Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
January 31, 2008
In heavily redacted documents released by the Ministry of Homeland Security, we learn that the State Department, Pentagon, Justice Department, CIA, National Security Agency and other leviathan agencies consider "hackers, bloggers and even reporters" a threat to national security.
In "dozens of detailed, mock disasters," the Associated Press reports, these "villains" launch "electronic attacks" against "computers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey." Adding to the treason, a "major news network" refuses to air its sources when reporting the fictional attacks, as of course we know the media is expected to serve the state. In the real, non-Bushzarro world, of course, the corporate media would never run such a story, but never mind, the Ministry would have us believe it is the 1970s, back when newspapers on occasion ran investigative journalism.
"The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. described as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers," the Associated Press continues. In other words, as the Ministry would have it, "plausible attacks" come not from an imaginary al-Qaeda, the CIA created terror group, but rather from people opposed to the globalist plan to turn the world into a slave plantation based on the China model.
Other enemies are likely enumerated in the document, not that we will ever know because the "government censored most of the 328 pages it turned over."
On the other hand, the government wants you to know bloggers are suspect and would "reveal locations of railcars with hazardous materials," while reporters can be easily "duped into spreading 'believable but misleading' information" that would lead to "confusing the public and financial markets."
All the more reason to destroy what's left of the Constitution and impose martial law, no doubt.
Michael Shermer, of Skeptic Magazine, claims to have debunked the 911 Truth Movement. In fact, he doesn't understand it. Shermer tars the movement with a broad and fallacious brush, absurdly comparing the 911 truth movement with Holocaust denial, a fallacious smear that misstates the 911 position. Holocaust deniers, in fact, have more in common with Bush and his defenders: both deny the nature and the scope of the crime of 911.
No holes, no Holocaust. No melted steel, no Al-Qaeda attack. The parallels are equal, and equally flawed. And just as I never imagined that Holocaust denial would wend its way into the mainstream press (Irving's trial was front page news for months), after my above conversation with the filmmaker I never imagined that 9/11 denial would get media legs. But now it has legs for days, and so we have been forced to provide a public response. To read our complete analysis of the claims of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, go here.At the very outset, Shermer's misstatement of fact discredits his article. Knowledgeable "truthers" have not denied the existence of "molten steel". It is the existing video tapes of molten steel that, in themselves, utterly disprove the official conspiracy theory of George W. Bush and those who would continue to cover up this crime. Steel melts at much higher temperatures that could possibly have been reached in the brief and relatively cool fires in all of the towers that fell that day. Additionally, Shermer's analogy collapses. Bush himself, the architect of what will ultimately prove to be the biggest cover up in history is more to be compared with holocaust deniers than are the growing legion who demand that the 911 white wash be ended now! Bush defenders likewise persist in a common fallacy, labeling those who demand an investigation as "conspiracy theorists". Rather, the only theory that has been forward is the outlandish and absurdly improbable "official conspiracy" put forward by George W. Bush. Until recently, Shermer had played the role of the great skeptic. We can now put that to rest. No one who buys into the official 911 conspiracy theory could possibly be a skeptic. The better word is: Gullible. The dictum of a true skeptic is this:Michael Shermer, 9/11 "Truthers" a Pack of Liars
(CBS) President Bush took a few minutes during his trip to Europe Thursday to voice his opposition to establishing a special commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before Sept. 11.Mr. Bush said the matter should be dealt with by congressional intelligence committeees.CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante reports that Mr. Bush said the investigation should be confined to Congress because it deals with sensitive information that could reveal sources and methods of intelligence. Therefore, he said, the congressional investigation is "the best place" to probe the events leading up to the terrorist attacks.Just recently, it has been learned that former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow interfered with the 9/11 report, now eschewed by the co-chairs of the committee.
According to the book, Zelikow had failed to inform the commission at the time he was hired that he was instrumental in helping Condoleezza Rice set up Bush’s National Security Council in 2001. Some panel staffers believe Zelikow stopped them from submitting a report depicting Rice’s performance prior to 9/11 as “amount[ing] to incompetence.”Earlier, evidence from the crime scenes in New York and the Pentagon was hauled off and disposed of. Last time I checked --the destruction of evidence was a felony....
In his book, Shenon also says that while working for the panel, Zelikow appears to have had private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, despite a ban on such communication, according to Holland. Shenon reports that Zelikow later ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls, although the commission’s general counsel overruled him, Holland wrote.--Key 9/11 Commission Staffer Held Secret Meetings With Rove, Scaled Back Criticisms of White House
Steel was the structural material of the buildings. As such it was the most important evidence to preserve in order to puzzle out how the structures held up to the impacts and fires, but then disintegrated into rubble. Since no steel-framed buildings had ever collapsed due to fires, the steel should have been subjected to detailed analysis. So what did the authorities do with this key evidence of the vast crime and unprecedented engineering failure? They recycled it!Some 185,101 tons of structural steel have been hauled away from Ground Zero. Most of the steel has been recycled as per the city's decision to swiftly send the wreckage to salvage yards in New Jersey. The city's hasty move has outraged many victims' families who believe the steel should have been examined more thoroughly. Last month, fire experts told Congress that about 80% of the steel was scrapped without being examined because investigators did not have the authority to preserve the wreckage. 1 The bulk of the steel was apparently shipped to China and India. The Chinese firm Baosteel purchased 50,000 tons at a rate of $120 per ton, compared to an average price of $160 paid by local mills in the previous year.A real investigation would have admitted this testimony in evidence. Real skeptics believe in the "burden of proof" and the burden of proof has always been on the Bush administration. A true skeptic would demand that this evidence be released immediately. A true skeptic would not have come to a conclusion without this evidence being examined publicly by experts in a way that would allow its public verification.There are, in fact, New York fighters --on video tape --stating: 1) molten steel was found at the base of the collapsed towers; 2) they heard rapid explosions as the towers collapsed in a free fall.--The Expeditious Destruction of the Evidence at Ground Zero
Our reporters were initially avoided by Moore, but he subsequently decided to approach We Are Change.org/ Infowars.com reporters for a discussion.Moore brought up his lingering questions on 9/11, which are a clear departure from the 'government negligence' picture he painted in his film Fahrenheit 9/11, released some three years ago.Moore told reporters, "I've had a number of firefighters tell me over the years and since Fahrenheit 9/11 that they heard these explosions-- that they believe there's MUCH more to the story than we've been told. I don't think the official investigations have told us the complete truth-- they haven't even told us half the truth."Moore's interest in 911 may have been peaked by the established fact: no identifiable airliner wreckage was ever found in the Pentagon debris. Moreover, as I detailed in a previous article, the "official" account of the burials at Arlington National Cemetary is shot through with inaccuracies, internal inconsistencies and inconsistencies with forensic accounts. As far as we know, none of those said to have been buried at Arlington were! Additionally, witnesses described a much smaller aircraft --certainly not an airliner, certainly not Flight 77!
It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this Trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: "Say I slew them not." And the Queen replied, "Then say they were not slain. But dead they are..." If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.Mr. Shermer, if you subscribe to the official story, if you support Bush's decision not to investigate, if you dare compare those demanding truth with those who historically sought to cover it up, you become the new Gloucester! You would have us say: there have been no official lies, there are no slain, there has been no crime! Additional resources--Justice Robert Jackson, Summation for the Prosecution by Justice Robert Jackson
The Municipal Center was swamped this week with nasty phone calls and e-mails, many containing language unprintable in this newspaper.
The level of rage from those who still believe that President Bush can do no wrong is astounding to behold. But while we're surprised there are still that many people in America who support Bush, we understand their rage.
Put yourself in the shoes of a diehard Bush supporter. You believed President Bush would avenge the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but Osama bin Laden has never been captured and Afghanistan remains a safe haven for al-Qaida.
You believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq posed a grave threat to America, but the WMDs turned out to have never existed and all the rationales for war turned out to be lies (see www. publicintegrity.org/WarCard for a fully searchable database of hundreds of false statements issued by the Bush administration in the two years after 9/11.
You believed him when President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, below a banner that read "Mission Accomplished," and proclaimed that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Now, nearly 4,000 Americans and about 1 million Iraqis have died in a conflict that was only supposed to last a few weeks and now is about to enter its sixth year.
You believed that President Bush would create a leaner, more efficient government, yet the size of the federal government has expanded and the federal budget surplus he inherited in 2001 is now a $9 trillion deficit.
You believed America would remain the unquestioned No. 1 superpower in the world. Now we're the No. 1 debtor nation, the dollar is weaker than it has been in decades and our influence on world affairs shrinks by the day.
In the face of all this, some little pipsqueak town in Vermont dares to call your president a war criminal and calls for his indictment and arrest.
We feel your pain. The man you believed was destined for greatness is now headed for the dustbin of history. Future historians will rate George W. Bush as the worst president ever. And the last remnants of the conservative majority you thought would last for decades will likely be swept away in November's election.
We fully realize that there is absolutely no chance that Brattleboro will indict and arrest Bush and Cheney. But three years ago, impeachment seemed like a crazy idea, too.
Conservatives laughed at Vermont in 2005 when Town Meeting voters around the state approved resolutions calling for Bush's impeachment. Now, the intransigence of the Democratic Party leadership in Congress is all that's preventing impeachment from taking place.
Nobody likes to be on the wrong side of history. That's why we have a certain amount of sympathy for the people who are attacking this town from the safety of their computer keyboards. Everything they believed in has been betrayed by an administration that exploited their trust.
