Enzo Titolo

Mexico's Unspeakable Truth about the 1968 Massacre

2008-12-01T17:21:00.002-05:00

Mexico's President in 1968 felt it was time to end student uprisings in Mexico City and he declared for them to end. A large rally ensued on October 2nd.

Shots were fired, and then the Mexican Army massacred dozens of students in the Plaza. Communist infiltrators were blamed. An investigation was scuttled. No one was held responsible for the massacre.

This is what has finally been uncovered:

The Mexican Army surrounded the plaza with the students. Above them were stationed the Presidential Guards who purposely shot at the the Mexican Army. Thinking that they were being shot at by the students, the Army massacred them and cleared the plaza, ending the uprising.

I guess that there wasn't enough confidence in the Mexican Army to brutally massacre the students unless they were firing in self-defense. This makes sense. Army troops rarely like shooting at civilians, much less ones from their own country.

It seems the President sent his own force to shoot at the troops as agents-provocateur impelling the massacre. The Communist Infiltrator boogey-man was probably prepared at that same time.

This outrage should be investigated and prosecuted immediately.

Green DoD

2008-11-27T15:24:00.002-05:00

Many of us are projecting our hopes onto Barack Obama's new administration. I have a specific proposal that I hope gets noticed or has already been thought of: make energy security, especially alternative energy, a national security issue. We can literally do this with making green fuel and fuel efficiency a high priority for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The U.S. military is the world's largest fuel consumer. The image of U.S. troops and materiel occupying or being based in oil rich nations is all the more poignant when we realize that fuel supplies security are not just a priority for U.S. consumers but also for the military, which runs on oil. The U.S. learned this lesson in World War II when we beat Rommel to the Mid-East's oil producers, and it was Franklin Roosevelt who established the U.S.' relationship with the number one source of oil, Saudi Arabia.

The D.o.D. spends millions, perhaps billions of dollars, on vehicle development and military research. Two great outcomes of that research include manned spaceflight, basically putting a can of men on top of a huge missile, and the Internet, originally DARPANet, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency project connecting cold war researchers through a non-hierarchical network that would continue working after a nuclear attack. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, impressed by the Autobahn and its ease for his tanks advancing across Germany sponsored the U.S. Federal Highway development.

The military could and should put its considerable funding behind the search for alternative fuels.

Joe 'the Plumber' another Jeff Gannon/Guckert?!

2008-10-16T19:10:00.003-04:00

Remember the fake journalist practically blowing President Bush in those 2005-2006 press conferences, Jeff Gannon, actually Jeffrey Guckert, tax scofflaw and male prostitute? He was a plant from a fake conservative news organization using questions based on Rush Limbaugh comedy sketches as if they were factual. He even used his credentials to interview Ambassador Joseph Wilson with planted questions, as if going to Niger as a volunteer were a junket.

If you catch his latest incarnation as a now-out gay blogger you see that in August 2008, he states that what Obama and Osama have in common is that they are buddies with terrorists who attacked the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour and Bill Ayers of the Weathermen! Bill Ayers was the supporting character in last night's debate, and has been echoing around Sarah Palin's speeches.

These neo-cons swim in a very shallow puddle. They don't have much of a back-bench, but they have message discipline, since they say the same inane smokescreening things repeatedly. I guess if you are the permanent minority seeking the most power and wealth, you do what you feel you must to win.

Which brings me to last nights main character in the debate: Joe 'the Plumber,' yet another conservative shill and plant, not an independent undecided voter, worrying about buying a business that will earn him $250,000 but faces 9% higher taxes.

There are no records of Joe Wurzelbacher being a registered plumber or even in the Yellow Pages of Toledo, but there are records of him having registered Republican, voting in this winter's Republican primaries, and he says that he was a member of the ultra conservative Natural Law Party. We don't really know who Joe Wurzelbacher is, what he does, or who sent him.

We do know, that like Jeff Guckert, he owed taxes. We also know that if his story were true, then his tax situation would improve with Obama's plan, and that the Plumbers' Union has endorsed Obama.

I wonder if he's related to Cincinnati's Samuel Wurzelbacher, Charles Keating's son-in-law who looted billions from a Savings and Loan, stealing folks' investments and retirements, before serving over three years in prison? The same Charles Keating whom Cindy McCain invested in real estate with, and the one who supported McCain's early Senate career with serious donations! Cincinnati is 200 miles south of Toledo.

As I've said before, these guys have a limited pool of dedicated operatives and shills to work with, but the following 'separated at birth' pictures are too funny. Let's hope the late night shows pick this up.

No Blank Check Bail-Out --- Invest in Infrastructure, Communities, and People

2008-09-23T18:18:00.001-04:00

Woah! Let’s slow down on this first $750 Billion blank check installment towards whatever the Executive Branch deems necessary.

George W. Bush’ Administration has a poor track record of using emergencies for terrible and costly policies – the Patriot Act rushed to vote during the Anthrax Scare a month after the September 2001 plane attacks, the Iraq Occupation which enriches military contractors and oil companies while increasing Al Qaida recruitment and distracting us from fighting the enemy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, and the de-populationing of New Orleans in the wake of the botched hurricane response, a major failure of Bush’ Homeland Security Mega-Department.

This first $750 Billion bail-out installment will cost me and each citizen $2000 and it will saddle our children and grandchildren with debt, higher interest rates, higher inflation, and a lower dollar worth.

It also significantly and further weakens Congress’ power over the Budget and Executive Oversight. I was already distressed by Congress’ weakened powers over the past sixty years, but the use of alarmism in the last eight years has greatly usurped Congressional power.

Congress should push for and get for our hundreds of billions of dollars these things:

• Consent and Oversight as to how the money is invested not spent;
• Equity or Warrants to buy bail-out equity at a good value;
• Strengthened Community Reinvestment Act (CRA);
• Revitalized and modernized Glass-Steagall Act;
• Demand-driven (consumers), not supply-side investments, such as
• Refinancing at-risk-of-foreclosure properties, including subsidized interest;
• Financing for worthy renters of foreclosed homes and buildings to buy the properties they rented as cooperatives, condominiums, or mutual housing associations, as long as they were responsible payers;
• Increased student loan financing and increased interest rate subsidies;
• Subsidized Financing for Microloans, Credit Unions, Economic Development Corporations;
• Subsidized financing for research, including energy, medicine, information, and space technology;
• Bridge loans with subsidized rates to Non-Profit Organizations, State and City Governments;
• Subsidized financing for infrastructure development and repair, mass transit, and affordable housing development and preservation;
• The financial institutions can earn profits from servicing these bonds, mortgages and loans, and will repay Congress;
• The financial institutions must keep jobs in the USA and not outsource their activities;
• All institutions receiving investment must blatantly report their lobbying activities;
• No Golden Parachutes for Executives of companies that Congress invests in.

While you're at it... Reign in the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts' Excesses

2008-09-23T17:07:00.002-04:00

To my Congressperson:

Please join Representative Ron Paul of Texas and co-sponsor the American Freedom Agenda Act.

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.

Pre-empting Pre-emptive Pardons, a letter you might send to Congress

2008-09-22T22:07:00.000-04:00

As we approach the end of the Bush Administration we are likely to experience a flurry of Presidential pardons.

President Bush has expanded his powers at every opportunity. For the first time in our republic, we are at risk of pre-emptive pardons, pardons for crimes that may be uncovered in the future.

The pardon was not meant for members of one’s administration, oneself, or for crimes that haven’t yet been prosecuted. This would not be a pardon, but a license to break the law. This means that the Bush Administration can try to put itself above the law, which is not what pardons are for or were intended to be.

President Nixon once asserted that if the President does it, it cannot be illegal. President Bush seems to think similarly.

Now is the time to write the President warning him of your concern and to sponsor legislation in the House/Senate to prevent the President from such an abuse of power.

Thank you.

Deep History Consistencies - Anthrax and Iraq

2008-08-07T00:51:00.001-04:00

One thing that is consistent about the W-Cheney Administration is that they use the same cast of characters, like they are from a stable, and they do the same things-- lie, fabricate, war-monger, aggrandize their own power, and see that it all works for the bottom lines of their coteries.

Throughout the spring of 2003 I was expecting an Iraqi WMD 'discovery,' assuming it would be a plant.

In early July 2003, Judith Miller wrote a NYTimes article about how Stephen Hatfill created a mobile bio-weapons lab to train the Delta Force to discover WMD.

We are now learning, more and more (Ron Susskind's latest book details that the W-Cheney Administration forged documentation falsely proving Iraqi bio-weapons capability, and Sy Hersh told the Center for American Progress that Cheney's staff seriously discussed having Navy Seals under an Iranian false flag to start hostilities with the US Navy to start a war), that this Administration lies to get what it wants and infects our entire governmental apparatus to do so. Politicization is too kind a word.

In July 2003, in Fort Bragg, we have Hatfill's life-size, workable, mobile bioweapons lab to train the Delta Force. I don't know why a small model or drawings couldn't suffice for training purposes. Who authorized this?

Was this full-scale prototype taken to Iraq? Were there plans?

That same month, Rove and Cheney's team destroys Valerie Plame-Wilson, the leading Middle East's WMD covert expert's career, and compromises her network and her entire cover. I speculate that the heat was too hot, especially with an election season coming up, to plant such a lab in Iraq to 'prove' that the war was justified, just as Ambassador Joseph Wilson was showing that the emperor was naked.
Such a hoax, if discovered, would have taken the Administration down.

Hatfill's previous project, according to Scott Shane, then of the Baltimore Sun, was for the CIA commissioning a study of what would happen in an office with an envelop of Anthrax in it. It's author, William C. Patrick III, denies writing it. Around this time, Hatfill also worked on a previous mobile weapons lab for training special operations forces in Guam.

In any case, there are lots of unanswered questions, and we need a powerful, apolitical investigation of this matter, and unlike the 9/11 Commission it shouldn't have a mandate not to assign blame, nor should it have administration people on the executive staff. Something more along the lines of a special prosecutor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/02/us/after-war-biological-warfare-subject-anthrax-inquiry-tied-anti-germ-training.html?scp=1&sq=Subject&pagewanted=all

AFTER THE WAR: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE; Subject of Anthrax Inquiry Tied to Anti-Germ Training
This article was reported and written by William J. Broad, David Johnston and Judith Miller.
Published: Wednesday, July 2, 2003

Three years ago, the United States began a secret project to train Special Operations units to detect and disarm mobile germ factories of the sort that Iraq and some other countries were suspected of building, according to administration officials and experts in germ weaponry.

The heart of the effort, these officials said, was a covert plan to construct a mobile germ plant, real in all its parts but never actually ''plugged in'' to make weapons. In the months before the war against Iraq, American commandos trained on this factory.

The tale of the mobile unit provides a glimpse into one of the most secretive of military and intelligence worlds, that of germ warfare defense. But here, two stories intersect. The first involves this previously unknown aspect of the Iraq war. The second involves the investigation into who sent letters containing anthrax that killed five people in the United States in late 2001.

Officials familiar with the secret project say that to design an American version of a mobile germ unit, the government turned to Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, then a rising star in the world of biological defense but more recently publicly identified by the Justice Department as ''a person of interest'' in the anthrax investigation.

It was unclear why investigators focused on Dr. Hatfill. Officials now say a major reason he came under suspicion was his work on the mobile unit.

Dr. Hatfill has been subjected to greater scrutiny than anyone else in the anthrax investigation, but the government has brought no charges. He has repeatedly denied any role in the attacks and has said he knows nothing about anthrax production.

Dr. Hatfill, people close to him say, is proud of his work on the mobile unit and says it demonstrates his desire to assist the government in biodefense, even though investigators tried to use his work against him. In any case, investigators found no evidence suggesting that the plant ever made anthrax, his friends, government experts and investigators all agree.

The secret trainer is similar to the mobile units that the Bush administration has accused Iraq of building to produce biological weapons. Neither its existence nor Dr. Hatfill's work on it has previously been disclosed publicly. Pat Clawson, Dr. Hatfill's spokesman and friend, said Dr. Hatfill would not comment on any secret project or any role that he might have played. Mr. Clawson also declined comment.

Dr. Hatfill helped develop the mobile plant while working for Science Applications International Corporation, a leading contractor for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, the officials and the experts said.

They said the unit was set up last fall at Fort Bragg, N.C., to help Delta Force, the Army's elite Special Operations unit, learn what to look for in Iraq and how to react if it found dangerous mobile gear.

Several people familiar with the Delta Force trailer, including senior counterterrorism officials, said it was intended solely for training. They emphasized that its components were not connected and that it could not have made lethal germs.

Even after the F.B.I. began investigating Dr. Hatfill, the Pentagon continued to draw on his expertise. But tensions arose between the Justice Department and the Defense Department over their access to the mobile unit, the weapons experts said.

The trainer's equipment includes a fermenter, a centrifuge and a mill for grinding clumps of anthrax into the best size for penetrating human lungs, these experts said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, suspecting that components from the Delta trainer might have been used to make the anthrax mailed in late 2001, examined the unit, officials and experts said. But investigators found no spores or other evidence linking it to the crime, they said.

The mobile unit is part of the government's secretive effort to develop germ defenses.

Critics say such biodefense projects often test the limits of the 1975 global ban on germ weapons, which the United States championed.

But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax letters only weeks later prompted the Bush administration to greatly expand the number of such clandestine projects.

Elisa D. Harris, a Clinton administration arms control official now at the University of Maryland, said developing a mobile germ trainer would not violate the treaty. But she questioned the wisdom of it.

''It will raise concerns in other capitals,'' Dr. Harris said, ''in part because the United States has fought tooth and nail to prevent the international community from strengthening the germ treaty.''

Senior Pentagon officials declined to discuss the mobile unit. An administration official said the Pentagon had reviewed the unit to ensure legal compliance with the germ treaty.

The American mobile unit was not a first. About 50 years ago, when the United States made germ weapons, scientists drew up plans for mobile units that could produce enough anthrax to kill almost everyone in a large city, said William C. Patrick III, a former head of product development at Fort Detrick, Md., then the military's center for developing germ weapons. The goal, Mr. Patrick said in an interview, was to create a reserve in case an enemy destroyed the nation's germ factories, in Arkansas and Maryland at the time.

Over the decades, other countries, including Iraq, have also sought such mobile gear.

After Iraq lost the 1991 Persian Gulf war and agreed to destroy its unconventional arms, Iraqi officials told United Nations inspectors that Baghdad had once considered making mobile germ plants. A United Nations official said that inspectors ''kept that in the back of their minds'' while looking for evidence of mobile germ plants. They found none.

In the fall of 1997, Dr. Hatfill, a medical doctor, entered the world of germ defense by taking a job at Fort Detrick, where he studied protections against deadly viruses like Ebola. In late 1998, he began working at Science Applications, a company based in San Diego that has offices in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Among other things, it helps the government develop defenses against germ weapons.

At Science Applications in Virginia, because of an increase in anthrax hoaxes, Dr. Hatfill helped commission a paper from Mr. Patrick to assess the risks of spores sent through the mail. The February 1999 paper compared the probable physical characteristics of anthrax that could be produced by amateurs with the known traits of American weapon-grade anthrax; it said nothing about anthrax production.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other senior American officials have said that in late 1999 a defecting Iraqi chemical engineer told American officials he had supervised operations at a mobile germ unit, and that Baghdad was making a fleet of them.

By 2000, the United States appears to have concluded that the rumored Iraqi mobile plants were probably real.

At his job, Dr. Hatfill took on the mobile trainer project with enthusiasm, colleagues recalled. At times, one said, he asserted that he was its instigator.

Military officials said that the effort was financed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to counter biological, radiological and chemical weapons.

Experts said that Science Applications assigned the project to Dr. Hatfill and Dr. Joseph F. Soukup, a vice president for biomedical science, who helped commission the 1999 anthrax report.

Science Applications declined to discuss the project or Dr. Hatfill's involvement. ''It's highly classified,'' Ron Zollars, a company spokesman, said. Dr. Soukup did not return phone calls.

To learn about mobile production, Dr. Hatfill again called on Mr. Patrick and his encyclopedic knowledge, said experts familiar with their work. Mr. Patrick, who also declined to comment, described the old American plans in detail, these experts said.

The collaboration, experts said, produced a novel design that demonstrated a number of ways to multiply viruses and bacteria, including the use of fermentation, chicken eggs and tissue culture. It was not meant to replicate Iraqi or American designs but instead to illustrate a range of mobile biological threats.

In 2000, Dr. Hatfill began gathering parts for the mobile unit, an expert said. Another quoted Dr. Hatfill as saying he had bought parts for the Delta trailer long before its construction and stored them in a warehouse.

''It's all the ordering of equipment that in hindsight looks suspicious,'' said a third expert, who is familiar with the secret federal projects that Dr. Hatfill worked on.

The trainer's construction began in September 2001, one expert said. Dr. Hatfill supervised it at A.F.W. Fabrication, a metalworking plant on the outskirts of Frederick, Md. The shop was a mile from Dr. Hatfill's apartment outside Fort Detrick's main gate.

Although Dr. Hatfill seemed fully engaged in biodefense work, his world began unraveling. That summer, the C.I.A. had rejected his application for a high-level intelligence clearance after he failed a polygraph test, associates and officials said. Then, in September 2001, the anthrax attacks began and Dr. Hatfill soon found himself under scrutiny.

Science Applications fired him in March 2002. The secret Delta trailer, a person close to Dr. Hatfill said, was then half built.

Mr. Zollars of Science Applications said Dr. Hatfill did no further work for the company and received no further pay. Experts familiar with Dr. Hatfill said he continued to work on the germ trainer. ''He was doing it on his own, using his own money,'' one recalled.

Later, as the Delta trailer was being hauled to Fort Bragg, F.B.I. agents and experts pulled it over and thoroughly checked it for anthrax and other deadly germs.

''The F.B.I. wanted to confiscate it,'' one expert recalled.

After tense discussions, the Pentagon kept the Delta trailer, which was set up at Fort Bragg last fall in preparation for the war with Iraq. Experts said many troops used it in training sessions run at times by Dr. Hatfill and at other times by Mr. Patrick.

''This is a sensitive thing,'' Col. Bill Darley, spokesman for the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., said of the mobile unit in an interview. He declined to disclose details, other than to say it was used exclusively for training.

''We are not growing anthrax or botulinum toxin,'' Colonel Darley said. ''None of this equipment is functional. It looks like -- it is -- the real stuff, but it's nonfunctional.''

Friends said Dr. Hatfill was deeply committed to following through on the project because it was for the Special Forces, in which he had tried to serve while in the Army at Fort Bragg. ''I had given my word,'' one friend quoted him as saying. ''I wasn't about to break it.''

Photo: Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, shown last year, has denied any role in the anthrax attacks of 2001 and has said he knows nothing about producing anthrax. (Getty Images)(pg. A17)

Correction: July 5, 2003, Saturday An article on Wednesday about a link between a biodefense training program and a doctor who has been questioned in the 2001 anthrax attacks described a statement he made about anthrax incorrectly. The doctor, Steven J. Hatfill, said in a news conference last year that he had never worked with anthrax; he did not say he knew nothing about its production.

Did the Democrats Kill Tim Russert?

2008-07-28T13:59:00.002-04:00

The U.S. Presidential Election Year is too long, especially since it lasts over two years.

I am sure that the stress of the long Democratic Primaries of 2008 killed Tim Russert.

All that coverage was practically political pornography, or something addictive and time-consuming, but ultimately leading to a far-off, indefinite payoff.

And think of the money wasted with these long primaries, hundreds of millions of dollars. And what does it buy? Fat-Cats' access.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world and our national business justs kills the clock, waiting for the election and the new administration. Waiting for a better deal, someone else to negotiate with, maybe to test.

Back when we were a rural nation, using horses for travel and communication, our quadrennial elections made sense, but we really need either a longer single term, or a Parliamentary system in which the leader leads with the confidence and support of Congress and the public.

Resign, Spitzer, Resign!

2008-03-11T12:04:00.000-04:00

Resign, Spitzer, Resign!

David Patterson would make a great Governor. He is a soft spoken consensus builder with experience.

Spitzer, the 'spike' driving 'steamroller,' and former "Mr. Clean" was toast last year when he tried to throw a wrench into Bruno's helicopters. 2007 and 2008 was and is another lost year with Spitzer.

Now, he's further dragging down Hillary and the Democrats nationally.

I was an early Spitzer supporter when he took on Wall Street Abuses, but he lost me when he never investigated his real estate buddies and the traders who profited from the attacks on our city in 2001.

His best move would be to resign and let Patterson lead us forward together.

Finally it is time AL GORE For President of the United States

2008-03-05T20:10:00.002-05:00

Gore Obama. Or Gore Bloomberg. The Democrats should Draft AL GORE!

This lack of a clear majority for Obama, whatever he stands for specifically, or the Hillary Clinton machine means one thing -- Bring Back Al Gore. He won the popular majority vote, and possibly/probably won Florida, and he's only more triumphant, yet sympathetic, yet accomplished and vindicated -- without even being President.

Obama and Gore hate Hillary, and this would get her both out and back. It would put Obama in the on-deck position, getting more seasoned as Gore's lieutenant. He'd still be young at 55.

Gore was the best and most positively effective VP our nation has seen, so he'd put Obama to good purposes, giving him more experience, gravitas and executive experience...

Bloomberg would also make a great VP as a lieutenant in charge of education, health, government accountability and information provision for transparency and economic growth. As long as he (and his police commissioner Ray Kelly is sidelined) from Homeland Security, Justice or the military. Their RNC convention abuses and police abuses would be ridiculous if they weren't so offensive and toxic.

For the TOP OF THE TICKET: GORE 2008.

Shootdown of Spy Satellite suggests 'inability' to protect the Pentagon and recalls the Glomar Explorer - CIA Project Jennifer

2008-02-29T02:07:00.003-05:00

Last week, the military shot down a 5,000-20,000 pound cold satellite the size of a small bus, traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, 130 miles above the earth's surface.

How large is a small bus? Maybe 50 feet long x 12 feet high x 10 feet wide.

How large is a 757-300 Jet? 178.5 feet long x 44.5 feet high x 124 feet wide. Its' weight: over 200,000 pounds.

This is a much larger, closer, hotter, and slower target than the dead spy satellite that we managed to take out into football sized pieces in outer space.

In eight years of testing, warships equipped with Aegis radar systems have hit 12 targets in 14 Pacific Ocean attempts, compiling a better record than the costlier land-based system of interceptor missiles in Alaska and California.

But the task of bringing down the satellite will be much harder, Navy officials warned. The satellite is traveling faster, higher and, perhaps most important, colder than the enemy missiles the system was built to hit.

"We're looking at a cold body in space, a body that has been shut down for some time, and so it doesn't have the traditional heating that a ballistic missile has," said a Navy official, noting that heat is one of the primary ways an interceptor finds its target.

"I’ve done a whole bunch of these" missile launches, the fire controlman Jackson said in a telephone interview Thursday from aboard the USS Lake Erie.

The US Navy modified a Standard Missile 3 to be launched from an Aegis destroyer - usually part of the US Missile Defense System designed to intercept ballistic missiles.

Gen Cartwright said they planned to have one missile shot, but there would be three missiles available on three ships.

Clearly, there are anti-missile systems in place over decades of a missile standoff with the USSR since the 1960s.

A plane, as we learn in physics class, is a large slow winged missile. Joseph Kennedy, Jr., President John Kennedy's older brother, used his plane as a missile in World War II, taking out German missile batteries, killing him in action. Condoleeza Rice' National Security Adviser statement that 'no one could envision planes being used as missiles' in 2001 was either disingenuous or incompetent, especially since the G8 summit a few months before protected the President against such attacks, and there were foiled attacks using planes against the CIA headquarters and the Eiffel Tower. In addition, on September 10, 2001, there were anti-missile batteries emplaced on the hotel where President Bush stayed in Long Boat Key, Florida.

How fast was this 757 model jet going when it hit the Pentagon on 9/11/01? About 600 miles per hour, and it was known to be off-flight-track during a period of hijackings for over an hour since the first plane hit North Tower One in NYC.

Planes emit heat and are vulnerable to heat seeking missiles.

According to Transportation Secretary Norman Minetta, VP Cheney was being briefed on this plane's progress as it approached D.C., and that he reiterated to military personnel that 'the order still stands.'

Based on my counts about 30 various scheduled and rescheduled to that day of military exercises on 9/11/01, these could have affected US defense of Washington, D.C., the Pentagon, and NYC that day. The dismissals that the many wargames that date didn't affect defense seems disingenuous or nefarious.

It seems strange that we can shoot a satellite at orbital speeds in space out of commission, but we cannot protect the Pentagon from an errant passenger jet, and it warrants further investigation by experts, not politically connected 'historical narrators.'

Here's video if you like.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I was younger, the Hughes Glomar Explorer was touted as a deep sea mining vessel, mining nodules of manganese from the bottom of the sea. It turns out that Hughes was actually working for the CIA's Project Jennifer to recover a Soviet Sub that was on the bottom of the sea.

This missile shot reminds me a bit of the Glomar Explorer cover story, and it reminds me of the possibilities of technology for defense, yet our national capitols were left unprotected on 9/11/01 -- despite a multi-trillion dollar military larger than the rest of the world's combined militaries...

Bloomberg Bows Out of Prez Race 2008

2008-02-28T10:20:00.002-05:00

I love Bloomberg.

He is possibly the greatest Mayor of NYC - except for his troubling NYPD Commissioner. Police Brutality under Ray Kelly, from the Bell shooting, the RNC abuses, arresting children in schools, and the continuing silly persecution of bicycle activists mars his administration and troubled me about him being President.

Bloomberg would make a great Secretary of Health Education and Welfare, HUD, or EPA -- or all of them at once. Just keep him and Kelly away from Homeland Security or Justice.

I don't see him as a VP. A bossy guy (with the present company excluded) doesn't thrive in that position.

And Obama needs a General as VP to bone up his international and military and patriotic bona fides.

Secret Service Doesn't Screen All Attendees for Weapons at Obama Rallies

2008-02-24T21:00:00.002-05:00

Obama rallies, and based on some the 550 comments this article has gotten from 2/21 to today (2/24), in Texas and across much of the nation don't have full crowd screening for weapons. The Secret Service said that the security in Dallas was the same for Obama as usual.

Two hours before the event starts people go through magnetometers and have their bags checked for weapons, but an hour before the events, as the lines grow around the block, the searches are called off and the magnetometers are put away.

In the instance of Dallas, this stand-down happened because the crowd of 17,000 'seemed friendly.'

It is frightening to think that a sharpshooter with a smiley face just has to be a little early or late to an Obama rally to get in with a weapon.

I don't understand how 50,000 in Yankee Stadium can be prohibited from bringing in bags, with each attendee getting pat down and wanded, while nearly 70,000 go through this for Giants games at the Meadowlands. And those games start on time.

It seems that the local security is tighter for Yankee games so that we have to buy $5 waters and $8 beers, while blowing up a bunch of fans and players.

Maybe our nation should value a visionary leader like Obama more than beverages, millionaire ball players, peanuts and crackerjacks.

Dallas Police Told to Stand Down on Obama Security by Secret Service

2008-02-22T14:54:00.003-05:00

This item is interesting and troubling from today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram of Texas:

Police concerned about order to stop weapons screening at Obama rally
By JACK DOUGLAS Jr.
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.

"Sure," said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a "friendly crowd."

The Secret Service did not return a call from the Star-Telegram seeking comment.

Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.

Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event.

"How can you not be concerned in this day and age," said one policeman.

Barack's team and the Democrats should be providing their own security on top of local police and the Secret Service.

JFK had no idea that the Secret Service stood down and stood down the Police when he visited Dallas his last visit there, nor that the motorcade slowed down before the overpass, or that the agents stepped away from his vehicle. He was entrapped.

There is no way Obama or the Democrats should allow anyone to protect him more than their own forces.

To wit, I don't understand how 70,000 people are screened to go into Giants Stadium or 50,000 into Yankee Stadium, with those games happening on time with packed seats, yet in Dallas they can't seem to screen 17,000.

I've long been worried about Obama's safety since he started front-running on a charismatic 'change and stop the war' platform.

FBI not revealing its counter-WMD failures, maybe covering up

2008-01-22T15:53:00.000-05:00

Bush' Neo-cons targeted Valerie Plame Wilson's Brewster Jennings cover firm at the beginning of the Bush2 admin, when they were inventing the Iraqi WMD pre-emption rationale - before her hubby hero Amb Joe Wilson publicly reported that Bush lied.

The Neo-Cons needed her out so they could lie.

I think they blew her cover & her intelligence career later in mid 2003 because they were having the accused Anthrax Attacker in Iraq assembling a fake mobile bio WMD lab - probably a psyop plant to justify the invasion & occupation while the real enemies, our allies, Saudi Pakistan, were funding terror, building WMD & proliferating it @ great personal profit.

Valerie Plame probably could have blown that mobile lab ruse & any phony Iranian plants and lies. Her specialty was Iranian WMD, although the whole region was her bailiwick. That was why she was 'fair game.'

Who got the FBI off Haftill for Anthrax? Who sent Hatfill to Iraq?

Who may have tipped the White House to the Anthrax attacks before the tainted mail arrived?

Who got the White House on Cipro then?

These Neo-con crazies are all linked to Cheney. I bet he has something to do with the Anthrax Attacks, the follow-up to 9/11/01's attacks that bridged our policy to pre-emption and Iraq, even though the Anthrax was American-sourced.

Since NATO is fighting the terrorists and WMD, NATO & InterPol should investigate.

The USA and the World needs an independent, funded, and powerful investigation of the 9/11/01 and the Anthrax Attacks.

He would have been the President of the United States

2008-01-21T07:58:00.000-05:00

I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been elected President of the United States in the 1970s. Maybe 1972 or 1976 considering the fields running then. He towered over them in terms of oratory, stature, and vision.

I've finally realized that there really was a Reagan Revolution, and we are still playing by the rules he rewrote in the 1980s.

But that wouldn't have happened, and we would have a lot more hope and justice had MLK, Jr not been taken out while staying at a cheap motel supporting the Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike. What kind of revolution would America have had had Martin Luther King, Jr. been President?

Reagan started his campaign in a racism capitol, continuing Nixon's Southern Strategy, flipping racist white Southern Democrats Republican, using coded symbolism. Reagan campaigned on the back of a chimerical Welfare Queen in a Cadillac. Luxury car makers did well in the wake of the Reagan Revolution as the nation split rich and poor, with the poor doing worse. Both Bushes kept that revolution, spinning our nation to resemble more South and Central American Republicas sans Middle Class than European social democracies, where citizens with dignity and without fear of starvation or lack of medical care is a point of pride. Reagan's first major action in office was to fire (fire!?!) all the PATCO Air Traffic Controllers on strike, compromising domestic air safety for a decade.

Martin Luther King, Jr. sacrificed his life for urban garbage carriers. He received no local or federal protection, even though he won the Nobel Peace Prize, campaigned to change America, and had numerous death threats that the FBI was fully aware of.

~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~

Hillary Clinton jabbed at Barack Obama that it takes more than a vision to make change, that it takes hard work, and that it took President Johnson to work his work and magic with Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, (not just MLK, Jr.'s oratory and advocacy). But MLK, Jr. was more than a speech maker or grandstander; he was a tireless campaigner who took jailings, wrote books, and he was beaten, bugged, gassed and threatened. As I stated above, I believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been President and a National Treasure by now, with the Civil Rights Act being just a stepping stone toward his ultimate greatness through his achievements and his revolutionary changes for justice and compassion in the USA.

Pundits speak of the power of martyrdom. They are shilling for the snipers.

Martyrs have no power. They are symbols used by lessers, like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or me today.

The dead are the bitches of the universe, carried, then cremated into carbon dust and vapor, or eaten by worms and bacteria in the dirt. Maybe their bloody shirts are waved or invoked. The dead and the martyred have no office, no voice, except for that which the living gives them in their memory or inspiration. Nothing beats being alive.

Barack Obama works hard. Community Organizing, his background, is hard work, and it doesn't pay well, and it is great political experience.

Too bad mainstream Democrats, or even the Democratic Party, doesn't realize, recognize or reward grassroots service and organizing outside of political clubs. This blind spot is part of the reason why parties or 'Democrat' is meaningless to most Americans.

Hillary Clinton speaks of Experience. It sounds like a code word for Qualifications, the code word countering affirmative action. I don't like her Experience or Qualifications,

speaking in codes,
supporting decades-long wars to look tough for political gain (like President Johnson, except Iraq will last longer than Vietnam -- and would be deadlier for us if battlefield medicine and transportation hadn't advanced so much since the 1960s),
making deals and owing for them,
fronting for corporations - including military profiteers and pharmaceuticals,
shilling for unions no matter what,
not pushing for a real 9/11/01 investigation - even though her home state was not defended and was hit hardest,
not pushing for the 9/11/01 rescue workers' health care,
absolutely failing to put forward a credible health care plan for the US when Bill Clinton was President,
absolutely failing to craft that health care proposal without arrogance or with any political savvy, turning half of America off to her,
working for a politically connected corporate law firm,
standing for nothing but for her own power and importance.

I'm tired of her opportunism, her symbols and codes, her annoying shrill voice (like a put-upon teacher or stressed out mother), her obviously fake expressions, her carefully crafted personae, and her dangerous lust for power and glory.

Barack Obama is my second-to-last choice for Democratic nominee for President, but I prefer him way more to Hillary Clinton.

