the candidate has some, or all of these key attributes, then the local Common Purpose Advisory Board decides if they can do the course.  

    Common Purpose – training our future EU rulers – continued Trained leaders are encouraged to act as a network, enable other members’ plans, and have meetings under the so called Chatham House rules. This effectively means their statements are not attributable to them, nor can attendees reveal information heard at a Common Purpose meeting. 

    Council Officers are having secret meetings with, for example, property developer Common Purpose friends. No agendas and no minutes. Common Purpose Graduates from the public quango sectors such as the Regional Development Agencies attend, and have the power to award large sums of public money to projects. It is the worst national example of cronyism, closed contract bids, fraud and corruption. And unseen to the general public. 

    Common Purpose undermines traditionally effective and efficient government departments with an overwhelming influx of new language, political correctness and management initiatives. The talk is of empowering communities, vision, worklessness, mainstreaming (sucking EU money into a project to sustain it), community empowerment, working partnership, regeneration and celebrating diversity etc etc. Documents appear about change, and reorganisation.  As CP “leaders” become more senior they employ countless managers and bureaucrats. In time confusion rules, and things don’t seem to work properly. Management decisions are made that seem stupidly destructive. The organisation’s performance becomes sluggish. Undermining the NHS is Common Purpose’s biggest success so far, with bureaucrats outnumbering hospital staff three to one.  

    David Cameron, who is pro Europe, uses the language of Common Purpose; he has appointed Ken Clarke, the most committed of the pro Europeans, in charge of his “Democracy Taskforce” – rather like putting the cat in charge of the safety of mice.  Common Purpose specifically targets children from the age of 13, and more recently younger, for special leadership and citizenship training. Yes, it is active in schools, and again the average parent has no idea. 

    People have contacted us to speak of their experiences with Common Purpose. A common theme is its all sweetness and light, until you fail to follow the direction set by the CP leadership. Then interesting things happen. Ladies in particular have been bullied at work, some have lost their jobs, some have become paranoid and depressed at the pressure from people ganging up on them. 

    A typical story is a husband describing the decline in his wife from the time she becomes a Common Purpose graduate. Loss of sparkle, enthusiasm, anxious and ‘changed’, and she initiated a divorce. Other Common Purpose people lie when they are challenged as to their involvement. 

    Common Purpose candidates are given a two day residential course in which they are ‘trained’ in a closed residential environment, such as a small hotel. They are encouraged to reveal personal information about themselves, such as their likes, dislikes, ambitions and dreams. Discussions are then controlled by the course leaders. Some participants have likened this to Delphi technique or the application of group psychology such as Cognitive Dissonance or brainwashing.  If you suspect Common Purpose is active in your organisation, or see a pattern of incredibly bad decisions, money being wasted, notice bullying, fraud, or threats, note the names of those involved (we’ve tracked down over a thousand) and please contact us. And publish the truth about Common Purpose as widely as you can. Brian Gerrish 07841 464187, David Noakes 07974 437097;   http://eutruth.co.uk for action.

    EU ID card By 2010

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    By Phil Muncaster

    E-business trade association Eema has revealed plans to make national identity card services in the European Union transferable across member states.

    The initiative was unveiled at the Information Security Solutions Europe (ISSE) conference in Warsaw last week and christened Stork. It is intended to bring national governments together to tackle non-standardisation of electronic identity systems across EU countries, according to Eema’s executive director, Roger Dean. The deadline for this is 2010, when the EU’s European eID Management Framework comes into force.

    “It’s a three-year project and the UK government is playing a significant part,” Dean said. “But each government has its own agenda. You have to show the benefits to government, citizens and businesses [to get buy-in].”

    Supporters say a pan-European ID card agreement could provide help in migration between member states, and accessing social security services, medical prescriptions and pension payments. It could also ease cross-border student enrolment in colleges, as well as provide identification in lieu of a driving licence.

    However, experts warned that there is a long way to go before the framework is assured of success. “The technology to achieve the goal of allowing electronic ID cards to work in multiple states is available but has never been commercialised on this scale before,” argued Dan Blum of analyst Burton Group.

    Blum argued that commercial organisations should persevere with their identity-based projects despite the problems many encounter early on.

    “The elephant in the road is trust and how you audit your partners,” Blum told delegates. “But the incentives are transactional revenue, new business opportunities and lower admin costs.”

    Blum recommended firms think about the SAML 2.0 standard as the basis for projects because it has the most industry buy-in, but warned that interoperability issues may still arise. “We need to pressure the standards organisations and the vendor groups so there is no friction,” he added.

    Also at ISSE, experts rejected the suggestion that vendors should be held legally liable for product faults, as recommended by a recent Lords report on internet security.

    “Liability and legislation can have unintended consequences for innovation, competitiveness, product acceptance and the supplier ecosystem,” said Steve Lipner, Microsoft senior director of security engineering.

    Watch buildings by satellite, companies told

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    By John E. Dunn

    Large organisations in the UK are being offered a new service that could be the ultimate in physical security — building surveillance via satellite.

    The service is the work of two companies, Scyron and Datasat, which have spied a need among large multi-nationals and government agencies to secure remote buildings and assets remotely. Scyron supplies the software analysis element, which can assess threat using satellite imagery, while Datasat has access to a satellite network to supply input for the application.

    Scyron – which invested in its partner Datasat in July – uses the example of a shipping company watching over its fleet in any part of the world. If suspicious incidents are recorded, the system can adjust bandwidth to ensure the efficient transfer of images back to its monitoring HQ. It can also be tied into biometric and audio security systems as an extra layer.

    Such a service doesn’t come cheap, but then again neither does any remote security analysis. The company claims its approach will still save time and money when compared to manual incident analysis.

    In addition to maritime and transport, other industries that might be interested include border controls, utilities, and even the military, though the latter might be expected to have their own systems in place for such security.

    “The system gives a solution to the headache of permanently manned controls at numerous locations across the world. It is more targeted as it only alerts to suspicious activity but also in conjunction with satellite — it reaches the parts which others just cannot reach,” said Phil Emmel, Datasat’s managing director.

    What the company describes as an ‘entry-level’ system would set an organisation back 50,000 euros, but an accurate cost would depend on the number and type of sites being secured, the company said. The service was demonstrated at the Alarmes, Protection Securite Expo, held this week in Paris.

    Federal judge rules 2 Patriot Act provisions unconstitutional

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    A federal court on Wednesday struck down two provisions of the Patriot Act dealing with searches and intelligence gathering, saying they violate the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures with regard to criminal prosecutions.

    art.mayfield.case.ap.jpg

    Brandon Mayfield, left, and public defender Steven Wax tell of the dismissal of the case against Mayfield in 2004.

    “It is critical that we, as a democratic nation, pay close attention to traditional Fourth Amendment principles,” wrote Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in her 44-page decision. “The Fourth Amendment has served this nation well for 220 years, through many other perils.”

    The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, set up to review wiretap applications in intelligence cases under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, “holds that the Constitution need not control the conduct of criminal surveillance in the United States,” Aiken wrote.

    “In place of the Fourth Amendment, the people are expected to defer to the executive branch and its representation that it will authorize such surveillance only when appropriate.”

    The government “is asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. The court declines to do so,” Aiken said.

    The Justice Department was reviewing the decision, said spokesman Dean Boyd.

    The ruling was a response to a lawsuit filed against the federal government by Brandon Mayfield, a Portland, Oregon, attorney who was wrongly arrested for alleged involvement in the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

    The federal government later apologized to Mayfield and settled part of Mayfield’s lawsuit for $2 million. But Mayfield was permitted to keep pursuing the portions of his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.

    Mayfield claimed in the suit that his home and law offices were secretly broken into by the FBI, his clients’ files at his office were searched, his business and personal computers were secretly copied, his telephone was wiretapped and his home was bugged.

    Mayfield said he was “excited and happy” with the ruling.

    “This, to me, is not so much personal,” he said. “I think it’s just the right thing to do. It was the right thing to continue to challenge the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.”

    “This is an example of the judicial branch doing what it should do, and that’s to be a check and balance for the legislative and executive branch of government,” he said. “I feel wonderful today, because the Fourth Amendment has been restored to its rightful place, and the balance between liberty and security is balanced again.”

    Mayfield’s attorneys — Gerry Spence, Elden Rosenthal and Michelle Longer Eder — lauded the ruling.

    “Judge Aiken, in striking down the challenged provisions of the Patriot Act, has upheld both the tradition of judicial independence and our nation’s most cherished principle of the right to be secure in one’s own home,” they said in a written statement. “We are relieved that the Bill of Rights can be honored and preserved even in times of perceived crisis.”

    Aiken ruled that FISA, as amended by the Patriot Act, permits the government to conduct surveillance and searches targeting Americans without satisfying the probable-cause standard in the Fourth Amendment.

    “Prior to the amendments [to FISA], the three branches of government operated with thoughtful and deliberate checks and balances — a principle upon which our nation was founded,” Aiken wrote.

    But the Patriot Act, she said, eliminated “the constitutionally required interplay between executive action, judicial decision and Congressional enactment.”

    “For over 200 years, this nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,” she wrote.

    Aiken noted that FISA does not require that the subject of a search be notified, although the Fourth Amendment ordinarily does. In addition, she said, the Fourth Amendment requires particularity — authorities seeking a search warrant, for example, must list what they are looking for and where they are looking for it.

    Named to the bench in 1997 by President Clinton, Aiken is considered one of the more liberal judges on the federal bench in Oregon.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/law/09/26/patriot.act/index.html

    Muslim doctor called terrorist by patient

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    Editors Note: The article below is a perfect example of thow government and mainstream media propaganda is causing paranoia and creating a race division. 

    By Ahmed J Versi

    “He’s a terrorist. I want to see a white doctor,” a newly registered patient is alleged to have said about her Muslim doctor, Dr Zia Hussein, soon after the failed attacks in Glasgow and London.

    The incident took place in a doctor’s surgery in Oxhey, Hertfordshire, on July 3.
    The receptionist called Dr Hussain for help as she did not know what to do. When he came out of his consulting room to the reception area, the patient allegedly shouted at Dr Hussain in front of other patients, “You are a terrorist. You are not fit to be a doctor. You don’t know your job.” The doctor asked her to leave the surgery.

    Dr Hussain told The Muslim News that she was his patient and had re-registered after returning from holiday on June 26. Then, Dr Hussain relates, she made some racist remarks, like, “I don’t trust foreigners. They are not trained here. I only trust white doctors who are trained here.”

    Dr Hussain said he was shocked at the patient’s outburst. He had had no problems at this surgery before with any patient. “I believe what she said about me being a terrorist is because of the recent arrests of the doctors who were involved in the failed terrorist attacks,” he said.

    Hizbullah: If Israel attacks Syria, we’ll respond

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    Senior members of Lebanese, Palestinian organizations vow to stand by Damascus if Jewish state launches war. ‘Doors will be open which have not been open before. Israel will pay a heavy price,’ they warn

    Roee Nahmias

     

    “If Israel dares to make an adventurous move against Syria, it will pay a heavy price,” a member of Hizbulla’s political council warned Thursday.In an interview with the Nazareth-based Kul al-Arab newspaper scheduled to be published on Friday, Dr Ahmad Malli warned Israel against considering an attack on Syria, saying that the Lebanese organization would respond to such an offensive with full force.

    “I believe that things have changed,” Malli explained. “The times when everyone was afraid of the Israeli threats are over. The Zionist entity knows more than anyone that the price of such adventurousness would be heavy, and the Israelis know the price more than anyone.

    “Since 2006 we have begun a new stage in the Arab-Israeli conflict and have demonstrated this during the Israeli aggression in July (the Second Lebanon War). If anyone wants to make an adventurous move, it will baer responsibility for this aggression.”

    Asked whether he was referring to aggression both against Lebanon and against Syria, Malli replied, “We are all in one Middle East.”

    Ahmad Jibril, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, also warned Thursday that if Israel attacked Syria or Hizbullah his organization would also respond.

    In an interview with the al-Hadat newspaper, which is published in Arabic in the Galilee city of Tamra, Jibril warned that Israel planned to invade Syria in coordination with Arab countries. The interview is scheduled to be published Friday.

    According to Jibril, if such an attack takes place, Iran and Hizbullah will stand by Damascus and respond in full force.

    “I believe that the Israelis and the Americans will carry out attacks against Syria as soon as possible, in other words in the near future. I do not reject the possibility that the Israeli aircraft will attack us — the Palestinians in Syria.

    “I also do not reject the possibility that they will attack the Palestinian headquarters in Damascus. We, the Palestinians in Syria, will not stand idly by. We will be at the front posts. I also believe that Hizbullah will take part in this war,” he said.

    Jibril added that Israel’s plan was to isolate Syria from Iran and the rest of its allies, after identifying it as the weakest link.

    “I stress that the plan to isolate Syria will not go by easily,” he declared. “I am certain that this war will last for months and will open doors which have not been opened in the past.”

    Bush seeks changes to cut U.S. airline delays

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    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush directed deputies on Thursday to devise a plan to shorten airline delays, an initiative that could force carriers to change schedules and pay more to use crowded airports at the busiest times of the day.

    “We’ve got a problem. We understand there’s a problem and we’re going to address the problem,” Bush said after meeting Transportation Secretary Mary Peters in the Oval Office.

    Transportation Department figures show that U.S. airline delays are on a record pace for 2007. For the year to July, delays surpassed the 1 million mark, up more than 20 percent from the same period a year ago.

    Nearly a third of flights are late or canceled and more than 50,000 through July had ground delays of between one and five hours, a 40 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

    Some aviation experts, lawmakers and regulators blame airline overscheduling for delays while others say the government has failed to upgrade the aging air traffic system to handle the millions of arrivals and departures each year. Airlines scheduled a record 647,000 flights in July alone.

    The focus of the White House discussion was congestion in the New York area, which handles a third of U.S. air traffic. Delays in New York can affect flights throughout the country.

    Of immediate concern are delays at John F. Kennedy airport, which is growing fast and is a major point for international service. The most concrete step to emerge from the White House meeting was a decision for government planners to meet with the airlines to discuss scheduling changes at JFK.

    Peters told reporters after meeting Bush that she preferred a cooperative approach but the Federal Aviation Administration could limit flights at JFK if necessary.

    Any action at JFK would most affect JetBlue Airways Corp. , which is based there, and Delta Air Lines, which operates two terminals. American Airlines operates international and some domestic service at JFK.

    Delays have been a chronic problem for the industry for nearly a decade, interrupted only by the aviation downturn that followed the hijacking attacks of 2001. Past efforts by airlines and regulators to reduce or rearrange schedules at some of the most congested airports have provided temporary relief at best.

    Mike Boyd, an industry consultant, said the steps announced by the Bush administration are too late and only “dumb down” the system.

    “Every flight is full, airlines are meeting the nation’s demands. The air traffic system is behind,” Boyd said, adding that airlines had failed over the years to forcefully demand improvements in air traffic services.

    U.S. officials will study the concept of charging airlines more to use crowded airports at the busiest times of the day. Recommendations are due in December.

    The Transportation Department has already proposed congestion pricing pilot programs at 15 airports as part of legislation to modernize the air traffic system.

    Airlines oppose congestion pricing, saying it will only raise fares as extra costs are passed along to consumers.

    Peters did not discount the possibility that government action could affect airline business models, such as the trend toward using more regional jets in place of larger planes.

    “We don’t necessarily want to say you can’t do that, but we do want to say at the end of the day we have to reduce congestion and delay. Everything is on the table,” Peters told reporters.

    Airlines quickly note shortcomings in the aging government-run air traffic system and the impact on operations in the New York area of corporate jets, a growing preference for business travelers.

    “The bottom line is that there is not much we can do once an aircraft leaves the gate and enters onto the taxiway. At that point, we come under the control of an antiquated air traffic control system,” Bob Reding, executive vice president for operations at American Airlines, told a Senate hearing on Thursday.

    American, Delta Air Lines and other carriers said they have already tweaked their schedules at peak hours at some airports, adjusted the time that planes sit at gates, and streamlined maintenance to ensure aircraft meet their schedules.

    (Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria)

    Do you know the truth about the EU?

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    http://drjn.co.uk/

     1. The Queen has signed 6 of the 7 EU Treaties.

    2. The 6 treaties define and build the EU as an unelected dictatorship.

    3. The EU’s laws give it the powers of a police state.

    4. The 7th EU treaty will complete the abolition of Britain as a nation – the Queen could sign it in as little as two years.

    Shouldn’t we repeal the 1972 European Communities Act now
    before we are imprisoned permanently inside?

    5. Thirty three years inside the EU – have you noticed how our democracy is being withdrawn?
    The EU has already denied us that most basic of human rights – the right to vote against the EU and to keep our own nation. A majority of us don’t want to be in the EU. We are being forced in against our will.     Do you feel you’ve become powerless, unable to influence events, or your vote is worth less? The six treaties are gradually removing our democracy; and 70% of the laws now passed by our Parliament are EU laws, not ours. Isn’t the real reason people have lost interest in politics precisely because the EU has taken away our ability to change things?

    Common law, where the government was our servant, is now largely replaced by the EU’s Corpus Juris, which puts the government above the law, and we don’t participate. We have already lost most of our rights (including habeas corpus). The power of government grows unchecked, as does that of large corporations. Politicians continuously lie about the EU, pretending its not significant.

    6. Massive EU corruption
    The EU’s auditors have found the fraud is so widespread they’ve refused to sign off the EU’s accounts for each of the last ten years. Whistleblowers like Marta Andreason, the EU Budget Director, who in 2005 found the EU couldn’t account for 95% of its £66 billion budget, are simply fired for telling the truth.

    7.The bribing of our Politicians by the EU
    Europe works by bribing politicians with huge salaries and expenses to vote for Europe, against the best interests of their own voters.

    As a result all three parties are in favour of the EU – Westminster acts like a one party state of politicians: the Lib-Lab-Con. The parties are run top down and implement the policy of their leaderships, not that of their members. (unfortunately UKIP is run in the same way). If you have voted for the Labs, Cons or Lib-Dems since 1969, you have voted for the EU dictatorship.

    8. EU corruption is now exploding through our Civil Service, our local government, and our 7,000 quangos.
    A shadow EU government lives inside our bureaucracy, headquartered in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM.) It includes many parts of government including the RDA and the Regional Assemblies. Common Purpose, an EU organisation, the UK branch also headquartered in the ODPM, has members across many government organisations including some city and county councils, the Land Registry, the police and the NHS, which it is destroying from within.

    Common Purpose is the glue that enables fraud to be committed across these government departments, most of it lining the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats. It often involves the sale of public assets such as land to friends of politicians or their businesses. (The RDA -The EU Regional Development Agency, is a major player in this type of fraud.) And the handing out of plum government non jobs with big salaries and expenses to members of Common Purpose, all of it involving the theft of our money as taxpayers. The Chief Executive Officer of Common Purpose is Julia Middleton of the ODPM.

    9. Businesses closing under EU regulation
    The EU’s 107,000 regulations will close hundreds of thousands more businesses when fully enforced, and control our private lives more closely than those of Soviet citizens. (In a Parliamentary answer to Lord Stoddart in January 2003, the government admitted there were 101,811 EU regulations)

    10. The EU costs us £200 billion pa, 20% of our economy
    According to the government’s Better Regulation Task Force, complying with EU regulations now costs our economy over £100 billion a year. Economists say we lose £80 billion pa by associating with the EU’s inferior economies. The EU took our fishing industry, which costs us £5 billion pa. EU damage to other industries (like forcing us to close the Rover Car Co) a further £20 billion. Our EU contribution is £10 billion.

    Before we joined the EU we had an even balance of trade with them. Now EU regulations have fixed it so we lose £22 billion year trading with the EU on our balance of payments. We’d be enormously more wealthy if we left.

    11. Our counties to be abolished
    The Queen signed the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which adopts the EU Regionalisation Plan. This will abolish England’s 48 counties and replace them with 9 European regions, each with their own Regional Capital, which reports directly to Brussels, not to Westminster. This effectively obliterates the country of England. For example the County of Cornwall is replaced by the South West Region, which stretches from Lands End and includes Gloucestershire and Wiltshire; its regional capital is Exeter. As this move is unpopular it is being kept low-key and will not be implemented until the seventh treaty is signed, when we lose our right to object.

    12. The deliberate destruction of our way of life, standards and morals
    From Sunday trading, where large stores force staff to work Sundays for derisory pay – or they don’t get a job, to the government’s deliberate undermining of the family, to sex education for the under 13’s, to children being given obscene homework, its all traceable via our compliant government back to the EU over the last 34 years. While inside atheist Europe, British Christianity has almost died out; safety on our streets and a great chunk of civilised life has left with it.

    13. The EU has controlled our immigration since 1997
    The Amsterdam Treaty handed complete control of our immigration to the EU. The EU increased the numbers of immigrants from 30,000 a year to 200,000 a year. That’s why house prices have been screaming up. Politicians and huge corporations like immigration – with thousands of immigrants available on low pay, corporations can impose the minimum wage on millions. Politicians then lie that they can’t get British workers to do dirty jobs. The truth is they won’t offer a decent wage to compensate for unpleasant work, and instead use immigrants at £5 an hour.

    Michael Howard was lying on the 24th January 2005 when he said he’d fix immigration – as Prime Minister, he’d have had no control over it whatsoever. Immigration hurts our existing immigrants first – new immigrants move into their areas, decreasing the wages and increasing the pressure on housing.

    If the seventh Treaty is signed, we lose our right to withdraw and Britain ceases to be a nation. Like the other six, it only requires two signatures: the Prime Ministers, and the Queen’s.

    Examples of how our lives have changed since we’ve been in the EU:In the EU, (which means in Britain) government is above the law.
    The EU’s corpus juris now pervades right through our legal system. A policeman was let off by magistrates this year (2005) for driving his private car at 159 mph in Ludlow, Shrops. Under Corpus Juris the government are above the law and cannot be prosecuted The judge ruled correctly under EU law. 45,000 police officers got off speed cameras in this way in 2004, although their speeding killed 44 innocent people. (Daily Mail 27.12.05.)

    We have lost the right to freedom
    The EU arrest warrant (signed by the Queen on 18th November 2003) allows us to be arrested without charge and held indefinitely with no right to see a solicitor, make a phone call, or even a right to a trial. You can simply disappear.

    Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005, we can now be arrested and held in the cells by any police officer for any petty offence, like dropping litter. Before it had to be an offense that carried a 5 year jail term. This also applies to all of the EU’s 107,000 regulations. Do you know them all?

    The Civil Contingences Act 2004 allows government to confiscate anything you possess permanently; you have no right to object. This includes your house. It also gives government the right to forceably move its population around to different locations; you can be left with no place to call your own and live like a refugee. The only check and balance here is a Minister just needs to utter the words “This is a national emergency.” If a demonstration or strike government doesn’t like is being organised, they can cut off all communications in a town – phones, mobiles, the internet, TV, and block all access to that town including closing roads and railways. It has all the powers and more of Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933.

    We have lost the right to free speech
    At the Labour Party conference the police held an 82 year old man, Walter Woolfgang, and denied him access to the conference under the EU’s “anti terrorist” legislation because he had shouted the word “nonsense” at Jack Straw, who was speaking about Iraq. Terrified the true nature of the laws they have passed on behalf of the EU was escaping too early, the Labour Party stopped the police and begged the man to return to conference.

    On October 25th 2005 Miss Maya Evans was arrested under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, for a lone protest at the Cenotaph by reading out the names of the 97 British soldiers killed in the Iraq war. She was arrested by no less than 14 police officers and found guilty at Bow Street Magistrates Court on the 8th December 2005.

    Would you hand over our nation, to be ruled by a foreign power, with oppressive laws like these, ? That’s what’s happening.

    We have lost the right to protest
    These laws make protest very difficult; if we did hold a General Strike and blockade Westminster it would now require some bravery: the powers the EU has demanded from our government enable it to respond in a way similar to the Chinese government’s in Tiaanamen Square should it so wish.

    It is no coincidence that since 2004, all MP’s offices in Westminster are guarded by police with machine guns, inside and out.

    The Governments “terrorism” deception
    All these new EU laws, including massive “anti terrorism” acts (recently 2000, 2001, 2005) were passed with the pretence they were only directed at terrorists, or in the case of Asbos, ruffians who terrorise the streets. In each case they are used far more often against ordinary law abiding people, particularly to suppress dissent. (91% of those detained under Terrorism Acts are innocent and have been improperly arrested. Most of the remainder are charged with offences that have nothing to do with terrorism, but cover up over zealous arrests).

    We have lost the right to life
    Under EU law the “Shoot to kill” policy did not need democratic authorisation. Just two senior police officers authorised the police to kill British people. A democratic vote by Parliament was not required, but even that would not have legalised the killing under British common law. A recent victim was an innocent Brazilian, Jean de Menezes, shot dead in Stockwell underground station, even though he was being held down by police officers at the time of the execution. The police used dum-dum bullets, outlawed under the Geneva Convention because they blow a man to pieces inside.

    The police can no longer be convicted for killing innocent people – Philip Prout shot at Lewannick in East Cornwall is just one of 30 people shot dead by police since 1992 when corpus juris crept in. At least one was shot in the back; most were no threat to anyone. Not once since 1992 has a policeman been convicted of any crime for these murders.

    Have you noticed this growing police state?
    In addition to many more laws than those above, add the 107,000 regulations, and whole bureaucracies such as VOSA building up networks of cameras and databases to record our movements and criminalise us when we can’t comply. Persecution is no longer confined to motorists; under EU Corpus Juris our courts have become extensions of government power instead of independent arbiters of justice.
    On the basis of the laws and treaties already signed by our Queen and Prime Ministers, What will life be like in the EU after the 7th Treaty is signed?

    Our Westminster Parliament immediately becomes pointess as its remaining powers are transferred to Europe.

    It is the formal end of Britain and England as nations.

    Britain’s 153 embassies around the world will be closed as the ink from the Queen’s signature dries. (As Tony Blair refused to admit this has been agreed to, Jose Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain, confirmed it in a February 2005 radio broadcast.)

    After the EU abolishes our 48 counties your address will change from 4 High St, Taunton, Somerset, Great Britain, to 4 High St, Taunton, Area K, European Union. (The glorious EU county “The South West Region” has had the postal address “Area K” assigned for over a decade.)

    The Official National Anthem of the EU, which you should have known since 1971 is based on the melody “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven, formally replaces God save the Queen. The EU flag replaces the Union Jack, the red, blue and white nautical ensigns etc. (The EU Commission has already ordered (24.11.2005) our Merchant Navy to fly the EU flag in place of the red Ensign.)

    The EU takes ownership and command of our Police, Army, Royal Navy, RAF, nuclear weapons, currency reserves, North Sea Oil. (See the EU Constitution below)

    The UK Independence Party will be banned under the 1999 ruling of the European court of Justice case c274/99, where it was held that it is illegal to criticise the EU.

    The Conservative, Labour and Lib-dem parties will be abolished (only pan EU parties like the EPP or PES are allowed -see clause I.46.4 of the EU Constitution). It will then be blindingly obvious to even the dumbest politician there is no reason to keep Westmister open, and that the EU has the legal right to close it.

    Many people will be excluded from the jobs they know best, as the EU’s demand that you must pay to be re-taught the job, and pay for a certificate before you can be employed, becomes universal.

    Hundreds of thousands more small businesses will close on the enforcement of the remaining 100,000 EU regulations our government has already passed. Several million will be permanently unemployed as a result.

    We will all be criminalised by the 107,000 regulations. Its impossible to know or understand 107,000 regulations, and the poor can’t possibly afford to comply. We will all be subject to frequent fines and arrest as a result. Here are just 4 examples:

    Under EU regulations it is now illegal for you to repair your plumbing, electrics or your car (from 1st January 2006). If you buy a boat over six feet long, built after the EU Recreational Craft Directive of 1999, and don’t pay the EU £4,000 to “measure” the boat, you get 6 months imprisonment. We will live under permanent threat of arrest and fear of the knock at the door that takes us away.

    Massive corporations will do well, but with huge immigration allowed from the EU, they’ll be able to pay minimum wage everywhere, not just in the provinces as they do now. If you don’t accept the minimum they’ll employ a Pole or a Czekoslovakian.

    Big corporations will also have a near monopoly (with the government) on employment and will be able to dictate unfavourable terms to staff without fear of contradiction.

    Plum government jobs and corruption will ensure the wealth of politicians, bureaucrats, their businesses and associates at all levels of government, including local government and amongst our 7000+ quangos.

    Society will divide into two: the remaining 60% of us will be either unemployed or treated abysmally on minimum wage.

    Taxes will rise more steeply to pay for the even larger explosion in government growth and corruption

    There will be no redress through local democracy because there won’t be any. The nine UK regional governments, which replace our 48 counties and councillors, will be unelected (see the European Regionisation plan). Our only vote is to the powerless EU parliament. We will be ruled by the 25 unelected Commisssioners, and have have no redress at any level; we will be as poor but have less freedom than Soviet Citizens.

    If we demonstrate or protest we can be be seized and relocated to another region. The EU Arrest Warrant and Civil Contingencies Act 2004, with 20 other oppressive Acts the Queen has signed between 1972 and 2005, give the government absolute power over us. They can shoot us if they wish with no legal comeback – the shootings of innocents Philip Prout and Jean de Menezes were entirely legal under EU law.

    The tendancy to pick on Muslims, as Germany used to pick on Jews, has already begun. Europe will be a very nasty place.

    How long will the EU last?
    Eventually, perhaps 15 years down the track, Europe will collapse under the weight of its own corruption, bureaucracy, and regulations. There will be so few productive businesses that even at 100% tax rates we will not be able to support the massive, corrupt and wasteful government. Many of us will be starving in the lead up to the collapse. After the collapse we may be able to leave the EU, if a dictator has not taken advantage of the complete absence of democratic checks and balances by seizing power. The Constitution of the EU is similar to the Soviet Union’s. That dictator is free to choose between a Soviet or Nazi style government. Then it could take 70 years to break free.

    .

    Fifty years ago our greatest threat might have been violence or mugging. Now the greatest threat to our economic well being, our way of life, our freedom and the very existence of our nation, is our own government.

    .

    What do we want?After the repeal of the EU treaties we want a change to our British Constitution so politicians can never hijack our nation again. Every Parliamentary Bill, after its Second Reading, should come down to us, the people, to vote yes or no as to whether the Queen should give it Royal Assent. This will take power away from our destructive politicians and return it to the people, where it belongs. (They do this in Swtizerland – they, not us, are the most democratic nation on earth.) We can then return to being a peaceable, just, honest, prosperous and fully democratic society where everyone’s rights, no matter how high or low are respected, and the disadvantaged properly looked after. And where neither governments, corporations nor individuals have obscene wealth and power.

    David Noakes 01326 316298 ; 07974 437 097 ; fire4effect@tiscali.co.ukCampaign to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act and get clean out.

    What can you do to help?
    1. Find out when your local MP holds their surgery and attend with a printout of this, and the one page summary of the EU constitution below. Ask that MP to cross the floor to be the leader of the first Anti EU Parliamentary Party (representing 65% of our nation). The publicity would be stunning, and might force an in/out vote.
    2. Make appointments with your local journalists, give them the same two print outs and ask them to write about the truth about the EU.
    3. Do you know anyone famous? Persuade them in the same way to join our cause and get the truth known.
    4. Print little stickers: “We didn’t vote for this – it has no mandate,” and stick them on everything that represents the police state and rip off government.
    5. Tell your Town, District and County councillors they are about to be abolished. See below.
    6. Do anything you can to get the truth about the EU published.
    Or print and hand out this flier (a .pdf), or flier (as a word document). It can be photocopied double sided on to one page..

    Our Councillors abolished
    Our 20,000 Councillors will be permanently abolished after the EU Regionalisation Plan has established the nine EU Regions. Point out they were elected to serve the public, not the government, and the public has not agreed to their abolition.
    Try to persuade them to stand up for the people who voted for them, (which is only doing their duty) by holding a yes/no local ballot on whether the public agree with the abolition of our counties, councillors and nation.

    If the public vote no, they should declare, for their Town or county, UDI from Europe and the illegal actions of our government since 1971, particularly the abolition of our British Constiution, common law, our nation and counties. The press coverage this would generate would force the truth into the open nationally, leading to a national in/out ballot on the EU. Just one council could achieve this fabulous result alone. s

    Download: A summary of the loss of our 48 counties (a WP file)

    Download: A map of the nine EU regions (.pdf)

    The Devonport Column, exposing Common Purpose nationally, and corruption in Plymouth.

    The six treaties are:
    1. The European Communities Act 1972.
    2. The Single European Act, 1986.
    3. The Maastricht Treaty, 1992.
    4. The Amsterdam Treaty, 1997.
    5. The Nice Treaty 2001.
    6. The European Union Treaty, 2003.

    The seventh will be called something equally innocuous, like the Treaty of Lille. Then the loss of our nation, way of life and freedom will be complete.

    The best summary of the six treaties is the ConstitutionSome British politicians were horrified when they saw the EU’s absolute power revealed in its new constitution, and falsely accused the EU of much more than a tidying up exercise. It wasn’t, it was a re-statement of the 6 treaties in almost readable English. Our politicians simply hadn’t read the six treaties before they voted for them. The French and Dutch “No” votes are being ignored as usual; the EU Constitution is 2/3rds implemented and still being implemented; it reveals the true nature of the EU. Here’s a one page summary with Article numbers:One page summary of the Constitution – pdf for download

    UKIP is way understating the costs of the EU. Even the British and EU governments admit to four times the UKIP figure.
    The EU is costing us 200 billion pa, 20% of our economy

    Quotes from our leaders revealing they know they built the EU as a dictatorship.

    EU treaties and publications abolishing our 48 counties

    The Conservative Con trick
    Many people have been fooled by the Conservative Party into believing the party is anti EU. It was the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, who took us in to the EU, and then he lied that his 1972 EU Treaty wouldn’t affect our sovereignty. Three out of the four Prime Ministers who signed the 6 EU treaties were Conservatives, every one af them legally a traitor under the British laws of their time. Do you see a pattern here?

    In 2005 Party Leader Michael Howard could have won the election for the Conservatives by making one simple statement: “We will repeal the 1972 EU Communities Act and leave Europe”. Millions of Conservative voters would have rejoined the fold. A million Lib-Dems and Labour voters would have joined him. But he didn’t.

    Because the Conservative leadership would rather be in Europe than be in power. The Conservative leadership, including David Cameron, is completely dedicated to Europe.

    Instead Howard continued betraying Conservative voters, so he lost. (And to be fair, why should Conservative leaders miss out on the EU corruption gravy train?)

    With the Labour and Lib-Dem parties openly for Europe, its clear the three parties will never give us a vote to leave the EU and keep our nation. The answer may be massive civil disobedience, a permanent General Strike, or a blockade of Westminster until MP’s resign.

    34 years of negotiation from the inside have failed to improve the EU one jot. Shouldn’t we repeal the 1972 European Communities Act and get clean out?

    The abolition of the Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem parties.
    So sloppy have our politicians been in their reading of the EU treaties, most haven’t noticed that the EU will abolish our Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem parties. It was clear in the Madrid 1999 party financing document, and it was re-stated in the Constitution, clause I-46-4. Only pan European parties like the EPP will be allowed. Some politicians, like Heseltine and Ken Clarke, can’t wait for this to happen.

    A date for the abolition of Westminster has tactfully not been given
    Once the 7th treaty is signed, Westminster’s remaining powers are transferred to Brussels, and Westminster is left with the powers of a county council. Except it won’t have a county, because they will be abolished under the Regionalisation plan. The 9 EU regions report direct to Brussels, so Westminster will be a county council without a county. Anyone with half a brain can see Brussels will abolish Westminster, as it’s only potential use would be as a rallying point to challenge the power of Brussels.

    The Queen, Treason and the Coronation oath
    The Queen is the only monarch to have broken her coronation oath, by signing these six treaties that abolish our common law, the British constitution, the British and English nations, and our sovereignty. She has also committed treason, together with co-signatories Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. Realising they stood a good chance of spending the rest of their lives behind bars, Tony Blair and the Queen signed the Crime and Criminal Evidence Act, 1998, which abolished the crime of treason.

    The new EU Hitler doesn’t have to get elected
    Its worth noting that Adolf Hitler first had to get elected, if on a 35% minority vote, and then get his Enabling Act passed. An EU dictator has no such problems. Our EU rulers do not submit themselves for election now. And the Queen has already signed the Enabling Act (Civil Contingencies Act 2004).

    The EU’s Hitler will have a much easier rise to power, and will have the formerly British and French nuclear weapons from day one. Adolf Hitler killed 54 million people. The EU’s dictator could kill a billion at the touch of a button, with no democratic checks and balances to answer to. How could any aspiring dictator resist the EU opportunity?

    .

    Here’s a link to Our Message at the last General Election – 2005

    A link to ukip-plymouth.org.uk

    Common Purpose, training 18,000 of our new EU rulers at all levels of our government now.
    As a word doc.

    Do we want to be in Europe? Do we want to lose democratic government, the nations of Britain and England, and all our counties? Do we want to put ourselves in the EU, where we will be at the mercy of any dictator who chooses to control us? Isn’t the answer obviously “No” ?

    We can live again outside Europe
    Outside the EU we can be a free and properly democratic nation. Free from Europe we could stop half our government spending being wasted, could save the £200 billion a year it costs us to be in Europe, repeal all its 107,000 regulations, and stop losing the £22 billion a year to Europe on our balance of payments. With those vast savings we could easily pay all our people a good living wage. According to the OECD we are the 4th strongest economy amongst the world’s 205 independent nations, and we will make it handsomely.

    We could leave the EU in 14 hours
    The fastest an Act of Parliament has been drafted, passed by Parliament and signed by the Monarch was the abdication of King Edward VIIIth. It was done in 13.5 hours. We could repeal the 1972 European Communities Act and be out of Europe in just fourteen hours, if our traiterous MP’s, Prime Minister and Queen so wished. So far they’ve illegally denied us the choice. We need to change that, but we may only have two years left before the final 7th treaty is signed.

    Thank you. Please choose one of the six actions above and complete it.

    Our other site: eutruth.org.uk

    U.S. Nuclear Weapons Being “Guarded” by Israel

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     American supporters of Israel were delighted to learn that an Israeli company, Magal Security Systems-owned in part by the government of Israel-is in charge of security for the most sensitive nuclear power and weapons storage facilities in the United States.The largest perimeter security company in the world, Magal started out as a division of Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI)-which was owned in part by the government of Israel. In recent years, however, Magal evolved into a publicly-traded company, although IAI (and thus the government of Israel) still holds a substantial share in the highly successful firm.

    What all of this means is that the government of Israel will actually have control over the security of America’s nuclear weapons.

    Supporters of Israel say that this is a splendid idea, since Israel is said to be perhaps America’s closest ally on the face of the planet. However, there are some critics who question the propriety of America’s super-sensitive nuclear security being in the hands of any foreign nation, particularly Israel which, even today, officially denies that it is engaged in the production of nuclear arms.

    Be that as it may, however, Magal’s global interests are quite broad-ranging. Having secured 90 percent of Israel’s borders through a wide-ranging array of super-modern “space age” technology, Magal has now branched out internationally.

    Not only does Magal provide security for American nuclear facilities, but it also does likewise for most major nuclear facilities in Western Europe and Asia. In addition, the Israeli firm also provides security for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and, for the last fifteen years, has kept watch on the Queen of England’s famed Buckingham Palace in London. What’s more, Magal provides security for 90% of the American prisons that utilize electronic systems. Magal brags that its other clients around the globe include: borders, airports, industrial sites, communication centers, military installations, correctional facilities, government agencies, VIP estates and residences, commercial buildings and storage yards.

    There is hardly a major country or major enterprise that does not have Magal’s security specialists keeping a close watch on their activities.

    Clearly, Magal is no small enterprise. While 27% of its total sales are in the Israeli market, its largest market is in North America, which currently accounts for 35% of its sales.

    However, Magal’s American outreach is expected to increase substantially, especially now that firm has set up a Washington, D.C. office which will promote its products to federal agencies and to the members of Congress who provide funding for federally-supervised security projects across the country at all levels: local, state and national.

    And with current U.S. Homeland Security Chief, Michael Chertoff, not only a strong supporter of Israel but also the son of a woman who has strong Israeli ties-even including service with El Al, the national airline of Israel-Magal, owned in party by Israeli Aircraft Industries-will be a clear-cut favorite in the eyes of the power brokers in official Washington who have the power to grant lucrative security contracts.

    At the moment, Magal has four U.S.-based subsidiaries: two in California, Stellar Security Products, Inc. and Perimeter Products Inc., as well as the New York-based Smart Interactive Systems, Inc., and the Virginia-based Dominion Wireless, Inc.

    All told, the Israeli company holds a 40% share in the worldwide market in perimeter intrusion detection systems and is working to expand its business in the protection of oil pipelines.

    Magal is also said to be quite interested in guarding water lines around the globe, particularly in the United States. In fact, Magal may have an inside shot at getting a monopoly in guarding America’s water supplies.

    On July 19, the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency announced a “partnership” with the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructures to improve what they called “water supply system security in the United States and Israel.” Since Magal is so highly respected in Israel, it’s an even bet that Magal will soon be guarding the U.S. water supply.

    By Michael Collins Piper

    Correspondent for American Free Press and author of “The New Jerusalem:Zionist Power in America”, “The High Priests of War,” and “Final Judgment,” which details the Mossad role in the JFK assassination conspiracy.

    No EU – Common Purpose Government Infiltrators

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    This presentation was given at Leicester England. MEP Rogert Helmer came specially to be there and guest host the meeting. Edward Spalton of the CIB (Campaign for an Independent Britain) gave a short introduction. The presentation was given by Brian Gerrish on his researches concering Common Purpose.

    (Disclaimer: Views and opinions presented here are for informational and educational purposes only and may not necessarily be those of the makers of this video who are serving only as recorders of the event for public view and may or may not support or advocate those views and have not checked the accuracy thereof. Use your own discernment.)

    Who’s guarding the Nuke Reactors? Lets sleep on that one

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    Guards protecting top terrorist target asleep while on duty… couldn’t this also be an illustration of the majority of Americans confronting the reality of terrorism in the U.S.?

    26 September 2007: We can thank CBS News 2 for doing their job by exposing those charged with protecting our critical infrastructure for not doing theirs, especially in a time of war. A video secured by CBS News 2 during their exclusive investigation shows the inside of our nation’s largest nuclear facilities. The images below are of security officers on the job, copied from the video shown by CBS News 2 at this link. The officers shown here are responsible for protecting the plant against a terrorist attack, an attack that could kill or injure tens of thousands in the northeast, from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, DC.

    Protecting our nuclear power plant…

    …does this look like we are “at war?”

    How safe are our nuclear facilities?


    Range of radiation contamination in the event of attack or incident.
    If terrorists were able to get past these guards and sabotage the nuclear reactors the result could be disastrous and deadly.

    Read the complete article and view this outrageous video HERE (CBS NEWS 2). Report by Scott Weinberger.

    Will BBC come clean over 911 Hit piece?

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    By J A Blacker, Science Correspondent
    RINF Alternative News

    The Cat is out of the BAG for the BBC, folk have slowly cottoned on to the fact its not as squeaky clean as it once was.

    http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13441

    Now the BBC has formally had to confess and subsequently apologise to viewers for deceiving them over the phone in naming of the Blue Peter CAT, will it do likewise with its disgraceful one sided and scandalous Hit Piece “The Conspiracy Files” Documentary?

    911 is THE most pivotal event in recent history and the BBC consistently and without a shred of regret or hesitation continues to spout, promote and defend the MOST outrageous and PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Government “Conspiracy Nonsense “.

    Just Who does the BBC serve?  When will it stop its TOTAL TREASON?

    To understand the sheer depths of BBC Total Public Deception one needs to be familiar with the sheer number of complaints they have had to deal with in the past 6 months.

    Indeed one complaint in particular is giving them a real headache:

    http://rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/st911-scientist-to-sue-bbc-for-public-deception/776/ 

    http://rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/bbc-will-ignore-911-hit-piece-for-9-months/801/

    Their time is almost up and they now have to Reply – For an update on BBC pearls of wisdom stay tuned.