Watching these people reminds us of the late psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous "Five Stages of Grief." They haven't really dealt with the first stage, denial and isolation ("Is Bush really that bad? It can't be.") Judging from the e-mails we've seen, they're very deep into the second stage, anger. They're entering the third stage, bargaining ("Maybe if we can find a real conservative like Ronald Reagan, everything will be better.") Stage four, depression, may be starting to sink in as they see that their presidential choices for 2008 are John McCain or Mitt Romney.
We're not sure if they will get to the final stage, acceptance ("Maybe John McCain isn't really that bad, after all.") We hope they do, eventually. If we as a nation are to eventually recover from the long nightmare that has been the Bush presidency, we'll need the support of those angry letter writers.
Officials in Brattleboro, Vt., have been inundated with e-mails and phone calls since outsiders learned about a petition that calls for local police to arrest President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the Associated Press says.
The town's Selectboard approved the measure last Friday, meaning that voters in Brattleboro will be asked to vote on the following resolution in early March:
Shall the Selectboard instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictments for consideration by other authorities and shall it be the law of the Town of Brattleboro that the Brattleboro Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro if they are not duly impeached, and prosecute or extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them?
The Rutland Herald reports that town officials stopped answering the phone on Monday because of the "nastiness" of the calls they were receiving from websurfers across the country. "We're getting e-mails and phone calls, nasty, nasty e-mails, I've only a gotten a few," Town Clerk Annette Cappy tells the paper. "You couldn't repeat most of those calls, they are nasty and nasty."
The whole thing appears to be a waste of time. AP says none of the officials named in the resolution has the authority to arrest, detain or otherwise prosecute to the president and vice president. "It is largely symbolic," Kurt Daims, the petition's author, tells the Herald.
The Vermont Cynic, a student newspaper at the University of Vermont, notes in a story about the controversy that "The White House did not comment on the issue."
Here's the statement that town officials posted on their website amid all the hullabaloo about the petition:
On January 25 the Town Clerk’s office received a petition from Brattleboro resident Kurt Daims. Per Town Charter, a petition containing signatures from 5% of Brattleboro voters can be placed on the ballot for a Town-wide vote. Mr. Daims’ petition did contain the required number of signatures. At a meeting on January 25, the Brattleboro Selectboard voted 3-2 to place the petition on the ballot. Reasons given by Board members voting in the affirmative centered on the belief that if a petition contained the required signatures, the voters should have the opportunity to vote on the matter. Reasons given by Board members voting on the dissent centered on the belief that articles outside the scope and authority of the Town should not go before the voters of the Town. The Brattleboro Town Attorney has stated that the petition has no legal standing, as the Town Attorney has no authority to write an indictment and the Town Police Department has no authority to attempt an arrest of the President of the United States.
The Town will vote on the article on March 4.
How would you vote if you lived in Brattleboro? Vote here.
(Photo of Selectboard meeting, top, and Daims taken by Zachary P. Stephens, Brattleboro Reformer via AP.)
Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak-and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn't there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.
But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America's first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.
The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race-and we can't win, because it's fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.
A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy
1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.
2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.
3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn't just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.
4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.
5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don't have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner BEFORE WE even know if the election was legitimate, they PRE-DEFINE all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of "sore losers."
6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.
7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.
Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don't.
8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID's at the polls.
As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.
9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.
We're under surveillance everywhere else, so why not?
10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday,
requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.
11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.
12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment--and disenfranchisement--for all repeat offenders.
"Three strikes and you're out" would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.
***
This comes from Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, a new collection of writings by the major Election Integrity people, which IG Publishing will be bringing out in early April.
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Mark Crispin Miller
Mark Crispin Miller is the author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, which is now out in paperback from Basic Books, with over 100 pages of new material. He may be reached through his blog at markcrispinmiller.com. A movie based on his off-Broadway show, A Patriot Act, is available on DCD at www.patriotnation.us.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12525
I think we can find enough people in every voting district who care enough to count the paper ballots. Long hours, low pay, no credit, get the blame if something goes wrong. It's worth it. Kenny
Bill Clinton wants you to suffer. “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren,” said Bill.
But not to despair because, as usual, all of this suffering and misery will eventually pay off, according to the Bill-miester.
During a “long, and interesting speech” in Denver, Colorado, stumping for his wife the Bilderberg Queen, writes ABC News “blogger” Jake Tapper, Clinton promised all the suffering and sacrifice “could ultimately increase jobs and raise wages with a good energy plan.”
How many times have politicians told us we must trade suffering and sacrifice for a rainbow and pot of gold down the road? Of course, the pay day never arrives and, in a few months or years, more sacrifice is demanded — ever more, endlessly. Remember back in the early 1990s when Bill told us NAFTA would result in more and better paying jobs? Of course, the exact opposite occurred, as good jobs were shipped off to Mexican maquiladoras and ultimately ended up in China where slaves labor under the sadistic whip of authoritarian bureaucrats for fifty cents an hour, if they’re lucky.
Said Clinton: “And maybe America, and Europe, and Japan, and Canada — the rich counties — would say, ‘OK, we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.’”
Rich countries? Actually, the average American’s wage and standard of living has fallen sharply since the 1970s. According to official statistics, as of 2004 there were 37 million people living in poverty in 2004, or 12.7% of the population, up from 12.5% in 2003. “Nationally, the poverty rate leveled off last year at 12.6 percent after increasing every year since the decade began. It was a period when the country went through a recession and an uneven recovery that is still sputtering in parts of the Northeast and Midwest,” CBS reported in 2006, and the 2005 census reveals that 16 million Americans — a 32 year high — are living in extreme poverty, defined as a meager $9,903 a year.
Bill would have those grinding away in poverty earn even less and suffer more — to save the planet, of course, never mind that “global warming” is junk science at best.
But then “global warming” and “climate change” are simply the latest in a series of scams to pauperize the populace, as our rulers have long range plans to reduce the planet to a feudal plantation that will make medieval peasantry bonds of manorialism pale by way of comparison.
It makes sense to enlist Bill and his Bilderberg door-stop wife to push this plan. Strangely and yet predictably, millions of Americans listen to Bill, who is a consummate actor and accomplished liar — as most sociopaths are — and people actually like him, thanks to years of corporate media hype, including his “all too human” moment of weakness with Monica Lewinsky.
Unfortunately, as “Paper Collar Joe” Bessimer famously noted, “there’s a sucker born every minute… and two to take ‘em.”
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has partially built his career on making London more environmentally friendly.
Piccadilly Circus in central London
He’s made a few missteps in tackling environmental problems, such as the recent law he was promoting that would have hurt on bike use in the city. But today, in the thick of his mayoral re-election campaign, he announced what is in effect a massive tax hike on gas guzzling vehicles in the city of London.
London already charges a tax, known as a congestion charge, on almost all vehicles that enter central and parts of west London. Certain vehicles, such as those hybrids or eco-friendly fuel cars are exempt. Livingstone’s most recent announcement, however, vastly increases the charge for the highest polluting vehicles.
Vehicles in band G, those that emit more than 225 grams of CO2 per kilometre, will pay a whopping £25($50) every day to enter the congestion zone. This will mostly affect heavy 4×4 vehicles. Most other vehicles will continue to pay the daily charge of £8($16).
Livingstone had previously discussed the congestion charge hike, but likely chose to formally announce it now in an effort to strengthen his campaign. He has frequently highlighted his “green” credentials throughout the campaign.
Livingstone said in a written statement: “A key issue at the election is my proposal for a £25-a-day charge for the most CO2-emitting vehicles entering the congestion-charging zone and, after consultation, I will be able to take a decision on this in the coming month. On the environment, the choice is even starker. [Mayoral opponent Boris Johnson] is one of the few politicians who supported George W Bush in opposing the Kyoto treaty.”
The move has come under some criticism from the Automobile Association. They argue the charge will penalize small business owners who use vans to conduct business in the city, as well as large families who must use bigger vehicles to travel.
Info from Guardian Unlimited
Written by RobertIsrael continues to refuse to tell international sappers where it dropped its illegal cluster bombs on Lebanon.
Related
Israel admits war crimes
Double Blind
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LEBANON: Deminers find new cluster bomb sites without Israeli data
High failure rates
ZAWTAR WEST, 22 January 2008 (IRIN) - Deminers clearing Israeli-dropped cluster bombs in south Lebanon are turning up an average of 10 new sites per month, while Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods. A single cluster bomb can disperse hundreds of bomblets.
Photo: Hugh Macleod/IRIN 
Deminers from MAG scour farmland in the village of Zawtar West in south Lebanon for Israeli-dropped cluster bombs. The UN says an average of 10 newly infected sites are found every month
“All these weapons systems are computerised and grid references are entered before the bombs drop. Not receiving the cluster bomb strike data from the Israelis remains our biggest obstacle to clearance,” Dalya Farran, a spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre for South Lebanon (MACSL), told IRIN.
The UN estimates that Israel rained down around four million bomblets - most US-supplied - onto south Lebanon in the last three days of its 2006 July war with Hezbollah fighters, when a ceasefire had already been agreed.
In a 24 December report last year the Israeli military cleared itself of accusations that it had violated international law in its use of cluster bombs to fight Hezbollah. In a statement, the army said its chief investigator, Maj-Gen Gershon HaCohen, said: "It was clear that the majority of the cluster munitions were fired at open and uninhabited areas, areas from which Hezbollah forces operated and in which no civilians were present." 
[Arabic] [English]
[English]
Around one million of the bomblets failed to explode on impact, leaving roads, schools, homes and fields littered with lethal explosives that detonate when touched, making them a danger similar to anti-personnel mines.