I miss the 1990s. I did better and had more fun during the Clinton years, but I really don't need Hillary teaming up with Bill as a loose cannon pit-bull, making their connections and standing for their own power, and a nicer status-quo for all. In the 1990s, where was the peace dividend, where was the end of the Gulf War, why did we refuse Sudan's offer of Osama, why did Bill ignore the 1993 WTC bombing, why were SUVs subsidized while alternative energy and mileage standards languished? While Bill was triangulating, and the first thing he came up with was 'don't ask, don't tell,' (some stand for gay rights!), Newt Gingrinch took Congress with a real vision, the Contract on America. It really is time for a change.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~~

Confederate Flag in the southern state capitols time again.

I've written before that anyone or any state should have the right to leave any union they want whenever they want or vote on it. That is, we shouldn't have had a civil war, and I'd be fine with the South being its own country. Heck, I'm fine with NYC being its own country as long as we get to annex a few more suburban counties in New Jersey, NYS, and Connecticut.

All that being said, a war was fought, and the Confederates were leaving the USA. They were killing over it, and it was treasonous.

I had a problem with Reagan honoring SS soldiers in Bitburg Germany, and I'd have a problem with any US capitol proudly flying a Nazi Flag. We fought a war against the Southern Confederacy for the USA's survival and beat them, and they are supposed to be Americans again. The North more than bent over backwards to heal the South, and they pretty much run the USA today.

We also shouldn't fly Mexican, Spanish, British, or Japanese flags of countries that the USA beat and befriended -- or any other flags in capitols, unless it is for a special occasion, like a visit. And we aren't supposed to be using Euros or Canadian dollars in the USA.

I understand that some Southerners are proud of the Confederacy, and so they should show the Confederate flag in an exhibit explaining its meanings. But to everyone this should be recognized as a flag of treason, and to many this is a flag of racism, redentism, regression, and oppression - a symbol of lynching, lawlessness, and vigilante terror. It is unacceptable to have this fly in a capitol.

True Americans embrace diversity, respect, justice, compassion, happiness, and tolerance.

Have a good Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Torture Tapes of Abu Zubaydah spinning

2008-01-17T16:15:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan implies recently in the UK Times that the destroyed torture tape of Abu Zubaydah decision reaches far up in the White House. But he also implies that Zubaydah was not credible because he was a crazy liar.

When Zubaidah was captured he was touted for his roles in the attacks on Amman, the USS Cole, and in the 9/11/01 attacks where he fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was subsequently captured.

Maybe Zubaydah has/had some valuable information amongst the lies and delusions.

My favorite detail about Abu is the fake CIA rendition to a fake Saudi intelligence torture chamber. Zubaydah was relieved upon his relocation to what he thought was a Saudi prison with Saudi interrogators. The US wrongly assumed that this would gravely frighten him and make him spill the beans out of fear.

Zubaydah, instead, was relieved, and he gave accurate personal cell phone numbers to three Saudi Royals in high government / intelligence positions, and told the agents to call them and get their instructions. He also had personal contact info for a high ranking Pak ISI intelligence chief / air force officer. Most of these fellows soon died in strange circumstances, except for one promoted to an ambassadorship, giving him diplomatic immunity.

Zubaydah provided contact information for:

Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of the Saudi king. He provides telephone numbers from memory and says, “He will tell you what to do.” He proceeds to give more information and phone numbers, claiming ties with higher ups in both the Saudi and Pakistani governments. He also names:
Pakistani air force chief Mushaf Ali Mir, said to be closely tied to the fundamentalists in the ISI.
Saudi Intelligence Minister Prince Turki al-Faisal.
Prince Sultan bin Faisal, another nephew of the Saudi King.
Prince Fahd bin Turki, another member of the Saudi royalty. According to Posner, Zubaida claims that all of these people were intermediaries he dealt with in the frequent transfer of money to al-Qaeda. The phone numbers and other details are consistent with information already known by US intelligence. Zubaida then lays out many secrets about the 9/11 attacks. One unnamed investigator will later call them “the Rosetta Stone” of 9/11. According to Zubaida, he was present in a meeting in 1996 where the Pakistanis and the Saudis struck a deal with bin Laden (see 1996 ), promising him protection, arms, and supplies in exchange for not being the targets of future terror attacks. He claimed both governments were told the US would be attacked on 9/11, but not given the details of how the attack would work. Within months, all of the people named by Zubaida die mysteriously except for Prince Turki, who is made an ambassador, giving him diplomatic immunity. [Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (New York, NY: Random House, 2003)., 186-94.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Posner, 2003, pp. 186-94]

One of the Saudi's was the owner of 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, War Emblem, Prince Ahmed Bin Salam, who suddenly died at age 43 of a heart attack. He was the King's nephew.

The next day, Prince Sultan bin Faisal, another nephew of the king, dies driving to Prince Ahmed’s funeral.

A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki supposedly “dies of thirst” in the Arabian desert.

Seven months later, on February 20, 2003, Pakistan’s air force chief, Mushaf Ali Mir, dies in a plane crash in clear weather, along with his wife and closest confidants.

Controversial author Gerald Posner implies that all of these events are linked together and the deaths are not accidental, but have occurred because of the testimony of captured al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida in March 2002 (see Early April 2002 ). The deaths all occurred not long after the respective governments were told of Zubaida’s confessions.

Only one other key figure named by Zubaida remains alive: Saudi Intelligence Minister Prince Turki al-Faisal. Posner says, “He’s the J. Edgar Hoover of Saudi Arabia,” too powerful and aware of too many secrets to be killed off. Prince Turki lost his intelligence minister job ten days before 9/11, and is later made Saudi ambassador to Britain, giving him diplomatic immunity from any criminal prosecution. [Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11(New York, NY: Random House, 2003)., 190-94.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Posner, 2003, pp. 190-94; Time, 31 August 2003.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Time, 8/31/2003]

According to author James Risen, there is no significant investigation of foreign governments in the wake of Zubaidah's confessions and personal-business links. (Citation in the link above). John Hockenberry did a Dateline NBC investigation report that Saudi Arabia, our 'ally,' has no intelligence cooperation with the USA at all.

Maybe Abu's tapes were destroyed for their implications. Maybe he is not so crazy or incredible, but has too good information revealed after less than a minute of controlled drowning / waterboarding.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org has timelines of mainstream media coverage of recent history. They are run by the Grassroots Center for Public Oversight and they need our support asap.

Links in this post:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3086937.ece?Submitted=true

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=ahmed_bin_salman

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/fundraiser.jsp

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19845

Here's another great link a review of the Posner book in Asia Times, which I love: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EI17Aa01.html

Sample Letter to your phone company, unless it is Qwest

2007-12-18T21:05:00.000-05:00

Hi.

I'm a customer with BIG TELECO for wireless and for my local home service.

In the news, I've learned that BIG TELECO has given information about its customers' calls -- local, long-distance, and international -- to the US Government without a warrant since early 2001.

Please let me know whether you provided my calls or information about my calls to the government, and if so, what information you provided.

Thanks!

Have a nice day.

Republican and Democrat Paul Supporters Protest Giuliani

2007-12-09T22:51:00.000-05:00

'Republican' and 'Democrat' is a false dichotomy rallying bases to eke victories and minimize risk to parties and corporate backers.

Parties are money-hungry, since our 'free public' airwaves cost so much for advertising.

The issue isn't party, meaningless to most Americans. The issue is whether you are for the constitution.

Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are the only candidates for the Constitution

Bravo to Paul supporters picketing Ghouliani, calling him on his lack of popular support and democratic bona fides. As a New Yorker, I am aware of his contempt for the 1st Amendment, and how self-aggrandizing, offensive and abrasive he is; how he profited from his mistakes making the 9/11/01 attacks far worse than they had to be, despite warnings from commissions and commissioners since 1994.

In 2001, Giuliani tried to circumvent the NYC Charter, and perhaps the NY State Constitution, to extend his term, past his term limit, due to the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center. His rationale was that only he would be able to be the Mayor of NYC in the wake of the attacks in early 2002. His chosen successor, Bloomberg, who self-financed his own candidacy to the tune of around $60 million denied Giuliani's gambit for a power grab -- an unprecedented term-extension. Bloomberg proved just fine that NYC could do just fine, thank you, without Giuliani continuing his reign over City Hall.

Giuliani is a blame-shifter who’d take credit for a sunny day if he could.

He has Arab oil clients paying him millions of dollars, yet he's pro-Zionist. He refused a sheikh's 9/11/01 grant for NYC when he linked the attacks to US policy, but Giuliani's fine with taking Pat Robertson's support, even though Robertson linked the attacks to NYC's moral degradation.

Giuliani repeatedly blamed cop-killed victims. He cut non-profits’ private & public funding for daring to do anything that he disliked, especially criticism of Giuliani and his values; he banned protests, even City Council press conferences, from City Hall.

If Giuliani gets elected, he will make Bush2 look good! At least Bush is profiting his cronies and supporters. Giuliani is all about himself. You thought the so-called Patriot Act and Patriot2 were bad... Watch out for this Ghoul who profits from death and misfortune.

The Iraq War - Return on Failure's costs will keep on costing

2007-12-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

Dana Perino is so corporate-Orwellian here, and the way she tries to talk down to the venerable Helen Thomas is ridiculous, insulting herself and us all.

Perino will become a corporate shill soon, and Helen Thomas is going down in history as a conscientious, truth-telling pioneer, a great American. Perino is foresaking her honor and privilege of facing Helen Thomas, the Press, and the US Public, to 'sell' a war based on lies and privatized profiteering at the expense of the American and Iraqi public.

But, for the sake of argument, let's get down and dirty with Perino's pseudo-MBA-speak, of 'Return on Success.' Rounding up for the White House, we are experiencing a return on success rate of 4% over 4 years of war, assuming that 'success return' equals the number of troops returned home divided by the peak number of troops [6000/150,000]. If we count the private contractors, then the rate goes to 2% over 4-5 years of war.

Would you invest in a risky proposition that only gave you 3% after four or five years? And what about the costs? The higher taxes, the higher oil prices, the lost allies and prestige? And the costs that Helen Thomas mentioned.

Helen brings in from the margins the costs of 650,000 Iraqi innocents killed [The Lancet], which isn't even factored into the Bush return rate, but should be, and adding to that 30,000 US casualties (severely injured or killed), then this return of 6,000 troops is not a success but an abject failure. Besides the Iraqis that are dead forever, up to 28,000 US veterans are maimed or traumatized forever.

By 1974 the Vietnam War was over, but the US was paying higher interest rates and inflation for that war until the recession of 1983. The Iraq War is on its way to being more expensive, and it may linger on like Korea for another 45 years!

We are going to be paying higher taxes, inflation and interest rates through 2017 if the war ended today, and the Veteran's injured today will need expensive care through about 2050, if the war ended today. And we are going to be paying these higher costs with stagnating jobs and lowered economic opportunities like the stagnant inflationary 1970s, or stagflation.

Who benefits? Military contractors, oil companies, OPEC, Russia, Oligarchs, Bush's friends and family, Health Care providers. I project that they are making off with a trillion dollars, a million-million dollars, or a thousand billion dollars of wealth transfer, transforming the US into a Latin-American or Russian style oligarchy with a few rich on top, a tiny middle class, and lots of poor and working-poor.

Who pays and will pay? The dead and surviving Americans and Iraqis. No wonder Dana Perino needed to 'move on.' There is no good story for her to tell, and Thomas was calling her on it with heart and a great deal of restraint and forbearance.

Perino is upset that we are not buying 'black is white,' 'freedom is ignorance,' 'war leads to peace and democracy.' She is confusing honor with obedience and compliance, and service with authority.

Kucinich is right. We need to impeach these lying, cheating, profiteering warmongers asap. Let's limit the damage, and cut our losses. And who knows what these greedy war pigs will pull in the last innings or downs of this game, especially if they feel desperate?

Imus is back!? Imus is Anti-American

2007-11-02T11:36:00.000-04:00

Don Imus' racism over the years, referring to Gwen Iffil as (looking like) the 'cleaning woman' and referring to the Rutgers' winning basketball team as (looking like) "nappy headed ho's," is not just racist -- it is un-American. This man is unable to look at black women of great achievement as playing anything but the roles of maids or hos (whores).

Black women, besides being about 5% of our nation's population, have overcome and are overcoming so much just surviving in the USA.

Imus is entitled to his opinions, and probably all of us struggle with racism and prejudice, but he has displayed a pattern of warping and hatred of an important part of our country. We just don't need this guy having access to our public airwaves, making fun while hurting noble people doing so much for our country.

The Rutgers University Women's Basketball Team are champions, winners, and they are scholars. Rutgers is one of our nation's oldest, most venerable universities. Imus' denigration of this team of achievers, insults us all as Americans.

This man is blind to our country's greatness; putting him on the air and paying him well to spew his hateful ignorance is an insult to our nation.

The Real Mukasey Issue - will he enforce the law?

2007-11-02T10:54:00.000-04:00

a friend writes:

The Nub is Immunity and Prosecution.

Obviously, the Bush regime is torturing, waterboarding, renditioning/disappearing people. The rhetorical and semantic flourishes the regime are displaying is the proof we need that they know they've broken the law, and they want to get away with it. Don Rumsfeld ran out of France to dodge war crimes prosecution - for torture. They are doing lots of other illegal stuff, too, that we don't know about, most likely.

Bush and Cheney need another compliant AG who will not cramp their style, investigate, and prosecute them -- or resign in a flamboyantly political way that might draw the attention of Congress or even impeachment.

the Neo-cons could use War, Terror, and Cheating to expand their power and profits

2007-10-23T15:22:00.000-04:00

A friend writes in response to Mark Green's commentary on Air America and the Daily News:

Brilliant Mark Green adds these two caveats to what can stop this perfect storm burying the Republicans in 2008: war in Iran and a major terror attack on the USA. These are two big and likely exceptions.

Cheney and Bush are gunning for expanding the war to Iran. The rhetoric hype is similar to the run-up to the Iraq bombing and invasion of 2003. They will do whatever needed to provoke the Iranians, and short of that, they will just bomb.

In short, we will have a war in three contiguous countries Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, which will shortly become the most expensive war in US history. This will also drive up oil prices to over $100 per barrel and benefit arms and military services providers like Carlyle and Halliburton which all benefits the friends of the House of Bush (and Saud and the BinLaden clan, too).

Getting back to fomenting and spreading war to Iran, this flows into Green's other caveat: a major terror attack on US soil. Unlike Iraq, Iran does have an international terrorism network at its disposal, which Iran has held off against attacking the US for about 20 years, since our involvement in Lebanon. However, Jews worldwide who have had nothing to do with Israel have been the victims of such Iranian-linked attacks, such as the bombing of a Childrens' Daycare and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1994, killing about 80 children and teachers, taking out about five floors of the center with the powerful destructive explosion. Yet, the political and investigatory implications of that attack are still playing out, with many mysteries and dead ends...

It is likely that Iran will call off its cease-fire against the US and its interests should we attack Iran. It would make sense, since this is the asymmetrical warfare that justifies terrorism to the state-sponsors of it. If you face an enemy with tanks, three air craft carrier groups, satellites, nuclear weapons and top quality fighter jets facing you, and you don't have much of that stuff, then sneaking in some suicide or truck bombers to cause havoc and death are quite effective. I really doubt that Bush or Cheney, in or out of office, are in much danger of getting hit by such attacks, but for the readers of these words, they are going to be much more vulnerable. Considering how much NYC shut down through 2001 after the city was left open to attack in September of that year, 20 such attacks across the country in short proximity would likely end our economy. Of course, taking down 260 floors of skyscrapers and attacking 20% of the Pentagon are quite destructive, so I estimate that 600 truck and suicide bomb attacks would seriously affect our way of life.

Of course, what is our government to do when attacked like this? Well, we have a HUGE military, which would be our only hand left to play. What is it: bigger than the next fifty militaries combined? (so that's where our healthcare and education funding went!) Such a huge force would be used against the 'Axis of Evil' countries. Bush mentioned World War III recently, well, our attack of Iran would be the first shove, their terror attacks against us (with or without rogue elements of the US allowing them) would be the reply shove, and our invasions and carpet bombings would be the final answer -- kill the people and take the oil.

But this is not the end of story. They were right when they said that 9/11 changed everything. We have the so-called Patriot Act and the so-called Patriot Act II. The USA has also recently established a NorthCom, a domestic military headquarters command. What has the FBI, NSA, and the DoD be doing with all the domestic spying and the militarization of the police that has been going on? That will be put to use, too. Databases of our associations and beliefs, including posts and memberships in groups like this, will be used to isolate, 'disappear,' 'suicide', or remove 'trouble makers and rabble rousers' once the Constitution is 'suspended' and martial law is called.

Remember how the Anthrax Attacks came and went just in time to get the so-called Patriot Act emplaced? We heard that the Anthrax wasn't from Iraq (although we gave it to them in the early 1980s), it was from the US' own bio-weapons 'defense research' labs, the Ames strain from Ft Detrick in Maryland. Seems that the Anthrax attacker is still at large. Could you imagine if a Democrat were President and this attacker and Osama Bin Laden were still at-large?! There would be a nightly count-up on the news of America held hostage by Clinton or Carter or whomever. But these guys get no accountability (the Neo-cons and the terrorists advancing their agendas).

Bio-terror is the perfect cover. It is invisible, yet technological. It relies on scientific authorities who test and inoculate (or maybe infect some of) us, and it recently gives the military power to enforce quarantines, to shut down areas or whatever news or communication network they want: 'everyone at Google is sick today, so that site is closed.'

The Health Department is literally no longer in charge of public safety, or anything really, in epidemics. Interesting.

If there is a 2008 election, then it will be Giuliani-Thompson. The terror guy and the Republican cover-up lackey.

This leads me to point three, the one that Mark Green forgot to include. Election cheating.

Green calmly remarks of the 2006 spike of black voters for Bush in Ohio. I recall seeing lines of blacks waiting in the rain to vote, and they weren't waiting to vote for Bush. Mark, were you being serious here, or tongue-in-cheek?! News of 'inadvertent' tampering with votes and destruction of votes during and after the elections is still coming out of Ohio. Remember how they used a 'terror emergency threat' to close one of the major elections counting centers to public scrutiny? LOL! Or cry.

The Republicans are a decreasing minority, but if you are a power-hungry greed head, are you going to accept being the loyal minority opposition and watch corporate power and profits be rolled back? For them, militarization and oil are very profitable. They can afford their healthcare, and their kids won't need to serve, and the terrorists' bombs probably won't affect them directly. Overthrowing our time-consuming and profit-threatening democracy is the only thing they have left to hold on to what they got and to get what they want.

They are going to cheat in 2008. They are going to cheat to keep folks from voting, and to keep folks' votes from being counted.

They might even cheat us into another war and to draw terror attacks on our soil to declare martial law.

I love Mark Green's brains and integrity, but his and the Democrats' problem is that this isn't a scientific debate with calm reason carrying the day. The Democrats may be willing to be the loyal, win-some/lose-some, opposition party, but the Neo-Cons (Neo-Nazi Con Artists -- they aren't Republicans and they aren't Conservatives) are not. Their gloves are off, and we aren't even in the ring.

Face it. They are going to lie and cheat. They are going to get us into war. They are going to draw terror attacks on our soil and maybe even allow or facilitate some. I'm not saying every Republican, just a few Neo-con moles and some dupes fooled by 'military exercises / drills.' They are going to cheat again at the polls and after the polls and with the news media again.

What are we going to do about this now?

We need to stop the Iraq war, prevent the Iran War, and sue to keep the polls accessible and to count the votes.

We should impeach these neo-cons and investigate them, cutting their traitorous cancer out before they metastasize into our country's DNA ending what's left of our republic.

Why is Generation Q quiet?

2007-10-19T16:04:00.000-04:00

A friend responds to the NYTimes' Tom Friedman column, reprinted below, entitled Generation Q.

Tom Friedman's column about Generation Q ignores the domestic terror we face, and didn't know we faced but suspected in the 1960s for activism: domestic surveillance by the DoD, the CIA, and the FBI of our communications and affiliations, as well as violence. This is emerging now. Thank you Representative Conyers!

Recently, a student got Tasered and surrounded by at least four officers for asking Senator Kerry three questions at a University of Florida forum while holding the book, 'Armed Mad House.' A student got tased last year at UCLA for using the library!!

There is a dark and scary side to activism, much less getting by and living in the USA, like using university libraries or speaking truth to power. There is a dark and scary side to working in the non-profit service realm -- low or no benefits, low pay, high rents, insecurity, competition and backstabbing, pressures, dwindling funding, lack of any retirement pensions...

Meanwhile, vested interests profiting from war, oil, pharmaceuticals, telecomm, banking, real estate, prisons, they are doing quite well.

We need to figure out a way to make online organizing lead to something as powerful as the prison-military-industrial-security state lobbies or peace and prosperity for all, isn't going to be enough for the greediest and power-hungriest...

Howard Dean and Ron Paul, for example, and Moveon.org are turning heads and paradigms, even as myspace and facebook titillate or mollify. As they said in Catch-22, it is better to be a live chicken than a dead duck.

Here is the Friedman piece from the 10/10/2007 NYTimes

October 10, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Generation Q
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I just spent the past week visiting several colleges — Auburn, the University of Mississippi, Lake Forest and Williams — and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed.

I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be. I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be.

One of the things I feared most after 9/11 — that my daughters would not be able to travel the world with the same carefree attitude my wife and I did at their age — has not come to pass.

Whether it was at Ole Miss or Williams or my alma mater, Brandeis, college students today are not only going abroad to study in record numbers, but they are also going abroad to build homes for the poor in El Salvador in record numbers or volunteering at AIDS clinics in record numbers. Not only has terrorism not deterred them from traveling, they are rolling up their sleeves and diving in deeper than ever.

The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Ole Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them.

There is a good chance that members of Generation Q will spend their entire adult lives digging out from the deficits that we — the “Greediest Generation,” epitomized by George W. Bush — are leaving them.

When I was visiting my daughter at her college, she asked me about a terrifying story that ran in this newspaper on Oct. 2, reporting that the Arctic ice cap was melting 'to an extent unparalleled in a century or more” — and that the entire Arctic system appears to be “heading toward a new, more watery state' likely triggered by 'human-caused global warming.'

'What happened to that Arctic story, Dad?' my daughter asked me. How could the news media just report one day that the Arctic ice was melting far faster than any models predicted 'and then the story just disappeared?' Why weren’t any of the candidates talking about it? Didn’t they understand: this has become the big issue on campuses?

No, they don’t seem to understand. They seem to be too busy raising money or buying votes with subsidies for ethanol farmers in Iowa. The candidates could actually use a good kick in the pants on this point. But where is it going to come from?

Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit — so we all won’t be working for China in 20 years?

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual.

Maybe that’s why what impressed me most on my brief college swing was actually a statue — the life-size statue of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. Meredith was the first African-American to be admitted to Ole Miss in 1962. The Meredith bronze is posed as if he is striding toward a tall limestone archway, re-enacting his fateful step onto the then-segregated campus — defying a violent, angry mob and protected by the National Guard.

Above the archway, carved into the stone, is the word 'Courage.' That is what real activism looks like. There is no substitute.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Can Peace Really Stand a Chance?

2007-10-11T13:33:00.000-04:00

Everyone likes peace, and its general prosperity, but no one makes a killing from it.

War is much more profitable and efficient to make profits and concentrate power.

Everyone wants crime reduced, but keeping 2 million people in distant jails is much more of a killing...

and so on.

Can we organize around peace, education, reform? Or make it blatantly profitable or rewarding? Or at least affect consciousness.

Fear and Greed versus security and prosperity...

This is the challenge facing us.

Neo Con

2007-10-11T13:27:00.000-04:00

NeoCon...

Suggesting Neo-Nazi ?
Suggesting Con-job ?

Conservatives don't expand government for their personal gain at the expense of everyone else.

Nazi's use nationalism and socialize the government, in partnership with corporations, to usurp rights, consolidate power, monopolies, militarism, prisons, in partnership with allied industries.

Con-Artists use confidence, lying, manipulating feelings, to fool others and steal from them fraudulently.

The Cure to Terrorism and Replublicanism or at least NeoCons

2007-09-02T16:49:00.000-04:00

Terrorism is like warfare, a way to impose a national will on another group, but it is such a blunt instrument. It is hard to see what its intentions are in terms of real change in making the world better.

Often the attacks on the US were done anonymously without even a statement. And even if one were issued, the violent and destructive acts engendered more resistance and violence, as well as the economic and physical and emotional damage that the terrorists wanted.

I don't get it. And when I don't get something, it usually means someone's lying for their own benefit.

If you can be martyred for suicide-bombing, for example, doesn't that make the victims go to heaven, too? If terrorists 'hate freedom' then what is their plan for tyranny? Seems too facile, especially since military contractors own TV networks.

I think it is all about sickos who want to kill and use religion and ideology to get others to do the dirty work.

When it comes down to it, Bin-Laden's friends and family are getting really wealthy from oil jumping from $30 a barrel to $70, and from a bunch of middle class saudis dying in Iraq shooting at our soldiers.

Meanwhile, Bush, the close saudi friend, and his friends and family profit from oil jumping in price, from military parts and services jumping in price (Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Kellogg Brown and Root).

It is the same oil, selling for twice as much, and a lot of weapons being sold, and used to thin out our nation's populations so that their kids have less competition for buying the stuff they want or threatened by merit.

Terror is a reptile-brain reaction.

We need more cerebral cortex stuff going on, like talking, inventing, doing business, communicating, making deals, respect, tolerance, education, educating women.

And we need more 'freedom.' Freedom to use contraceptives, freedom for women and children to get educated. Freedom to work or start businesses, and to have rule of law. Freedom to walk in public without an escort, or drive. Freedom to have protection from rapists or religious freaks, greed-heads, power-mongers.

Men and women, boys and girls, need to be able to talk with each other in public.

People also need to be able to hook up and get their rocks off. We need more sexual freedom.

I think terrorism and Republicanism would die off if there were sexual freedom, and subsidized, legal and safe prostitution. Republicans need to be bad and dirty, but when they can't they buy missiles, and guys in the mideast who can't relate to women resort to rocket propelled grenade launchers. More orgasms -> less violence.

Returning Corporate Power to the People

2007-08-30T10:22:00.000-04:00

In the 19th Century corporations had to re-certify themselves regularly with a government (state) to make sure that they were serving the public good and keeping to its charter. I believe it was every 40 or 20 years.*

By the mid to late 19th Century this was done away with, giving corporations effective immortality and their owners cover from accountability and liability. Corporations have more rights now than humans do, and their owners profit from this at public expense.

We should re-institute regular corporate re-certifications and make the re-cert periods much more frequent, such as every five years, to make sure that corporations use their privileges, that they enjoy at public expense (Rule of Law, the SEC, the FTC, the DoC, the Departments of State and Attorneys General, the DoD, the police departments, the FBI...), use their privileges responsibly.

Corporation Re-certifications should evaluate whether the corporation is serving the public good, following its charter, following local and national laws, and causing domestic job growth or preservation. Re-certifications should be on both the state and the national levels.

In the 19th Century corporate recertifications were on the state level only, but interstate commerce is quite normal now, and some states would compete to be the easiest state to be re-certified in, much like Delaware is the number one incorporation state now due to its ease of registration and low state incorporation filing fees.

Re-certifications can be staggered so that regular National Corporate Re-certifications happen a few years apart from their State's periodic Re-certification, to reduce reporting burden, and if a corporation loses its national trading privileges, it could still trade in-state, or vice-versa, giving the corporation a chance to have a turn-around, as well as apply to its home state or another one for another chance.

One only has to look at 1974's Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to see the effect on the banking industry and how banks' philanthropy, lending, and investing where they do business has benefited the creation of probably hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing managed by local community organizations, as well as financing supermarkets in the inner-city, mortgages for low-income families, bank branches (rather than check cashing rip-offs), and local entrepreneurs.

Despite this great effect, CRA is largely toothless! It's greatest 'enforcement' is implied. When banks seek to merge, they rely on their CRA ratings as a trend suggesting that such mergers won't harm local businesses.

Imagine if CRA ratings affected whether banks could continue to do business at all! We'd see much more investment in our local communities and in our states and our nation.

Imagine if states and the nation regularly evaluated corporations for their public service, and their compliance with laws and regulations, in exchange for enjoying the rights to do business and be protected the way citizens are supposed to. Imagine if the corporation's "lives" depended on this recertification.

We'd see a lot less corporate polluting, fewer jobs shipped overseas, more cooperation with unions, more accountability for executive fraud, more employee volunteerism encouraged, more family-friendly policies, more philanthropy and matching gifts, and more cooperation between corporations and the places and people where they do their business.

It is time to bring back and strengthen corporate re-certification, and to not accept corporate immortality and privilege as inevitable, but as a responsibility that must be earned after accounting for it to the public which makes corporations possible and profitable.

Our Self-Hobbled Nation

2007-04-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

How cheap can our nation be when it comes to the public good? Yet we spare no expense for our military-security state with hundreds of bases in over a hundred countries? With millions in jails. A huge jobs program for people with guns, people making arms, and caring for the maimed.

Pets die from tainted food... How many? Why?
No one knows. There is no system to report or collect the data. And the source is... wheat gluten -- in practically everything we eat. The banned Chinese company denies any knowledge of even selling wheat gluten. Or was it rat poison? NYS' laboratory found this cause first. The Feds found tainted wheat gluten with something used in plastics manufacturing and fertilizer.
If human food were tainted, the system would be only slightly better. We have less than 80 agricultural inspectors across the nation. What fraction of imports is scanned?

A student is mentally ill at Virginia Tech. In 2005 he was committed for being mentally ill, a danger to himself or others, but he is released. Was this related to his repeated stalkings on campus?

What is our nation's deal with mental health care? We went from institutional snake holes to 'community care.' That is, releasing mental patients to communities in the hope that they will get care there. Ridiculous! Homelessness is out there for all to see in cities and suburbs across the nation, much of it the mentally ill -- much of whom could greatly benefit from some regular medication, maybe some counseling, maybe activities where they could belong or contribute in some way. Sure, a few folks save on their taxes with this widespread neglect, but everyone is at risk of being killed anywhere at random due to this public shame.

This same guy, the Virginia Tech Shooter, buys a gun in mid-March because he self-certifies himself as sane. A month later, he buys another. And lots of ammo. In mid April he begins recording his suicide-martyr message.

His classmates and dorm-mates at college thought he was an exchange student because he never spoke ever, never replied, or had eye contact.

His professors were disturbed by his writings about the protagonist surviving sexual abuse and then living to extract revenge through killings. They recommended counseling.

The police recommended counseling after one of his incidents.

Cho shoots up two in a dorm, returns to his dorm, prepares his dvd for mailing, and then posts it. Two hours later, he returns to Tech and kills over two-dozen more in the lecture halls.

Virginia Tech has a legacy as being a pioneer of the wired community since the early-mid 1990s. The college, along with Bell-Atlantic, used its fiber optic network to not just wire the campus, but its neighboring community of Blacksburg, VA, nearly every resident and business!

The school couldn't have a web cam on the dorms? It couldn't send an email alert out? Change the website? Call everyone? http://www.iping.com allows mass calls from a single voicemail.

I'm sure if the VT Hokies Team had a big game, such broadcast messages would go out via multimedia.

And what is Cho doing going through college as if everything is fine? With only suggestions that he seek counseling?! No one seems to know. Those who cared feared him.

What kind of mills are our colleges? What kind of nation do we have with little to no counseling, academic, psychological, or mentoring available to students -- to students paying the highest tuitions in the world? What kind of nation do we have where these college administrations bloat, growing for decades past the rate of inflation, and college Presidents make over $500,000 a year? What kind of communities are our colleges?

Earlier this month, we heard that colleges are in cahoots with Banks, getting the colleges and employees kickbacks and other perqs for financial aid officers to offer higher rate loans from preferred lenders, at the expense of the students, paying thousands of dollars more for decades....

When I was in graduate school, I did research on grants that students could apply for from my program, since I was having a very hard time making ends meet to pay for my expensive education and live in an expensive city. The deputy of the financial aid office angrily refused to accept the information I offered to the school for their files, in case anyone wanted help in the future and might benefit from my research -- research that other graduate programs routinely provided. That year I was unable to meet with the head of financial aid at my grad school. She has since retired, but the deputy was promoted, and has her job -- head of financial aid!

At the time, her behavior struck me as strange. How hard would it be just to make a suspended folder and file and put the information in? It seemed almost diabolically lazy. She was an administrative assistant who worked her way up in the bureaucracy as an administrator, an office, so I thought she just retained the customer is always wrong, I'm in the union, attitude. But now I wonder if she was on the take... If students get free money reducing their tuition and living costs from her having information on file in her office represented reductions in student debt -- reductions in her take from the bank. And that graduate school did very much have a preferred lender.

And when it came time for the loan checks to come through, the school got paid first (in advance for the semester), and then the student got paid in October or November for living expenses for the semester beginning in early September or late August... If we weren't wealthy with assets in the bank, then we were living quite leanly or working our way through grad school.

I remember speaking with the former head of financial 'aid' when I was considering attending school. She said that there was plenty of loans available and that we'd be able to live ok on them. I wonder how she was living from those loans now.

Ten years out, I still owe $45,000, not including the future interest costs that will be added in...

Cho was a sick guy, living in a sick society, lashing out in a sick way, killing sickly. Finally the loan nut gets attention posthumously, but what does it really mean?

Why do people keep shooting up schools?

Why are guns so easy to get?

Why do record companies bust into teens bedrooms for 'napping downloaded free music, yet you can't get an order of protection enforced?

Why do we have a dozen aircraft carrier fleets and the next dozen industrialized nations might have a few combined among all of them, and their qualified students all get free college and health care? And they have to do more than just show up to get a gun?

Who Lost Russia?

2007-03-21T12:17:00.000-04:00

Why isn't this being asked? Who lost Russia?