    Charlie Rose Interview with the President of Iran

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    You can see the media conditioning at work.

    To Rose’s credit, he doesn’t froth at the mouth like a rapid dog (or Columbia University’s president.) He manages to keep himself in check.

    Rose’s stamina is impressive.

    For a full hour, he presents one propaganda fantasy after another as fact and never seems to tire. I’m sure whoever writes his checks (note the country he emphasizes at the very end of the program) was happy with his performance.

    ===========================

    – Scott Ritter, September 25, 2007

    I just got back from a talk by Scott Ritter about the Bush administration’s plans to attack Iran.

    Who is Scott Ritter?

    He’s the ex-Marine officer and former UN weapons inspector who said during the build up to the Iraq invasion that Iraq DID NOT have weapons of mass destruction.

    Ritter was slandered and threatened for expressing this opinion.

    He was 100% right.

    Ritter was warning Americans as early as 2002 that Bush & Co. were going to invade Iraq. At the time, people thought the very idea was crazy.

    He was 100% right.

    Now Ritter says that the signs are clear:

    Bush & Co. will attack Iran before Bush’s time is up unless they are stopped.

    Some facts:

    1. Bush already has authorization to order an attack on Iran without asking for approval from Congress. Blanket war powers have already been granted him and unless taken away, he can use them any time on any country.

    2. Iran – like Iraq – has no nuclear weapons program.

    Nuclear ENERGY program? Yes, but that is far from having a nuclear weapons program.

    In fact, UN inspectors have concluded after extensive study and investigation there are no nukes in Iran – but this simple fact is NOT being reported by the US new media.

    Instead the US news media is manufacturing claims that the President of Iran has threatened Israel with annihilation and is supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons (both false claims.)

    3. An attack on Iran will not be without consequences to the US.

    Iran has three times the population of Iraq and unlike Iraq which was militarily shattered after Gulf War I and over ten years of sanctions and US bombing, Iran has a fully capable conventionally armed military.

    In 2006, Hamas – military students of Iran – defeated
    a full bore attack by Israel in Southern Lebanon.

    Iran can easily shut down the Straits of Hormuz and stop the flow of oil out of the Middle East. Oil has recently been as high as $80 per barrel. A Middle East shutdown could skyrocket the price to $250 per barrel or more,

    Great for Bush’s friends in the oil industry.

    Disastrous for the US economy.

    Remember, Bush & Co. have mastered the art of profiting from catastrophe. Think 9/11, Iraq and New Orleans. Each one of these events has been a massive financial windfall for the
    Bush family and their allies.

    I will be posting video from Ritter’s talk soon.

    In the meantime, you can hear Iran’s president on the Charlie Rose show here:

    http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/166.html

    Stopping the Bush administration from attacking Iran and creating a catastrophe many times bigger than the one they have created in Iraq should be every sane American’s focus until Bush is out of office.

    – Brasscheck

    Pentagon seeks billions more for Iraq war

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    By Susan Cornwell

    U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Wednesday asked Congress to approve nearly $190 billion (94.3 billion pounds) more in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    In prepared testimony to a Senate committee, Gates said the Bush administration sought the money for more training and equipment for the U.S. military, including new armoured vehicles that give extra protection to troops against bomb blasts. The funds were for the 2008 fiscal year beginning October 1.

    More money was also needed to train and equip Iraqi security forces as well as to improve U.S. facilities in the region and “consolidate our bases in Iraq,” Gates said. Reuters obtained a copy of his remarks in advance of his testimony on Wednesday.

    In asking for the money, Gates said he was aware of the controversy surrounding the unpopular war. Since September 2001, Congress has appropriated $602 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

    “I know that Iraq and other difficult choices America faces in the war on terror will continue to be a source of friction within the Congress, between the Congress and the president, and in the wider public debate,” Gates said.

    But he said U.S. troops had done far more than had been asked of them, and “like all of you, I always keep our troops — their safety and their mission — foremost in my mind every day.”

    The administration had already asked Congress to approve

    $147 billion for the war effort in the coming fiscal year. Gates said it was seeking another $42 billion more, bringing the total war funding request for fiscal 2008 to $189 billion.

    The biggest chunk of the new request would go for force protection, including $11 billion for fielding about 7,000 more of the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, which have V-shaped hulls to disperse the impact of bomb blasts. This amount is being sought in addition to 8,000 MRAPS already funded or requested, Gates said.

    9/11-1st Responder confirms countdown and massive explosion

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    Kevin Mcpattern a 9/11 first responder talks of his experience of the collapse of WTC 7. filmed at the world trade centre in New York on September 18th 2007 he stands below where the Twin Towers used to stand, part of a feature lentgh documentary ‘The Elephant In The Room’ Currently in Production …

    Revealed: script for Bush’s mangled words

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    By David Usborne

    There is nothing mysterious about George Bush when he comes to the annual General Assembly of the United Nations. He comes, he excoriates countries he doesn’t care for and he leaves. Everyone knows the routine and while some other world leaders may spit his name, they sure know how to pronounce it.

    But the President, who used his appearance at the podium yesterday to call for a “mission of liberation” to bring democracy and human rights to countries under dictatorship or repressive rule, needs a little help in this regard.

    Heaven forefend that he mangles the names of Sarkozy, say, or Mugabe. We know this thanks to a snafu by the White House staff who mistakenly allowed a few journalists to glimpse a draft of the President’s address complete with phonetic spellings in brackets to assist him with names of people and places. In the correct version for the press, they had been erased.

    Safe from Mr Bush’s famously dyslexic tongue, therefore, were the Presidents of France [sar-KO-zee] and Zimbabwe (moo-GAH-bee]. The speech-writers, whose names and even telephone numbers were also posted at the end of the wrongly circulated version, also helped him with the capitals of Zimbabwe [hah-RAR-ray] and of Venezuela [kah-RAH-kus].

    Yet, Mr Bush was sometimes left to his own instincts. While prompts were provided for Kyrgyzstan [KEY-geez-stan] and Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a], he was offered no such help with Sierra Leone or with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader in Burma. He made two runs at the latter and mangled the former, seemingly renaming it Syria Leone. (A member of his axis of evil, surely.)

    Cuba he got right and it was the Cubans who provided still more distraction yesterday when its entire delegation upped and walked out of the General Assembly hall midway through Mr Bush’s speech. This after Mr Bush suggested, referring to the ailing Fidel Castro, that, “the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom.”

    In a statement, the Cuban government last night said its boycott was a “sign of profound rejection of the arrogant and mediocre statement” delivered by the American President. “Bush is responsible for the murder of over 600,000 civilians in Iraq… He is a criminal and has no moral authority or credibility to judge any other country.” It concluded: “Cuba condemns and rejects every letter of his infamous tirade.”

    Expressions of disdain for Mr Bush by other leaders have become an annual sideshow of the UN Assembly. Last year it was Hugo Chavez of Venezuela who achieved the greatest theatrics saying he could smell sulphur at the podium where Mr Bush had spoken hours before, thus likening him to Satan.

    Mr Chavez announced at the last minute yesterday that he would be skipping the Assembly this year where he was scheduled to speak today. So there will be no Bush-Chavez spectacular. The starring role this time may be seized by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

    Mr Mugabe will have his chance to respond tomorrow when he is scheduled at the podium. Mr Bush said that his government “has cracked down on peaceful calls for reform and forced millions to flee their homeland”. He went on: “The behaviour of the Mugabe regime is an assault on its people.”

    Mr Ahmadinejad has used his visit to the New York to underscore Iran’s determination to stand-up to pressure from most of the international community for a suspension of its uranium enrichment activities. But it was unclear how far he had furthered his cause with his appearance at Columbia University on Monday where he was labeled a “petty and cruel dictator” by his hosts and went on to cause bafflement, and even bursts of laughter, when he flatly suggested that there are “no homosexuals in Iran”.

    President’s crib notes

    * Kyrgyzstan, KEYR-geez-stan

    * Mauritania, moor-EH-tain-ee-a

    * Mugabe, moo-GAH-bee

    * Harare, hah-RAR-ray

    * Sarkozy, sar-KO-zee

    * Caracas, kah-RAH-kus

    Hypocrite Bush hits out at tyrants and human rights abuse

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    Editors note: One word – Guantanamo

    George Bush yesterday launched a fierce attack on countries which he accused of human rights abuse.

    The president used a UN speech to hit out at ‘brutal regimes’ including Iran, as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad watched on.

    He said: ‘In Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of the United Nations.’

    He singled out ‘tyrannical’ Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe and Cuban president Fidel Castro for criticism.

    ‘The United Nations must insist on change in Harare and must insist for the freedom of the people of Zimbabwe,’ he added.

    ‘In Cuba, the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom.’ The Cuban delegation walked out of the chamber in protest.

    But Mr Bush’s speech in New York was branded ‘hypocrital’ and he was accused of abandoning human rights in Iraq and at the US prison camp Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

    Lawyer Louise Christian, who has represented Guantanamo Bay prisoners, said: ‘George Bush needs to realise when making these statements what is happening in his own back yard.’

    And Phil Shiner, head of Public Interest Lawyers, described it as ‘absolute nonsense’.

    ‘He’s got as much in common with human rights as Pol Pot did,’ he added.

    http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=67594&in_page_id=34&ito=newsnow

    Education agency to build fingerprint database

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    BY TARA BOZICK

    The Michael Maples scandal shook the Victoria community, and Texas leaders are pushing to safeguard against such future incidents.

    When Maples was hired as principal of Memorial High School, the system for checking the criminal background of employees failed, said Eleanor Gonzalez, president of the Victoria Federation of Teachers.”Somehow people are slipping through,” Gonzalez said. “Whoever expected something like that to happen in Victoria?”

    Scenarios such as Maples lying on his application for VISD principal show a need for urgency in the push for background checks by the Texas Legislature. Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick signed a letter directing the Texas Education Agency to cover fingerprinting costs for teachers and other education professionals, said Allison Castle, spokeswoman for Perry’s office.

    “It was an unfunded mandate so the leadership wanted to do right by the teachers and the school districts,” Castle said.

    Dewhurst became aware of incidents where educators lied on their applications or where it was found they committed prior offenses of which no one was aware, said Mike Wintemute, spokesman for Dewhurst’s office. Dewhurst wants to establish safeguards to prevent that.

    “Parents deserve to know who is working with their children,” Wintemute said.

    Senate Bill 9, passed through the 80th Legislature, requires that the TEA build a fingerprint database through the Department of Public Safety by January 2008, said Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman with the education agency. The system would update information to provide the latest information, in case already-certified teachers stopped teaching for a while, committed a crime and wanted to go back to teaching.

    The database would be accessible by school districts that could look at backgrounds for hiring or checking up on the activities of long-time teachers, Marchman said.A 2003 law required that all teaching candidates submit to national criminal background checks, but that did not cover those already certified.

    Joe Bean, public affairs specialist with the Texas State Teachers Association, said the $50-per-person funding would cover the cost of the fingerprinting, which could cost from $47 to $52.

    “Fingerprinting is the mechanism that makes the background check possible,” Bean said,

    Bean said thorough background checks using fingerprints might keep other people like Maples from coming into Victoria.

    The TEA plans to meet on how and when to distribute the funds, Marchman said.

    Linda Bridges, president of the Texas American Federation for Teachers, said the group sent a letter to Dewhurst and Craddick last week raising the issue of the TEA passing on the cost to teachers.

    “We’re delighted to see the leadership come through,” Bridges said. “All during the legislative session they said this would not be a cost item to teachers.”

    The school district welcomes Senate Bill 9, said Diane Boyett, VISD communications specialist. Any funding that would help the school district meet its requirements is needed.

    Boyett said she hopes it will serve as a deterrent to people seeking employment in schools who shouldn’t be.

    But Boyett said covering the costs for Maples background check wouldn’t have done anything.

    “This was an unfortunate situation where the person was not forthcoming with VISD about his history,” Boyett said.

    Gonzalez said pushing funds toward background checks that don’t work are a waste of money. She would like to see the funds put toward other educational programs.

    Diana: The unseen evidence which has been mysteriously ignored until now

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    By SUE REID

    Over English tea served in fine china cups at a sumptuous Paris apartment last November, an astonishing meeting took place to discuss the death of 36-year-old Diana, Princess of Wales.

    The conversation was cordial. A butler carrying a teapot and tray of delicate sandwiches moved smoothly between the guests in the richly decorated drawing room of a building owned by the British Government, near the famous Champs Elysees.

    In one Victorian armchair sat Lord Stevens, the respected former head of Scotland Yard. He had just finished a three-year investigation called Operation Paget into whether there was a conspiracy to murder the most famous woman in the world ten years ago and a cover-up to hide the truth.

    The Princess was travelling with her Muslim lover Dodi Fayed in a Mercedes car when it smashed into the 13th column of the Pont D’Alma road tunnel in Paris at 12.23am on Sunday, August 31, 1997.

    dianaPrincess Diana: New evidence is to be heard at the inquest

    She was mortally injured, dying in hospital three-and-a-half hours later. Dodi was killed instantly, as was the driver of the car, Henri Paul.

    Since that moment, the controversy over Princess Diana’s death has not abated. There is a veritable conspiracy theory industry which claims the Princess was assassinated, some even say at the instigation of the Royal Family or the British intelligence services because she was pregnant with Dodi’s baby.

    The report of Lord Stevens is now published. It concludes that Diana died in a tragic road accident. The report was meant to provide the final, unequivocal chapter on her death and a factual framework for her inquest which will begin next Tuesday.

    Yet, if anything, the debate over how and why the Princess came to die is fiercer than ever. At the epicentre of this brouhaha is Lord Stevens himself.

    For in the Paris apartment last November, he met the parents of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul for the first time. The couple must have been apprehensive.

    No one in the Diana saga has been more vilified than their 41-year-old son. Within 24 hours of the accident he was being blamed for driving “like a lunatic” through the tunnel while “drunk as a pig”.

    Nevertheless, Giselle and Jean Paul, in their 70s, had bravely made the journey from their home in Brittany, on the west coast of France, to hear exactly what Britain’s most famous policeman had to say about their son.

    Lord Stevens soon put their minds at rest. The couple had hardly sat down before the peer assured them that Henri Paul had not been drunk – indeed, he’d had only two drinks that night.

    As the meeting finished on November 8, 2006, the couple shook hands with Lord Stevens and went off with their heads held high. “We were pleased to hear our son was innocent as we always believed,” Mr Paul senior told the Mail this week.

    Yet a little over a month later the world was to hear a very different account from Lord Stevens. The 832-page Operation Paget report, compiled by 14 Scotland Yard detectives at a cost of £3.7 million, was published on December 14, 2006.

    It declared that Henri Paul was driving at double the speed limit – 60mph – and had consumed a very considerable amount of alcohol before ferrying Diana and Dodi in the Mercedes from the Ritz Hotel in Paris to a private flat, where they were staying.

    The driver was twice over the British drink-drive limit and three times over the French one. An expert cited in the report estimated that Paul had sunk the equivalent of ten small glasses of Ricard, his favourite liquorice-flavoured French aperitif, before taking the wheel.

    If he had survived, he would be liable to prosecution for causing death by dangerous driving. It was a damning indictment of the dead driver, conflicting sharply with the account given by Lord Stevens to Henri Paul’s mother and father.

    Now grief can do terrible things to people’s minds and it is possible Henri Paul’s parents misunderstood or misheard Lord Stevens. However, detailed and contemporaneous notes of the meeting by an Operation Paget police officer suggest that this was not the case.

    So why did Lord Stevens appear to have such a massive change of heart in less than five weeks? Did the policeman nicknamed Captain Beaujolais because of his love of fine wines come under pressure to change the conclusions of Operation Paget? It seems implausible.

    Yet this troubling question has been aired at the preliminary hearings, overseen by High Court judge Lord Justice Scott Baker, for the forthcoming inquest on Diana and her lover.

    Controversially, the judge – acting as coroner – will now order the jury to entirely disregard the Operation Paget report. It is a slap in the face for Lord Stevens. The contents have been removed from an official website linked to the inquest.

    Lord Justice Scott Baker insists that 20 vital questions on Diana’s death – and possible murder – still have to be answered.

    They cover such matters as: whether Henri Paul was drunk or taking drugs; the possible pregnancy of Diana and why she was embalmed on British Embassy orders just an hour before her body was flown home to London, a process nullifying any later tests on whether she was expecting a baby; the presence, if any, of the secret intelligence service, MI6, in the French capital on the night she died; and the enduring mystery of why the Princess feared for her life.

    Significantly, the judge has ordered that hundreds of explosive background documents, witness statements and tape recordings garnered during his investigation must now be made available to the jury. Some were not even alluded to in the Operation Paget report.

    The background files cover the most contentious allegations surrounding the Princess’s death.

    For instance, a tape recording of one unnamed informant claims that the Queen’s Private Secretary, Robert Fellowes, who was also Diana’s brother-in-law, was in the French capital an hour before the crash and was seen in the telecommunications room of the British Embassy. (For his part, he insists he was at home in Norfolk all night.)

    Another piece of evidence, detailed in a sworn witness statement from an American man, states categorically that Diana told a close female friend that she was pregnant just before she died, although she never named the father.

    The files also delve deep into the lifestyle of Henri Paul. To understand his pivotal role, one must return to the days following the Princess’s death.

    The world was aghast. Flowers were heaped in Hyde Park, London, outside her home at Kensington Palace. Ordinary men and women wept in the streets across the globe.

    Over in Paris, there was grieving too. Yet there was also something strange afoot. Within hours, rumours began to circulate that the driver of the Mercedes had killed the Princess.

    By the Monday morning of September 1 – little more than a day after the crash – the French newspaper and television were publishing reports that Henri Paul had consumed “grossly excessive quantities of alcohol” and the speedometer of the Mercedes had jammed at 121mph. None of these stories was denied by the authorities.

    Indeed, the allegations grew more detailed. On September 9 there were reports that a search of Henri Paul’s flat in Paris had revealed a veritable drinking den. Shelves were groaning with bottles of spirits and wine. Tables were littered with bottles of vodka, Martini and fortified wines, while the kitchen contained open bottles of Ricard and American bourbon.

    The reports contradicted what is now known to be the truth. An inspection of Henri Paul’s flat by the detectives of the French Brigade Criminale much earlier – 48 hours after the crash – had found only copious bottles of soda water and just one bottle of champagne and a bottle of Martini.

    Nevertheless the story that Henri Paul, a deputy security chief at the Ritz Hotel in Paris who had stepped in at the last moment to drive the couple, was a hopeless alcoholic gained credence.

    Conspiracy theorists ask was he deliberately turned into the scapegoat? Was the driver, suspected of being a paid informant of the French and British intelligence services, used to cover up a much more sinister set of events?

    Almost every person who talked to Henri Paul that night has since confirmed that he did not appear intoxicated before he set off into the Paris night.

    Furthermore, a crucial blood sample taken from Henri Paul’s suit jacket after his death – and the only one that has been firmly linked to him by DNA testing on his mother Giselle – shows no measurable trace of alcohol in his body.

    In addition, a carbohydrate deficient transferring test ‘proving’ he was an alcoholic and conducted by the French authorities on Henri Paul after his death has also been undermined. A CDT test, the inquest will be told, is unreliable if performed on a dead body.

    Meanwhile, what of the clutch of blood samples taken from his body in the days after the crash. They, apparently, showed that Henri Paul was hopelessly drunk. But were they really his own?

    Intriguingly, they contained a medicine called albendazole, which the driver’s doctor said he was never prescribed. It is a drug taken to get rid of tapeworms and given to downandouts on the streets.

    Could they have come from a dead Paris tramp lying in the public mortuary alongside Henri Paul?

    Equally puzzling is that the same clutch of blood samples revealed no sign of another medicine named acamprosate, which Paul had been prescribed. It is the only solid piece of evidence that he was a heavy drinker.

    The driver was worried about his love of Ricard and had begged his doctor to give him the drug, designed to help alcoholics reduce their intake without cravings.

    Pertinently, his doctor has since said that he felt Paul was worrying unnecessarily, as his drinking was moderate.

    There is another dilemma, too.

    The Henri Paul blood samples at the very heart of the Diana controversy reveal something else quite bizarre – that he had breathed in a very high quantity of carbon monoxide before his death: the same amount as a person committing suicide by putting a rubber hose from the exhaust through the window of his car.

    Such a level would have left Paul visibly disorientated and almost certainly comatose. Yet at the Ritz that evening, minutes before he drove Diana, the CCTV cameras show him walking normally and even kneeling down to retie his shoe laces and gracefully standing up again.

    It is now accepted that he never drew breath after the crash, ruling out the possibility that he inhaled poisonous exhaust fumes. Significantly, Dodi’s blood was tested and was shown to contain no carbon monoxide.

    The tainted blood samples remain – as Lord Stevens and toxicology experts say in the Operation Paget report – a complete mystery. One possible explanation is that they are not the driver’s blood at all but come from someone else in the public mortuary who had committed suicide that weekend.

    So were the samples tampered with? Were they mistakenly, or deliberately, swopped with those from another corpse?

    The first samples of blood taken from the driver’s body were left unattended and unlabelled in a fridge at the mortuary for more than a day until Monday, September 1.

    So what will happen next? Lord Stevens is to be called as a witness at the inquest. He will be asked by lawyers for Henri Paul’s family about the ‘gross discrepancy’ between the soothing account he gave in the Paris apartment on their son and the one contained in the official Operation Paget report.

    He is also likely to be quizzed on the plethora of evidence on Diana’s death never included in his final report. Of particular concern is the testimony of a Paris jeweller, who sold Dodi an engagement ring on the day before the crash, sparking theories that the playboy was about to propose to Diana.

    Of course, Diana might well have turned down any such marriage. But the jeweller, in a written complaint, says that he was pressured – unsuccessfully – by the Paget detectives to change his tale and say it was just a ‘friendship’ ring. There are other worrying matters too. The preliminary inquest hearings have revealed that important eyewitnesses of the crash – including those claiming there was a blinding flash in the tunnel and that they saw a mystery white Fiat Uno at the scene which may have deliberately clipped Diana and Dodi’s Mercedes, causing the accident – were never interviewed by Lord Stevens’ team.

    Instead, his detectives relied heavily on old statements made years ago to the French police. Now Lord Justice Scott Baker has ruled that crash onlookers and other witnesses should give evidence via video links from Paris and in person at the London inquest. The jury will be taken to the accident site in the Alma tunnel in the French capital.

    One important new witness will be a French fireman, Christophe Pelat. He discovered the body of a paparazzi photographer named James Andanson – thought by conspiracy theorists to have been driving the white Fiat Uno – in a remote woodland with a shot in the head three years after the crash.

    It was always said that Andanson had committed suicide after marital problems.

    The photographer amassed millions selling photographs of Diana and is suspected of tipping off British, American and French intelligence services on the Princess’s movements during her last holiday.

    Andanson gave conflicting accounts of his movements to French police. They concluded that he was not in Paris on the night of the crash, although he had chased the couple relentlessly as they cruised on Dodi’s yacht the Jonikel in the days beforehand.

    Why, one might ask, would he have stopped following her when there was still money to be made?

    The evidence of Christophe Pelat is vital. It might indicate that Andanson knew the truth and was disposed of. Yet the fireman’s name and testimony – just like those of many others – appeared nowhere in the Operation Paget report in what was billed as the definitive account on Diana’s death.

    Of course, all this must be somewhat discomforting for Lord Stevens. As a life peer and now an international security adviser to Gordon Brown, he moves in the upper echelons of society with a hitherto untarnished halo as a formidable investigator.

    Meanwhile, Lord Justice Scott Baker faces the challenging task of guiding a jury through a monumentally complex inquest. For if the 12 men and women leave their verdict open – if there is no conclusion on the cause of the Princess’s tragic death – there will have to be a police inquiry.

    Yes, a second one. When will the spirit of Diana be allowed to rest?

    Airport security arsenal adds behavior detection

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    By Thomas Frank, USA TODAY

    DULLES, Va. – Doug Kinsey stands near the security line at Dulles International Airport, watching the passing crowd in silence. Suddenly, his eyes lock on a passenger in jeans and a baseball cap.

    The man in his 20s looks around the terminal as though he’s searching for something. He chews his fingernails and holds his boarding pass against his mouth, seemingly worried.

    Kinsey, a Transportation Security Administration screener, huddles with his supervisor, Waverly Cousins, and the two agree: The man could be a problem. Kinsey moves in to talk to him.

    The episode this month is one of dozens of encounters airline passengers are having each day – often unwittingly – with a fast-growing but controversial security technique called behavior detection. The practice, pioneered by Israeli airport security, involves picking apparently suspicious people out of crowds and asking them questions about travel plans or work. All the while, their faces, body language and speech are being studied.

    The TSA has trained nearly 2,000 employees to use the tactic, which is raising alarms among civil libertarians and minorities who fear illegal arrests and ethnic profiling. It’s also worrying researchers, including some in the Homeland Security Department, who say it’s unproven and potentially ineffectual.

    “Terrorists or anybody who knows about screening will find this very easy to beat if you give them a little training,” says Michigan State University professor Timothy Levine, who’s published more than a dozen papers on deception and communication.

    Advocates say behavior detection strengthens security by replacing “hunches” about who seems troublesome and worthy of scrutiny with research that shows how suspicious people actually look, sound and act.

    Its growing use portends a transformation in airport security, and perhaps beyond. The technique could be used in anything from interrogations to job interviews. U.S. troops, FBI agents, Customs officers, consular officials, personnel managers and thousands of police at dozens of agencies have been trained to observe whether suspects, informants or applicants are being truthful. Bus drivers, airline ticket agents and airport custodians, sales clerks and waiters are getting milder instruction in spotting odd behavior.

    At the vanguard is the TSA, which plans to train 600 more screeners in the next year and have “behavior-detection officers” in every major airport to spot possible terrorists.

    “We have to get out front and take the fight to them and let them know that when they show up at an airport, they’re susceptible to being identified,” TSA chief Kip Hawley says.

    The future could be a “Blade Runner” world of cameras and body scanners that monitor voice, movement, speech, gait, pulse, perspiration and body odor to spot suspicious people. Federal agencies are pouring millions of dollars into automated sensors that could read vital signs and help flag suspicious people. One leading San Francisco researcher, Paul Ekman, says he’s gotten Defense Department funding to finish his work building an interactive training game that teaches people to be alert for facial expressions that often precede a physical assault.

    “Computer power can extract patterns the human wouldn’t see,” says University of Arizona psychologist Judee Burgoon. She led a recent Air Force- and Homeland Security-funded study that analyzed technology utilizing video cameras to chart tell-tale hand and head movements. “Much needs to be done” before machines can accurately analyze people, the study concluded, but the research “is a small first step.”

    Uneasy response

    Computerized physiological readings chill researchers such as David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University, who’s spent 25 years studying how people reveal emotion in split-second “microexpressions” that flash across their faces. “We’re talking about feelings we don’t want others to know in the first place,” he says. Authorities “are becoming privy to information we’re not consenting to give.”

    Hawley, who has emerged as the government’s leading behavior-detection advocate, says automated detection “is in the far distant future.” The TSA’s present system, he says, “is phenomenally successful” – even if more than 90% of questionable people turn out innocent.

    At Dulles last week, Kinsey, the TSA behavior officer, approached a suspicious passenger going through security and guided the man to an open area for additional screening. Kinsey did a routine passport and boarding-pass check, searched the man’s messenger-style bag and chatted him up while paying attention to what he said and how he said it.

    The man had caught Kinsey’s eye not just because he acted nervously, but because he acted differently. Other travelers shuffling blankly along the security line that quiet afternoon showed all the emotion of cattle. This passenger’s contrasting anxiety showed, in TSA parlance, “deviations from baseline behavior.” He merited a closer look, a face-to-face conversation where Kinsey could scrutinize his body, voice and speech to see if his score on a TSA checklist rose to a level requiring police attention.

    “We’re looking to see if there’s any cognitive overload in responses to simple questions like, How are you today? Where are you headed?” says Carl Maccario, a TSA program analyst in Boston who helped launch the agency program at Logan International Airport in 2003. “If you’re trying to be deceptive or up to some malfeasance, people can pick up cues the body will display when that conflict is going on.”

    But the ability of screeners to reliably detect deceit during conversations is questioned by Homeland Security researchers, who early this year launched a study of what security officials should look for to find dangerous people. “The research in this area is fairly immature,” says Larry Willis, who manages the department’s Project Hostile Intent. “We’re trying to establish whether there is something to detect.”

    When Kinsey asked questions, the anxious look that the passenger wore in the security line melted into a smile as he explained how he got confused going through the unfamiliar Dulles terminal to make a connecting flight. Assured by the passenger’s chatty comfort and by his own search, Kinsey wished him a good trip without taking down his name.

    A variety of charges

    The encounter underscored the rarity of problems that the TSA program has uncovered since January 2006 when it was expanded from a handful of airports.

    In that time, 43,000 of the millions of travelers watched by crowd-scanning behavior-detection screeners have appeared suspicious enough to warrant a closer look, the TSA says. The closer looks generated 3,100 calls from the TSA to police for further questioning.

    The police arrested 278 of those people, none on terror charges. Among the charges described in TSA news releases about behavior-related arrests are immigration violations and possessing guns and illegal prescription drugs.

    At least one behavior-related stop has “developed meaningful information of interest to the intelligence community,” Hawley says. And many people who were questioned by police but not arrested were found with problems that could indicate terrorist intent, such as having fake identifications or appearing to do surveillance. Such incidents are logged with a subject’s name into a federal database.

    “The vast majority of them are hiding something,” Hawley says of travelers who raise the highest level of suspicion.

    The program has won converts among skeptics such as security technologist Bruce Schneier. The frequent TSA critic says behavior detection may be “really powerful” because it tries to find terrorists instead of keeping them from carrying an ever-changing list of dangerous objects on airplanes. “If you focus on a tactic, the terrorists pick a different tactic. This focuses on the bad guy,” Schneier says.

    But critics who question behavior detection wonder if the TSA could net the same number of criminals by randomly pulling 43,000 travelers aside for extra screening and a few questions.

    “It doesn’t seem like a lot of arrests, given how easy it is to arrest someone,” says Barry Steinhardt, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s liberty and technology program. “It’s a waste of law-enforcement resources” on a “completely unproven” program. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, supports the concept of singling out travelers based on behavior but fears that relying on screener observations could lead to ethnic profiling. “Any time you move from an objective system to one that is subjective, it is prone to abuse,” Zogby says.

    No guarantees

    Many leading researchers cite potential drawbacks and flaws but say behavior detection backed up by research and ample training can focus and improve security.

    “The question is, by how much and at what cost?” says Bella DePaulo, a prominent deception researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “And by cost, I don’t mean money. I mean the cost of falsely accusing or stopping people. If this program becomes known and somebody gets pulled over, there’s a cloud of suspicion.”

    The method by which screeners spot suspicious air travelers is questioned by Ekman, the San Francisco psychologist and one of the first deception scientists. Research and training has focused on people’s ability to detect deceit during interviews – not from silently watching someone, Ekman says.

    Ekman jump-started deception detection in the 1960s when he studied a film of a psychiatric patient assuring doctors that she was not suicidal and could be released. Days later, the woman committed suicide. Scouring the film, Ekman noticed fleeting facial expressions on the patient lasting one-fifteenth of a second – he called them “microexpressions” – that revealed the distress she tried to hide. Ekman’s theory – that people reveal their true emotions through facial expressions, words, gestures and other uncontrollable responses – is the basis of contemporary behavior detection.

    Ekman advised TSA officials while they were developing their system four years ago. His company, the Ekman Group, was paid $1 million to train 1,200 TSA inspectors last month in his interviewing technique. He proposed a study to Homeland Security researchers to find behaviors indicating hostile intent among travelers walking around airports.

    “We might find things that are important clues that someone has malevolent intent,” Ekman says.

    Willis, the Homeland Security researcher, said efforts are now focused on interviewing travelers, “not the broader and more difficult area of suspicious behavior detection.”

    Levine, the Michigan State researcher, saw his suspicions of behavior-detection science grow when he did a study in 2005 of how well three groups of subjects detected lies told by lab volunteers. The subjects who were told to look for lies by focusing on the volunteers’ foot-tapping and other meaningless behaviors did just as well at lie-detection as subjects who watched facial expressions and other supposed cues to deceit. Those two groups did much better than a third group that got no instructions.

    “With training, you just get people paying attention a little more,” Levine says. That might help security officers find easy-to-spot terrorists such as Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who looked to fellow passengers like he was crazed but nonetheless was allowed on the Paris-to-Miami flight. “And catching the Richard Reids,” Levine says, “is a good thing.”

    The BBC – How Did It Get So Bad?

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    By Adrian Morgan

    This article by Adrian Morgan (Giraldus Cambrensis of Western Resistance) appeared today in Family Security Matters and is reproduced with their permission. Alexandra Palace

    High up on a hill in Wood Green, north London, is a Victorian brick building called Alexandra Palace. Surrounded by 196 acres of parkland, the edifice was constructed in 1873. In 1936, it was from Alexandra Palace that the BBC made its first television broadcasts. When I was growing up in 1960s Britain, the BBC was highly regarded. There was a time when people would validate a statement by claiming that they had heard it “on the BBC”. Those days have long passed, and a once-revered institution is now being used to disseminate disinformation and political correctness.

    Certain departments within the BBC seem to have their own political agenda. When BBC journalist Alan Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza this year, the head of the BBC Middle East bureau admitted engaging in secret talks with leaders of the terrorist group Hamas to secure a release. Before Johnston was freed, the journalist made a video statement in which he bemoaned the “huge suffering of the Palestinian people….” He spoke of their “absolute despair after nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation which has been supported by the West.” Johnston turned his attention to Afghanistan, blaming the Americans and British: “In all this, we can see the British government endlessly working to occupy, err, the Muslim lands, against the will of the people in those places.”

    After his release, Johnston never said he had been subjected to violence to make him say such anti-British statements. After any Palestinian suicide bombing, Johnston would interview the mother and relatives of the terrorist involved, always failing to interview the relatives of the Israeli victims. Damien Thompson, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph has noted that the BBC’s “reporting of the Middle East has been so relentlessly pro-Palestinian for so long, and that coverage is so influential, that it finds itself an actual player in the conflict, as opposed to an impartial observer.”

    The Balen Report was an internal BBC document which was commissioned in 2004 to investigate complaints of anti-Israeli bias in the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East conflicts. Even though the BBC is funded by the taxpayer, the organization allegedly spent $400,000 of tax-payers’ money to prevent the report from being made available to the public. The Telegraph quoted lawyer Steven Sugar, who was using the Freedom of Information Act to have the Balen Report released. The report was widely believed to have found the BBC guilty of anti-Israeli bias.

    Sugar said: “This is a serious report about a serious issue and has been compiled with public money. I lodged the request because I was concerned that the BBC’s reporting of the second intifada was seriously unbalanced against Israel, but I think there are other issues at stake now in the light of the BBC’s reaction.” On April 27, 2007 the BBC won its battle to suppress the report’s publication. In 2006, an independent review, commissioned by BBC governors, had found that the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict had been to “constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and, in that sense, misleading picture.” That report had found that the BBC “favored Israel” and claimed there was a “failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other side lives under occupation.”

    The decision to suppress the Balen Report was condemned by Tory MP Philip Davies, who said: “This seems to be outrageous. If the BBC are embarrassed about what they are doing they should not be doing it. If they are not embarrassed they should release the information.” On October 30, 2004, on the BBC Radio 4 show “From Our Own Correspondent”, journalist Barbabra Plett had said she had cried when, in the previous month, Yasser Arafat was dying. She had said: “When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose from his ruined compound, I started to cry.” Immediately after Plett’s radio statement, a BBC News spokesman admitted that there had been hundreds of complaints, but claimed that Plett had upheld high standards in “fairness, accuracy and balance”. In November 2005, the BBC governors ruled that Plett had “breached the requirements of due impartiality”.

    The BBC runs a “rolling news” channel, called News 24. One of its frequent guests and commentators on Middle East events is Palestinian-born Abdel Bari-Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In June 2007, Bari-Atwan told a Lebanese TV station: “If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight… Allah willing, [Iran] will attack Israel.” Defending its decision to keep Bari-Atwan as a pundit, the BBC said that it was obliged to present “a range of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented.”

    In 2002 the then-head of BBC News, RIchard Sambrook, warned his journalists that they needed to be more concerned about “impartiality” on contentious issues such as the Middle East, the European Union and the gap between those living in the countryside and those in towns. Sambrook would later commission the Balen Report. His warnings were not heeded. In January 2005 an independent review commissioned by BBC governors found that reporting on the European Union was riddled with ignorance. Presenters were described as “ill-briefed” and there was lack of knowledge about the EU “at every stage” of the news gathering and presenting process. The report claimed that BBC reporting of this subject needed to be “more demonstrably impartial”, but stopped short of stating that the BBC was “pro-EU”.

    Even though the BBC’s governors are appointed by the government, a poll revealed in July 2005 that four out of ten Labour party members of parliament (from the same party that has selected governors since 1997) claimed that they did not think the BBC was “free from influence and bias”. The figure amongst Tory MPs was higher, with six out of ten believing this.

    In 2005, the BBC advised journalists to be cautious in the use of the word “terrorist”, as the term was deemed to be “judgmental”. In October 2006, a senior executive at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted at a conference that the corporation was “ignoring” mainstream opinion and was out of touch with the British public. A month earlier the BBC held an “impartiality” summit. Alan Yentob, head of BBC Drama, admitted that he would not air a Koran being thrown in a garbage can, lest the act offended Muslims, but he would allow a Bible to be shown being thrown in a bin. The impartiality summit found that there was an anti-Christian bias within the corporation, as well as an anti-American bias.

    A former political editor for the BBC, Andrew Marr, announced in the 2006 impartiality summit that the BBC was “a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people compared with the population at large.” Jeff Randall, a former business editor at the BBC, gave damning testimony. He said that he had complained about the “multicultural stance” of the BBC to a top news executive and was told: “The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.” When Randall wore cufflinks into work, which bore the Union Jack (the national flag) he was told: “You can’t do that, that’s like the National Front!” The National Front is a racist political group. To Americans, the notion of being accused of racism for wearing an item carrying the Stars and Stripes would be unthinkable, but not so in the Britain of the BBC.

    The issue of the BBC’s liberal and left-wing bias was brought to a head earlier this year. In June a BBC-commissioned report authored by John Bridcut was published, which stated that the corporation was existing in a “left-leaning comfort zone”, and that it had an “innate liberal bias”.
    The full report, entitled From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel can be found in a pdf document.

    In July 2005, after the 7/7 Muslim bombings in London, which killed 52 innocent people, the BBC had a discussion show entitled “Questions of Security: A BBC News Special”. The corporation admitted that it had deliberately stacked the audience with Muslims. As a proportion of the audience, there were five times as many Muslims as the proportion of Muslims in the national demographic.

    During the 2006 Lebanese/Israel conflict, one BBC report by Orla Guerin, wrongly claimed that the Lebanese town of Bint Jbail had been “wiped out” by an Israeli bombardment.

    Fiona BruceIn October 2006, while the BBC was discussing plans to introduce news anchor women wearing Muslim headscarfs, it was noticed that an existing news presenter, Fiona Bruce, had been wearing a crucifix. She had worn this on BBC News for a few years. A discussion among BBC heads included suggestions that she should not be seen to show religious bias.

    The PC and leftist bias has extended to the BBC Drama Department. The popular drama “Spooks” is known in the US as “MI-5” and is entertaining hokum. In November 2006, the BBC was facing complaints ofo anti-Christian bias, after an episode of this show featured religious terrorists murdering people from another faith. The terrorists were evangelical Christians, and the victims were Muslims. The show again foundered on the banks of realism and showed political prejudice with the first episode of its fifth series. This involved Al Qaeda terrorists taking control of the Saudi Embassy and murdering people inside. Except the Al Qaeda terrorists were not Muslim terrorists – they were dastardly Israeli agents, posing as Muslims. Jew-hating Islamists across the country must have been pleased.

    “Casualty” is a long-running hospital drama, where patients get injured, brought into an Emergency Room, and then all their emotional problems are solved by the improbably intrusive staff. Recently, the show was to have featured the aftermath of a suicide-bomber blowing himself up in a bus station, with all the consequent mayhem and social hand-wringing amongst the caring, sensitive hospital staff. The suicide bomber was originally written as an Islamist. By the time BBC executives had got their hands on the script, the bomber had changed his allegiance to become an animal rights activists. Animal rights campaigners in the UK have set off car bombs, sent letter bombs, and have even indulged in grave-robbing, but none has so far been a suicide bomber.

    Lord Tebbitt, who served in Thatcher’s government and whose wife was paralyzed in an IRA bomb attack in 1984, condemned the decision to change the Casualty storyline to avoid offending Muslims. He said: “People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists. What is the difference here? The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness.”

    Markov

    The BBC produces international radio shows on its “World Service”, in the manner of “Voice of America”. These are produced at Bush House near Piccadilly. The reports from the BBC World Service used to be influential – so much so that in 1978 Bulgarian dissident and World Service broadcaster Georgi Markov was assassinated by a Bulgarian communist in the street outside Bush House. A device disguised as an umbrella was used to inject Markov with a pellet of ricin, as he stood at a bus stop. Markov died four days later. Now, the BBC World Service has succumbed to the leftist climate. In March this year, Professor Frank Stewart claimed that the BBC’s Arabic language service, which began in 1938, was “anti-Western and anti-democratic”.

    Professor Stewart claimed that the Arabic BBC service spoke of Saddam’s 2002 election victory as if it was “straight” news, and said that Assad of Syria also received favorable coverage. When a member of the US State Department referred to Assad’s Ba’athist regime as a dictatorship, the interviewer “immediately interrupted and reprimanded him”. Stewart wrote that “authoritarian regimes and armed militants of the Arab world” had received “sympathetic treatment”.

    The bias which exists on the BBC has been so frequent that blog sites have been created to document its transgressions, such as Busting BBC Bias and Biased BBC. As an institution connected with government, and considering the current Labour government is obsessed with “spin” and propaganda, bias is to expected within the institution. But the extreme examples of its bias, as presented to innocent children, are shocking.

    The BBC has a strong presence on the internet, which rarely mentions the word “Muslim” when dealing with Muslim terrorism or crimes. The word “Muslim” appears mainly when Muslim “victimhood” is described. The BBC has a show called “Newsround” which purports to present news in a way that young people can understand. Two BBC internet articles connected with this Newsround show were subsequently re-edited after they initially appeared. Tom Gross, writing in The National Review presented the original content of one recent article.

    Published this month to coincide with the sixth anniversary of 9’11, the article was entitled “Why did they do it?”. This gave an “explanation” of 9/11 from an Al Qaeda perspective: “The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda – who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks. In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war – called a jihad – against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do. When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.”

    Remember that this was aimed at children. And of course, Al Qaeda are “widely believed” but not explicitly stated to have carried out the 9/11 attacks, opening the door for leftist and lunatic conspiracy theories. The BBC later amended the text, but still maintain that “Al-Qaeda is unhappy with America and other countries getting involved in places like the Middle East.” The amended text still tries to justify terrorism and thus implicitly blames the victims of 9/11. Another recent Newsround article aimed at kids begins: “Al-Qaeda has been accused of being behind a series of attacks and bombings since its formation in the late 1980s.” Al Qaeda is not just “accused” of terror attacks, it admits and actively glorifies its involvement in terrorist atrocities.

    Tom Gross has pointed out that in 2005, the same children’s section of its internet site described the Holocaust, but astoundingly failed to mention the fact that Jews were victims, let alone that six million Jews died. The original text merely stated: “Most of the victims died because they belonged to certain racial or religious groups which the Nazis wanted to wipe out, even though they were German citizens. This kind of killing is called genocide.” The article failed to mention the Jews in France, Poland, the Netherlands and elsewhere who were not German citizens, but still were sent to Nazi gas chambers.