More strike sites Cluster bombs, or sub-munitions, are legal, and manufacturers say their failure rates should be between 10-15 percent. The UN estimates in general the weapons fail between 20-30 percent of the time. In south Lebanon MACSL estimates between 30-40 percent of the bombs dropped failed to explode, rising up to 80 percent in some places.
The high failure rate may partly be explained by Israel’s use of Vietnam-war era munitions, such as the M42, M77 and Blue 63, all US or Israeli-made and the MZD2, made in China, many of which MACSL said had gone beyond their expiry date by the time they were dropped on Lebanon.
The Israelis also dropped the new M85 cluster bomb that is designed to self destruct if it fails to explode on impact and which manufacturers say has a 1 percent failure rate. MACSL’s Dalya Farran said they estimate the bomb, used for the first time on battlefields in Lebanon, had a 10 percent failure rate.
“By their nature, cluster bombs are very likely to fail,” said Farran. “They are not accurate and not reliable. When they fail they become more or less like land mines, and actually worse as they are spread over a very large area.” - hm/ar/cb
Initial estimates by MACSL that most of the unexploded munitions would be cleared by the end of last year have been revised to the end of this year.
Since the end of the war, over 30 Lebanese have been killed and over 200 injured, many permanently disabled from the loss of a limb after accidentally triggering an unexploded bomblet. The state provides no direct support for cluster bomb victims.
At the end of October 2006, two months after the end of the war, MACSL recorded 796 individual locations as infected with unexploded ordnance, totalling 32 million square metres of land.
By late last month that figure had risen to 961 strike locations, totalling 38 million square metres. According to MACSL, 137,000 bomblets have so far been safely destroyed, mainly in high priority areas, such as roads, homes and schools.
Farmers risk all
Tens of thousands of the bomblets still lie on farmland, however, making agriculture - the mainstay of the economy in south Lebanon on which 16,000 families depend - a dangerous and increasingly unprofitable pursuit.
Legality |
| In a 6 September 2007 report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the US government to conduct an investigation into what it called “Israel’s use of US-supplied arms, ammunition, and other material in violation of international humanitarian law.” An initial report by the US State Department last January found the US-made weapons were misused in civilian areas. Israel justified its use of cluster bombs during the war by arguing that all civilians left in south Lebanon were “terrorists related to Hezbollah”. HRW’s report accused the Israeli military of war crimes: “To the extent such attacks were conducted with knowledge or reckless indifference to the civilian nature of those being attacked, then those who ordered these attacks would have the criminal intent needed for the commission of war crimes as defined by international humanitarian law.” In the Protocol additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the protection of victims of international armed conflicts (Protocol I), of 8 June 1977. Part IV, Chapter II; Article 51; Point 2 says: "The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." In a statement issued on 24 December, the Israeli military cleared itself of illegal use of cluster bombs saying it had used them to target Hezbollah rocket launching sites. In 1982 the US Reagan administration imposed a six-year ban on sales of cluster bombs to Israel after a Congressional investigation found that Israel had used the weapons in civilian areas during its invasion of Lebanon that year. A coalition of over 138 nations met in Geneva in December to discuss a draft treaty banning cluster bombs, which have been widely used in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Chechnya. But major weapons producing states including the USA, Russia, Israel and China have opposed the ban, saying they need to keep the option of using the weapons for self-defence. As of 7 December 2007 there were 94 states that have explicitly endorsed the Oslo Declaration calling for a ban on the use of cluster bombs. The coalition is due to meet in Wellington in New Zealand in February. - hm/ar/cb |
An unexploded cluster bomb containing hundreds of bomblets shot in an open field in southern Lebanon last week. (AP) The cluster bombs constitute the number one humanitarian problem facing Lebanon after the war because many of the bomblets remain unexploded and as duds, they have turned into make-shift mines, converting towns, villages and fields into undeclared minefields. Since the cease-fire went into effect on August 14, at least 14 civilians, including many children, have been killed by the unexploded bomblets. - Meron Rapoport
Related
Two out of three US Tax dollars go into military spending
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Ron Paul responds to McCain's "100 years in Iraq" statement in the Jan. 30 debate on CNN.
Added: January 30, 2008
Paul Joseph Watson | |
Ron Paul was cheated for the umpteenth time last night, this time by CNN, as the corporate media once again engaged in mass public deception by advertising their spectacle as a "debate" when in fact it was nothing more than a staged punch and judy show.
CIA trainee Anderson Cooper directed just five questions at Congressman Paul as well as two half-questions, the answers to which he interrupted on both occasions.
In comparison, Mitt Romney fielded 17 questions and John McCain got 15, not including the time the two spent bickering with each other about their past statements.
Again, just as with the previous MSNBC debate and numerous others before it, Ron Paul was given less than a third of the questions as the other candidates.Since Ron Paul is the only candidate expressing opposing viewpoints, the corporate media's deliberate ploy to relegate, marginalize and restrict his opportunities to speak amounts to overt public deception. These farces should not be referred to as debates because they are merely PR stunts that are conducted with a deep-seated bias towards the establishment candidates.
As we have repeatedly emphasized, this is how frontrunners are created, this is how the establishment promotes its own candidates at the expense of others. The only solution is to continue to strike at the root of America's corporate media monopoly by creating our own forms of media and eventually eclipsing their influence which, slowly but surely, is beginning to happen with the aid of the Internet.
Here's the breakdown of Paul's participation time courtesy of the Lew Rockwell blog.
Question 1 on the economy: 1:19 minutes
Question 4 on the environment: 0:41 minutes, because Anderson cut him short and assured him "2 minutes, in 2 minutes we have a question for you. I promise"
Question 5 on income tax rebates and "make work" schemes: 0:49 minutes
Question 11 on Sandra Day O'Conner: 0:09 minutes, I kid you not. Cut short by Anderson
Question 15* on McCain's "100 years in Iraq" statement: 1:39 minutes (only question directly asked to Dr. Paul)
Question 18* on how X would handle the military as commander in chief: 1:50 minutes
Question 19* on a Reagan endorsement: 0:46 minutes
The highlight of the night came when Ron Paul slammed the punch and judy spat between McCain and Romney over Iraq, both of whom fully support endless occupation, with the Senator making it clear this week that a McCain presidency would mean more wars.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/013108_cheated_again.htmAble Danger and The Reflecting Pool, two separate motion pictures based on the non-official version of what happened on 9/11, will be premiering this January. The two independently made drama films confront the viewer with the facts that 9/11 could not have been perpetrated by the 19 hijackers and deal with the question who might be behind the crime of the century. Able Danger premiers Monday 28 January at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands. The Reflecting Pool will premiere on 31 January in the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, USA. - Watch the trailers at the bottom of this article.
Able Danger
Able Danger is a movie based on the fact of an official unit called Able Danger, comprised of United States intelligence personnel. The unit observed ringleader Mohammed Atta and his hijackers, but was not allowed to provide the FBI and later the 9/11 Commission with their data. More than a year before the attacks on 11 September 2001 it destroyed the gathered information, worth 2,5 terabytes, equal to one fourth of the printed books in the Library of Congress. In reality, says Webster Tarpley, author of Synthetic Terror - Made in USA, Able Danger took care of the hijackers in order for the group to be the real life cover story for 9/11. Watch Tarpley explain the system behind the hijackers and the controllers. Watch news clips about Able Danger.
In a reaction Tarpley writes to me: ‘In my analysis, Able Danger were terrorist controllers and terrorist monitors who observed carefully what the various patsies were doing in order to check up on them and make sure they were following orders and conforming to the strateghy set by the rogue network. The obvious problem of Agentenfuehrung is to make sure such criminal types do what you want, not what they may want. They have to be supervised by case officers directly, and also constantly observed. Able Danger did the observing part. Door Hop Galley is another unit inside Able Danger which has never been explained. Congressman Weldon thought he could use Able Danger against the Kean-Hamilton commission and the Democrats, but he was meddling in something much more explosive, so he was politically and personally destroyed’.
Eventhough the voice of Tarpley features prominently in the trailer (see below) of the movie Able Danger, he is not part of it. The movie is about a character called Thomas Flynn, who is the quixotic publisher of a hard-hitting 9/11 conspiracy expose, implicated in the murder of his friend and employee. At the same time he finds himself entangled with a mysterious Eastern European beauty, Kasia. As it turns out, Kasia possesses the smoking gun that proves the identities and methods of the real architects of 9/11, and Thomas willing to risk everything to expose the truth.
Movie director Paul Krik writes: ‘DeepJournal, it seems to me, lives in the film noir perspective. You look at the news events and see beyond its news spin to its true cause. My story is about someone like you, who lives in Brooklyn and runs a cafe and publishes alternative media. But the movie begins when a femme fatale out of a 40s noir movie who works for the ’shadow government’ enters his cafe … The movie is fiction!’
Able Danger premiers Monday 28 January at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands, (Pathé 7, 21.45 hrs). Writer/director Paul Krik will be present and lead actress Elina Löwensohn. Press and industry can watch it the previous day, (Cinerama 2, 22.30 hrs). Additional public screenings on Tuesday 29 (Cinerama 7, 20.00 hrs) and on Friday 1 February (Pathé 7, 19.15 hrs).
The Reflecting Pool
The fictional movie The Reflecting Pool, announced earlier by DeepJournal, is about a successful journalist called Alex Prokop, who receives a rare 9/11 videotape revealing new information on the attacks. The footage was sent by a driven researcher by the name of Paul Cooper, whose daughter died on 9/11. Sensing a good story, Prokop travels with Cooper to New York and Washington, DC, where they uncover suppressed information about the attacks. As Cooper introduces Prokop to key eyewitnesses, the façade of the "official story" begins to crumble.