Joe McCarthy and Whitaker Chambers (actually a former Communist himself!) slurred U.S.' Chinese diplomat, Edmund Clubb, and others in State as being crypto-commies or pinks, allowing China to be taken over by Communists in the late 1940s.

Condoleeza Rice, our Secretary of State, after her failure as NSC Director (allowing the 9/11 attacks), first tutored Bush in foreign policy, since he didn't know who was in charge of Pakistan when he was running for President, got her Ph.D. as a Soviet expert! Good for her that a 'former' KGB man had just taken over there, using fake false-flag self-inflicted terrorism to seize power.

Maybe she only knows what to do with a Soviet Union, and not a Yeltsin-style free (or free-for-all) Russia, or a socialist-reformed Soviet State like under Gorbachev, and so the KGB-veteran Putin just seems so much more familiar. Or maybe Condi and Bushie see in Putin something that they see in how they like things to work.

It was disappointing to hear Bush say this after Putin was already quite shady. Nine months before Bush met Putin, the Russian leader allowed the Kursk to sink without rescue and when family members were at a town hall with the Navy a distraught mother who told the ranking officer he should take his medal off as she screamed from the audience found herself getting a dose of old school Soviet-era shut-up-and-go-to-sleep-juice.

Shortly after being grabbed and jabbed, she collapsed and was carried out and the photographers were ejected. Days later she 'emerged,' giving a statement to deny being drugged, but media were not allowed to see her or speak with her in person. Maybe the Russians gave her a nice pay off, an offer she couldn't refuse.

It was in this context that Bush2 said about he and Putin:

"We've got common interests. And from that basis we will seize the moment to make a difference in the world. That's why he ran for the presidency, and it's why I ran for the presidency."

Of course, as we'll see later,* how far Putin had to go to begin to 'make a difference' in his country and how he got to run for re-election after forcing Yeltsin to appoint him in late 1999 as a strong man in the aftermath of the apartment bombings pinned on the Chechens, allowing for a state of emergency to emerge and the revival of war with the Muslim province.

And then this kind of strange Bush remark :
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He's a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country..."

What did Bush see in Putin's eyes? The cold glare of his CIA father's scheming and putsches? Or perhaps his own?

From Wikipedia

Starting from 1998, people from state security services came to power as Prime Ministers of Russia: a KGB veteran Yevgeny Primakov; former FSB Director Sergei Stepashin; and finally former FSB Director Vladimir Putin who was appointed in August 8, 1999.

In August 7, Shamil Basaev began incursion to Dagestan which was regarded by Anna Politkovskaya [she was the reporter-friend of Litvenenko (he got murdered in November with Polonium, accusing Putin on his deathbed from England), and she got killed shortly after reputedly giving him documents about how the Beslan School Terror attack might have been botched on purpose or worse, an inside job... Litvenenko got killed because, as a former intelligence agent, refused to kill his countrymen -- and blew the lid off how the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings were not done by Chechen terrorists but by the FSB when Putin was in charge! -editor] as a provocation initiated from Moscow to start war in Chechnya, because Russian forces provided safe passage for Islamic fighters back to Chechnya. ...

In September 4 [1999] a series of four Russian apartment bombings has began. Three FSB agents were caught while planting a large bomb at the basement of an apartment complex in the town of Ryazan in September 22. That was last of the bombings. Russian Minister of Internal Affairs Rushailo congratulated police with preventing the terrorist act, but FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev had declared that the incident was a training exercise just an hour later, when he had learned that the FSB agents are caught.

Next day, Boris Yeltsin received a demand from 24 Russian governors to transfer all state powers to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to Sergei Yushenkov. The Second Chechen War began in September 24. This war made Prime Minister Vladimir Putin very popular, although he was previously unknown to the public, and helped him to win a landslide victory in the presidential elections in March 26, 2000.

That was a successful coup d'état organized by the FSB to bring Vladimir Putin to power, according to former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov, and journalist David Satter, a Johns Hopkins University and Hoover Institute scholar. All attempts to independently investigate the Russian apartment bombings were unsuccessful. Journalist Artyom Borovik died in a suspicious plane crash. Vice-chairman of Sergei Kovalev commission created to investigate the bombings Sergei Yushenkov was assassinated. Another member of this commission Yuri Shchekochikhin died presumably from poisoning by thallium. Investigator Mikhail Trepashkin hired by relatives of victims was arrested and convicted by Russian authorities for allegedly disclosing state secrets.

FSB as ruling political elite

According to former Russian Duma member Konstantin Borovoi, "Putin's appointment is the culmination of the KGB's crusade for power. This is its finale. Now the KGB runs the country." Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites, has found that 78% of 1,016 leading political figures in Russia have served previously in organizations affiliated with KGB or FSB. She said: "If in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB people were mainly involved in security issues, now half are still involved in security but the other half are involved in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture... They started to use all political institutions." "Like cockroaches spreading from a squalid apartment to the rest of the building, they have eventually gained a firm foothold everywhere," said Sergei Grigoryants, a Soviet dissident.

This situation is very similar to that of the former Soviet Union where all key positions in the government were occupied by members of the Communist Party. The KGB or FSB members usually remain in the "acting reserve" even if they formally leave the organization ("acting reserve" members receive second FSB salary, follow FSB instructions, and remain "above the law" being protected by the organization, according to Kryshtanovskaya). As Vladimir Putin said, "There is no such thing as a former KGB man". GRU defector and writer Victor Suvorov explained that members of Russian security services can leave such organizations only in a coffin, because they know too much. Soon after becoming prime minister of Russia, Putin also claimed that "A group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission."

The idea about KGB as a political force rather than a security organization has been discussed by journalist John Barron, historian Victor Suvorov, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, and Evgenia Albats, a Harvard graduate and writer on KGB subjects, who was assigned to examine the KGB archives after the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991. According to Albats, most KGB leaders, including Lavrenty Beria, Yuri Andropov, and Vladimir Kryuchkov, have always struggled for the power with the Communist Party and manipulated the communist leaders. Moreover, FSB has formal membership, military discipline, an extensive network of civilian informants, hardcore ideology, and support of population (60% of Russians trust FSB), which makes it a perfect totalitarian political party. However the FSB party does not advertise its leading role because the secrecy is an important advantage.

With regard to death of Aleksander Litvinenko, the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa stated that there is "a band of over 6,000 former officers of the KGB — one of the most criminal organizations in history — who grabbed the most important positions in the federal and local governments, and who are perpetuating Stalin’s, Khrushchev’s, and Brezhnev’s practice of secretly assassinating people who stand in their way."

Suppression of internal dissent

Many Russian opposition lawmakers and investigative journalists have been assassinated while investigating corruption and alleged crimes conducted by FSB and state authorities: Sergei Yushenkov, ‎Yuri Shchekochikhin, Galina Starovoitova, Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Paul Klebnikov, Nadezhda Chaikova, Nina Yefimova, and many others. Former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky believes that murders of writers Yuri Shchekochikhin (author of "Slaves of KGB"), Anna Politkovskaya, and Aleksander Litvinenko show that FSB has returned to the practice of political assassinations which were conducted in the past by Thirteenth KGB Department. Just before his death, Alexander Litvinenko accused Vladimir Putin of personally ordering the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya.

An increasing number of scientists have been accused of espionage and illegal technology exports by FSB during the last decade.... All these people are either under arrest or serve long jail sentences. Human rights groups also identified Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a political prisoner.

....There are credible reports that FSB use drugs to erase memory of people who had access to secret information

Criticism of anti-terrorist operations

Use of excessive force by FSB spetsnaz was criticized with regard to resolving Moscow theater hostage crisis and Beslan hostage crisis. According to Sergey Kovalev, Russian government kills its citizens without any hesitation. He provided the following examples: murdering of hostages by the poison gas during Moscow theater hostage crisis; burning school children alive by spetsnaz soldiers who used RPO flamethrowers during Beslan school hostage crisis; crimes committed by death squads in Chechnya.... Anna Politkovskaya and Irina Hakamada, who conducted unofficial negotiations with terrorists, [were assassinated after they] stated that the hostage takers were not going to use their bombs to kill the people and destroy the building during Moscow theater hostage crisis. This was supported by the subsequent events when the Chechens did not use their bombs.

It is also possible that FSB has returned to the old NKVD practice of creating puppet rebel forces ...Former FSB officer Aleksander Litvinenko stated in a June 2003 interview, with the Australian SBS television programme Dateline, that two of the Chechen terrorists involved in the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis — whom he named as "Abdul the Bloody" and "Abu Bakar" — were working for the FSB, and that the agency manipulated the rebels into staging the attack. Litvinenko said: "[w]hen they tried to find [Abdul the Bloody and Abu Bakar] among the dead terrorists, they weren't there. The FSB got its agents out. So the FSB agents among Chechens organised the whole thing on FSB orders, and those agents were released." The story about FSB connections with the hostage takers was confirmed by Mikhail Trepashkin. Yulia Latynina and other journalists also accused FSB of staging many smaller terrorism acts, such as market place bombing in the city of Astrakhan, bus stops bombings in the city of Voronezh, and the blowing up the Moscow-Grozny train, whereas innocent people were convicted or killed. Journalist Boris Stomakhin claimed that bombing in Moscow metro in 2004 was probably organized by FSB agents rather than by the unknown man who called to Kavkaz Center and claimed his responsibility. Stomakin was arrested and imprisoned for writing this and other articles.

....

According to Anna Politkovskaya, most of the "Islamic terrorism cases" were fabricated by the government, and the confessions have been obtained through the torture of innocent suspects. "The plight of those sentenced for Islamic terrorism today is the same as that of the political prisoners of the Gulag Archipelago... Russia continues to be infected by Stalinism", she said.

Alleged involvement in organized crime

Former FSB officer Aleksander Litvinenko accused FSB personnel of involvement in organized crime, such as drug trafficking and contract killings. It was noted that FSB, far from being a reliable instrument in the fight against organized crime, is institutionally a part of the problem, due not only to its co-optation and penetration by criminal elements, but to its own absence of a legal bureaucratic culture and use of crime as an instrument of state policy [

International affairs

FSB collaborates very closely with secret police services from some former Soviet Republics, especially Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The FSB is accused of working to undermine governments of Baltic states and Georgia. During 2006 Georgian-Russian espionage controversy several Russian GRU officers were accused by Georgian authorities of preparations to commit sabotage and terrorist acts. Historian J. R. Nyquist believes that "The KGB president of Russia wants to reestablish the USSR...."

Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission Richard Butler found than many Russian state-controlled companies are involved in the Oil-for-Food Programme-related fraud. "

...And so did we and Kofi Anan's kid.

Here is Wikipedia's take on the Russian Apartment Bombings of 1999 and the ascent of Putin:

"The first bombing, which did not target an apartment, occurred in Moscow, the Russian capital, on August 31, 1999. A bomb exploded in a mall, killing one person and leaving 40 others wounded. A note was left saying the bombing was a result of increasing Russian consumerism.

On September 4, 1999, a car bomb detonated outside an apartment building housing Russian soldiers in the city of Buynaksk, in the province of Dagestan. Sixty-four people were killed and dozens of others were wounded. Russia blamed separatists from Chechnya, and days later invaded the province of Dagestan.

On September 8, 1999, 300 kg to 400 kg of explosives detonated on the ground floor of an apartment building in southeast Moscow. The nine-story building was destroyed, killing 94 people inside and wounded 150 others. A total of 108 apartments were destroyed during the bombing. A caller to a Russian news agency said the blast was a response to recent Russian bombing of Chechen and Dagestan villages in response to the invasion of Dagestan.

Moscow, Kashirskoye highway

September 13, 1999, was supposed to be a day of mourning for the victims of the previous bomb attacks. But on that day, a large bomb exploded at an apartment on Kashirskoye Highway in southern Moscow. The eight-story building was flattened, littering the street with debris and throwing some concrete hundreds of yards away. In all, 118 people died and 200 were wounded.

It was at this time when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared a war against the "illegal military units" in Chechnya. Though there was not much evidence pointing to Chechens, preparations were made by the Russian military forces to re-enter the province and to strip the Chechen government of its powers.

The motive for the forceful solution was clinched when a truck bomb exploded September 16, 1999, outside a nine-story apartment complex in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, killing 17 people.

In response, Russia launched air strikes on Chechen rebel positions, oil refineries, and other buildings inside that province. By the end of September it was clear another war over Chechnya was underway, and by October Russian troops had entered the province. The attacks would not be the last in Russia or Chechnya.

Ryazan incident

On the evening of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment building in the town of Ryazan noticed strangers moving heavy sugar sacks into the basement from a car. Militia (the local police) were called to the site and all residents were evacuated. The first test of the powder from the sacks showed the presence of an explosive. All roads from the town were brought under heavy surveillance but no leads were found. A telephone service employee tapped into long-distance phone conversations managed to detect a conversation in which an out-of-town person suggested to take care and to watch for patrols. That person's number was found to belong to an FSB office in Moscow.

Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) declared that the incident was a training exercise forty-eight hours later. The original chemical test was declared inaccurate due to contamination of the analysis apparatus from a previous test. The public inquiry committee could not come to a complete conclusion on this and other incidents due to incoherent answers from federal bodies. The General Prosecutor's office has closed the criminal investigation of the Ryazan incident in April 2000.

Official investigation

According to the official investigation, the apartment bombings were planned and organized by Amir Khattab and Abu Umar, Arab militants fighting in Chechnya on the side of Chechen insurgents, both of whom were later killed. The planning was carried out in Khattab's guerilla camps in Chechnya, "Caucasus" in Shatoy and "Taliban" in Avtury.

This particular operation was led by an ethnic Karachay Achemez Gochiyayev. The explosives were prepared in Urus-Martan, Chechnya at the fertilizer factory by mixing hexogen, TNT, aluminium powder and nitre with sugar. From there they have been sent to a food storage facility in Kislovodsk which was managed by an uncle of one of the terrorists, Yusuf Krymshakhalov. Another conspirator, Ruslan Magayayev, had leased a KamAZ truck which the sacks were stored in for two months. After everything was planned, the participants were organized into several groups which transported the explosives to different cities. Most of the people participating were not ethnic Chechens. [Most were subsequently killed. editor]

....
Attempts at independent investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident. Duma, on a pro-Kremlin party block vote, voted to seal all materials related to Ryazan incident for the next 75 years and forbade an investigation of what really happened. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members, have since died in apparent assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003 respectively. The Commission's lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin has been arrested in October 2003 to become one of the better-known political prisoners in Russia. Another member of the commission, Otto Lacis, was brutally beaten in November 2003 and two years later on 3rd of November 2005 dies in the hospital after a car accident.

Theory of FSB involvement

The Ryazan incident on September 22, 1999 prompted the initial speculation in the Western press that the Moscow bombings were organized by the FSB, the Russian domestic intelligence service.

The FSB were caught by local police and citizens in the city of Ryazan planting a bomb with a detonator in the basement of an apartment building at the address of 14/16 Novosyelov on the night of September 22, 1999. Explosives experts arriving at the scene found that the bomb tested positive for hexogen (i.e., RDX). On September 24, 1999, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, said on the NTV channel that the bomb in the basement of the apartment had been a dummy and that the FSB had been conducting a test. The FSB officially stated that the gas analyzer that detected hexogen had malfunctioned, and that the substance in the dummy bomb was sugar.

....

Yuri Tkachenko, the explosives expert who defused the bomb claimed that it was real. Tkachenko suggested that the explosives, including a timer, power source, and detonator were genuine military equipment and obviously prepared by a professional. He also alleged that the gas analyzer that tested the vapors coming from the sacks unmistakably indicated the presence of hexogen. The police officers who answered the original call and discovered the bomb also insisted that the incident was not an exercise and that it was obvious from its appearance that the substance in the bomb was not sugar.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who was dismissed from the service, accused FSB agents with coordination of the apartment block bombings in his book Gang from Lubyanka sponcored by the exhiled tycoon Boris Beresovsky. On 29 December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 5000 copies of the book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia.

Boris Berezovsky also financed a documentary film "FSB blows up Russia" ("An assault on Russia"?) and the book with the same title (financing 25% of the costs). The film accused Russian special services of organising the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow. According to research carried out by two French journalists, Jean-Charles Deniau and Charles Gazelle, the explosions were carried out by FSB to provide justification for the continuance of the Chechen War, which in turn helped Putin beat the communists in the presidential election of 2000."

I think Bush in his dreamworld would be Putin.

So, who lost Russia? Who lost the democratic USA?

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." George W Bush, 43rd President of the U.S. Dec. 18, 2000 on his transition to the Presidency and his having to deal with Congress (a month after the Supreme Court stopped the recount of the Florida votes (which later indicated he lost both the popular and the electoral votes))

I've long believed that to fight an enemy, you become like the enemy. That in the Cold War with missile delivered nuclear weapons the US lost its democracy with the rise of the 'security' state. The US allowed 'former' Nazi 'intelligence' assets who proclaimed an expertise on the Soviet Union to join the CIA (Project Paperclip) where they over-hyped the Soviet threat, leading to US bellicosity and arms build-ups, while keeping these war criminals in clover and power.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, we did not return to democracy after the war ended or enjoy the peace dividend. Yet there were few reasons to justify these enormous global military expenses, a military larger than the rest of the world's militaries combined. 700 full Bases in over 100 countries. What justifies this when millions have no health coverage or pensions?

Ten years later, attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, basically larger versions of the attacks on Russian malls, highways, apartment buildings, and military housing, were used to to propel the US to a 'soft' privatized military - corporate - 'security' 'counter-terror' state. These attacks and the lack of full investigation seem very similar to what happened in Russia in what was basically a coup without it being identified as one -- even better to have a soft coup that way.

Even though we are bogged down in Iraq, the largest military in the world, now we are less secure, and the only solution is to throw more money at the problem.

More about how experts and witnesses are cowed in the Bush2 juggernaut

2007-03-19T12:10:00.000-04:00

Michael Isikoff and David Corn, co-authors of "Imperial Hubris," discuss how the aluminum tubes found (by Valerie Plame!) were pounced upon as evidence that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program. This piece also touches on how the U.S. first considered provocating Iraq to attack the British and US forces by Kuwait and the no-fly zone by helping a 'Bay of Pigs' type force take over a section of Iraq by the border covered by the 'no-fly zone.' This piece also mentions how Plame was in charge of anti-nuclear proliferation for Iran. When her work or her husband started threatening the Bush2 party-line for invasions and their justification, they turned against her and her network.

MI: ....the image of the mushroom cloud was based on and first pushed vigorously by Vice President Cheney. That Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and was close to -- was on its way to getting a nuclear bomb. The intelligence supporting that conclusion -- the primary piece of intelligence -- was these aluminum tubes that Iraq was seeking to purchase on the open market. A shipment of the tubes was seized in Jordan under an operation headed by Valerie Plame Wilson. She oversaw the operation that intercepted these tubes that were then shipped back to the CIA. A CIA analyst came to the conclusion that these tubes could only be used for a nuclear centrifuge to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. That piece of intelligence was shared by the White House, embraced by the White House, and then jumped on by Vice President Cheney and the Administration to argue the nuclear weapons case. Well, it turns out that there was vigorous dispute within the intelligence community about the conclusion about the aluminum tubes. The Energy Department scientists who were experts in nuclear centrifuges to the man...

DC:.. the biggest and most prominent experts in the US government...

MI: ... said, This is not the case, these tubes aren't suited for nuclear centrifuges. We believe they're for conventional rockets. There were multiple Energy Department reports written to this effect. The State Department intelligence bureau came to the same conclusion. Those dissents were recorded in the classified National Intelligence Estimate that was released to Congress on the eve of war but it was not made public. And in fact the White Paper -- the public version of the NIE -- contained no reference to those dissents.

DC: We talked to some of these scientists after the fact and they saw this piece of evidence being used to support a war and they all said they were afraid to speak publicly or to get into the debate. Because they feared they would lose their top-secret classifications. So the people who knew the most were cut out of the debate internally eventually. And then when they saw it going public with Cheney citing the tubes and the White House doing the same -- and all these documents -- they sat on their hands.

In this world, Department of Energy nuclear analysts and developers, to lose your classification is career-death. You can't get further work. Maybe you lose your pension if you don't work x number of years before retirement. Maybe you get fired or impugned. Look what happened to the Plame-Wilsons, John O'Neill, Sibel Edmonds, maybe Hatfill.... They were out, completely out.

As Giuliani once said about a good-government organization (middle of the road, if not pro-business) that once criticized his budgeting or performance: 'cut off their air supply.' He went after the corporate sponsors of their Annual Dinner. ]

... People often retort, when folks speak about rogue parts of the U.S. government being involved in the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon in 2001, that wouldn't someone from the government speak out? Some folks have spoken out, such as firemen, and they have been reprimanded or demoted... so they speak privately or keep their mouths shut about witnessing explosions visually or hearing them throughout the buildings... or they grumble about seeing the black box being carried off.

As for many of the others, they could have been confused, distracted or taken out of the scene by the dozens of wargames going on that day. Besides with such huge events - planes crashing into buildings, fires, collapses, deaths, it is easy to be distracted. Few people in the public even noticed that a third WTC building crashed that day at 5:20 pm.

Folks who work in government often work there for a steady job with benefits, retirement, and pensions. One of the few jobs like that left in a constantly changing world. Risking all that to bear witness to one small detail by one person -- well, it kind of makes sense that people wouldn't step forward. You don't just have everything to lose and little personally to gain, but you can more than just lose everything, you can be attacked, ridiculed, labeled as insane or dangerous, so that you can't work anymore anywhere.

Patterns from Repeat Players - Aspens Turn in Clusters, connected at their roots

2007-03-18T23:17:00.000-04:00

Sy Hersh' New Yorker piece about the Iran-Contra Conspirators' Lessons Learned Conference in the VP's office is the latest example of the same cast of characters doing the same things.

The hazy memory / bad governing excuse has been in vogue since Reagan 'couldn't recall.' Libby used it, and now it is being used for Gonzalez' firing the 'disloyal' prosecutors for not prosecuting Democrats or for prosecuting Republicans, sometimes in the middle of investigations or trials. This is win-win for them for two reasons: 1) It is hard to audit someone's memory, 2) if 'public servants' come off stupid, then fine! That only makes government look more incompetent, which these guys want, so we'll run towards corporatism/privatization.

I can't get over how often these characters are reused. And then, perhaps, abused. (Note to moths: flying around candles is fun, but flying into the flame will get you killed.)

Judge Reggie Walton of the Libby Trial, which didn't get to the bottom of the actual crime -- who outed Plame-Wilson, ruining her counter-proliferation work. Walton was a highly placed anti-drug policy administrator, second to Kemp, and he was an anti-drug crusader in the Reagan days, and during Bush1's days he was appointed his first judge position. He was assigned Sibel Edmonds' judge about five times, including after she requested and was granted switches to other judges, but then Walton was back, supposedly randomly assigned,, quashing her case. And he was the judge on the Stephen Hatfill anthrax outing suit, allowing the government to drag the case out, while Hatfill deals with being blacklisted.

These are three cases that each have the potential of blowing the lid off the Bush2 admin and their vision for a national corporatist security state. All of them judged by Reggie Walton, a judge with his own penchant for privacy, as we see in how he approaches his public disclosure of where his income comes from...

Stephen Hatfill, a bio-wmd specialist, was fingered for the Anthrax Attacks, which really changed America after 9/11/01 because of the Patriot Act (but few remember those attacks and that investigation going nowhere)... He's the same fellow who designed and built training trailers for the US military to identify Iraqi Mobile Weapons Labs of the same design that Colin Powell had for his UN presentation. The return addresses on the envelopes from the Anthrax attacks referenced a fake school, Greendale, possibly alluding to Hatfill's days in a Rhodesian pro-white/anti-communist paramilitary force [There is a school in the once white Harare suburb of Greendale named for Courtney Selous, and Haftill fought in that commando unit (while perhaps working with the CIA or the USA). This unit has been accused of anthraxing hundreds of rural black villagers who experienced the skin type of the disease. Still, anthrax is a disease of livestock that affects humans through the skin. Of course, this 'Greendale' could have been put on the envelopes to set Hatfill up. Yet, there are dozens of Greendales, including one linked to a popular British TV show referencing a postman from Greendale, which would be appropriate for a mail-attack irony.] Also the the messages inside the envelopes could have set up Islamists as terrorists, using poor English, handwriting, and anti-Israeli, pro-Allah statements. Yet in Hatfill's suit (with Judge Reggie Walton) he says he only knows how to make pasty anthrax, not the finely milled dried weaponized kind... The kind made in Fort Detrick in Maryland where Hatfill stopped working a couple of years previously. Curiouser and curiouser. The FBI is against him, or maybe he's their convenient fall guy, but the DoD uses and needs him for counter-terrorism. The biggest mystery is why is the Anthrax killer investigation seemingly dead and dead for years? This is the first US WMD domestic case. And why did the DoD/CIA need Hatfill to build a practically working prototype. (Judy Miller said it was never plugged in... I won't even deal with her ... Aspens turning in clusters. Maybe Libby knew he was going to jail just as she was already in jail, so she might as well get out.) Wouldn't a drawing work for searchers just as well as a prototype? Was the DoD attempting to plant at least one fake WMD lab in Iraq for discovery to justify the war? Was Brewster-Jennings/the CIA's Counter-Terrorism unit a threat to such a ruse? Was Hatfill's reputation pro-actively assassinated so that he'd be forced to cooperate with the DoD and keep his mouth shut about plants?

There's a fine line between defense and offense, between terror and counter-terror, news and propaganda, between war-games and war.

I really like how the Washington Post covered Hatfill's work in 2001 creating nearly functional versions of mobile weapons labs for the DoD in this article:

One of Hatfill's most intriguing projects at the SAIC was his design of the mock mobile lab, which was assembled for training of the Delta Force, a commando unit of the U.S. Special Forces based at Fort Bragg. The nonfunctional lab was built on an 18-wheel trailer and fitted with a fermenter and other specialized equipment.

Hatfill planned the equipment, designed the interior layout and stored construction materials in a warehouse before building began, said a source who has seen the vehicle.

In its investigation, the FBI has traced all of the materials ordered for the lab by Hatfill and others at the SAIC, the source said.

The trailer, known at the SAIC as the "can," was under construction in late 2001 at a shop in Frederick, where Hatfill once lived in an apartment near Fort Detrick.
....
Col. Bill Darley, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, said that Hatfill also designed a fixed or "static" nonfunctional bioweapons lab for use in training Special Forces in an unspecified location in the western United States.

Darley said he could not discuss details of how these labs have been used in training. The programs, he said, are at the heart of the "dark tactics, techniques and procedures" used to prepare troops for missions abroad.

I have pointed out in previous posts how dangerous (from a fragging or 'friendly-fire' perspective) it is to work in US counter-terrorism during the Bush2 era. I am not sure if Hatfill fits this pattern. But it seems that the message has been received loud and clear in the US community, even if proliferators in Pakistan get to live a bit easier. It took over a year for the 'mobile bio-weapons labs' were finally admitted to really be weather balloon inflaters. The scientists on the team were frightened to come forward and kept their mum until word came out about their work in spring 2006. The truth kind of leaked out from other sources in autumn 2004 (when they knew since spring 2003). Even so, those scientists are still cautious, and their work is still largely classified -- another example of politically motivated classification and abuse of the privileges of state secrets to subvert democracy.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

" In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.

"It was very assertive," said one weapons expert familiar with the report's contents.

Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.

"I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated," one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live with it." "

Nicholas Berg, a leftist going to Iraq to build cellphone radio towers for the Iraqi's in the name of freedom... Cellphone towers? High-tech communications equipment? Maybe signals intelligence or setting up compromised networks? And he knew or at least met Zack Moussaoui? Berg lent him his computer and web-email account. Hotmail I think. It takes five minutes to set up a Hotmail account... Why lend yours out? Moussaoui was a student. Students can use web terminals. Then Berg gets beheaded like Daniel Pearl. And then Robert Baer the former CIA agent posthumously says Pearl and he were collaborating together, which kind of echoes the terrorists' statements that Pearl was a spy. I got a kick out of President Mushareff's quotes about Perl, that he basically had it coming to him for digging where he was. It did seem to have a chilling effect on journalism since...

The Mo. Atta stories are pretty wild, too, and then there's the time he had those anthrax sores in the Florida hospital.. And his passport survives the plane attacks on the WTC, but somehow the black boxes are never revealed or publicly examined, presumed missing, so some say. You can read whole books about Atta, or is it more than one guy? Several of the hastily identified 9/11/01 hijackers are actually still alive, and the Atta stories just don't add up.

Back to Sibel Edmonds, she finds that a Turkish version of AIPAC is running drugs and arms, buying politicians, and that tipoffs to 9/11/01's plane attacks, as well as plans of buildings, probably including the WTC, were sent to the mid-east, and that plane attacks associated with Bin Laden were being planned. This arms network has a nuclear component, too, in which neo-cons are allowing parts to go to AQKhan's proliferation network. Edmonds is gagged, and her testimony to congress is retroactively classified! She's the defending whistleblower, and they stuff her.

Yet so long as people like Sibel Edmonds are prevented from speaking and the Libby trial remains restricted in scope, we will likely know little about the facts, whatever they may be and wherever they may lead.

Finally, the non-judicial nature of Judge Walton's prior job as a government policy crafter at a very high level, something that must have involved the same cast of characters, denotes in and of itself a conflict of interest. Courts are vexed whenever some famous person is tried and it becomes impossible to find jurors who have no prior opinion of them. That said, in what kind of country is a judge appointed to try his own former colleagues, who themselves are being defended by other former colleagues?

Back to Valerie Plame-Wilson (of Libby and Rove and NOVAKula fame), her international cover company, Brewster Jennings [the fake energy consultancy (named after a Rockefeller associate and Mobil oil founder)] is completely blown, ruining our intelligence gathering in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and North Africa.

Bush and Cheney weren't after Joe Wilson, they were after Plame-Wilson and Brewster Jennings' work. Novak's statement on CNN, months after his column blows Plame's cover, then goes on to blow out Brewster-Jennings as a fake company! The whole revenge/schoolyard theme is a smokescreen.

Back to Hersch, one of the 'explosive' revelations of his piece is that the US is using slush funds from Iraq (Is it the oil or is it the tons and tons of missing $12Billion in cash?) to finance Al-Q'aida-linked jihadists against Iran.

This stuff is just too big to cover and to wrap one's head around.

Basically, in the age of nuclear and oil fueled empire, it seems that some feel that democracy is just too unpredictable and deliberative for the needs of empire. But rather than officially Ceasarize the US Executive Branch and declare the empire, we just keep enough of an idea/illusion of democracy going to inspire people to keep going to work (rather than protesting or fomenting) and serving in the military, either for patriotic reasons, or just pure lack of alternatives in a stagnant economy with very expensive education and health care.

Here's a tangential link to a quoted 2004 LA Times article about a former Israeli former South African now American selling nuclear weapons electronics to Pakistan; he got busted. One of the firms he dealt with, Giza Tech, a US firm (owned by Turkish Jews), was mentioned in the Sibel Edmonds' cans of worms with regard to trafficking nuclear technology to the middle east.
My take on this is the so-called splits between Jews and Muslims, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Al Qu'aida and the USA and/or Israel is a canard. At the levels of the greediest and super-wealth, there is no division -- arms, drugs, terrorism, war, and oil all fuel that greed. The splits are to satisfy and distract the middle class, motivating them to pay the taxes and work hard, and motivating the lower classes to fight in the wars and get killed off to thin the herd while distracting it.
The Party is in Dubai, the Las Vegas and the Swiss Bank of the world, behind sand, water, and security.

Here's something about how 'we' 'knew' those mobile labs were for weather balloons, but the President and Colin Powell kept saying for six months that they were WMD bio-trailers.

After Libby Guilty Verdict - When Will We Get Some Answers and Oversight?

2007-03-06T13:39:00.000-05:00

Now that it has been determined that Libby lied and covered-up the outing of CIA Agent Plame, it is time for the Senate to investigate and have a Special Prosecutor investigate the actual crimes behind the cover-up. We still have so many serious questions unanswered about the reckless abuse of Executive power.

Who outed a CIA agent, ruining her cover, her cover company, her network, and her work actually countering WMD proliferation in Iran, Iraq, and Africa? Who endangered all those lives? Who made public service so dangerous? Why?

I think this illegal outing was not just against Joe Wilson but was intended to cow and neutralize the CIA and its analysis that might slow the Bush Administrations plans and fake rationales for wars. This whole Novakula-reported 'nepotism cancels Joe Wilson's credibility' line was unbelievable or at best irrelevant from the start. Which is probably why so many reporters held off on the story. But Novakula, the Prince of Darkness, was counted on to plant the story. So, who ruined the CIA counter-WMD network? Why?

Whomever orchestrated this is guilty of high crimes and treason, and this is certainly impeachable. At the very least, public servants in intelligence need to know that they will not be sold out by the Executive Branch. That work is dangerous enough without having to worry about being fragged by the White House or the Vice Presidency.

In addition, an investigation with prosecutorial powers might uncover current treasons and high crimes, and will slow down or cow those who are quite well committing them right now.

Our government does not have a parliamentary system with a prime minister; we have term limits on the Presidency. On the surface this limits executive power, by limiting the time that one can exercise power, but it was subject to the continuing approval of the voters. But with term-limited Executives, this structure incentivizes Executive abuse of power, and its committing serious abuses as fast as possible, giving only foot-dragging co-operation with Congress and the Press, running out the clock toward the next election cycle and irrelevancy. That, combined with the power of Executive Pardon, makes it ideal for abuse of power and crimes.