    It is bad enough for the BBC to be blatantly anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Christian and pro-Islamist. But recently in a series of scandals the BBC has been exposed blatantly lying to the public. To compound their guilt, they have lied to the nation’s children. The problems began in March this year. “Blue Peter” is a children’s magazine show which has been on air since 1958. It frequently invites child viewers to take part in competitions. When I was a child, the competition entries were sent by mail, but now premium rate phone lines are employed. It was revealed that a phone competition to raise money for Unicef had failed to select a winner, so a child who was visiting the studio was asked to “phone” the show. She was awarded the prize. TV regulator Ofcom ruled that the BBC should pay $100,000 for the deceit.

    socks/cookieMost recently, the same show was involved in a similar incident. “Blue Peter” has a menagerie of “pets”. The first of these was a mongrel called Petra who was introduced in 1963. The latest in the line of pets for children with no animals at home is a cat who first appeared in January 2006. The nation’s children were given a vote, and chose the name “Cookie”. For some reason, a producer decided to ignore the viewers’ (expensive) phone votes and claimed that they had chosen the name “Socks”. Perhaps a lover of Bill Clinton, whose cat bore the same name, the producer has since been fired. The BBC refuses to comment on its deception.

    Though the story of Socks aka Cookie made front page news this weekend, one should not be surprised. I remember the lies they told about “Petra”. On Friday November 22, 1963, aged five, I was waiting to see Blue Peter. The week before, the show had announced that the nation’s kids had voted to name the new Blue Peter pet “Peter”. Peter was a male puppy, but shortly before the show went on air, the creature had died. Rather than confront kids with the truth, presenters Valerie Singleton and Christopher Trace claimed that they had “made a mistake” and said that Peter was in fact a girl. Fiery producer Biddy Baxter had substituted a female puppy, as it was the closest look-alike for the deceased TV pet. This substitute animal was “Petra”. Despite such deception, aimed at protecting children’s feelings, the show was interrupted with the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Which is why I remember my father (who was in the room at the time) fuming about the “nonsense” of the BBC being unable to ascertain the gender of a puppy.

    In July this year, Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, admitted that at least six BBC shows had involved rigged competitions. As a result, he cancelled all subsequent phone-in competitions. More recent revelations of BBC deception involved a further five faked phone-in shows.

    The BBC has come a long way since it began broadcasting radio shows in 1922, under its original title the “British Broadcasting Company”. It began TV broadcasting in 1936 from Alexandra Palace, though these broadcasts were suspended for the duration of WWII. In 1937, the company became nationalized as the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC still produces good natural history documentaries, but its dramas are hackneyed. With a few rare exceptions its comedy fails to raise a titter. Its news output is still biased, and every UK citizen with a TV is expected to pay $270 per year to be patronized and lied to by the BBC’s mandarins.

    Is the BBC worth its license fee? If it cannot present the truth, and deliberately misinforms both adults and children, it short-changes the nation in more ways than one. What was once a great British institution is now a club for the commissars of political correctness. Alexandra Palace, where BBC TV began, is no longer used by the BBC. The last “Open University” shows were made there in 1981. Alexandra Palace was built when Britain had an empire. That empire was given away after World War II. In a symptom of the times we live in, Alexandra Palace still has a purpose. In 2006, while London marked the first anniversary of 7/7, Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood held an “Islam Expo” at the site. Last month, the terror supporting Hizb ut-Tahrir held its annual conference at Alexandra Palace.

    Israel Opens Criminal Probe of Prime Minister

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    By Robert Berger

    A new corruption scandal is dogging Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. As Robert Berger reports from VOA’s Jerusalem bureau, it could distract him from efforts to revive the peace process with the Palestinians.

    Ehud Olmert looks on during cabinet meeting, 25 Sep 2007
    Ehud Olmert looks on during cabinet meeting, 25 Sep 2007

    Israeli police are opening a criminal investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s purchase of a home in Jerusalem. The attorney general suspects bribery and fraud because Mr. Olmert bought the house at far below the market value.

    According to an investigation by the state comptroller, Mr. Olmert received a discount of more than $300,000 in exchange for helping a developer obtain construction permits from Jerusalem authorities. This allegedly occurred when he was a Cabinet minister in 2004.

    In a statement, Mr. Olmert denied any wrongdoing and insisted that the price he paid was fair.

    Right-wing opposition leaders are calling for the prime minister to resign. But Michael Partem of the Movement for Quality Government says he is innocent until proven guilty.

    “The investigation is not an indictment. It is only an investigation,” he noted. “So until there is a decision as to whether or not to indict the Prime Minister, we would not be calling on him to step down.”

    The scandal is another blow to Mr. Olmert whose popularity has plunged since an official inquiry described his handling of last year’s Lebanon War as a failure.

    The prime minister is also trying to advance peace talks with the Palestinians. Mr. Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are working on a document on Palestinian statehood to be presented at an international peace conference planned for November in the United States.

    Partem says the investigation is bound to be a distraction from the prime minister’s official duties.

    “It is certainly not healthy, and this is obviously not within his purview of the job,” he said. “And it is wasting his time and it is wasting our resources.”

    It is the latest in a series of scandals involving government officials. The justice minister stepped down in a sex scandal, the finance minister resigned amid charges of embezzlement and Mr. Olmert is facing separate allegations of influence peddling. The scandals have eroded public confidence in the government.

    Israel Says Tension with Syria Subsiding

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    By Robert Berger

    Israel is playing down tensions with its arch-enemy to the north – Syria. As Robert Berger reports from VOA’s Jerusalem bureau, there are new moves to bring Syria into the Middle East peace process.

    Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, 24 Sep 2007
    Ehud Olmert, 24 Sep 2007

    Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel is not interested in war with Syria. Speaking behind closed doors to parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Mr. Olmert said he believes tensions between the two countries will subside.

    There have been unconfirmed reports in the foreign press of a secret Israeli air strike on a Syrian nuclear facility more than two weeks ago. Syria denies reports that it received nuclear materials from North Korea, but confirms that Israeli jets violated its air space.

    The incident occurred months after Israel warned of a Syrian military buildup. Israeli generals said Syria could opt for war to retrieve the strategic Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967.

    Israeli analyst Alon Liel says suspicions are running deep.

    “Syria all the time said that it has one hand extended to peace and the other one is preparing for war,” said Liel. “Israel believes the second half, that Syria is preparing for war, and did not believe the peace option.”

    The United States has signaled that it would invite Syria to an international peace conference expected to take place in November. Israeli spokesman Mark Regev says Israel would not object to Syrian participation.

    “Israel is interested in as many Arab states attending this meeting as possible, states that support peace, that support reconciliation, that oppose terrorism,” said Regev.

    Israel hopes that if Syria attends the conference it would be pulled away from the radicals and into the camp of the Arab moderates. At the same time, Israel says it will not resume peace talks until Syria cuts ties with Iran and stops supporting Islamic militant groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

    North Korea accuses US of helping Israel develop nuclear weapons

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    AP

    SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea accused the United States on Tuesday of actively providing nuclear weapons assistance to Israel while seeking to deprive other countries of the right to peaceful nuclear programs.

    North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, meanwhile, denied accusations that his country had cooperated with Syria on a secret nuclear project.

    The United States is “shutting its eyes” to the nuclear programs of its allies while “taking issue with the rights to nuclear activities of other countries for peaceful purposes,” North Korea’s communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

    “As an illustration, the U.S. has long actively promoted and cooperated with the Israeli nuclear armament plan,” the newspaper said. “They decided to provide assistance to Israel’s nuclear development program. Then the U.S. dispatched nuclear experts to Israel and transferred highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons, to them.”

    Israel is widely believed to be a nuclear power, but its government has never formally confirmed or denied that it has nuclear weapons. The Israeli “nuclear ambiguity” doctrine is largely meant to scare potential enemies from considering an annihilating attack while denying them the rationale for developing their own nuclear deterrent.

    North Korea’s criticism came amid news reports that Israeli warplanes attacked an installation in northern Syria earlier this month which was allegedly either a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear project or a shipment of arms for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

    North Korea has flatly denied any nuclear link with Syria, calling the accusation a fabrication by “dishonest forces” who want to obstruct recent progress in North Korean-U.S. relations.

    “That matter is fabricated by lunatics, so you can ask those lunatics to explain it,” North Korea’s top nuclear envoy, Kim Kye Gwan, told reporters Tuesday after arriving in Beijing for talks on his country’s nuclear weapons program.

    International negotiations aimed at convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear programs have reported progress in recent months, with the North shutting down its only functioning nuclear reactor in July and pledging to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by year’s end.

    A new round of six-party talks – involving the U.S., the Koreas, China, Russia and Japan – is scheduled this week, with the participants expected to firm up a deadline for North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities.

    How easy is it to create false flag terrorism?

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    How much nuclear material would terrorists such as renegades within CIA or MI6 need to make a Nuclear Bomb to blame on Muslims to undermine or eliminate our DEMOCRACY?

    By J A Blacker, Science Correspondent
    RINF Alterative News

    A simple gun-type nuclear bomb were you use conventional explosives to fire one charge of material into the other to obtain critical neutron density and hence a nuclear explosion would require approximately 50 kilograms of Highly Enriched Uranium — an amount that would fit in an MI6 or CIA suitcase.

    The basic first-generation implosion-type bombs like the Nagasaki bomb can be made with 6 kilograms of plutonium or 15 kilograms of Highly Enriched Uranium. With these amounts, a terrorist group such as a Renegade CIA or MI6 could potentially build a bomb with the power of thousands of tons of C4 high explosive, which is what MI6 & Guliani Associates used on 7/7 in the London underground blaming Muslims.

    Sophisticated nuclear weapon states can potentially make nuclear bombs with smaller amounts of nuclear material and Renegade CIA and MI6 could easily thieve these and again misappropriate public funding to pay its mindless minions to terrorise the population.

    If anyone is in any doubt why the British Government refuses to allow a public enquiry into 7/7 they should understand it is because the public enquiry would identify the Explosive was military grade C4 and the explosions came from under the trains.

    The public would then ask, how did a Muslim terrorist get hold of military grade C4 and how is it physically possible for a Muslim terrorist to put a rucksack bomb under a tube train whilst it is still moving?  – Immediately the general public would smell the whiffiest of RATS and of course the real culprits would then be in the frame CIA/Guliani Associates (as in former mayor of New York Guliani) & British MI6.

     

    War psychosis of our ruling class, check out this experts take on what is really going on:

    http://rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/webster-tarpley-at-the-vancouver-911-truth-conference/1164/

     

    How many people know that on both 911 and 7/7 identical terror bomb scenarios were being practiced by the security services and military exactly as to what really happened. On 911 there was a jet hijacking training operation ongoing and on 7/7 there was an exercise involving the same trains, same stations and same scenario to what was being practiced — Google Video: Terrorstorm

    http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=786048453686176230&q=terrorstorm&total=783&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

    The same goes for 911; Renegade CIA did this inside job False Flag terrorism also, “the evidence” is overwhelming, indeed the Treason goes straight to Bush’s door because he sighed an executive order number W199I-WF-213589. If researchers goggle this number and then bypass the first few links put up by the CIA to misinform the true extent of the BUSH deception and protection of Criminals & Terrorists becomes apparent.

    On both occasions, 7/7 & 911, the political motive behind the “False Flag” “Inside Job” terrorism was to secure fewer Human rights for British and US citizens and reduce civil liberties whilst producing a pretext for “Profitable never ending War on terrorism” in which corporations are making Millions if not Billion in WAR profits.

    Halliburton charged the US tax payer over $24,000,000 (million) to deliver fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad, a distance of about 300 miles, which under normal circumstances would have cost only $3,000 – $10,000 — does this sound ridiculous? That is because it is ridiculous — BUT FACT.

    Check out these films:

    Iraq for sale:

    http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155&q=iraq+for+sale&total=392&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

    And the Ripple effect:

    http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6847507648836588010&q=ripple+effect&total=255&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

    If anyone wants physics proof 911 was a demolition then go here:

    http://rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/st911-scientist-to-sue-bbc-for-public-deception/776/

    Once you realise 911 was a deliberate demolition the whole world becomes a safer place because every other lie the UK & US governments spout then becomes so much easier for YOU to see.

    J A Blacker MSc IMI (Science Correspondent RINF.COM)

    TruthFest

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    Sun. 11th November (venue to be announced): Edinburgh Truth Collective presents the capital’s first all-day ‘TruthFest’. Presentations and films on truth issues including the background to WWI and other wars, the illusion of democracy, 9/11 and 7/7.

    Webster Tarpley – Edinburgh

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    Sat. 10th November, 7-10pm, Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh. Presentation by Webster Tarpley on history of state-sponsored false-flag terrorism, with especial reference to 9/11.

    Gitmo lawyer worries about being wiretapped

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    A Vermont lawyer representing a client being held at Guantanamo, Cuba, is worried that his phone is being tapped by the federal government.

    He ought to be. The federal government may have interpreted the revised federal surveillance law to allow it to wiretap the lawyers of Guantanamo prisoners.

    The Vermont Public Service Board heard testimony last week about the suspicions of lawyer Bob Gensburg of St. Johnsbury, who says his phone line has inexplicably gone dead and has been subject to strange buzzing noises. Gensburg is one of Vermont’s most respected lawyers, and he is not likely to be imagining these occurrences or to be making them up.

    The PSB has already involved itself in the issue of unwarranted spying by the government, mounting an investigation into whether Verizon and AT&T had turned over phone calling records to the National Security Agency without warrants. The federal government has sued to block the PSB’s investigation, and those in other states, on the grounds that it would jeopardize national security to talk about the activities of the telephone companies.

    Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, may have undermined the government’s case last month when he acknowledged in an interview that the telecommunications companies had helped the government carry out its program of warrantless electronic spying. It will be harder for the government to argue in court that it cannot talk about the phone companies’ role now that the nation’s spy chief has talked about it. The Public Service Board is now receiving briefs from the parties in the case in response to McConnell’s admission.

    Meanwhile, Gensburg wonders if his calls to Afghanistan on behalf of his client are being monitored by the government. If so, it would be an unconscionable breach of the lawyer-client privilege.

    Gensburg is not the only Vermonter with connections to Afghanistan. Others have relatives working there or friends living there. One editor of our acquaintance telephoned a friend in Kabul within the past two years. The question inevitably arises: Was the telephone contact monitored or subject to the government’s efforts at data mining?

    Data mining and warrantless spying on international calls are being carried out in the name of the war on terrorism. So is the detention of Afghans and others at Guantanamo, without charges, with limited access to lawyers, and without recourse to the law. The possibility of unaccountable secret detention of American citizens still exists because of the erosion of the habeas corpus rights that are supposed to be part of our constitutional birthright. Last week the Senate failed to end a Republican filibuster of a bill authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy that would have restored our habeas corpus rights.

    No one knows if Gensburg’s phone has been tapped, but the Bush administration’s disregard for constitutional protections creates an atmosphere of fear and suspicion that make the possibility seem real. One of the great advantages of a democracy is that we need not live in fear that the government will be rifling through our desk drawers or spying on private communications.

    As for the telephone companies, it was their responsibility to know right from wrong and to stand up to the government when it sought their cooperation in illegal surveillance. The companies are seeking immunity in Congress for their actions. Instead, the investigations in Vermont and elsewhere need to move forward to hold those accountable, in government and the private sector, for actions that compromised our constitutional rights. No one in Vermont or anywhere else should have to fear that a phone call to Kabul is going to get them in trouble – unless the government has reasonable grounds to believe that a particular individual is actually involved in criminal activity.

    For the government to monitor the phone calls of a lawyer or to cast out a vast electronic dragnet is for it to practice the methods of the Soviet Union or East Germany. The Vermont PSB now has an important role in checking the excesses of the government and private companies in spying on innocent Vermonters.

    http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070921/OPINION01/70921003/1021/OPINION01

    Guantanamo lawyers barred from visiting or writing prisoners

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    By Ben Fox   

    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico Attorneys for at least 40 Guantanamo Bay prisoners have been barred from visiting or writing their clients because of a judge’s order dismissing legal challenges to the men’s confinement, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.

    A Justice Department lawyer informed the attorneys of the new restrictions in an e-mail that cited Thursday’s dismissal of their cases by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina in Washington.

    “In light of this development, counsel access (both legal mail and in-person visits) is no longer permitted,” Justice Department lawyer Andrew I. Warden said in the e-mail.

    Urbina’s ruling, which covered 16 legal petitions filed on behalf of 40-60 detainees, invalidated an order that establishes rules for contact with detainees, Warden said.

    Challenges are still pending for dozens of other detainees with the Supreme Court set to consider whether Congress had the right to strip the prisoners of the right to contest their confinement with petitions of habeas corpus.

    The Justice Department letter outlined a series of legal steps that would be required before the attorneys could resume contact with the detainees.

    But attorney Wells Dixon said he would most likely not be able to complete those measures in time for a scheduled visit with a Libyan client in October.

    That visit is crucial, Dixon said, because he is in the midst of trying to prevent the government from transferring the client back to Libya, where his lawyers fear he will be tortured.

    “This is just the latest example of the government’s efforts to frustrate counsel access to detainees,” he said.

    A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said the U.S. was following the laws that govern the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees and officials were pleased with Urbina’s ruling.

    “We have afforded detainees at Guantanamo with greater access to attorneys than any other combatants in the history of warfare,” Gordon said.

    The U.S. holds about 340 men at the detention center in Cuba on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Most of the prisoners have filed petitions of habeas corpus, a legal challenge to their confinement.

    Last year, the U.S. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which stripped all detainees of the right to file habeas petitions a fundamental legal right under the U.S. Constitution.

    The Supreme Court has said it will consider the law in its next term.

    New Police “Sneak and Peak” Technology Exclusive

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    Zeik Heil welcome to Rochdale, have you anything to declare?

    police-camera.jpg

    Smile! You’re on fascist candid camera! 

    Shocking new technology allow police to film inside your car, it also sends and retrieves information about you in seconds. 

    By J A Blacker MSc IMI (Science Correspondent) and Mick Meaney
    RINF Alternative News

    ocheckpoint.jpg

    Driving along Queensway, Rochdale, UK, we came upon what I can only describe as some sort of Nazi style road checkpoint. The car was parked up immediately to allow us to investigate further.

    checkpoint2.jpg
     

    Crossing the road I could see a 2-mile line of traffic, not much fun for motorists stuck in that, I thought.

    As I got closer to the Nazi style checkpoint there were police officers just mulling about not appearing to do very much.

    I observed the top cop supervising with the assistance of Customs and Excise.

    police.jpg

    These chaps were not happy to see me, I wonder why? Was it the fact they told me not to take their picture and I said, “It’s a public place I can take pictures all I like, smile”.

    They become even more uncomfortable when they learnt a RINF Alternative News reporter was on the scene and demanded to see a press pass despite all photographs being taken on public property.

    car-taken.jpg

    The guy who lost this car was less than happy, no insurance got him arrested and his car towed.

     black-windows.jpg

     This chap has dark windows, which breaks the law because the cameras can’t video the occupant’s private space.

    police-car.jpg

    This is the cop car that sneakily films inside your car.

    police-camera.jpg

    This is the camera that records your private space inside your car and sends the registration and picture via wireless to Nazi cop HQ to be processed within 10 seconds.

    This also means the police can now operate a mobile network of “intelligent CCTV” cameras within the UK as we slowly become the victim of a blanket surveillance program.

    johns-car.jpg

    This is my car with the 911 was an inside job / Infowars sticker – I took it upon myself to formally use the pub car park for what it was originally intended prior to the fascist state taking over bid.

    check-point-gone.jpg

    20 minutes after my first courtesy call, the Junter had shut up shop, only the removal truck remains — nice work if you can get it. Smile and say Zeik Heil! Welcome to Rochdale.

    Welcome to 1984: Your Boss as Big Brother

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    By Mick Meaney
    RINF Alternative News

    Amazingly, the corporate environment could pose a far greater privacy risk than methods currently being used by the authorities. Corporate surveillance is on the increase as businesses use a range of tactics and technology to monitor your activities, both in the work place and in your private life – and in some cases, even before you start a new job.

    “There is no true privacy in this country any more, and that’s more true at the workplace than anywhere else,” says Sharon D. Nelson, who is president of Sensei Enterprises, a consulting firm that specializes in computer forensics.

    “If you had an iPod or digital camera charging through the USB port, we could browse all the files that were stored onto the device.”

    It has also been revealed that some Welsh companies are going to extraordinary lengths by hiring private detectives to snoop on employees outside the workplace.

    Businesses have direct access to private information that authorities need a search warrant to examine.

    A private investigator, Wayne Reynolds, claims that around 70 per cent of his work involves spying on company staff.

    “Normally we’re called in when someone has been off work for a long time, maybe a few months, and the employer wants to check that they’re not having the wool pulled over their eyes.

    “Tips-offs tend to come from people inside the company, and then we launch a full-scale surveillance operation and see if it’s actually happening,” he said.

    In another case, private investigators in Stratford-upon-Avon admitted to monitoring a University student recently offered a job with a blue-chip firm.

    Jay Brown, from R & G Investigations said: “Some bosses want to ensure that the people they are employing are trustworthy so that — if and when they get promoted — they know that they won’t jeopardise big deals.

    “That way they can make sure that none of their staff are weak links and let the rest of the company down. Bosses basically want to know that employees are what they say they are, and that they are not being lied to.”

    There is very little employees can do to protect themselves from corporate surveillance as the method is increasing on both sides of the Atlantic and growing in almost every industry. Companies will use hidden CCTV cameras, radios and spend tens of thousands of pounds tracking employees.

    Laurence Weekley, from Covert Investigations & Surveillance said: “Sometimes we’re asked to pose as a mystery shopper to make sure the staff are selling things in the way they should be. We’re making sure that customers are being given the right information about certain products.”

    Liberty, a civil rights charity said: “Employers need to have respect for their employee’s private lives. Unfortunately there is little to prevent the unscrupulous employer using potentially unlawful methods to snoop.

    “Proper resourcing of the Information Commissioners office could allow action to be taken if an employee finds that evidence from detective work is being used against him or her.”

    Last month in New York one employee was fired after bosses found he was leaving work early after tracking him for five months with a cell phone they supplied him carried a GPS antenna.

    War crime lawyers fight UN on top job

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    New secretary general is challenged over ‘secret appointment’ to replace top tribunal prosecutor

    Ed Vulliamy in The Hague
    Sunday September 23, 2007
    The Observer

    The new leadership of the United Nations is facing a defiant challenge from within one of its few recent successes – the war crimes tribunal in The Hague – over who will steer the epic trials towards their close.Prosecution lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – trying Europe’s bloodiest war criminals since the Nazis – fear a backstage deal has been struck between new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon over an appointment of a successor to chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who leaves in December. Senior Hague lawyers say they are ready to quit over the issue.

    Accounts by tribunal and UN sources of how a former Belgian attorney-general petitioned for the job and has reportedly been guaranteed it affords a rare insight into the veiled sanctums of the UN.

    Sources at the ICTY, at UN headquarters in New York and across the world of international law and human rights advocacy, say Del Ponte’s succession has been pledged in secret to Serge Brammertz, a Belgian criminologist who became deputy prosecutor at the new International Criminal Court and heads the UN commission into the murder of Lebanese premier Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, which he wants to leave.

    The entire senior prosecution staff at the tribunal have taken the unprecedented step of sending a joint letter to Ki-Moon, contesting a Brammertz appointment by proposing Del Ponte’s current deputy David Tolbert, who has worked for nine years at the tribunal, for the job.

    ‘The matter is not one of personalities nor Brammertz’s standing’, says one lawyer. ‘It’s the difference between someone who knows the history, understands every case and can deliver a completion strategy, or someone brought in by the Secretary General just to shut the tribunal down, with no experience of the cases, background or region.’

    Ki-Moon’s office will not comment, citing confidentiality of the appointments procedure. But the lawyers’ view is backed unanimously by organisations with an interest in the tribunal’s work, including the George Soros Foundation, Human Rights Watch and campaigners within former Yugoslavia itself, all of whom have also petitioned Ki-Moon.

    ‘Just because people haven’t heard of the names remaining to stand trial doesn’t mean that they are not the most important cases,’ says Kelly Askin, senior legal officer at the Soros Foundation. ‘It’s crucial that there be continuity – and the fact is we have someone available who knows the institution and the people, and has followed every case and every detail for nine years. Several senior staff have told me they will leave the tribunal if David Tolbert is not appointed.’

    The ICTY has had a bumpy journey since it was established under pressure from then President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in 1994. It was seen at the time as an act of contrition after the UN’s catastrophic failure to intervene as hundreds of thousands died in three years of savage ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, culminating with the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at the UN-protected ‘Safe Area’ of Srebrenica in July 1995.

    The tribunal lost its biggest catch with the death in prison of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, and is haunted by the failure to catch the two Bosnian Serb leaders accused of unleashing the genocide in Bosnia – General Ratko Mladic and former President Radovan Karadzic. Their capture would extend the tribunal’s mandate beyond 2010, and make for a climactic end-game; Del Ponte made what could be her final trip to Belgrade this week as a last-ditch attempt to secure, under her watch, the two leaders.

    But for all the publicity over Karadzic and Mladic, the tribunal – the first of its kind since the Nuremberg trials – has seen remarkable successes. Even apart from the convictions secured, accounts of the slaughter have been told for the historical record in intimate language from the witness boxes. There have been dramatic moments as killers and leaders have been confronted by victims.

    The tribunal won a guilty plea from Karadzic’s co-President Biljana Plavsic, for her role in the overall planning of war crimes. New laws of war have been written: the Serb siege of Sarajevo was deemed a war crime, as was the use of systematic mass rape as a means of persecution at Foca, in Eastern Bosnia.

    But crucial trials are outstanding or still in process – the leadership of the Bosnian Croat war machine, which laid murderous siege to East Mostar and set up a gulag for Muslims, is currently standing trial; notorious paramilitary warlord Milan Lukic awaits trial, accused of locking scores of families in houses and burning them alive in Visegrad. Above all, Momcilo Peresic – Milosevic’s most senior general – is also due for trial. It is a critical case, because a conviction would establish Serbia’s direct involvement in the genocide, in stark counterpoint to a ruling by the International Court of Justice, which rejected a case by the Bosnian government against Serbia for its involvement in genocide.

    The team that convicted Krstic, Krajsnik and those preparing the cases against Lukic and Peresic all are signatories to the letter to Ki-Moon.

    An ICTY statement last week said del Ponte’s mandate had been extended until 31 December. ‘The successor to the current prosecutor has not yet been appointed yet,’ it said.

    Mark Ellis, of the London-based International Bar Association, said: ‘It struck me as very odd that the UN would make a decision which would in essence put a newcomer in charge.’

    War Costing $720 Million Each Day, Group Says

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     By Kari Lydersen

    CHICAGO, Sept. 21 — The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.

    The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group’s analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.

    The estimates made by the group, which opposes the conflict, include not only the immediate costs of war but also ongoing factors such as long-term health care for veterans, interest on debt and replacement of military hardware.

    “The wounded are coming home, and many of them have severe brain and spinal injuries, which will require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives,” said Michael McConnell, Great Lakes regional director of the AFSC, a peace group affiliated with the Quaker church.

    The $720 million figure breaks down into $280 million a day from Iraq war supplementary funding bills passed by Congress, plus $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs.

    But some supporters of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq say that even if the war is costly, that fact is essentially immaterial.

    “Either you think the war in Iraq supports America’s national security, or not,” said Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “If you think national security won’t be harmed by withdrawing from Iraq, of course you would want to see that money spent elsewhere. I myself think that belief, on a certain level, is absurd, so the question of focusing on how much money we are spending there is irrelevant.”

    The war’s unpaid long-term costs do not include “macro-economic consequences” described by Bilmes and Stiglitz, including higher oil prices, loss of trade because of anti-American sentiments and lost productivity of killed or injured U.S. soldiers.

    In 2006, Bilmes, who was an assistant secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton, and Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank, placed the total cost of the Iraq war at more than $2.2 trillion, not counting interest. The American Friends group used cost breakdowns and interest projections from the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the daily cost of war emblazoned on the banners flown in Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities.

    The banners show what this could buy in terms of health care, Head Start programs, new elementary schools, free school lunches, renewable energy and hiring new teachers. Protest organizers say they hope to turn more people against the war by laying out its true financial impact.

    “I think people are becoming more aware of these guns or butter questions,” said Gary Gillespie, director of the group’s Baltimore Urban Peace Program, which displayed the banners in the Baltimore suburb of Bel Air on Friday. “But when you talk about $720 million a day, even people who work on this issue are shocked by the number and shocked by what could have been done with that money. War has no return — you’re not producing a product.”

    Blackwater denies making illegal weapons exports

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    By James Vicini and Will Dunham

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Private U.S. security contractor Blackwater USA denied on Saturday it was involved in illegally shipping automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq.

    The statement by the company, whose contractors were accused by the Iraqi government of killing 11 people in Baghdad this week, came after a newspaper report that federal officials were investigating whether Blackwater exported unlicensed military hardware into Iraq.

    “Allegations that Blackwater was in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities are baseless. The company has no knowledge of any employee improperly exporting weapons,” the company said in a statement.

    “This issue is completely unrelated” to Blackwater’s U.S. government programs in Iraq, said the company, based in Moyock, North Carolina. It employs about 1,000 contractors to protect the U.S. mission in Iraq and its diplomats from attack.

    The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, reported that two former Blackwater employees had pleaded guilty in Greenville, North Carolina, to weapons charges and were cooperating with the federal investigation.

    Court records showed Kenneth Wayne Cashwell and William Ellsworth Grumiaux pleaded guilty earlier in the year to possessing, receiving and concealing between May 2003 and August 2005 stolen firearms that had been “shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.”

    The records, which showed both men agreed to cooperate with authorities and testify about any crimes they knew of in plea deals filed last November, did not name Blackwater or Iraq.

    The newspaper also quoted two unidentified sources as saying federal officials were probing whether Blackwater was shipping weapons, night-vision scopes, armor, gun kits and other military goods to Iraq without the required permits. 

    A U.S. Justice Department spokesman declined comment on the investigation.

    SMUGGLING ALLEGATIONS

    Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has suggested the U.S. Embassy stop using Blackwater after what Iraq called a flagrant assault by the firm’s contractors in which 11 people were killed last Sunday while the firm was escorting an embassy convoy through Baghdad.

    The Washington Post reported in Saturday’s edition the Iraqi government’s investigation into the shootings had expanded to include allegations about Blackwater’s involvement in six other violent incidents this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead.

    Asked at a news conference at the United Nations on Saturday about whether Iraqi investigators had videotape of Blackwater security men firing unprovoked on Iraqi civilians, Maliki said, “We’ve asked the Americans to deal with the investigation through an investigation committee to see whether there is a video about this (Baghdad) incident.”

    The issue of suspected weapons smuggling by a U.S. contractor in Iraq surfaced earlier in the week in a letter from a congressional committee chairman, Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, to Howard Krongard, the State Department’s inspector general.

    “You impeded efforts by your investigators to cooperate with a Justice Department probe into allegations that a large private security contractor was smuggling weapons into Iraq,” Waxman told Krongard in a letter dated September 18.

    Waxman’s letter did not name Blackwater.

    Waxman has asked the head of Blackwater USA, Erik Prince, to testify before his committee on October 2 on its work in Iraq.

    The State Department said on Friday it would thoroughly examine the use of private security contractors to protect American diplomats in Iraq.

    In its statement, Blackwater said that when it was uncovered internally that two employees were stealing from the company, it immediately fired them and invited the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to conduct a thorough investigation.

    “The employees, who were former Marines and law enforcement, have been convicted and are currently negotiating sentencing in Raleigh with federal prosecutors,” the company said.

    (Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip at the United Nations)

    Secret US air force team to perfect plan for Iran strike

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    Sarah Baxter

    THE United States Air Force has set up a highly confidential strategic planning group tasked with “fighting the next war” as tensions rise with Iran.

    Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June.

    It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

    Detailed contingency planning for a possible attack on Iran has been carried out for more than two years by Centcom (US central command), according to defence sources.

    Checkmate’s job is to add a dash of brilliance to Air Force thinking by countering the military’s tendency to “fight the last war” and by providing innovative strategies for warfighting and assessing future needs for air, space and cyberwarfare.

    It is led by Brigadier-General Lawrence “Stutz” Stutzriem, who is considered one of the brightest air force generals. He is assisted by Dr Lani Kass, a former Israeli military officer and expert on cyberwarfare.

    The failure of United Nations sanctions to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which Tehran claims are peaceful, is giving rise to an intense debate about the likelihood of military strikes.

    Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, said last week that it was “necessary to prepare for the worst . . . and the worst is war”. He later qualified his remarks, saying he wanted to avoid that outcome.

    France has joined America in pushing for a tough third sanctions resolution against Iran at the UN security council but is meeting strong resistance from China and Russia. Britain has been doing its best to bridge the gap, but it is increasingly likely that new sanctions will be implemented by a US-led “coalition of the willing”.

    Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who arrives in New York for the United Nations general assembly today, has been forced to abandon plans to visit ground zero, where the World Trade Center stood until the September 11 attacks of 2001. Politicians from President George W Bush to Senator Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2008 race for the White House, were outraged by the prospect of a visit to New York’s most venerated site by a “state sponsor” of terrorism.

    Bush still hopes to isolate Iran diplomatically, but believes the regime is moving steadily closer to obtaining nuclear weapons while the security council bickers.

    The US president faces strong opposition to military action, however, within his own joint chiefs of staff. “None of them think it is a good idea, but they will do it if they are told to,” said a senior defence source.

    General John Abizaid, the former Centcom commander, said last week: “Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed Iran.”

    Critics fear Abizaid has lost sight of Iran’s potential to arm militant groups such as Hezbollah with nuclear weapons. “You can deter Iran, but there is no strategy against nuclear terrorism,” said the retired air force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney of the Iran policy committee.

    “There is no question that we can take out Iran. The problem is the follow-on, the velvet revolution that needs to be created so the Iranian people know it’s not aimed at them, but at the Iranian regime.”

    Checkmate’s freethinking mission is “to provide planning inputs to warfighters that are strategically, operationally and tactically sound, logistically supportable and politically feasible”. Its remit is not specific to one country, according to defence sources, but its forward planning is thought relevant to any future air war against Iranian nuclear and military sites. It is also looking at possible threats from China and North Korea.

    Checkmate was formed in the 1970s to counter Soviet threats but fell into disuse in the 1980s. It was revived under Colonel John Warden and was responsible for drawing up plans for the crushing air blitz against Saddam Hussein at the opening of the first Gulf war.

    Warden told The Sunday Times: “When Saddam invaded Kuwait, we had access to unlimited numbers of people with expertise, including all the intelligence agencies, and were able to be significantly more agile than Centcom.”

    He believes that Checkmate’s role is to develop the necessary expertise so that “if somebody says Iran, it says: ‘here is what you need to think about’. Here are the objectives, here are the risks, here is what it will cost, here are the numbers of planes we will lose, here is how the war is going to end and here is what the peace will look like”.

    Warden added: “The Centcoms of this world are executional — they don’t have the staff, the expertise or the responsibility to do the thinking that is needed before a country makes the decision to go to war. War planning is not just about bombs, airplanes and sailing boats.”

    Child ID program draws hundreds

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    By Daarel Burnette II
    dburnette@courier-journal.com
    The Courier-Journal

    Seeing her aunt go missing for three days was all too frightening for Keisha Boog.

    She was eventually found and was OK, but Boog said she would do all that’s necessary to prevent a similar disappearance.

    Yesterday she took her sons, 1-year-old William and 7-year-old Austin, to Byerly Ford-Nissan off Dixie Highway where police were filing fingerprints and handing out identification cards to children.

    “We hope this will help if anything happens to them,” Boog said. “We don’t want another” fright.

    Close to 300 children had their fingerprints scanned and photos taken. The children’s fingerprints and photos, along with their weight and height, were also logged onto an encrypted disk that only the FBI can read.

    Parents were also given kits that contained DNA vials that would keep DNA for up to 100 years and information on child safety regarding lead and ink poisoning.

    Around 500 people showed up for the event, which lasted throughout the afternoon. It was the fourth year that the dealership had served as the host, said sales manager Bob Copas.

    “If a child goes missing, this allows the police to get their information out to the media in a timely manner,” Copas said.

    Six-year-old Pia Cuesta and her brother, Pidion Cuesta, 8, said they spoke with the police officers about not talking with strangers and staying safe.

    “I learned to stay close to my parents,” Pia said.

    Shively training officer Eric Brooke said when children are missing, stressed parents often can’t remember simple things about them.

    “This information becomes very helpful,” he said.

    Tracy Frost brought her 5-year-old daughter, Abigail Booth, to have her fingerprints scanned for the first time.

    “I’m always worried something will happen to her,” Frost said. “This makes me feel a little safer.”

    Fingerprinting, ID cards part of Kids Day

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    By NICOLE GERRINGMARINE CITY– Children had their faces painted, ate free pizza and cookies and tried their skills on a rock climbing wall at Belle River Elementary School on Saturday afternoon.

    But their parents didn’t bring them to the school just to have fun – they had their children fingerprinted and checked out for cavities and spinal problems as part of Kids Day America.

    The event, initiated by the World Wellness Foundation, has been taking place for more than a decade in cities around the world and arrived in Marine City for the first time this year. Zimmer Chiropractic of Marine City and other local agencies and businesses pitched in to educate families about health and safety issues.

    Children were given an emergency child identification card with a dental record form; space for a photo; questions such as address, height, weight and blood type; and boxes for each fingerprint.

    Lt. Tim Donnellon of the St. Clair County Sheriff Department, which conducted the fingerprinting with Marine City Mayor George Bukowski, said the fingerprints and the ID books are useful in an emergency situation.

    “It’s for (the families) education and prevention and it will aid us,” he said, if a child is lost or kidnapped.

    Charlotte Schwartz brought her 5-year-old twins, Lynn and Wilfred Schwartz, to the event because she heard about the fingerprinting session through their school.

    “We thought it would be a good idea to get at least the fingerprints done and on file,” she said. She said she also liked having her children be seen by a dentist and chiropractor without having to make and pay for medical appointments.

    Randy Allor of Marine City said he brought his son, Ryan Allor, 9, and his friends and cousin to the event for the fingerprinting and to spend time as a family.

    “It gives us time to share,” he said.

    When they had completed the check-ups and ID books, families were fed pizza, hot dogs and cookies and had a chance to play in an inflatable obstacle course and house and climb a synthetic rock wall.

    All events were free, but donations were collected for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to terminally and severely ill children.

    The continued exploitation of 9/11

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    By As’ad Abdul Rahman

    Like other colossal events, the attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington, have significantly transformed many countries. The events of 9/11 have had devastating repercussions on the regional and international levels, and forced some rulers in Arab and Muslim countries to make some unsavoury choices. On that ominous day, the US administration, under George W. Bush, began to look more narrowly and fanatically than ever before at regional and international issues.

    From the time he first took office, Bush was determined to pursue a policy contrary to that of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. And right from the start, Bush did away with Clinton’s repeated efforts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the time of 9/11, Bush was neither interested nor experienced in international politics. The Palestinian cause was not much of a concern for him. Nor was the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations at Camp David, the eruption of the second intifada and the election as Israeli premier of Ariel Sharon, the anti-peace rightwinger.

    Moreover, the official US stance was ostensibly clear even before 9/11. The then national security advisor Condoleezza Rice publicly said the Middle East crisis “needs a miracle” to be solved. Clinton and his administration had approached it, but only burnt their hands there. Bush was no miracle-maker who can change rock to loaf, nor did he intend to burn his fingers in it.

    And then, the 9/11 attacks provided the Republicans in Washington with an excuse to give total and unflinching support to Israel, at the expense of the Palestinian people and their leadership, which had become, after Oslo Accords, a part of the US alliance in the region.

    True, it was only in the aftermath of the attacks that Bush began to focus on foreign policy, where the “war on terror” was placed at became the main issue on his agenda. The US has since then effectively exploited the September 11 attacks and involved the international community in it.

    Arrogance

    The US administration was not satisfied with mere statements from foreign states denouncing the attacks. It arrogantly told those governments that it was “compulsory” for them to declare whether they were “with us” or “against us”.

    As such, the exploitation of terrorism as an international phenomenon began, and the administration subsequently strengthened its policy of using force in international relations, legitimising its interference in others’ internal affairs and marginalising the role of the United Nations. On the Arab level, the administration has followed a new strategy, which intensified the Arabs’ subordination to US demands.

    As for the Palestinian cause, the attacks were so catastrophic that they denigrated acts of Palestinian resistance to “terrorism”. The US administration even started seeing Israel’s war against the Palestinian people as a part of America’s war on terror.

    So Israel made immediate use of the attacks and plunged its tanks, just a few days after September 11, into cities and towns in the West Bank, and without any hesitation, the US stepped in to equip the Zionist state with more helicopters to be used in the assassination of several Palestinian leaders.

    In the political arena, the US often vetoed any UN resolution condemning Israel for its criminal actions against the Palestinian people. Among several other things, the US also played down the “Mitchell Plan”, and the proposal of sending international observers to the Occupied Territories to control “violence”.

    Sharon’s crimes

    Strange enough, while European criminal courts were prosecuting Sharon for the crimes he perpetrated against the Palestinians, Bush came up with his own claim, calling Sharon “a man of peace”.

    The period that followed 9/11 had put the Palestinians in a critical situation. Rather than being given the support to bring the Israeli occupation of their land to an end, the Palestinians were asked to make “reforms” and “fight terrorism” – demands to evade the growing calls for an end to Israeli occupation and the formation of a Palestinian state.

    Along with this, secret hands have also been responsible, to an extent, in creating the division that have now led to the West Bank and Gaza being dominated by different factions.

    Indeed, the US has been playing the “creative disorder” game. The Palestinian cause has been distorted. It is now being seen as part of America’s war on terror, and as such distanced from international purview, while Israel has been given the green light to carry out its policies of aggression, expansion and colonisation.

    Finally, irrespective of Bush’s call for a peace summit to be held this autumn (an event that has revived optimism in certain circles) isn’t it politically wise to assume that the upcoming meeting will only cement Israel’s efforts to hoist its flag in Arab skies?

    Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia.

    Shelter eyes fingerprint scans, ID cards for homeless

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    Sarah Chapman

    A Calgary homeless shelter is considering a high-tech security system that would require fingerprint scans and photo ID cards from people looking for a warm, safe place to spend the night.

    A spokeswoman for the city’s Drop-In Centre said Thursday the shelter is pricing new security measures that could include biometric technology, such as fingerprints.

    The effort to ramp up security comes after a survey at the shelter showed more than half of 284 users were concerned about their safety while there.

    “There would be a desk where people [would] have to swipe their cards,” said Louise Gallagher, manager of resource development and public relations.

    “The cost of implementing it is probably much less than not implementing it.”

    News of stricter security procedures came as a relief to some homeless patrons of the Drop-In Centre.

    “When you’re sleeping upstairs and you have a blanket and it’s cold, that blanket means a lot,” said Oscar Laboucan, who has been staying at the Drop-In Centre for about five months.

    “They’ll come and steal it from you. They’ll steal anything from you,” he said of others who stay at the shelter.

    The centre wants to maintain a database of client identities. The cards could help identify individuals who previously have been barred from the centre.

    “Our clients are much more likely to experience an act of violence than everyday Calgarians,” said Gallagher.

    Gallagher did not know what the costs could be for implementing the new system, but said an outside consulting firm is preparing a report that is expected to be completed soon.

    The centre is also considering adding more security guards, Gallagher said.

    She said she did not know if other shelters have used ID cards or similar security measures.

    A biometrics consultant based in New York City said he hasn’t heard of any similar agencies currently using the technology.

    “The reason why some have shied away from it in the past is the perception by those who are tenants — particularly some are averse to the perceived privacy invasiveness of some of the technology, whether it’s true or not,” said Victor Lee, a senior consultant with International Biometric Group.

    Lee said equipment costs are minimal and fingerprint scanners can be purchased for as little as a few hundred dollars.

    He estimated the cost of a fingerprint ID system for 1,000 clients could run between a couple of thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

    Syria strike: US shared intelligence with Israel

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    By Leonard Doyle

    Before it bombed Syria, Israel provided the US with intelligence suggesting that North Korea was secretly supplying Damascus with nuclear technology, The Washington Post newspaper claimed yesterday.

    However, there is considerable scepticism of the intelligence that prompted Israel’s attack, with some proliferation experts querying whether Syria is even attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The quality of the Israeli intelligence is also unknown, as is the extent of North Korean co-operation. Some people have suggested that a North Korean ship merely unloaded items it no longer needed.