Prokop hears accounts of underground explosions in the Twin Towers moments before their collapse, and discovers that a firm run by the President’s brother provided security for WTC.
We follow Alex and Cooper as they investigate the inexplicable collapse of the 47-story WTC Building Seven, disprove the implausible airliner "attack" on the Pentagon, and uncover the illegal destruction of physical evidence from Ground Zero. Alex’s search for the truth leads to a dangerous and shocking realization.
The Reflecting Pool premiers Thursday 31 January at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, California, USA (19.30 hrs), followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. Next is the opening on Saturday 2 February in the Laemmle’s Monica 4-plex, Santa Monica
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1834
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Joseph Culp: Rebel Without a Budget
Published in the Santa Monica Mirror
by Lee Michael Cohn, Mirror Contributing Writer
About a year ago, the Mirror ran a book review of Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring, a delightful overview of the local maverick filmmaker’s long and varied career. Corman’s legacy might be summed up with this simple idea: YOU CAN MAKE YOUR MOVIE. Although much different in his artistic sensibilities, longtime Santa Monica resident Joseph Culp has clearly embraced The King of The B’s do-it-yourself philosophy.
Culp, an award-winning actor whose many credits include leading roles in Alan J. Pakula’s Dream Lover, Monte Hellman’s Iguana, and a recent guest-starring role on the hit TV drama Mad Men, now finds himself wearing an additional professional hat – independent film producer. Indeed, the three micro-budget films Culp has produced and starred in arguably place him in the vanguard of “art house” independent filmmaking.
Culp won critical acclaim at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival for his performance in Hunger, an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Knut Hamsun’s novel, which he produced with writer-director Maria Giese and which featured his father, veteran actor Robert Culp (I Spy, The Greatest American Hero). Updated to modern Hollywood, Joseph plays a kind-hearted but struggling screenwriter set adrift on the mean streets of Tinseltown. Shot “guerrilla style,” director Giese opts for a grainy, nearly monochromatic patina that highlights both the vérité quality of the story and Culp’s fine performance as the desperate, self-deluded writer slowly losing his grip on reality. Shot entirely on location in Los Angeles, Hunger won Best Feature at the 2007 Moondance Film Festival, besting several films that clearly spent more on a day’s worth of craft service than Hunger spent on its entire shoot. And despite the fact that the film took years to find the resources to finish post-production, Culp’s desire to continue making small, personal films was fueled by his experience on Hunger.
Culp’s current project, The Reflecting Pool, incorporates many of his skills and passions in a project that has the potential to stir an international controversy. Completed last summer, Culp and writer-director-co-star Jarek Kupsc began developing the material in the Walking Theatre Group, a workshop integrating theatre, film, and transpersonal work for actors, writers, and directors that Culp has run for over 10 years at the Electric Lodge performance space and gallery in Venice. As the script took shape, Kupsc and Culp developed a close working relationship, so collaborating on the film was a natural outgrowth of the creative partnership that began in Culp’s workshop. The film, although ambitious and far-reaching in its socio-political agenda, is indeed the product of local artists working in close communal collaboration.
The Reflecting Pool follows an investigation by a Russian-American journalist and the father of a 9/11 victim into the labyrinth of suppressed facts and anomalies surrounding the tragedy. The investigation eventually yields striking revelations that have a devastating personal effect on both men. The mind-boggling array of secrets, lies, contradictions, and cover-ups the main characters discover collectively suggest that the 9/11 attacks could not have occurred without some level of complicity from our government. Although a fictionalized “docudrama,” the film is based entirely on verifiable facts, all readily available to the public in print and on the Internet.
Culp explains that within the “9/11 Truth Movement” there are essentially two schools of thought: LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) and MIHOP (Make It Happen On Purpose). The film makes a very persuasive case that the American people must consider both possibilities, or at the very least, strongly question the official version of the 9/11 attacks.
Culp feels that The Reflecting Pool has come along at just the right time. Says Culp: “It’s time to tell a story like this; the initial shock of the tragedy and the co-opted invasion of Iraq made it taboo for many to even question what really happened. But now, after nearly five years of controversial war, we have gained new perspective and can ask hard questions.”
The film was basically made by three people: Culp, Kupsc, and co-producer/cinematographer Jodie Baltazar (who also happens to be Kupsc’s wife). Culp smilingly recalls shooting a scene at the Electric Lodge where for several hours he would touch up the actors’ make-up, unplug a large industrial fan, go grab the boom mike and hold it for the duration of the take, re-plug the fan, and then repeat the process with each new take. He muses on the fact that even though it’s nice to work with a full crew and trucks full of grip and electrical equipment, at the end of the day three industrious individuals will do just fine.
Culp believes that this is an exciting time for independent filmmakers, due to the affordability of professional gear and the opportunities afforded by the Internet for alternative distribution (a clip of TRP posted on YouTube has already garnered over 35,000 hits and thousands of requests to purchase the DVD). “It’s an exciting time for making independent film because the technology is such that you really can get a good digital camera and editing and sound software and go make your film. It still remains for you to have some skill and vision in your ability to tell a story, but it’s marvelous that it’s become more possible to make your own films,” he enthused.
American Cinematheque presents the Los Angeles premiere of The Reflecting Pool at the Aero Theatre on Thursday, January 31, at 7:30 p.m., followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. The Reflecting Pool opens theatrically at Laemmle’s Monica 4-plex on February 2. For more information about the film, go to reflectingpoolfilm.com. To learn more about Joe Culp and his current projects, go to josephculp.com.
LA PREMIERE - AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE
WHEN: Thursday, January 31 , 2008, 7:30 PM
WHERE: Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA.
TICKETS $10.00 at door or Fandango.com
There will be a Q & A with the filmmakers following the AERO PREMIERE on January 31. A perfect way to kick off the 2008 election year! .
THEATRICAL OPENING starts FEBRUARY 2, 2008
LAEMMLE'S MONICA 4-plex
1332 2nd Street
Santa Monica, 90401
310-394-9741
SCREENING TIMES: Saturdays/Sundays at 11 AM - Starts February 2, 2008.
Trailer at http://youtube.com/watch?v=32b-e-xwuB8
Note to 9/11 Truth Activists from Carol Brouillet
Jarek Kupsc wrote this recently:
In addition, the DVD of “The Reflecting Pool” features an audio
commentary track revealing all sources used in making the movie.
The DVD is recorder in All Regions (NTSC), and should work on most dvd
players around the world.
You can pre-order you DVD now at:
reflectingpoolfilm.com.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a camping trip, set up their tent, and fall asleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes his faithful friend.
"Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
Watson replies, "I see millions of stars."
"What does that tell you?"
Watson ponders for a minute. "Astronomically speaking, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Timewise, it appears to be approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, it's evident the Lord is all-powerful and we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?"
Holmes is silent for a moment, then speaks. "Watson, you idiot, someone has stolen our tent."
~~~~~~~~
ILLEGAL ALIEN MIGRANTS: WHY HERE, WHY THEY STAY
By Frosty Wooldridge
January 31, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
In this third and final interview, Michael Folkerth’s book: “THE BIGGEST LIE EVER BELIEVED” exposes America’s greatest crisis—unending growth.
Trying to corner Clinton, Obama, Romney and McCain into addressing America’s immigration invasion proves harder than arm wrestling an octopus! Trying to get our apathetic American public to force definitive answers from this presidential quartet proves tougher than bringing an Egyptian mummy back to life.
Once the full impact of adding endless millions of people hits, the devastation to American society will make Hurricane Katrina look like a Sunday picnic. It’ll make Mount Saint Helens look like a puff of smoke from Humphrey Bogart’s cigarette. It’ll make Briteny Spears’ life resemble a “Father Knows Best” happy ending. What’s the big difference for our entire society? Immigration, both legal and illegal, will create carnage and consequences that affect every state forever.
In other words, before the Titanic hit the iceberg, all seemed well. Once it hit, everything changed for the worst.
Folkerth examines why our corporations demand unending immigration to force-feed growth. “Today we will once more work through the actual root cause of illegal immigration as it relates to the economy,” he said. “To avoid having to descend into the dismal science of conventional economics, we’ll apply my patented ‘Mikeronomics’ and take a shortcut to the truth.
“Consumer spending represents two-thirds of our domestic U.S. economy, and is responsible for some 62 percent of the jobs that have thus far, not gone off to China. The necessity of keeping such consumer spending whipped up to a brisk pace is well up in the red zone of the alert scale for those seeking reelection.
“And, since our economy is based on the impossible basis of ever increasing growth, the necessity of adding a few million new consumers to our buyers club from time to time becomes imperative. Here’s the rub. The current birthrate in the U.S. doesn’t get the consumption job done.
“No problem; we have the I.N.S., often thought to mean Immigration and Naturalization Service, but actually meaning “Instant Necessary Shoppers,” which allows 1.2 million foreign folks to join our club each and every year, legally.
“However, with all things ever expanding some years back we reached that unfortunate, but predicable, point where the birthrate and legal immigration combined didn’t trip the trigger.”
That’s when the brilliant, foghorn-leghorn rooster, alcoholic Senator Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts dumped the 1965 Immigration Reform Act onto the American public. He raised immigration rates from a stable 175,000 annually to 1.1 to 1.5 million. That single bill drove consumption into high gear. Corporations busted unions and wages declined because millions of immigrants moved into the work place to undercut Americans. Soon, illegal aliens followed to work slave wages off the books. Result? Farmers and corporations raked-in unheard-of profits. Our economic engine roared with production, consumption, sales and pollution.