This is what we found out recently with the deal between Nixon and Ford to pardon Nixon for Watergate. Bush1 gave a Christmas gift to Caspar Weinberger (and Colin Powell) just as Lawrence Walsh was getting close to them in 1992-1993. Bush was leaving office and he pre-emptively flushed Walsh' five year Iran-Contra investigation down the drain.

And now we are stuck with most of those perpetrators back in power, Armitage, Negroponte, Abrams, working with Bandar Bush... Maybe even Bush1 was involved... Colin Powell was, too. And we have warmongering in Iraq and it is coming elsewhere in the Middle East.

For these reasons we need a strengthened Legislative Branch, doing serious investigations, oversight, and prosecutions of Executive abuse and crimes.

Write your Senator! We need an investigation of who outed Plame. We need the Independent Prosecutor law renewed. We need an Independent Prosecutor and Investigation, one unhobbled by Congressional immunity in exchange for TV testimony.

What is it with those 9-11 Victims' Families Bashers?

2007-02-19T02:03:00.000-05:00

I am sick of hearing MAnn Coulter and her ilk complaining about the 9-11 victims' families, and what those commenters think the families should do to please them and their visions for America and how to get the terrorists back. I think the motive is that the families are powerful and this is a way to divide us, and disempower the victims' families, to make them shut up or to cause us to tune them out.

I would hope that if I were murdered that people would try to find my body, clean up the murder scene but after examining the evidence around my murder, put the murderers to justice, build a spot to memorialize me, and send me off in the way of my faith.

The families of the victims are our nation's conscience. Without them we wouldn't have had even the lame 9-11 Commission that we did have after a year of pushing, which then was rushed (after being stonewalled) and then underfunded. Compare that with the investigation/fishing expedition of President Clinton. The families of the victims, especially 'the Jersey Girls,' are sacrificing to protect all of us! You or your loved ones could be next, and our nation could still be just as unprepared as it was in 2001.

Meanwhile, the families of the victims get to grieve in a trailer, near 350 bones recently found, computer equipment, and office furnishings that were embedded a few feet from their trailer; they were told that the area was thoroughly searched years ago. 40% of the WTC victims, around 1200, were not identified with any remains.

Foreign visitors are shocked at the lack of a memorial or indoor space for the public to visit. The WTC Tribute Visitors Center is underfunded, run by the 9/11 community and donations.

Don't confuse the war on terror with the need for an investigation, or even a real recovery of the remains, with the greed and megalomania that is represented by the Port Authority, the LMDC, and Silverstein Properties with regard to the WTC redevelopment. The families are not blocking their power or greed or redevelopment.

WTC7 is done. The plans were ready 30 days after the attacks. It is lawsuits with insurance companies so that Silverstein can make a $3 billion profit on the attacks, rather than a few million from the insurance companies, while he gets to modernize the complex with mostly his plan and favorite architects -- and he gets the $200 million asbestos job in the Twin Towers removed free by the 40,000 rescue and recovery workers and volunteers' lungs, none of whom have seen a dime of health care for their heroism.

Congress set aside $1B in health insurance for them (about 3 days' costs in Iraq, which had NOTHING to do with 9/11 except tangentially in that it has something to do with oil prices and the unsavory leaders who set them and then use the profits to buy arms and services from U.S. based companies like Halliburton, Carlyle Group, and Kellogg, Brown & Root.) Meanwhile the insurance lady in charge of the fund gets paid $350,000 a year for two years, paying $400/hour lawyers to block every single claim. If you want to get angry about something, get angry at people who gain from these attacks, not the grievers.

Next time someone says the victims' families should shut up, please encourage listening to them, empathizing, asking how we can help them or support their favorite causes. By doing so we will help our families, nation, and selves.

MAnn Coulter is an attack dog, a provocateur, who should not be taken seriously for what she says but for what she represents or whom. That is what is interesting about her. Trying to figure out who behind her benefits from her advocacy or divisions.

The victims of the WTC attacks and their families are the canaries in the coal mine. If we don't listen to them, their stories, and needs, we might be next.

So if you are wondering about who has won, think about how, without justice or safety, or trustworthy leaders, or responsible business people in insurance, real estate, or media, then we all lose, and we become more like a nation of mullahs and oligarchs, running things in secret meetings without accountability, while dividing people and distracting them. The kind of nations where terrorists come from.

What a far cry our nation has become since the Depression and World War 2 when people pulled together and hated greedy war-profiteers, and insisted upon full complete investigations, and honor. That's patriotic!

The Wilsons' Sacrifice and coming war with Iran

2007-02-18T18:48:00.000-05:00

It is amazing to me that people, especially the M.S.M. are just catching on to the fact that Bush2 is a serial liar, worse than Holden Caufield, where if he says something truthfully it is rare. I doubt it has happened since the Supreme Court elected him in 2000. Cheney might be crazy enough to actually convince himself of his lies. But no matter, they and their kleptocratic, megalomanic fellow oligarchs are profiting handsomely from their war-mongering and so-called incompetence.

These guys are very competent at gerrymandering, playing race or homophobia, fomenting fear, lying, and getting us into wars, like marketing a product.

The game plan for Iran is different than Iraq. It is clear to everyone that the WMD canard is played out. No one believes anyone in the Bush administration about such things. And getting consensus and making an international case takes too long and won't work anyway.

Bush will use our troops in Iraq and the multiple aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf to incite an incident with Iran, quickly following up so we can bomb them and start a war quickly. Facts on the ground style, or should I say, bombs in the ground style. And these guys are chomping at the bit to use some nukes, too.

I envision this starting with a trumped up 'incident' a-la Gulf of Tonkin affair, which has only recently (thank you Bamford) come out as, at best, an exaggeration, if not a total fabrication.

This provocation or fabrication to start war is an American military tradition, including the USS Maine incident in 1898 in which our ship sinking in Havana Harbor was blamed on the Spanish, who were roughing up their Cuban colony. Meanwhile, our press, led by W.R. Heart was whipping up Cuban sympathy. I don't think he used nearly as much ink detailing southern oppression, northern poverty, or the sweat shops two miles away.

Seventy-five years later our investigation of the incident concluded that the Spanish had nothing to do with the Maine sinking. It was due to engine room failure or intentional self-sabotage. We are still not sure. But Hearst's tower still has a great view of the Battleship Maine Memorial on Columbus Circle, but it is not considered polite to bring that up inside the offices that publish Popular Mechanics, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Oprah Magazine, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping. The new Hearst Tower is by Norman Vincent Foster, the same architect of Tower Two at the new-to-be World Trade Center, the handsomest tower in the complex' design.

But the heat of the moment, stoked by newsprint and 'incident' worked out well for the coming U.S. Empire: the U.S. took over (officially, economically, covertly-clandestinely, or out and out criminally) the declining Spanish empire's colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Can Empire co-exist with Democracy? Perhaps not, and certainly not with a Presidential rather than a Parliamentary Executive. Our fixed election terms give the executive power to run the military and the government much like a dominant quarterback, just making it to the next down. Term limits just makes the President have to move faster, and Bush already has two wars, both kind of stale from his perspective.

President Polk in 1848 is largely accepted by now of provoking war with Mexico, through a faked incident, to finally get Texas after ten years of diddling in between, and taking over the top half of Mexico including present-day California, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. At the time, nearly half the country didn't buy the warmongering pretexts. Freshman Congressman Lincoln decried it for that reason, although maybe he was really concerned that there were so many southern-type states/territories in the warzone, threatening the balance of power in the nation from industrial/northern to rural/southern.

In history class, we wash the whole thing down with sweet Manifest Destiny elixir. Like the song says, from sea to shining sea, it just makes sense, so obvious that it must be G*d-given, like a new covenant, a new Canaan.

We have Iran surrounded to the west from Iraq and from the northeast in Afghanistan, and from the south in the Gulf. We have the largest military in the world, greater than the rest of the world's forces combined, so we gotta use that stuff. And if we don't use that stuff, then we are stuck with it, and the values or stocks of those firms that Carlyle Group owns go down with the revenues and profits. Same thing for Halliburton and Kellogg Brown and Root.

And, not by coincidence, the hotspot is in the heart of the middle east, the Straits of Hormuz between where all of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi's oil is exported. You don't and didn't see us fighting with North Korea for their WMD, or India's or Pakistan's. The other investments that the Bushes, Cheneys and their cohorts share is in oil.

All this constant instability has tripled the price of oil, even though supply is roughly the same. People think Bush botched Iraq, New Orleans (clearing most of the Democrats out of the one Democratic city in that Republican State), and Afghanistan, where the Taliban are creeping into power again, selling tons of heroin flooding the world market. All that oil and drug money buys the US' biggest export: arms, and it doesn't hurt our other big ones either, entertainment and agriculture. Exxon-Mobil, the great Saudi partner, recently reported quarterly profits of around $10 Billion! That's 2,500 million dollars a month. War with Iran will give Osama or is it Aiyman Zawahiri what they said they wanted a few years ago: a 'fair price for oil, over $100 per barrel.'

But too bad for us, and not just because of $4 per gallon gasoline, inflation for the huge military debts, and the tens of thousands of troops maimed or killed.

Iran is not going to fight us on the battlefields of our choosing at a time that we pick. They will fight the U.S. by acts of terror, such as blowing up any centers with the name "Jewish" in their title, like what happened in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s that killed nearly a hundred people at a recreation center, mostly kids and day-care providers. Or blowing up a ferry, a highly visible way to kill thousands of people while playing out for everyone to see for a long while. Or shooting up a shopping mall, or even driving inside one, Blues Brothers style except with much fewer near-misses. This will slow our economy down, and kill lots of random diverse people, but not nearly as many will be killed by the bombs, fallout, and cancers in Persia and India.

I have often wondered when Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney were going to declare finding the caches of WMD in Iraq. I mean, that is their true incompetence: not successfully planting WMD. The war was going well in 2003, too well. The Iraqi troops seemed to melt away and the Baathists went into their underground networks that they had been developing for many years. This would have been a slam-dunk time to plant and find the weapons.

It was also the time they fired Jay Garner for uniting the Iraqis around owning their own resources, fired the Iraqi Army, and criminalized the Baathists, ensuring an insurgency that would flare in 2004 and gather strength. It was also the time that Garner's replacement, the U.S. Viceroy Paul Bremer was towing the oil industry line, ensuring Iraq's inclusion in OPEC, supporting high energy prices, and partnerships with U.S. and British firms that enable these firms to own half of Iraq's oil reserves without buying them. But it wasn't all bad. He got us four permanent military bases in Iraq, and a billion dollar embassy-compound, bigger than the Vatican City-State, with its own water supply, the biggest 'embassy' in the world. We'll be wired into the middle east with that embassy, and have bases next to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

But what else was going on then? Who was ruining the coming victory parade?

Former Ambassador and previous Gulf War Hero, Joseph Wilson. He just wouldn't let those 16 words from the State of the Union Address, the President's Big Lie die. Six months later, July 2003, he outed himself as going to that luxurious (ha) vacation-spot of Niger, at the behest of the CIA, from the original behest of Dick Cheney, to investigate the claims that Iraq tried to obtain Niger's Yellowcake Uranium, which could be refined for WMD. What he didn't find in Niger was any evidence of this pretext, and he told the CIA this in 2002, several times. And the CIA got this out of some of the President's speeches then after he said it. But it 'accidentally' made it into the SoTUA again. Someone, was it National 'Security' Advisor Condi or CIA Director and later-to-be Freedom Medal winner Tenet? Whatever! Someone fell on their sword months ago, and Wilson's editorial made an issue of it again.

The Bush Administration hates accountability since that leads to the blame game, which wastes their time, opens them up to resignations or prosecutions. They'd rather play the invade, pillage, war-profiteer and energy-profits-gouging game, while we watch dumbfounded our mouths, wallets, and assholes agape.

[In July 2003, was Curveball, Chalabi's alcoholic relative, outed then as cooking up fake mobile weapons labs reports around then, too? Can't remember...]

With no offense to dogs or homosexuals, the Bush Administration started whining like fauntleroy faggot-bitches to the media in a whispering campaign about Joseph Wilson, a hero who saved Americans during the first Gulf War at personal risk, and whom negotiated face to face with Saddam back in those days after his boss April Glaspie kind of screwed things up (or did she?) by somehow green-lighting the Kuwait invasion that we soon very adamantly opposed. They said: 'his wife, you know she works in the CIA, sent him to Niger as a boondoggle junket!' A former Ambassador to Africa going to Niger to look into something that the VP brought up as worth investigating is not that implausible. But if it were a junket, why would he keep bringing it up? Wouldn't that just open him up to a blame game?

His wife, the CIA Operative that traitor Novakula outed, Valerie Plame-Wilson, was just one of many counter-terrorism and WMD experts who had career-limiting incidents during the Bush2 years. While connecting Wilson to charges of nepotism (funny, coming from Cheney who keeps hiring his daughter into State, and Bush2 whose main qualification for the Presidency was his repeat-name of Bush 41 and that they kind of look-alike, with #2 being a bit cuter and tougher-talking, but also more pop-culture-friendly.) and boondoggling would somehow damage his claims -- by using offense as defense. This is the common accepted wisdom of why the Whitehouse and the Cheney Administration were character assassinating Wilson by outing his wife.

But I think think that that is too simple. My sense is that Valerie Plame Wilson had competency in WMD counter-proliferation, and she had a network in Iraq and Iran and probably elsewhere in the Middle East and West Africa, as well as an established cover with fake international energy consultancy 'Brewster Jennings.' This made her suspect enough. She could call Bush2 and Rummy on fake WMD or implanted WMD in Iraq.

But now that her husband blew the whistle, and kept blowing the whistle on the fake Niger Uranium canard, it was clear that these guys were not typical CIA or FBI bureaucrats that could be shut-up by threatening their pensions, firing or demoting them --something that has happened to government employees, including municipal firemen, soldiers, and FBI agents, for not towing the official 9-11 conspiracy story and the subsequent game plans, such as allowing torture, whistle-blowing, or asking questions.

Testimony in the Libby perjury trial indicate that Cheney and the whole crew knew that outing a CIA agent was against Federal law. It was George H.W. Bush who pushed for the law in the first place, while Cheney was deep into policy creation or administration. The Libby trial described how Cheney motioned, gesturing that he was not going to say certain things that could be prosecutable later. Outing Plame-Wilson didn't just destroy her intelligence career, it ruined a cover company that was built up over many years at taxpayer expense, and it unraveled that entire informant network, possibly leading to the torture, killing, or compromising of anyone associated with Brewster Jennings throughout its history in any country it 'did business' in. If I were in charge of one of those countries, I would investigate every citizen or person that had any association with that firm, and I might even try to turn them around and give me useful information.

Why would Cheney and Bush risk all this to silence Joe Wilson? They could just use their old saws like:

"this is old news;"
"Blah-blah already fell on his/her sword;"
"We are at war now, and asking such questions threatens our national security by distracting us from defending the nation," or
"Are you saying the Saddam Hussein was good, that things aren't better without him? Everyone, especially Clinton, thought he was a threat."

They attacked Wilson and his wife to ruin her ability to threaten the administration's plans to plant WMD in Iraq and possibly into Iran by revealing the truth both through the system via the CIA, through media leaks, and public disclosures in teamwork with her husband, a citizen-hero like Joe Wilson. They needed to be stopped, and to be made an example of.

I think the Whitehouse counted on summer 2003 to be a good time to slime Wilson and quickly neutralize his wife, disposing of them so that the DoD/CIA could plant WMD in Iraq to be found in September after Labor Day. Probably the original plan was to plant fake WMD and they lost it when they realized that the Plame-Wilson team would call them on such an obvious ruse when the fakes were debunked, or if no one on the investigation network could corroborate that real weapons came from anywhere but the U.S.A.'s own stockpiles.

Meanwhile, the Plame Affair didn't shut Joe Wilson up, and journalists and bloggers noted the illegality and ironies of outing his secret-agent counter-wmd wife. The issue festered throughout the summer, and took the Whitehouse's eyes off their prize, not Saddam, but a WMD plant, an intricate, covert operation that could not be discovered by potential enemies -- not just from other nations, but the Bush Administration's enemies from within: honest soldiers and whistleblowers.

[It is one thing to run lots of confusing military drills on 9/11/01 and populate the radar screens with all sorts of blips, while sending the normal chain of command and pilots away or very far away on various pretexts and drills (in Alaska, the Carolinas, Iceland, or Saudi Arabia). Individuals can chalk up the day to being confusing, awful, sad, and overwhelming -- even "interesting."

But it is a whole other thing to have soldiers lug in real or even faked ordinance into a spot, conceal it, and then months later have other soldiers 'discover' it. You would have to kill the whole first group of soldiers before they blabbed about burying the weapons.

Killing your own troops wholesale for a cover-up is touchy and controversial. The kind of thing that can get conspirators court-martialed and impeached, no matter how complacent a nation is. To wit, check out the scandal of convalescing vets languishing in the crown jewel of VA Hospitals, Walter Reade. And it was on the shoals of the Army that the career of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy (MAnn Coulter's hero) careened, crashed, and burned out, instead of fading away.]

In an administration characterized by consistent lies and the use of force and fear to foment war, higher oil prices, and increased arms sales, the only thing missing is planted WMD in Iraq. Finding WMD would make the war justified, 'making the world safer from WMD in the hands of an aggressive regime that had once sponsored and harbored terrorists.'

Although many of us are disappointed by the Fitzgerald-Walton punt regarding the Plame-outing, maybe Valerie Plame's sacrifice did serve a higher purpose, causing attention and static, preventing a WMD plant.

***
In late February 2007, Seymour Hersch does it again in The New Yorker. Not only does he meet face to face with Sheikh Nasralla of H'ez B'Allah, but he links all those recycled, actually re-used, Iran-Contra figures to the coming war with Iran. They even had a 'lessons-learned' meeting! The one from from the Nixon era, don't make tapes, was already gotten. Now, they know to run it out of the VP's Office (learned that one from Poppy?), not to involve the military or the CIA, nor to trust their friends (or I guess the obscure Beirut daily that originally broke the story in November 1986).

Another lesson already learned was that these Shi'ite and Sunni schisms, as well as overt anti-Jewishness combined with covert Israeli and Jewish contacts and co-operation, can be useful, profitable, and a way to thin the heard while providing lots of distractions and smoke, while huge huge profits, thefts, and deals are made. We armed Iran and Iraq in their 8-year war.

What did that Iran-Iraq War kill? A million? Who benefited? Saudi Arabia, Iraq's 'ally' and Israel, Iraq and Iran's enemy, yet Saudis and Israelis sent American DoD arms to Iran. (Powell and Cap Weinberger knew and helped!) Whom did that profit? Oil companies, arms manufacturers, and that shadowy network of arms dealers, bankers, and 'operatives' who have to turn those dollars into other forms of useful and non-traceable currency accepted world-wide, such as drugs...

We are missing twelve Billion dollars in Iraq (that we know about) from three years ago. That's twelve thousand million dollars, shipped over in Hercules Transport planes (the ones that carry tanks), measured in tons of cash, packed on pallets, filling the plane.

This sort of thing is playing out in Iraq now, but it has already been spreading to Lebanon, Iran, and Syria.

Here is the most compelling part of Hersch' The New Yorker piece (my emphasis added):

"The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.”

The government consultant said that Negroponte shared the White House’s policy goals but “wanted to do it by the book.” The Pentagon consultant also told me that “there was a sense at the senior-ranks level that he wasn’t fully on board with the more adventurous clandestine initiatives.” It was also true, he said, that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East.”

The Pentagon consultant added that one difficulty, in terms of oversight, was accounting for covert funds. “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,” he said. The budgetary chaos in Iraq, where billions of dollars are unaccounted for, has made it a vehicle for such transactions, according to the former senior intelligence official and the retired four-star general.

“This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”

The issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from Congress. Last November, the Congressional Research Service issued a report for Congress on what it depicted as the Administration’s blurring of the line between C.I.A. activities and strictly military ones, which do not have the same reporting requirements. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing for March 8th on Defense Department intelligence activities.

Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, a Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “The Bush Administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the Administration.” "
Another explosive shocker from this piece is that the U.S. is cozying up with the Muslim Brotherhood against the Shi'ites. [The Muslim Brotherhood, an international network, is a forerunner to Al Q'aida. Their splinter group, which assassinated Sadat and attempted to assassinate Mubarak, and whose spiritual leader the Blind Sheikh Abdel Rahman is linked to the first WTC attack (which is linked to the second attack through Bin Al Shibh and his uncle, as well as the foiled plot to bomb the UN and the FBI, this is the group where Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, supposedly Bin Laden's 'Deputy' is from! I think Doc Zawahiri is really in charge, actually, but Bin Laden is better looking, younger, and has a better story -- being from a really rich family and living in caves and hanging with the trainees, so he's put forward as being in charge. He makes a better enemy symbol *and* he's a better leadership-symbol. Who really wants to listen to a Doctor? Also, for years before 9/11/01's attacks UBL was painted merely as the financier of Al Q'Aida, and in the U.S. whomever sign the check runs the show, right? But who is signing the checks behind the check? Is UBL really that cut off from the Saudis? And from his Saudi and Bush (through the Carlyle Group and more) connected family? Not!
Even though support of the Saudi-Pak-ISI-CIA-backed Mujahedins (practically Arabic for 'contra') against the Soviets began at the end of the Carter Administration under Brezhinsky, it was the Reagan Administration that gave them Stingers to shoot the Soviet helicopters and expanded the operation, perhaps even had a blind eye to the poppy and hashish exports (supposedly sealed with 'Support the Contras' stamps). This is where Usama Bin Laden cut his teeth on jihad.
So, this war with Iran, with its international terror network including Hezb'Allah, could be bombing US interests with abandon, like the Argentinian Jewish Center got it with 85, mostly kids, being car bombed.
It would be a logical response for pro-Iranian terrorists to fight this way, asymmetrically. And, of course, Billions of dollars are floating around Iraq, unaccounted for, which means 'black ops' or bad guys doing bad things they don't want taxpayers to know about... And cozying up with Al Q'aida linked groups and networks to weaken the Shi'ites, who happen to live above most of the oil in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and who border northern Israel Lebanon, and live in Syria. Well, we are looking at a lot of warfare, civil war, high gas and arms prices, concentrated power plutocrats in energy and arms and covert ops, and everyone else picking up the pieces of the collateral damage from the terror-attack-blowbacks.

So, back to the Wilsons' problems with the Bush Administration, this outing of CIA Counter-WMD Middle East and Africa specialist, Valerie Plame-Wilson using an energy consultancy cover, seems to really be about getting yet one more knowledgeable/troublesome person out of the Cheney-Bush Junta's way towards profits for them and their cadre.

These are some additional counter-terrorism and counter-wmd personnel whom have had bad luck or problems during the Bush-Cheney era:

Richard Clarke, Former WhiteHouse Counter-Terror Czar under Clinton (demoted to Cybersecurity after being ignored for first year of Bush2 Admin),
Linda Franklin, the FBI's Infrastructure Guru then moved to cyber-security like Clarke (shot in the head during the beltway sniper spree of 2002. Her murder was never investigated nor tried. It was pinned on the Beltway Sniper John Allen Muhammad, who, indeed, might have randomly shot her in a Home Depot parking lot.),
John O'Neill, FBI Counter-Terror Guru, run out of the organization on a pretext/set-up (killed in the WTC Tower 1 collapse about two weeks after he started as Port Authority Chief of Security),
Colleen Rowley and the FBI Whistleblowers (fired or in career limbo, as their nincompoop superiors like Maltbie and Frasca, who stalled and hobbled the pre-9/11/01 investigations into hijackers at flight schools were promoted),
Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer, the Bronze Star Medal recipient who is a CIA trained Army lieutenant colonel with more than 22 years of experience in the intelligence community, identified Mohammed Atta and three domestic cells involved in 9/11/01's attacks a year before the attacks (first his work was ignored, then destroyed, then he spoke about it with the 9/11 Commission who told him it was important, then they ignored it, not including it in their report six months later, then denied knowing much about it. Shaffer was then investigated by the Army at a cost of $400,000 for $67 in personal phone bills, racked up 25c at a time over 18 months, about ten local calls a day. He was also gagged on national security grounds for discussing previously unclassified information, and his clearance was revoked, severely limiting his intelligence career.)
Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator found that her associates and her boss was slowing translation processing and 'botching' them. Her boss tried to get her to join a Turkish 'networking' association, even though she was translating Turkish wiretaps for an FBI investigation. Her boss implied that it would be rewarding and that Edmonds' family back in Turkey might be endangered if she doesn't cooperate. Edmonds' work found links to 9/11/01's attacks, links to drug money, and a former House leader, and she re-corrected key translations that were 'missed' or 'botched.' She was one of the few language specialists in Farsi (Iran's main language and spoken in Afghanistan). Edmonds was ignominiously fired, retroactively gagged, and her whistleblower case was shut down (in Plame Trial Judge Reggie Walton's court), using the rarely-invoked State Secrets Privilege. Reggie Walton obviously values secrecy, since his federal disclosure form is completely redacted!

Time for Cheney to go now

2006-11-29T06:36:00.000-05:00

Craig Crawford recently opined on Chris Matthews' Hardball that he thinks, now that pal Rummy's gone, Cheney's next, since it isn't fun anymore for him. I'm inclined to agree, especially after this week Rob 'Prince of Darkness' Novak mentioned how some senior officials are so upset with how Bush so abruptly gave Rummy the heave-ho during election week.

I think it is plausible that Cheney would leave. In October there were some quiet rumbles about Rummy going, and so long!

Cheney loves power and he has less of it now without Rumsfeld and Congress behind him, plus he's not able to use fear as much to get people behind him.

Bush2 is so obviously flailing under Cheney's tutelage that Daddy's crew (Bush1, Baker, Gates, Kissinger, and maybe Scowcroft) is taking over. Bush2 has finally kind of gotten used to actually being President and is probably realizing that he's becoming an historical laughingstock. Shedding Cheney will be easy.

So, who's in line to be President for the next 9-10 years (in their dreamworld)? Jeb Bush? John McCain? Giuliani? They are all horrible, but McCain seems the least bad. At least he's served in the military and has a modicum of honor left. Giuliani is an authoritarian who chases the cameras and hogs credit for blown up but mostly flimsy accomplishments. Jeb is more evil and competent than Shrub.

It doesn't matter, all of them are profiting quite handsomely from their investments in military materiel and services via Carlyle Group, Haliburton, and KBR, as well as their oil and oil services investments and gigs. The war mongering leading to crises inflates the revenues from energy and guns. Their kids aren't dying, and their investments are ballooning from the situation. We were wrong saying 'no blood for oil;' more accurately it is: 'no blood for less oil (higher pump prices).'

Good riddance scarey Dick Cheney. He was creepy around 9/11/01 and we're safer with him away from the button.

Let the Repugs choose their next candidate now, so the Democrats can run polls against the VP and pick their most winnable opponent. Plus, this maneuvering will further cement George2 as even lamer duck. He doesn't care. His money is going to be coming and coming. Letting Dick go and letting the Republicans move on puts George in a position to say to his club house buddies how 'he' took one for the Republican team, whomever he appoints as VP to succeed him...

Taser Cop, Cover-up Cops, and major weapons get off Campus!

2006-11-21T20:56:00.000-05:00

The Taser Cop (who has a history of violence over the years in four incidents according to the LATimes and the UCLA Daily Bruin) and his campus police accomplices who aided him and threatened peaceful students with being tased should be fired after the investigation gathers the evidence of their abuses present and past. In the meantime, the Taser cop and his accomplices should be immediately be disarmed, then separated from the students and the campus for the safety of the students, and perhaps themselves.

The purpose of campus security is to provide a safe environment in which to study. These abusive police officers compromised student safety by brutalizing a student, and risked killing him by repeatedly tasing him. In addition, they disturbed the entire library during midterms, and when students asked the police to identify themselves, which is reasonable, the students were threatened by the security officers. These fellow officers: Alexis Bickamong, Kevin Kilgore and Andrew Ikedaare (or Ikeda), Ricardo Bolanos, and Sgt. Philip Baguliao, a supervisor, are already involved in a cover up and abuse of power that is obvious on the video tape on YouTube in which one officer threatened to tase a student for asking to identify himself.

A student going limp (a classic civil disobedience tactic, which campus police should be experienced with handling, especially an 18 year veteran) does not need to be tased, only carried out, even if he is shouting. Repeated tasing of the student is abusive and dangerous and disruptive.

The officers decided to use the Taser to incapacitate Tabatabainejad after he went limp while they were escorting him out and after he urged other library patrons to join his resistance, according to the university's account.
....
[The student who was Tased] Tabatabainejad's attorney, Stephen Yagman, said his client was shocked five times with the Taser.

UCPD Officer Duren seems to have serious issues with students, abuse of power, authority, and diversity including asians, south asians, and homeless people. My sense of this man is that he has some mental, emotional, or learning disabilities that fills him with rage when he sees people he perceives as being more educated and privileged than he, and that he tries to abuse people whom he sees as powerless, including homeless people, students who are alone, and in court representing that a student carrying books is a threat because the student's grip on the books resembled fists. This is not ideal for a campus police officer.

Duren said Monday that he joined the UCLA police force after being fired from the Long Beach Police Department in the late 1980s. He said he was a probationary officer at the time and was let go because of poor report-writing skills and geographical knowledge.

In May 1990, he was accused of using his nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on a Saturday in front of a UCLA fraternity. Kente S. Scott alleged that Duren confronted him while he was walking on the street outside the Theta Xi fraternity house.

Scott sued the university, and according to court records, UCLA officials moved to have Duren dismissed from the police force. But after an independent administrative hearing, officials overturned the dismissal, suspending him for 90 days.

Duren on Monday disputed the allegations made by Scott.

In October 2003, Duren shot and wounded a homeless man he encountered in Kerckhoff Hall. Duren chased the man into a bathroom, where they struggled and he fired two shots.

The homeless man, Willie Davis Frazier, was later convicted of assaulting an officer. Duren said Frasier had tried to grab his gun during the struggle. But Frazier's attorney, John Raphling, said his client was mentally ill and didn't do anything to provoke the shooting.

Court documents and complaints in reference to the case of Willie Davis Frazier, Jr., the homeless man who Duren shot in 2003, outline several other allegations, some of which include altercations with students, the Daily Bruin reported.

According to one court complaint presented in the trial, Duren allegedly woke a student sleeping in the study hall in Kerckhoff in August 1993, escorted him outside, slammed him against a wall, and handcuffed and arrested him.

The complaint also stated that on the way to the police station, Duren told the student, "For a while there I thought I was going to have to 'Rodney King' you."

In 2002, Duren had a verbal confrontation with another student, Kirk Zhong, which resulted in Zhong being arrested, according to an incident report.

Zhong said the confrontation began when he walked by two officers questioning a homeless man and they began yelling at him.

According to the report, Zhong took a combative stance against the officers by clenching his fists.

Zhong maintained the report was unfounded because he was carrying books, so he could not have clenched his fists.

The one point Duren most wanted to make about his work as a police officer is that criticisms can be a result of misunderstanding...

There is definitely several misunderstandings going on here. I'm misunderstanding what level of corruption in the UCLA PD exists to let this guy keep his job and let's his fellow officers feel confident in threatening to tase students who dare question them to identify themselves. I believe that brutal, and probably disturbed, Learning Disabled, and Emotionally Disturbed Duren misunderstands that students who walk, snooze, study in the library at night during midterms, who or carry books in his vicinity are not threats to him or anyone. I think Duren misunderstands that Persians, Asians, and homeless people aren't his punching bags or target practice.

I believe and hope Duren misunderstands (quite confidently from the smug pictures and quotes he gives) that he is going to hang on for another two years to get his pension and retire at the age of forty-five after about a half dozen cases of serious brutality and abuse already in eighteen years at UCLA after failing as a Long Beach cop. From what we already know, this guy pulls off a violent attack on average every three years, starting with his first year on the job at UCLA. By all accounts, this freaky thug should be suspended and on very thin ice.

What Duren incidents are unreported? What Duren incidents have been covered up? UCLA, in respect for rule of law, civilization, tolerance, and academic freedom must come clean on Duren and out with the truth.

Maybe there aren't 'misunderstandings.' Maybe Duren understands something that most of us don't: it seems that police can state they feel or felt threatened and that this means that they can get away with whatever force they use to 'defend' themselves. All they need is cover of darkness, closed doors, or a blue wall of silence and solidarity to cover-up abuses of power.

Duren used this 'threat so self-defense' excuse three times in his career. The first time was with Zhong who 'threatened him' by interacting him while gripping text books with a hand that could become a fist, sort of like unwieldly brass knuckles but made of paper. The second time was with the homeless guy #2 that he chased into a bathroom and shot. Accounts differed, and Duren's is that the homeless guy was going for his gun. In the most recent case last week, Duren thought the threat came about as a result of the student going limp. This guy is over-using the 'threat so self-defense' is justified excuse beyond believability.

I think the 'threat' that Duren misunderstands or misrepresents is the threat to his career for abusing people and power. This mix-up is felicitous for Duren, as it seems that 'self-defense' or even thinking that a policeman is threatened (or testifying to it) gives the police wide latitude for abusing their victims by blaming them. Last year the Supreme Court found in Castle Rock v. Gonzales that the Police can choose to ignore court orders of protection or even cries for help and danger if that is what they feel is the best thing to do their jobs, even if that means that people get kidnapped and killed while they ignore repeated calls for their help, putting off the complaints repeatedly, and then finally going out to dinner instead. Scalia said for the majority decision that "police retain discretion in their crime-fighting methods and tactics..." and certainly self-defense would be the police's prime directive, certainly more than having dinner during an emergency.