    The Bush administration has not commented on the Israeli raid or the details of the intelligence, which President George Bush was handed during the summer. The US reportedly corroborated some of the original intelligence it received from Israel, but fears remained that any immediate action would bring an end to negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme.

    The target of the Israeli bombers was reported to be in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. To maintain secrecy, the details of the mission were given to the pilots who conducted the attack only after they were in the air, the newspaper said.

    The Israeli intelligence included satellite images, according to anonymous sources quoted by the paper. Most details about the alleged North Korean-Syrian connection remain unknown.

    At a press conference on Thursday, President Bush refused to answer questions about Israel’s air strikes in Syria. “I’m not going to comment on the matter,” Mr Bush said.

    Israel is also refusing to discuss the raid, although Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud party, told Israeli television that he knew of the operation. In Syria, officials said its air defence forced Israel’s jets to flee. It has also warned that it may retaliate.

    Syria has denied receiving North Korean nuclear technology and Pyongyang has also denied any such deal.

    US captivated in the theater of war

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    By Ira Chernus

    A week has passed since President George W Bush announced that US troops will stay in Iraq in “a security engagement that extends beyond my presidency”. Last spring, those words would have evoked howls of protest from Democratic leaders. Now, scarcely a peep.

    While the world was on August vacation, Republican and Democratic leaders moved toward a compromise. The outlines are clear enough: some US troops will start leaving Iraq soon, but tens of thousands will stay on indefinitely with a permanent mission of providing something called “overwatch”. This open-ended “Korea model” seems to be a done deal. About the only issue left to debate is how fast the “transition” should happen, how quickly the troops that aren’t staying should be “redeployed”.

    Peace activists who despair of the spineless Democrats should keep in mind that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have compromised, too. In his most recent speech, just six years and two days after he became the United States’ tough-as-nails “war president”, the Decider announced that he has decided to do what many Democrats and the peace movement have been demanding – begin getting troops out of Iraq.

    Yes, the numbers will be so pitifully small that many already claim they are meaningless. Nonetheless, it’s a major shift in Bush’s narrative. And that counts for something all too real, because the debate is hardly about policy any more. It’s mainly about the stories we tell about policy – and about “America”. Perhaps it always was.

    Every war is bound to turn into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic spectacle – the more mythic the better. It’s no coincidence that the military refers to a battle zone as a “theater”.
    Political “battles” are high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a debate about the math of minimalist “drawdown” – how many troops should leave and how soon – is hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to fuel public passions. And yet the two major parties have to conjure up the illusion of a profound, emotionally stirring difference between them. So they turn a debate like the present one about troop numbers and time frames into a contest between larger competing narratives.

    Last spring, with Bush’s “troop surge” plan seemingly floundering, it looked as if the Democrats were winning that contest. Then, over the summer, the Bush administration began to catch up – and not just by accident. According to the Washington Post:

    Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45am and again late in the afternoon [among] the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the US Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge. From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between January 10 and [early September], the office put out 94 such documents.

    Call it a surge of words on the home front. But mounting a publicity blitz, no matter how well funded, is no guarantee of success. You have to put on a show good enough to sell tickets and elicit applause. So why did the pro-war show draw a big enough audience (at least among beleaguered Republicans) that many key Democrats, frustrated by congressional voting math and frightened for the 2008 electoral future, began to wave the flag of compromise – and so few Republican senators were willing to support even the Democrats’ halfway measures?

    A war president who can’t win the war
    Part of the answer is revealed in the most astounding polling figure of recent weeks. A New York Times poll asked, “[Whom] do you trust the most with successfully resolving the war in Iraq?” In response, only 5% of those polled gave the nod to the Bush administration, just 21% to Congress, but fully 68% – more than two out of three – plunked for “the military”.

    Once again, the top-rated show of the season is evidently that all-time favorite, “The Military Saves the Day”, a sequel to the smash hit of the past several seasons, “Support Our Troops”. No wonder the White House brought its hero and “surge” commander, General David Petraeus, onstage for the final scene in this act of a seemingly never-ending drama. No wonder Bush used the general as cover not only for continuing the war, but for making his own shadowy compromises in his September 13 address to the nation (which, by the way, drew a far smaller audience than his last major speech introducing his “surge” plan, or “new way forward”, on January 10).

    “General Petraeus recommends that in December, we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy,” Bush said. “Our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks.” It was as if, all of a sudden, the newly four-starred general, and not the president, were now the commander-in-chief.

    For White House scriptwriters, there was certainly another reason to give the general the leading role in this scene from the administration’s home-front Iraq drama. He has actually seen something of the reality of war. Everyone knows that Bush (like Cheney and others high in the current administration) studiously – even notoriously – avoided the real theater of battle. With his wartime credibility always somewhat suspect, all Bush can offer is an illusion spun out of dramatic words.

    Bush and his writers also made compromises in their storyline. The ringing language of past years about bringing “freedom” to Iraq and the Middle East, though not completely absent, was far more muted this time around. Instead of spreading good tidings about a US mission to liberate the world, the main theme of Bush’s Petraeus speech was a reprise of another close-to-home classic: “The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States.” The post-September 11, 2001, narrative – defending America against those who would destroy us – had again taken center stage.

    No facts are available to indicate that the war in Iraq is making Americans safer, as Petraeus himself admitted. So the president’s claim made no sense – not, that is, if you were measuring his argument against facts or logic. But don’t fool yourself, it made fine sense as a good old-fashioned American yarn: the band of brothers righteously defending themselves against evildoers who will annihilate us if we don’t annihilate them first.

    There is, however, one crucial piece of that old American yarn that Bush now has no choice but to play down – the piece that says the good guys always win, unconditionally. After years of announcing that victory was at hand, or at least claiming that he had a surefire strategy for victory, he can no longer tell that part of the story because no one will believe it anymore. In his latest speech, the word “victory” – which he once used 15 times in a single speech – was missing in action, replaced by the far less martial, so much less triumphant word “success”.

    The “Korea model”, that more than half-century of garrisoning the southern part of that country after a stalemated war, lets us know what “success” is supposed to mean: a government (or a set of regional governments) in Iraq that can provide safety for US troops on their permanent bases and wherever they go throughout the country.

    But even that hard-to-imagine outcome would be far too pallid a denouement to look like victory to a US audience. In fact, that’s one big reason Bush’s public support has eroded enough to force him to make compromises. He’s a war president who can no longer promise actually to win the war.

    A test of character
    A good plot raises the right question, one that keeps people in the theater because they care deeply about the answer. In the battle of narratives, the Bush administration, no matter how crippled, still knows what the right question is.

    When it comes to Iraq, in recent months, Democratic scriptwriters have indeed spotlighted a question: Can inept Iraqi politicians succeed in getting their act together when brave Americans give them the time to do so? It’s just not the right question from a storytelling point of view. Few Americans really care about the performance of a faction-torn foreign government on the other side of the world.

    The Bush administration’s story might seem to turn on a question with little more mobilizing power: Can American troops succeed in reducing violence in Iraq? But behind that question – and General Petraeus’s elaborate charts on the metrics of violence in that country – Republicans build dramatic tension by raising a very different question, which really does matter to a sizable part of the US audience. Does the United States have the “character” or the “stomach” – Dick Cheney’s favorite word – to keep on fighting evil until something that can plausibly be called “success” is conjured out of the dusty air of Iraq?

    Bush raised that question in the opening words of his recent address: “In the life of all free nations, there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment.” And he offered the answer many want to hear – even if not, at the moment, from him – in his closing words: “Support our troops in a fight they can win.”

    That has, of course, been the basic plot of Bush’s “war on terror”. Since September 11, he and his speechwriters have been telling a story whose hero is not, in fact, a president, or a general, or any individual, but “America” – with all the world, by rights, its stage.

    In Bush’s story, as long as America is strutting across that stage, playing the lead with a commanding tone, fighting evil at every turn, Americans can feel like winners and heroes. All of this is supposed to be not an American ego trip, but a classic test of character.

    Only by defeating evil enemies, in Bush’s tale, can you prove you have character. It’s the old story of victory culture, and millions of Americans still believe in it.

    Millions more wish they could. If they are old enough, many remember a time when they did – before Vietnam. Failure in Vietnam cast into doubt all the old American verities about heroism, character, and national direction. It left many wondering whether the old stories could ever be played out again on the stage of American life – and feeling remarkably good, after September 11, 2001, when victory in war seemed once again to become the finale of the national drama. The growing feeling since that “Iraq” is Arabic for “Vietnam” has, of course, been devastating to any sense of fated US triumph. Yet millions of doubters must still yearn to believe in an American story that ends with good defeating evil on some planetary frontier.

    Because the Iraqis have proved so unwilling to play the role of defeated enemy in the theater of battle – and the Iraqi situation has grown so complex – the Bush administration has been left with little choice but to blame all evil on al-Qaeda, in Iraq and elsewhere. As a White House official told a Washington Post reporter, at least Americans “know what that means. The average person doesn’t understand why the Sunnis and Shi’ites don’t like each other. They don’t know where the Kurds live … And al-Qaeda is something they know. They’re the enemy of the United States.”
    In such a script, our protectors are “the troops”, the ultimate symbol and proof of America’s character. The most powerful weapon of war supporters has long been the question, raised with appropriate self-righteousness: “Don’t you support our troops?” The politically correct anti-war answer almost has to be: “Yes. That’s why I want to bring them home.” As it happens, though, such a response has had little effect because it misses the point.

    “Supporting our troops” is not about helping individual soldiers to live better lives or, for that matter, making their lives safer. It’s about supporting a morality play in which the lead actor, “our troops”, represents all the virtues that so many Americans believe – or wish they could believe – their country possesses, giving them the privilege (and obligation) of directing all that happens on the world stage.

    Bush put on yet another performance of that morality play on September 13, ending with the almost obligatory tragic message from grieving parents: “We believe this is a war of good and evil and we must win … even if it cost the life of our own son. Freedom is not free.” That sums up the essence of the drama. Coming from people whose child is dead, it seems like a show-stopper. What else can you say?

    The Democrats read from a thin script
    In response to Bush’s Petraeus address, the Democrats’ answer man, Senator Jack Reed, did not actually have much to say. He did make it clear that when it comes to war and the military, he’s a lot more in touch with reality than the president. “I was privileged to serve in the United States Army for 12 years,” Reed said modestly. He might have added that he was a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, and an officer in the famed 82nd Airborne Division.

    But like so many Democrats, including legless former senator Max Cleland and Vietnam veteran John Kerry, he found himself mysteriously unable to turn his real-life experience into an effective post-September 11 narrative. A powerful drama creates a world of its own, one that can easily feel more real than reality. Even after so many years of disaster and so much repetition, against Bush’s rich drama, Reed could still offer only a thin script with feeble characters, little if any plot, and no sense of direction. Mostly he carped at the commander-in-chief of what the Democrats themselves acclaim to be the finest fighting force in the world. So he left his party open to the same criticism thrown at ’60s radicals: “You only know what you’re against. You don’t know what you’re for.”

    The Democrats’ story does embody positive values. It calls on Americans to act in an old US tradition of pragmatism, where the only question that matters is: “Is it working?” If it’s not working, you try something else that might actually get the job done. But Reed never even suggested what that something else might be.

    In a battle between stories, it’s often not enough to attack the incumbent’s ineptitude. As John F Kennedy, another Democrat with a real-life war record, knew, you also have to tell a satisfying tale about moving on to a new frontier, where you can pass that test of character and become a profile in courage. Heroism makes for a more alluring story than timidity every time.

    So, even if the practical side of Americanism screams out, “Leave the theater, now!” there is still a powerful impulse to stay glued to our seats until the bugles sound, the cavalry charges, and our side wins the day.

    The Democrats sense that. They sense as well that opposition to the war is spread wide but not necessarily deep; that public opinion might, at least to some extent, still be turned by a well-produced show – as the marginal poll gains of President Bush among Republican audiences in the past two months have indicated. The Democrats fear that if they truly lead the way to the exits, they might turn around one day to find fewer than half the voters following. That’s why so many of them – and all too many Republicans as well – are afraid to act on what they know is right.

    The show must go on
    The great debate about Iraq is not, and never really was, about what the US should do in Iraq. No matter how many Iraqis have died or become refugees thanks to the Bush intervention, they remain largely ignored bit players in America’s central drama, which is, and always was, about what we will make of America. Now, the outcome of that debate is coming more clearly into view, and it’s not a pretty picture.

    The compromise the two parties are hammering out on Iraq policy reflects a deeper compromise the public seems to be groping toward on national identity – between who they are in reality (pragmatic, if sidelined, civilians who know a war is badly lost and want to end it) and who they are in their imaginations (heroic soldiers proving their character in the theater of war).

    All theater, all storytelling, rests on the power of illusion and the willing suspension of disbelief. Bush and the Republicans have repeatedly given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their post-Vietnam disbelief in traditional tales of American character; the Democrats have given millions of doubters a chance to suspend their disbelief that the will of the people can make any difference whatsoever. The two parties join together to give the whole nation a chance to believe that a fierce debate still rages about whether or not to end the war. That political show we can expect to go on at least until election day 2008.

    And we can expect both parties, and the media that keep the show going, to abide by an unspoken agreement that one kind of question will never be asked, because the tension it raises might be unbearable: Is it moral for US troops to occupy another country for years, bomb its cities and villages, and kill untold numbers of people halfway across the planet? If the script ever makes room for that question, we’ll be able to watch – and participate in – a far more profound debate about the war.

    Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.

    (Copyright 2007 Ira Chernus.)

    Children of NY latest victims 9/11

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    Lower Manhattan Children Exposed to Terrorist Attack Suffering From Breathing Problems

    Joan Trombetti

    New York City health officials have released information revealing than more than half of the children closely exposed to the September 11 terrorist attacks developed breathing problems in the years after the horrific act.

    Of the 3,184 (53 percent) children’s registered in the World Trade Center Health Registry experienced new or worsened shortness of breath, sinus problems or wheezing following the 9/11 attack. And, 180 children who registered have been diagnosed with asthma.

    It is estimated that almost half of the children were caught in the dust cloud, a significant factor in developing new asthma and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and half witnessed a disturbing event that day.

    A city-sponsored Web site (www.nyc.gov/html/doh/wtc/html/home/home.shtml) published these findings for New Yorkers and others whose health was affected by the attacks. The site includes previously unreleased information from the registry about lower Manhattan residents.

    London’s CCTV network is a waste of cash

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    £200 million and can’t solve crime
    By Nick Farrell 

    LONDON’S 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV network, which costs £200 million, might as well be cardboard boxes on the end of sticks.

    According to an analysis of London’s publicly funded spy network, the whole shebang is hopeless at helping coppers solve crime. Coppers were no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any, the analysis says.

    Four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The figures were obtained by the Liberal Democrats on the London Assembly using the Freedom of Information Act.

    The Lib-dems say that the money would not have been better spent on more police officers.

    There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totaling at about £200million.

    Hackney has the most cameras and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent. Wandsworth, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, and Lewisham which have loads of cameras fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.

    Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have less than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.

    It is not clear if the CCTV cameras help to deter crime. But that function could be simulated by sticking an empty box on a pole. Street lighting has been shown to be a more effective deterrent to crime, according to the charity Nacro.

    It seems that the cameras are hardly looked at when a crime is reported. London coppers are apparently going to get a bit more training on their use.

    Mr Bush, Mandela is still alive

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    Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader’s death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.South Africa's former President Nelson Mandela waves as he arrives to attend the unveiling ceremony of a statue in his honour in London's Parliament Square, August 29, 2007. REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico“It’s out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive,” Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush’s comments received worldwide coverage.

    In a speech defending his administration’s Iraq policy, Bush said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s brutality had made it impossible for a unifying leader to emerge and stop the sectarian violence that has engulfed the Middle Eastern nation.

    “I heard somebody say, Where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,” Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

    Jailed for 27 years for fighting white minority rule, Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for preaching racial harmony and guiding the nation peacefully into the post-apartheid era.

    References to his death — Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail — are seen as insensitive in South Africa.

    WE ARE RULED BY POLITICS OF FEAR

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    Britain is becoming a surveillance society ruled by the technology and the politics of fear, the Liberal Democrats have warned.Home Affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said the Government saw no limits to the use of technology for spying on people.

    The conference voted to repeal the ID Cards Act and for the destruction of DNA samples taken from innocent” people. It also called for appropriate regulation of CCTV cameras.

    Delegates voted for people to have the right to see any information held on them by public and private sector bodies and correct any errors they found.

    Mr Clegg told delegates: “I believe we are on the edge of a new surveillance society ruled by the technology and the politics of fear.”

    http://www.westpress.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=146242&command=displayContent&sourceNode=145920&contentPK=18452761&folderPk=75888&pNodeId=145833

    More than 1000 biometric scanners will be used as part of biometric visa scheme

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    The Home Office has signed a $4.4m (£2.18m) deal with supplier Cross Match Technologies to provide 1,385 biometric devices at government buildings based in foreign countries.

    The Guardian scanners will be used to take fingerprint readings of every applicant for a UK visa.

    The new biometric readings will help to strengthen control of British borders, said UKvisas head of procurement Andrew Pestell.

    “The recording of biometric information through our new fingerprint readers allows us to fix an individual’s identity at the earliest point practicable so that only those with permission can travel to the UK,” said Pestell.

    The UK is the first EU country to collect ten fingerprints and a digital photo from every visa applicant.

    http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2199192/home-office-reveals-18m

    Sanity in Tiny Nibbles

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    The abyss between “crime against humanity” and “we’ll have to look into this” may be all but unfathomable — deep as a mass grave — but sometimes we have to trust the process.

    I fear that democratic progress is a mouse’s progress: justice — sanity — in tiny nibbles. This past Sept. 11, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a law that seems to promise this sort of progress — to evaluate the scope of an acute, ongoing, manmade calamity — and I find myself trying to curb my sense of impatience that it doesn’t do more.

    The law authorizes the state to educate returning vets and National Guardsmen on their rights, as well as available testing and treatment, if they think they’ve been exposed to hazardous substances overseas, in particular, depleted uranium. It also sets up a task force through the Illinois Veterans Association to study the health effects of such exposure.

    Meanwhile, the profoundly undemocratic forces that have control over the mechanism of “creative destruction” on a global scale are remarkably free to wage old wars and plot new ones: to wreak mass mayhem and spread hazardous substances with impunity, in the name of national security or whatever sells, and to ignore the consequences of their actions even as democratic task forces promise, eventually, to look into some of those consequences.

    “Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran,” the UK’s Sunday Telegraph recently reported, apprising us of the state of the Bush administration’s slow-mo edging toward another shock-and-awe confrontation in the Middle East. We watch in helpless disapproval.

    Whatever else war with Iran would mean, it would mean, at the onset, another large-scale poisoning of Planet Earth and its residents — primarily Iranians, this go-around, and of course U.S. troops — with the fine-powder residue of de facto nuclear weapons: that is to say, bombs and missiles made of the high-density, super-penetrating substance called depleted uranium.

    DU, also known as U-238, is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process. It’s almost twice as dense as lead, burns when launched and explodes on impact into microscopically fine particles, which are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin; it’s also radioactive, with a half-life of more than 4 billion years. It’s a very dirty weapon, linked in every country where it has been used — Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq — with cancer and neurological, respiratory and other disorders. The time-release horror of DU, especially in tandem with other toxic substances churned up by war, belies every conceivable rationale for its use.

    “It’s a crime against humanity,” says Doug Rokke, a retired major and Gulf War 1 vet who headed up a cleanup crew in the aftermath of Desert Storm and has become one of the world’s leading experts on — and critics of — DU munitions. Rokke’s crewmembers, who readied U.S. tanks destroyed by friendly fire for transport back to the States, are either sick or dead, and Rokke himself has suffered for years with an array of symptoms that stem from breathing in DU dust.

    “I got real sick on Tuesday,” he told me last week. “I stood up and completely went down. For 30 minutes I was completely down. I had no control on the left side.” He talked about this in the context of the new Illinois law.

    “The doctors sure did get scared — I got scared,” he said. “But it was transient. It wasn’t a stroke but a neuromuscular effect. I was so sick on Tuesday and then Wednesday the first thing I saw when I finally opened my e-mail was this (legislation). I couldn’t be happier.”

    So this is my lesson in patience. This is a scary world, organized, it so often seems, for the convenience of the bellicose. The unspoken credo of the U.S. Department of Defense is surely: Mobilization without accountability. But things do change; the universe, as Martin Luther King said, bends toward justice.

    Thus Illinois’ new law, the National Guard Veterans Exposure to Hazardous Materials Act, may represent the dawn of official awareness that something is severely amiss. Five other states — Louisiana, Connecticut, New York, Washington and Hawaii — have similar legislation.

    Our vets are getting sick in frightening numbers. Why? According to VHA figures from last fall, 205,000 GIs who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, a third of the total, have sought medical care, many for troubling internal conditions such as diseases of the nervous and digestive systems. A shocking 1,584 have been diagnosed with malignant tumors. It’s sure to get worse. And nobody, of course, is tabulating stats on the Iraqis and Afghans.

    But six states now have laws authorizing local agencies to look into the matter and help vets get care they could easily be denied for the illnesses they’re bringing home. It’s a start. Awareness will grow. The mice are nibbling.

    – – –

    Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

    © 2007 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

    Iran has plan to take out Israel should they attack Iran‏

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    Nazila Fathi

    A SENIOR Iranian military official has warned that Tehran has prepared a plan to attack Israel if Israel bombs Iran.

    “We have drawn up a plan to strike back at Israel with our bombers if this regime possibly makes a silly mistake,” General Mohammad Alavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s air force, said.

    General Alavi spoke after remarks by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who said on Sunday that nations should prepare for a possible war with Iran if it continued with its nuclear drive. Mr Kouchner and the French Foreign Ministry subsequently toned down the remarks.

    International pressure on Iran increased this week. The permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, France, Britain, China and Russia – plus Germany will meet in Washington tomorrow Melbourne time to discuss tougher economic sanctions on Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    Iran has already been the target of two sets of economic sanctions.

    The US and some European countries accuse Iran of having a clandestine nuclear arms program. But Iran insists that its program is peaceful.

    General Alavi added in a long interview with Iranian news agency Fars that Iran’s “missiles can reach all parts of Israel” if Iran wants to retaliate.

    “In addition, we can attack them with our fighter bombers in case of an unlikely attack.

    “They should know that we will destroy at least 30 per cent of their forces before they can leave our country,” he warned, referring to a possible air strike against Iran.

    Iranian officials have dismissed threats of war as psychological warfare, but have vowed to retaliate if attacked.

    The White House said General Alavi’s comments were “totally unprovoked and unnecessary”.

    Earlier, Iranian Government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham dismissed as “far fetched” the idea that, if attacked, Iran would block the Hormuz Strait, the world’s most important waterway for oil shipments.

    But he said: “We would use all our means to defend ourselves, because territorial integrity is a key issue for every country.”

    US Navy chiefs are concerned that Iran could resort to mining the strait and the wider Gulf in a major conflict.

    â– A firestorm has erupted over a request made last month by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Ground Zero so he could lay a wreath.

    The request was rejected by New York police because the site is closed while construction continues on the Freedom Tower.

    But a mis-statement by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who said the request was still being considered, made its way to the websites of several newspapers and sparked a torrent of criticism from presidential candidates.

    Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani called Mr Ahmadinejad’s request “outrageous”, describing him as “a man who has made threats against the US and Israel; is harbouring (Osama) bin Laden’s son and other al-Qaeda leaders; is shipping arms to Iraqi insurgents; and is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons”.

    Syrian official: Damascus eager to respond to Israel flyover

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    Senior Ba’ath official tells Arab-Israeli reporter there is growing consensus among Syrian leadership for need to retaliate to reported Israeli violation of Syrian airspace

    Roee Nahmias

     

    A senior official in the ruling Syrian Ba’ath party said Thursday there was growing consensus among the Syrian leadership for the need to launch a military response to Israel’s reported airstrike in Syria two weeks ago.

    The official said the Syrian air force has been placed on high alert.The official made the remarks to a reporter from the Arab-Israeli newspaper Al-Hadath during a visit to Jordan.

    The official said Israel ordered the flyover in Syrian airspace to test air defense systems newly acquired from Russia.

    The official reject reports that Israel destroyed nuclear equipment sent to Syria from North Korea who has agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities in exchange for generous aide packages.

    The official accused Israel and the United States of conspiring to ignite a war in the region in Iran and Syria did not bow to Washington’s demands.

    Washington has accused Syria of smuggling Iranian arms to Hizbullah in Lebanon and of facilitating the flow of insurgents into Iraq. The United States is also pushing for a third round of UN sanctions against Iran over its disputed nuclear program.

    “The Syrians are well aware of the Israel threat and are following Israel’s military maneuvers in the north and in the Golan Heights and are wary that Israel would seek to salvage itself from the internal crisis by igniting crises abroad,” he said.

    The official also brushed off reports that Israel had targeted an Iranian weapons shipment to Hizbullah.

    “Israel is seeking to impose a certain policy on the Syrian leadership so that it retracts on its national objective to reclaim occupied lands and to punish it for supporting the resistance in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq,” the official said.

    Arabs push through nuclear vote against Israel

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    AFP

    Arab states on Thursday pushed through a resolution at the UN atomic agency clearly aimed at Israel, calling for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

    The UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) adopted an Egyptian-sponsored resolution on a nuclear weapons-free-zone in the Middle East with Israel and the US voting against and EU states except Ireland abstaining.

    The lack of consensus weakened the impact of the measure, at a general conference of the 144-nation IAEA.

    The resolution was backed by 53 votes, with two against and 47 abstentions.

    The IAEA has a tradition of adopting resolutions by consensus but the Middle East issue has become highly politicized, even though Israel backs a nuclear weapons-free-zone (NWFZ) within the framework of a Middle East peace settlement.

    Some Western and non-aligned diplomats said the problem this year was that Iran was agitating behind the scenes for a showdown over Israel, in order to distract from its own nuclear programme.

    One Western diplomat said the large abstention vote, which included Australia, Canada, Georgia, Ghana and Zambia, “shows that the world is hanging together on these matters.”

    But the Iranian speaker blasted the vote as putting into question the views of “some members that full-scope safeguards” need be complemented by wider inspection measures, as Israel, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) seemed to be exempt from this.

    An Irish diplomat said his country had voted for the text since Ireland favored a NWFZ in the Middle East. “It’s as simple as that,” the diplomat said.

    The general conference approves broad policy lines for the 144-member IAEA, the verification arm of the NPT.

    But the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors makes decisions for the agency on how policy is implemented.

    The contested resolution, backed by the Arab League, contained two new paragraphs that were added to past texts and which Israel felt expanded the scope of the resolution too much, diplomats said.

    The first called on “all states of the region, pending the establishment of the zone, not to develop, produce, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or permit the stationing on their territories … of nuclear weapons.”

    The second new paragraph urged “nuclear-weapons states and all other states to render assistance in the establishment of the zone.”

    Israel neither confirms nor denies it has nuclear weapons.

    The Arab states insist, however, that the Jewish state does have such weapons and is a danger to peace and stability in the Middle East.

    Traditionally at the IAEA’s general conference, Arab states introduce a separate resolution on the Israeli nuclear threat but in the face of strong Western opposition withdraw it.

    It is then postponed to the following year in return for Israel agreeing to a call for a NWFZ in the Middle East.

    This arrangement fell apart for the first time at last year’s general conference, when the NWFZ resolution was adopted by a vote of 89-2.

    This year Egypt refused to compromise on the text, even though the Europeans and the United States offered a consensus on the previous year’s version of the resolution.

    “They could have had consensus but look at the hash they have made of it now,” a non-aligned diplomat said.

    US ambassador Gregory Schulte said he was disappointed at the lack of consensus.

    Israel’s atomic energy chief Gideon Frank said that “for 14 years until last year, Israel has supported a consensus resolution” but could not this year due to Egypt’s unwillingness to negotiate on the hardened text, as well as on the resolution condemning Israel as a nuclear threat.

    This second resolution has not yet been presented to the general conference, which ends Friday.

    Egyptian ambassador Ehab Fawzy said the weapons-free-zone text had “not been amended for the last 15 years” and even so consensus failed to be reached last year.

    Southern US race row resonates across America

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    A protest against perceived injustice in a southern US town has brought tensions over racial equality in America to the surface again. Tens of thousands of people from across the country took part in the rally in Jena calling for the release of six black teenagers charged with beating a white schoolmate. It stems from an incident last year when, it is alleged, white students hung nooses from a tree to intimidate black pupils.

    Hostility intensified over several months and culminated in the attack of which the six teenagers have been accused. The case has reignited a national debate about civil rights, just as those of Rodney King and OJ Simpson did in the 1990s. Veteran campaigner Jesse Jackson said the events in Jena are a throwback to another era: “In 1957 it was the fight for de-segregation, Selma was about the right to vote. Today it’s about a fair criminal justice system,” he said.

    With the Louisana town now coast-to-coast news there have been smaller support rallies in New York and Washington. Even Democrat presidential hopefuls, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John Edwards have weighed in urging justice in the case.

    http://euronews.net/index.php?page=info&article=443959&lng=1

    Reviewing Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”

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    By Stephen Lendman
    RINF Alternative News

    Naomi Klein is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist. She writes a regular column for The Nation magazine and London Guardian that’s syndicated internationally by the New York Times Syndicate that gives people worldwide access to her work but not its own readers at home.

    In 2004, she and her husband and co-producer Avi Lewis released their first feature documentary – “The Take.” It covered the explosion of activism in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. People responded with neighborhood assemblies, barter clubs, mass movements of the unemployed and workers taking over bankrupt companies and reopening them under their own management.

    Klein is also the author of three books. Her first was “No Logo – Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” (2000) that analyzes the destructive forces of globalization. Next came “Fences and Windows – Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate” (2002) covering the global revolt against corporate power.

    Her newest book just out is “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” that explodes the myth of “free market” democracy. It shows how neoliberal Washington Consensus fundamentalism dominates the world with America its lead exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. Wars are waged, social services cut, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or bludgeoned to object. Klein describes a worldwide process of social and economic engineering she calls “disaster capitalism” with torture along for the ride to reinforce the message – no “New World Order” alternatives are tolerated.

    “Free market” triumphalism is everywhere – from Canada to Brazil, China to Bulgaria, Russia to South Africa, Vietnam to Iraq. In all cases, the results are the same. People are sacrificed for profits and Margaret Thatcher’s dictum applies – “there is no alternative.”

    “The Shock Doctrine” is a powerful tour de force, four years of on-the-ground research in the making and well worth the wait. In an age of corporatism partnered with corrupted political elites, it’s must reading by an author now firmly established as a major intellectual figure on the left and champion of social justice. Naomi Klein is all that and more. Even for those familiar with her topics, the book is stunning, revealing, unforgetable and essential to know. This review will cover a healthy sample of what’s in store for readers in the full equisitely written text. It’s in seven parts with a concluding section. Each will be discussed below starting with a brief introduction.

    Introduction – Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World (into Hell)

    New Orleans, post-Katrina, is a metaphor for an American-style “New World Order” with unfettered capitalism unleashed in its most savage form. Klein quotes Republican congressman Richard Baker telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did.” And New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro added: “I think we have a clean sheet to start again (and take advantage of) big opportunities.” Their scheme is erasing communities and replacing them with upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city real estate at the expense of the poor mother nature forced out and government won’t allow back.

    Enter the “grand guru” of free-wheeling capitalism, then age 93 and in failing health. This was conservative/libertarian economist Milton Friedman’s moment that he first articulated in his 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom.” His thesis: “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When a crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around….our basic function (is) to develop alternatives to existing policies (ones Friedman rejects, and have them ready to roll out when the) the impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Klein calls crises “democracy-free zones,” and Friedman’s thesis “the shock doctrine.” For New Orleans it means “permanent reforms” like destroying public housing and issuing vouchers for privatized schools in lieu of rebuilding public ones with government reconstruction funds.

    For Friedman, government’s sole function is “to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies….and from our fellow-citizens.” It’s to “preserve law and order (as well as) enforce private contracts, (and) foster competitive markets.” In his view, anything else in public hands is socialism that for “free market” fundamentalists like Friedman is blasphemy.

    Until 1973, Friedman’s radical doctrine stayed in his classroom, but all that changed on an earlier September 11. Following General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody ascent to power, he had a real life laboratory as advisor to the new Chilean dictator. His prescription came to be known as the “Chicago School” revolution of rapid-fire economic transformation he called “shock treatment,” now known as “shock therapy.” It’s an economic version of “destroy(ing) the village (and country) to save it” from the Vietnam era and nearly as harsh.

    Millions know its lessons, but Friedman’s not their hero. It’s central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws, harsh crackdowns and torture along for the ride to reinforce the core tenet Reaganites call “trickle down” and Brits call “Thatcherism.”

    Its recipients call it hell, and Klein explains why – in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Russia, the Falklands, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Orleans, Israel, and coming to a neocon-occupied homeland neighborhood near you. It’s “disaster capitalism” unleashed, and business is booming. Klein cites insiders saying opportunities are on a par with a thriving “emerging market….”the deals are even better than the dot-com days, and the ‘the security bubble’ picked up the slack when those earlier bubbles popped.”

    Reaganomics adherents are today’s neoconservatives with the “full force of the US military machine (serving their unfettered) corporate agenda” of greed writ large. Its holy policy trinity is: “elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending (if any at all).” But instead of lifting all boats as promised, it’s mirror opposite. It creates a powerful ruling corporatist class partnered with corrupted political elites – “with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups.” Russia got billionaire “oligarchs,” China “the princelings,” Chile “the piranhas,” and America the Bush-Cheney “Pioneers.”

    Everywhere, the scheme is the same: huge public wealth transfers to private hands, exploding public debt most often, “an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism (like George Bush’s permanent “war on terrorism” and the world) that justifies bottomless spending on security.” “Inside the bubble” is paradise. Outside, however, is hell with “aggressive surveillance, mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties,” a declining standard of living, and repression and torture reinforcing the message to non-believers.

    Klein calls the harshness “a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic.” When applied, it induces a state of “deep disorientation,” and shock to force targets “to make concessions against their will.” The “shock doctrine” works the same way on a mass scale, and the 9/11 experience proved it. It exploded the “familiar world” and created a period of disorientation and regression the Bush administration jumped on abroad and at home. As Klein put it: “Suddenly we found ourselves living in a kind of Year Zero (with) everything we knew of the world before (now) dismissed as ‘pre-9/11’ thinking.” We became a “blank slate, a clean sheet of paper,” and the administration did what was impossible before. It’s how the “shock doctrine” works: “the original disaster (terror attack, war, hurricane, market meltdown) puts the entire population into a state of collective shock” enabling policy manipulators to move in for the kill to remake the world in their image and get it done before the shock wears off.

    Part 1 – Two Doctor Shocks – Torture and Chicago School Fundamentalism

    Following a crisis shock, another quickly follows. The corporate piranhas exploit disorientation with economic “shock therapy” along with “police, soldiers and prison interrogators” with torture their method of choice “to build a model country (by) erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch.”

    Klein reviews the history of CIA’s interest in torture as a way to control the human mind. It began with the Montreal doctor they funded to perform “bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients (by) keeping them asleep and in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock (plus) experimental (psychedelic LSD and hallucinogen PCP angel dust) drug cocktails.”

    The experiments were performed at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute by Dr. Ewen Cameron even though they clearly violated all standards of medical ethics using human guinea pigs without their permission with permanent damage their reward. Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of shocks, he could “unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild (on a blank slate) new personalities” cleansed of their previous nature. It was voodoo science, and it failed. His patients were his victims, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it now employs with no pangs of conscience or regard for ethics.

    Klein traces CIA’s interest in mind manipulation to a 1951 trinational meeting of intelligence agencies and academics in Montreal when concern was that Communists could brainwash POWs to control them. That was when the spy agency engaged Canadian researchers to learn how, and one of them was Dr. Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill, who was working on the problem. Intelligence agencies were impressed enough with his work to fund classified sensory-deprivation experiments on volunteer McGill students.

    They proved intensive isolation interferes with clear thinking enough to make people more receptive to suggestion. They were also “formidable interrogation techniques” amounting to torture that Hebb knew violated medical ethics. He later characterized Cameron’s work as “criminally stupid,” but CIA got what it wanted – a way to interrogate “resistant sources” in a “new age of precise, refined torture, not the gory, inexact” kind from the Spanish Inquisition or what Nazis and other tyrants often practiced. Cameron’s experiments with human guinea pigs built on Hebb’s earlier work laying the foundation for CIA’s “two-stage psychological torture method” of sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy in his book, “A Question of Torture” on CIA interrogation, called it “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.”

    Pre-9/11, these techniques were freely used covertly as any form of abuse or torture violates the Geneva, UN and other statutes prohibiting these practices as well as the US Army’s own Uniform Code of Military Justice barring “cruelty” and “oppression” of prisoners. No longer, as “On September 11, 2001, that longtime insistence on plausible deniability went out the window” as well as any claim this nation respects the law and rights of free people everywhere. What once was done sub rosa or by proxy is now condoned and authorized at the highest levels of government on the fraudulent claim of national security to hide the real aim of social control.

    Klein notes torture is still technically banned in the US, but only when pain is the “equivalent in intensity to (what accompanies) serious physical injury, such as organ failure.” Simply put, anything goes, but it’s not put that way. In Iraq, it was thought “shock and awe” would be so stunning, Iraqis “would go into a kind of suspended animation.” A second makeover Chicago School fundamentalism shock could then be imposed on a blank post-invasion slate, and bingo, mission accomplished. Klein notes “there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people” who were blasted with more shocks when they resisted. Like Cameron and his experiments, “Iraq’s shock doctors can destroy, but they can’t seem to rebuild,” and the same is true wherever these shock doctors show up.

    Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Factory

    The epicenter of shock ideology is the University of Chicago Economics Department. It came out of the 1950s “in the thrall” (of a) man on a mission to fundamentally revolutionize his profession,” and on that score Milton Friedman succeeded mightily. Friedman, now gone, believed, markets work efficiently and best unfettered of rules, regulations, onerous taxes, trade barriers, entrenched interests, and human interference. Whereas Cameron believed electroshocks could restore natural health, Friedman favored economic shock as extreme and destructive to nations as Cameron and CIA’s methods are to human minds.

    Friedman taught this voodoo science and believed to the end, all contrary evidence aside, it was perfect and worked. Chicago School fundamentalism developed at a post-war time in the 1950s when leftist ideas supporting worker rights were gaining ground. Where they “promised (workers) freedom from bosses, citizens from dictatorship (and) countries from colonialism,” Friedman promised “individual freedom” to choose that appealed to owners of capital who embraced him and his thinking.

    It stood in stark contrast to what became known as “developmentalism” or “Third World nationalism” in the post-war developing world. Economists in it favored an “inward-oriented industrialization” strategy to break the cycle of poverty and grow. Like Keynesians and social democrats, they showed it worked in Latin America’s Southern Cone with leaders like Juan Peron “put(ting) their ideas into practice with a vengeance (by) pouring public money into infrastructure projects, (providing) local businesses generous subsidies, and keeping out foreign imports with….high tariffs.” It brought prosperity to the South and “dark days” for Friedman, his acolytes, and free-wheeling capitalists losing out to social progress.

    It sprung corporate America to action by funding a legion of think tank and Chicago School foot soldiers to change the message and fortunes of their businesses. Friedman was their ideological leader preaching public wealth should be in private hands, rules and regulations out the window, accumulation of profits unrestrained, and social welfare programs curtailed or abolished. In short – deregulate, privatize and get government out of the business of everything besides providing security and enforcing contracts. He also believed taxes were onerous and once said he was “in favor of cutting (them) under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible….”

    He also said corporations should be exempt from federal taxes claiming what they pay ends up in consumer prices that, in fact, is pure nonsense as every marketing MBA (like this writer) learns straightaway. The fundamental law of pricing is to charge what the market will bear, no more or less. In other words, get all you can but no more than buyers will pay. Soon enough they’d pay plenty in the developing world.

    In 1953, the US declared war against “developmentalism” with CIA’s first ever coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Another followed the next year in Guatemala, and in both instances democratically elected leaders were ousted because corporate interests opposed them. It was only the beginning, and Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” soon had a real time laboratory to prove their “capitalist utopia” worked.

    Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government electoral victory in 1970 was the opportunity. Three years later he was out giving Friedman the chance he wanted. Klein related the results in what she called “the first Chicago School state” with others to follow. They’re all the same with “an unstoppable hurricane of mutually reinforcing destruction and reconstruction, erasure and creation” following the crisis. Next is unfettered economic shock therapy with torture and disappearances awaiting resisters and anyone guilty of bad thinking. Friedman’s brave new world was beginning to roll. It’s devastation is everywhere including at home.

    Part 2 – The First Test – The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution

    Counterrevolution began 34 years ago in Chile on another September 11 that should have been unimaginable and had to seem surreal. There were tanks in the streets and fighter jets attacking government buildings in a scene all too real and deadly. It played out in Santiago and around Chile and was just the beginning of a long nightmare. It brought General Augusto Pinochet to power (with plenty of CIA help) who called his action “a war,” not a coup, and to reinforce his message he made it seem like one. Blood in the streets, the presidential palace in flames, and President Salvador Allende dead ended the most vibrant democracy in the Americas. It was a cakewalk with “the junta’s grand battle over by mid-afternoon.”

    A state of siege was imposed followed by mass arrests, killings and torture in a climate of fear that enveloped the country. Allende supporters were targeted in Chile’s “Caravan of Death.” Chileans paid dearly, but the Chicago Boys had their moment of triumph, and they were ready. Rolling off the press was their detailed economic manual for the new government called “The Brick.” It was a 500 page Chicago School shock therapy wish list. It was “the first Chicago School state,” its first “global counterrevolution” victory, and “a genesis of terror” in a brave new world for Chileans.

    The economic playbook was right from Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” that’s long on free market triumphalism and void on its effects on real people. It was pure Friedman featuring mass privatizations, deregulation and deep social spending cuts flavored generously with corporate-friendly tax cuts, trade unionist crackdowns, savage repression for non-believers, and an end to Chile’s social democratic state Friedman condemned.

    Pinochet bought it along with a team of Chicago School alumni called “technos.” They embarked on a free market binge with disastrous results. In the first year, inflation hit 375%, thousands of Chileans lost jobs, the country was flooded with cheap imports, local businesses closed and hunger grew along with public and small business discontent in this free market “paradise.” In desperation, “it was time to call in the big guns” with Milton Friedman coming to Santiago to reinforce his message that for things to improve they first had to get worse. It was classic shock treatment and Chicago School baloney with Friedman preaching patience and promising an “economic miracle” if his prescription was followed.

    Pinochet agreed, and slash and burn followed with visions of paradise at the end of the rainbow. It was pure untested fantasy, and the results showed it. After one year of hardened shock therapy, Chile’s economy contracted 15%, unemployment rocketed to 20%, and contrary to Friedman’s rosy scenario it lasted for years with no social safety net help for desperate Chileans.

    Klein notes Chile today is still cited as a model that free market “Friedmanism” works in spite of the clear evidence it doesn’t. Growth did resume a decade later, but only after conditions worsened. It forced Pinochet to reinstate Allende policies like renationalizing privatized companies but not his social democratic agenda. Chileans were left with the shambles. When the economy stabilized and rapid growth resumed in the late 80s, poverty was 45%, but the richest 10% saw their incomes rise by 83%. Even today, Klein notes, Chile remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. It’s shock therapy miracle shifted “wealth to the top and shock(ed) much of the middle class out of existence.”

    It’s the way it works everywhere and a glimpse of the future: “an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population (excluded); out-of-control corruption and cronyism; (decimated) nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; (mass) transfer of (public) wealth (and resources) to private hands (accompanied by) a huge (shift) of private debts into public hands.” Inside the Chilean bubble was paradise. Outside was “The Great Depression.” Bubble-benefitters reacted with “junkie logic: Where is the next fix?”