“We also reached the point where the good citizens of this country were reluctant that immigration continued at high numbers,” Folkerth said. “Therefore we had a conundrum. Congress doesn’t like conundrums. It forced them to either tell the American people that the false economy that they have come to love and enjoy was no longer an option, or let a few thousand illegal immigrants sneak in each night to reinvigorate the activity at the mall.
“Given the above choice and with election coming up, the decision for a person who is desperately seeking reelection becomes quite clear; never face south.
“We have noticed that nearly all politicians have denied the personal knowledge that 12 to 20 million illegals lived and worked our country. I remind you that these are the same politicians who are protecting you from terrorists sneaking into the country.
“If a federal or state politician says he or she didn’t know these folks were here, throw the bums out. If they did know it and didn’t tell us, throw the bums out.
“They all knew we had illegal immigration because it was encouraged. Allowing thousands of illegal people to invade the U.S. on a daily basis and remain here for years without any measure of enforcement against such activity, is encouragement; plain and simple.
“Imagine a consumption based society that is already teetering on the brink of recession due to a lack of consumer spending. Teetering may not be the correct word when our president and Congress are so desperate for Americans to spend money, that both agree to sending checks out to the good taxpayers (and non-taxpayers) to provide the money for that purpose.
“Continue to imagine that in the middle of this mess, 12 to 20 million of those consumers would leave overnight, due to being deported. Politicians imagine this event occurring all the time; it’s called a hideous nightmare.
“Now, given the above information, can you spell a m n e s t y? Your faithful representatives sure can. After all, if there is a fine, it’s not amnesty, it’s then spelled ‘collusion.’
“So what’s the answer? Should we just continue to increase population until the whole thing flies into a million pieces? Should we keep on expanding until our natural resources can no longer support us? Or should we work toward a sustainable economy that is not based on ever expanding population growth?
“Unfortunately, it is possible to add millions of people to these United States. However, have you ever seen pictures that exhibit the living conditions of the average people in China and India? A picture is worth a thousand words. That picture may well represent Middle America, just a few years down the road.”
To be certain, it’s not pretty.
“THE BIGGEST LIE EVER TOLD”
Author: Mike Folkerth
ISBN # 0-9779965-3-0
Publisher: Lifetime Chronicle Press
Available: www.kingofsimple.com
Price: $13.95 includes shipping
Next column: “State of the Union: What Bush Didn’t Tell You”
Listen to Frosty Wooldridge on Tuesdays and Thursdays as he interviews top national leaders on his radio show “Connecting the Dots” at republicbroadcasting.org at 6:00 PM Mountain Time. Adjust tuning in to your time zone. Tonight, January 17, 2008, he interviews author Mike Folkerth about his book “The Biggest Lie Ever Believed.” It’s about the American Dream sinking faster than the Titanic.
© 2008 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved
Ask yourself why the same media that lambasted the White apartheid government at every opportunity isn't covering the REALITY that is South Africa today.
Watch the video and then keep in mind that this is what Barack Obama has said about the "New South Africa," by "Paying Tribute To Victims Of Apartheid."
"It's a good way for all of us to remember the struggle that people went through for their freedom," Obama said. "That's an inspiration."
One wonders what Obama has said about the thousands of Whites that have been murdered since the end of Apartheid.
January 31, 2008 at 10:55 am
‘The Exodus’ By Ismael Shammout
It sure seems that’s what he wants…. yesterday he went as far as calling for an end to the coup in Gaza by Hamas. Is ‘coup’ the new term for LEGALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT? Are we to expect the Palestinian people to reject their own CHOICE and bow down to the desires of the occupier? Abbas seems to think so… as can be seen in the following essay…
“We will not accept any new conditions; they (Hamas) have to go back to the old border-crossing agreement. We are more interested in the Palestinian people’s interests than Hamas is. If Hamas is really for them as well, let them comply with this agreement.”
Well, does Abbas really know what he is talking about? Indeed, as the Arab proverb goes, if he knows, it is a real calamity, and if he doesn’t, it is even a greater calamity.”
I am saying this because the old agreement governing operations at the Rafah Border-Crossing enables Israel, the country that has been trying to decimate 1.5 million Gazans by way of starving them, to have the final say as to when the border terminal may be opened and when it will be closed.
We all remember how thousands of Palestinians, including students, patients, pilgrims and other travelers, were left stranded on the Egyptian side of the border for weeks and months because an Israeli officer on the Israeli side of the border decided to keep these helpless victims hostage to his whims and cannibalistic instincts.
In fact, this wicked sadism, which Mr. Abbas is defending doggedly now, was responsible for the death of dozens of Palestinians who were left stranded in the desert, as if they were animals, not human beings. Go back to relevant reports describing the plight of stranded Gazans and you will understand what I am talking about.
How did Israel manage to keep the border-crossing closed most of the days of the year? Well, it was very simple. According to the “wonderful” agreement Abbas is now demanding that Hamas accept unconditionally, the Rafah border terminal can’t be operational unless in the presence of EU monitors. But the monitors themselves, who hail from several EU countries and some of them may well be working for the Israeli Intelligence, are based in the small Israeli kibbutz of Kerem Shalom, a few miles away from the border terminal. And according to the infamous agreement, they can’t have a free access to the border terminal unless they receive beforehand a daily permit from the Israeli army.
For its part, the Israeli army, acting on instructions from the government, would simply and routinely declare the only road from Kerem Shalom to the Rafah border terminal a closed military zone in order to keep the border-crossing closed. Of course, the army would concoct “security reasons” to justify the virtually perpetual closure, but everyone , including the Israelis themselves, know quite well that genuine security considerations have very little to do with the Israeli measures and that the real motive is to punish and torment the Palestinians.
As mentioned, this flagrant abuse of authority was not done one day or two days or even ten days per month. This was the norm, the modus operandi, and the border crossing was kept closed 26 or even 29 days per month, causing tremendous suffering to the Palestinians.
It was a deliberate and calculated process intended to torment, savage, brutalize and humiliate the people of Gaza, and it was all done under the rubric of an “international agreement.”
The EU leadership and member-states knew well what was going on at Kerem Shalom. But they were too morally dishonest and too subservient to Israel and the United States to show any meaningful objection to Israel’s systematic persecution of a helpless people whose men, women and children are clinging to life just as many of the Jewish inmates at Ghetto Warsaw did nearly 67 years ago.
So, I would like to ask Abbas and his aides and hangers-on who talk too much and make so much noise, claiming to serve the vital interests of the Palestinian people:
How do you think that re-allowing Israel to control the Rafah border- crossing would serve the interests of the Palestinian people? Are you drunk? Are you stupid? Are blind? Are you ignorant?
Besides, why do you think that Israel should be involved in running the Rafah border- crossing in the first place? Isn’t the border crossing an exclusively Egyptian-Palestinian crossing? Didn’t Israel declare that it ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip? Has not the Zionist regime been saying ad nauseam that it is no longer responsible for Gaza? If so, why do you insist that the slave master remain the ultimate decision-maker, the ultimate boss? This is sickening, to say the least and it shows a kind of umbilical subservience on your part to the nefarious occupiers.
I realize that there are problems between Fatah and Hamas. However, betraying the Palestinian people and undermining their vital interests for the purpose of weakening Hamas and appeasing Israel and pleasing Washington borders on treason, pure and simple.
What else can be said of and about clinging to an unconscionable agreement that allows the evil occupiers to imprison, torment and humiliate us with impunity…because the “agreement” says so.
Well, the agreement may go to hell along with those who signed it.
In short, Hamas is right a hundred per cent. The Rafah border crossing must be jointly run exclusively by the Palestinian and Egyptian authorities. And the Ramallah regime may, if it wants, take part in managing the border terminal, as part of an overall reconciliation process between Gaza and Ramallah.
However, brining Israel into the picture is unacceptable. The people of Gaza have suffered more than enough at the hands of Israel. Their murderer and tormentor must never be allowed to be jailer as well.
Is Abbas going to understand this? I doubt it.
In "Ebb Tide: Political Analysis Reaches Astonishing New Lows", we were looking at a column from the International Herald Tribune by Alan Cowell which amounted to one lie after another, with a grain of truth thrown in here and there.Voting along party lines in George W. Bush's first term ran at 90% among House Republicans, almost 86% among House Democrats, 89% among Senate Republicans and 85% among Senate Democrats, according to a recent Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report. This may be compared with levels averaging 71% or less through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter years...What do these numbers tell us? Nothing! The national political landscape has been changing so fast that it is virtually unrecognizable compared to the one we lived in just eight years ago. Back then our president was already a scoundrel and a war criminal, but the Bill of Rights was still more or less intact, we didn't consider torture "normal", and none of us had ever heard of a "free speech zone". Telecom providers weren't archiving our calls and emails to hand over to the feds; libraries weren't required to tell anyone what books we were reading; we didn't have to take off our shoes to get on an airplane; on and on it goes.
Brownstein's analysis is so shallow that even the New York Times has no trouble publishing a cogent refutation:Brownstein skillfully and convincingly recounts the process by which the conservative movement gained control of the Republican Party and its Congressional delegation. He is especially deft at identifying the institutional and procedural tools that the most conservative wing of the party used after 2000 both to vanquish Republican moderates and to limit the ability of the Democratic minority to participate meaningfully in the legislative process. He is less successful (and somewhat halfhearted) in making the case for a comparable ideological homogeneity among the Democrats, as becomes clear in the book’s opening passage. Brownstein appropriately cites the former House Republican leader Tom DeLay’s farewell speech in 2006 as a sign of his party’s recent strategy. DeLay ridiculed those who complained about “bitter, divisive partisan rancor.” Partisanship, he stated, “is not a symptom of democracy’s weakness but of its health and its strength.”It's pretty sad when Kos is considered "scorched-earth". But the whole thing is pretty sad. The so-called "hyperpartisanship" which forms the central thesis of Brownstein's book is not a fact of political life but quite the opposite -- a false story first floated by the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House.