There is s fine line between defense and offense, and I'm finding that it is intentionally and increasingly blurred to serve nefarious interests. Lots of nations are developing bioweapons against the Geneva conventions under the self-defense ruse. That is, the new deadly strains are developed (even using recombinant DNA) so we can develop defenses for them!

It is high time that all police officers have portable video recorders on their uniforms recording every moment of their time on the peoples' clock. This should not be edited or editable, and this should be stored in an independent location in an archive as a public record.

What does this repeatedly abusive Duren guy have on UCLA??!! Or is he married or related to someone on the PD or the review board?

The fact that the Taser Cop has kept his job despite several repeated violent abuses over the years, as well as being lauded as officer of the year, sends a scary signal about UCLA's views of policing power. All these threatening cover-up cops and the taser cop should be immediately suspended pending the investigation so that students can be safe on campus from the police squad.

For its own protection, the UCPD should get this cadre off campus. If not, they shouldn't be surprised if students set up defense squads to protect themselves from the UCLA campus police. The police gang is lucky that the students didn't pile on them and pummel them, since they were out-numbered by the students. On the other hand, maybe these campus police goons had guns on them. I wouldn't put it beyond these UCLA Taser and cover up goons to kill or maim in such a situation, especially if they stand to get rewarded for such behavior.

If these officers stay on, then the lesson that UCLA is imparting to its students and the world is that 'might makes right' and that the police have the guns and make the rules and we need to tow their line. Is this the new world order that UCLA is preparing/conditioning students for?

If not, then UCLA should make a much more restrictive and prudent policy about its police carrying weapons, that perhaps only the most circumspect ones will have shocking or lethal weapons. I had no idea that campus security carried Tasers!

But silly me, I didn't realize that the Philadelphia Police (or any police) has bombs, which they used to get rid of Move and their neighborhood in 1985, and I didn't realize that the NYPD has tanks, which they used when they cleared squatters from Alphabet City in 1995.

Ironically, it seems that UCLA brought in the Tasers in 2004 as a reaction to Duren's nearly deadly use of force when he confronted a homeless guy in the bathroom. This was Duren's second rough run-in with the homeless. The first one led to him brutalizing student Zhong, threateningly carrying books, while witnessing Duren and colleague's Rodney-Kinging a homeless man (to paraphrase hearsay of Duren).

Is it really necessary to have firepower to make sure studying students have their IDs with them? Can't the campus police call the base and see if the name matches the database from the registrar's office if a student forgot his ID? Maybe more campus police should have radios, and much fewer of them should have nightsticks, tasers, and guns.

Maybe Duren and his accomplices in uniform should be cleaned out of UCLA and given jobs where they can work off their rage and ganglike thug behavior doing something constructive with their hands and their might, far away from weapons. Our society is far too dependent on services and militaristic 'services.' We need a lot more factory, labor, dock, and farming jobs for guys like this, because our society and economy has changed and left no place for them to be productive, and therefore they will commit crimes as criminals or as criminal police if they are more bureaucratically inclined. Too many machines and computers, and not enough labor anymore. In the old days Duren would be a village idiot, but he'd have a place to fit into the village, rather than riding through some sort of patronage service/military economic mill where he gets away with nearly killing students and homeless people because of his existential frustration.

When things go badly, they go well for Team Bush

2006-10-04T19:09:00.000-04:00

The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Condi Axis, with Bush as its Goofy-Faced Simulated-Tuff-Talkin'-Guy, are a cancer on our country and the world.

They have used whatever means at their disposal to get their objectives met: high energy prices and high military materiel prices, and maybe even population reduction behaviors (wars) thrown in to keep folks fearful, united, and with the added bonus of thinning out the herd. More stuff for them, with less competition and inflation.

They used the religious right, the conservatives, the neo-cons, tandem terrorist events (2001's plane bombings and anthrax), and probably even Israel (the recent Lebanon debacle to test out new urban anti-muslim-insurgency techniques and technologies) to further their goals. Cheney owns Halliburton stock, Condi was a Chevron Board Member (which while she was on its board they named a super tanker after her), Rumsfeld's probably heading to Carlyle Group, and the Bushes own Carlyle, and are owned by their Saudi brethren to whom they owe a lot.

The world realized that we in the USA were on our own a while ago. The American Left realized it by 2003 or 2004.

At this point, even brow-heads like John Murtha and Tom Ridge and conservatives with brains like William F. Buckley realize that this Axis is playing only for itself.

The worse things get for everyone else, the better they get for Cheney-Rumsfeld-Condi-Bush. These guys are pirates.

'There is chaos under the skies, and the situation is excellent' - Mao. As Barb Bush said about the poor in the Houston stadium after Katrina blew them there: 'It is scary, but this is working out quite well for them.' I think that this quote can apply to her brood much more accurately.

NeoLogism - Simcurity

2006-06-17T04:02:00.000-04:00

Here's a new word invented by someone else - Simcurity.

Simcurity is a public show of simulated security rituals meant to demonstrate to the public by authorities that 'something' is being done 'against terrorism' that inconveniences many, but simcurity doesn't actually provide any or much actual security, just a show of force and authority to convey a feeling of security.

Ironically, or perhaps not so, these ritual shows that we often must comply with foster an ongoing underlying sense of insecurity (due to prolonging the after-effects of terrorism), and simcurity also conditions the public to comply with authorities' demands such as lining up, taking off our shoes, answering questions, and presenting identification when we've done nothing wrong (while terrorist supporters and terrorists go free).

It is sort of a shell game in which the public is distracted and terrorized by authorities, while the terrorists and their financiers do their things. At the very least it is difficult and dangerous to find and confront terrorists and their networks. Nonetheless, Johnny Walker Lindh the teenage Marin convert was able to meet Osama and choose an assignment as a terrorist or a Taliban member. However, despite the dangers and difficulties infiltrating terror networks (look at what happened to Danny Pearl), there may be other internal circumstances which further complicate such activities and policies, such as industries' ties with oil producers that may not want those networks blatantly confronted.

This is reminiscent of the recent-post-World-War-2 era in which Nazi agents were recruited into the US to provide anti-Soviet information, which these Germans did quite well. They provided plenty of information and some interesting stories, exaggerating the capabilities of the USSR, which made these agents seem more valuable to the US, causing us to build an arms race against the USSR with whom we were allied with against the Germans, and in so doing enabled the USSR to justify its own arms build-up against the US. Meanwhile the populations of both nations were terrorized by the prospect of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). This situation continued for forty years, scleroticizing both nations, but greatly benefiting the 'security' apparatuses of both nations at a cost of several trillion dollars, freedoms, and lives during that Cold War Era. Our military-security state still hasn't been able to adapt to the post Soviet war as we continue ordering the development and manufacture of multi-billion dollar weapons systems and classes of ships, planes, and tanks to fight the USSR which dissolved in the early 1990s.

This 'save the Nazi spies' operation was recently elucidated with the revelations that the US enabled Adolf Eichman to escape from Germany and then shielded him from prosecution or justice for fifteen years until Israeli agents managed to capture him in South America. I believe that this paralleled or was part of Operation Paperclip, in which the US actively recruited and integrated the Nazi spy/intelligence network into its intelligence ranks or as consultants.

But back to the present, pasted below for our public debate and information is an article about a security expert who thinks that much of today's security rituals are a huge waste of time and money, and feed into a strengthened police state in the U.S.A.

A state of security should not be confused with a budding Security State, which is built on Simcurity, a false feeling of security which breeds insecurity leading to loss of liberty.

Tales from the Cryptographer
Security guru Bruce Schneier busts the myths of post-9/11 safety measures

by Ken Picard (06/07/06).

Bruce Schneier has little patience for pointless security measures. As an internationally acclaimed cryptographer and security expert who travels extensively for work, he encounters them every day. Most airline passengers probably have wondered whether taking off their shoes for airport screeners accomplishes anything. Schneier not only understands why it doesn't, he can explain why it actually make us less secure. As he puts it, "If we're relying on airport screeners to prevent terrorism, it's already too late. After all, we can't keep weapons out of prisons. How can we ever hope to keep them out of airports?"

Schneier, 43, has the same assessment of the National Security Agency's controversial program of eavesdropping on American citizens. While advocates of so-called "data-mining" projects claim they can help foil future terrorist plots, Schneier contends that they're not just costly, time-consuming and an invasion of privacy; they're also ineffective at catching terrorists. He argues that when it comes to defending homeland security, the real choice we need to make isn't between security and privacy. It's between liberty and a police state.

Schneier should know. As founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a global Internet security firm, he is considered an authority on emerging security threats. Schneier has appeared in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, USA Today, Wired and The Economist. He's been interviewed on National Public Radio and CNN, and publishes a free monthly newsletter called "Crypto-Gram," which has more than 100,000 subscribers. He has also testified before Congress on national security issues. Schneier's book, Applied Cryptography, is considered such a seminal work in the field of secret codes that author Dan Brown used him as a "realistic background detail" in The DaVinci Code.

Schneier's latest book, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, explains to the non-expert many of the overarching principles of security, from securing ATM machines to safeguarding nuclear secrets. Next week, he is a featured speaker at a daylong seminar in Montpelier, entitled "Privacy: How Much Is Left?" It is sponsored by the ACLU-Vermont.

Seven Days interviewed Schneier by phone during a recent layover at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.

SEVEN DAYS: You began your career as a cryptographer. How did you become an expert on security in general?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: A lot of the methodology and formal ways of thinking we develop for computer security have a lot of applicability to real-world security -- to airplanes, ID cards. Everything involves a computer these days.

SD: It seems as though understanding security is less about understanding the technology than the human psychology it's predicated on.
BS: I think the human factors are much more important. Knowing what technology can and can't do is vital, but too often people believe that technology can solve the human problem. It can't. Burglaries are a great example. Burglaries have been a problem for 5000 years. We use technology to control it, but we don't solve the problem.

SD: You're in an airport right now. Of all the security measures implemented since 9/11, what's the most absurd?
BS: The ID checks. There have been exactly two things that have improved airport security since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door and teaching passengers that they have to fight back. This whole ID check everywhere is ridiculous. Everybody has an ID. So what? Osama bin Laden has an ID. All the 9/11 hijackers had IDs. You can fly under a fake name and a fake ID really easily. It's pure security theater.

SD: What's the focus of your presentation in Vermont?
BS: I'm going to try to paint a picture of the future of privacy. In the modern technological world, what are the logical extensions of today's technology that we're likely to see? How many years will it be before a "life recorder" is a reasonable thing to carry? That's something that you'll wear on your lapel that'll audio-record everything that happens to you. That's probably only five or six years away. Nobody will mug you because you have your life recorder as evidence. Surveillance technologies come about because more of our transactions are being done by computers, and computers make records. Instead of putting a quarter into a tollbooth, we use an EZ Pass. Instead of paying cash, we pay with credit cards. Records are generated, and as the storage [cost] drops to free, and the processing [cost] drops to free, more records are saved.

SD: What's wrong with this enormous aggregation of data?
BS: It's very troubling because it goes to the heart of liberty and individuality. The right to do things while not being watched is very fundamental to humanity, whether we sing in the shower or have private conversations with friends. If we are constantly under gaze, we can't experiment as human beings. When we know we're being watched, our lives are altered, even if we're doing nothing wrong . . . Amazon can collect my data -- actually, I like it when they present me with books I might want to buy -- and we gladly trade data for convenience. What we don't like is when we lose control over it, when it goes into the hands of data brokers and is used for things we're not aware of.

SD: What's the biggest threat to our privacy?
BS: The confluence of corporate and government interests. Right now, data that is illegal for the government to collect they buy from corporations. And, data that corporations can't possibly get they buy from the government. So there's this confluence. And it's not because someone is being malicious. It's because that's where technology is leading us. Corporations are not public charities. They will do whatever will make them the most profit that's legal.

SD: Have we already fallen too far down the rabbit hole?
BS: We're living in a very unique time. The cameras are everywhere, yet you can still see them. ID checks are ubiquitous and you know they're going on. Ten years from now, you won't see the cameras. All the ID checks will be RFID [radio frequency identification] or face recognition, and will happen without your knowledge. Surveillance will just fade into the background of society.

SD: Is data mining useful?
BS: It depends. Data mining's great success story is credit-card fraud. Data mining systems comb through all of our transactions looking for patterns of credit-card thieves. And they catch them. Why does that work? A bunch of reasons. First, there's a reasonable percentage of credit cards stolen each year, so the number of bad guys you're looking for is high. Second, credit-card thieves follow pretty regular patterns you can look for. They have standard profiles. Third, the cost of a false negative isn't that great. If you catch 25 percent of the credit-card thieves with this system, that's fantastic. If you miss 75 percent, so what? The business is still profitable. Four, the cost of a false positive is very low. You get a call from a credit-card company saying, "Did you buy a big-screen television in Omaha today?" You say yes, and life goes on.

SD: Why doesn't this work for national security?
BS: When you apply this to terrorism, you get completely different answers. First, terrorists are extremely rare. Two, terrorists don't have defining patterns you can search for . . . How many of us change jobs each year? Change friends? Changing your baseline is normal. Terrorists are like any other group of people planning an operation, whether it be a surprise birthday party or a bank robbery. The only difference is that their operation is illegal.

SD: What else?
BS: The cost of false negatives is very high. Security is a tradeoff, and if you build a system that misses 75 to 90 percent, it's ineffective. Lastly, the cost of false positives is very high. It's a two-week FBI investigation. We saw this in the first NSA eavesdropping scandal. The New York Times reported that there were about 1000 people that this system had the FBI investigate. Every one of them was a false alarm. That's completely wasted time and effort.

SD: Is there a fundamental security flaw the government is missing?
BS: It's not a flaw. If you look at what they're doing, it makes sense [to them]. If you were a government official, you want to err on the side of more visible security . . . There's a propensity for things that are visible, so spending money on Arabic translators is not as good as fingerprinting foreigners. It looks like you're doing something.

SD: So, we ask people to take their shoes off in the airport because there was one shoe bomber.
BS: You just have to be thankful he wasn't an underwear bomber.

SD: Is profiling the answer?
BS: We all profile. The difference is smart profiling versus dumb profiling. If you see a guy running at you with a bloody knife, you profile. Maybe he's a butcher chasing a woman who forgot her change. Maybe he's not. But you have to profile the right things. Racial and sexual profiling don't work because you're inviting the bad guys to not meet the profile. When you fall back on stereotypes, that's when you fall blind to the real threats.

SD: Is it possible for people to cover their digital footprints?
BS: Probably not . . . Think about trying to live your life without getting into a computer. Buying things with cash is suspicious. You can't rent a car, you can't get on an airplane. Throughout our day we leave digital footprints. If you're the bad guy, you take solace in the fact that everybody does. If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody.

SD: What can we do?
BS: I don't have any tips. We're screwed. The data about us is not controlled by us. The only tip is to get involved politically. It isn't something you solve with "10 easy tips to keeping your privacy." We need legislation, because technology is working against us.

SD: What keeps you awake at night?
BS: The biggest thing to worry about is the alliance of industry and government because it's making things possible that weren't before. There's a great quote from [George] Orwell from the 1940s, which says that basically, police states have been kept in check because they're so inefficient. They're not inefficient anymore. The dream of a dossier on everybody in the country was realized already. ChoicePoint [the credit verification company] has a dossier on everybody in the country because it's their business. A massive police state -- knowing who talks to whom, especially as more of our communication goes on the Internet -- becomes easy. And you don't have to be malicious to do it. You just need to be providing good customer service.

From Seven Days, Vermont's Alternative Weekly.

http://www.sevendaysvt.com/features/2006/tales-from-the-cryptographer.html

NeoLogism - Inclusive Education

2006-06-15T23:58:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about how tired and negative the term Special Ed is. It sounds so smarmy and falsely affirmative. Like having a challenge or disorder is good, making you 'special.' I actually kind of love my ADD, but I don't think it makes me special. I make me special.

It also reminds me of that 1980s SNL Dana Carvey skit with the church lady: "isn't that special?" There was even a character on Comedy Central's Crank Yankers named Special Ed.

Special Education sounds like the students are all retarded, yet retarded people don't like being called retarded because it means stupid, weird, dirty, and frightening. Parents want their kids to succeed and to be special for themselves, not because of their challenges, disabilities, or disorders. They want their kids to cope but to thrive and to do it included in mainstream America, not segregated into a second class class out of site.

I think it is long overdue to rename Special Education. I suggest: Inclusive Education.

Inclusion is a good thing, especially in public education. Also, inclusion appreciates diversity of learning styles.

I am smart, but I need help with organizing and dealing with social situations. If Inclusive Education were available to me in college and graduate school I could have learned and succeeded much more, and gained more skills for the work-world. I'd be more included in school and in work.

Those who oppose or fear Inclusive Education are exclusive, keeping people out.

The Pentagon Explosion Footage Official May 2006 Release Part 1

2006-06-02T23:38:00.000-04:00

Prison Planet has had Pentagon explosion footage for a while.

A couple of weeks ago, to a bit of ballyhoo that we hadn't heard about for a long time, the Pentagon released, officially, its parking lot footage of the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11/01...

Well, let's go to the video itself: first there's smoke coming from the Pentagon, then we see a 'whoosh' approach the Pentagon fast and low with a contrail after it and then we see a huge explosion.

I don't see how an airplane can go so low without damaging poles or the lawn. I don't know if planes even leave contrails at so low an altitude. What was that puff of smoke in the first frame?

It is so funny/strange/sad/scary how the newscasters framed this video: Telling what we were supposed to be seeing and thinking, like hypnotists! And the hype, too. I've seen this video on the web before. I think it was on [URL=http://www.prisonplanet.com]http://www.prisonplanet.org[/URL] .com at least months ago, and it is there to prove that it was a missile hitting the building. This video, at the least, is a public Rorshack test.

[What was going on that week (mid May 2006) in the news? The immigrants/aliens? Karl Rove or Cheney maybe getting involved with the Libby imbroglio? Bush' approval going below 30% to Nixon/Carter/Bush41 levels? Was this after the week that Ray McGovern argued Rumsfeld into the ground, calling him a liar about Iraq? Was this around the time New Orleans was electing its Mayor, with the city still in ruins and population scattered even as the next hurricane season was brewing? Was this the week that USAToday revealed that the NSA has conspired with phone companies and a database company, Choicepoint, to create a massive database of every American phone call for use in datamining connected with our voter registrations, license plates, medical records? Explosive implications and revelations in the face of previous lies.

Was this explosive video's release some sort of stimulus to make us fearful and united, like the old color coded warnings that were lated revealed to be politically manipulative?

Really, I don't see how the timing of its release, blamed on Moussaoui's trial being over, a month after the Moussaoui trial ended, was linked to that trial, or even how it was relevant to it in the first place... The lies just keep on coming with this administration. Do they ever tell the truth?]

Then there's other surveillance videos that we know about, like from the (Sheraton?) hotel and the (Citgo?) gas station, still unreleased, but seized by the FBI on the day of the attacks. And there's the other ones we don't know about, since we can reasonably assume that the Pentagon probably has more video footage of what's going on around the building than the one from a crappy parking lot camera. I've seen better Predator surveillance footage of a distant battlefield from the 1990s. And doesn't the Pentagon have second-to-second satellite pictures on Washington DC?

25 years of a missile standoff against the USSR, and the Pentagon isn't protected against missiles?? Aren't missiles smaller and faster than large commercial airliners? The Pentagon doesn't have anti-aircraft working?

According to a local paper in Florida in mid September 2001, see [URL=http://www.cooperativeresearch.org]http://www.cooperativeresearch.org[/URL] Cooperative Research's section, An Interesting Day for the link, Bush' Sarasota resort had anti-aircraft installed on the roof of his resort on 9/10/01. What, they took it off from the Pentagon?? Only one anti-aircraft battery for the east coast? The Pentagon needs to hold a bake sale or something!

It seems weird that we'd protect Tokyo, Tapei, Seoul, Ankhara, and Berlin better than we'd protect Washington DC and NYC. Especially since we've spent TRILLION$ on defense since WW2 and sacrificed universal healthcare for this advanced protection, which doesn't even work for us the one day we really needed it.

Then, what was the Chain of Command doing that morning, hours after multiple hijackings, allowing our capitol's military headquarters to go unprotected?! So many people stepped off duty during that period, and then there's all the folks kind of missing or out of town that day, including the Prez, VP, Chief of Staff. And there's Minetta and Cheney's conflicting accounts of their whereabouts and schedules and who was doing and saying what....

Then, what about no fighter planes defending the skies during multiple hijackings that have been going on for hours? I don't see how Payne Stewart's jet can get escorted in 1999, but the Pentagon and NYC go unprotected, and when they are finally protected after it is too late, it is from more distant bases hundreds of miles away?

And then these guys who 'let it happen' all keep their jobs or get medals or promotions, and all the whistleblowers or folks trying to prevent the attacks either die, get fired, threatened, demoted, run out of town or the agency, told to shut up or step off...

It is mind boggling how little sense the official conspiracy story makes. The only thing that does make sense is a conspiracy to make those attacks happen, or to help them along. In a way, maybe they ostensibly screwed up Irag (so the military gets to stay there while the Iraqis kill each other), and we seemingly screwed up the Katrina response even though there were naval vessels with rescue supplies nearby (yet this miscommunication makes Lousiana more reliably Republican, since N.O.'s Democratic Blacks are scattered across the nation).

As a result, we believe that the country and the world is ungovernable, that government services are a waste of money, and that even if the military only works minimally well, it is the only thing that works at all, so throw more money and power at it. There's always force.

[Then, we are 'prepared' if the next big emergency happens, even bigger than the DC and NYC attacks of 2001, which after all the horror were just four planes and four buildings and three thousand people dead followed by the Anthrax attacks, killing less than a dozen and terrorizing the liberal media and congress.

What if something big happened? Like an epidemic in which millions are expected to die anyway, then the military gets to quarantine areas and people, move or save whom they want, and either let some undesireables die or facilitate the process... If the phones and news and Internet get cut off from that region, well, that's because all the people in the phone company 'died' or went into the quarantine holding area, or because there were 'rumors' that 'hurt/threatened public safety.'

The beauty of such a plan is that an epidemic kills people, but leaves property intact. Since such an attack is invisible and caused by germs, it is less traumatic than a war or terror attack, caused by people, yet we still have to rely on people in authority with special knowledge and equipment to save us.

Maybe the epidemic would be partially real, or maybe one is disemminated, like what the military did to SF, NYC, and St. Louis in the 1950s which got several people sick, and killed a few... Enough to make us take it seriously. But the disease gets trumped up, so everyone has to fall into line and co-operate or they will not get 'care' or 'help,' or those that are difficult might have to be executed to keep order or they just 'disappear' in the wake of the plague, or maybe some people get the good vaccine, some get placebos, and some get the diseased vaccine, depending on where you fit into in the database that has your political registration cross tabulated with your phone, email, and blog records... ]

I don't understand why so many obvious 9/11/01 questions aren't or weren't investigated or why folks don't seem to give a hoot. Shouldn't we all be on strike? Or constantly protesting in the streets? Those Korean students against the South Korean authoritarians in 1988 put us to shame. Those Russians in 1991 and the Chinese staring down tanks in 1989 put us to shame.

I feel like our country has been caught sleepwalking in a collective nightmare since November 2000. And it is spreading. Like a nightmare it just keeps going, getting worse, and going down stranger and scarier corridors.

People often say that dying in one's sleep is peaceful, but I don't think so. I think some nightmares get so bad that they kill you from the terror, and the terror kills you from your heart spasming in an attack. People glibly write off dying in one's sleep as 'a peaceful way to go,' because it is easier to go through life classifying dying that way to make it easier for the living, so we can 'move on,' 'get closure,' form a scab, 'heal,' and live our daily lives again in a routine as if we'll live forever.

I guess it is just hard enough to make a living and keep it together, rather than be outraged or thinking too much. Otherwise, you could be unemployed, without any health insurance, maybe homeless and hungry...

After all, what's the use thinking, worrying, or striking about it? Our country has cooked up wars since the mid 1840s to advance certain interests, and we've practically genocided the Native Americans and then enslaved blacks for hundreds of years, but life has gone on for those fortunate enough not to be in the line of fire or the prisons...

Why should I be surprised if these attacks were events to give certain people and institutions power and money, amd enough power to let these people kills hundreds of thousands of foreigners already, and maybe even kill millions of Americans in the near future should the military-security-industrial-corporate powers chose to abuse their power further so that they could 'thin the herd' and takes its property, like gathering chips on a poker table.

Psychologists say that the best way to take care of others you care about is to take care of one's self first.

What did Pink Floyd say in that song, Money? I'm alright, Jack; Keep your hands off my stack!

Support Paper Verified Ballot Voting

2006-05-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

Writer to your Congressional Representative to support Congressman Rush Holt's House Resolution to institute paper-trail verified voting across the nation.

I have worked on many campaigns over the past 20 years from getting
politicians on the ballot, to canvassing in person and on the phone for
getting out the vote. I have organized a bi-lingual campaign to get 5000 voters
in Harlem and the Upper West Side registered to vote.

We do not need to throw out a system that works, paper ballots, for a
system that is murky and unverifiable and unsafe: the electronic voting
systems presently mandated by HAVA (Help America Vote Act). Expert after expert attests to the electronic systems ease with which voting results can be tampered.
In addition, nearly all of the electronic voting machine manufacturers have
deep connections with each other and the Republican Party.

These developments are not likely to increase voter participation or
confidence in our democracy. This is serious in that voter turnouts in Baghdad
exceed those of New York City. Democracy is ill when turnover in the peoples' house, Congress, is less than the turnover of the Soviet era Politburo!

It is cruelly ironic that in the wake of the 2000 Florida National
election debacle the 'reform' that we got is the so-called Orwellian-named HAVA. Under the old system I told voters that we needed to get out the vote overwhelmingly to counter any possible miscounts to make victory decisive. But with electronic
voting and the ability to easily cheat without detection, participating in
elections is seemingly becoming a waste of everyone's time. Voting won't even have the appearance of an empty ritual, the last vestige of our democracy.

Incompetent Nincompoops! How we lost Iraq. Or maybe it works out well this way for some?

2006-05-24T10:28:00.000-04:00

Idiocy, or bumbling brilliant boondoggle?

The only halfway competent thing that the Bush 43 Administration does is overthrowing governments, including our own, starting with Florida in 2000, the ridiculous HAVA bill with its unverifiable and hackable electronic voting machines as 'upgrades,' which shoves future cheating into the jaws of 2000's defeat and debacle, and the 2004 Ohio irregularities. Perhaps the neglect of New Orleans, the loss of a major Democratic city, now leaves Louisiana a safer Republican stronghold was a passive let-it-happen overthrow...

Then there is the overthrow of the Taliban, who seem to be making a comeback in Afghanistan. Somehow, our allies allowed Bin Laden to escape, allowing the 'Long War' against 'Terror' to continue indefinitely. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Hamid Karzai is more like the Mayor of Kabul than the President of Afghanistan.

Other overthrows include the various eastern European 'color' revolutions, several of which are now unraveling, as well as Haiti, which stands, and an unsuccessful coup that we backed against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. We probably played a role in 'ousting' Syria from Lebanon with Harriri's mysterious assassination.

Obviously, toppling that statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was most significant, but to what end? Who stands to benefit from this overthrow? Iran! They got rid of Sunni rival and warmongering neighbor Saddam. Their Shiite neighbors in Iraq get a lot more power than they've probably ever had, including control of southern oil fields and ports, and with Iraq being the home to many, if not most Shiite holy places, Iranians have freedom to infiltrate Iraq under religious cover.

Who was behind the Neo-cons' vision of flowers and candies greeting the US soldier liberators and oil funding the reconstruction of Iraq? Iranian backed and Iranian intelligence-connected Shiite Ahmed Chalabi! Remember 'Curveball'? The unreliable drunk falsely describing weather stations as mobile weapons labs? He's Chalabi's close relative (brother or brother-in-law)! The neo-cons have been conned! Or maybe not...

This is sort of like how Bush in 2001 looked into Putin's eyes and saw into his soul that he was a good man. Condi Rice, a so-called Russia/USSR expert, is Bush' foreign policy brains. Now we are in a chilly war with Russia. Perhaps all that Condi Rice knows what to do with Russia is deal with them as a Cold Warrior.

Certainly, our military-industrial complex does a lot better facing off against large nation-state-enemies like Russia and China than we do against cells of terrorists using the Internet, money changers, and messengers to enable the bombing of buildings, planes, and public spots. It is especially hard to fight terrorists with deep and enduring links to our 'friends and allies' in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan!

The only WMD attacks against the USA have their origins in the US military! The most publicized attacks, 2001's anthrax attacks against Democratic Senators and media outlets, have their origins in US weapons labs. Yet these attacks were used to rush through the mysteriously prepared so-called-Patriot Attack, er Act, that was so long that Congress wasn't even able to read it. Miracle how such a huge document was ready so soon, a couple of weeks, after the plane bombings of September 2001. These anthrax attacks were also used to justify beating the war drums against Iraq, since at the time it was intoned that: 'only Iraq could have the capability do such an attack.' Months later, the genetic strain for the anthrax was traced to US weapons labs, developed in the USA, and the trail of this terrorist seems to have gone cold.

Other such WMD attacks include spraying biological weapons on San Francisco, in New York City Subways, and, I recall, St. Louis, in the 1950s and 1960s, to test how biological attacks would work. Supposedly, this secret research was done for defensive purposes, but the line between defense and offense is not always so clear... Many people in SF fell ill due to these tests, as hospitals filled up with people suffering from pulmonary problems shortly after the tests. Much of the testing was supposed to be done with 'benign' bacteria, none of it happened with the consent or knowledge of the public, some of it led to actual illnesses, which the public health community was not notified about at the time. It took decades for this research to be quietly disclosed through research and dogged Freedom of Information Act requests.

All this to say, maybe the US was played by Iran to invade Iraq, or maybe the US is really in cahoots with Iran... It was several people in the current Bush administration with connections to the Iran-Contra Scandals in which the neo-cons, using Israelis and Saudi Arms dealers to arm the Iranians with missiles and aircraft parts against Iran's enemy and our ally at the time, Iraq. Strange all the internecine alliances and enemies in the mid-East. The Bushes are close with the House of Saud and the House of Bin Laden, both of which are supposed to be enemies of Iran. It defies logic. There is also some evidence that Bush 41 and the Reagan campaign worked with the Iranians to delay the release of the US hostages in Iran to ensure Carter's defeat and Reagan's election.

Before the US invasion of Iraq, I hoped that the US would create a new stable ally in Iraq, one that could be a counter-balance against Saudi oil power, especially if Al Qaida takes over neighboring Saudi Arabia. It would also give the US a reliable base from which to invade Saudi Arabia should terrorists take over the Saud regime. In addition, with our foothold in Afghanistan, we have Iran almost completely straddled.

The only clear winner in this mess seems to be Iran, Saudi Arabia, OPEC, and the oil companies enjoying windfall profits, military contractors, the burgeoning military-intelligence budget and powers, and military service providers like Kellogg Brown and Root, Booz Allen, Blackwater Security, Halliburton, and the private military investment consortium, the Carlyle Group. The later two firms' growth benefiting many Bush and Cheney family and friends with the nexus between rising energy prices and demand for military products.

Hatfil (the Anthrax Attacker Person of Interest), Mobile Iraqi WMD Labs, and Judy Miller

2006-05-04T13:41:00.000-04:00

The blog linked here makes a fascinating connection between Judy Miller, Stephen Hatfil the Anthrax attacker 'person of interest,' and the failed project to build and find Iraqi WMD labs.

I look forward to checking up on this blog's citations!

I always wondered why part of the US government never bothered to plant a bioweapons lab into Iraq. The involvement of world-class expert Hatfil in the 'search' for the lab now makes sense. Obviously, the Army and Intelligence could just go by Curveball and Hatfil's diagrams or 'police sketches' based on them if they wanted to search for the labs. However, upon finding such labs they'd be scrutinized and they would have to be credible via scientific method. Hence, bring in the US expert, since it would be too risky to force Iraq's Dr. Germ to fabricate the labs.

But, based on what we heard from the 2 former CIA officers this week (was it on 60 Minutes or MSNBC?), the highest levels of the Whitehouse and the CIA knew before the war that such labs didn't exist, according to a Saddam Regime mole on our payroll.

Therefore, the involvement of Hatfil indicates that we were going to plant a real mobile WMD lab into Iraq, and purport it to be Iraqi. A false flag operation.

But someone else in the government, through checks and balances, put a stop to this somehow... Perhaps it was Valerie Wilson Plame.

It is typical of the Bush43 regime to let the shit roll down-hill, compmentalized, letting some lower level person take the fall.

The circularity/insularity of this cast of characters: Libby, US Bioweapons Production and covert ops, false flags, Hatfil, and Judy Miller is also typical of this regime.

With regard to Plame/Wilson I would also like to point out that the top counter-terrorism experts and whistle blowers serving our government have all met opposition, attack, gag orders, or even death.

John O'Neill was hounded out of the FBI because his colleagues stole/lost his laptop during a conference when he left a meeting room for a phone call. O'Neill was asking too many questions about the Saudis. He lost his life a few weeks later during the WTC attacks/bombings.

http://enzotitolo.blogspot.com/2006/04/triple-leak-hypocrisy-these-leaks-and.html

Linda Franklin, an FBI counter-terrorism analyst died from a gunshot while she was leaving a Home Depot during the Beltway 'Sniper' Shootings spree in October 2002. She worked with distinction at the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the only FBI division slated at the time to move to Homeland Security. Ms. Franklin was a cyber-security expert. Her murder was not tried or thoroughly investigated, since there were so many other charges against Army veteran and Nation of Islam convert John Allen Muhammad. It seems strange to me that the FBI wouldn't do their own investigation and push for a prosecution against the murderer of one of their own.

http://enzotitolo.blogspot.com/2006/04/triple-leak-hypocrisy-these-leaks-and.html

Valerie Plame Wilson was a top WMD investigator for Iran and Africa; she and her assets are blown and endangered.