    It was first across the border in other Latin American Southern Cone countries where the “counterrevolution spread (and) people vanish(ed).” Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were targeted with similar results as in Chile under juntas replacing democrats. Chicago School fundamentalism was on a roll, and woe to the non-believers. Nations that were developmentalism models became wastelands with decades of worker gains lost almost overnight. Factories closed, wages fell, unemployment soared, poverty grew severe, dissenters disappeared, and ordinary people suffered to prove what pin-stripped academics knew after Chile went sour. Instead, it was on to the next target.

    In them all, the slate was cleansed and terror unleashed, unrestrained by national borders. Former Allende economist and diplomat turned activist Marcos Orlando Letelier became a victim in September, 1976. While living in Washington, he condemned Chile’s “economic freedom” for the privileged and paid with his life. Pinochet’s DINA secret police killed him and his American colleague, Ronni Moffit, by remote-detonating a bomb planted under his driver’s seat. An FBI investigation learned the assassins entered the country under false passports with full CIA knowledge and complicity.

    The purging included cleansing wrong ideas and thinkers like legendary left wing Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara. He was seized and taken to Chile’s notorious National (killing and torture) Stadium to be reeducated. Soldiers broke his hands so he couldn’t play the guitar. Then they shot him 44 times “to make sure he couldn’t inspire from….the grave.” One culture was being erased and replaced by another. As in Nazi Germany, books were burned, newspapers and magazines shuttered, universities occupied and strikes and political meetings banned. Trade unionists were specially targeted as threats to the new economic order. It’s leaders were rounded up, movement members viciously attacked, and “battalions” targeted workers in factories. They were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared in a sweeping reign of terror designed to crush opposition and wrong-thinking.

    In Argentina, Ford Motor Company’s local subsidiary was complicit. It helped soldiers and secret police rid unionists from its factories and supplied vehicles as well. Green Ford Falcon sedans became the feared symbol of terror an Argentine playwright called “death-mobiles.” Many thousands kidnapped and disappeared rode off in these cars, never to return.

    Farmers involved in land reform struggles also were targeted along with anyone with “a vision of society built on values other than pure profit.” It affected community worker activists, many church-connected, who wanted social services like health care, public housing and education the state was erasing through shock therapy and mass repression. Klein noted while “policies attempted to excise collectivism from the culture, inside….prisons (the practice was to) excise it from the mind and spirit.” The sickness was democratic socialism, the cure pain and suffering. Wrong-thinkers were taught the hard way, and many paid with their lives. Chicago School fundamentalism is harsh medicine. Its grand guru, Milton Friedman, was unrepentant. He called it “freedom” and took his mathematical model miracle to the grave amidst a hail of undeserved eulogies.

    In his memoirs before he died, his “blatant revisionism” on Chile was shameful and disturbing. He falsely claimed Pinochet only asked for help in 1975 when, in fact, the Chicago Boys worked with the military before the 1973 coup, and their policies were implemented on Pinochet’s first day in power. Friedman also claimed the junta’s repressive years didn’t undo Chilean democracy. In his view, it opened up “more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life (offering a greater) chance of a return to a democratic society.” It was classic convoluted Chicago School thinking. It made him famous courtesy of corporate triumphalism, generous funding and an utter disdain for human rights and dignity.

    Friedman also used his 1976 Nobel lecture to argue economics was as scientifically accurate and objective as other sciences. He failed to mention its dark side – devastating poverty, unemployment, shuttered factories and mass human misery and deaths in the first nation adopting his ideology on its victimized people. Now it’s everywhere and savagely enforced in an age of corporate dominance, wars for profit and neglect of human needs to fund them. That’s Friedman’s real legacy from the barrel of a gun and called “freedom.”

    Part 3 – Surviving Democracy

    Chicago School dogma became known as Thatcherism in Britain, but its prime minister wasn’t an early adherent. Margaret Thatcher thought Chilean shock therapy wasn’t possible in a democracy like the UK because voters wouldn’t buy it. Three years into her first term, her approval rating was lower than George Bush’s. She was in danger of not being reelected and didn’t dare risk imposing bitter economic medicine that would sink her chances. That is, until destiny intervened on April 2, 1982 when Argentina invaded the British-held Falkland Islands off its coast that was unimportant to either country except for the political hay to gain from war.

    Thatcher jumped at the chance to regain her footing and “went into Churchillian battle mode,” even though Argentina’s president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, wasn’t Adolph Hitler. But defending the British empire was almost as good, and it paid off. Thatcher’s political future was at stake. She revived it, more than doubled her approval rating and henceforth was known as the “Iron Lady” that for her was high praise, and she made the most of it.

    She launched a “corporatist revolution” based on Chicago School economics she thought impossible earlier. She parlayed her new popularity to a victory against striking coal miners in 1984 with tactics like unleashing 8000 “truncheon-wielding” riot police in a single confrontation. Before the strike ended, thousands of workers were injured, but Thatcher stood firm with a clear message to other unionists. Take what you’re offered or get the same medicine.

    She didn’t stop there, and what followed was a radical economic agenda in a wave of state enterprise privatizations including British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Steel and others in what Klein called “the first mass privatization auction in a Western democracy.” It proved Chicago School fundamentalism didn’t need repressive dictatorships to advance as long as “Iron Ladies” like Thatcher were around to match the best of them, short of all out tanks in the streets shock therapy, that is. Her eleven and a half years in power proved it, and Britain hasn’t been the same since with Labor as committed now as the Tories.

    Bolivia was soon targeted as well, but in 1985 was part a democratic wave sweeping the world. It was an election year with two familiar figures facing off for the presidency – former dictator Hugo Banzar and former elected president, Victor Paz Estenssoro. It was close and Banzar thought he won so before final returns were in he named 30 year old Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to help develop an anti-inflation economic plan for the country.

    Sachs was part Keynsian but larger part Chicago School adherent that made for a bad combination. He bought its orthodoxy in softer form by supporting debt relief and generous aid along with the shock therapy he advised Banzar to adopt as the only solution to hyperinflation.

    As it turned out, Banzar lost and Paz won, and while no socialist, he was no Chicago School adherent either, or so voters thought. Four days into his term, he charged his emergency economic team to radically restructure the economy using shock therapy with a twist. It was much harsher than Sachs proposed with the entire state-centered structure Paz erected decades earlier dismantled in the first 100 days before the public could react. In its place, food subsidies were ended, price controls lifted, wages frozen, oil prices hiked 300%, deep government spending cuts imposed, unrestricted imports allowed, and state-owned companies downsized as a first step to privatizing them. It cost hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs, pensions and safety net protections. Friedman continued to roll.

    The results were predictable. The minimum wage never regained its value, and two years later real wages were down 40% and average per capita income dropped from $845 in 1985 to $789 in 1987. As in other shock therapy countries, a small elite got richer while the great majority of Bolivians lost out with campesinos faring worst. In 1987, they earned on average $140 a year, or less than one-fifth the nation’s declining average income.

    Bolivian misery gave Sachs star status for the country’s “Miracle.” It launched his new career and brought him to Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and Russia later on plus a best-selling book and three-part PBS “success story” series. The only problem was it wasn’t true. President Paz had no mandate for shock therapy, and many workers were predictably furious at his betrayal. They went on strike and Paz’s response made Margaret Thatcher’s earlier action against striking coal miners seem tame by comparison. Tanks rolled in the streets, and riot police raided union halls, a university and factories. Hundreds of arrests followed, including the top 200 union leaders, and oppositional politics was banned. The siege lasted three months during the decisive shock therapy period with more repression and Chicago School medicine later.

    It showed shock therapy needs harsh authoritarian rule backing with Bolivia’s pin-stripped politicians, economists and bureaucrats administering it, not uniformed soldiers as in Chile. Paz’s democratic victory was illusory like others when leaders renege on promises and sacrifice them on the alter of Chicago School orthodoxy.

    Argentina was another “textbook case.” In the post-Falklands War period, it was burdened with billions in odious debt Washington insisted be serviced and paid. It was far more onerous after the (Paul) “Volker Shock” when the US Federal Reserve Chairman hiked interest rates up to 21% in the early-mid 1980s to fight inflation, so he said. It was painful in the US and disastrous for developing countries turning their debt burdens into crises. New loans were needed to pay off old ones, and the debt spiral was born afflicting nations then and still today. That was the whole idea, or at least one of them.

    Argentina, Brazil and other countries had another option they didn’t take – defaulting on debt so great it was unrepayable. As Klein put it: “Understandably (new democracies were) unwilling to go to war with Washington (and the international lending agencies it controls so they) had little choice but to play by Washington’s rules (and) in the early eighties (they) got a great deal stricter….It was the dawn of the era of ‘structural adjustment’ – otherwise known as the dictatorship of debt.”

    In the 1980s, Chicago School economists colonized the IMF and World Bank to advance their corporatist crusade. Economist John Williamson named it “the Washington Consensus” that stuck ever since. It consisted of core economic policies both institutions consider essential for economic health according to their orthodoxy. We know them well: all “state enterprises ….privatized (and) barriers impeding entry of foreign firms….abolished.” There was more that together was classic Friedman dogma: privatization, deregulation, unrestricted free trade (never called fair), and deep cuts in government spending except for security.

    Indebted developing countries learned shock doctrine 101 the hard way. Getting aid meant accepting Washington Consensus rules – the whole package. So to save their countries, they had to “sell (them) off.” Klein calls Argentina the “model student” in the 1990s under leaders like Carlos Menem. Appointing Domingo Cavallo economy minister signaled he bought the corporatist package. But as Klein points out: “Argentina was not unique (and by 1999) Chicago School alumni included more than twenty-five government ministers and more than a dozen central bank presidents from Israel to Costa Rica.”

    Shock therapy was on a role that in Argentina turned into a textbook case of therapeutically induced disaster. What Time magazine in 1992 called “Menem’s Miracle” became Menem’s Mirage when the economy collapsed in 2001, and Argentina did the unthinkable with Menem gone and a new president in power. It defaulted on an $805 million debt to the World Bank. It should have ended the neoliberal experiment, but instead it spread. Economic crises fueled it, and when old ones ebbed “even more cataclysmic ones appear(ed): tsunamis, hurricanes, wars and terrorist attacks. Disaster capitalism was taking shape” with shock therapy its tool of choice.

    Part 4 – Lost in Transition: Slamming the Door on History

    Before the Berlin Wall fell, Lech Walesa became a labor hero in Poland and the West by defying the Moscow-controlled government and getting away with it. Solidarnosc (Solidarity) spread from its Gdansk roots to the country’s mines, shipyards and factories and within a year had 10 million members. They won the right to bargain but wanted more. They aspired to take over the state and institute their own alternative economic and political program. It’s radical centerpiece was to transform huge state-run companies into worker-run cooperatives so Solidarity members could be empowered in their own “socialized enterprise.”

    Walesa objected, lost the debate, and he feared what then happened. The Jaruzelski government declared martial law, sent tanks to the streets and rounded up thousands of Solidarity members. By the late 80s, the crackdown subsided, the economy was in free fall, workers again struck and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist government was in power in Moscow. Solidarity was legalized, a Citizens’ Committee Solidarity wing was formed, its members stood in snap elections and won effective control of the government capturing 260 parliamentary seats.

    It should have been the best of times, but with the economy in trouble, Poland needed aid including debt relief. With Chicago School alumni running IMF, none was offered except under Washington Consensus rules, take it or leave it. Enter Jeffrey Sach, the shock doc, with an even harsher plan than imposed on Bolivia. It included an immediate end to price controls, slashing subsidies, and privatizing mines, shipyards and factories. It short, it ran directly counter to Solidarity’s aim for worker-run industry.

    Sachs promised Solidarity Poland could become like France or Germany under his plan. By swallowing shock therapy medicine first, taking the pain, the patient would end up cured and healthy – if he was right. After debate, the verdict was in and the treatment bought with predictable results. Sachs promised “momentary dislocations” but delivered a full-blown depression. Industrial production plummeted 30% after two years of “reforms.” Unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 hit 25% in some areas. It’s still chronic today with recent World Bank figures pegging it at around 20%, the highest in the European Union. For young people, it’s even worse with 40% of workers under 24 unemployed.

    Most alarming is the number of people in poverty. From a 15% level in 1989, it rose to a startling 59% in 2003. Incredibly, the country, like Chile, is still cited as a free market reform model. It’s pure myth, angry Poles know it, but reports in the West ignore them as they do shocked victims everywhere.

    They didn’t ignore “the shock of Tiananmen Square,” but didn’t report it accurately either. In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping was transforming his country economically while keeping rigid political control including iron-fisted repression when needed. Democracy was nowhere in sight nor is it now. While many of Deng’s reforms were successful and popular, others in the late 80s weren’t, and it provoked deep anger in the cities by people most affected. Price controls were lifted, corruption and nepotism was rampant, freedom minimal, job security eliminated, unemployment soared, and deep inequalities grew between “winners and losers in the new China.”

    It came to a head with mass protests in 1989 in Tiananmen Square that Western reports characterized as a clash between old-guard Communist authoritarians and idealistic students wanting western-style democracy. It was pure propaganda. The protests were massive and threatened the government, but democracy wasn’t the issue. It was popular discontent from wrenching economic change raising prices, lowering wages, and causing “a crisis of layoffs and unemployment.” Protesters weren’t against economic reform. They were against the Chicago School version of it, but their efforts were costly.

    Deng declared martial law May 20, tanks rolled in the square, indiscriminate shooting took place, and when it ended thousands were dead, many more thousands injured, and still more thousands hunted down, arrested, jailed, some tortured, and hundreds likely executed. Shock therapy rolled in China as in Chile – through the barrel of a gun and raw state terror. Following the crackdown, China opened to foreign investment, joined the WTO, and turned the country into the world’s largest low wage sweatshop for Wal-Mart’s “Always Low Prices.”

    For foreign investors and party apparatchiks, it was a win-win arrangement with Klein citing a 2006 study showing 90% of China’s billionaires to be Communist Party officials. About 2900 “party scions” (called “the princelings”) control $260 billion, and Klein notes the “stark similarity between (China’s authoritarian rule) and Chicago School capitalism – a shared willingness to disappear opponents, blank the slate of all resistance and begin anew” using shock and fear to transform countries into free market paradises for the privileged.

    The Tragedy of South Africa’s “Democracy Born in Chains”

    Klein quotes Nelson Mandela in January, 1990 (two weeks before he was freed) in a note to his supporters from prison saying: “The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC (and changing) our views….is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.” That belief became ANC policy in 1955 in its Freedom Charter. The liberation struggle wasn’t just about a political system but an economic one as well. White workers in mines earned 10 times more than blacks, and large industrialists worked with the military to enforce order and disappear dissenters.

    Once apartheid ended, a new way was possible, and Mandela seemed poised to lead it. The ANC had “a unique opportunity to reject the free market orthodoxy of the day” and choose a “third path between Communism and capitalism.” ANC candidates swept the 1994 elections and Mandela became president at a time South Africa surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world. Negotiations were held with the ruling National Party, and a peaceful handover was achieved but not without “prevent(ing) South Africa’s apartheid-era rulers from wreaking havoc on their way out the door.”

    Negotiations took place on two parallel tracks – political and economic. Mandela and his chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, “won on almost every count” politically. But along side it, economic negotiations were held with the country’s current president, Thabo Mbeki, in charge with the outcome in the end far different. With ANC leaders preoccupied with controlling Parliament, the former white supremacist government and industrialists were determined to safeguard their wealth, and they succeeded by assuring Washington Consensus policies would be instituted when political power changed hands.

    ANC economists and lawyers were outfoxed or outgunned by the opposition, IMF, World Bank, GATT and power of big capital against inexperienced politicians and technocrats who ended up losers. Black officials controlled the government, but discovered the real power was elsewhere. As Klein put it: “The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured.” The leadership mistakenly thought once firmly in power they could undo earlier made transition compromises.

    They couldn’t or didn’t for the same reasons other developing countries accept free market rules. Adopt them or be punished by the market as Mandela learned when he was freed. The South African stock market collapsed in panic, and the country’s currency (the rand) dropped by 10%. He acknowledged the problem later on saying it’s “impossible for countries….to decide economic policy without regard to the likely response of these markets.” It’s too bad he didn’t know how Hugo Chavez managed after 1999 (oil aside). He achieved what Mandela reneged on, and Venezuela’s economy is booming. Had he and ANC officials stood their ground early on, South Africa (with its mineral riches) might have done the same thing – had a growth economy in a socially democratic state and a model for its neighbors.

    They didn’t, black South Africans lost out, Mandela’s legacy is tainted, and a key factor was current president Thabo Mbeki. He spent spent years studying in exile in England during the apartheid years during which time “he was breathing in the fumes of Thatcherism.” He became the ANC’s free market tutor, believed in market fundamentalism, and its prescription was “growth and more growth.” It meant neoliberal shock therapy with the full Friedman package Mbeki supported. He later professed: “Just call me a Thatcherite,” and Mandela told journalist John Pilger the same thing in retirement saying: “….you can call it Thatcherite but, for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy.”

    After over a decade of that agenda (1994 – 06), Klein highlighted the toll showing conditions today much worse than under apartheid, and ANC’s leadership responsible:

    — the number of people living on less than $1 a day doubled from two to four million;

    — the unemployment rate more than doubled to 48% from 1991 – 2002;

    — only 5000 of 35 million black South Africans earn over $60,000 a year;

    — the ANC government build 1.8 million homes while two million South Africans lost theirs;

    — nearly one million South Africans were evicted from farms in the first decade of democracy; as a result, the shack dweller population grew by 50%, and in 2006, 25% of South Africans lived in them with no running water or electricity. And there’s more:

    — the HIV/AIDS infection rate is about 20%, and the Mbeki government shamefully denied the severity of the crisis and did little to alleviate it; it’s been a major reason why average life expectancy in the country declined by 13 years since 1990;

    — 40% of schools have no electricity;

    — 25% of people have no access to clean water and most who do can’t afford the cost; and

    — 60% of people have inadequate sanitation, and 40% no telephones.

    “Freedom” for these people and all black South Africans came at a high price, and no efforts are being made to ameliorate it. Political empowerment was traded for economic apartheid under Chicago School fundamentalist rules. Klein observed: “Never before had a government-in-waiting been so seduced by the international community.” If China, Vietnam and even Russia saw “the neoliberal light,” Mandela was told, how could South Africa resist it. The ANC leadership might have (and Mandela had the credentials to lead them) had they examined the wreckage around the world in Friedman-seduced countries. Instead, they took the easy way out and surrendered.

    Russia Chooses “the Pinochet Option”

    The man who ignited political and social change in Russia wasn’t around long enough to lead it. Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in March, 1985, believing the economy stalled and needed change. His solution became glasnost (liberalizing opening up) and perestroika (reconstruction), and Soviet Russia would never be the same again. By the early 1990s the press was freed, the constitutional court was independent, and elections were held for Russia’s parliament, local councils, president and vice-president. In addition, Gorbachev favored a Scandinavian-style social democracy combining free market capitalism with strong social safety net protections. He hoped to build “a socialist beacon for all mankind.” He never got the chance.

    While still in office at the 1991 G7 meeting in London, his fellow heads of state delivered a free market message Chicago School-style. Later, the IMF, World Bank and other international lending agencies reinforced it – Soviet-era debts must be honored and aid depended on adopting strict shock therapy rules. The Soviet Union soon dissolved, Gorbachev was out, Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s president, and Chicago School fundamentalism was adopted as needed “reform.” Klein calls what happened next “one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy (in peacetime) in modern history.”

    Yeltsin assembled a team of Chicago School ideologues to remake the economy. Jeffrey Sachs showed up, too, with other US-funded transition experts to help write privatization decrees, launch a New York-style stock exchange, and craft a total radical economic makeover for a country long used to central planning. Only one thing stood in the way – democracy, and a parliament able to vote down what Yeltsin’s team designed. A clash of wills drew closer in the spring of 1993 when parliament’s budget diverged from IMF demands for strict austerity. Yeltsin reacted with the “Pinochet option.” He issued decree 1400 dissolving parliament and abolishing the constitution. Two days later, parliament voted 636 – 2 to impeach him, and battle lines were drawn.

    Yeltsin sent troops to surround parliament and cut off power, heat and phone lines. The army backed him and he pressed on. He then proceeded to dissolve all city and regional councils in the country. Then, on October 4, 1993, he ordered the army to storm the parliament, set it ablaze and “defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy.” The assault took about 500 lives, wounded nearly 1000 others with the enthusiastic support from the West in headlines like the Washington Post proclaiming “Victory Seen for Democracy” in Russia. Some democracy.

    Yeltsin now had unchecked dictatorial power, the West had its man in Moscow, and shock therapy had an open field to inflict wreckage on Russia’s people who didn’t know what him them as it unfolded. A corporatist state replaced a communist one, and its apparatchiks were winners along with a handful of western mutual fund managers who made “dizzying returns investing in newly privatized Russian companies.” In addition, “a clique of nouveaux billionaires” (17 in all called “the oligarchs”) were empowered to strip mine the country of its wealth and ship profits offshore at the rate of $2 billion a month.

    As a result, Yeltsin’s popularity plunged so he did what all desperate leaders do to hold power with the next election to worry about. He began a war in 1994 in the breakaway Chechen republic killing 100,000 civilians by the late 90s. Elections were held in 1996, and Yeltsin won by overcoming his low approval ratings with huge oligarch-funding and near-total control of television coverage. He then quietly handed power to Vladimir Putin on December 31, 1999 without an election but with the stipulation he was exempt from criminal prosecution. His legacy was devastating with Klein noting “never have so many lost so much in so short a time.” When Russia’s 1998 financial crisis hit:

    — 80% of Russia’s farmers were bankrupt;

    — around 70,000 states factories had closed;

    — an “epidemic” of unemployment raged;

    — before shock therapy in 1989, two million Russians lived in poverty on less than $4 a day; by the mid-90s, the World Bank estimated 74 million were impoverished and by 1996 conditions for 25% (almost 37 million) Russians were “desperate” and the country’s underclass remained permanent;

    — Russians drink twice as much now as before; painkilling and hard drug use increased 900%, and HIV/AIDS threatens to become epidemic with a 20-fold jump in infections since 1995; suicides are also rising, and violent crime increased more than fourfold; and

    — Russia’s population is declining by 700,000 a year with capitalism having already having killed off 10% of it as one more example of free market-inflicted disaster. That’s the brave new world disease spreading everywhere with another scorched-earth stop below. Friedman called it “freedom.”

    The Looting of Asia

    In the summer of 1997, economic crisis hit Asia from no apparent cause beyond rumors the Thai bhat was in trouble, and Thailand didn’t have enough dollars to back it. Hot money in became an electronic stampede out with “Asian Contagion” unleashed and heading for Indonesia, South Korea and other so-called Asian Tiger countries that were fast-growth miracles until they crashed together with the plight of one affecting the others. It then got worse and spread to Latin America and Russia with US markets also affected briefly in 1997 and then again with a severe jolt in the summer of 1998.

    The 1997 Asian panic was crippling with $600 billion in stock market wealth taking decades to build wiped out in a year. Klein notes “a classic fear cycle” ignited the crisis that might have been contained by the same type “quick, decisive loan” rescue package offered Mexico in 1994 in their so-called Tequila Crisis. It would have been a strong signal to markets the US Treasury and international lending agencies wouldn’t let the Asian Tigers fail. No help came, and the message instead was: “Don’t help Asia.” Why? Because “Asia’s catastrophe was an opportunity (for predatory western corporations and vulture investors) in disguise.”

    Asian Tigers grew by protecting their markets and barring foreign companies from ownership of land or national firms. They also restricted imports from the West and Japan and instead built up their own domestic markets. Western predators wanted unfettered entry to the region with the right to scoop up the best Asian companies but needed a way to do it. Now they had it from an event Klein calls “the fall of a second Berlin Wall,” as important to western capital as the first one.

    Enter the IMF with crisis-struck Asian countries too sick to resist it. They needed help, and the lending agency had plenty to offer on similar terms as to previous crisis recipients. With economies in trouble and empty treasuries, the Tigers got no choice. First, they had to remove all “trade and investment protectionism and activist state intervention that were the key ingredients of the Asian miracle.” IMF also demanded big spending cuts, “flexible” workforces (meaning mass layoffs and constrained wages and benefits), privatized basic services, and the rest of the package they demand for loans.

    The regional toll was devastating with the International Labor Organization estimating 24 million lost jobs along with “what was so remarkable about the region’s ‘miracle’ in the first place: its large and growing middle class.” In addition, 20 million people fell into the “planned misery” of poverty, reversing an earlier trend reducing it. Women and children suffered most with families selling daughters to human sex traffickers to survive as child prostitution had a new growth market.

    So did Wall Street as IMF structural adjustments put “pretty much everything in Asia….up for sale” in the affected countries. The more markets panicked, the lower asking prices became, and the more pressured hurting companies were to sell out for what they could get or face bankruptcy. It was a bonanza for buyers, and major deals went through in a great fire sale at bargain prices. Asia became hugely transformed with hundreds of local brands replaced by western transnational ones. The New York Times called it “the world’s biggest going-out-of-business sale.” It also became an early glimpse of post-9/11 disaster capitalism – a way for corporate predators to exploit crises in what’s become common practice in the age of “terror” creating opportunities galore and big profits for well-connected firms.

    Klein notes the Asian crisis never ended as desparation took root after 24 million people lost jobs in two years. No nation handles that, and the fallout can be unpredictable. It led to a rise in religious extremism in Indonesia and Thailand and “the explosive growth in the child sex trade.” Unemployment is still high and layoffs continue with new foreign owners demanding higher profits with jobs disappearing to provide them.

    Eventually things settle down but never to where they once were. Throwing people overboard, displacing small farmers and business owners and crushing unions means those affected stay that way. “They end up in slums, now home to one billion people (and rising); they end up in brothels or in cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited (or what) German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (called) ‘ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.’ ” They’re the human wreckage left behind by countries swallowing Chicago School economic medicine. Its promised miracle is people-poison but not for vulture investors thriving on it. Disaster capitalism is on a roll, and its growth market potential is unlimited and guaranteed to continue unless mass public outrage stops it as one day it will.

    Part 5 – The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex –
    Shock Therapy in the USA

    Richard Nixon knew before the rest of us that Donald Rumsfeld is “a ruthless little bastard.” He also has a knack for making enemies even inside the Pentagon he ran as Defense Secretary. He planned to “reinvent warfare for the twenty-first century (making it) more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable” than ever before. Talk aside, he wanted to revolutionize the military by running it like the corporate world, and that meant using methods like outsourcing and branding. His idea was for fewer full-time troops, more as-needed ones from the Reserves and National Guard, and a lot of backup help from private contractors like Blackwater USA for security and Halliburton for a range of functions unrelated to soldiering. He wanted less staff and more tax dollars diverted to private companies. The Pentagon brass wasn’t pleased, but Rumsfeld was boss and Dick Cheney backed him.

    Klein calls them both “proto-disaster capitalists” who practice “the central tenet of the Bush regime (that) the job of government is not to govern but to subcontract.” The privatization mania was kick-started in the Reagan era, but Bill Clinton bought it as well. Now the feeling is anything government can do, private business can do better so let them. That means fire departments, prisons, public schools, public health, data management, border control and even parts of the military. As Klein explained: “crisis-exploiting methods….honed over the previous three decades would be used to (privatize) the infrastructure of disaster creation and….response. Friedman’s crisis theory was going postmodern (to create a) privatized police state” by auctioning it off.

    “Then came 9/11, and the idea of hollowing out government seemed opposite of what a frightened public wanted – a strong central government to protect them. Bush promised it in speeches, but “his inner circle had no intention of converting to Keynesianism.” September 11 security failures only reinforced their belief that private firms could handle the challenge better than government, and that meant transferring hundreds of billions of public dollars to corporate pockets. The Bush administration exploited shock and fear “to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture.”

    Mass disorientation post-9/11 provided the opportunity, and the “war on terror” became a “bold evolution of shock therapy….built to be private from the start” to capitalize on it. It came in two stages. First, policing, surveillance, detention and war-making powers of the executive were dramatically increased though nothing in the Constitution permits it. Then, the whole package, including occupation and “reconstruction,” was outsourced to well-connected private firms that responded with generous campaign funds to keep the mutually reinforcing daisy chain humming. Using the ploy of fighting “terrorism,” the homeland disaster capitalism complex emerged as a full-blown new economy and what Klein calls “a virtual fourth branch of government.”

    The Bush administration’s idea of government, with security as one function, wasn’t to provide it but to buy it at cost-plus market prices with lots of latitude for the plus. Just as the internet launched the dot-com bubble, from 9/11 emerged the disaster capitalism one, and it was off to the races “in an ad hoc….chaotic fashion.”

    Fighting “terrorism” is big business, and one of the first opportunities was the market for surveillance cameras with 30 million of them installed in the US, billions of hours of footage, analytic software to scan it, digital image enhancement to help it, and information management and data mining technology to handle all data government collects on everyone and everything. September 11 unlocked the potential, a huge new growth market was created, and protection from terror became more important than big brother watching. In six short years, an industry that barely existed is now much larger than Hollywood or the music business, and its potential looks limitless.

    Klein calls it “an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison” in a frightening brave new world most people barely understand or know exists. It generates enormous wealth that creates a powerful incentive for its winners to sell fear for more of it and partnering with government makes it easy, especially the kind in power now.

    Capitalism Becomes Corporatism in a Corporatist State

    Proto-disaster capitalism defines the Bush administration as crises, wars and other disasters “conflate with what’s good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and (Rumsfeld’s old company) Gilead” Sciences. Cataclysm is a growth business that in the current climate involved “some of the seediest and most blatant corruption scandals in recent history,” war-profiteering in the hundreds of billions, and a “whirling revolving door between government and business” taken to a new level. The limitless homeland security and war-profiteering markets are so alluring, hundreds of administration officials can’t wait to cash in like earlier ones did. Klein names some noted ones like Richard Pearle, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Paul Bremer, George Shultz, John Ashcroft, Tom Ridge, Rudi Giuliani, Richard Clarke, James Woolsey, Joe Allbaugh, and Michael Brown who wrote an infamous memo to a fellow FEMA staffer asking: “Can I quit now?”

    That’s the whole idea in a get rich quick environment – get an impressive government title, stay in office long enough in a department handing out big contracts, collect insider information with market value, then quit and cash in. Klein calls public service now “little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.” She also quotes Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (a nonprofit watchdog group) saying: “It’s impossible to tell where the government ends and Lockeed begins.” She also believes that corporatist economic goals and right to limitless profit seeking lie at the heart of the most committed neocons who talk a good game but value great wealth their top priority. They partnered permanent war and homeland security with the disaster capitalism complex to get it, and it’s hard indeed telling where one ends and the other begins. But it’s centerpiece project is Iraq, and its headquarters is in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.

    Part 6 – Iraq, Full Circle – Overshock – Erasing A Country

    Perhaps no country provides a greater untapped opportunity for unfettered capitalism than Iraq. It represents the planet’s last remaining low-hanging oil resources fruit with potentially more of it than Saudi Arabia according to some oil analysts. It’s also strategically located in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East (with two-thirds of proved reserves) Klein calls the “crusade’s….final frontier.” Iraq’s potential alone is so enormous it made war the way to crack open its market potential because peaceful methods hadn’t worked. Its conquest would then serve as “a different model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world” that could become a catalyst to opening the whole region.

    The potential is a giant free-trade zone, the illusion of newly created democracies, and the freedom for unfettered capitalism “to feed off freshly privatized states.” Klein explained this as “the model theory,” Iraq as the model, with the idea not being nation-building but nation-creating. But what of the nation already there that’s known as the “cradle of civilization.” It would have to be erased, and Chicago School fundamentalism would create a new one in its place in its own image with a blank slate to work from.

    Bush administration war planners considered the full array of possible shocks and went with them all – blitzkrieg “shock and awe,” elaborate PsyOps, use of fear as a weapon, repressive occupation, mass detention and torture, and “the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere….From the start, the invasion was (Washington’s message) to the world….in the language of fireballs, deafening explosions and city-shattering quakes.” It said dare challenge US authority, and you’re next. Shock and awe planners designed its strategy to deter “the public will of the adversary to resist (to render) the adversary completely impotent” from the effects of sensory deprivation and overload inducing disorientation and regression.

    In March, 2003, Baghdad got it on a massive scale. The ministry of communication and four telephone exchanges was blitzed and set ablaze cutting off millions of phones and preventing people from learning if their family and friends were alive. Television and radio transmitters were also destroyed along with the electrical grid plunging the city into “an awful, endless night.” Residents were trapped in their homes unable to speak or hear each other or see outside at night. “LIke a prisoner destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was shackled and hooded. Next it was stripped.”

    Unchecked looting did the most to erase the “country that was….Gone are 80% of the museum’s 170,000 priceless objects….the national library is a blackened ruin….the Ministry of Religious Affairs….was left a burned-out shell (and the) national heritage was lost.” Paul Bremer’s senior economic advisor, Peter McPherson, wasn’t bothered. It made his job of radically downsizing the state and selling it off easier. Cleaning the slate and erasing the nation was proceeding fast. It “all unfolded in a matter of weeks.” Baghdad was “open for business,” and the fire sale for its assets began with US firms having first dibs on everything, except oil, and that would come later as it has now but is stalled.

    While he was there, Paul Bremer was Washington’s man in Baghdad charged with readying the launch of Iraq, Inc. He saw to it laws were passed smoothing the way for Chicago School shock therapy. Two hundred firms were to be privatized immediately to get “inefficient state enterprises into private (predatory) hands….” New economic laws followed that comprised a “wish list….foreign investors and donor agencies dream of,” according to The Economist. The corporate tax was cut from 45% to a flat 15%; another allowed foreign companies to own 100% of Iraqi assets and take all profits out of the country; all restrictions on imports were removed; and investors could sign deals and leases lasting 40 years so no future government could change them.

    Iraq became a bold new experiment with invasion, occupation and reconstruction transforming the country into a fully privatized new market “with a huge pot of public money” doing it. Klein called the adventure an “anti-Marshall plan,” mirror opposite the post-WW II plan, and guaranteed “to further undermine Iraq’s badly weakened industrial sector and send Iraqi unemployment soaring.” No funds went to Iraqis or their industries nor was anything done to build a sustainable economy, or rebuild local infrastructure like electrical grids, schools, and hospitals. Iraqis played no role in planning, local firms weren’t even given “subsubsubcontracts,” jobs were destroyed not created while thousands of serf-type foreign workers were brought in and abused, and critically needed social services were ignored.

    Another goal was for a fully outsourced, hollow government with no function so “core” a contractor couldn’t handle it for profit. It was pure pillage, but nothing went as planned. “Each miscalculation provoked escalating levels of resistance” with occupying forces responding with counterrepression “sending the country into an inferno of (unending) violence.” Everything “tearing Iraq apart today – rampant corruption (and unfettered plundering), ferocious sectarianism, the surge in religious fundamentalism and the tyranny of death squads (including US ‘Salvador option’ ones) – escalated in lockstep with….Bush’s anti-Marshall Plan.” In that environment, the country became “a cutthroat capitalist laboratory” for shameless pillage. Iraq today is a model, a metaphor for everything wrong with Chicago School dogma showing it to be savage, ruthless, heartless and bankrupt.

    Its implementation is the core reason for resistance that continues and grows, but it caught war planners off guard when it began. They thought the shock and awe of attack, invasion, occupation and rapid transformation on the ground would be disorienting. Instead, Iraqis demanded a say from the start in how their country would be rebuilt and transformed. “And it was the Bush administration’s response to this unexpected turn of events that generated the most blowback of all” that became even worse by crushing democracy and effectively installing a puppet government in the fortified Green Zone masquerading as a real one.

    The result was predictable and so was the harsh response – mass detentions, aggressive interrogations, administration-sanctioned gloves off torture, and US unleashed “Salvador option” death squads making it hard to know who’s doing the killing and blasting away at selected targets. What is clear are the consequences – “millions of psychologically and physically (traumatized, angry and) shattered people, first by Saddam, (then) by war, (then) by one another (and the occupation). Bush’s in-house disaster capitalists didn’t wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up….Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep breaking….Which….requires more blasting – upping the dosage….”

    Slowly, it’s disappearing, disintegrating, erasing an entire country – women behind veils and doors, children from schools, four million displaced, Iraqi industry collapsed, a new growth industry in kidnapping for ransom, a country so unstable investment is high-risk, and even the heavily fortified Green Zone is too unsafe for George Bush to visit on one of his “surprise trips” to the country. Bremer’s charge was to build a “corporate utopia” but instead unleashed a “ghoulish dystopia,” and, on an April, 2004 visit to the country, Klein thought she was witnessing a mass contractor exodus with 1500 of them leaving in one week.

    Now she’s not sure. Big investors like Wal-Mart, HSBC and Procter and Gamble never showed up, and in December, 2006, the Pentagon announced a new project to get state-owned factories operating with plans to buy cement and machinery from them instead of the usual corporate suppliers. Does it signal a change of disaster capitalism tactics? Not at all, and it’s likely this amounts to no more than tinkering and tokenism that in the end will do little for the local economy and even less to reduce hardened anger.

    The Big Oil drafted Hydrocarbon Law is still a work in progress but already inflamed things further, and well it should. It’s an anti-Marshall Plan project at its worst, and in whatever final form is a shameless act of theft on the grandest scale. It’s a privatization blueprint for plunder giving Big Oil a bonanza and Iraqis a mere sliver of their own resources. In one draft, Iraq’s National Oil Company got exclusive control of just 17 of the country’s 80 known oil fields with all yet-to-be-discovered deposits set aside for foreign investors. Even worse, Big Oil is free to expropriate all earnings with no obligation to invest anything in Iraq’s economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire local workers, respect union rights, or share new technologies. In addition, foreign investors are guaranteed long-term contracts up to 30 or more years, dispossessing Iraq and its people of their own resources in a naked scheme to steal them and deny them the one source of revenue able to rebuild their shattered country and lives.

    The battle for Iraq continues that involves clinging to if not winning the hearts and minds on the home front as well. The country is a wasteland, the nation creation project bankrupt, and the prospect for success bad and worsening. Iraq has been a graveyard for past imperial powers, and it may just be a matter of time until history again repeats. The Brits in the South know it, and after four and a half futile years are tiptoeing out to the dismay of their “coalition” partners. One day, Washington may join them, and for shocked Iraqis it can’t come too soon. For now, though, the shock continues, and Iraq more closely resembles hell than “the cradle of civilization.”

    Part 7 – The Movable Green Zone: Blanking the Beach – “The Second Tsunami”

    For coastal Sri Lankans, like those in Arugam Bay, December 26, 2004 felt more like 1945 Hiroshima than life before that fateful day changing everything for them. A devastating tsunami took 250,000 lives and left 2.5 million homeless throughout the region. It affected Arugam Bay, “a fishing and faded resort village” on the island’s east coast that government was showcasing in its plans to “build back better.” Indeed, but not for the villagers hoteliers, developers and the government wanted removed but weren’t sure how until nature did what they couldn’t. Everything was gone, and a blank slate remained for what the tourist industry long wanted – “a pristine beach (in a prime area), scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden. It was the same up and down the coast once rubble was cleared….paradise.”

    “New rules” forbade homes on the beach and a “buffer zone” imposed insured it. Beaches were off-limits, displaced Sri Lankans were shoved into temporary grim barracks camps inland, and “menacing, machine-gun-wielding soldiers” patrolled to keep them there.

    Tourist operators were treated differently. They were encouraged to build and expand on prime vacated oceanfront land. It was all in a document called the “Arugam Bay Resource Development Plan” to transform the former fishing village into a “high-end ’boutique tourism destination’ (with) five-star resorts, luxury….chalets, (and even a) floatplane pier and helipad.” Arugam Bay was to be a model for transforming up to 30 similar “tourism zones” into a “South Asian Riviera.” When the plan leaked out, people in Arugam Bay and around the country were outraged.

    The grand scheme to remake Sri Lanka was around two years earlier and began when the civil war ended. It was to be the country’s reentry into the world economy as one of the last remaining uncolonized places globalization hadn’t touched, and a high-end tourism project was seen as the right option. It would be a luxury destination for the “plutonomy set,” once a few changes were made. Government’s 80% land ownership had to be opened to private buyers, more “flexible” labor laws were needed, and modernized infrastructure had to be developed with World Bank and IMF providing funds on their usual shock therapy terms discussed above. With mass public opposition to the ideas, it wouldn’t be easy, and before the tsunami hit, militant strikes and street protests held it back.

    Sri Lanka’s president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, was elected on an “overtly antiprivatization platform,” but the tsunami changed everything and helped her see “the free market light.” Four days after the disaster, her government passed a bill “pav(ing) the way for water privatization.” It also raised gasoline prices and began crafting legislation to privatize the electricity company in pieces. It was like a second tsunami, and the same scheme followed hurricane Mitch in October, 1998 with Hondurus, Guatemala and Nicaragua hardest hit like New Orleans discussed below.

    Klein explained when the tsunami struck in 2004, “Washington was ready to take the Mitch model (now familiar) to the next level – aiming not just at individuals laws but at direct corporate control over the construction.” Sri Lanka’s president complied and created a new body called the Task Force to Rebuild the Nation fully empowered to proceed. On it were the most powerful business leaders from banking and industry including key players from the beach tourism sector. Absent were villagers, farmers, environmentalists or even a “disaster-reconstruction specialist.” Klein called the task force a new type corporate coup d’etat mother nature made possible.

    In ten days, then had a complete reconstruction blueprint from “housing to highways” with aid money directed to corporate development and nothing for disaster victims. They were destined to become permanent shantytown dwellers similar to the kinds ringing most Global South cities and populating Global North inner ones. Similar stories of law changes and land grabs came out of other affected Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Thailand, the Maldives and India where around 150 Tamil Nadu displaced women had to sell their kidneys for food.

    A year after the tsunami, NGO ActionAid surveyed the aftermath in five Asian countries and found the same pattern everywhere – residents barred from rebuilding, living in militarized temporary camps, hotels “showered with incentives,” no restoration of homes lost, and “entire ways of life” destroyed. In July, 2006 in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers ended their cease-fire and war resumed. It’s hard knowing if disaster capitalism had a role because peace was always precarious, the government offered little, and continued violence at least promised a chance for something better before and more than ever now given the choice between disaster capitalism and hope.

    Disaster Apartheid – A World of Green and Red Zones

    On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans. The well-off left town, “checked into hotels, and called their insurance companies.” For 120,000 others without cars or means of transportation, it was another story. They depended on the state, waited for help and got none. FEMA is supposed to provide it, too, but it was one of the many government functions Bush gutted advancing savage capitalism at the expense of public service.

    Katrina was disastrous for those affected, but Milton Friedman saw “an opportunity” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It was easy for him to say from his luxury San Francisco digs as well as his like-minded ideologues who met 14 days later to plan how to pounce on the tragedy for profit. They produced 32 Chicago School-type schemes packaged as “hurricane relief” that was a wish list for developers and hell for the displaced. They ranged from suspending Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas and making the whole area a flat tax free enterprise zone to erasing public schools by giving parents vouchers for privately-run charter ones. They also wanted environmental regulations suspended on the Gulf Coast and permission to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that showed how far afield they’d go to capitalize on the shock of a local tragedy.

    Things moved fast, and within weeks “the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of (outsourcing schemes) pioneered in Iraq.” The names were familiar with Halliburton first in line along with Bechtel, Blackwater USA and a host of others homing in for the kill. Billions were at stake, and no open bidding was required, just good connections. As Klein put it: “within days of the storm it was as if Baghdad’s Green Zone….lifted from….the Tigris and landed on the bayou….As in Iraq, government once again played the role of a cash machine equipped for both withdrawals and deposits.” Corporations took one and repaid with the other in sizable campaign contributions in a pattern now familiar.

    They also ignored unemployed locals and relied instead on cheap imported undocumented labor easily exploited. The Bush administration showed its type compassion, too, with $40 billion in budget cuts for essentials like Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and more so funds could go to contractors and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, a familiar pattern.

    In visiting Iraq, Klein first thought the “Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq.” She then discovered it emerges wherever disaster capitalism lands with the same stark divisions between the included and excluded. It was evident in New Orleans with “gated green zones and raging red” ones – not from flood damage but from predatory free market solutions only for the privileged.