But making the same argument about a similar dogmatism and zealotry among Democrats is a considerable stretch. To make this case, Brownstein cites not an elected official (let alone a Congressional leader), but the readers of the Daily Kos, a popular left-wing/libertarian Web site that promotes what Brownstein calls “a scorched-earth opposition to the G.O.P.” According to him, “DeLay and the Democratic Internet activists ... each sought to reconfigure their political party to the same specifications — as a warrior party that would commit to opposing the other side with every conceivable means at its disposal.” The Kos is a significant force, and some leading Democrats have attended its yearly conventions. But few party leaders share the most extreme views of Kos supporters, and even fewer embrace their “passionate partisanship.” Many Democrats might wish that their party leaders would emulate the aggressively partisan style of the Republican right. But it would be hard to argue that they have come even remotely close to the ideological purity of their conservative counterparts. More often, they have seemed cowed and timorous in the face of Republican discipline, and have over time themselves moved increasingly rightward; their recapture of Congress has so far appeared to have emboldened them only modestly.
Instead Brownstein writes about "paralysis" and "hyperpartisanship". Who else but a mainstream "reporter" could pick up such a transparent lie and make a whole book out of it?
01.24.08 | 12:00 PM 
If there's a debate that sums up post-9/11 politics, it's security versus privacy. Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It's the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.
In a Jan. 21 New Yorker article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusses a proposed plan to monitor all -- that's right, all -- internet communications for security purposes, an idea so extreme that the word "Orwellian" feels too mild.
The article (not online) contains this passage:
I'm sure they have that saying in their business. And it's precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it's true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.
We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.
Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don't have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it's based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.
Since 9/11, two -- or maybe three -- things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and -- possibly -- sky marshals. Everything else -- all the security measures that affect privacy -- is just security theater and a waste of effort.
By the same token, many of the anti-privacy "security" measures we're seeing -- national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on -- do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.
The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control.
You can see it in comments by government officials: "Privacy no longer can mean anonymity," says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. "Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information." Did you catch that? You're expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who -- presumably -- get to decide how much of it you deserve. That's what loss of liberty looks like.
It should be no surprise that people choose security over privacy: 51 to 29 percent in a recent poll. Even if you don't subscribe to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's obvious that security is more important. Security is vital to survival, not just of people but of every living thing. Privacy is unique to humans, but it's a social need. It's vital to personal dignity, to family life, to society -- to what makes us uniquely human -- but not to survival.
If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy -- especially if you scare them first. But it's still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.
Bruce Schneier is CTO of BT Counterpane and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. You can read more of his writings on his website.
HR 1955 (the Thought Crime Bill) is now S-1959 in the Senate, and sits on the desk of Joe Lieberman.
Lieberman (zionist Jew) is pushing for Bush nominee James Glassman (zionist Jew) to be appointed assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy. This is the top position in the U.S. State Dept. for dispensing propaganda.
Glassman says “al Qaeda” is doing a better job than the Bush regime in winning friends over the Internet. "Our enemies are eating our lunch in terms of getting the word out in digital technology.”
Glassman is now the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which dispenses official U.S. propaganda through such networks as the Voice of America, the Arabic language Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa, and so on.
His comments echoed a November speech by Secretary of Offense Robert Gates, who said the United States needs more speed, agility and cultural relevance in its communications.
Rumsfeld is also back, and is calling for a new propaganda agency at the Pentagon.
"We are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals," Gates said.
(Bombs and bullets aren’t getting the message across.)
"It is just plain embarrassing that al Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America."
(Out of curiosity, I’ve long searched for one of these “al-Qaeda” sites. Does anybody know of one?)
Glassman said he will use person-to-person contacts, student and cultural exchanges, and new technologies to push the United States' message.
(“New technologies” meaning thought crime legislation?)
"I am deeply committed to a program of ridiculousvigorous propaganda communication," he told the committee.
Glassman said the United States must overturn a misconception in the Muslim world that the USA and Israel are a military threat, and want to weaken and divide the Muslim world.
(Above all, however, we must continue to kill Muslims.)
One member of the committee, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey, asked Glassman, "Do we broadcast what people want to hear or what they need to hear?"
Glassman replied, "We have to be honest. If we tell them lies, they are going to figure that out very quickly."
(Tee hee.)
Lieberman said Glassman’s public diplomacy post is "the closest thing to a supreme allied commander in the war of ideas and one of the most important posts in Washington."
By: Devvy
January 31, 2008
© 2008 - NewsWithViews.com
"If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power of money should be taken from banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies." ~ Thomas Jefferson
Despite clever word smithing coming out of the mouths of polished politicians and high paid illusion artists for networks like FOX (in for a very rough 2008) News, only someone in extreme denial can ignore the true state of America's economy. I've written about it for years, warning people that while Congress continues to write hot checks, kissed, blessed and signed off by whatever banking cartel water boy is sitting in the White House, the powder keg was just waiting to blow. BOOM.
With two or three exceptions (Dr. Ron Paul being the stand out), the U.S. House of Representatives, comprised of useful fools, the functionally illiterate and stinking buzzards, has just passed another monumental piece of lunacy called an "economic stimulus package." This $1.5 BILLION dollar shell game will stimulate nothing and let me tell you why.
One: There is no money in the U.S. Treasury. As I write this column, the people's purse is overdrawn $9,203,187,681,379.26. Every one of those "economic stimulus package" checks sent out to the American people will be a hot check written against an account that's over drawn $9.2 TRILLION DOLLARS. How can Congress do this? They do it by borrowing from the unconstitutional central bank called the "Federal" Reserve. By the time the interest is paid on this grotesque "stimulus package," the tab will be $3 BILLION dollars.
Two: There will be no economic stimulus because this is just another Band Aid being applied in an attempt to stop the patient on the operating table from hemorrhaging to death. Whatever the amount, at this time it appears to be a $600.00 hot check to individuals and a $1200.00 hot check to couples, it will get spent right away. Because tens of millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, it's doubtful these 'hot bux' will go into a savings account. Off the struggling middle class will go to Wal Mart to buy needed products made in commie China, which increases the trade deficit that most Americans neither understand nor have any interest in because daily survival is all consuming.
Third: Now that this quick fix called 'hot bux' is spent, what did it accomplish? Like a heroin junkie, flash bang, but then right back to reality and looking for the next fix. Let's not forget that these hot checks might be in the mail sometime in May - almost four months down the road. Yesterday's rate drop by the privately owned "FED" will not be felt for six-eight months down the road, long after many more Americans will have already drowned and small businesses had their 'final liquidation - going out of business' sales.
Fourth: Here's the part that proves these miscreants in Congress are not only unfit for office, but border on the brink of mental illness - ILLEGAL aliens will also get these "tax rebates." No, you're not reading that wrong. Comrade Pelosi and her gang of nitwits passed this bill which contains a provision to give criminals (illegals who smuggle themselves across our borders) who "earn" $3,000 per year by stealing jobs they have no legal right to have, a $300.00 hot check and your children and grand babies will be the ones to inherit the debt. Yesterday, the counterfeit senate scared for their political future this November, killed that provision in their version of this grotesque "stimulus" package; who knows what the final carrot will look like.
Fifth: The massive "entitlement" programs already gasping for some sort of life line, are now like full grown hippos looking to mother government to bail them out for another month, then another month, then another month. If you missed Carolyn Lochhead's bombshell column back in 2004, she gave the numbers that shocked a whole lot of people - except Congress who remained in their delusional states of self-importance as the cancer continued to fester. BOOM.
Isn't that a great solution to our "ailing economy"? There's no money in the treasury, but Congress, signed off by Bush, will run up another $3 BILLION borrowed dollars in debt. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! If Democrats think Pelosi's House is going to do anything to stop what's coming, just think of this past year under her "leadership": chaos and fluff and puff while our soldiers continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While the FBI is now investigating sub prime mortgage fraud, Marxist Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to jawjack how they have the magic fix to help the masses. Establishment lackeys, Flip Romney and notoriously hot tempered, John McCain talk the worn out "tax cuts." Folksy, Brother Huckabee's ignorant promotion of a "fair tax" shows his lack of qualification on the subject. Of course, all of this is just a continuation of the dance into the abyss because it means nothing in real time.
On January 23, 2008, I went in search of a tent city located in Ontario, California, about a 45-minute drive (depending on traffic) East of LA. While I had an approximate idea of the location, West end of the Ontario Airport, I knew I would have to do a little bit of searching. It didn't take long. The stench of human waste and garbage was so over powering, I picked it up a half mile away.
This tent city is shocking to see up close. It is reminiscent of photos from the artificially engineered Great Depression, only in living color. The city is doing their best to help these folks, but that cost gets passed on to the productive in Ontario and the county itself in higher taxes.
One young man I interviewed asked me not to take his photo because he's looking for work. While the majority of Americans living at this tent city are simply those left with no place to go for various reasons, this 30-ish, educated American lost his home through foreclosure several months ago. As he sat, stroking his cat, a sad story emerged. Caught up in the hype about the glorious state of the economy, he and his wife bought a house with an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) in a high ticket market. When it came time to face the reality of a bigger payment, credit card debt to the max and little savings, the first loss was the house, then the marriage due to stress and then his job.