Sibel Edmonds has gag orders on her.

And the guys in the DIA who discovered Mohammed Atta's cell were told that Atta was off limits nearly a year before the attacks, and they are muzzled in the Able Danger Operation affair....

I've also lately been intrigued by the fine line that exists between defense and offense, intelligence and counter-intelligence, and terrorism and counter-terrorism. Why are we making the Ames strain of Anthrax bioweapons? For defense? I suppose that this is our way around the ban on WMD that we signed a treaty for...

9/11/01 Conspiracies

2006-05-04T03:05:00.000-04:00

The official 9/11/01 story *is* a conspiracy theory. It is a narrative about a group of men in and out of Afghanistan who bombed America with planes.

It is also the story of a massive series of failures on the part of higher ups at the FBI, the Air Force, the CIA, the White House, and probably other agencies, despite dozens or even hundreds of warnings.

It is also the story of how those in government obstructed the investigations of these attacks, and how those higher-ups in the FBI, CIA, Air Force, NSC/Whitehouse that were so 'clotted' got to either keep their jobs, get medals, or promotions, while those who blew the whistle and still try to blow the whistle on them were gagged or had their careers limited.

The Anthrax attacks referenced the 9/11/01 attacks and their weaponized strain was initially stoking the fears of a state sponsor of terrorism using government produced WMDs, and Iraq was the bogeyman. Meanwhile, the main Senate dissidents against the so-called Patriot Act --Daschle and Leahy -- were targeted.with an Anthrax strain that was later traced to US military labs!

But that didn't emerge until after they changed their votes. Seems like the Anthrax investigation has gone nowhere. Meanwhile, some of the contractors serving the biological weapons industry profited handsomely from the scare, making a killing off vaccines that never seemed to work. The owner of this contractor, BioPort,Mr. Al-Hibri, has ties to the UAE and the Carlyle Group, which places investments in many armaments manufacturers. You might want to look into Project Jefferson or Operation Jefferson.

Also, whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? How could we only box him in on three sides? How could this jihadist, whom the CIA trained, get so elusive, when a Marin teenager named Johnny Walker could shake his hand?

Meanwhile, who in the US has benefited from these attacks and their ensuing long wars? The military budget has ballooned, including military contractors and privatized services providers like Halliburton and KBR, which also profited from the Vietnam war, and then set up shop in Saudi Arabia after that gig ended.

I recommend reading Professor David Ray Griffin's excellent books on 9/11/01's attacks. The main point of his works is that we need a thorough independent investigation of the events around the attacks on 9/11/01.

Another great source of information, based on linked or cited mainstream media sources, is http://www.cooperativeresearch.org

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&projects_and_programs=sibelEdmonds

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=militaryExercises

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&projects_and_programs=ableDanger

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay.jsp?article=essayaninterestingday

I understand that it is shocking to consider that part of country could allow or foster fellow countrymen being killed for power or profit, but consider that the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved and submitted to President Kennedy Operation Northwoods. ABCNews.com broke this story recently and http://www.wikipedia.com has a good article on this.

Northwoods was a set of US plots to foment a war with Cuba to make it look like the war was Cuba's fault. These plots included hijacking a US plane, diverting it, and then destroying a decoy plane and holding funerals for the passengers. Another plot involved the Navy blowing up one of our own ships and killing our own sailors and blaming Cuba for it. President Kennedy cancelled this operation.

Less than two years later we refocused on Vietnam, using the 'mistaken' and later found to be trumped up Gulf of Tonkin incidents. I think James Bamford, the NSA expert originally scooped that story 30 or 40 years after it happened. However, trumped up wars are not unique to modern times. James Polk and McKinley's administrations used phony provocations to expand America's empire.

My take on these incidents is that the attitude behind them is: one must break a few eggs to make someone's omelet.

Save Net Neutrality

2006-05-03T23:01:00.000-04:00

Please act immediately to save the Internet.

The Internet represents one of the few growth areas of our economy since the 1960s.

In addition, the Internet when it is neutral and free magnifies democracy. That is, it is a source of affordable communication (speech and press), and affordable information (press).

It is said that knowledge is power; through the Internet anyone can look up encyclopedia articles or news archives, and anyone can set up these resources and help maintain them. If Net Neutrality is destroyed because access to and from the Internet is sold to the highest bidder, or the ones that have a deal or agree with the network providers, then our democracy's newest hope is greatly diminished.

If Network Neutrality is destroyed, this decade's emerging businesses like last decade's Yahoo! and Google, which pay well and employ many, will be stifled. Small businesses will not be able to be nimbler than larger corporations who will use the Network to outsource our good-paying jobs. Small businesses are the engine of our economy and of social mobility.

Save the Internet and save our democracy and our economy!

Sign the http://www.SaveTheInternet.com petition and they'll send your message to your Congressfolk. Our actions are making a difference!

2006 NYS Attorney General Candidates' 9/11/01 Questions

2006-04-27T23:40:00.000-04:00

2006 is an election year for the Office of NYS Attorney General.

I'm quite disappointed that our current AG, Eliot Spitzer, has been stonewalling an investigation of the attacks on 9/11/01 and how they affected NYS. I was a big Spitzer fan, but I'm not voting for him, unless in the waning days of his tenure he opens up an investigation with subpoena powers. Not likely, word has it that a major staffer in his office has some links with folks that would rather not open up this can of worms.

Then there's AG candidate Mark Green, another old advocacy favorite of mine. He's the author of 'Reagan's Reign of Error,' written over twenty years ago at the height of Reagan's popularity, and Green is a former 'Nader Raider,' who was Mayor Giuliani's nemesis for years in his role as NYC Public Advocate. Giuliani so hated Green that he attempted to amend the NYC Charter so that, in the case of the Mayor's vacating of that office, the Public Advocate couldn't step in as acting-Mayor through the next Mayoral election. Giuliani further put it to Green when he pretty much drafted Michael Bloomberg to run as his successor, necessitating a party switch for the lifelong Democrat (since he would have lost in that party's primary), and the limousine liberal putting up tens of millions of his own dollars to finance his campaign.

Interestingly, in the aftermath of the 9/11/01 attacks on the WTC, during the campaign between Bloomberg and Green, Giuliani attempted to extend his term beyond his charter mandated two-term term limit. Giuliani, and many people in the wake of the shocked aftermath of the terror attacks, believed that only Giuliani could possibly govern NYC. The courts didn't agree, and neither did Bloomberg, his hand-picked successor, who said that he could govern the city in 2002, or during any emergency, just fine.

Green, however, abandoned his good-government and rule-of-law principles and said that he'd step aside for Giuliani to continue his term throughout the duration of the emergency! This waffling or pandering showed Green to be perceived as a wimpy opportunist. Perhaps he thought he was being magnamimous, or he doubted his abilities. It was an awful posture for Green to assume, since Giuliani supporters weren't won over, since Giuliani hated Green even more than Green hated him, and Green's supporters hated Giuliani even more than they loved Green!

This, and a bruising Democratic primary battle with Ferrer (who ran in 2001 as a conservative Democrat), enabled Bloomberg, a newly converted Republican in a town with 5x as many Democrats to squeak past Green, who had previously served as a two term Public Advocate garnering the highest percentage of votes in those elections. Bloomberg did a pretty good job, balancing the budget, creating a promising 311 NYC information line, keeping crime rates low, and getting smoking banned in bars. His major flaw being the brutal clampdown on protestors and passers-by during the Republican National Convention in which people were swept of the streets and put into pre-emptive detention for days, which is illegal, to prevent lawful protests in Manhattan during the convention. Bloomberg ruled the table, and he handily beat Ferrer in the last election in which Baghdad's voter turnout in their last elections exceed NYC's by more than two-to-one.

Green sat the last election cycle out, but some of us New Yorkers and former Green fans still remember his cave-in to post-9/11/01 government fear mongering, personnified by Giuliani's ghoulish power-grab attempt. Mark Green as NYS Attorney General candidate needs to pledge that he'll investigate the 9/11/01 attacks on NYC, the failure to prevent the attacks, the mysterious circumstances during the attacks, and the failures afterward. At the very least, there are many unanswered questions and many flaws in protecting the public that are either flagrantly negligent or even criminal.

The Village Voice recently raised some questions and issues about the attacks.

But there are things that the NY State AG should specifically investigate including:

Air Defenses of our city failing on 9/11/01:

Why wasn't NYC protected from attacks by the Air Force, especially since the WTC was a previous target, and there was plenty of notice after the first hijacking when the FAA heard early on that they 'had several planes'?

Why did the Air Force send fighters from Cape Cod when there are closer bases?

Did the multiple Air Force war games that day, some of which drilled for multiple hijackings and a plane crashing into a building affect their defense of NYC?

What is being done to prevent this complete defense failure from happening again?

We spend billions on air defenses, why is Tokya and Taipei getting better protection from our Air Force than NYC? Shouldn't NYC have Air Force protection a few minutes away at all times?

Generally, planes that go off course or turn off their transponders are immediately confronted by Air Force planes. Why were none of the hijacked planes intercepted by fighter planes? Has the Air Force corrected this breach of security?

Unusual Stock Trading leading up to the day of the attacks:

Were there unusually high put-option trades (bets that stocks would fall in value) on UA, AA, the insurers of WTC, and some of the major tenants? Who placed these trades? Is there a pattern? What is the outcome of the investigations done so far?

Doesn't the SEC and the CIA monitor unusual trading volumes, sometimes in real time? Did this happen the week before 9/11/01?

Why did WTC 7 fall when it wasn't hit by a plane? Why did WTC 1 & 2 fall?

The WTC 7 collapse has never been determined nor investigated fully. If a fire took a steel framed building (constructed in the 1980s) down for the first time in history, then this needs to be determined. Or if the PA was scrimping somehow on construction and maintenance, then this needs to be determined before they rebuild the WTC.

Why would three skyscrapers fall from fires when this has never happened before in history?

Some reporters and firefighters report hearing explosions before and after the planes hit. Why did some building employees report explosions in the basement?

Were Columbia University's Lahmont Doherty Geological Observatory (which measures local earthquakes) measurements coinciding with the timing of the building collapses, or did they register shocks before the collpses?

Did the EPA do anything illegal or irresponsible in declaring downtown safe so soon after the attacks?

Why was the evidence after the attacks removed so quickly and sold off overseas so quickly?

This was evidence at a crime scene. Was it scrutinized fully? If not, who made this decision and why?

Also, if the towers did fall because of the planes' fuel, then examining the evidence would make it safer for all buildings that might get hit by a plane. The Empire State Building was hit by a bomber, for example.

Why did the first responders have such failing communications equipment? Wasn't this problem identified after the first WTC attack in 1993? We had the entire Giuliani era to address this problem. What steps were taken during his era?

Has there been progress in the nearly five years since the second attacks?

Why were the exits to the WTC not all working in 2001?

Wasn't this problem identified after the first WTC attack in 1993? Is the PA liable for this repeated failure?

Should the PA have NYS oversight in developing and inspecting the new WTC's emergency systems? Is the PA qualified to be in the real estate development and ownership business?

Is the PA exempt from any building rules that most landlords and developers must comply with? If so, are other PA projects that the public uses, including airports, dangerous or safe? Should the PA's building safety exemptions be modified?

Perhaps the PA should be sticking to developing the ports and the economy with regard to shipping? NYC's economic heritage was based on its shipping, and since the PA took over the port we've lost a great deal of shipping in NYC, while trucks spew gasses and waste that contributes to our population's high asthma rate.

Why did the Port Authority security tell the office workers in WTC 2 not to evacuate and to return to their offices after WTC 1 was hit, especially in light of the previous attack in 1993?

Is the PA liable for this deadly move?

Was the PA putting the perceived needs of their tenants, employers, ahead of their tenants' employees' safety? Can they be trusted again as a safe landlord.

Were there flight recorders/black boxes recovered?

Flight recorders are designed to withstand more intense fires and impacts and few have ever been lost. Some rescue workers reported that the FBI took them. Were they recovered and taken? What information was recovered?

The NTSB is a highly respected authority on air catastrophes. Have they been able to review any of the planes' evidence and make an authoritative report?

Is it true that John Ashcroft and the US military stopped flying on domestic commercial flights before 9/11/01? Were NY'ers given these warnings?

Is it true that members of the Executive Branch took Cipro anti-biotic before 9/11/01 and the ensuing Anthrax attacks in October 2001 which affected NY'ers?

What is the status of the Anthrax Attacker investigation?

We last heard that the strain of the weapon was only found in US labs. Are these labs more secure? Isn't manufacturing biological weapons illegal according to treaties that the US signed?

Is there anything to the 'squibs' or 'puffs of smoke' on video tapes that indicate explosions preceding below the three WTC buildings' collapses?

Is there any evidence that terrorists put explosives in these buildings? Some demolition experts say that the smoke, heat and duration of the fires indicate explosives. Were the planes or the buildings rigged with explosives?

If so, then other attacks might be able to be prevented, and perhaps we can gather more evidence about these attacks so we can find who supplied the attackers.

When you look at this time line of events culled from mainstream articles before and after the attacks, it is clear that there are many patterns and unanswered questions that need investigation, especially from a NYS perspective.

Another Question - EP-3e $

2006-04-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

Presidents Bush and Hu of China had a Whitehouse meeting this week. Media coverage focused on some protocol 'gaffes,' such as our announcing their national anthem as being for the 'Republic of China' (which is Taiwan's name), rather than the Peoples' Republic of China. [In my wildest dreams, I'd love for Taiwan's ex-pats to somehow take over China, but I'm starting to let that one go...]

Then there was the screaming lady (a physician) at the press conference telling Hu that he's doomed, and that Bush should push him for human rights and the encourage the freedom of the Falun Gong. Bush instead told Hu, "You're OK!"

Isn't it strange that this lady got Epoch Times day-Press-credentials (the pro-Falun anti-China broadsheet) for this event? I've already gone off about how male escort Jeff Guckert / Gannon could possibly get such credentials to serve the Bush Administration's propaganda needs. Considering how using the Press ruse has been used to kill world leaders before.. (think of how Al Qaida got Ahmed Shah Massoud of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance on 9/9/2001, and think of how on the morning of 9/11/01 a shabby van with middle eastern men inside wanted to interview the President before he headed to the school.) You'd think that the Secret Service would finally be more careful who is allowed to get those Day Press Passes. Or maybe they were and are careful...

Television stations in China were even more careful, blacking out the screaming lady's spectacle until the US Secret Service literally covered her mouth and pulled her out of there to await charges. The Chinese coverage also 'missed' the mis-appellation of their country's name was mis-translated to the correct name for the benefit of the home crowd. Though it is interesting to think of the many Chinese in America working and in graduate schools catching this. I don't know if they care to compare notes.

The US just makes the darndest mistakes with Chinese diplomacy, like our 'accidental' bombing of their embassy during the 1999 Serbian bombing campaign. There was no way that that could be covered up, and there were some big rowdy demonstrations against the US for that one. I don't blame them. Any tourist map of any city would list where every embassy is. Either we were showing them who's still boss, or someone in that embassy was using it to help the Serbs kill U.S. troops. And the Chinese have a major chip on their shoulders about Western domination of humiliation of their culture, people, and sovereignty going back to the awful Opium Wars. Meanwhile, Chinese memories are long, and when the West was mostly dirty and ignorant, these guys were building a wall to cut us out of their society with abacii, paper money, gun powder, fireworks, and pasta noodles.

Honestly, though, I can't see how an exercise and meditation program is worth persecuting! I've seen these folks demonstrating peacefully and exercising in the parks. They seem perfectly positive and gentle. But then again the French have rioted over ballets, so maybe in China any group with millions of dedicated adherents is a threat to be trampled down on HARD.

Since China went Corporatist/Capitalist (or Neo-Feudal -- more on that neologism another time), they are fine with private property and greed, as long as the Party retains control and full cooperation and compliance. So here's this group of people probably forsaking greed, seeking justice and balance, in a society totally out of balance environmentally and in terms of corruption and extremes of poverty and wealth, and how these extremes serve only a few within their nation and the West... I guess that meditation and t'ai ch'i is revolutionary!

The Falun Gong assert that their thousands of prisoners are being robbed of their body parts, I assume for the Chinese rich or the connected, or maybe on the global market.... It is so shocking as to sound insane, but on further thought, I don't put it beyond the Chinese or the world market to steal prisoners' organs for the benefit of the wealthy and free. And Falun Gong members' organs are likelier to be healthier in that the members exercise, meditate (less damaging stress), and might eat better.

BUT, all these tragic issues and protocol comedies of manners aside (a State Luncheon instead of a dinner? Hu meeting with Bill Gates before the President!), another tense protocol moment between China and the US came to Enzo's mind.

The EP-3 Reconnaisance Plane incident over China in the spring of 2001 was Bush' first crisis. A US crew from an advanced signals monitoring plane (not 'spy plane' since it was not in China) was brought down by a kamikaze Chinese air pilot, Wei Wang. The US asserted that we were in international airspace dozens of miles from Hainan Island. China tends to take an expansive view of what constitutes its territory. And I'm not talking about Tibet or Taiwan. They claim much more sea territory than is internationally accepted in Law of the Sea treaties. If, for example, there is a "China Sea" then I wouldn't be surprised if China were to claim all of it, much like Mexico claiming the entire Gulf of Mexico up to a couple of miles off Florida and Alabama.

The US didn't accept these air and sea territory claims, and the official story was that we didn't fly into their official air space or their plane. Their hotdog suicide pilot almost managed to take our plane out completely, but the US pilot was awesomely skillful, bringing the plane down to a rough landing on the pleasure and military installation island of Hainan. I bet someone on our side would have preferred the plane crashing or being shot down, since the crew, despite an almost free fall speed crash to near-certain death, actually went about destroying their collected data and sophisticated equipment, but much of it survived since the whole thing happened so fast -- this stuff is extremely sophisticated signals and data gathering equipment, perhaps state of the art. We were probably getting good stuff, but the Chinese commenced to take the plane apart and they kept it for quite a while. Meanwhile, US public sympathy for the crew gave the Chinese time to reverse engineer the plane.

Chinese Suicide pilot Wang Wei became a national hero. I think they had a parade and named his high school after him. There might still be a holiday for him. He was definitely called a national hero honored with a day of mourning.

Meanwhile, the US Crew was being interrogated/questioned as 'guests' of the Chinese. They held up quite well, especially considering their ordeals. Bush came off as nervous and tic-y, but Colin Powell kept a straight face. The whole thing ended up being a whose-fault-is-it kind of situation, but the Chinese had our plane and our crew.

It also came down to a payment for 'hosting' the spy 'guests' and for landing 'privileges' that the plane did not ask for in advance. The way it played in the US was that we stated that we 'greatly regretted' that their pilot bumped into us and we didn't have time to ask them to emergency land on their base, and that we 'allowed' the Chinese to 'save face' and translate the US statement as a deep 'apology' for their domestic consumption. It took almost a couple of weeks for all this to play out.

The Chinese billed us one million dollars for taking apart our plane (which we told them that we didn't want them to do), putting it into a bunch of crates to be carried off by a transport plane, and for our pilots' 'hospitality' costs. The US replied with a $34,000 counter-proposal.

My question is: what did the US pay the Chinese for this incident? The closest I can get to an answer is that once we got our airmen back and our plane back in boxes, the Pentagon was planning on paying only the $34,000.

I am sure that the answer to this question is something that the US Department of State and the Chinese Communist Party does not want to be addressed. You can spin an apology/regret translation, but you can't spin a deposited check.

C.S.A. the Confederate States of America

2006-04-12T16:04:00.000-04:00

You don't have to see this movie...

If you wonder what would have happened if the South won the war look at
any newspaper, especially from 1875-1898 (Jim Crow's beginnings), 1916
(the Wilson / KKK / lynchings era) and any day since 1967 (the Nixon
Southern Strategy). The Party of Lincoln is today's Republican GOP. The
formerly racist Democrats of the Civil War era hasn't been able to win
a national election since 1968 without running a Southerner.

Let's face it, the North 'won' the War militarily, but lost the Peace.
I don't know why we bothered to fight to keep states in the union that
didn't want to be a part of it. It seems unconstitutional.

As for slavery, it would have probably died off on its own accord
because the present system of 'wage slavery' is much better for the
ruling class. The land and capital owners don't have to feed, clothe,
house, or care for their employees now. And with mechanization,
transportation, communication, and globalization, wage slavery
employees can be discarded much more easily than capital-intensive
slaves.

Just think of the current immigration/guest worker debate, and look at
our falling wages and increasing wealth disparities in this context.
Think also of the crisis that continues to face Blacks in the USA
today, with so many males incarcerated, the squalid state of public
housing, and all the drugs infiltrating poor populations (much of them
from places like Afghanistan). There is something rotten in the USA
today, and it is subtle so that many of us are unaware of how these
things connect, and who benefits from this continuing disparity. We've
replaced the blatant immorality of slavery with the status quo.

If the North had truly won the War and the Peace, then the Slaves would
have gotten their 40 acres and a mule and things would be a lot better
today.

Maybe this movie would have been more interesting if it were about the
real unrealized USA, if Lincoln weren't assassinated.

A few quick follow-up questions

2006-04-07T18:58:00.000-04:00

o|
Regarding Russia, isn't Condi Rice supposed to be a Russian/Soviet expert? Is she going to be blamed for the US 'losing' Russia? It looks as if they are joining up with China against us, and that we are losing all those Color Elections and Revolutions from last year...
Does George W Bush still feel, when he looks into Putin's eyes, that he can really trust that guy?

o|
Remember Jeffrey Gannon / Guckert, the prostitute turned into a planted
Whitehouse journalist? He threw softballs and got a lot of scoops, including the start of the Iraq War and the Plame Coverup.
Was it ever investigated how he got his credentials to get so close to the President? Someone must have thrown some influence around, or is the Secret Service or FBI completely asleep?
How close to his sources he was? How did he get so much insider access?
Whom was he visiting so often when he wasn't going to press conferences? Did the Whitehouse release those visitor logs?

o|
Last autumn 2005, Harry Reid led a Democratic Senate walkout due to an intelligence committee stonewall. What was that related to? Able Danger? Pre-Iraq War intelligence 'failures?'
Did that committee finally start meeting, making progress and including Democrats? When's the report due?

Just asking...

Triple Leak Hypocrisy - these leaks and lies are killing US!

2006-04-07T16:25:00.000-04:00

It has recently been disclosed in Libby's court documents that on the word of Vice President Cheney President Bush authorized selective leaks of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that was to somehow prove in the media that there were going to be found WMD in Iraq, thus justifying our invasion there on pre-emptive national security grounds.

These grounds were being challenged because after three months in Iraq the WMD weren't found and because American Hero Ambassador Joseph Wilson, experienced in African diplomacy, business, and security issues found in 2002 that the Niger yellowcake Uranium story was probably a canard. He was sent there by the CIA, and he reported that back. Nonetheless, in Bush' 2003 State of the Union Address to Congress, the President repeated this canard. In June of 2003 Wilson started circulating this meme to the press and in July he published an OpEd about it.

At which point the Bush/Cheney Admin started to smear Wilson, his conclusions, and even started spreading the rumor that his wife, a CIA WMD expert, sent him to Niger as a nepotistic boondoggle. Imagine, Niger, one of the poorest places on the planet, being a junket.

Hypocrisy #1:

Wasn't this whole Iraq war supposed to be about enhancing WMD security against terrorists? These leaks might kill US!

The post-invasion lies in July 2003 and the Whitehouse sanctioned leaking, whisper campaigning, and outing of one of the CIA's top African WMD experts probably serious damaged our ability to collect real intelligence on the source and distribution of much of the world's uranium! Africa is a hot spot for Al Quaida, too. What little we could find out before, and we were, let's face it, practically flying blind for our 40 million dollars, now we can find out even less.

The Whitehouse's politically-inspired leaks and character assassination of Wilson and his intelligence officer wife has probably ended their careers as people that can be useful to help guard our national security. Valerie Plame Wilson was one of the world's leading WMD experts. Now she's out of business, and so are her intelligence assets (informers, handlers, sources) across Africa, and forget about the front companies she used. The whole intelligence operation is probably trashed now, and people that were part of it might be at risk now, too.

Plus, our national security is compromised. What we don't know about this region and its uranium resources can sneak up on us without warning, in the form of a mushroom cloud, to use the Administration's terrifying words from 2003.

o|

On a tangentially related issue, how pitiful is it to have much of your staff attack a man's wife to get payback and score political points! And to do all this at reckless disregard for our national security. Isn't this an impeachable high crime? Isn't this traitorous?

Every time Bush puts on his cowboy hat and 'regular tough guy' routine, he is being a hypocrite, because at heart he is a scheming High School girl.

Hypocrisy #2:

Bush is only against national security leaks that affect him politically, like the NSA domestic spying and wiretapping disclosure.

But when his staff leaks on his behalf, it is fine and worth stonewalling investigation for as long as possible, even if those leaks compromise and threaten CIA operatives, their front companies, and their enablers working on active missions.

Meanwhile, let's face it, unless there is a dual impeachment of Bush and Cheney, no one in this Bush Administration debacle is going to serve time for these crimes. Bush will abuse his pardon powers one Friday afternoon or on a holiday weekend and they will all quietly get off, like Cap Weinberger did one Christmas Eve when Bush1 saw Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh got a little too close to proving that fellow co-conspirators in the Reagan Administration sold arms to embargoed enemy Iran [while we were arming their enemy Iraq

(including with WMD)] and used the profits to arm the embargoed hothouse revolutionaries, the Contras, against Nicaragua, and who knows what else was involved in that can of worms...

This whole Patrick Fitzgerald prosecution is like Kabuki Theatre. It will play out in a ritualized stylized format with barely comprehensible gestures eventually signifying nothing (if you don't know Japanese or the conceits of that theatre form).

This sort of limited-term Presidential politics is being played like a football team in which the highest point getter keeps possession of the ball and runs the clock down. That is, they: Lie, stall and stonewall for years and for as long as possible. Keep the public bored and distracted from legalistic details. Keep abusing power. Maybe prop up your friends and distract or rally the public with bombing Iran, an invasion, or a trumped up terror-threat (fear or fervor). Then pardon the whole gang when most aren't looking and after most don't even care.

Hypocrisy #3:

Bush committed in 2003 to finding the leakers of the Valerie Plame CIA Operative's cover and to fire them in 2003.

But Bush knew all along the whole network of leakers and liars, including himself. When is he going to keep his word by firing Cheney, Rove, Hadley, and then resign? Not likely.

It is not enough to Impeach Bush, we must co-Impeach Bush and Cheney.

o| On another, related tangent, I am alarmed and saddened that three of our nation's top counter-terrorist experts have been 'put out of business' during the Bush2 era.

1. Valerie Plame Wilson. WMD/Africa expert.

2. John P. O'Neill was the FBI's top anti-jihadist-terrorism expert from 1995 until he was practically forced out in 2001 due to agency and State department politics when he started making too many connections to the Saudis and wouldn't back down under pressure.

"O'Neill's rise through the ranks at the bureau began to slow as ... by losing a bureau cell phone and Palm Pilot, improperly borrowing a car from a safe house, and losing track of a briefcase with sensitive documents for a short period." (from Wikipedia)

Word has it that O'Neill's colleagues may have 'helped' him lose his briefcase during a staff conference, setting him up. Fed up with all that, he left the Agency and joined the Port Authority as Chief of Security for the World Trade Center in August 2001. He died during the attacks on the WTC the following month.

3. Linda Franklin, an FBI counter-terrorism analyst died from a gunshot while she was leaving a Home Depot during the Beltway 'Sniper' Shootings spree in October 2002. She worked with distinction at the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the only FBI division slated at the time to move to Homeland Security. Ms. Franklin was a cyber-security expert. Her murder was not tried or thoroughly investigated, since there were so many other charges against Army veteran and Nation of Islam convert John Allen Muhammad. It seems strange to me that the FBI wouldn't do their own investigation and push for a prosecution against the murderer of one of their own.

In any case, at least Valerie Plame Wilson is still alive, even though her life is still at risk because of the Bush Administration for serving our country.

These three counter-terrorism experts in the CIA and FBI sacrificed a great deal for our country and accomplished a lot to make us safer.

How the FBI Let 9/11 Happen questions

2006-04-03T21:37:00.000-04:00

Reason magazine, which seems to be a center-right-libertarian publication, gave good skeptical coverage of the FBI's obstruction/incompetence in the lead up to 9/11/01 vis-a-vis the Mousaoui case in this article
"How the FBI Let 9/11 Happen:

Never mind Moussaoui, the smoldering gun was right there all the time"

Since I couldn't find a bulletin board on their site, I respond to its writer here.

Mr. Taylor,

First of all, the official 9/11/01 story is a consipiracy theory. Whenever you get different people banding together to cause something to happen, that is a conspiracy. I'm sorry, but I don't see how your good recent article in Reason debunks the 9/11/01 'conspiracy freaks.' I also don't see how everything is clear now about what happened to our country (now 'homeland' security state) during the summer and autumn of 2001.

Considering how much we don't know about 9/11/01 and how many aberrant things happened leading up to that date and following, the commonly accepted narrative is also actually a freaky theory. The FBI's incompetence that your article highlights is indeed remarkable, but it coincided with simultaneous incompetences across the Federal Government, including the Air Force, the FAA, the CIA, the DoD, the Secret Service, the National Security Council, and the White House.

This was juxtaposed with strange competencies, like allowing the Bin Laden famiily to efficiently leave the country, when most everyone else couldn't charter a flight to hop across the country. The FBI was great at getting the private video tapes of the Pentagon attack, the black boxes, keeping those flight recorders under wraps, and getting the student records of the Florida flight school attackers shortly after the attacks.

Some of the black boxes were supposed to be incinerated/lost, such as the WTC flights I believe, but Atta's passport was found by an agent a few blocks away, intact. The FBI was great at finding that passport.

Before the attacks the FBI didn't stop the flight school terrorists, but within hours they were absconding with their records. Meanwhile, for the first time in its history, the respected and independent NTSB doesn't get to investigate only these plane incidents...

The Air Force couldn't stop the attacks, since for some reason they claimed that NORAD only looked 'out' but they could intercept Payne Stewart's plane in 1999. But they made up for it a few weeks later with a successful regime change in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, a few months later we didn't box Osama in at Tora Bora and he fled to Pakistan, so we have to continue the war on terror, since he's still at large.

You could say that the Federal government is diverse and that some units do better than others, and the same ones might have good days and bad days. But there seems to be a lot of failures that allowed the attacks to happen and allowed the investigations to be stymied. Maybe these incompetents are only good at doing nothing, preventing the 'blame game' when something happens, and somehow making it work to their advantage by getting re-elected, keeping ones pension or even being promoted -- all while replacing our controversial Saudi bases with Iraqi ones to fight 'terror' (even though there's a lot more terror coming from our allies in Saudi and Pakistan), and losing a major Democratic-leaning city in a Republican state, replacing most of the Democrats with golf courses.

Then there's that Anthrax terrorism the following month, targetting Democrats in Congress. I remember two strange news items from that era. The strain was from the US weapons labs, and some of the Florida-based terrorists were hospitalized for what seemed like Anthrax. But before that there was the reputed link to Saddam's labs, and this helped the Patriot Act to sail through Congress. It is strangely efficient again how the Department of Justice can have such a comprehensive set of laws drafted so quickly, but they still haven't had the time after all these years to propose any changes to the hobbling FISA laws. They must be busy with all their post-9/11 prosecutions of Moussaoui and the Dirty Bomber.

Is it true that weeks before 9/11/01 AG Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial flights? What was that about?

The higher ups' obstruction of the Special Agents' good counter-terrorism investigative/prevention work across the nation could indicate that a rogue element of the US government, including the folks in charge of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit and the OBL unit, went beyond 'Let It Happen' to 'Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP).'

If there were to be rogues in government allowing or aiding the attacks on the country, for say, an enhanced security and military state apparatus searching for a new Cold War, wouldn't at least some of them esconce themselves in counter-terrorism?

Here are some other interesting open questions or issues:

1. Of those obstructionist FBI leaders who failed, they failed laterally or upward. Not one of these failures got fired! Meanwhile, the 9/11/01 whistleblowers at the FBI are gagged by unprecedented uses of the State Secrets Act, or they are threatened, investigated, or fired.

From your article: "Samit also testified that he was told pressing too hard to obtain a warrant on Moussaoui would hurt his career."

Not a single person in the CIA or the FBI has been documented to be disciplined, demoted, or fired for pre-9/11/01 counter-terrorism incompetence.

George Tenet got a Medal of Freedom! Frasca and Maltbie are still at the FBI.

I don't know how working for the Federal Government works, but I suppose that being fired for gross incompetence might endanger one's pension, much less pay. It might even make them less healthy if they make their agency full of people who carry guns or deal with crooks look bad.

At least the Stasi would have shot or Gulaged these guys if they failed so miserably! But maybe Frasca and Maltbie didn't 'fail...' Maybe they did 'a heck of a job...'

I believe that the Air Force commander who wasn't there during the hijackings to scramble fighters to protect the Pentagon (!) and the WTC (which was already a known and previously attacked terror target), which were both in no-fly zones was promoted!