    The Bush administration refused emergency funds for public sector salaries so 3000 city workers were fired. Charity Hospital closed and still isn’t open. Public transit was gutted losing half its workers, and most public housing is still boarded up and empty by design. Some sits on prime land close to the French Quarter, developers want it for luxury properties, and New Orleans is being erased for profit just like Iraq. It was all planned with the storm the excuse to do it.

    Earlier “creative destruction” opportunities generated “rust belts,” neglected neighborhoods, and underfunded inner city public schools. Creative neglect is at work as well as the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2007 said it will cost $1.5 trillion over five years to bring essential public infrastructure back to standard. Instead it continues to deteriorate while the well-off withdraw into gated communities and luxury condos with all their needs met by private providers. Klein calls this trend a “state-within-a-state that is muscular” and as able as the public one is frail. It no longer can function without help from contractors as government is hollowed so business can prosper.

    New Orleans is a window on the future in which survival depends on the ability to pay, and those who can’t are discarded like trash. It promises a world of protected Green Zones with those outside it neglected, abandoned, ignored and forgotten.

    Losing the Peace Incentive – Israel As Warning

    Conventional wisdom once thought economic growth and prosperity required peace and stability. No longer. Post-9/11, the terror scare was ignited, wars rage in Iraq and Afghanistan, more war is threatened on Iran, oil prices touched $80 a barrel, the WTO Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and “a golden period of broadly shared growth” prevails (at least until the recent credit crunch). How come?

    Conflict and global instability don’t just benefit arms related industries. They help the high-tech security sector, heavy construction, private health care companies treating soldiers and oil and gas. The business bonanza in Iraq alone is hugely profitable with all sorts of companies cashing in. The same goes for New Orleans and Gulf Coast overall. Terrorist attacks are good for business. The more destruction, the more to rebuild – a great market for disaster capitalism it pounces on with every incentive to assure the trend continues unchallenged, and why not when government throws public tax dollars at it.

    Today, “instability is the new stability,” and Israel is its “Exhibit A.” In the post-1993 Oslo years, the Jewish state designed its economy to expand in response to escalating violence at home at first and now everywhere. The nation’s technology firms pioneered the homeland security industry, and they still dominate it. In addition, its economy overall is the most “tech-dependent in the world,” according to Business Week magazine, twice as dependent as the US representing half its exports.

    Following the 2000 dot-com crash, Israel’s leading tech companies needed a new global niche, and the government encouraged expansion beyond information and communications technologies into security and surveillance. It launched a slew of start-ups “specializing in everything from ‘search and nail,’ data mining, surveillance cameras, to terrorist profiling.” It was perfect timing for a market that exploded post-9/11, and Israel’s economy is thriving with one of the fastest growth rates in the world. Klein calls the country “a kind of shopping mall for homeland security technologies,” and Forbes magazine says it’s “the go-to country for antiterrorism technologies.” Today, the country’s counterterrorism industry is booming, and its defense-related exports make it the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, larger than the UK.

    Klein notes: “With more and more countries turning themselves into fortresses (with walls and high-tech fences part of it), ‘security barriers’ may prove to be the biggest disaster market of all.” In the case of Israel, it’s also another “Chicago School frontier marked by rapid stratification of society between rich and poor inside the state.” The security boom fueled a wave of privatizations accompanied by social program cuts, “an epidemic of inequality,” and the virtual end of Labor Zionism. Klein notes 24.4% of Israelis live in poverty, including 35.2% of children, compared to 8% twenty years earlier (but she doesn’t say if these figures include Arab Israeli citizens comprising 20% of the population). She concludes Israeli industry no longer fears war as it thrives on it.

    Today, Baghdad, New Orleans and suburban Atlanta Sandy Springs are glimpses of a gated community future run by the disaster capitalism complex. But it’s in its most advanced state in Israel – “an entire country (turned into) a fortified gated community, surrounded by locked-out people living in (the) permanently excluded red zones” of Gaza and the West Bank that aren’t just left out but are encroached on and under attack. Disaster capitalism thrives in this environment so it yearns to bring it to a neighborhood near you, and that’s a prospect to fear.

    Hopeful Signs – Shock Wears Off

    Klein quotes Canada’s National Post editor, Terence Corcoran, wondering if the Chicago School movement Milton Friedman launched could continue as before after his November, 2006 death. The movement’s pinnacle was capturing the Congress in 1994 that it lost in 2006 for three reasons – public disenchantment with the Iraq war, political corruption, and a growing class divide unseen since the Gilded Age of the “robber barons” or roaring 20s. Each factor related to core Chicago School economics – privatization, deregulation and cutting government services. In the US, it created a wealth disparity economist Paul Krugman calls unprecedented while poverty is growing and the middle class dying in the richest country in the world that’s also the least caring one.

    Everywhere Chicago School fundamentalism shows up, the results are the same. A small elite gains hugely while most others don’t. But cracks in the ideology are visible as many of its front line adherents got caught up “in an astonishing array of scandals and criminal proceedings (from the) earliest laboratories in Latin America to the most recent one in Iraq.”

    Before he died, Pinochet was under house arrest. In Argentina, courts stripped former junta leaders of immunity. Bolivia’s de Lozada got chased from the country and is now a wanted man. In Russia, many of the oligarch fraudsters were either in exile or jail. In Canada, newspaper magnate Conrad Black was convicted of fraud. In the US, a rogue’s gallery of CEOs were charged and convicted as well, and other high level types were caught up in scandals like lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s influence-peddling one.

    Klein notes another hopeful sign as well – shock effects were beginning to wear off, and in Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis forced out five presidents in three weeks. It was spreading and most apparent in Latin America where it began with opponents of Chicago School doctrine winning elections like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but he wasn’t alone. It showed a renewed faith in democracy and condemnation of Washington Consensus dogma when people made a choice at the polls in free and open elections. Today’s movements aren’t replicas of the past, and one of the differences “is an acute awareness of the need for protection from shocks of the past” – coups, foreign shock therapists, torturers, debt and currency shocks.

    They’ve learned from the past and are building “shock absorbers into their organizing models.” It’s in movements less centralized, Venezuela’s grassroots community councils, Brazil’s Landless Peoples Movement, and the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico where thousands battled police since a year ago May and still won’t quit. In addition, governments are rejecting old trade models and adopting new ones like Venezuela’s ALBA bartering system making it less vulnerable to turbulent markets.

    They’re also rejecting World Bank and IMF debt slavery, and the change is dramatic. In 2005, 80% of IMF’s lending portfolio was to Latin America. It dropped to 1% in 2007. And IMF’s 2005 $81 billion dollar portfolio shrank to $11.8 billion in three years with nearly all of it in Turkey. The World Bank is also being rejected. Venezuela severed its relationship, and Ecuador’s Raphael Correa suspended bank loans and declared its country representative persona non grata in an extraordinary move the equivalent of a well-deserved slap in the face. In addition, the Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and some observers thought it signaled “globalization is dead,” or if not, it’s at least breathing hard.

    Resistance is showing up in Europe, too, with voters in France and the Netherlands rejecting the European Constitution the French call “savage capitalism” and a codification of the corporatist order they reject. The Putin era in Russia is also seen as a backlash against the shock therapy of the 90s that impoverished millions of its people still left out and many desperate. The same is true in South Africa where people in slums abandoned the ANC to protest against their broken Freedom Charter promises. It even surfaced in China where, according to official government sources, 87,000 large protests were held involving over four million workers and peasants. They won major victories for new rural area spending, better health care, and pledges to eliminate education fees.

    Millions of Lebanese were in the streets as well that wasn’t a show of strength by Hezbollah as the major media characterized it. It was a rejection of the Siniora government’s willingness to accept Chicago School reforms in exchange for billions of needed reconstruction loans to recover from Israel’s summer, 2006 blitzkrieg attack. Klein called their actions “a poor and working-class people’s revolt.”

    Examples are everywhere but so far just ripples in a pond needing greater numbers for real change. They were in tsunami-struck Thailand where, unlike in Sri Lanka, many settlements were successfully rebuilt in months but not by the government offering no aid. So hundreds of villagers “engaged in what they called land ‘reinvasions,’ ” defied their government with direct-action, and rebuilt their communities making them better than before the destruction.

    The same thing happened in New Orleans. In February, 2007, housing project residents “reinvaded” their old homes and reclaimed them in another example of “people rebuilding for themselves” and bypassing government indifferent to their needs and rights. Klein calls this phenomenon “the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex’s ethos.” The actions are communal with people helping each other, rebuilding rubble, and aiming to end the erasure “of history, of culture, of memory.”

    It’s a message of collective shock resistance replacing shock, but it’s too early to declare victory. The signs are encouraging, and with enough of them who knows what’s possible. Hopefully a better world replacing the bankrupt notion that markets work best and government is the problem. That’s an idea for the trash bin of history where it belongs and where it one day will be.

    Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

    Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

    YET another Senior aide quits Bush team‏

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    By Andrew Ward and Eoin Callan in Washington

    President George W. Bush lost another senior member of his administration on Thursday when Mike Johanns resig­ned as agriculture ­secretary.

    His departure deprives the Bush administration of its chief advocate for reform of trade-distorting agricultural subsidies at a critical moment in the passage of a new farms bill.

    Mr Johanns is expected to return to his native Nebraska to compete for the Senate seat held by Chuck Hagel, a Republican critic of the Iraq war who is retiring next year.

    The agriculture secretary had launched a broad effort to persuade Capitol Hill to reduce farm subsidies and move towards payment methods more consistent with world trade rules.

    The US is facing significant legal challenges at the World Trade Organisation to its farms programmes after losing a landmark case brought by Brazil over cotton subsidies. But so far the administration’s appeals for reform have been largely rejected.

    The farms bill passed this summer by the House of Representatives rejected many of Mr Johanns’s reform proposals and largely exten­ded existing farm supports.

    There have been some suggestions that the Senate was likely to show more flexibility when it passed its version of the farms bill, due later this month.

    But Mr Johanns’s departure will shake confidence that a big change of direction by the US is imminent.

    Chuck Connor, the deputy agriculture secretary, was appointed to replace Mr Johanns on an acting basis.

    Mr Johanns is the latest senior official to leave the Bush administration since its domestic policymaking power was weakened by the Democratic takeover of Congress in January. But Mr Bush welcomed his expected decision to run for the Nebraska Senate seat, which the Republicans are desperate to retain in next year’s election.

    “If it’s Mike’s decision and Nebraska’s choice, he would make an outstanding member of the United States Senate. There is no doubt in my mind,” said Mr Bush.

    Mr Hagel’s is one of several vulnerable Republican Senate seats that Democrats are targeting next year as they seek to extend their majorities in the House and Senate. Incumbent Republicans face difficult challenges in at least four states, while retirements in Virginia and Colorado will provide Democrats with additional opportunities to expand their one-seat majority in the Senate next November.

    U.S. Spy Chief: 9/11 ‘Could Have Been Prevented’

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    Director of National Intelligence Says U.S. Didn’t Connect Available Information

    By JASON RYAN and THERESA COOK

    Sept 11

    (AP Photo)

    Six years after the deadliest attack on U.S. soil, the head of U.S. spy operations admitted to lawmakers that “9/11 should have and could have been prevented.”

    Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, told members of the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday that “it was an issue of connecting information that was available.”

    McConnell, explaining that the intelligence community was, at the time, very focused on foreign threats, said the community allowed itself “to be separated from anything that was potentially domestic,” and that domestic threats were “not something we [were] supposed to be concerned with.”

    “Yeah, that translates to negligence,” charged committee chairman John Conyers, D-Mich.

    “Or interpretation of the law – of how the culture had evolved,” McConnell countered.

    Given the vast resources of the intelligence community, along with the FBI’s and CIA’s knowledge that al Qaeda had an interest in flight training, and had sent 9/11 hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi and terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui to undertake such training in the United States, McConnell said, “For whatever reason, we didn’t connect the dots.”

    A federal judge in Virginia sentenced Moussaoui, the only person indicted in connection with the 9/11 attacks, to life in prison without the possibility of parole, in May 2006. He is serving his time at a super-maximum security federal facility in Florence, Colo.

    “We could have done a better job as a community,” McConnell told the House panel.

    McConnell’s admissions before the panel took a statement he made on June 29 a few steps further.

    In his earlier remarks, McConnell said, “The rules that were established during the Cold War and post-70s served us well, but it created seams. In my view, the 9/11 tragedy should have been prevented. It was preventable. But, I think the terrorists took advantage of the seams that had been created in the process for how we conduct our affairs, both intelligence and law enforcement.”

    The 9/11 Commission criticized the National Security Agency and its ability to analyze intercepted communications, noting in its final report, “While the NSA had the technical capability to report on communications with suspected terrorist facilities in the Middle East, the NSA did not seek FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court warrants to collect communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries, because it believed that this was an FBI role.

    “It also did not want to be viewed as targeting persons in the United States and possibly violating laws that governed NSA’s collection of foreign intelligence,” the report continued.

    Intelligence officials had previously stated that the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was established after analyzing the pre-9/11 movements and communications of the hijackers after the attacks.

    After poring over the hijackers’ phone calls and e-mails, investigators noticed missed opportunities – communications that could have been intercepted, and possibly would have tipped investigators to the coming attacks.

    After a review by lawyers from the White House, NSA and Justice Department, the program operated at the NSA, and allowed the agency to perform warrantless electronic surveillance of suspected al Qaeda members in the United States.

    Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on changes in the FISA law, and technical aspects of the government’s data collection programs.

    Shortly after the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was transferred to the FISA court’s jurisdiction in January 2007, a secret order from the court required intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications that were routed on U.S. communication networks.

    Given the NSA’s ability to collect communications and data from around the world and the Internet, the nation’s security officials faced a daunting task. McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee that, in some cases, this meant that the U.S. was required to get a warrant to intercept Iraqi insurgent communications.

    He added that the changes made to FISA under the Protect America Act, signed into law in August, provided wider surveillance coverage of terrorism targets by freeing up resources.

    Civil liberties groups have long voiced concerns about the changes in the law, and over the NSA program. The Terrorist Surveillance Program had operated covertly until it was revealed in a December 2005 story by the New York Times. A pending leak investigation is underway by the Justice Department over the disclosure.

    Congress is currently holding hearings on making changes in the FISA law permanent. At the Tuesday hearing, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said, “The power to invade people’s privacy cannot be exercised unchecked.”

    Bush calls for expansion of spy law

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    President Bush, right, accompanied by Raul Yanes, Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary, waves as they leave the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2007, as the president left for a trip to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds )

    By DEB RIECHMANN

    President Bush said Wednesday that a law hastily passed in August to temporarily give the government more power to eavesdrop without warrants on foreign terror suspects must be made permanent and expanded.

    If this doesn’t happen, Bush said, “Our national security professionals will lose critical tools they need to protect our country.”

    “Without these tools, it will be harder to figure out what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate operatives into America,” he said on a visit to the super-secret National Security Agency’s headquarters in suburban Fort Meade, Md. “Without these tools, our country will be much more vulnerable to attack.”

    The 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governs when warrants for eavesdropping must be obtained from a secret intelligence court. This year’s update–approved by the Senate and House just before Congress adjourned for an August break–allows more efficient interceptions of foreign communications.

    Under the new law–the Protect America Act–the government can eavesdrop, without a court order, on communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States, even if an American is on one end of the conversation–so long as that American is not the intended focus or target of the surveillance.

    That change was urgently requested by the Bush administration, which said that the modernization of communications technology had created a dire gap in the nation’s terrorism intelligence collection capabilities.

    Such surveillance was generally prohibited under the original FISA law if the wiretap was conducted inside the United States, unless a court approved it. Because of changes in telecommunications technology, many more foreign communications now flow through the United States. The new law allows those to be tapped without a court order.

    But civil liberties groups and many Democrats say the new changes

    go too far. Congress’ Democratic leaders set it to expire in six months so that it could be fine-tuned, and that process is beginning on Capitol Hill now.

    Democrats hope to change the law to provide additional oversight when the government eavesdrops on U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties.

    Bush timed his visit to the NSA facility to press his case.

    “The threat from al Qaida is not going to expire in 135 days,” he said, “so I call on Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent.”

    He also pleaded with lawmakers to expand the law, not restrict it. One provision particularly important to the administration, but opposed by many Democrats, would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which may have helped the government conduct surveillance prior to January 2007 without a court order.

    Bush was joined at the podium in an NSA hallway by Vice President Dick Cheney, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and others.

    The president received private briefings from intelligence officials and mingled with employees in the National Threat Operations Center. While cameras and reporters were in the room, the large video screens that lined the walls displayed unclassified information on computer crime and signal intelligence.

    Along one wall at NSA is a sign that says, “We won’t back down. We never have. We never will.”

    Safer society or Big Brother state?

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    Marcel Berlins
    The Guardian

    The question we need to ask about the storing of DNA samples is the same as the one bedevilling our approach to identity cards, and stiff anti-terrorism legislation. Crudely, it is this: how much interference with our liberties are we – as a society, as individuals – prepared to countenance in the cause of public safety? The question can be put more emotionally. Would we accept giving the police draconian powers of interrogation and detention (or introducing compulsory ID cards) if we knew that it would prevent 100 people from being blown up by terrorists? But what if only 10 lives would be saved? Or would we need 1,000 to die before we readily relinquished our civil liberties? These are, of course, absurd questions; yet that is the balancing exercise we (and our MPs) are constantly being asked to consider, even if we don’t articulate the issue in precisely those terms. Yesterday’s thoughtful report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the retention of DNA samples discusses the various options open to the government. At one extreme is the permanent storage of DNA taken from convicted criminals, and from no one else; at the other, a national DNA database of the whole population. There are many possibilities in between. Broadly speaking, the police would favour a large DNA library, which, they say, would help them to solve a lot of crime. The civil libertarian doesn’t accept that such a conclusion follows from the available statistics.

    The trouble is that no one has any real idea of the consequences of the various models, in terms of crime detection. Still less can we calculate the balance between retaining DNA samples and public safety. Just how many extra crimes, of what seriousness, would be committed if the police were denied their wish for an expanding DNA database? We don’t know. Even assuming a more successful detection rate, would it be enough to compensate for the inevitable human mistakes and computer foul-ups that would occur, breaching people’s privacy and putting the innocent at risk of an injustice? We cannot know, just as we have no provable or even vaguely persuasive way of assessing whether identity cards will result in a safer society or a Big Brother state.

    At present, the police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in the course of investigating crime, are entitled to take DNA from a suspect, victim or witness, and to store the sample (even that of an acquitted defendant) for ever. This has enabled them to collect the DNA of four million people, the vast majority innocent of any crime. It is different in Scotland, where they can permanently retain samples only from convicted criminals and, for three years, samples from those charged with a serious sexual or violence offence, even if not convicted. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics strongly urges the government to adopt the Scottish practice throughout Britain. I fear it will not. It is not in the mood to give in to civil liberties concerns. The official inquiry currently under way will, I predict, meet the police’s demands. If it’s the police versus the rights lobby, there can be only one winner.

    It is precisely because Michael Palin is so good and so popular that his series on “New Europe” – mainly the countries of the old Soviet bloc – leaves me a little uneasy. It has something to do with the combination of the subject matter and Palin’s personality. I’m not saying that he makes a joke of everything – there was some moving and thought-provoking stuff in the first programme, last Sunday, about the aftermath of the Balkan tragedies of the 1990s – but I don’t think I am being unfair in saying that his main stock-in-trade is a kind of light-hearted approach to whatever and whoever he encounters, punctuated by the occasional self-deprecating tomfoolery. He chats to many eccentrics and discovers strange and silly local customs. He plays himself, beautifully, to the satisfaction of a very large audience (7.5 million watched the first episode).

    So what is my problem? What bothers me is that the countries Palin visits emerge to the viewers as seen through his eyes and humour, and that means as somewhat dotty people in dotty places. (I haven’t seen the whole series, but I have seen the ads and trailers, and read what he himself has written and, besides, the evidence is in his previous television series).

    So what? Does it matter? I think it does, in a way that Palin’s presentation of nations and peoples in his other series didn’t.

    Europe and the European Union matter. The British, whether Europhobe or -phile, are curiously edgy, confused and sensitive about the EU. They should be absorbing information that brings them closer to understanding their new fellow members. Palin is wonderful at what he does, but you don’t go to him for insight.

    The BBC could have made programmes on the same subject, treated more seriously and with a more earnest presenter – but they would have attracted a fraction of the viewers. Indeed, there have been such programmes, especially at the time of the enlargement of the EU in 2004, mainly consigned to late-evening slots or the less watched channels. I am blaming neither Palin nor the network. I just wish the British television watcher had been given something a little more substantial on which to judge and understand the countries of new Europe.

    This week Marcel read Foreigners by Caryl Phillips: “Three stories about how the white English exploited and destroyed black men in their midst. The one about Randolph Turpin, once a world boxing champion, is particularly moving.” Marcel watched on television: “Two world cups, with England men rubbish at rugby and England women terrific at football.”

    Is the mis-use of IT destroying our civil liberties?

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    This is a question that we all must think hard about because many Governments and private companies around the world are building up vast databases of personal data, biometrics and more.

    The UK Government has already begun the roll out of biometric technology in passports, fingerprinting of school children and is well underway with the the UK National ID card and National Identity Register which will allow private companies and public sector to verify UK citizens using a single card and record all this activity. The UK ID card will also make use of iris scans, DNA and fingerprints. The UK Govt. also embarked on the NHS NPfIT (National Health Service National Programme for IT) in which all patient records will be centralised and can be accessed from anywhere.

    Former PM Tony Blair and his successor have already shown their support for a national DNA database holding DNA for every UK citizen and the Home Office IPS (Identity & Passport Service) are also looking at RFID implants.

    The UK Govt. like others has a terrible record when it comes to delivering IT projects and recent cases where NHS staff where viewing the records of a celebrity being treated at a different hospital, CSA (Child Support Agency) failing to deliver anything, NHS staff swapping swipe cards and leaving passwords at computer terminals and a report from the US about a company forcing RFID implants upon it’s staff are all signs of what is to come.

    Should we be embarking on these projects to use this IT technology to monitor, track, document and watch citizens 24/7?

    HM Government and UK citizens have no formal relationship documented in the form of a constitution and this therefore allows this UK Government and future ones the right to use these systems as they like.

    What implications for the future?
    Do you want the police and Government to know your entire private life?
    Is it the job of Govt. to award citizens identity or is it just the job of Govt. to serve the people?

    http://www.zdnet.co.uk/forums/0,1000000782,39289511-39001037c-20087441o,00.htm

    America’s PSI Spies Penetrate the Kremlin: The Secret History of Remote Viewing

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    By Jim Marrs
    RINF Alternative News

    Behind the doors of the CIA and U.S. Army Intelligence, science and ESP come together like a movie in the electrifying scenes of Jim Marrs’ new book, PSI Spies: the True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program. The author of best-sellers that have revealed the secrets and the conspiracies of the Federal Government, Marrs traces in PSI Spies the evolution of remote viewing and the use of this mental technology from the hidden laboratories of the 1970s to a new generation of viewers now being trained by former PSI spies.

    At the height of the Cold War an American intelligence officer prowled the hallways of the Kremlin in Moscow. Creeping up a staircase at the center of Soviet Russia’s most secret intelligence operations, he suddenly froze when he saw a Soviet soldier on guard. Holding his breath, he slipped past the guard, who showed no reaction. Reaching his destination, the American passed through a locked doorway and began to study the maps on the walls.

     

    He was no ordinary spy. Unseen by the guard, he had literally passed through a locked door because he was one of America’s PSI Spies–military men trained in the use of a psychic technique known as remote viewing.

     

    The PSI spy was able to penetrate the Kremlin with his mind, while his body lay on a cot in an obscure wood-framed building on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland. As he practiced a skill called “bi-location”, physically he was in one place while mentally he was on the other side of the planet. 

     

    Previously known as clairvoyance, remote viewing is the ability to perceive people, places and things beyond the reach of our normal five senses. In one of the most rigorous and secret scientific investigations in history, it has been discovered that most humans can develop this skill that, scientists have found, is confined by neither time nor distance.

     

    Despite extensive scientific study and operational use over a quarter of a century and through four separate White House administrations, few Americans know the true story of the remote viewing as it was studied and used by tax-supported government agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the United States Army. Begun as an experimental response to psychic research that was being conducted behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s, the use of secret remote viewing by both the East and the West may have helped end the Cold War. Remote viewing of distant planets has been verified by NASA space missions, and it may have explained the mysterious loss of both the Soviet Phobos II in 1989 and the U.S. Mars Observer in 1993; contact with these craft was lost as they entered orbit around the planet Mars.

     

    I reveal the history and the discoveries of the U.S. Army’s formerly Top Secret remote viewing unit in my new book from Career Press/New Page Books entitled PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program. The book traces the history of remote viewing from the Cold War all the way back to the Bible, detailing research results from Stanford Research Institute proving that unlimited by time and space, remote viewing is available to everyone.

     

    At one time a closely guarded government secret, the truth about remote viewing has filtered into some aware segments of the public where it continues to attract fascination and interest. Today, several former military viewers are currently teaching the skill, while others reveal the details in books, articles and in public appearances. Some PSI entrepreneurs even advertise psychic readings reportedly accomplished by remote viewing.

     

    As one of the first non-government researchers to study remote viewing, I have examined the transition from Top Secret government project to public fad, interviewing many members of the original PSI Spies unit as well as people connected to the unit as supervisors or consultants. First studied by the CIA in the 1970s, remote viewing as a psychic technology for espionage was used by U.S. Army, which formed a small unit of viewers who spied for America during the Cold War and later. Overseen at the time by hundreds of people in oversight committees and by congressional supervisors, the study and use of the extraordinary psychic program has been described as “the most severely monitored scientific experiment in history.” 

     

    Gaining covert knowledge about a variety of government and military activities around the world, the soldiers turned psychic spies were asked to stop a Soviet plot to kill President Ronald Reagan by mentally prowling the halls of the Kremlin, and in later years they probed Iraq’s hidden weapons sites in preparation for the 1991 Gulf War. Lyn Buchanan, former training officer for the PSI Spies, has described how it feels to lose integration with our material plane as he mentally steps into the trajectory of a particle beam weapon. From insights into our future to the mysteries of UFOs and crop circles, no subject has been immune to penetration by the military remote viewers.

     

     

    About the author:

     

    An award-winning Texas journalist and author, Jim Marrs served in Military Intelligence with the U.S. Army before becoming an independent journalist/author, and he worked for and owned several Texas newspapers. His in-depth overview of the UFO phenomenon in the book, Alien Agenda, has been cited as the best-selling non-fiction book on UFOs in the world, having been translated into several languages. Marrs is also the author of the New York Times best-sellers, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK; and Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. He is a frequent guest on nationwide radio talk show programs and has appeared on major TV networks, and on Good Morning America, Geraldo, Larry King and the Today Show, among others.

     

    Prior to the recent publication of PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program, Marrs’ latest book was The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11 and the Loss of Liberty.

    UK TV Documentary about surveillance and privacy needs YOU!

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    Are you concerned about government surveillance? Or do you think we’re heading for an Orwellian mass surveillance system?

    Firecracker Films are making a documentary about surveillance society and individuals increasing loss of privacy and would like to hear from anyone who is either actively campaigning against surveillance, or anyone who takes measures to avoid it.

    Email webmaster@rinf.com

    Calls grow for Bush war crimes trial

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    U.S. President George W. Bush will definitely be tried at an international tribunal, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said in a sermon at this week’s Friday prayers in Tehran.

    The Mehr News Agency interviewed a number of political figures on Saturday and Sunday to learn their views on the issue.

    “World public opinion, even U.S. public opinion, is demanding that Bush be put on trial,” Center for Contemporary Iranian History Chairman Abbas Salimi Namin said.

    “Of course, it seems somewhat difficult under the current circumstances, in which the Western states dominate international organizations, but it is most unlikely that the current state of affairs will last forever,” he added.

    “The rising tide of protests against the White House and Bush and the opposition to the unilateral and warmongering approaches of the United States will change the situation over time,” Salimi Namin noted.

    “Saddam was a criminal, but we see that during the occupation of Iraq, there has been a rise in terrorism and other criminal activities, and the same happened in Afghanistan, where drug trafficking and terrorism increased,” he observed.

    He described Bush as a “pawn” on the political chessboard, saying, “Those who control the White House would probably like to blame a pawn named Bush for all their crimes.”

    Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami of the Assembly of Experts said, “The words of the Supreme Leader on the trial of Bush reflect a global desire.”

    Ayatollah Khamenei spoke about a global demand and not just calls for a trial from the Islamic world, he added.

    Kuwaiti national security advisor Sami Naser Khalifa said U.S. policies have caused a rise in terrorism and instability in the Middle East.

    “Bush is responsible for countless crimes against humanity, and most people on this Earth want to see him tried in an international court,” he stated.

    “The U.S. government used to interfere in the internal affairs of regional countries until it chose military intervention for the liberation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, and since then it uses direct military force to confront any group that does not kowtow to its Middle East policies,” he explained.

    “The U.S. is entrapped in the Iraqi quagmire and cannot do anything,” he said.

    Iranian-American anti-war activist Ardeshir Ommani emphasized the need to put Bush on trial for committing war crimes and said the anti-war movement in the U.S. will make the utmost efforts to show U.S. citizens that their government’s adventurism in regard to Iran would have serious repercussions since Iranians would definitely defend their country in the event of a foreign attack.

    About 100,000 people participated in a demonstration in front of the White House and the Congress on Saturday to protest against Bush’s warmongering policies in Iraq. At least 190 demonstrators were arrested by the police.

    Anti-war demonstrations, led by a few peace groups, are going to be held in response to the statements of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, which these groups believe are attempting to justify the continued presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, Ommani explained.

    The demonstrations, organized by the International Action Center, the UFTJ, and Answer, will continue until September 29, he said.

    “In our gathering in Washington, we will try to neutralize the propaganda of Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker,” Ommani added.

    He went on to say that former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has recently called for Bush to be tried as a war criminal since he is not really trying to resolve the Iraq crisis.

    http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=153054

    “Unrecognized” Palestinians

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    By Stephen Lendman
    RINF Alternative News

    Israel’s population today is about 7,150,000. About 5.4 million are Jews (76%) plus another 400,000 Jewish settlers in over 200 expanding settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank that includes Palestinian East Jerusalem. They’re the chosen ones afforded full rights and privileges under the laws of the Jewish state for Jews alone.

    Palestinian Arabs are another story. Their population is around 5.3 million (plus six million or more in the Palestinian diaspora). Around 3.9 million live in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and another 1.4 million are Arab citizens of Israel (20% of the population), including about 260,000 classified as internally displaced. Palestinians get no rights afforded Jews even though those inside Israel are citizens of the Jewish state, have passports and IDs, and can vote in Knesset elections for what good it does them. They’re subjected to constant abuse and neglect, are confined to 2% of the land plus 1% more for agricultural use, and are treated disdainfully as nonpersons.

    Arab Israeli citizens live mainly in all-Arab towns and villages in three heartlands – the Galilee in the north; what’s called the “Little Triangle” in the center that runs along the Israeli side of the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank; and the Negev desert region in the country’s south. These communities aren’t geographically consolidated and are surrounded by established Jewish communities, hostile to Arab neighbors, and with Israel’s full military might backing them. A minority of Palestinians also live uneasily in mixed Jewish-Arab cities like Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Jerusalem in the West Bank and others.

    The Plight of Palestinian Nonpersons in “Unrecognized Villages”

    The term is Orwellian in its worst sense. How can something real not officially exist? Around 150,000 or more (accurate numbers are hard to come by) Palestinian Arabs today live in over 100 so-called “unrecognized villages,” mainly in the Galilee and the Negev desert. They’re unrecognized because their inhabitants are considered internal refugees who were forced to flee their original homes during Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence” and were prevented from returning when it ended.

    These villages were delegitimized by Israel’s 1965 Planning and Construction Law that established a regulatory framework and national plan for future development. It zoned land for residential, agriculture and industrial use, forbade unlicensed construction, banned it on agricultural land, and stipulated where Israeli Jews and Palestinians could live. That’s how apartheid worked in South Africa.

    Existing communities are circumscribed on a map with blue lines around them. Areas inside the lines can be developed. Those outside cannot. For Jewish communities, great latitude is allowed for future expansion, and new communities are added as a result. In contrast, Palestinian areas are severely constricted leaving no room for expansion. Their land was reclassified as agricultural meaning no new construction is allowed. This meant entire communities became “unrecognized” and all homes and buildings there declared illegal, even the 95% of them built before the 1965 law passed. They’re subject to demolition and inhabitant displacement at the whim of Israeli officials. They want new land for Jews and freely take it from Arab owners, helpless to stop it.

    All Israeli public land is administered by the Israel Land Authority (ILA) that has a legal obligation to treat all its citizens fairly. Instead and with impunity, it serves Jewish interests only using various methods to do it.
    It restricts and prohibits Palestinian land development by:

    — putting large Arab areas under its control through the creation of regional councils;

    — zoning restrictions mentioned above;

    — transferring public land adjacent to Arab communities to Jewish National Fund (JNF) ownership that mandates it’s only for Jews;

    — connecting the cost of leasing land to military service that discriminates against Palestinians not required to serve and almost none do;

    — declaring national priority town areas for Jews only;

    — delaying, restricting and prohibiting local development in Arab communities;

    — ignoring Arab needs in regional and national plans;

    — allowing Palestinians little or no representation on national planning committees;

    — enforcing a policy of forced evictions and demolitions of buildings without appropriate permits. In “unrecognized villages,” no permits are allowed Palestinians on their own land. Entire villages thus face prosecution in the courts and loss of their homes, land and possessions through a state-sponsored policy to remove them judicially.

    It gets worse. No new Palestinian communities are allowed, and existing “unrecognized villages” are denied essential municipal services like clean drinking water, electricity, roads, transport, sanitation, education, healthcare, postal and telephone service, refuse removal and more because under the Planning and Construction Law they’re illegal. The toll on their people is devastating:

    — clean water is unavailable almost everywhere unless people have access to well water,

    — the few available health services are inadequate,

    — many homes have no bathrooms, and no permits are allowed to build them,

    — only villages with private generators have electricity enough for lighting only,

    — no village is connected to the main road network,

    — some villages are fenced in prohibiting their residents from access to their traditional lands,

    — in the North, only one school remains open and children must travel 10 – 15 kilometers to attend another; as a result, achievement levels are low and dropout rates high.

    It’s worse still when home demolitions are ordered. It may stipulate Palestinians must do it themselves or be fined for contempt of court and face up to a year in prison. They may also have to cover the cost when Israeli bulldozers do it under a system of convoluted justice penalizing Palestinians twice over.

    Discriminatory Israeli Law

    Israel is a signatory to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Its Preamble states “the obligation of (signatory) States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and freedom.” It then covers what states must observe in 53 Articles that stipulate the following:

    — “All people have the right of self-determination.”

    — “Each state party….undertakes to respect and ensure to all individuals within its territory the rights in this Covenant, without distinction of any kind” for any reason.

    — “Every human being has the inherent right to life,” to “be protected by law,” and no activity may be undertaken to destroy any rights and freedom covered under this Covenant.

    — “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

    — “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention.”

    — “Everyone….within the territory (shall) have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to chose his residence (and) to be free to leave any country (and not be) deprived of the right to enter (or return to) his own country.”

    — “All persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals.”

    — “Everyone shall have the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

    — “All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law.”

    — In states with “ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities (those persons) shall not be denied the (same) right(s)….as the other members.”

    In Israel, for all intents and purposes, the ICCPR is a nonstarter. It applies to Jews alone, not to Arabs and other non-Jews. Israeli laws allow it by subjecting non-Jews, and specifically Arabs, to three types of discrimination:

    — legal direct discrimination guaranteeing Jews alone the right to immigrate and become citizens; it also gives various Jewish organizations in the country quasi-government status serving Jews only.

    — indirect discrimination through “neutral” laws and criteria applying principally to Palestinians; government preferences and benefits are predicated on prior military service most Palestinians don’t perform; the categorization of the country into preferential zones for Jews provides them privileges and benefits denied Palestinians.

    — institutional discrimination through a legal framework facilitating a pattern of privileges afforded Jews only; they’re allocated through budgets and resources showing preferential treatment for Jews and discrimination against Palestinians; Israeli courts enforce the bias by refusing to hear cases where Palestinians claim their rights have been denied;

    — even when courts hear cases and rule favorably, Palestinians get only crumbs; an example was in the early September Supreme Court decision that Israel reroute part of its illegal apartheid wall and return a small portion of stolen land to the people of Bil’in; a far greater issue was ignored by allowing the illegal Modiin Illit settlement on Bil’in land to remain intact; for anti-occupation Gush Shalom, the court decision message to settlers is do as you please, build fast and expect court approval retrospectively.

    Israel professes to be a democracy. It is not by any reasonable standard. It defines itself as a Jewish state which contradicts its claimed democratic credentials. It treats Jews preferentially and entitles them to special consideration denied non-Jews who are discriminated against as second-class citizens and denied comparable rights.

    Israel has no formal constitution and instead is governed by its Basic Laws that before 1992 guaranteed no basic rights. That year, the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom passed authorizing the Knesset to overturn laws contrary to the right to dignity, life, freedom, privacy, property and to leave and enter the country. The law states “There shall be no violation of the life, body or dignity of any person. All persons are entitled to protection” of these rights, and “There shall be no deprivation or restriction of the liberty of a person by imprisonment, arrest, extradition or otherwise.”

    For a nation committed to violence, the irony is particularly galling that a section of the Basic Law also deals with “The Right to Life and Limb in Israeli Law.” It states “Israeli law has abolished the death penalty for murder (and corporal punishment).” It notes this penalty exists in principle but only under limited circumstances such as for treason during war and under the Law for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It further notes Israel’s 1998 Good Samaritan Law requires assistance be given in situations “of immediate and severe danger to another.” Omitted from the Basic Law is the right to equality so all rights in it apply to Jews only.

    Palestinian Arabs have none, yet can stand for public office in the Knesset. Some do, a few are elected but have no power beyond a public stage to state their views and be shouted down or ignored. They’re also constrained by the 1992 Law of Political Parties and section 7A(1) of the Basic Law that prohibits candidates for office from denying “the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” No candidate may challenge the fundamental Jewish character of the state or demand equal rights, privileges and justice under the law for Arabs and Jews. The essential Zionist identity is inviolable, the rule of law works for Jews alone, and Palestinians are denied all rights, equal treatment and justice under a legal system for Jews that discriminates against Arab Muslims. In South Africa it was called apartheid.

    The Current Plight of Palestinian Israeli Citizens in the Negev

    About half the 160,000 Bedouin Arabs today face forced displacement in the Negev. Why? Because they live in dozens “unrecognized villages” making their homes illegal under Israeli law. They face imprisonment and fines if they refuse to leave so their land can be cleared, homes demolished, and the area Judaised for a Negev development plan. It’s described as “A Miracle in the Desert” that aims to populate the area with a half million new Jewish residents in the next decade. Plans are for 25 new communities and 100,000 homes on cleared Bedouin lands. For the past two years, Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Negev and erasing Bedouin villages to make it possible.

    All Bedouin Arabs in “unrecognized villages” face what those living in Tawil Abu Jarwal endured in January. The entire village was destroyed when the Israeli military (IDF), a large police contingent and special task forces, a helicopter and bulldozers came in January 9. They demolished all 21 of its homes that consisted of shacks, brick rooms and tents. It followed a month earlier assault when 17 other homes were destroyed and their residents forcibly displaced. The people became homeless, and 63 of them in January were children. In late 2006, Israel’s interior minister, Roni Bar-On, announced his intention to destroy all 42,000 “illegal structures” in the Negev in a bandit declaration of planned forced ethnic cleansing against people helpless to stop it.

    It’s happening in Al-Sadir, Tel-Arad, Amara-Tarabin and on June 25 to Bedouin families in the small villages of Um al-Hiran and Atir that are homes to about 1000 people. Hundreds of police and Israeli security forces destroyed over 20 of their homes to make way for a Jewish community called Hiran to replace them. People living in them lost everything including their possessions they had no chance to remove. Haaretz reported Atir villagers lived there for 51 years after being transferred to the area in 1956 under martial law. The article continued saying the Israeli Regional Council of “Unrecognized Villages” will move displaced families to a refugee camp in the center of Jerusalem (where Bedouins don’t wish to live) “as part of the government’s (forced ethnic cleansing) relocation project” to make the “desert bloom” for new Jewish only communities.

    This is what all Negev Bedouin Arabs now face unless something can stop it. Large numbers of them attended an early August protest conference. It was held in solidarity with unaffected Palestinians who together called on Arab and other countries to support their right to remain in their homes and denounce Israel’s racist apartheid laws.

    Arab Knesset member, Talab Al Sane, spoke on their behalf. So did Hussein Al Rafay’a, head of the regional council of the “unrecognized villages,” who said Israel wants Palestinians to be refugees in their own lands and has been forcing them into this status by a policy of home demolitions and continued displacement. Arabs once owned 5.5 million dunams of land (550,000 hectares) in the Negev, he said. They now own less than 200,000 (20,000 hectares) and are threatened with losing all of it. “We will resort to the Security Council, and the international court (in the Hague) to provide the residents and their lands with needed protection.”

    With an assured US veto in the Security Council and Israel’s record of ignoring UN resolutions and World Court rulings against it, there’s little chance for success and every likelihood legal Israeli Arab citizens will continue being displaced from their own land.

    Advocacy for Palestinian Arabs in “Unrecognized Villages”

    Israel denies all Palestinians their basic rights. However, those living in so-called “unrecognized villages” face a special threat – demolition of their homes, loss of their land and possessions, and frightening displacement that will make them refugees along with millions of others in their own land. Few organizations advocate on their behalf, but a group that does is called The Association of Forty.

    It’s a grassroots NGO in Israel committed to promoting social justice for Israeli Arabs and to gain official recognition for their “unrecognized villages.” It was formed in December, 1988 when Arab and Jewish residents from several of the affected villages and other areas formed the Association. It now “represents the residents of the ‘unrecognized villages’ and their problems, and promotes support locally and internationally” on their behalf. It seeks official recognition for the villages, an improvement in their living conditions, and “full rights and equality for the Arab citizens of the state” of Israel.

    Its work consists of initiating “the preparation and implementation of active projects within these villages such as paving roads, improving existing roads and helping the residents to achieve their rights, to connect their villages to the network of water, electricity and telephones, to establish and operate kindergartens and clinics for mother and child care, and to obtain educational non-curricular activities for the schoolchildren….” It publishes a monthly newspaper, Sawt Al-Qura, has photographic exhibitions, films and documentaries that reflect the plight of the villages. It also organizes study days, holds local and international conferences, and participates in other international ones.

    The Palestinians Enduring Struggle for Freedom and Justice

    Palestinians today live under horrendous conditions. By any standard, they’re appalling, repressive and in violation of fundamental human rights principles under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating:

    — “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

    — “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms….in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind.”

    — “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

    — “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

    — “All are equal before the law and are entitled….to equal protection.”

    — “Everyone has the right to own property (nor shall anyone) be arbitrarily (be) deprived of his property.”

    Israel offers these rights to Jews alone. It denies them to Palestinian Arab Muslims in violation of its own Basic Law professing “Fundamental human rights….founded upon recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of human life, and the principle that all persons are free.” It continues stating the Basic Law of Israel “is to protect human dignity and liberty….(that) There shall be no violation of the property of a person….(that) All persons are entitled to protection of their life, body and dignity….(that) All government authorities are bound to respect the rights under this Basic Law.”

    The Basic Law also states Israel is a Jewish state, and the message is clear. All rights, benefits, privileges and protections are for Jews alone. All others are unwelcome, unwanted, unprotected, and unequal under the law. For them, justice unrecognized is justice denied and for Palestinians it’s willful and with malice.

    They face constant harassment, abuse and near daily assaults in the West Bank and even worse treatment under virtual imprisonment in Gaza. Their democratically elected government was ousted by a US-Israeli orchestrated coup in June to the shameless applause of Western leaders and silence from Arab ones. They’re now isolated, surrounded and dangerously close to a humanitarian disaster affecting 1.4 million people.