If you think this tent city is just a bunch of bums, not true. The city has stepped in with out houses and getting children transported to local schools. The adults milling around were dressed middle class, some cooking over open fires, others in groups talking. I asked one lady who came near the curb to dump some water if she wouldn't mind speaking with me? She said yes, but was defensive because a lot of media have been around and apparently some of the coverage has been less than kind. Single mother with two children; husband skipped out so there's no help there. Evicted because she couldn't pay her rent with the taxes eating both of her paychecks - Mr. Bush's idea of the American dream: multiple, low paying jobs while our good jobs are destroyed through trade treaties signed by him, his father and Bill Clinton. The conversation moved to the high cost of everything and despair. This in a land rich in human and natural resources. I left this tent city knowing it's not going to be the last one on the American landscape.
Are Americans now burning their homes to the ground to collect the insurance instead of facing foreclosure? Others are just walking away from their loans. What happens to the local economy when foreclosures in one county (Lee, Florida) numbered 1,441 in December and 7,324 for the year? When you add the financial time bomb Jeb Bush built and lit before he left office now ready to go off, the citizens of Florida face a frightful future. According to one real estate tracking service, the number of U.S. homes that slipped into some stage of foreclosure in 2007 was a stunning 79 percent higher than in the previous year. Recession is the word being used for a "soft" market, but look out as 2008 progresses because it's going to get far, far worse than most Americans can envision.
In their effort to shore up disaster, Congress and the thieves at the FED have been bailing out Wall Street, the bankers and their own backsides. After all, it's not the little guy out there filling their campaign coffers with ill gotten gains, it's the corporations that own them right along with their magical money machine, the "Federal" Reserve. As the carnage begins to spread deeper into American households, Americans will demand more and more from mother government to bail out their bacon. Of course, it never seems to sink in that it's the American people themselves who reelect (with the help of high tech rigging) the same crooks who continue to spend recklessly on unconstitutional expenditures; just read this one. Bring home the bacon? Nothing like getting fat off the hog and then dropping dead from all that pork.
So few Americans understand the relationship between the FED and their wallet. They have little or no understanding of the money trail between the IRS and the FED. Those who do have been buying gold as a hedge against what IS already underway. I'm not a gold dealer, but if you're considering protecting what you have left, I always recommend El Dorado Gold. Professional like Harvey (Phoenix) 602.228.8203 and Eric (Florida) 623.643.8786, are highly knowledgeable and can get you on the right path to financial security. I get sick just thinking about the real time jeopardy to the trillion dollars in pension funds at risk right along with 401K savings; here's just one example. How many times have I encouraged Americans to listen to David Walker, Comptroller General of these united States of America trying to warn the American people about the financial tsunami that is now building speed? Too many to count along with hundreds of other writers.
Ron Paul has a bill lingering in Congress since July 15, 2007, to abolish the unconstitutional Federal Reserve. There are no sponsors. Why? Because without the central bank to borrow from on a daily basis, Congress would be unable to write hot checks to the tune of more than NINE TRILLION BORROWED DOLLARS. Because without the central bank to borrow from, Bush would not be able to steal from the American people to fund his nebulous and endless "war on terror," his unconstitutional nation building or endless "wars of liberation" to the tune of almost ONE TRILLION BORROWED DOLLARS.
Yes, the numbers are staggering and there isn't going to be any quick fix. Financial analysts whose reputations will soon be in tatters and craven elitists like George Bush and his minions, are hoping that the massive consumer dollars generated by the American people will save the day, but it's not going to happen. This is why so many Americans support Dr. RON Paul for president. They know he's the only candidate from either party who truly understands our monetary system and limited, constitutional government. One must remember that the next president won't be seated in the Oval Office for another year and by that time, between hyper inflation and more heavy taxation eating what little the American people have, the picture is indeed grim.If Ron Paul were to win the presidency and Dr. Edwin Vieira as Secretary of the Treasury in his administration, we would begin the recovery process towards a true and honesty monetary policy and an elimination of the unnecessary federal income tax. If that doesn't happen, we will see more tragedy for our nation. As Dr. Vieira said almost a year ago: "Rest assured that what you decide today you will be required to live with tomorrow. For the fiscal gap is a national trap that is inexorably closing. Once the financial swallows come home to the Disgrace of Columbia, there will be no going back—only “forward,” into the New World Disorder of economic dislocation and deprivation enforced by a thoroughgoing police state."
You've heard the expression, "It's not over until the fat lady sings." Can you hear the cacophony of sound from millions of Americans yet? You will, but it won't sound like singing.
Reality links:
1 - Transportation bill: More financial bondage
2 - Credit loss could hit $ US 1 trillion
3 - Cleveland Sues 21 Banks Over Mortgage Foreclosures
4 - Billions still at risk (Call Congress for a bail out!)
5 - Banks May Write Down $70 Billion, Oppenheimer Says
6 - Will the coming monetary crisis provide opportunity for reform? (2005)
7 - Keynesian Chickens Coming Home
8 - Beware alternative taxing schemes
9 - Banks 'May Write Down $70 Billion'...
10 - America's "robust economy"
11 - Unpaid Credit Cards Bedevil Americans
12 - Chrysler CEO: We're 'operationally' bankrupt
A forthcoming book by NYT reporter Philip Shenon — “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation” — asserts that former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow interfered with the 9/11 report.
According to the book, Zelikow had failed to inform the commission at the time he was hired that he was instrumental in helping Condoleezza Rice set up Bush’s National Security Council in 2001. Some panel staffers believe Zelikow stopped them from submitting a report depicting Rice’s performance prior to 9/11 as “amount[ing] to incompetence.”
Relying on the accounts of Max Holland, an author and blogger who has obtained a copy of the forthcoming book, ABC reports that Zelikow was holding private discussions with White House political adviser Karl Rove during the course of the 9/11 investigation:
In his book, Shenon also says that while working for the panel, Zelikow appears to have had private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, despite a ban on such communication, according to Holland. Shenon reports that Zelikow later ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls, although the commission’s general counsel overruled him, Holland wrote.
Zelikow flatly denied discussing the commission’s work with Rove. “I never discussed the 9/11 Commission with him, not at all. Period.”
After completing his work with the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow was hired by Condoleezza Rice as Counselor at the State Department. He resigned from that position in late 2006. In 1995, Rice and Zelikow co-authored a book entitled, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed.”
"The only thing that gets paid off on the money that never needed to be borrowed in the first place is the interest via the income tax on the citizens. Now that's Ponzi capitalism par excellence."
---
The distraction du jour is a debate on ‘Monetary Policy’. Specifically what should the FED do in regard to interest rates? The one dominant overriding FED policy is to drive the US so deeply into its debt that they have to pump daylight down to us. The only differences discussed are in the means of doing it and who among the financial elite’ benefits. The media do their part in deflecting attention from the root cause of fiscal evils which is that the FED is a private bank issuing public money. All the current intellectually dressed up discourse on banking theory and monetary policy debate is BS. In reality this is just a good ole fashion turf war with the Street crowd on the side of propped up equities and the bankers who want the toilet paper dollar doled out today to be worth more tomorrow rather than less. It’s a cute little ancillary benefit for the bankers and a stealth interest charge to the borrower ---the dollar borrowed being worth less than the dollar repaid. While the balance of power up there will rock to and fro, for the minions below feeding off the scrapes of victors table it never changes, the borrower is servant to the lender; the US is in their ---FEDs--- debt, so we are all their slaves. Right now Wall Streets biggest Godfather, Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson is the Treasury Sectary of the United States, so guess who’s in charge? Yup the Street is and the US dollar rolling over under resistance of 80 on the USDX being well on its way into the dirt.
It was in 1913 that J P Morgan and John Rockefeller fronting for bankers Maynard Rothschild and Paul War-burg succeeded in establishing the federal reserve system of the United States or the FED. The FED is a private bank which holds secret meetings ---see Mission Impossible--- to determine the nation’s fate. Its business plan is to seize the constitutional authority to issue money from congress and become the sole issuer of the nation's money. The result is a new business plan for Uncle Sam, which is debt. That is instead of issuing or using his own money to pay for things uncle Sam will borrow the money from the FED at interest whether he needs to or not. If you or I ran a business that way what would they us? CRAZY! Oh and by the way the money the FED lends to Sam comes from nothing, right out of thin air. HOW? When Sam saunters up to the FED window to borrow the bank doesn’t crank up the press and print more dollars, no way. The fed gives Sam an electronic credit for the desired sum and that is it. Now Sam must pledge tangible collateral for the debt he incurs, that collateral being the income tax, a regressive tax on the real producers of the nation's wealth the workers. But the bank only promises to remove the accounting entry once the debt is paid. What would we be called if we did business that way? CRIMINALS its FRAUD. But it is and that is all that counts.
Actually the process described above is how it works with you and me private people, the regular Sams. Money we borrow from the bank or Credit Card Company comes from nothing. Shocking, but simple, so simple that a construction worker can figure it out so, the bankers now more con artists and criminals than financiers cloak the simple money making scam behind high powered banking jargon and hyped up hyper complicated sounding economic BS.
A synopsis of the mechanics of the debt driving process is:
1. Sam sells bonds to the FED,
2 .The FED buys the bonds with money outta nowhere
3. The bonds mature and Sam sells more bonds to the FED to pay back the maturing ones.
The only thing that gets paid off on the money that never needed to be borrowed in the first place is the interest via the income tax on the citizens. Now that's Ponzi capitalism par excellence.