In forty years of Cold War with the Soviets, thirty years of which involved fast-moving (faster than commercial aircraft) intercontinental ballistic missiles, it seems strange that the Pentagon doesn't have any defenses to protect the building from missiles or aircraft. If it does, then why didn't they work?

We've spent TRILLIONS of dollars on 'Defense' for decades. Not defending our capitol and its military headquarters from a commercial plane hours after multiple hijackings were happening across the east coast is an utter failure.

Think of the guff we gave Carter for those copters unsuccessfully rescuing the Tehran Embassy hostages because of a sandstorm! At least Carter tried to do something. I don't think a single missile or bullet was fired to defend the Pentagon in 2001. We still have Rumsfeld, the guy who put the Vietnam era to 'rest' so ignominously, in charge there.

But within hours of the Pentagon explosion, all the footage of the occurance is efficiently confiscated by the FBI, never to be publicly shown again.

What about that General who put sticky-notes over Mohammed Atta's face in the 2000 Able Danger investigation? Why was Atta off limits to the Able Danger investigators when all the dots connected to him? I think that this was General Schoomaker was pulled out of retirement to run NorthCom, which is the new DoD unit in charge of domestic operations, like defending the 'homeland' from invasions, civil unrest, diseases, disasters, maybe martial law.

2. Al-Qu'aida was a late-1970s (Carter-Brezhinsky era) US/Pakistan/Saudi invention. The name comes from the 'database' of jihadis trained to fight the Soviets. Bin Laden was 'our' guy.

Brezhinsky, a few years just before the attacks, opined that the US needed another Pearl Harbor to get us behind the military again so that we can secure our access to Eurasian energy resources. This same theme was picked up by the neo-cons' Project for a New American Century report.

Closer to the attacks, the head of the Pakistani Intelligence Service wired Atta $100,000. Wasn't this Pakistani fellow meeting senior Washington D.C. officials, perhaps the US Presiident, in September 2001?

Funny how when the President was running for office, the world leader's name he didn't know was Mushareff. Yet, even though the Clinton administration chilled relations with that country, there we were, before 'War on Terra' broke out, meeting with our old cold warrior buddies, the ISI, who were actively involved with Bin Laden and the (Saudi backed) Taliban. Didn't Bush also meet with senior Saudis around then, too?

Didn't Atta have links to US military training?

Didn't least two of the Saudi hijackers stay in San Diego with the FBI's main counter-terrorism informant there? Why did he neglect to inform us about these fellows? Or maybe he did... Weren't the the ones on watch lists?

Were these the same Saudi hijackers who came into San Diego who received funding from the Saudi royal family?

Then there's those close friends of the Saudis and the Bushes, the 'good' Bin Ladens, many of whom were allowed to fly out of the country on special flights while the rest of America was grounded. They were not allowed to be investigated by the FBI. However, if you or I were a sibling of a murderer or a saboteur, wouldn't we probably be closely investigated and not allowed to leave the country? Is this incompetence, too?

Who was that Al Quaida official who told the CIA agents intorrogating him (disguised as Saudi agents) that they should just call Prince so-and-so and he'll straighten this whole thing out, since he is working for him. This is one of those three Princes with intelligence or arms ties that in his 40s strangely died of heart disease or of 'thirst' within weeks of each other. Dead men don't tell tales.

The powerful Pakistani ISI chief was finally retired after his wire transfer to Osama became public.

Incompetence, or Letting It Happen On Purpose?

The 8/6/01 PDB "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the US" didn't rouse the President from his vacation, certainly not as much as brain-wasted Terri Schiavo's death could.

Then there's that unusual level of put-option activity on UA, AA, Morgan Stanley (didn't they have 22 floors in the WTC?) through Alex Brown Bank the day before the attacks? Doesn't this bank have longstanding ties with the CIA? Doesn't the CIA have software that monitors unusual stock market trading patterns to tip them off? Was this not working on 9/10/01? Who placed those highly profitable trades/bets? Why hasn't the SEC revealed this publicly yet?

Is there anything strange about when the new leaseholder bought terrorism insurance for the WTC? Is there anything strange about 7 WTC collapsing the evening of 9/11/01? A 47 story tower built about 15 years prior, with the SEC and CIA offices inside, collapses perfectly straight down, even though it wasn't hit by a plane and wasn't supposed to have big fires in it. Did leaseholder Silverstein misspeak during that documentary when he said that the building had to be 'pulled'?

Is it good fortune that the Mayor had the firefighters evacuated from that building so that more of them wouldn't die? At least someone was competent that day, although I dislike the competance with which Giuliani absconded with the public records of his administration.

Another question I'd love to see investigated is the perhaps unusually high number of war-games the day of the attacks. Was it a record number of wargames? Some of these simulations involved hijacking scenarios. Did these war games affect our defenses that day? Is that why (in the 9/11 Commission report) the Air Force guy asks the FAA guy reporting the hijackings to him if this is 'real world'? Was it a good idea to have many aviation war games during a sumer in which there were many warnings about hijackings?

3. If a rogue element of the military were involved in Making or Letting It Happen, then using a classified wargame would be a good tactic to get troops to do your bidding, keeping their mouths shut, each thinking that they were only firing blanks, for example, or targeting mock blips, or controlling mock drones.

Don't they say that in every firing squad there is one rifle with blanks so each of the shooters thinks that they weren't responsible for the execution?

Meanwhile down South that horrible day, the President sat in a classroom for several minutes after hearing about the second plane attack on the WTC. In an interview about that day, he claimed to have seen the first plane hit on television. Maybe he saw the smoking building, but there was no video of the first plane hitting, and the second one hit while he was listening to the kids read. Maybe he was just addled. Or maybe he was remembering some other footage he saw around that time.

Still, considering that the President's location was public knowledge, it is strange that he stayed in that school for a half hour after the second attack, about an hour after the first planes were hijacked. Was the Secret Service incompetent, too? Or did they know that the President was safe?

One of my impressions of that day was how on-the-run Bush was for so long. It was strange that instead of showing some leadership in DC or NYC that day, he headed to Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. Isn't that where the nuclear missiles are commanded from? He was clearly rattled that day.

Another tidbit from that era explaining or spinning why the President was on the run was a report that the Secret Service heard a code word that indicated that the President's plane was in danger. I recall it was subsequently reported that this was a mistake or a misinterpretation. But this was the explanation for whe President flew away from Washingto, D.C. to be on an unpredctable flight path. So, at first he's safe in the school, where he's publicly known to be, then he's safer flying away, then it is found out that he was safe all along.

Then there are the reports of Warren Buffet also being in Offut that day with several CEOs, some of which were from corporations affected by the attacks, but I have no idea if that is true. Was the billionaire Wizard of Omaha scheduled to be out there that day? Do VIPs get to visit bases for meetings? If not, does he get special military protection during emergencies?

Still, it is strange to think that Al Quaida would be feared or thought to know the military/secret service code for Air Force One... The only people who should know that code word would be the Secret Service and parts of the military. Al Quaida would have to have been quite well-infiltrated into our system to accomplish that. It was all they could do to bomb American buildings that have been in the same place for decades.

If I had my money on it, I'd think it more likely that we could have Al Quaida infiltrated better than they us, considering that a Marin teenager improbably named Johnnie Walker could personally meet Osama just by showing up to his camp... And also considering that we co-founded Al Quaida.

Who in the government might want to keep Bush on the run by threatening Air Force One with a Code Word? Or who in government would threaten the President? Who could benefit from showing the President that they mean business? Did someone bluff the President to Offut?

Is someone in the military calling the real shots and letting Bush be the public face for the decisions? Did the President think that he had to go to Offut to personally oversee 'the button?' There were a lot of misunderstandings that day, so Bush might have averted a worse disaster that day by heading west and keeping an eye on things as the Commander In Chief, making sure no one had an itchy button finger after hearing some code word from a voice that sounded like the President's but wasn't...

I don't know. The thing is we don't know. Everyone said that 'everything is going to change' since 9/11, but we don't even know what happened that day on 'our' side. There are a lot of basic questions being asked, and a lot of evidence that is still being blocked, and meanwhile the President and the Vice President only answered questions once about that important day, together, without any recordings whatsoever, and no public disclosures. If that day changed everything, then it is because we the people let it change everything, and if so, we deserve to know who, what, how, and why it happened.

Maybe it was a lot of incompetent indicidents... An improbably high number. Even if so, it is high time to stop the butt-covering and start figuring out where we've been going wrong, because Americans are dying in our cities, on our coasts, and in wars because of these 'incompetancies' or because of some sort of soft coup. We need to find out, and journalists and bloggers seem to be one of last refuges and hopes for our democracy.

How the FBI Let 9/11 Happen

Never mind Moussaoui, the smoldering gun was right there all the time

Jeff A. Taylor

Anyone paying attention to the Zacarias Moussaoui trial gets it now. All the 9/11 blanks are filled in, and the picture is complete. Sorry, conspiracy freaks and blind partisan hacks. Dull, common, gross incompetence is again at the heart of a deadly government cluster-hump.

Do not linger on Moussaoui's bizarre suicide-by-testimony or the literal cheerleading for his execution—He knew. He lied. And 2,749 people died.

Neither of these is the real story of this case. Rather, the story is the definitive proof Moussaoui's case provides that the U.S. government—pre-PATRIOT Act, pre-NSA wiretaps and all—had and missed clear opportunities to stop 9/11. The FBI uniquely and repeatedly punted carefully gathered evidence of an attack in favor of adherence to bureaucratic hierarchies and power trips.

The testimony of FBI agent Harry Samit forever buries the quaint notion that 9/11 was unforeseen and unpreventable. Beginning with Moussaoui's August 16, 2001 arrest Samit mounted a global and indefatigable investigation of the man and concluded that an attack involving hijacked airplanes was imminent.

The flipside of Samit is Michael Rolince, former head of the FBI's International Terrorism Operations Section. Rolince is the man who previously deflected questions about the FBI's pursuit, or lack thereof, of pre-9/11 terror suspects with the line, "Would CNN have really aired their photos if we'd asked them?"

Rolince smugly insisted at trial that Samit's "suppositions, hunches and suspicions were one thing and what we knew" was another. Yet Rolince, in service of the government's desire to link Moussaoui to 9/11 and trigger the death penalty, also tried to argue that, had Moussaoui spilled his guts, everything would have changed. 9/11 might have been prevented. In short, Samit's investigation and leads were not enough; Moussaoui had to speak up for the FBI brass to hear anything.

When defense lawyer Edward MacMahon cross-examined Rolince, possibly the first and only time a government security official has been so challenged on 9/11, the disconnect between the official story and reality was plain. Rolince knew nothing of the August 18, 2001 memo Samit had sent to his office warning of terror links. In that memo, Samit warned that Moussaoui wanted to hijack a plane and had the weapons to do it. Samit also warned that Moussaoui "believes it is acceptable to kill civilians" and that he approved of martyrdom. Rolince testified he never read the memo.

On August 17 Samit sent an e-mail to his direct superiors at FBI headquarters recounting Moussaoui's training on 747 simulators. "His excuse is weak, he just wants to learn how to do it... That's pretty ominous and obviously suggests some sort of hijacking plan," Samit wrote.

Rebuffed by his superiors and ignored by Rolince, Samit still sought out more info worldwide and from sources as diverse as the FBI's London, Paris, and Oklahoma City offices, FBI headquarters files, the CIA's counterterrorism center, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, probably the National Security Agency, and the FBI's Iran and OBL offices.

He was sufficiently alarmed by what he heard that Samit sent an August 21 e-mail requesting that the Secret Service be informed about Moussaoui's intentions to see the White House and that he was interested in flight training.

Samit testified that on August 22 he had learned from the French—the French!—that Moussaoui had recruited a fighter to go to Chechnya in 2000 to fight with Islamic radicals with previous links, so the CIA told Samit, to Osama bin Laden. The FBI brass remained unmoved.

Defense attorney MacMahon then displayed an August 30, 2001 communication addressed to Samit and FBI headquarters agent Mike Maltbie from a Bureau agent in Paris. It passed along that French intelligence thought Moussaoui was "very dangerous" and had soaked up radical views at London's infamous Finnsbury Park mosque. The French also said Moussaoui was "completely devoted" to bin Laden-style jihadism and, significantly, had traveled to Afghanistan.

Yet on August 31 Maltbie stopped Samit from sending a letter to FAA headquarters in Washington advising them of "a potential threat to security of commercial aircraft" based on the Moussaoui case. Maltbie said he would handle that, but it is not clear if he ever did.

"Minneapolis believes Moussaoui, [Moussaoui's roommate Hussein] Al Attas and others not yet known were...engaged in preparing to seize 747s," the aborted warning said.

Samit did directly tell FAA officials in Minneapolis of his concerns on September 5.

In total, the information Samit pulled together dovetailed with his belief that, based on interviews with the suspect, Moussaoui had been to Afghan terror training camps. Because he did not have proof of the suspected terror camp connection, however, Samit never passed this hunch on to the FBI headquarters. Maltbie and Maltbie's boss, David Frasca, chief of the radical fundamentalist unit at headquarters, were clearly pressing Samit for facts only, as Rolince's disdain for "suppositions" from far-off Minneapolis confirms.

So? The 9/11 Commission investigation detailed that British intelligence directly told U.S. officials on September 13, 2001, that Moussaoui had attended a training camp in Afghanistan. "Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense, high-level attention," the commission concluded. As it turns out, Samit had that info in late August 2001 and nobody cared. CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on the Moussaoui threat on August 23. The case received intense, high-level attention. Nobody cared.

Back in 2004, Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 commission, said he was troubled that Moussaoui's arrest never made it up to the top of the FBI hierarchy.

"If it had maybe there would have been some action taken and things could have been different," Kean was quoted by The New York Times.

Yet now it is clear that senior FBI officials Maltbie and Frasca did know about Moussaoui's arrest. In fact, they knew the case so well that they denied Samit's request for a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer and belongings. Samit also testified that he was told pressing too hard to obtain a warrant on Moussaoui would hurt his career.

This decision to deny a warrant gave rise to the myth that "The Wall" between overseas intelligence and criminal investigations made the PATRIOT Act necessary. To this day this myth is cherished among right-wing radio talkers and has, just now, morphed into a clumsy justification for the White House's sidestepping the FISA court and directing its own wiretap frenzy via the NSA. This is all pure fantasy.

Instead of clueless Carter-era restrictions on domestic spying or insufficient distrust of civil liberties, Samit cited "obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism" by top FBI officials as what stopped his investigation.

There is also the curious Bureau flip-flopping on Moussaoui and his laptop. Back in November 2001 the FBI dropped Moussaoui from the 9/11 plot. In his place the Bureau put Ramsi Binalshibh, as part of the hijacking team that crashed United Airlines Flight 93 into a field in Pennsylvania.

FBI Director Robert Mueller back then also told prosecutors that there was no information on the computer seized from Moussaoui that linked him to the September 11 attacks. At that same time, Rolince himself was not convinced that Moussaoui was tied to 9/11, saying "Whoever that fifth person was is probably still alive. Clearly we are looking into the pool of people who crossed paths with the hijackers." Only sometime later did that someone become Moussaoui and his un-searched info.

While Samit was spending a solid three weeks trying to get Washington to act on his pre-9/11 terror fears, future 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour was raising suspicions with his flight training in Phoenix (suspicions Samit was not told about until after 9/11). Margaret Chevrette of the Pan Am International Flight Academy reported her worries to the FAA and somehow those concerns also made their way to CIA chief Tenet and into CIA memos of August 2001, but the FBI never acted on them. Yet on September 12, FBI agents interviewed Chevrette for more information on Hanjour—reflecting the fact that another local FBI agent (Arizona-based Kenneth Williams, author of the July 2001 Phoenix memo) had notified FBI headquarters of the danger posed by Middle Eastern terrorists training at U.S. flight schools.

There were also repeated attempts by the New York City FBI office to get follow-up on Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi and an August 2001 request from a New York FBI agent who warned that "someday someone will die" if New York did not win approval to launch a criminal investigation of al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar was on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

Minneapolis, Phoenix, New York. Three different Bureau offices were hot on the terror plot in the days leading up to 9/11 and all were stiffed by Washington. If that is not institutional incompetence, Stalin purge-worthy stuff, heaven help the next 3,000 martyrs to J. Edgar Hoover's über-suits.

One exchange from the Moussaoui trial makes clear what happened in the weeks running up to 9/11:

"You tried to move heaven and earth to get a search warrant to search this man's belongings and you were obstructed," MacMahon said to Samit.
"Yes sir, I was obstructed." Samit replied.

No disaster, it seems, can force reform on the Bureau. The same people are still manning the posts at the FBI and Main Justice. They are going to miss the next terror attack because they are dead-certain to stop the last one. That's what bureaucracies do: cover ass. The Bureau's poisonous Andersen Consulting–with-arrest-powers culture remains unreformed and dangerously low-tech. New York City agents do not have enough e-mail addresses to go around, for example.

Instead of an effective anti-terror agency, the Bureau is morphing into a kind of Stasi Lite, keeping tabs on domestic subversives: assorted peaceniks, communists in Texas, and the League of Women Voters in Michigan, who had the gall to invite a critic of the PATRIOT Act to a panel discussion. There is a sort of logic to such surveillance: This what the FBI is good at, so this is what it does. Kinda of like looking for your car keys under a street light because the rest of the street is dark.

Still, for all the bungling in the dark the FBI has nothing to fear, not from a complicit Bush administration, not from a prostrate Congress, not from a bamboozled public. An e-mail sent to Agent Harry Samit on September 10, 2001 from a CIA Counterterrorism Center official identified only as "Cathy" points the way: "God help us all if the next terrorist attacks involves this same type of plane."

God? Cathy, dear, the FBI is God. Just look around.

Jeff A. Taylor writes the weekly Reason Express.

Bush Proposed a FALSE FLAG Operation to draw the UN into Iraq War

2006-03-31T21:35:00.001-05:00

"Bush was so committed to going to war that he discussed painting a U.S. surveillance plane in U.N. colors in hopes of drawing Iraqi fire. 'If Saddam fired on them,' Bush said, 'he would be in breach.'"

(British Memo: War of choice, Editorial, by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Board. March 29, 2006.)

This is known as a false-flag operation, something done in as a covert action to cause nations to go to war under false pretenses, like:

the 'accidentally' mistranslated or untranslated Gulf of Tonkin incident tranmissions leading to the Vietnam Catastrophe in 1964 (and lasting almost ten years more to the profit of KBR and Halliburton),
the destruction of the USS Maine (by 'machine failure' but blamed on a Spanish mine), precipitating the Spanish-American War in 1898 under conservative favorite, McKinley. leading U.S. influence in P.R., Phillipines, Cuba, and D.R, as well as big profits for industry and railroads, or
the Operation Northwoods plots proferred by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which President Kennedy nixed in 1963, in which passenger planes would be switched with military aircraft drones to be shot down and blamed on Cuba, or in which the U.S. sank a U.S. naval ship with sailors aboard all to precipitate war with Cuba.

Still, not only is this sort of action (drawing fire on a U.S. spy plane painted to look like a UN plane) proposed to be ordered by President Bush prohibited under the U.S.' Rules of War, but it is stupid.

What would be the rationale: that the UN would be mad at Iraq for downing a spy plane that would have been the UN's, if it weren't the US' plane flying provocatively?

Or that maybe we could fool the UN, as well as Iraq, into thinking that that plane was operated by the UN, even though no one in the UN would know about the plane's provenance or have any association with the lost crew?

The most illuminating things about this memo is that it is more proof that Bush wanted war with Iraq badly, desperately.

He was willing not only to lie about wanting war, which he did again this week in a town hall meeting and in reply to Helen Thomas' pointed question, but he was willing to run a prominent false flag operations to precipitate war with Iraq, which would mean a ton more lies committed by thousands of people for a long time, involving cover-ups, etc.

What else is President Bush lying about? What else is he and his cronies covering up? What is worth it to them to risk perjury and calumny and impeachment? That is, what are the motives behind the lies taking us into Iraq?

Thank you for Censuring the President, Senator Feingold

2006-03-29T01:26:00.000-05:00

Thanks for your courage censuring President Bush, Senator Feingold. What a pack of passes he's been getting all these years!

Could you imagine if 9/11/01 had happened under Gore? All the blame.

And then if he were blocking the investigations, letting the Bin Ladens leave the US when we couldn't fly, and then dropping the ball in Afghanistan allowing Bin Laden still at large? And then starting war in Iraq by lying about it? And then botching up the occupation? And those lost billions of dollars? Those thousands of lives, including American troops without armor, and tens of thousands of Iraqis who had nothing to do with 9/11/01. The torture in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib? Letting the rank and file take the blame for that...

And then strumming a guitar while on yet another long vacation while we lost a major American city? Something that's never happened before in our history!

And then we find out that he's been spying on Americans, in specific contravention to the FISA?
Plus, blowing a surplus and turning it into a huge debt? A five year long undeclared recession? Blocking stem cell research? Gas prices skyrocketing up and staying there...

This administration is an unmitigated disaster! The only 'effective' thing about it is the privatized pillaging of our treasury and whatever their cronies can take from the rest of the world.

They impeached Clinton for lying about sex with an intern which obstructed a (politically motivated?) civil suit!

They pilloried Carter for trying at first unsuccessfully to rescue the hostages in Iran with the military, and he freed those hostages without trading arms for them and without supplying terrorists and death squads in Central America.

But Carter gets no credit for his principles or results, and Clinton was impeached.

Meanwhile, no one in the Bush administration is ever held accountable for their tremendous failures, lying, and incompetence! This has to stop, and I'm glad you started by holding him accountable, bringing up Censure. Long overdue!

The next step is impeachment, but we need to impeach both Bush and Cheney.

Shark & Awe - The Costs of FULL spectrum dominance on the US

2006-03-28T16:22:00.000-05:00

I love Asia Times. I love it so much that I'm reprinting an article by Tom Engelhardt with my annotations in (parenthesed italics).

But since I have such a peripatetic brain, this article called to mind a BBC article beyond meatspace about the Pentagon's literal plans for full-spectrum dominance. I cite that article inside italicized [[square brackets]].

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
'Shark and Awe'
By Tom Engelhardt

The US already has "stealth" aircraft, but what about a little of the stealth that only nature can provide?

(At first, this concept was shocking to me: using animals to fight our wars! But then again, the Asyrians used elephants to conquer ancient Palestine, the Cavalry used horses, birds were used as messengers in WWI, BF Skinner taught pigeons to guide missiles in World War II, and we used German Shephards at Abu Ghraib.)

Navy SEALs, move over - here come the navy sharks. According to the latest New Scientist magazine, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the blue-sky wing of the
Pentagon, has set yet another group of American scientists loose to create the basis for future red-in-tooth-and-maw Discovery Channel programs.

(ahh, DARPA, the people who brought us the forerunner to the Internet, DARPANet, which was to connect scientists after a devestating nuclear war knocked out communications and transportation systems. But that was the Cold War, and that was a good idea. Since then Gore really did help convert it to peacetime uses, driving some massive US-based innovation and entrepreneurship.
I think of how much I relied on the Internet in the terrified weeks after the bombings of the WTC and the Pentagon in 2001, and then the unfolding Anthrax attacks on the east coast... I hope that the Internet still stays up, free, and informative if there is another catastrophe, and that it is not hacked by terrorists or militarists from the US or anywhere else so people can communicate directly and get the news...
Truth being the first casualty of war, I doubt it, though...
With DARPA being the original agency that Iran-Contra Anti-hero and almost convicted co-conspirator John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness used to launch the massive database used to detect terrorists and terror plots, it seems that the Internet as threat-medium is on the neo-cons' radar as something to destroy.
It wasn't enough for Bush2 to stomp on the bursted tech bubble, they have to militarize anything good about network technologies and make anything like blogging more and more a liability to bloggers. Did you know that if somone finds any blog offensive, then the blogger could be convicted under a law new against harassment? The right wing slipped that one in.)

(Back to the military, in a recent strategy document, "Informations Operations Roadmap 2003" (signed by DoD Secretary Rumsfeld), they labeled the Internet as a threat that should be fought. The overt implication was that enemies could bring down networks or spy with the Internet, or perhaps they could hack sites and spread disinformation. But I also read into the strategy that there was a homefront to the war as well. That is, if you are a dissenting citizen, excercizing First Amendment rights, then you citizen, could have your site or email shut down, or you could be considered and treated as an enemy/conspirator, even if you are patriotic and law-abiding...."[[When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system. "Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads. The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap."....
"From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war....And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon....And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".
US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".
...The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?
The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.
And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.]]

My sense is that the military wants to stuff the Genie they founded on Coca Beach in the 1960s back to the bottle.
I miss the days of the Peace Dividend when the military let the Internet go and grow, when English majors and Comp Sci Geeks could finally find good work and good pay developing the web. We had the first sense of hope and growth for young people in this country since they killed the Kennedy Brothers.
If the poop really hits the fan next time around, Terror Threat Level Red, probably what will happen to the Internet is the equivalent of the former Soviet Union cutting into TV programming, playing only military tunes whenever a Premier died and the Politburo was sorting out the transition.
That is, the military either will accidentally shut the Net down completely, or they will have it on some sort of 'safe mode' with pre-approved news providers, and most traffic restricted to big business and government use.
Back to the military's planned dominance of the animal kingdom for US' Earth and Sea supremacy...)

In this case, they are planning to put neural implants into the brains of sharks in hopes, one day, of "controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling". In their dreams at least, DARPA's far-out funders hope to "exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted."

(Pretty cool. Maybe they can eat enemies in really horrific ways. Teach their friends and those who harbor them a lesson... Even better, give them fricken laser guns! We can get them from afar. Much cooler than drones.)

So far they've only made it to the poor dogfish, "steered" in captivity via electrodes keyed to "phantom odors". As it happens, though, DARPA-sponsored plans are a good deal lustier than that: next stop, the blue shark, which reaches a length of 4 meters. Project engineer Walter Gomes of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, claims a team will soon put neural implants "into blue sharks and release them into the ocean off the coast of Florida". To transmit signals to the sharks, the team will need nothing less than a network of signaling towers in the area. This has "anti-ballistic shark system" written all over it.

(Now, paranoiacs' theories of Ultra Mind Kontrol isn't too far off into the future...)

Actually, it's not the first time the US military has invested in shark technology. As Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org pointed out in July, "The navy has tapped three firms to build prototype gadgets that duplicate what sharks do naturally: find prey from the electric fields they emit."

(Finally, we understand why fire ants infest eletrical systems.)

One of them, Advanced Ceramics Research Inc, limned the project's potential benefits this way: "If developed, such a capability might allow for the detection of small, hostile submarines entering a seawater inlet, harbor or channel, or allow objects such as mines to be pinpointed in shallow waters where sonar imaging is severely compromised."

And then there's that ultimate underwater dream, the Microfabricated Biomimetic Artificial Gill System, that could lead to all sorts of navy breakthroughs, perhaps even - if you'll excuse a tad of blue-skying - blue shark/human tracking teams, or if not that, then lots of late-night-TV Aquaman jokes.

Of course, the US Navy has been in nature's waters in a big way for a while with its Marine Mammal Program in San Diego. There, it trains bottlenose dolphins as "sentries" and mine detectors. Such dolphins were "first operationally deployed" in Vietnam in 1971 and a whole Dolphin Patrol (like, assumedly, the shark patrol to come) is now on duty in the Khor Abd Allah waterway, Iraq's passageway into the Persian Gulf. To the embarrassment of the navy, a dolphin named Takoma even went "AWOL" (absent without leave) there in 2003, soon after the invasion of Iraq began.

(Some say Dolphins are the smartest animals...)

DARPA funds research into weaponizing creatures that inhabit just about any environmental niche imaginable - including bees capable of detecting explosives;

(Bees detecting explosives? How about swarms of bees landing on Osama and stinging him to death? But talk about blow-back: what if the killer bees turn on US?)

"eyes" patterned after those of flies that might some day make "smart" weaponry even smarter; gecko wall-climbing and octopus concealment techniques; and electrode-controlled rats capable of searching through piles of rubble. In addition, between nature and whatever the opposite of nurture may be, there's been an ongoing military give-and-take. Consider, for instance, BigDog, highlighted in the same issue of New Scientist. Compared to a pack mule, goat or horse, this "robotic beast of burden" is being developed by Boston Dynamics to haul over rough terrain at least 40 kilograms of supplies soldiers won't need to carry, while being able to take a "hefty kick" in the legs without crumpling to the ground.

(Big Dog is reminiscent of the Imperial Walkers from Star Wars. In fact, the US is morphing into the Empire.)

From sharks to robots, from hacking into your nervous system to manipulating the weather, the Pentagon seems determined to exert "full-spectrum dominance", especially over that top-of-the-line primate, us. To achieve this, it sponsors blue-sky thinking with a vengeance. Nothing that moves or breathes on the planet, it seems, is conceptually beyond conscription by Uncle Sam into possible future war scenarios.

This is undoubtedly what happens when you have an administration that considers the Pentagon the answer to all America's problems and gives it a US$439.3 billion budget to play with - and that's exclusive of actual war-fighting money (which, for Iraq and Afghanistan, at an estimated $120 billion for the year, will come in supplemental requests to Congress). And remember as well that the fiscal 2007 Pentagon budget does not include the $9.3 billion the Department of Energy will put into nuclear weapons or a host of veterans-care benefits, all of which bring the budget at least close to the $600 billion range. Analyzing the 2006 budget, economist Robert Higgs estimated that all military-related outlays - that is, the real Pentagon budget - totaled closer to $840 billion.

Even taken at face value, the 2007 Pentagon budget accounts for more than half of the $873 billion in federal discretionary spending - the funds that the president and Congress decide to spend each year. For 2007, education, the second-largest discretionary budget item, amounts to just over $50 billion, a piddling sum by comparison. But there is probably no way to put any version of the Pentagon's finances into perspective. Militarily speaking, it throws other military spending on the planet into the deepest shadow. As Frida Berrigan, senior research associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center and co-author of Weapons at War 2005, points out, "The Pentagon accounts for about half the world's total military expenditures of $1.04 trillion, spending alone what the 32 next most powerful nations spend together."

(Meanwhile if you use a wheelchair, you better not try to leave most NYC subway stations. Or if you are unemployed and need a doctor, forget it. Or if you live in a housing project, you don't have someone guarding your building, even though you need it the most. Or if you are lower-middle class you don't qualify for subsidized housing.)

The United States is also by far the planet's largest exporter of weapons and military hardware. An annual Congressional Research Service report found that, in 2004, global weapons deliveries totaled nearly $37 billion - with the United States responsible for more than 33% of them, or $12.4 billion - and it hasn't gotten better since.

No other country puts anything like such effort, planning and dreaming into the idea of projecting planet-spanning military power, caught so grimly in that phrase, "full-spectrum dominance". To Pentagon minds this seems to mean: from 20,000 leagues down to 30 kilometers up (and everything that creeps, crawls, swims or flies in between). The phrase first gained attention with the release in 2000 of the US Air Force's Joint Vision 2020 statement - a supposed look into a future world of US war-making.

It's one of those terms that sticks with you - and not just because of the full-spectrum weaponry that's now on the drawing boards, ranging from hypervelocity rod bundles meant to penetrate underground bunkers from outer space (ominously nicknamed "rods from God") to the Common Aero Vehicle (CAV), "an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that [by 2010] would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds [454 kilograms] of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads" anywhere on the planet within two hours, or that permanent base on the moon the administration of President George W Bush has called for by 2020 (and the array of Star Wars-style space-based weaponry that would ring it).

Full-spectrum dominance turns out to include even the US, where in 2002 the Bush administration established the United States Northern Command (Northcom), whose website at present has the following from a visit by assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense Paul McHale as its reassuring quote of the week: "I'm leaving with a clear sense of confidence in the vision and planning of Northcom to deal with any emerging threat, whether an occurrence of pandemic flu, a 2006 hurricane ... or a terrorist attack still being planned by our adversaries."

While the Pentagon quietly begins to take over tasks that once were delegated to civilian agencies, its blue-sky weapons planning extends into the distant future. Take, for instance, the Air Force Futures Game 05, held for several days last October in the Dulles, Virginia, office of consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. The exercise was dedicated to "looking at scenarios for the year 2025", especially one in which a nuclear weapon is loose in a "Middle Eastern country" and a major war is in the offing. Like many other Pentagon war-gaming exercises, this one was largely committed to confirming the usefulness of as-yet-non-existent or hardly existent weaponry, especially in the areas of "space access" and "electronic warfare". According to Colonel Gail Wojtowicz, US Air Force division director of future concepts and transformation, the gamers were "also looking at one of the trickiest issues the air force or another service may have to face: what the Pentagon can do on American soil". Indeed.

Military analyst William Arkin wrote about these particular air-force games, meant to boost "laser, high-powered microwaves, and acoustic weapons", at his Washington Post Early Warning blog. Such blue-sky exercises, he explained, advance new weapons systems (and their corporate sponsors) "along the familiar development path of boosters and patrons feeding information to war gamers who feed study participants who feed researchers who feed manufacturers. At the end of the day, it is hard to tell whether high-powered microwaves and laser came into being because someone conceived it out of need or because its existence in the laboratory created the need."

To support letting inventive minds roam free outside normal frameworks is in itself an inspired idea. But I bet there's no DARPA-like agency elsewhere in the government funding the equivalent for education 2025 or health 2025 or even energy independence 2025. To have this happen, I'm afraid, you would have to transform them into Northcom war games.