    It’s no better for Israeli Palestinian citizens. They’re nonpersons in their own land, are treated like intruders, given no rights, face constant harassment and mistreatment, get no justice, and face imminent loss of their homes, land, freedom and lives any time Israeli authorities wish to act against them. Yet they persist and endure as do their brethren in the Occupied Territories. They reach out to the world community, press their case, and a delegation from occupied Palestine stated it at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya in January.

    It was a call to action and cry for help for “freedom, justice and (a) durable peace” and an end to six decades of repression. It called for a “global Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it ends its apartheid-like regime of discrimination, occupation and colonization, and respects the right of return of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons.”

    It called for “Consumer boycotts of Israeli products; boycott of Israeli academic, athletic and cultural events and institutions complicit in human rights abuses; divestment from Israeli companies (and) international companies involved in perpetuating injustice, and pressuring governments to impose sanctions on Israel….”

    Silence is not an option, and people of conscience can help. Noted author and documentary filmmaker, John Pilger, believes “something is changing,” and he saw it in a recent full page New York Times ad having a “distinct odour of panic.” It called for boycotting Israel, and Pilger senses the “swell….is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed (and it’s) reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa…..once distant voices,” notes Pilger, have “gone global,” it caught Israel off guard and may signal change. But not easily or fast and may not happen at all unless global pressure becomes mass public outrage that this injustice no longer will be tolerated by people of conscience anywhere.

    Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

    Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

    The Greatest Story Never Told

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    By Stephen Lendman
    RINF Alternative News

    No issue is more sensitive in the US than daring to criticize Israel. It’s the metaphorical “third rail” in American politics, academia and the major media. Anyone daring to touch it pays dearly as the few who tried learned. Those in elected office face an onslaught of attacks and efforts to replace them with more supportive officials. Former five term Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney felt its sting twice in 2002 and 2006. So did 10 term Congressman Paul Findley (a fierce and courageous Israeli critic) in 1982 and three term Senator Charles Percy in 1984 whom AIPAC targeted merely for appearing to support anti-Israeli policy.

    DePaul University Professor Norman Finkelstein has long been a target as well for his courageous writing and outspokenness. Depaul formally denied him tenure June 8 even though his students call him “truly outstanding and among the most impressive” of all university political science professors. It’s why his Department of Political Science endorsed his tenure bid stating his academic record “exceeds our department’s stated standards for scholarly production (and) department and outside experts we consulted recognize the intellectual merits of his work.”

    It didn’t help, and on August 26 got worse. The university acknowledged “Professor Finkelstein is a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher.” Yet it issued a brief statement canceling his classes and placing him on administrative leave “with full pay and benefits for the 2007-8 academic year (that) relieves professors from their teaching responsibilities.” For now, Finkelstein’s long struggle with the university ended the first day of classes, September 5. Both sides agreed to a settlement, and a planned day of protests was curtailed. But as Chicago Tribune writer Ron Grossman put it in his September 6 column headlined “Finkelstein deal ends DePaul tiff….the underlying struggle between supporters of Israel and champions (like Finkelstein) of the Palestinians continues, not just at the North Side campus but across the academic world.”

    That struggle is nowhere in sight in the dominant media that includes major print publications, commercial radio, television and so-called Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio both of which long ago abandoned the public trust in service to their corporate and government paymasters.

    In all parts of the major media, no Israeli criticism is tolerated on-air or in print, and any reporter, news anchor, pundit or on-air guest forgetting the (unwritten) rules, won’t get a second chance. Support for Israel is ironclad, absolute, and uncompromising on everything including its worst crimes of war and against humanity. Open debate is stifled, and anyone daring to dissent or demur is pilloried, ridiculed, called anti-semetic, even threatened, ostracized, and finally ignored. In his seminal work on Middle East affairs, “Fateful Triangle,” Noam Chomsky put it this way: “….Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship….”

    Call it the myth of the free press in a nation claiming to have the freest of all. It’s pure fantasy now and in an earlier era, journalist A.J Liebling said it was only for “those who own(ed) one.” Today, they’re giants operating the way Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained in their classic book on the media titled “Manufacturing Consent.” The authors developed their “propaganda model” to show all news and information passes through a set of “filters.” “Raw material” goes through them, unacceptable parts are suppressed, and “only the cleansed residue fit to print (and broadcast on-air)” reaches the public. The New York Times calls it “All The News That’s Fit to Print.” By its standard, it means sanitized news only leaving out the most important parts and what readers want most – the full truth and nothing else.

    The same goes for the rest of the dominant media that serve as collective national thought control police gatekeepers “filtering” everything we read, see and hear. They manipulate our minds and beliefs, program our thoughts, and effectively destroy the free marketplace of ideas essential to a healthy democracy. In America, that’s nowhere in sight.

    The problem is most acute in reporting on Israel. Criticism of the Jewish state is stifled in an effort to portray it as a model democracy, the only one in the region, and surrounded by hostile Palestinians, other Arab/Muslim extremists and whoever else Israel cites as a threat, real or contrived. The truth is quite opposite but absent from corporate-controlled media spaces.

    How “The Newspaper of Record” Reports on Israel

    This article focuses mainly on the media’s lead and most influential voice, The New York Times. It’s been around since 1851 when it quietly debuted saying “….we intend to (publish) every morning (except Sundays) for an indefinite number of years to come.” Today, it’s the pillar of the corporate media and main instrument of fake news making it the closest thing in the country to an official ministry of information and propaganda. But here’s the Times 1997 Proxy Statement quote media critic Edward Herman used in his April, 1998 Z Magazine article titled “All The News Fit to Print (Part I).” Its management then (and now) claimed The Times to be “an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.” It leaves one breathless and demands an earlier used quote – “phew.”

    No media source anywhere has more clout than the Times, none manipulates the public mind more effectively, and where it goes, others follow. It’s most visible supporting all things corporate, foreign wars of aggression, and everything favoring Israel it views one way. That’s the focus below – how the New York Times plays the lead cheerleading role for Israel even when its actions are unjustifiable, unconscionable and criminal.

    Freelance journalist Alison Weir founded “If Americans Knew” as an “independent research and information-dissemination institute (to provide) every American (what he or she) needs to know about Israel/Palestine.” That includes “inform(ing) and educat(ing) the American public on issues of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media.” Below is an account of her in-depth study of how the New York Times betrays its readers by distorting its coverage on Israel.

    It was in her April 24, 2005 article called “New York Times Distortion Up Close and Personal.” It drew on the findings from her 23-page report, and 40 pages of supportive data, titled “Off the Charts – Accuracy in Reporting of Israel/Palestine (by) The New York Times.” To be as objective as possible, the study “count(ed) the deaths reported on both sides of the (Israeli-Palestinian) conflict, and then compare(d) these to the actual number….that had occurred.” The findings showed a “startling disparity….depending on the ethnicity of the victim(s).”

    The study covered two periods. The first was from the September 29, 2000 beginning of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (or second) Intifada (ignited by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount Al-Aqsa Mosque site) through September 28, 2001. The second ran from January 1, 2004 through December 31, 2004. Deaths counted were only those resulting from Israeli – Palestinian confrontations.

    The first study showed the New York Times reported 2.8 times the number of Israeli deaths to Palestinian ones when, in fact, three times more Palestinians were killed than Israelis. In the second one, the ratio increased to 3.6 adding further distortion to the coverage. Reporting children’s deaths was even more skewed, coming in at a ratio of 6.8 for Israeli children compared to Palestinian ones and then at 7.3 in the later study. The latter ratio is particularly startling since 22 times more Palestinian children were killed, in fact, than Israelis in 2004 according to B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Terroritories. The Times simply ignored them.

    In all its reporting in both periods, the Times distorted the facts egregiously. It highlighted Israeli deaths by headlining and repeating them. In contrast, there was silence on most Palestinian ones. The impression given was that more Jews died than Arabs or at times the numbers were equal on both sides. Most often, they weren’t even close.

    It was startling to learn that Israeli and other human rights groups documented 82 Palestinian children killed at the Intifada’s outset (most by “gunfire to the head” indicating deliberate targeting) before a single Israeli child died. The Times willfully ignored this in its coverage the same way it obsessed last summer over Hamas’ capture of a single Israeli soldier while ignoring around 12,000 Palestinian men, women and children political detainees held by Israelis illegally. For the Times, they’re non-persons, but everyone in Israel and many outside it know that soldier’s name and still do.

    Weir calls this coverage a “highly disturbing pattern of bias.” She presented her findings (“complete with charts, spread-sheets, clear sourcing, and extensive additional documentation”) to the Times’ Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, in a face-to-face meeting, but came away disappointed. It was because of a 1762-word column Okrent wrote in response. It ignored or misrepresented the facts, was unconcerned that most Times reporters covering Israel/Palestine are Jewish, all live inside Israel, and the paper claimed it’s impossible finding “sufficient numbers of high quality journalists of Muslim or Arab heritage to work on this issue.” It is when you don’t look.

    Yet, it’s worth noting what Weir believes was a “personal confession” in a single line. Okrent may have slipped up saying: “I don’t think any of us (at the Times) can be objective about our own claimed objectivity.” Confession or not, it led to no change in the Times’ reporting.

    Weir updated her report to include Palestinian children’s deaths in 2004 and 2005 from documented information on the “Remember These Children” web site. It uses Israeli and other human rights organizations’ sources with these findings through June, 2007:

    — 118 Israeli children under 18 years years of age killed compared to 973 Palestinian youths, most shot in the head or chest indicating deliberate targeting by Israeli soldiers. This information never appears in Times’ reports.

    Instead, The Times “marginalizes Palestinian women and Palestinian rights” according to a November 17, 2006 Electronic Intifada (EI) report. Its authors (Patrick O’Connor and Rachel Roberts) state: “The New York Times pays little attention to human rights in Israel/Palestine, downplays….violence against Palestinian women and generally silences (their) voices.”

    Since the second Intifada began, B’Tselem, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) published 76 reports documenting Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights and four others on Palestinian violations against Israelis or other Palestinians. The Times, however, wrote only four articles on them all – two on Israeli abuses and two others on what Palestinians did suggesting both sides shared equal guilt.

    Three other Times articles on the conflict focused on a Human Rights Watch report criticizing Palestinian suicide bombings, another HRW one on Israeli actions in Jenin in 2002, and a B’Tselem report on the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) exoneration of soldiers for killing a Palestinian child. The Times also published one article criticizing Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and one other one critical of Hezbollah during that conflict. It’s the Times’ idea of fairness and balance, that distorts facts, ignores truth, and in every instance betrays its readers.

    EI’s writers refer to thousands of New York Times articles on Israel/Palestine since the second Intifada began September 29, 2000. Yet in them all, it “quoted, cited or paraphrased just 4187 words….from human rights organizations in 62 articles, snippets (only) averaging just 69 words per article.” In the same articles, far more space was given to Israeli government denials even when clear evidence proved them false.

    Other research shows The New York Times op ed page marginalizes Palestinian voices and completely shuts out its women who are portrayed as passive, docile and at the mercy of men. Readers aren’t told they “balance their dual commitment to the national (and feminist) struggle(s)” by courageously leading the fight against domestic and Israeli violence in the Occupied Territories. The Times also ignores Amnesty International’s emphasis on the occupation’s harmful effects on women in detention centers and from “military checkpoints, blockades and curfews” even though they cause sick and pregnant women to die for lack of aid.

    It’s part of the same pattern of selective disclosure and distortion so readers don’t know what’s happening and are led to believe victims are the victimizers. Facts are ignored, international law is unmentioned and reporting “contributes to the dangerous pattern of Western disparagement of Muslim society,” made easy post-9/11.

    EI sums up its article stating “If the Times cared about human rights in Israel/Palestine, (balanced reporting, and) valued independent third party perspectives, (it) would have published more than 6256 (total) words….of major human rights organizations (reports) in its thousands of articles” for the past seven years. Instead, the impression given is Israeli crimes are marginal, sporadic, inconsequential, acts of self-defense and not crimes at all. This type reporting sets the (low) standard for the rest of the dominant media and highlights why few Americans question their government’s full and unconditional support for Israeli policy.

    The Times willfully ignores the following type information B’Tselem posts and updates on its website (www.btselem.org). From September 29, 2000 through August 31, 2007, it documented 4274 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces or civilians including 857 children. That compares to 1024 Israelis killed by Palestinians including 119 children.

    Throughout this period, The Times low-keyed Israeli violence in its coverage but featured dozens of articles on Palestinian suicide bombings and other acts of self-defense it portrays as “terrorism” against innocent Israelis. Left out is what B’Tselem, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), AI, HRW, ICRC and other human rights organizations report:

    — willful violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s protections of civilians in times of war and under occupation by a foreign power.

    — excessive use of force and abuse;

    — policy of collective punishment and economic strangulation;

    — growing numbers of expanding illegal settlements;

    — home demolitions;

    — random IDF invasions, air and ground attacks;

    — many dozens of extrajudicial assassinations;

    — administrative detentions without charge and routine use of torture of thousands of Palestinians including young children treated like adults;

    — land expropriation;

    — crop destruction;

    — policies of closure, separation, checkpoints, ghettoization and curfews;

    — denial of the most basic human rights and civil liberties; and

    — an overall Kafkaesque “matrix of control” designed to extinguish Palestinians’ will to resist.

    The Times willful distortion and indifference to Palestinian suffering highlights its coverage. Like others in the dominant media, it displays no sense of fairness, accuracy or balance in portraying Palestinians as militants, gunmen and terrorists – never as oppressed human beings under occupation struggling for freedom in their own land. In sharp contrast, Israelis are seen as surrounded, beleaguered, and innocent victims acting in self-defense. It’s sheer fantasy, the facts on the ground prove it, but Times readers aren’t given them.

    They’re also not told how Israel discriminates against Palestinian Arab Israeli citizens. Patrick O’Connor explained in his March 30, 2006 Electronic Intifada article titled “The New York Times Covers Up Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens of Israel.” He noted the rise to prominence of Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and his extremist Yisrael Beiteinu party. It advocates “transferring a number of Palestinian towns in Israel to Palestinian Authority (PA) control,” thereby revoking the legalized status of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. They’re already second class ones and are treated unequally under Israel’s Basic Law that affords rights and benefits to Jews only.

    O’Connor notes the Times plays “a leading role collaborat(ing) with this strategy.” It characterizes all Palestinians as militants, gunmen and terrorists while suppressing their “experiences under….occupation (victimized by) Israeli state terrorism, and (the) systemic Israeli discrimination against Palestinian (citizens) living in Israel….”

    An instance of Times distortion was from a March 21, 2006 article by Dina Kraft. In it, Israel dismissively refers to “Israeli Arabs” and so does Kraft. They’re not called Palestinian Israeli citizens “to divide and rule, and to cover up the familial, historical and cultural relationship between Palestinians” inside Israel to those in the Territories and diaspora. The Times goes along without challenge, never questioning if a self-declared Jewish state can be democratic without ensuring equal rights to its non-Jewish minority. Ignored as well is Yisrael Beiteinu’s outlandish proposal to revoke citizenship rights for Arabs inside Israel because they’re not Jews.

    O’Connor stresses how the Times, Kraft and the major US media collaboratively perpetuate the myth that Israel is “a liberal, democratic state inexplicably beset by Arab/Muslim terrorism.” In so doing, they suppress the historical record that Israel ethnically cleansed 800,000 Palestinians, killed many thousands of others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem in its 1948 “War of Independence.” They also deny that Palestinians everywhere have close historical, family and cultural ties, yet Israel discriminates against them all unfairly.

    In her report, Weir noted what all people of conscience believe: that “readers of The New York Times (and all Americans) are entitled to full and accurate reporting on all issues, including the topic of Israel/Palestine.” In her study period, the Times covered it in “well over 1000 stories,” so it’s deeply troubling how much critical information was omitted.

    A 9/11/07 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) Action Alert provides more evidence of NYT cover-up and distortion. It’s titled “Whose Human Rights Matter? NYT on Hezbollah and Israeli attacks on civilians.” FAIR cites two recently released Human Rights Watch (HRW)investigations of Israel’s war against Lebanon in which The New York Times highlighted “unlawful attacks against Israel” while giving short shrift to “unlawful attacks committed by Israel.” This is de rigueur at The Times so the FAIR report is no surprise.

    It noted the NYT ran its own 800 word story supportive of Israel on 8/31/07 titled “Rights Group Accuses Hezbollah of Indiscriminate Attacks on Civilians in Israel War” accompanied by a photo of “Israeli civilians at risk from Hezbollah rockets.” In sharp contrast, it settled for a 139 word AP report on Israeli unlawful attacks under its own headline titled “Israel Criticized Over Lebanon Deaths” with no photo. Even worse, The Times report on Israeli infractions omitted key information about the claim that Hezbollah used Lebanese people as human shields. HRW found no supportive evidence, and its executive director, Kenneth Roth, said the Israeli government’s assertion was false.

    The Times also failed to reflect the dramatic disparity in civilian deaths on each side. HRW estimated Israel killed about 900 Lebanese civilians out of a total 1200 death toll in the country while Hezbollah killed 43 Israeli civilians plus about 80 IDF personnel. FAIR’s conclusion: The Times values Israeli lives far more than Lebanese ones. No surprise.

    FAIR raised an additional point as well from its 12/6/06 Action Alert. It refuted a Times report as false that Israeli attacks on civilians were legitimate “since Hezbollah fired from civilian areas, itself a war crime, which made those areas legitimate targets.” Again, standard practice at The Times that values fake news above truth, accuracy, fairness and balance.

    Weir hoped a public airing of her findings on The Times would lead to better reporting at the “paper of record.” It never did and just got worse following Hamas’ dramatic democratic January, 2006 electoral victory. Afterwards, all outside aid was cut off, Hamas was marginalized and politically isolated, and Israeli repression got stepped up in an effort to crush the fledging government by making the Territories “scream.”

    It came to a head June 14 following weeks of US-Israeli orchestrated violence. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas declared a “state of emergency” and illegally dismissed Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and his national unity government. He appointed his own US-Israeli vetted replacements days later with The New York Times in the lead supporting the new quisling coup d’etat government. Noted journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger explains the first casualty of war is good journalism. It’s as true for reporting on Israel, especially on the pages of “the newspaper of record” that sets the low standard others then follow.

    That standard excludes discussion of the powerful Israeli lobby with AIPAC just one part of it. Noted figures like John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government are persona non grata for their heroic work documenting its powerful influence on US policy toward Israel and the Middle East. Noted scholar and activist James Petras makes the same compelling case in his revealing 2006 must-read book titled “The Power of Israel in the United States.” The record of “the newspaper of record” includes none of their findings and conclusions proving when it comes to truth in reporting, it’s absent from its pages. It’s especially pronounced in its coverage of Israel/Palestine.

    More Evidence of Corporate Media Distortion on Israel-Palestine

    When it comes to shoddy reporting, most notably on Israel/Palestine, there’s plenty of blame to go around. It’s found on major US broadcast and cable channels, most all corporate-owned publications here and abroad, the BBC, CBC, Deutche Welle, other European broadcasters, and what passes for so-called public radio and broadcasting in the US. An exception is Pacifica Radio, the original and only real public radio in the US. Its provides excellent coverage, especially on KPFA’s daily Flashpoints Radio with the best of it anywhere on-air from its co-hosts, contributors and top quality guests.

    The opposite is true for so-called National Public Radio’s (NPR), but its public broadcast (PBS)counterpart shares equal guilt. Many people naively turn to NPR as an acceptable alternative to corporate media disinformation without realizing it’s as corrupted by capital interests and big government as all the others. Its president, Kevin Klose, is the former head of US propaganda that includes Voice of America (VOA), Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Worldnet Television and the anti-Castro Radio/TV Marti. He’s ideal for the same role at National Public Radio, and it’s why he got the job.

    NPR never met a US war of aggression it didn’t love, and it’s especially attentive to the interests of its corporate paymasters like McDonald’s (with $225 million of it), Allstate, Merck, Archer Daniels Midland, and the worst of all worker rights’ abusers, Wal-Mart, that NPR welcomes anyway. In its space, there never is heard a discouraging word on any of these or most other major US corporate giants.

    Then, there’s the issue of fair and balanced reporting on Israel/Palestine that’s absent from NPR programs all the time. The media watchdog group FAIR exposed it in its study of NPR’s coverage of Israeli/Palestinian violence in the first six months of 2001. Over virtually any period, Palestinian deaths way outnumber Israeli ones. Yet NPR in the period studied reported 62 Israeli deaths compared to 51 Palestinian ones at a time 77 Israelis and 148 Palestinians were killed. It meant “there was an 81% likelihood an Israeli death would be reported on NPR, but only a 34% likelihood” a Palestinian one would be.

    The findings were similar each way FAIR examined the data. They showed one-sided pro-Israel reporting the way it is throughout the dominant media. The result (then and now) is NPR betrays the public trust. It suppresses real news in favor of the fake kind it prefers. It violates its claim to be “an internationally acclaimed producer of noncommercial news, talk and entertainment programming” and its mission statement pledge “to create a more informed public – one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciations of events, ideas and cultures (through) programming that meets the highest standards of public service in journalism and cultural expression.” It’s pure nonsense. On all counts, NPR fails badly.

    The Electronic Intifada web site showed how badly. It was in a February 19, 2002 article titled “Special Report: NPR’s Linda Gradstein (its Israel correspondent) Takes Cash Payments from Pro-Israel Groups.” Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry (its co-founders) discovered Gradstein violated professional journalistic and NPR ethics and policy by accepting cash honoraria from pro-Israeli organizations in the past and currently to the date of the article.

    Gradstein is notorious for her pro-Israeli bias and being paid for it makes it worse. Hillel is one of her paymasters, and in one instance openly acknowledged it considered Gradstein an Israeli propagandist. Other Israeli groups apparently do as well as Gradstein openly violated NPR’s stated (but uninforced) policy not to accept these fees. Instead, she regularly takes them and likely still does.

    The EI writers concluded “for some reason or other, Gradstein is effectively exempt from NPR’s own regulations. These revelations only broaden existing concerns about the integrity of NPR’s Middle East reporting and honesty of Linda Gradstein….the sad truth is that Linda Gradstein rarely meets (the minimum) standard(s)” of journalistic ethics and integrity. This is common practice at NPR and at the rest of the major media as well.

    The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)

    The dominant US media have loads of firepower and freely unleash it supporting Israel. They need no backup help but get it anyway from CAMERA, a powerful Boston-based pro-Israeli media lobby group. The organization was founded by Charles Jacobs in 1982 and claims to be “non-partisan….regard(ing)….American or Israeli political issues (and takes no position) regard(ing)….ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” It calls itself “a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East.”

    It claims “Inaccurate and distorted accounts of events in Israel and the Middle East are….found everywhere from college radio stations to network television, from community newspapers to national magazines (to the) Internet.” They’re also in “fashion magazines, architectural publications, encyclopedias….travel guides, and even dictionaries.” They’re “inaccurate (and) skewed (and) may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.”

    CAMERA’s on guard to fight back with plenty of dues-paying members to do it – 55,000 well-heeled ones plus “thousands of active letter writers.” They monitor all media and its journalists everywhere for one purpose – to resolutely support Israel and combat all criticism it calls “anti-Israel bias.” CAMERA tolerates none, not even modest in tone on issues too minor to matter. They do to CAMERA that views everything in black and white terms with no gray allowed.

    Muslims are bad because they’re Muslims and not Jews. Jews, on the other hand, are good because they’re Jewish. This for CAMERA is fair and balanced meaning support Israel, right or wrong, and you are. Dare criticize, you’re not, and be targeted full force with all CAMERA’s hard-hitting tools – mass letter-writing, articles, op-eds, monographs, special reports, full-page ads in major publications, the CAMERA Media Report critiquing “bias and error,” CAMERA on Campus doing the same thing, CAMERA Fellows training students in pro-Israeli thinking, and focused attacks on “media bias” and journalists anywhere even mildly critical of Israel.

    CAMERA is effective because it’s unrelenting, focused and well-funded. It “systematically monitors, documents, reviews and archives (all) Middle East coverage.” Its staffers “contact reporters, editors, producers and publishers” demanding “distorted or inaccurate coverage” be retracted and replaced by “factual information to refute errors.” For CAMERA, it means support Israel without compromise or be hounded until you do.

    Two Examples of Truth in Reporting Banned in the Dominant Media – First from Bethlehem

    Pacifica’s KPFA Flashpoints Radio co-host Nora Barrows Friedman has become the electronic media’s most courageous voice on Israel/Palestine. An example was her disturbing story from Bethlehem August 21 for Inter Press Service that was unreported in the dominant media. It’s a dramatic example of sanitizing ugly parts of a story to prettify Israeli actions or simply ignoring it as in this case.

    Friedman reported the Israeli military has been cutting and destroying apricot and walnut trees for months to make way for its scheme in the village of Artas, southeast of Bethlehem. It’s a concrete tunnel (along with the apartheid separation wall) for raw Israeli settlement sewage (excrement and waste). It’s to be dumped on Palestinian land even though its toxicity will endanger the health and welfare of its residents. It will destroy crops and poison the land rendering it useless for agriculture.

    Artas villagers have been “active and defiant….over the last year after unofficial information” about the plan leaked out. It’s still ongoing, nonetheless, as Israeli bulldozers continue uprooting crops and orchards in preparation for construction to follow. Non-violent protesters (on their own land) “have been shot at, beaten” arrested and imprisoned for defying expropriation of their property. Israel frequently does this throughout the Occupied Territories for the parts it wants. In this case, it’s for land to dump raw untreated toxic sewage waste on from its settlements.

    It’s part of an overall ethnic cleansing scheme to dispossess Palestinians from their lands, one parcel, one village at a time, every devious way Israelis can invent to do it. This time, villagers are fighting back in the Israeli Supreme Court. But based on its past rulings, they have little hope for justice and no hope the major media will help stop the abuse by exposing it in its coverage.

    A Second Example: Hamas’ “Goals for All of Palestine”

    Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas political bureau deputy, prepared an eloquent op-ed piece July 10 titled “Hamas’ stand” that got rare space in the latimes.com but none in the New York Times, NPR or elsewhere in the dominant media. In it, he explained Hamas’ July rescue of BBC journalist Alan Johnson wasn’t done “as some obsequious boon to Western powers. It was….part of our effort to secure Gaza from (all) lawlessness…. and violence….where journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity.”

    He stressed Hamas never supported attacks on Westerners. Instead, its struggle “always….focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it….supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Despite that right of any occupied people, Israel and Washington falsely accuse its leaders of ideologies “they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Queda and its adherents.”

    Marzook “deplore(d) the current prognosticating over “Fatah-land (in the West Bank) versus “Hamastan (in Gaza). In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state,” and its people have every legal right to demand and expect one. He continued saying its “militant stance” is reasonable in “our fight against the occupation and the right of Palestinians to have dignity, justice and self-rule.” It’s guaranteed all peoples everywhere under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    Marzook raised the litmus test issue of Palestinians having to concede Israel’s “putative right to exist as a necessary precondition to discussing grievances, and to renounce” its 1988 charter position “born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.” A state “may have a right to exist,” he stated, “but not….at the expense of other states (or more importantly) at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice.”

    Marzook justifiably asked “Why should anyone concede Israel’s right to exist, when it….never….acknowledged (its) foundational crimes of murder, ethnic cleansing (and seizure of) our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees? Why should any Palestinian recognize (this) monstrous crime….?” How can Israel “declare itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews (alone)….in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.”

    Marzook continued denouncing Israeli hypocrisy referring back to the writings of its Zionist founders. In them, they made “repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants” saying: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” Israeli policy today “advocat(es) for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan (River) to the sea.” The international community voices “no clamor….for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is” for Palestinians alone.

    Marzook has no trouble “recognizing” Israel’s right to exist. “Israel does exist,” he says, “as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you.” He referred to a distracting “dance of mutual rejection (while) many are dying (or live) as prisoners….in refugee camps” and Israeli prisons unjustly.

    Marzook speaks for all Palestinians saying he “look(s) forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: ‘Here, here is your family’s house by the sea (we took from you in 1948), here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again.’ Then we can speak of a future together” and can have one in peace but never under occupation.

    Try finding that commentary in the New York Times or on NPR. Somehow, it slipped into the latimes.com and maybe in error. Pilger is right. The first casualty of war is good journalism. It applies as well to reporting on Israel/Palestine and most other major world and national issues. Real news and information fall victim to the fake kind in the dominant media. Thankfully, people are catching on, viable alternatives abound in print and online, and web sites like this one provide it.

    Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

    Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

    Human rights groups accuse MoD of hypocrisy over cluster bombs

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    · Weapon reclassified to escape ban, say critics
    · Unexploded munitions are threat to civilians

    Richard Norton-Taylor
    The Guardian

    Humanitarian organisations accuse the Ministry of Defence today of reclassifying one its newest weapons to escape an expected world ban on cluster bombs.The MoD last year described the Hydra CRV-7 system, which delivers a number of bomblets from a helicopter-mounted rocket pod, as a cluster weapon.

    Later in the year, Margaret Beckett, then foreign secretary, said the government did not consider the weapon fell within the term “dumb”, because virtually all the bomblets exploded on impact. Des Browne, the defence secretary, announced earlier this year he had banned the use by Britain’s armed forces of “dumb” cluster bombs. He said Britain would deploy only cluster bombs which had a self-destruct mechanism.

    In July, Bob Ainsworth, the armed forces minister, told MPs the CRV-7, equipped with “multi-purpose submunitions” fired from Apache helicopters, did not after all fall within the government’s “understanding of a cluster munition”. Cluster munitions release smaller “bomblets” when fired, posing a danger to civilians during and long after a conflict. Unexploded “bomblets” maim and kill civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.

    Mr Ainsworth said in July CRV-7 bombs were not now cluster weapons because of “direct fire capabilities” and because they had “too few submunitions”.

    However, the MoD admitted trials in the US had revealed a 6% failure rate. Though the MoD says the CRV-7 bomb has nine submunitions, critics say today it is a 19-rocket pod, with 171 submunitions in all.

    The reclassification is attacked today by Oxfam, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Landmine Action, who also say that Britain has been the world’s third largest user of lethal cluster bombs over the last 10 years. “Ten years after it championed a treaty banning landmines, the UK has a chance to do the same with cluster bombs – but instead it is spinning a cluster bomb con,” said Simon Conway, Director of Landmine Action.

    Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch, said: “Our investigations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have all shown that cluster munitions, no matter how sophisticated, do not work as advertised, and instead get used in ways that violate international humanitarian law.”

    In February 2007, Britain joined 46 other countries in calling for a worldwide ban on cluster bombs. This initiative, the Oslo Process, is expected to lead to a treaty next year, the humanitarian groups say.

    Anna MacDonald of Oxfam said: “Current UK policy on cluster bombs makes no sense. They say they want an international treaty but they also want to keep using cluster bombs well known to kill and injure civilians.”

    Britain also has in its armoury artillery-delivered M85 cluster bomblets which are supposed to self-destruct if they do not explode on impact. A Commons foreign affairs committee report estimated that the weapons had a 10% failure rate.

    “Despite being the third biggest user of cluster bombs in the world over the last 10 years, the government hasn’t made any efforts to asses the harm these weapons cause to civilians,” said Oliver Sprague of Amnesty International.

    In a statement last night, the MoD said: “The UK is committed to improving reliability of all munitions, including cluster munitions, with the aim of achieving lower failure rates and leaving less unexploded ordnance. There is no internationally recognised definition for cluster munitions.” The statement added that an MoD assessment concluded “direct fire munitions” should not be classed as cluster weapons and that was the view shared by the Red Cross; “direct fire” normally means the gunner can see the intended target.

    US halts diplomatic convoys in Iraq

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    The US embassy in Baghdad has suspended all diplomatic convoys outside the heavily fortified Green Zone and the rest of Iraq.

    The move comes as the Iraqi government said it would review the status of all private security companies working in the country following a deadly shooting on Sunday involving guards from the US firm Blackwater.

    The government announced the investigation on Tuesday, after the interior ministry decided to “halt the licence” of Blackwater, which provides security to US diplomats in Iraq.

    Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman, announced the decision “to review the operations of foreign and local security companies in Iraq”.

    He said: “This came after the flagrant assault conducted by members of the American security company Blackwater against Iraqi citizens.”

    In a notice sent to Americans in Iraq, the US embassy said it had acted to review the security of its personnel and possible increased threats to those leaving the Green Zone while accompanied by security details after the weekend killing of Iraqi civilians involving Blackwater guards.

    “In light of a serious security incident involving a US embassy protective detail in the Mansour District of Baghdad, the embassy has suspended official US government civilian ground movements outside the International Zone [Green Zone] and throughout Iraq,” the notice said.

    “This suspension is in effect in order to assess mission security and procedures, as well as a possible increased threat to personnel travelling with security details outside the International Zone,” said the notice.

    No official notice

    Blackwater said on Monday that it had received no official notice from Iraq’s interior ministry.

    The toll from the shooting rose to nine-10 civilians and one policeman – on Tuesday, according to a local hospital medic.

    US officials in Baghdad have yet to clarify the legal status of foreign security contractors in Iraq, including whether they could be liable for prosecution by Iraqi authorities.

    Riad Kahwaji, director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military analysis, told Al Jazeera: “Only the party that brought them [the private security firms] into Iraq can take them out of Iraq – and that is the US.”

    He said that under their contracts “neither Blackwater nor the other [private security] companies are obliged to obtain a licence from Iraq”.

    Kahwaji said: “The chances are they are going to stay. Because a lot of the foreign companies and contractors that are rebuilding Iraq rely totally on these Western, or US-based, security companies.

    “They don’t have any confidence in the Iraqi police and the Iraqi security services.”

    Regret expressed

    Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, telephoned Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, on Monday to express regret over the death of innocent civilians.

    US and Iraqi sources said the shooting erupted after a bomb exploded near a US diplomatic convoy, but a US government incident report said armed men fired on the convoy and Blackwater guards responded.

    “Blackwater’s independent contractors acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack in Baghdad on Sunday,” said a statement from the North Carolina company, reported by CNN on its website.

    “Blackwater regrets any loss of life, but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.”

    Nevertheless, Abdul Sattar Ghafour Bairaqdar, a judge from Iraq’s highest court, the Supreme Judiciary Council, said Blackwater could face trial.

    “This company is subject to Iraqi law and the crime committed was on Iraqi territory and the Iraqi judiciary is responsible for tackling the case,” he said.

    Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader of the al-Mahdi Army militia, added his voice to anger over the incident, urged the government to “cancel this company’s work, and the rest of the criminal and intelligence companies”.

    Car-bomb attacks

    The Blackwater controversy provided the backdrop to more violence across the country.

    Four car bombs in Baghdad on Tuesday killed 17 people and wounded 50 more, according to police.

    The deadliest car bomb attack killed eight people and wounded 22 others near a market in the Ur neighbourhood, not far from the Shia-dominated district of Sadr City, police said.

    Three other car bombs killed a total of nine people and wounded 28.

    An explosion near a US security patrol killed three soldiers and wounded three others in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, the US military said on Tuesday.

    London meeting

    Also on Tuesday, the top US commander in Iraq briefed British officials on the course of the war.

    The visit to Britain by General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, came a week after their testimony to US congressmen.

    Speaking before a meeting with Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, Petraeus praised British forces serving in Iraq, repeating his assessment of stability in Iraq in the wake of the “surge” of American forces.

    He also offered support for Britain’s plan to give Iraqi security forces control of Basra province later this year or earlier next year.

    However, Petraeus warned against pulling out too early.

    “There are no easy answers or quick solutions to helping the Iraqis build sustainable security and achieve national reconciliation,” he said.

    “Our assessments underscore the importance of recognising that a premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences not only for Iraq and the region, but for our nations and the world.”

    Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

    Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil

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    Graham Paterson

    AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

    In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

    However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

    Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.

    Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

    US agrees further British withdrawal from Iraq

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    · Petraeus and UK officials give upbeat assessment
    · Announcement could come next month

    Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black
    The Guardian

    General Petraeus
    General David Petraeus holds talks with British officials. Photograph: David Levene
     

    Britain is poised to announce significant cuts in the number of troops in southern Iraq following an upbeat assessment by US and British military officials in London yesterday.This was the message from defence officials last night following talks between ministers and General David Petraeus, the American military commander in Iraq.

    Amid concern about the mounting tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iraq and nuclear issues, Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, also kept up the pressure on Iran, saying its repeated calls for dialogue with the US were irrelevant as long as it continued supporting Iraqi militias and played what Mr Crocker called a “lethal and damaging” role.

    The Guardian understands an announcement on further cuts in British troops could be made as early as October 8 when Gordon Brown is due to make a statement to MPs when the Commons returns after its summer break. A reduction of 500 troops out of a total of 5,500 has already been announced.

    At a press conference after talks with Des Browne, the defence secretary, and British military chiefs, Gen Petraeus went out of the way to emphasise the intimate links between the senior commanders of the two countries in Iraq.

    He declined to talk figures but said the talks included the “rotation” of British troops in southern Iraq. A change of brigades would take place between the end of October and beginning of December and would provide the opportunity for a new round of cuts in the number of UK troops based in Basra.

    He said that, subject to continuing negotiations, he expected Basra province, the last of the four Iraqi provinces controlled by Britain after the 2003 invasion, to be transferred to the Iraqis “later this fall or in the winter”.

    He added: “There has been a substantial reduction over the past month and a half in the number of violent attacks [there]. Political deals appear to have been established.”

    Gen Petraeus also emphasised “reconciliation”. Referring to the British experience in Northern Ireland, he spoke of coming “to grips with the obvious idea you reconcile with your enemies”.

    He said he had discussed “specific tasks” with Mr Browne and British defence chiefs. Officials said this was a reference to the importance of political and economic progress – an issue likely to have been raised in his talks later in Downing Street.

    The MoD said last night Mr Browne “re-emphasised the UK’s commitment to Iraq, that we will continue to help build their capabilities – military and civilian – so that they can take full responsibility for the security of their own country”.

    At the joint press conference, Mr Crocker said: “We have not witnessed any constructive changes in Iranian behaviour on the ground in Iraq.

    “For us the issue is not about the US talking to Iran or the bilateral relationship, which is extraordinarily difficult. It’s about what Iran can and should be doing – and should not be doing – by supporting and training and financing extremist militias that are killing Iraqis and coalition forces.” Iran’s interest was in a stable, democratic and peaceful Iraq, he said. “The Iranians have a decision to make whether their long-term interest overrides their short-term tactical desire to cause problems for us – because they really can’t have both.” Gen Petraeus said he had not sought authorisation to cross the border into Iran.

    Two weeks ago George Bush said he had authorised US military commanders in Iraq “to confront Tehran’s murderous activities”.

    Gen Petraeus spoke of an unnamed prisoner who had laughed out loud when asked if his group’s activities would be possible without Iranian support. The tape of his interrogation had been shown to Iraqi politicians to prove the extent of Iran’s involvement.

    Overall, the message was the same as the two men relayed in their testimony to the US Congress last week.

    “Iraq’s problems will require a long-term effort,” Gen Petraeus said.

    “These can succeed but they will take time. There are no easy answers or quick solutions to helping the Iraqis build sustainable security and achieve national reconciliation.

    “Our assessments underscore the importance of recognising that a premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences … for our two nations and the world.”

    Mr Crocker spoke of “new momentum” in Iraq following the surge, which had led to a fall in the number of attacks on civilians in 10 out of 13 provinces. “Should we decide that we are tired and want a dramatic political change then I’m certain there will be failure,” he said.

    Mr Crocker defined Iraq’s central problem as the absence of “broad agreement on the nature of the state”.

    The US, he said, was prepared to talk to those “who are ready to accept the reality of a new Iraqi state and society”. But there had been no contact with “unreconstructed elements” of the Ba’ath party.

    Iraq to review legal status of private security companies

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    By Kim Sengupta

    The Iraqi government announced yesterday that it will review the legal status of all private security contractors working in the country in the wake of the banning of the American company Blackwater USA over the killing of civilians.

    The death toll from the shooting on Sunday rose to 11, with 13 wounded. Blackwater has refused to apologise and claimed that those shot, who included women and children, were “armed insurgents and our personnel acted lawfully and appropriately”. It has also been claimed that as well as shooting at civilians, the Blackwater guards exchanged fire with Iraqi police and soldiers.

    The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, called the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to offer condolences for the deaths and promised a through investigation into what happened. Blackwater had been contracted to provide security to many US officials in Baghdad, including the ambassador.

    The radical Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, said yesterday: “This aggression wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the presence of the occupiers who brought these companies. Cancel this company’s work, and the rest of the criminal and intelligence companies.”

    An Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said the cabinet “was meeting to review the operations of foreign and local security companies in Iraq”.

    Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Khalaf, of the Interior Ministry, said: “Blackwater committed a crime. They carried out a flagrant assault. The judicial system will now take action”.

    It remains unclear, however, what legal “action” can be taken. Private military companies were granted immunity from Iraqi prosecution under order number 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

    Mowaffak Rubaie, the country’s national security advisor, said: “This is a golden opportunity for the government of Iraq to radically review the order.”

    There was more violence in Baghdad yesterday as four car bombs in Baghdad killed 21 people. Some of the victims were at the morgue waiting to collect the bodies of relations who had died in Sunday’s shooting.

    UF Student tasered at John Kerry Speech

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    Bush’s ‘proxy war’ claim over Iran exposed

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    By Gareth Porter

    In his prepared statement to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, General David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shi’ite militias into a “Hezbollah-like force” to “fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq”.

    But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had in essence left Iraq. “The Quds Force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity.”

    Petraeus’ contradictory statements on the Quds Force are emblematic of a US administration propaganda line that has in essence fallen apart because it was so obviously out of line with reality. Nine months after the George W Bush administration declared that it was going to go after Iranian agents in Iraq who were threatening US troops, the US military still has not produced any evidence that Quds Force operatives in Iraq were engaged in assisting the militias fighting against US troops.

    The US military command in Iraq has failed to capture a single Quds Force member it could link to the Shi’ite militias. And the evidence that has emerged over the past nine months about Shi’ite militias and their relationship to Iran suggests that Quds Force personnel in Iraq never had the mission of assisting Shi’ite militias, as claimed by the Bush administration.

    It appears that an increasing number of military intelligence officers in Iraq have concluded that the Quds Force has been steering clear of working directly with Shi’ite militias attacking US troops, to avoid giving the Bush administration a pretext for aggression against Iranian territory.

    In a military briefing presented in Baghdad on February 11, an unnamed US official stated flatly that weapons were being smuggled into the country by the Quds Force, but the briefers failed to present any specific evidence to back up the assertion.

    Since that briefing, the US military command has captured the alleged deputy head and key logistical officer of the main Iraqi EFP (explosively formed penetrator, or armor-penetrating explosives) network and a Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the network, as well as a number of what it called “suspected members” or “suspected leaders” of a “secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of and EFPs from Iran to Iraq”.

    But the interrogations of these detainees have not led to the capture of a single Iranian official. Nor has the US military been able to identify a link between any Iraqi militia member and any Iranian official. On July 6, Major-General Rick Lynch, commander of US operations south of Baghdad, told reporters his troops had not captured “anybody that we can tie to Iran”.

    Even more devastating to the “proxy war” line, Lynch’s spokeswoman, Alayne Conway, acknowledged on August 19 that they had not caught anyone supplying arms from Iran to the Iraqi Shi’ite militias.

    There has long been some evidence, however, of a link between Shi’ite networks for procuring EFPs and other arms and the Lebanese Hezbollah. The leader of a Mahdi Army group that was carrying out attacks against British forces, Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, who was arrested in September 2005, had lived in Lebanon for several years and was known to have personal contact with Hezbollah, according to a March 27 New York Times report.

    Along with evidence of a growing relationship between Hezbollah and Muqtada al-Sadr’s army, which has now culminated in a Sadr office in Beirut, such past links between the two Shi’ite groups suggest that Hezbollah’s assistance to the Shi’ites need not have been ordered by Tehran.

    US and British officials have acknowledged in the past that the EFP technology being used in Iraq might have entered Iraq from Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than from Iran.

    The premise that the Quds Force agents in Iraq were involved in training Shi’ites to carry out operations against US troops was shattered when Lynch told reporters on August 19 that the Iranians were “facilitating the training of Shi’ite extremist” militiamen in Iraq. That clearly implied that the training was being done by Hezbollah.