Now it's true that much blue-skying may never come to be. Those US Navy stealth sharks may not patrol America's coasts and a good, swift enemy kick to some unexpected spot on BigDog's anatomy may fell the "creature", if budgetary or high-tech wrinkles don't do the trick first - just as an unexpected series of low-tech blows to the United States' full-spectrum military has left the Pentagon desperate and its army unraveling in Iraq.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if official blue-sky thinking didn't always mean mobilizing finances, scientists, corporations and even the animal kingdom in the service of global death. Wouldn't it be nice to blue-sky just a tad about life?

Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

(The author offers special thanks for Pentagon facts and figures in this piece to Frida Berrigan of the World Policy Institute's invaluable Arms Trade Resource Center.)

(Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt.) [all bold was Enzo's addition]

What to Call This Decade: THE NAUGHTIES

2006-03-24T18:49:00.000-05:00

In the late 1990s I 'joined' a group of New Yorkers naming this, the next decade, "THE NAUGHTIES." At the time we hoped it would be a continuation of the good fun we'd been experiencing since the mid 1990s. Heck, this was the decade in which the first time the word 'blow job' was used in polite politcal parlance among the general populace. And I liked it.

It was the first decade since the death of RFK in which young people had hope for the future, and the first time since the 60s that young people had hope of making a good living, doing better than their parents. English majors and Programming Geeks were kings of the new economy. And I liked it.

Continuing the good-hearted fun only seemed the natural innocent inclination. Naughty had come to mean mischievous or sexy, transgressive. Women were wearing school girl skirts in basement nightclubs, loving it when guys bent them over, spanking them on a bar stool telling them, 'you are so naughty!' We hadn't had naughty fun like this since AIDS shut down Plato's Retreat in the early 1980s.

Plus, even though the first two decades of the Twentieth Century were quite important, they are largely forgotten due to the lack of a catchy name for that era. The closest we come is 'the 'Aughts' or something like that. It was based on zero being before a number, like nineteen-aught-eight. But I don't know anyone who refers to that era as the Aughties, like the Twenties or the Thirties, etc. More likely, if one is conscious at all of the black-&-white era, then their consciousness usually begins with the Twenties.

But as the 1990s waned things quickly took a dark turn, as naughtiness' namesake kicked into gear. Naughty originally derives from nothingness or void. Void is the anti-stuff that the Lord filled-in 'in the beginning' ...of Genesis. And that was Good. Naught is also what the debauched grasshopper was left with after his summer of naughty merry-making in comparison to the hardworking thrifty grasshopper from the allegory. The good grasshopper had a store of food to get him through the winter, and the naughty grasshopper was left with nothing but memories and fear.

In late 2000 the naughty alcoholic Boy King stole the Presidency from the diligent Gore. What is worse than a good thing happening to a bad person, and a bad thing happening to a good one?

For over a month we stared at the tube as 'the Brooks Brothers Rioting' Republican-Youth-thugs (mostly House Staffers and now many in the Bush Regime) were shipped to the Palm Beach Board of Elections' offices, shutting them down and banging on the doors, terrorizing vote counters so that those votes would never be counted. And those votes weren't counted as the Florida bureaucrats called it a day, leaving it maybe for manyana. John Bolton showed up in another county and said he was there to stop the vote count. Naughty, naughty!

Bush won the US election by one vote: Antonin Scalia's. Word has it that his wife greeted him at home with a Martini. The Supreme Court decision was deliberately naughty, as they stated that their decision not to count the votes was not a precedent. That is, nothing could be based on it. And being further naughty, they used the one-man-one-vote rationale to 'justify' this decree, even as blacks' votes were not being counted and hundreds of thousands of blacks and Democrats were already purged from the voter rolls by Katherine Harris and the King-to-be's Brother Governor Jeb. My understanding of one-man-one-vote is empowering individual citizens equally, so this twistedly ironic use of the principle is, well, naughty.

We have a President who uses 'morality' and religion for political purposes and to hide mass killings. What is more cynical and naughty than that? When the devil shows on a recruitment drive, he won't be dressed like the devil, but he'll be wearing a suit and a smile, making you feel comfortable and good about yourself. Or maybe he'll come off as a 'regular' guy that you'd like to have 'a' beer with. Certainly he won't sound like the singer from Panterra. It just wouldn't be a good way to "market a new product," like the war in Iraq.

After stealing the election these Naughties stole Haiti, a few Central European countries with the 'color' revolutions, and they've been trying with varying degrees of success to steal Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, the 2004 election, and post-disaster New Orleans. They are stealing our tax money, our nation's good will, our futures...

And what comes of all this theft? Naught/Nothing! At least for those of us left holding the empty bags and wallets and bank accounts. These guys are only good at coups and fleecing the public through their privatized government service providers like Halliburton, KBR, CSX, BlackWater, Bechtel, and Fluor, while the taxpayers' kids and economy tanks and tanks and tanks. Avast ye Pirates!

What else have we got this decade? Where there were proud Twin Towers we have a hole. Where is that Bogeyman, Osama? In a cave?! Where is our Constitution? In the garbage.

Where there was Fortune's "most innovative company" in the world for years on end, Enron is a big void, but only after stealing thousands of pensions and ripping off the stock market in general, and only after they precipitated an energy crisis in California over nothing, fleecing million$ from them.

Accountants, including the once highly respected Arthur Andersen, are now cheaters that we are supposed to keep an eye on. Accountants are naughty in the Naughties. Priests have been buggering boys, sometimes in their parent's homes. And to 'top' that, Bishops and Cardinals have been covering it up and quieting it down, by shifting these predators to different parishes again and again. They use their parishioners' donations to settle the lawsuits for millions and millions of dollars... I think Jesus would clearly not approve were he striding in front of the Vatican.

The moral of the story: be careful what you wish for, and now that it is the Naughties be careful and beware.

Once again, now more than ever, this decade is the Naughties.

Credit for the Naughties meme goes to the folks behind this site http://www.guruadrian.com/

Here Come 'The Naughties'

by Steve Silberman
1999-11-30

NEW YORK -- What comes after Y2K?

If we avoid the Big Meltdown, and the fin de millennium turns out to be less than apocalyptic, one of the first tasks we'll face will be to name the decade after the 90s.

Just doing the math won't help. Tags for the zero-laden next decade floated in popular magazines in recent weeks have included such ungainly -- or outright depressing -- monikers as the Zeroes, the Singles, the 2000s, the Double-Os, the Oh-Ohs, the Y2Ks, and the Millies.

Futurist Faith Popcorn is billing the next cultural growth-spurt as the "EVEolennium," an era of marketing influenced by the growing economic clout of women that will launch the "e-lennium."

If none of those names ring your chimes, you're not alone.

A cheeky Silicon Alley-based arts collective called Foomedia has come along with a grassroots campaign to encourage the widespread adoption of its own idea as the buzz phrase of the decade.

In the past few days, posters and stickers have appeared on walls and in phone booths all over downtown Manhattan. "The coming decade has a name," they declare. "Naught = 0. Naughty = Fun."

Goodbye, '90s. Hello, "Naughties."

Over the weekend, Foomedia launched the online arm of its campaign to spread the Naughties meme. Visitors to Project Naughtie headquarters at Naughties.com are invited to register as "naughtie boys and girls," and to download posters and stickers emblazoned with the grinning face of the campaign's mysterious figurehead: a toothy, cowlicked, not altogether innocent-looking boy named "Guru Adrian."

Guru Adrian is the jaunty "non-prophet" alter ego of the mastermind behind Project Naughtie, artist David Wales.

"Who wants to live through 'the Zeroes?'" asks Wales. The catchier moniker came to him in a moment of inspiration on the subway, he says. He remembers giggling out loud.

"That's how I know it's a good name -- everyone I've told it to has laughed."

The Project Naughtie team hopes that, by christening the decade with a name that suggests creative subversion, they'll help jumpstart the next millennium with 10 years of irreverent innovation.

Predicting trends is more than just a hobby for Wales, whose day job is keeping an eye on the Zeitgeist for Toyota. The car manufacturer employs the Australian-born artist as a "cultural forecaster." Recent research included clocking the contents of messenger bags, backpacks, and purses of New Yorkers attempting to lug their increasingly mobile offices around on straps across their shoulders.

"When people ask me what people are going to be wearing in five years," says Wales, "I tell them, 'Computers.'"

To launch the Naughties campaign, Wales hooked up with Matt Frost and Geoff Seelinger, whose two-person startup, Foomedia, has done print advertising and Web design for scrappy online destinations aimed at teens such as Planet Kiki and a do-it-yourself DJ site called the Dollhouse. Seelinger says he likes the Naughties tag because "it implies innocence and mischief. It's about extending boundaries in a playful way."

Frost sees an inherent optimism in the sharing of ideas and resources on the Web that encouraged the team's ambition to coin a catchphrase for the next decade. The team has no commercial interest in the Naughties tag -- they just want to see their snappy, upbeat name catch on.

The campaign is being run out of the Foomedia studio, which is located on the site of a former brothel on Third Avenue. More Web projects and a Naughties dance track for MTV are in the works, and Frost and Seelinger plan to use movie projectors rescued from a local dumpster to screen Naughties graphics on the huge wall outside their studio. A pair of trendy gift shops called Alphabets have volunteered their windows in January in service of the cause, and a window-dresser at upmarket Bergdorf-Goodman is considering highlighting a Naughties exhibit early next year.

The Project Naughtie team is decidedly psyched about the future. Jaded New York-style irony and cynicism are "so 20th century," Wales quips.

Seelinger, who studied post-Structuralism in college, adds that "perhaps we needed a critique of everything at the end of the century. But it's time to move on. It's time to make good with what we know."

Interesting Article About Sibling Violence - Enzo's ADDNotations

2006-03-22T15:46:00.000-05:00

For some reason this article about sibling violence among children struck me as powerful, but it neglects what could be a common cause for this problem: under-diagnosed and under-treated ADD in families.

The article points out two juxtapostions. There is the sometimes serious violence contrasted with bittersweet bonds of love and family (despite the abuse) mentioned at the end of the article. [What was not mentioned was how the abusive sibling might be suffering, too, from a brain disorder combined with at least one neglectful or distant parent (who might also be suffering from a brain disorder). Also, it is interesting that the most abusive sibling in this story died so early (mid thirties) from heart disease, often a stress related illness that might have been exacerbated by mental disorders, and certainly by his serious drug and alcohol addictions.] Children are powerless in general, and especially against their parents, and if one sibling is not receiving the proper medical treatment for bipolar disorder or severe ADD then that sick child might sometimes strike where he can, I suppose: his younger brother. This abuse spreads sometimes lasting trauma and psychological damage from the sick child to the (possibly formerly-well) other child.

This article gives short shrift to mental disabilties, since, I recall that such disorders affect somewhere between 10-50% of the population during our lifetimes. This means that nearly every family might have someone with a brain or mood disorder, and there is a high genetic correlation among mental disabilities. According to the National Association for the Mentally Ill or NAMI: "The most serious and disabling conditions affect five to ten million adults (2.6 – 5.4%) and three to five million children ages five to seventeen (5 – 9%) in the United States. ... The best treatments for serious mental illnesses today are highly effective; between 70 and 90 percent of individuals have significant reduction of symptoms and improved quality of life with a combination of pharmacological and psychosocial treatments and supports. Early identification and treatment is of vital importance. By getting people the treatment they need early, recovery is accelerated and the brain is protected from further harm related to the course of illness." My reading of this article is that between 10-20% of children are suffering from serious sibling abuse, so indeed sibling abuse is not just coming from 'seriously disabled' youth like psychotic schizoprhenics, but from under-diagnosed children with ADD, which I don't think NAMI defines as 'serious or disabling.'

One of the child psychologists in this article, Dr. Caffaro, attributes this violence problem partially to boys' testosterone and over-impulsiveness, but he mainly blames the parents. Since the article states that sibling violence most often occurs between ages 6-12, I don't think that testosterone is indicated, since if boys had testosterone at those ages, then 10-20% of them would be shaving early and pumping iron. There is another difference beween pre-pubescent boys and girls, and that is the prevalence of a more aggressive form of ADD among boys compared to girls. As for the old saw of blaming the distant father and the incompetant/overwrought mother, there is some truth there, but I'd really rather that that be addressed within the context of children and parents getting their brains treated with proper nutrition, excercize, medication, and therapy. Since ADD is genetically correlated, very likely the father could be emotionally detached/irrespsonsible/workaholic and/or the mother could be scattered and less able to cope, so the parents need care, too! Caffaro's description of the parents indicates Adult ADD to me. Proper ADD treatment, not its neglect, would lead to less alcohol and drug addiction, since there is a high correlation between self-medication/addiction and untreated ADD.

The other juxtaposition in the article contrasted society's indifference and often parental indifference to widespread abuse of children and their suffering. The article points out that if anyone else were to treat children, or anyone for that matter, the way some siblings treat each other, then that would be grounds for legal or administrative intervention, as well as possibly criminal, family, or civil court involvement.

It is like Alice Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" pointing out how adults neglect children emotionally and abuse them through such neglect. Don't let the mistranslated title fool you: This book is not about gifted children, but the genius of all children to adapt to terrible situations fostered by the adult world's abuse of its power. Miller was wrestling with how a civilized and educated people as the Germans could perpetrate genocides in the 1930s and 1940s. She theorized that she was part of a nation of children who were mass-abused, yet they grew up in 'good' middle-class homes to become abusers themselves of their own children, and of their countrymen (Jews, Gypsies/Romanis, the mentally ill, disabled, Communists, Trade Unionists, Catholics, Gays, and others whose power was taken away) and citizens of neighboring countries that they invaded through bureaucracy, fiat, and militarism.

In case my link to the article doesn't work, here it is for posterity's sake and for the sake of discussion. All the bolded text is my own emphasis and the square brackets are mine, too:

February 28, 2006

Beyond Rivalry, a Hidden World of Sibling Violence
By KATY BUTLER

From infancy until he reached the threshold of manhood, the beatings Daniel W. Smith received at his older brother's hands were qualitatively different from routine sibling rivalry. Rarely did he and his brother just shove each other in the back of the family car over who was crowding whom, or wrestle over a toy firetruck.
Instead, Mr. Smith said in an interview, his brother, Sean, would grip him in a headlock or stranglehold and punch him repeatedly.

"Fighting back just made it worse, so I'd just take it and wait for it to be over," said Mr. Smith, who was 18 months younger than his brother. "What was I going to do? Where was I going to go? I was 10 years old."
To speak only of helplessness and intimidation, however, is to oversimplify a complex bond. "We played kickball with neighborhood kids, and we'd go off exploring in the woods together as if he were any other friend," said Mr. Smith, who is now 34 and a writing instructor at San Francisco State University. (Sean died of a heart attack three years ago.)

"But there was always tension," he said, "because at any moment things could go sour."

Siblings have been trading blows since God first played favorites with Cain and Abel. Nearly murderous sibling fights — over possessions, privacy, pecking orders and parental love — are woven through biblical stories, folktales, fiction and family legends.

In Genesis, Joseph's jealous older brothers strip him of his coat of many colors and throw him into a pit in the wilderness. Brutal brother-on-brother violence dominates an opening section of John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," and in Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," the cowboy Ennis del Mar describes an older brother who "slugged me silly ever' day."

This casual, intimate violence can be as mild as a shoving match and as savage as an attack with a baseball bat. It is so common that it is almost invisible. Parents often ignore it as long as nobody gets killed; researchers rarely study it; and many psychotherapists consider its softer forms a normal part of growing up.

But there is growing evidence that in a minority of cases, sibling warfare becomes a form of repeated, inescapable and emotionally damaging abuse, as was the case for Mr. Smith.

In a study published last year in the journal Child Maltreatment, a group of sociologists found that 35 percent of children had been "hit or attacked" by a sibling in the previous year. The study was based on phone interviews with a representative national sample of 2,030 children or those who take care of them.
Although some of the attacks may have been fleeting and harmless, more than a third were troubling on their face. [10% of the sample - Enzo]

According to a preliminary analysis of unpublished data from the study, 14 percent of the children were repeatedly attacked by a sibling; 4.55 percent were hit hard enough to sustain injuries like bruises, cuts, chipped teeth and an occasional broken bone; and 2 percent were hit by brothers or sisters wielding rocks, toys, broom handles, shovels and even knives. [now 20% of the sample - Enzo. So, 5-10 million children are suffering from untreated serious sibling abuse.]

Children ages 2 to 9 who were repeatedly attacked were twice as likely as others their age to show severe symptoms of trauma, anxiety and depression, like sleeplessness, crying spells, thoughts of suicide and fears of the dark, further unpublished data from the same study suggest.

"There are very serious forms of, and reactions to, sibling victimization," said David Finkelhor, a sociologist at the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, the study's lead author, who suggests it is often minimized.

"If I were to hit my wife, no one would have trouble seeing that as an assault or a criminal act," Dr. Finkelhor said. "When a child does the same thing to a sibling, the exact same act will be construed as a squabble, a fight or an altercation."

The sibling attacks in Dr. Finkelhor's study were equally frequent among children of all races and socioeconomic groups; they were most frequent on children 6 to 12, slightly more frequent on boys than on girls, and tapered off gradually as children entered adolescence.

As violent as sibling conflicts are among humans, they are seldom fatal, as they can be among birds and a smattering of other animals.

Siblicide is common among birds of prey, including tawny eagles, brown pelicans and kittiwakes. A Pacific Ocean seabird known as the blue-footed booby pecks at its siblings and pushes them out of the nest to die of starvation while the parents stand idly by. A baby black-crowned night heron in Minnesota was twice observed swallowing the entire head of a younger nestmate until it went limp and looked close to death. Embryonic sand tiger sharks eat one another while they're still in the womb.

Piglets are born with a special set of temporary "needle teeth" to attack their littermates in the struggle for the mother's prodigal frontal teats; the runts kicked back to the hind teat sometimes starve on its thin milk.
On the Serengeti Plain of Tanzania, spotted hyena pups, who are usually born in pairs, bite and shake each other almost from the moment they leave the womb. When the mother's milk is thin, the struggles often end with the death of one pup from wounds or malnutrition — especially, curiously enough, if the pups are the same sex.

Baby animals, researchers theorize, fight mainly to establish dominance and to compete for scarce food. Human children, on the other hand, fight not only over who got the bigger bowl of ice cream but also over who decides what game to play, who controls the remote, who is supposed to do the dishes, who started it and who is loved most.

Few experts agree on how extensive sibling abuse is, or where sibling conflict ends and abuse begins. It is rarely studied: only two major national studies, a handful of academic papers and a few specialized books have looked at it in the last quarter-century. And it is as easy to over-dramatize as it is to underestimate.

In 1980, when the sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire published "Behind Closed Doors," a groundbreaking national study of family violence, he concluded that the sibling relationship was the most violent of human bonds. Judged strictly by counting blows, he was right: Dr. Straus and his colleagues found that 74 percent of a representative sample of children had pushed or shoved a sibling within the year and 42 percent had kicked, bitten or punched a brother or sister. (Only 3 percent of parents had attacked a child that violently, and only 3 percent of husbands had physically attacked their wives.)

John V. Caffaro, a clinical psychologist and family therapist in private practice in the San Diego suburb Del Mar, defines sibling abuse as a pattern of repeated violence and intimidation.

In an interview, Dr. Caffaro, a co-author of "Sibling Abuse Trauma," said abuse was most often determined by a combination of disengaged upbringing by parents, testosterone and family demographics. It occurs most often in large families composed entirely of closely spaced boys, and least frequently among pairs of sisters, he said.

"A kid can hit a sibling once and it can look pretty bad, but that's not what we consider abuse," he said. "We're looking for a repeated pattern and when that happens, somebody — a parent — has got to be out to lunch."
Abuse occurs most frequently, he said, when a parent is emotionally absent as a result of divorce, long working hours, extensive business travel, alcoholism, preoccupation with his or her own problems or other factors. "One or both parents aren't really around much to do their jobs. It's almost a given," Dr. Caffaro said, adding that "peripheral" fathers are particularly problematic.

"Things are chaotic, boundaries are blurred, and supervision is minimal," he said, noting that those families do not always look chaotic from the outside.

"Sometimes the father is just basically extensively out of town for business and Mom is not a good limit-setter," he said.

In other cases, he added, parents escalate conflicts by playing favorites, ignoring obvious victimization, intervening only to shut the kids up or blaming older children without understanding how younger children helped provoke them.

Dr. Caffaro said that in his experience sibling violence could rarely be attributed simply to an extraordinarily aggressive or psychotic child.

In nearly 15 years of working with more than a hundred families and adult survivors of sibling abuse, he said he could remember only a handful of such cases, one involving a girl repeatedly beaten up by a brother with schizophrenia. Although some children have poor impulse control, he said, violence only becomes repeated abuse when parents fail to nip it in the bud.

Several adults, contacted through a classified advertisement posted online on Craigslist and through a Web site for survivors of sibling abuse, said that their parents had ignored their siblings' intimidation.

"My parents tended to lessen the significance of the abuse, telling me that my brother loved me, really, and that he really was a nice person," wrote Kasun J., 21, an Australian university student, in a posting on the Web site he started under the pen name Mandragora.

Kasun J., who did not want to be further identified for fear of family repercussions, said in an interview that he still kept his distance from an older brother who once threw a clock and a set of nail clippers at his head.
Daniel Smith said that his parents rarely intervened when he and his brother fought, figuring that "boys will be boys."

When he was in sixth grade, he said, a school counselor, concerned about a violent short story he had written, asked him about possible abuse at home, and he felt relieved and hopeful. But as soon as he told her that it was his brother, not his parents, who was hitting him, the counselor dropped the subject.

"I remember thinking that she was sort of a fraud," Mr. Smith said.

Other people interviewed said they were still haunted by memories of older brothers — and an occasional sister — who dumped them out of bassinets, hit them with mop handles, sat on their chests until they feared suffocation, punched them in the mouth or stabbed them in the hands with a nutpick or compass point.
Several said they were second-born children, and they theorized that their abusive siblings had resented being displaced. None wanted to be further identified out of concerns about family privacy.

Many people said the effects of the early abuse had lingered into adulthood. Mr. Smith, for instance, said that he still fights a tendency to avoid confrontations, especially with aggressive people who remind him of his brother. Another man, an academic in his 50's who did not want to be further identified out of privacy concerns, ascribed what he called his "constant wariness" to his physical intimidation in childhood by an older sister.

"I have a high need for solitude when I work," said the professor, who added that the unwelcome shoving and wrestling started when he was a toddler and was one of the defining influences of his early emotional life.

"I'm attentive to noise," he said. "If somebody's around, a lot of my brain immediately turns to: Who is it? What's up? Are they going to bother me or sabotage me in some way?"

Several people said that the abuse continued until they reached early adolescence and became strong enough to defend themselves. In Mr. Smith's family, however, the fights became even more violent when he reached his late teens, because he took up tae kwon do, began lifting weights and eventually struck back.

One afternoon in the family kitchen when he was 19, in the course of a routine argument, his brother half-heartedly slapped him. This time, for the first time, it was Daniel who got his brother in a crushing headlock, and Daniel who pressed a forearm against his brother's nose until it bled.

Knowing he could hold the position forever, Mr. Smith let his brother up. When Sean tried to restart the fighting, Mr. Smith, much to his surprise, burst into long, jagged sobs.

"I remember feeling like I should have been triumphant and I did feel some of that, but I also felt scared and confused," he said. "It was a rite of passage for me. I'd accomplished something and become my own person."
The brothers never fought again, never spoke about the violence and were not close for most of their lives. Sean Smith went on to a difficult adult life, and had only recently freed himself from addiction to alcohol and methamphetamines when he died three years ago, Daniel Smith said.

Only then, he said, did he realize the unspoken depth and complexity of their connection. When asked whether he had forgiven his brother, Mr. Smith hesitated.

"Once he died, I realized that we had a pretty strong bond that I didn't understand or even knew existed," he said. "I can tell you I outcried everybody else at the funeral."

United Arab Emirates' takeover of NYC Port is the next Katrina and 9/11/01 disaster in the making

2006-03-02T09:44:00.000-05:00

In my world view, I don't put it beyond the Bush Administration to actively work to allow New York City to be completely destroyed. They allowed New Orleans to sink. Such situations work out quite well for them. What do they need with Democratic-leaning NYC with its dissent, welfare-state, publishing, media, immigrants, and minorities?

It seems that NYC's only saving grace in the eyes of the Bush regime is Wall Street and the Federal Reserve Bank's world gold holdings. But Wall Street's wealth is paper, and that data is backed up elsewhere, so the trading will be back within a few days after a nuclear catastrophe. The Federal Reserve's gold is deep underground behind and under concrete, stone, and probably lead. The gold will be dug up as the dead are cleared away.

The port of NYC only checks about 5% of cargo shipping containers as it is, and that is after the containers get here. Now putting a company owned by a terrorist-infiltrated nation in charge of our ports provides the compartmentalization needed for plausible deniability when New York City is obliterated by a shipped and detonated nuclear weapon.

When or if Congress is able to conduct oversight and investiagation after the coming catastrophe of how NYC was nuked, the trail will go cold in Dubai, just as investigations with our 'allies' in U.A.E., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have consistently gone cold before. This has been going on for ten years.

The article linked above and here
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/03/01/aq-infiltrated-uae/
and the US Coast Guard's investigative report to the President's committee both strongly suggests that the United Arab Emirates is not safe to outsource our ports' operations to. As Buzzflash joked a few days ago, why not outsource the Secret Service's Presidential and Vice Presidential protection to the UAE (and let's see how safe they feel)?!

The best thing I can say about the W Adminstration is that they are pro-globalization and soft on the roots of terrorism and its related financing in the middle east and south asia. That is, they might just be laissez-faire capitalists and pro-corporation boondogglers and raiders. But, they are also consistent liars. The trail of destruction and devestation associated with this administration is enough to discern a pattern beyond incompetence and indifference. And they might actually be aiding or abetting destruction of population centers that resist the administration's plans for plunder and the possible martial takeover of the U.S.

Can we PLAY THE KATRINA BLAME GAME now? PLEASE?!

2006-03-01T19:57:00.000-05:00

Can we play the blame game NOW, please?

6 months after Bush claimed that 'no one could envision the levees breaching' we have video proof of him getting the warning from FEMA the day before the hurricane hit land, and then there was Bush telling the local state leaders that the Feds have everything under control -- perhaps lulling them into the same complacency that the President, Cheney, Rice, and Chertoff were experiencing at the end of their long breaks.

Never in U.S. history have we lost a major city. Even laissez-faire Italy has managed to keep Venice above water for a thousand years. Can this administration do anything right?

Not only is this administration abidingly and consistently incompetent, but so it is with lying. This is like the lie that Rice said about no one being able to predict that planes could target buildings, even though planes had been used as weapons on targets for sixty years.

Jimmy Carter was pilloried for some helicopters crashing in an Iranian desert sandstorm, trying to nobly and boldly rescue hostages. I don't understand how W gets away with blunder after incompetent boondoggling blunder. This guy is poison to our nation and to the world. Lord help us all!

Check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Katrina-Video.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 1, 2006
Filed at 7:14 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: ''We are fully prepared.''

The footage -- along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press -- show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced ''grave concerns'' about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

''I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe,'' Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

The White House and Homeland Security Department urged the public Wednesday not to read too much into the video footage.

''I hope people don't draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing,'' presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said, citing a variety of orders and disaster declarations Bush signed before the storm made landfall. ''He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times.''

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said his department would not release the full set of videotaped briefings, saying most transcripts from the sessions were provided to congressional investigators months ago.

''There's nothing new or insightful on these tapes,'' Knocke said. ''We actively participated in the lessons-learned review and we continue to participate in the Senate's review and are working with them on their recommendation.''

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a critic of the administration's Katrina response, had a different take after watching the footage Wednesday afternoon from an AP reporter's camera.

''I have kind a sinking feeling in my gut right now,'' Nagin said. ''I was listening to what people were saying -- they didn't know, so therefore it was an issue of a learning curve. You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware.''

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

-- Homeland Security officials have said the ''fog of war'' blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. ''I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,'' National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

''I don't buy the `fog of war' defense,'' Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. ''It was a fog of bureaucracy.''

-- Bush declared four days after the storm, ''I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees'' that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. He later clarified, saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm -- and Bush was worried too.

White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit.

''I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One,'' Brown said. ''He's obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he's asking questions about reports of breaches.''

-- Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared but the transcripts shows they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. ''I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off,'' Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing.

It wasn't long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed.

''We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what's going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up,'' Smith said Aug. 30.

Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing.

''We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we'll have people dying -- not because of water coming up, but because we can't get them medical treatment in our affected counties,'' said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape.

Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government's disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims.

''We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,'' Brown warned. He called the storm ''a bad one, a big one'' and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary.

''Go ahead and do it,'' Brown said. ''I'll figure out some way to justify it. ... Just let them yell at me.''

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing.

''I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm,'' the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security's operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina's reach, for a bird flu event.

One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard.

Chertoff: ''Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?''

Brown: ''We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now.''

Chertoff: ''Good job.''

In fact, active duty troops weren't dispatched until days after the storm. And many states' National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen.

The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

''I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,'' Mayfield told the briefing.

Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

''They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that,'' Brown said.

Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes.

Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome -- which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response -- would be safe and have adequate medical care.

''The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level.... I don't know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane,'' he said.

Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome.

''Not to be (missing) kind of gross here,'' Brown interjected, ''but I'm concerned'' about the medical and mortuary resources ''and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe.''

------

Associated Press writers Ron Fournier and Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.

Word Play on the Aruban Police Chief

2006-03-01T04:57:00.000-05:00

Am I twisted, or is it funny and somewhat appropos that the Aruban Police Chief in charge of the botched Natalee Halloway murder/missing person investigation is named "DOMPIG" ?

3 Presidents' Day Proposals

2006-02-20T18:09:00.000-05:00

In honor of Presidents’ Day, I would like Congress to please consider these three things with regard to the current administration’s abuse of powers.

First, I would like you to explore impeachment of the President and Vice President for the following reasons:
1. Incompetence with regard to fighting Al Qu'aida and the Taliban, allowing the leaders to continue operating.
2. Lying to Congress (during the State of the Union 2003) and the American people about the link of Iraq to Al Quaida and WMD.
3. Violating classification and national security by outing CIA WMD expert Plame for political and revenge purposes.
4. Abusing intelligence agencies NSA and DIA to spy on Americans and peaceful anti-war groups.

Second, I am alarmed that the President has sealed access to previous administrations’ records, especially the Bush41 administration. Several principals from this administration play rolls in the current administration, so these records, which are public property, are relevant to both political scientists and historians. This abuse of secrecy makes the Executive Branch less accountable. We need legislation to make Presidential papers quickly accessible to the public, and we need the Freedom of Information Act strengthened.

Finally, I would like to see legislation that limits the Presidential Pardon, especially for current and former administration officials. We have seen how after more than five years and millions of dollars spent, Independent Counsel Walsh’ responsible work uncovering the Iran-Contra abuses were swept away by a Bush41 pardon in the final days of his administration. Justice was thwarted, accountability was avoided, and the public’s right to know about this scandal was ignored. I fear that this is going to happen with regard to the current Plame/Fitzgerald Prosecutions of Libby, Rove, and Cheney. The result of a Bush43 pardon of the Plame Affair players would be that national security is abused without recourse or accountability and that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money will again be wasted without justice being served.

Finally, the media feel they have Cheney's Smoking Gun

2006-02-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

The Dick Cheney hunting accident shooting isn't all that significant in the big scheme. He hunts with lobbyists and connected fat cats frequently, and nearly a hundred hunters die annually in accidents in Texas. Cheney's policies have led to tens of thousands of people dying during his current reign, too. But all that's too nuanced for the press to grasp.

Finally, "WE HAVE A SMOKING GUN!" the Press intones. It is the search for the smoking gun, like the Watergate Tapes, or whatever physical symbol the press needs, that have obsessed the media since the age of the atomic bomb, intercontinental ballistic missiles, television dominated news and social interaction, and terrorism. Consequently, there seems to be a nearly impossible hurdle to hold the imperial Executive Branch accountable.

In this incident, we have the mean-faced sneering Cheney shooting his friend at close range in the face and chest. All at once we have a physical and public manifestation symbolizing an administration's homicidal and reckless impulses.

Was Cheney hunting while drunk? If he can't hunt responsibly, can he be trusted to a heartbeat away from the Presidency? If he wasn't drunk, then how can he make such an Elmer Fudd like mistake? Is he "Dead Eye Dick"? Is he part of the "Gang that Can't Shoot Straight"? 2005 was a bad year for the Bush-Cheney regime, and now 2006 is shaping up to be another bad year for them.

This is reminiscent of Bush 41 throwing up at a Japanese state dinner. The Presidency is a grueling job, with lots of travel and exposure to people (and their viruses), but somehow the seemingly effete Bush puking on the Prime Minister partially handed the Presidency to a more vigorous Bill Clinton who had no pretentions of partrician manners.

Back to Cheney, this incident also symbolizes his administration's penchant for secrecy, coverup, and lying, combined with double standards between the administration and everyone else. Why hasn't the Vice President or his office faced the nation about this incident? Why does it take a day for an annoucement to come at all, and then it comes from his lobbyist friend who owns the ranch (and not the Whitehouse)? Why does the victim's heart attack news announcement get further delayed? These questions don't get answered, but their silence implies what is becoming obvious to everyone: these guys aren't careful, they don't care, and in short they are incompetant.

We can get our emails and phone calls tapped in real time. If you are in a Quaker Peace Group you can have your meetings under surveillance. If you are a suspected terrorist you can be disappeared for years at a time without legal representation. But if you work for the Bush-Cheney regime, you're loyalty to almost genocidal policies is rewarded and you continue to get paid by the government and pursue your agenda. While the rest of us wonder who will help us in the next disaster, or if we'll get mysteriously arrested.