    The Washington Post and other news outlets quoted Lynch’s statement but nevertheless reported that Lynch had charged that Iranians were doing the training. A spokesperson for Lynch confirmed to Inter Press Service that Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians training Shi’ites in Iraq.

    Petraeus dealt the final blow to the notion of a Quds Force training role when he noted that the Hezbollah trainers had also been withdrawn from the country.

    The briefing by US military spokesman Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner on July 2 was aimed primarily at advancing the theme that Hezbollah acts in Iraq as a “proxy” for Iran. But the real significance of the briefing – unreported in the US news media – was the first suggestion by a US official that the Quds Force personnel in Iraq might have avoided direct contacts with Shi’ite militias altogether.

    Asked by a journalist why the Quds Force would “subcontract” the training of Shi’ite militias to Hezbollah, Bergner answered that Hezbollah could “do things that perhaps they didn’t want to have to do themselves in terms of interacting directly with special groups”.

    Without mentioning any pullout of Quds Force personnel, Conway said on August 19 that Lynch estimated there were 50 Quds Force agents in his entire area of responsibility in southern Iraq. Four days later, Lynch clarified that estimate, telling reporters that 30 of those estimated 50 agents were “surrogates” – presumably referring to Hezbollah operatives engaged in training Shi’ites in southern Iraq.

    Although it was buried in the August 19 story inaccurately reporting Lynch’s statement about training in Iraq, Megan Greenwell of the Washington Post reported the much more significant fact that “some military intelligence analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence” linking the Quds Force in Iraq with the Shi’ite militias.

    The charge that Iran is using the Quds Force to fight a proxy war is an effort to raise tensions with Iran by suggesting a potential reason for a US attack against that country. Similarly, the pressure for targeting the Quds Force in Iraq late last year came from senior officials in the Bush administration who wished to demonstrate US resolve to confront Iran, according to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer published on February 26.

    That policy was regarded with “skepticism” by the intelligence community, the State Department and the Defense Department when it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear it would contribute to an escalation of conflict with Iran.

    “This has little to do with Iraq,” a senior intelligence officer told Linzer. “It’s all about pushing Iran’s buttons. It’s purely political.”

    Marijuana Ingredient May Prevent Mad Cow Disease

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    Cannabidiol May be Effective in Preventing Bovine Spongiforme Enzephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease)

    Michael Hess

    According to basic research of scientists of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Valbonne, France, cannabidiol (CBD) may prevent the development of prion diseases, the most known being BSE (bovine spongiforme enzephalopathy), which is often called mad cow disease. It is believed that the BSE may be transmitted to human beings. In humans, it is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

    Huge Dairy Cow under blue sky.

    The infectious agent in prion diseases is believed to be a specific type of misfolded protein called prion. Misfolded prion proteins carry the disease between individuals and cause deterioration of the brain. The French researchers reported that the non- psychoactive cannabis constituent CBD inhibited the accumulation of prion proteins in both mouse and sheep prion- infected cells, whereas other cannabinoids were either weak or not effective. Moreover, after infection with mouse scrapie, a prion disease, CBD limited accumulation of the prion protein in the brain and significantly increased the survival time of infected mice. CBD inhibited the nerve damaging effects of prions in a concentration-dependent manner. Researchers noted that CBD may be a promising agent for the treatment of prion diseases.

    (Source: Dirikoc S, Priola SA, Marella M, Zsuerger N, Chabry J. Nonpsychoactive cannabidiol prevents prion accumulation and protects neurons against prion toxicity. J Neurosci 2007;27(36):9537-44.)

    Spy laws track mobile phones

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    Tom Allard

    SECURITY agencies would be able to secretly track people via their mobile phones and monitor their internet browsing for up to three months without obtaining a warrant under new laws due to go before the Senate this week.

    The powers could be used in a range of even relatively minor criminal investigations, not just terrorism cases.

    They would allow ASIO and federal and state police forces to demand that phone companies and internet service providers stream information to them in “near real-time” – just a few minutes after calls are made or websites visited. The information would have to be provided for up to 90 days for ASIO investigations, and 45 days if state or federal police are involved.

    Justified as a counter-terrorism measure, the legislation has already been passed by government and Labor members of the lower house. But it remains deeply unpopular with legal experts and privacy advocates.

    As well as not requiring a warrant signed by a judicial officer, the powers could be used in any criminal investigation into a suspected offence that carries a jail term of three years or more.

    The regime applies to all “telecommunications data”, including the time and destination of phone calls made and received, the duration of the calls and the location of the callers.

    For computers, security agencies would be told what website addresses and chat rooms the user has visited and what files have been downloaded. The laws would also enable authorities to track internet conversations.

    Security agencies would still need a judicial warrant to listen in on phone calls, or peruse emails.

    The Greens senator Kerry Nettle said the powers would allow authorities to glean huge amounts of information. Every mobile phone could potentially become a tracking device for police and ASIO.

    The bill “is more like something from East Germany than a party claiming to support liberal principles”, she said. “There is no judicial oversight. Police and ASIO should have to get a warrant to track and tap people’s mobile phones or web browsing.”

    The Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, was unavailable for comment yesterday. He has previously said the laws do not constitute new powers for security agencies, but a “more systematic and appropriate controls over the existing access framework”.

    But the legislation’s own explanatory memorandum says the regime for “prospective” telecommunications data – the streaming of near real-time information for up to 90 days – is new.

    The Law Council of Australia argues that technological advances mean the powers pose new dangers to privacy. Tracking someone with a mobile phone was far easier than secretly affixing a listening device without breaking and entering, it said. Therefore the proposed powers were “far more amenable to misuse or over-use by law enforcement agencies”.

    Why the ban on mandatory RFID implants should be Federal

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    George Ou

    The California legislature recently banned employers from mandating RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) implants for their employees. While I’m glad I’m covered in my state, why isn’t this ban being implemented at the Federal level to cover every citizen? I’m not suggesting that we ban the devices; I’m suggesting that no one should be forced to stick on of these in their body just to get a job. I’ve covered the issue of RFID many times before and I’m not fundamentally opposed to RFID technology or RFID implants, but I do oppose the idea that anyone should be forced to implant one in their body and it would be just as offensive if my employer asked me to tattoo a bar code on to my forehead.

    Verichip RFID implants are worthless from a security standpoint because they’re essentially passing clear text data over the radio waves and it can easily be cloned. If it’s cloned, you’ll have to undergo knife treatment to get a new one unless the chip is reprogrammable. Even if Verichip stopped using clear text authentication and switched to strong NSA Suite B grade crypto, I wouldn’t want it inside my body. Is any material item in this world worth life or limb? If someone wants my access device and password at the point of a gun, I’d give it to them. I don’t want them to have to cut it out of my body.

    Last summer there were some issues raised about the privacy and safety of RFID enabled passports. While the scenarios were arguably remote and the privacy concerns overblown because someone can copy the same information from a regular passport, there is no reason to have the RFID in the passport since an optical or contact based system would have the same effectiveness. RFID in the traditional sense gives you more flexibility and convenience because of its long wireless range but the usable range for RFID passports is literally a few millimeters away. RFID in the Passport implementation is effectively a contact based solution that has none of the flexibility but all of the security liabilities of a wireless solution.

    What about the argument that we need RFID implants for our children? I have two kids and I can tell you that RFID isn’t going to make me feel any better. First of all, that RFID implant isn’t going to be a “LoJack” device for children and you’re not going to be able to track them down if they’re abducted unless you’re within a few feet of the child. Second, having the RFID implant might mean the abductor will cut it out of your child to take out the implant. I might consider an external device hidden in a watch or something that has an active transmitter with some effective range but implants are simply out of the question.

    As critical of RFID as I am, I’m not so sure why some people are so anti-RFID that they don’t even want the devices to exist in the first place. RFID implants can make sense in medical areas. If it makes it easier for emergency workers to identify a patient’s special needs, that’s great so long as the consumer gets to voluntarily place it in their own body. There’s also new technology being developed for diabetics where the RFID sensor can wirelessly report glucose levels without you having to prick your finger every day. RFID inventory tracking and logistics can simplify and automate many things so we must distinguish between good RFID devices and bad ones.

    Police must not store DNA details of the innocent – report

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    Alok Jha
    The Guardian

    The government must prevent police from storing the profiles of innocent people on the national DNA database, an influential group of experts has said. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics also recommended that ministers drop plans to extend police powers that would see DNA samples being taken from people suspected of minor offences such as littering or speeding.”Innocent people are concerned about how their DNA might be used in future if it is kept on the national DNA database without their consent,” said Sir Bob Hepple QC, chair of the council, which convened a group of lawyers, ethicists, geneticists and sociologists a year ago to study the ethical issues behind the use of biological information in police investigations.

    The national DNA database has details of almost 4 million people and almost 400,000 profiles of biological samples (such as blood, semen, saliva or hair) left at crime scenes. It is updated every day and automatically compares the DNA profiles it receives with those from crime scenes. A Home Office report in 2006 said the database provided police with about 3,000 matches every month.Under present laws, police can take DNA samples from anyone who has been arrested for recordable offences without asking permission. The profiles are permanently stored on the database, even if the person is later acquitted of all charges

    “We’re recommending that the police should only be permitted to keep the DNA of people who are convicted of a recordable offence,” said Carole McCartney, director of the centre for criminal justice studies at the University of Leeds and one of the authors of the report, published today. She said exceptions could be made for people charged with violent or sexual offences.

    But the Home Office said that maintaining records of people who were innocent at the time had helped solve crimes years later. “It is estimated that there are about 200,000 profiles on the database which would have been removed prior to a change in legislation in 2001,” a spokesperson said. “From these, about 8,500 individuals have been matched with DNA taken from crime scenes, involving some 14,000 offences that include 114 murders, 55 attempted murders, 116 rapes, 68 other sexual offences, and a number of other serious crimes.”

    In March, the government asked for feedback on proposals to expand police powers to take DNA samples from people arrested of non-recordable offences. Dr McCartney said: “There’s no actual evidence that’s been provided that an increase in police powers would significantly improve the effectiveness of the DNA database.”

    The report also advised against a DNA database containing records of everyone, which some say would remove issues of discrimination which have seen some ethnic minorities over-represented. “This would be hugely expensive and would have only a small impact on public safety,” it said.

    Pentagon has plans to bomb 2,000 targets in Iran

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    By Philip Sherwell in New York and Tim Shipman in Washington

    Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

     
    Dick Cheney ('The Man') with George W Bush
    Dick Cheney (‘The Man’) with George W Bush

    Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

    Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

    Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action.

    In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq – arming and training militants – would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

    A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

    Under the theory – which is gaining credence in Washington security circles – US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.

    Senior officials believe Mr Bush’s inner circle has decided he does not want to leave office without first ensuring that Iran is not capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

    The intelligence source said: “No one outside that tight circle knows what is going to happen.” But he said that within the CIA “many if not most officials believe that diplomacy is failing” and that “top Pentagon brass believes the same”.

    He said: “A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq.”

     
    Possible flash points: Click to enlarge

    Previously, accusations that Mr Bush was set on war with Iran have come almost entirely from his critics.

    Many senior operatives within the CIA are highly critical of Mr Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, though they themselves are considered ineffective and unreliable by hardliners close to Mr Cheney.

    The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias.

    Recent developments over Iraq appear to fit with the pattern of escalation predicted by Pentagon officials.

    Gen David Petraeus, Mr Bush’s senior Iraq commander, denounced the Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq last week as he built support in Washington for the US military surge in Baghdad.

    The US also announced the creation of a new base near the Iraqi border town of Badra, the first of what could be several locations to tackle the smuggling of weapons from Iran.

    A State Department source familiar with White House discussions said that Miss Rice, under pressure from senior counter-proliferation officials to acknowledge that military action may be necessary, is now working with Mr Cheney to find a way to reconcile their positions and present a united front to the President.

    The source said: “When you go down there and see the body language, you can see that Cheney is still The Man. Condi pushed for diplomacy but she is no dove. If it becomes necessary she will be on board.

     

    “Both of them are very close to the president, and where they differ they are working together to find a way to present a position they can both live with.”

    The official contrasted the efforts of the secretary of state to work with the vice-president with the “open warfare between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld before the Iraq war”.

    Miss Rice’s bottom line is that if the administration is to go to war again it must build the case over a period of months and win sufficient support on Capitol Hill.

    The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Mr Bush has privately promised her that he would consult “meaningfully” with Congressional leaders of both parties before any military action against Iran on the understanding that Miss Rice would resign if this did not happen.

    The intelligence officer said that the US military has “two major contingency plans” for air strikes on Iran.

    “One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would – over two or three days – hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets.”

    Water Fuel Cell – Panacea Presentation

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    Patents from Stan Meyer’s Water Fuel Cell are now available so you can convert your car NOW !

    Bush Administration War Plans directed against Iran

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    Michel Chossudovsky

    US Military Encirclement of Iran Quoting official sources, the Western media is now confirming, rather belatedly, that the Bush Administration’s war plans directed against Iran are “for real” and should be taken seriously.

    “Punitive bombings” directed against Tehran could be launched within the next few months.

    The diplomatic mode has been switched off: The Pentagon is said to be “taking steps to ensure military confrontation with Iran” because diplomatic initiatives have allegedly failed to reach a solution.

    These diabolical statements come within barely a couple of weeks following the release of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report. The later confirms unequivocally that Iran’s nuclear program is of a civilian nature and that Iran has neither the intention nor the capabilities to develop nuclear weapons:

    Article IV (1): These modalities cover all remaining issues and the Agency [meaning IAEA] confirmed that there are no other remaining issues and ambiguities regarding Iran’s past nuclear program and activities.

    Article IV (3): The Agency’s delegation is of the view that the agreement on the above issues shall further promote the efficiency of the implementation of safeguards in Iran and its ability to conclude the exclusive peaceful nature of the Iran’s nuclear activities.

    Article IV (4): The Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded that it remains in peaceful use. (IAEA Report, italics added)

    At the same token, the IAEA report is a slap in the face for Washington. It confirms the lack of legitimacy and criminal nature of US foreign policy as well as Washington’s intent to bypass the rules of international diplomacy:

    “The Bush administration’s abrupt dismissal of last Thursday’s IAEA report is one more sign that Washington has no interest in a diplomatic resolution to its confrontation with Tehran. Following Bush’s bellicose denunciations of Iran last week, the US has reiterated its intention to push for tougher UN sanctions against Tehran this month.” (Peter Symond, Global Research, September 2007)

    No Public Outcry

    Despite the overtly aggressive nature of US statements, these war plans directed against Iran, which in a real sense threaten the future of humanity, are not the object of public concern or debate. They are simply not front page news.  

    The dangers of a broader Middle East war are downplayed or ignored by the main anti-war coalitions. Moreover, the planned attacks on Iran are not being addressed by “progressive” civil society organizations including the “Left”. According to Jean Bricmont:

    “All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American “left”. The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not ­according to our views — but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, especially on the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law.” (Jean Bricmont, Global Research, September 2007)

    Background of War Planning

    For the last three years, in several carefully documented articles, Global Research has been reporting in detail on US sponsored war plans directed against Iran. These war plans include the preemptive use of thermonuclear weapons against Iran in retaliation for Tehran’s alleged non-compliance with the demands of the “international community”.

    War plans in relation to Iran have been an advanced stage of readiness since mid 2005. Israel, Britain and NATO are part of the US led coalition and are slated to play an active role in the military operation.

    The first phase of these war plans was formulated initially in mid-2003, under a Pentagon scenario entitled TIRANNT (Theater Iran Near Term). The military build-up has occurred over a period of more than three years.

    In Summer 2006 as well as earlier this year, extensive war games were conducted in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

    The Israeli bombing of Lebanon in July 2006 was an integral part of the broader military agenda. In recent developments, Israel has conducted bombing raids inside Syrian territory visibly in an act of provocation.

    Recent official statements by Washington confirm the broad nature of these war plans:

    “Senior American intelligence and defense officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, …

    Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, …

    Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

    In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq – arming and training militants – would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

    A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

    The intelligence officer said that the US military has “two major contingency plans” for air strikes on Iran.

    “One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would – over two or three days – hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets.” (quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, 16 September 2007)

    US-NATO naval deployments are taking place in two distinct theaters: the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

    In recent developments, it is reported that two aircraft carrier strike groups (USS Nimitz and USS Truman) are en route to the Persian Gulf to join up with the USS Enterprise, which means that there will be, by late September, three carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf.

    According to military sources, the USS Kearsarge Expeditionary Strike Group took up position in late August opposite the Lebanese coastline.

    The attacks on Iran are now officially supported by America’s European allies including France and Germany. France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has called upon France to support the US war on Iran:

    “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war,” Mr Kouchner said in an interview on French TV and radio. Mr Kouchner said negotiations with Iran should continue “right to the end”, but an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose “a real danger for the whole world” .(quoted by BBC, 16 September 2007)

    Britain is closely involved, despite denials at the diplomatic level. Turkey occupies a central role in the Iran operation. It has an extensive military cooperation agreement with Israel. NATO is formally involved in liaison with Israel, with which it signed a military framework agreement in November 2004.

    While the US, Israel, as well as Turkey (with borders with both Iran and Syria) are the main military actors, a number of other countries in the region, allies of the US, including Georgia and Azerbaijan have been enlisted.

    There are indications from several media sources that Israel is also at an advanced stage of military preparedness and would be involved in carrying out part of the aerial bombardments. Syria and most probably Lebanon would also be targeted.

    Already in 2005, the Israeli Air Force had reached a state of preparedness. Israeli air attacks of Iran’s nuclear facility at Bushehr had been contemplated using US as well Israeli produced bunker buster bombs. The attack was planned to be carried out in three separate waves “with the radar and communications jamming protection being provided by U.S. Air Force AWACS and other U.S. aircraft in the area”.

    (See W Madsen, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD410A.html

    Escalation Scenarios

    If this military operation were to be launched, the entire Middle East Central Asian region would flare up.

    The war would encompass an area extending from the Eastern Mediterranean to China’s Western frontier.

    In this regard, US military planners have analyzed various “escalation scenarios”.

    In fact, they expect the war to escalate. In other words, escalation, namely retaliation by Iran is a desired objective. It is part of the military agenda.

    “A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq….

    Under the theory – which is gaining credence in Washington security circles – US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.  (Sunday Telegraph, op cit)

    Iran Retaliates

    The nature of Iran’s retaliation should be understood. General David Petraeus, who is responsible for managing the Iraq war theater, has voiced his opposition to an attack on Iran.

    “Gen David Petraeus, Mr Bush’s senior Iraq commander, denounced the Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq last week as he built support in Washington for the US military surge in Baghdad.” (Sunday Tewlegraph, op cit)

    General Petraeus is fully aware of the underlying implications for the Iraq war theater. A war on Iran would immediately spill over into Iraq: 

    Iran is the third largest importer of Russian weapons systems after India and China. In the course of the last five years, Russia has supported Iran’s ballistic missile technology, in negotiations reached in 2001 under the presidency of Mohammed Khatami.

    Iran tested three new types of land-to-sea and sea-to-sea missiles in the context of its “Great Prophet II” military exercises last November. These tests were marked by precise planning in a carefully staged operation. According to a senior American missile expert, “the Iranians demonstrated up-to-date missile-launching technology which the West had not known them to possess.”

    Tehran has the ability to retaliate and wage ballistic missile attacks against US and coalition facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states.

    Iranian ground troops could cross the border into Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Iran’s forces total about 545,000 active military personnel. Iran has some 400,000 ground forces as well several million reservists. The Iranian Army disposes of some 2200 tanks. With these capabilities in terms of military personnel and hardware Iran could potentially inflict significant losses to US and coalition troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Bush-Cheney Military Appointments

    Several key military appointments were made in recent months which tend to reinforce Bush-Cheney control over the Military. Specifically, these appointments pertain to the positions of Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commanders respectively of USCENTCOM, USSTRATCOM and US Pacific Command. All three commanders recently relinquished their respective positions.

    These new appointments are crucial because USSTRATCOM, USCENTCOM US Pacific Command are slated to play key roles in the coordination and implementation of the Iran military operation, in liaison with Israel and NATO.

    1. Joint Chiefs of Staff

    In May, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) General Peter Pace was fired (non-renewal). General Pace in recent months, had indicated his disagreement with the Administration regarding both Iraq and the proposed attacks on Iran. General Pace stated (February 2007) that he saw no firm evidence of Tehran supplying weapons to Shiite militias inside Iraq, which was being heralded by the Bush administration as a justification for waging war on Iran:

    “[M]aybe that’s why he’s the outgoing chairman. Maybe that’s why they’re not renewing him. Because …He has seen no evidence that Iran is fomenting unrest in Iraq that’s causing Americans lives… ” (Fox News’ Alan Colmes, ox News, June, 13, 2007),

    General Peter Pace’s term as Chairman of the JCS ends at the end of September. Defense Secretary Gates’ chosen successor Admiral Michael Mullen, formerly U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, is slated to replace General Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff.

    Mullen’s discourse is in marked contrast to that of General Peter Pace. Mullen, who was in charge of coordinating 2006-2007 naval war games off the Iranian coastline, has expressed an unbending commitment to “waging” and “winning asymmetric wars”, while also “protecting the United States”:

    “we must ensure we have the Battle Force, the people, and the combat readiness we need to win our nation’s wars…

    Our Navy is fighting the Global War on Terror while at the same time providing a Strategic Reserve worldwide for the President and our Unified and Combatant Commanders…. Simply reacting to change is no longer an acceptable course of action if our Navy is to successfully wage asymmetric warfare and simultaneously deter regional and transnational threats (Statement, Senate Armed Services Committee, 7 May 2007)

    Admiral Mullen’s stance is in line with that of the Bush Administration’s key Neo-conservative ideologues. With regard to Iran, echoing almost verbatim the stance of the White House, Admiral Mullen considers that it is “unacceptable that Iran is providing U.S. enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan with capabilities that are hurting and killing U.S. troops.” (Inside the Pentagon, June 21, 2007). But on the issue of Iran, the Democrats are on board. There is a bipartisan consensus, expressed by Senator Jo Lieberman:

    “I want to make clear I’m not talking about a massive ground invasion of Iran,… [but a] strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers” (AP, June 11, 2007)

    In June, Secretary of Defense Gates appoints the Commander of USSTRATCOM, General Cartwright to the position of Vice-Chairman of the JCS. Together with the appointment of Admiral Mullen, who is slated to take on his position of Chairman of JCS in October, these two new appointments imply a significant overhaul in the power structure of the JCS

    In the meantime, USSTRATCOM is headed, pending Senate confirmation of a new commander, on an interim basis, by Air Force Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler

    2. CENTCOM

    Admiral. William J. Fallon, was appointed Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in March by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

    Admiral Fallon is fully compliant with the Bush administration’s war plans in relation to Iran. He replaces Gen. John P. Abizaid, who was pushed into retirement, following apparent disagreements with Rumsfeld’s successor, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. While Abizaid recognized both the failures and the weaknesses of the US military in Iraq, Admiral Fallon is closely aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney. He is also firmly committed to the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT). CENTCOM would coordinate an attack on Iran from the Middle East war theater.

    Moreover, the appointment of an Admiral is indicative of a shift in emphasis of USCENTCOM’s functions in the war theater. The “near term” emphasis is Iran rather than Iraq, requiring the coordination of naval and air force operations in the Persian Gulf.

    3. Pacific Command

    Another major military appointment was implemented, which has a direct bearing on war preparations in relation to Iran. Admiral Timothy J. Keating Commander of US NORTHCOM was appointed in March, to head US Pacific Command, which includes both the 5th and the 7th fleets. The 7th Fleet Pacific Command is the largest U.S. combatant command. Keating, who takes over from Admiral Fallon is also an unbending supporter of the “war on terrorism”. Pacific Command would be playing a key role in the context of a military operation directed against Iran.(http://www.pacom.mil/about/pacom.shtml)  

    Of significance, Admiral Keating was also involved in the 2003 attack on Iraq as commander of US Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet.

    It should be understood that these new military appointments tend to consolidate the power of Bush-Cheney in the military, overriding potential dissent or opposition to the Iran war agenda from within the upper echelons of the US military.

    It is, however, unlikely that a major military operation would be launched immediately following Mullen’s instatement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and prior to the confirmation of a new USSTRATCOM Commander by the US Senate.

    USSTRATCOM’s Central Role in Coordinating the Attacks

    USSTRATCOM would have the responsibility for overseeing and coordinating this military deployment as well as launching the military operation directed against Iran. (For details, Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, Jan 2006 ).

    In January 2005 a significant shift in USSTRATCOM’s mandate was implemented. USSTRATCOM was identified as “the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction.” To implement this mandate, a brand new command unit entitled Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike , or JFCCSGS was created.

    Overseen by USSTRATCOM, JFCCSGS would be responsible for the launching of military operations “using nuclear or conventional weapons” in compliance with the Bush administration’s new nuclear doctrine. Both categories of weapons would be integrated into a “joint strike operation” under unified Command and Control.

    According to Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,

    “The Defense Department is upgrading its nuclear strike plans to reflect new presidential guidance and a transition in war planning from the top-heavy Single Integrated Operational Plan of the Cold War to a family of smaller and more flexible strike plans designed to defeat today’s adversaries. The new central strategic war plan is known as OPLAN (Operations Plan) 8044…. This revised, detailed plan provides more flexible options to assure allies, and dissuade, deter, and if necessary, defeat adversaries in a wider range of contingencies….

    One member of the new family is CONPLAN 8022, a concept plan for the quick use of nuclear, conventional, or information warfare capabilities to destroy–preemptively, if necessary–“time-urgent targets” anywhere in the world. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an Alert Order in early 2004 that directed the military to put CONPLAN 8022 into effect. As a result, the Bush administration’s preemption policy is now operational on long-range bombers, strategic submarines on deterrent patrol, and presumably intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).”

    The operational implementation of the Global Strike would be under CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022, which now consists of “an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,’ (Japanese Economic Newswire, 30 December 2005, For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War against Iran, op. cit.).

    CONPLAN 8022 is ‘the overall umbrella plan for sort of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.’

    ‘It’s specifically focused on these new types of threats — Iran, North Korea — proliferators and potentially terrorists too,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing that says that they can’t use CONPLAN 8022 in limited scenarios against Russian and Chinese targets.’ (According to Hans Kristensen, of the Nuclear Information Project, quoted in Japanese Economic News Wire, op. cit.)

    USSTRATCOM would play a central decision making and coordinating role in the eventuality of a war on Iran. The administration has demanded USSTRATCOM to elaborate centralized war plans directed against Iran. CENTCOM would largely be involved in carrying out these war plans in the Middle East war theater. .

    USSTRATCOM’s is described “a global integrator charged with the missions of full-spectrum global strike”.

    USSTRATCOM is in charge of the coordination of command structures under global C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). “Day-to-day planning and execution [by STRATCOM] for the primary mission areas is done by five Joint Functional Component Commands or JFCCs and three other functional components:”

    If Iran Retaliates, the US Could Use Nuclear Weapons

    US, NATO and Israeli military planners are fully aware that the aerial “punitive bombings” could lead coalition forces into a ground war scenario in which they may have to confront Iranian and Syrian forces in the battlefield.

    Tehran has confirmed that it will retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel as well as against US military facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war.

    Iranian troops could cross the Iran-Iraq border and confront coalition forces inside Iraq. Israeli troops and/or Special Forces could enter into Syria.

    If Iran were to retaliate in a forceful way, which is contemplated by US military planners, the US could then retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons.

    This scenario of using nuclear weapons against Iran has been in the pipeline since 2004. In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney ordered USSTRATCOM to draft a “contingency plan”, which “includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.” (Philip Giraldi, Attack on Iran: Pre-emptive Nuclear War , The American Conservative, 2 August 2005).

    In relation to current war plans, Cheney has confirmed his intention to strike Iran with nuclear weapons.

    “The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias.

    Recent developments over Iraq appear to fit with the pattern of escalation predicted by Pentagon officials.” (Sunday Telegraph, op cit)

    Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization

    In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued.

    The contents of this highly sensitive document remains a carefully guarded State secret. There has been no mention of NSPD 35 by the media nor even in Congressional debates. While its contents remains classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.

    Tactical nuclear weapons directed against Iran have also been deployed at military bases in several NATO non-nuclear states including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey.

    It should be understood that even without the use of nukes, the proposed US aerial bombardments could result in a nuclear Chernobyl type disaster..  

    World War III Scenario

    While the war on Iran is acknowledged by the Western media, it is not front page news.

    The broad implications of an impending catastrophe are simply not addressed.

    Escalation could lead us into a World War III scenario.

    Through media disinformation, the seriousness of a US-led war on Iran allegedly in retaliation for Iran’s defiance of the “international community” is downplayed . The objective is to galvanize Western public opinion in support of a US-led military operation, which would inevitably lead to escalation.

    War propaganda consists in “fabricating an enemy” while conveying the illusion that the Western World is under attack by Islamic terrorists, who are directly supported by the Tehran government.

    “Make the World safer”, “prevent the proliferation of dirty nuclear devices by terrorists”, “implement punitive actions against Iran to ensure the peace”. “Combat nuclear proliferation by rogue states”…

    Supported by the Western media, a generalized atmosphere of racism and xenophobia directed against Muslims has unfolded, particularly in Western Europe, which provides a fake legitimacy to the US war agenda. The latter is upheld as a “Just War”. The “Just war” theory serves to camouflage the nature of US war plans, while providing a human face to the invaders.

    What can be done?

    The antiwar movement is in many regards divided and misinformed on the nature of the US military agenda. In the US, United for Peace and Justice tacitly supports US foreign policy. It fails to recognize the existence of an Iraqi resistance movement. Moreover, these same antiwar organizations, which are committed to World Peace tend to downplay the implications of the proposed US bombing of Iran. More generally the antiwar movement fails to address the existence of a broader Middle East military agenda, a long-war. Is actions are piecemeal, focusing on Afghanistan, Iraq  and Palestine without addressing the relationship between these various war theaters.

    To reverse the tide requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war, which contemplates quite explicitly the use of thermonuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: As confirmed by the IAEA report, Iran is not the threat.

    Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community, particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government.

    Ultimately, the legitimacy of the political and military actors in high office must be challenged.

    The corporate media also bears a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. It must also be forcefully challenged for its biased coverage of the Middle East war.

    For the past two years, Washington has been waging a “diplomatic arm twisting” exercise with a view to enlisting countries into supporting its military agenda. It is essential that at the diplomatic level, countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America take a firm stance against the US military agenda.  

    What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called “Homeland Security agenda” which has already defined the contours of a police State.

    The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity.

    It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.
    This article includes a few selected excerpts from my previous writings on US war plans in relation to Iran. For a review of US war plans in relation to Iran, see Global Research’s Iran dossier.

    Labour accused of building a “surveillance society

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    By Nigel Morris and Ben Russell

    Labour has been accused of building a “surveillance society behind the backs of the British people” as it has developed the world’s largest DNA database and presided over an unprecedented growth in the use of closed-circuit television cameras.

    The Liberal Democrats, who insist the issue of civil liberties is a key dividing line with the other parties, are demanding wide-reaching controls to protect personal privacy. Nick Clegg, their home affairs spokesman, yesterday published research which suggested levels of surveillance had been substantially extended in nine ways.

    Mr Clegg said: “They have been building a surveillance society brick by brick behind the backs of the British people. When you put together the individual initiatives, a chilling picture emerges. It amounts to a radical redrawing of the rights of the individual against the powers of the state.”

    He said 4.2 million cameras now criss-crossed the country and a single individual could be photographed 300 times a day. The DNA database had more than 4 million entries — including samples from a million people without a criminal record — and could reach almost 4.5 million by 2010. He added nearly 10 million passports had been issued which had security chips vulnerable to hackers, criminal records checks were riddled with errors, and thousands of schools took fingerprints from pupils. Full-body security scanners that can “see” through clothes were being developed, mobile phone networks were being targeted by hackers, and more than 400,000 requests to bug telephones and computers were made in just over a year.

    Mr Clegg’s remarks came at the start of a crucial conference which the party leadership believes could be a springboard to an election that might be called within weeks.

    Frontbenchers will meet this week to finalise the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto and activists have been put on high alert for a snap poll.

    Sir Menzies Campbell, the party’s leader, told delegates yesterday that Labour had been “the most centralising, authoritarian and intrusive government in the post-war era”. He denounced the Government for eroding the right to privacy, as well as freedom of speech and freedom from detention without charge.

    “There has been no right too precious, too hard-won or too long-standing for New Labour not to want to trample on it,” he said. The party also sought to carve out distinctive ground on tax policy by making clear it wanted taxes to rise for households earning more than £70,000 a year, which form the top tenth of earners.

    Sir Menzies stressed that 90 per cent of the population would be better off under the plans, but asked by the BBC if that meant “hammering” the other 10 per cent, he replied: “Yes.”

    Vince Cable, the party’s Treasury spokesman, will underline the emphasis on “fairer” taxes with a condemnation of Gordon Brown’s “complacency” over soaring levels of personal debt. He said: “It’s clear the Liberal Democrats’ emphasis on fairer taxes — but not higher tax levels — with tax cuts for those on low and middle incomes, strikes a chord with the voters.

    “There is genuine disgust at some of the tax dodging, including the abuse of non-domicile status, and a large majority share our wish to see a crackdown.”

    Today, party delegates in Brighton will vote on a far-reaching package of environmental measures to meet a pledge to make Britain carbon-neutral by 2050. Proposals include shifting all of Britain’s power generation to zero-carbon sources by 2050, and banning petrol and diesel cars by 2040.

    Intel chief pushes new spy law

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    By Richard Willing

    Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell heads to Capitol Hill this week seeking to extend the government’s power to read e-mails, listen to telephone calls and carry out other surveillance within the USA in national security cases.

    Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are criticizing McConnell’s proposals. They say judges should oversee such surveillance.

    Some Democrats also object to a second item on the spy chief’s wish list: immunity from lawsuits for telecom companies that helped the federal government intercept calls between U.S. and foreign intelligence targets without warrants from late 2001 until last January.

    McConnell is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Complicating his task: a view among moderate Democrats that the self-described “apolitical” director has become an advocate for the Bush administration’s expansive views on the government’s power to spy.

    McConnell is “undermining the authority of (his) office” by “appearing to play a political role,” said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., chairwoman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence.

    A 1978 law requires the nation’s intelligence services – CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and others – to get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before eavesdropping in a national security case on a target in the USA. Overseas targets, such as two al-Qaeda operatives speaking on cellphones in Pakistan, generally could be tapped without a warrant.

    Recent changes in fiber-optic technology, though, cause many foreign-to-foreign phone calls, e-mails and other electronic messages to pass through American-based switching points. Earlier this year, a foreign intelligence court judge ruled that warrants were required to intercept those calls as they passed through American lines. The warrant process, McConnell said, takes 200 hours per phone number and is unnecessarily time consuming and results in lost opportunities to collect intelligence.

    This spring, with the backing of President Bush, McConnell and other intelligence officers lobbied hard for a bill that would eliminate the need for a warrant in such cases.

    Last month, Congress passed a temporary fix that allows intercepts without a warrant. It applies to wire communications involving foreign parties and to calls and e-mails in which one participant is U.S.-based, provided the overseas party is the object of a national security investigation.

    The law expires in February. Making it permanent is “critical” toward “ensuring the protection of our nation,” McConnell told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week.

    His spokesman, Ross Feinstein, said McConnell will bring that same message to the U.S. House this week.

    Democrats are poised to offer their own legislation addressing what Pelosi called the “many deficiencies” in the law. Chief among them, says American Civil Liberties Union attorney Tim Sparapani, is the lack of “even limited court oversight” of the decision to tap a phone or read an e-mail.

    Under the new law, “the court’s role has been marginalized,” Sparapani said. “Do we really want the attorney general and the director of national intelligence doing the oversight on their own decisions?”

    McConnell’s own action have also complicated his mission.

    In August, shortly after the temporary intelligence bill was passed, he told a reporter for the El Paso (Texas) Times that 100 or fewer Americans had been targeted for intercepts. In a letter to McConnell, House Judiciary Committee Democrats called that a “selective disclosure of classified information” designed to “rebut the concern” that warrantless surveillance will amount to a large scale “dragnet.”

    Before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, McConnell appeared to say the temporary warrantless surveillance had helped produce the arrests this month of three Muslim men accused of planning attacks against Americans in Germany. He later issued a statement noting that intelligence in the German case was not collected under the warrantless surveillance authority.

    Spokesman Feinstein said McConnell plans a written response to the House Judiciary Committee Democrats. Feinstein said McConnell would not respond to suggestions from Harman and others that he has become a Bush partisan.

    In his El Paso Times interview, McConnell said it was he who first suggested to the Bush administration that surveillance law needed updating because “technology had changed.”

    “I’m an apolitical figure,” McConnell said.

    Pentagon Developing New Unmanned Spy Planes

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    The Pentagon is on the hunt for new sophisticated unmanned spy planes that can be sent to any location above the planet within an hour and remain over the hot spot gathering intelligence for at least five years without touching down

    By Larry Greenemeier

    The Department of Defense wants to develop spy satellites that can detect a military force mobilizing halfway around the world, enabling it to immediately assess possible threats to national security. An unmanned surveillance aircraft packed into the nose of a missile would be launched over suspicious areas to gather more intelligence; if the threat were confirmed, it would be replaced by another aircraft that could perform low-flying surveillance for up to five years without returning to Earth to refuel.

    Toward that end, the Pentagon has commissioned development of the Rapid Eye and the Vulture–two new unmanned, high-altitude aircraft better able, it says, to meet today’s needs for gathering information about nimbler threats.

    “We’re not talking about big, thick structures that we want to keep an eye on like in the Cold War,” says Wade Pulliam, program manager with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office, an arm of the Pentagon charged with researching and developing new technology for the defense department. “Threats today are more fluid right now, and military responses are more likely to be low-level and long-term, rather than fast and sharp. So endurance of all the assets involved is important.”

    The goal is to have demos of the technology for both aircraft within three years and working models ready to go within five years. DARPA plans to spend $12 million developing the Rapid Eye and $7.9 million on the Vulture through the end of fiscal year 2009.

    The idea behind the Rapid Eye is to create an aircraft that can be stored on board a ballistic missile able to deliver it anywhere in the world within an hour. The Rapid Eye would travel inside the missile–with its wings folded or deflated, depending on the design–and be released over a designated spot. The Rapid Eye program will research and develop technologies and systems that would let the military deliver a 500-pound, high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle via a ballistic missile to an approximate location, decelerate the missile so that its payload can be deployed, then launch the spy plane and start its propulsion system. Once aloft, it would provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities at high altitudes for at least seven hours without refueling.

    Science Image
    Image: Courtesy of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency
    BIRD OF PREY: The Vulture would weigh in at 1,000 pounds, have a wingspan as wide as 500 feet and be capable of staying in the air for five years without landing.

    The Vulture project, which stands for Very high altitude, Ultraendurance, Loitering Theater Unmanned Reconnaissance Element, seeks to deliver and maintain an aircraft that can remain above a surveillance target for at least five years. Weighing in at an anticipated 1,000 pounds, the vehicle is being designed to collect its power from its environment–via solar or some other source–to store and use energy efficiently, and include a robotic refueling capability. With a wingspan of between 300 and 500 feet, the Vulture would function like a low-orbit satellite as much as like an aircraft, staying aloft far longer than any surveillance plane can today, says Jamey Jacob, an Oklahoma State University associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, adding, “It would provide a persistent presence for the military.” Jacobs is working as a consultant to defense contractors developing designs for the aircraft.

    The two biggest hurdles in developing the Vulture are choosing the best energy source to power the vehicle and well-constructed sturdy components that will last at least five years. One option is to make the aircraft modular, so that components can break off and fly home via remote control when necessary and new modules can be flown up and remotely attached. Another option is to use a second aircraft to refuel the Vulture and repair it while in flight.

    Several improvements in technology over the past decade–including solar cells and more efficient engines–make these aircraft more of a reality than they have been in the past. “The aircraft have to be light and run extremely efficiently,” Jacob says. “You can’t run off of today’s fuels for five years. Ideally, the aircraft would have solar cells that can alternately charge and operate while in flight.”

    The projects are complementary. “The Rapid Eye is for when you don’t know where you want to be but you need to get there quickly,” Pulliam says. “The Vulture is for when you want to be over an area for a long time.”

    It’s unclear whether the Rapid Eye will be able to be retrieved after it is used; DARPA is leaving that question to the firms that submit designs for the plane. “We would prefer to be able to recover the aircraft,” Pulliam says, “but the cost of the aircraft will not be such that it must be recovered.”

    U.K. defense firm QinetiQ claims to hold the record in keeping an unmanned aircraft aloft. In 2005 its Zephyr high-altitude, solar-powered vehicle stayed aloft continuously for 54 hours during a test flight. The previous unmanned endurance record was set in 2001 by a jet-powered U.S. Air Force Global Hawk surveillance aircraft, which flew for more than 30 hours. The Zephyr is a carbon-fiber aircraft weighing 66 pounds and with a wingspan of about 59 feet that by day flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays that cover its wings; it is powered at night by lithium-sulfur batteries recharged during the day using solar power.

    Americans Wrong On Their Rights

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    ACCORDING to a new poll released by the nonpartisan, nonprofit First Amendment Center, 55 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, and 56 percent believe that the freedom to worship as you choose doesn’t extend to all religious groups.It’s troubling that at a time of serious constitutional debates in this country – from school prayer to the detainee program at Guantanamo – so many Americans don’t even have a minimal understanding of the very bedrock of our Republic. Just in case, here is a refresher on the rights guaranteed in our Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution:

    FIRST AMENDMENT – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

    This means, despite what the majority of Americans believe, there is not now and nor will there ever be, a declaration of Christianity as our national religion, barring another amendment to the Constitution that declares so. We are not a Christian nation, and our founders specifically forbid us to become so. Further, it guarantees the right of Americans to practice any religion they wish to – no matter how “offensive” others may find it. This amendment also guarantees us all freedom of speech, no matter how offensive it may be, the right to rally, no matter how extreme the cause, and the right to petition our government.

    SECOND AMENDMENT – “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Often up for interpretation, this amendment guarantees the right to own guns. Some believe that it means guns for all, and others believe a “well regulated Militia” is what is known as the National Guard.

    THIRD AMENDMENT – “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” Believe it or not, at one time, British troops barged into the houses of Philadelphia and elsewhere, and hung out there as long as they wanted. Today, this amendment guarantees that you are the “King of the Castle.”

    FOURTH AMENDMENT – “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . .”

    This amendment protects you from the government busting into your house and rifling through your things, and taking what it wants, without a proper warrant that is issued, due to probable cause. Remember this one next time the president says we have no time to issue warrants in the war on terror.

    FIFTH AMENDMENT – “No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

    Every American, no matter how horrific the crime he is accused of, is allowed his day in court, and cannot be forced to testify against himself, or be tried twice for the same offense. It doesn’t matter if someone shoplifted or killed 500 people. This right is extended to all Americans. Additionally, the government cannot take something you own without paying you what it’s worth.

    SIXTH AMENDMENT – “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial . . .”

    Again, no matter how horrific the crime alleged against the accused, every single American has the right to a speedy trial, and cannot be held for an extended period of time without it. We all have the right to trial by our peers, and the right to see all evidence that will be used against us. We all have the right to a lawyer.

    SEVENTH AMENDMENT – “In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

    Again, even in civil suits, we have the right to judgment by our peers.

    EIGHTH AMENDMENT – “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

    Yes, this right even extends to American citizens who are members of terror cells within the U.S.

    NINTH AMENDMENT – “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

    Just because the Bill of Rights doesn’t protect a right specifically doesn’t mean you don’t have that right.

    TENTH AMENDMENT – “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

    This amendment makes clear – if the Constitution doesn’t give the power to the federal government, or specifically keep it from the states, that power is exercised on the state and local level.
     

    That such a large number of Americans don’t know their rights is a sure sign that we are on the road to no longer fighting to protect those rights. Once misunderstanding and complacency over our rights reaches a critical mass, you can be sure your government will exploit that and regularly violate the liberties the Constitution gives to all of us.

    Don’t let that happen. *

    http://www.philly.com/dailynews/opinion/20070917_AMERICANS_WRONG_ON_THEIR_RIGHTS.html

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