---In fact the 16th amendment was fraudulently passed in the infamous year 1913--
So Why war, Why welfare, Why moon shots, Why Debt? Because FED. One the FED is the nation’s bank and bankers profit from the issuance of debt. But mainly because the borrower is slave to the lender; the US is in their ---FEDs--- debt, so we are all their slaves.
Any other debate is smoke. The heated media made debates about should they (the FED) stop inflation, or protect the economy is worse than worthless, its distraction.
Here is an example. The pretense of this article is to criticize the FED for lowering interest rates in favor of the Street gang. It divides the audience into two camps battling over an irrelevant issue. The true issue is simply that the FED should not exist. Anything else is distraction. Then there is a video showing the Good Cop Bad Cop routine between a true Street mouthpiece Steve Liesman and someone I want to like but just don’t trust Rick Santelli with Barry Ritholtz of fusion IQ.
As Jerome R. Corsi revealed on the Alex Jones radio show today, U.S. central banks may have less than half the gold they claim to possess in their vaults, according to watchdog group that will publish an ad in the Wall Street Jouranl later this week.
“As WND reported, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, or GATA, claims the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury are surreptitiously manipulating the country’s gold reserves by participating in undisclosed leases, according to an advance copy WND obtained of the ad running in Thursday’s edition of the Journal,” writes Corsi. “GATA believes much of the borrowed gold out on lease will never be returned to the central banks.”
Moreover, GATA further charges the U.S. government strategy to manipulate the price of gold is beginning to fail miserably. “The objective of this manipulation is to conceal the mismanagement of the U.S. dollar so that it might retain its function as the world’s reserve currency,” the newspaper ad reads. “Gold’s recent rise toward $900 per ounce shows that the price suppression scheme is faltering. When it is widely understood how central banks have been suppressing gold, its price may rise to $3,000 or $5,000 an ounce or more.”
It is but another example of how the central banks and the Fed, as in Federal Express, are screwing the people out of thier property in order to make obscene profits.
Read the entire Corsi story at the WorldNetDaily website.
http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1828
Every generation has its challenges, its wars and its peculiar identity. Every generation replaces the one in front of it and gets replaced by the one behind it. The enemy of each generation is always the same. It changes its clothes and terrain. It moves in and out of political ideologies and religious dogmas but it’s the same enemy.
Defining the enemy isn’t an easy thing. You’re dealing with continuous shape-shifting. You think you are confronting it in front of you when it is actually leaning over your shoulder and advising you. You find that it agrees with you and is on your side only to discover that it has used its seeming alliance to discredit what you believe in; to misrepresent what you believe in.
One day it’s the communists, next day it’s the Nazis, today it’s the Zionists. Tomorrow it will morph into something else. It’s always about disinformation and confusion. It’s always about treachery and deceit. While it is filling your head with Al Qaeda and terrorism it is muscling up against
It’s controlling the information into the mass mind. It knows that you know about it. It also knows that all it has to do is to control the larger portion of humanity that does not possess objective reasoning in order to make you ineffective.
It controls the flow of money. It opens the tap and closes the tap. It prints money out of thin air. It goes back to ‘the big dogs in the yard’. No matter what time in history you find yourself in, the big dogs are there along with the pigs and the reptiles. It’s an unfortunate truth that animal characteristics express themselves through human agency when the human agency is open to that expression. This comes about when greed and the will to power predominate over the inspiring angels of our higher nature. You see a lot of it when materialism is in the ascendant as it is today.
You can say we’re at war because of external threats; political differences, the machinations of bankers, hegemony and the demands of empire or any of the usual appearances which history has shown so many times. But… there’s only one war going on and that is the war between our higher and lower natures. The corporations and the bankers and the politicians and every enemy of the greater good for the greater number all work to turn you against yourself; to make humanities lower nature predominate.
This is what dumbing down is all about. This is why the usual entertainments are all cheap entertainments and why what passes for music today is full of ‘pimps’ and ‘bitches’ and ‘ho’s’. This is what tabloids are about and what Rupert Murdoch is about. This is how you get worked and controlled; by playing to your lower nature and by making you appear to be less than you are… by demeaning humanity in it’s own eyes. The trashiest aspects among us are being held up as icons of success. The worst liars have the most airtime. There is nothing accidental about any of this.
The sub prime mess and housing crisis… the millions living on edge; this has all been intentionally manufactured. The first thing we must all realize is that we are considered as nothing more than pawns and canon fodder to the big dogs in the yard. The next thing that must be realized is that we are dealing with psychopaths and it would behoove us all to know just what that means. It is also important to remember that though psychopaths are not human as we understand that term, they are practical. More on that later;
You become a slave when you cease to be your own master. None of what is going on is new. It’s older than ‘bread and circuses’. It’s about distraction and Jack in the Box non-existent enemies that the state creates. It points at the enemy with one hand and draws you into its protective embrace with the other. It blows up trains and buildings and makes laws to protect you from these events which results in increasingly restrictive legislations against your freedom of action, speech and thought. It is right out of Orwell but it was going on long before that.
I tend to believe what Oswald Spengler taught. I believe in cycles. Sometimes it looks dark indeed and sometimes it seems to be “getting better all the time”. The fact is that is just moves from one to the other. The fact is that no one has ever taken over the planet and that no particular evil has ever prevailed. It is true that millions upon millions have been murdered and tormented in unpleasant ways but the vehicles that caused these things did not last. Somehow humanity moved on. This present evil will not prevail either. Do not believe that.
Do not believe the doomsday prophets. Do not believe that the big dogs in the yard will prevail. Despair is just another weapon of the enemy and it always comes back to the way you are made to feel about yourself. You are made to feel powerless. You are placed into debt so that you have to struggle to stay afloat and not be given the luxury of dissent or you will not even have the job that keeps you bobbing in the waves. You are being blackmailed with the threat of greater misfortune if you do not continue to turn the hamster’s wheel.
We hear that Don Imus actually went down because he threatened to reveal things about the 9/11 false flag op. Now we hear that Dennis Kucinich has backed off of his impeachment effort. We notice that with the absence of Cynthia McKinnon there might not be another honest member left in congress. Something very heavy is going on behind the curtains. No one is speaking truth to power. What can this be that is pressing down on all of our legislators that no one seems to have the balls to talk about?
There can be no doubt that the psychopaths are running an efficient game upon the human race. There can be no doubt that they intend us harm upon harm. There can be no doubt that we have no elected officials with the will to oppose them. There can be no doubt that the present American administration is a criminal enterprise. There can be no doubt that
Psychopaths are practical, remember that. Realize that we do not have the guns to storm the castle. Besides the reality of this fact there are other ways to succeed. I have said it before and I am going to say it again. We the people must stop the wheel. We must cease to work and to consume except for basic needs. If we do not feed the beast with our time and money the beast will have to adjust. Somehow, some way, what I am saying here has to be repeated all across the internet. Somehow, some way, some courageous souls must organize and it must catch fire across the country and the globe. A week must be set aside in which some large part of the planet does nothing, in protest of what is happening. It must happen again and again until it succeeds. Psychopaths are practical.
Large spontaneous gatherings of people need to occur. People need to gather in large crowds as a statement that things, as they are and have been, must end. These could be like the old ‘be ins’ of the 60’s. There is no need for anything more than the presence of the crowd. There is no need to chant or act out. Silent witness is a good ticket.
Those who sponsor the liars and support the horrors visited upon people in foreign lands should have their products boycotted across the board. Somehow, some way, enough of us have to catch hold of this idea and make it happen. I guarantee it will work. There is no greater power that we have than this; that we stop contributing to anyone and anything that does not have our best interests in mind. We the people. “We the people.”
You have a choice, seize the moment and bring these big dogs to heel. We are far more powerful than they. Your choice is whether you now cry, “Hold! Enough!!!” or whether you have something far worse thrust upon you further down the road. There is no avoiding this issue. Either you act soon or you will be compelled to act later after even greater and more protracted suffering. We can expect nothing more from our leaders. They have failed us. We can expect nothing from public and religious leaders and famous entertainers, nor can we tell the difference between them. We must now expect something from ourselves. We the people.
Warning bells about anomalies in the fiscal sector were sounded in the summer of 2001, but not heeded. Among those who has since raised questions was Bill Bergman. As a financial market analyst for the Federal Reserve, he was assigned in 2003 to review the record of July and August of 2001. He noticed an unusual surge in the currency component of the M1 money supply (cash circulating outside of banks) during that period. The surge totaled over $5 billion above the norm for a two-month increase. The increase in August alone was the third largest single monthly increase since 1947, even after a significantly above-average month in July.
billion surge in the currency component of the M1 money supply—the third largest such increase since 1947. Bergman asked about this anomaly—and was removed from his investigative duties.Bergman points out that the August 2001 withdrawals may have been, to a large extent, caused by the Argentinian banking crisis that was occurring at the time. However, he raises the point that no explanation has yet fully answered the important question: Why was the cashing out of billions of dollars just before the 9/11 attacks never investigated? It’s possible that the answer to this question is also the answer to the other follow-the-money questions surrounding 9/11; and despite an embarrassing heap of evidence, neither the press, nor Congress, nor any agency with investigative responsibility has done its job on our behalf. On the contrary, their inaction might reasonably be construed as a cover-up.
Bergman "followed the money," including developing a framework for working with money-laundering data and “suspicious activity” reports for monitoring and investigating terrorism. The questions he asked about what happened during the summer of 2001 should have led to investigations, which should have resulted in the prosecution of those with foreknowledge of the attacks.
Those who follow the history of the 9/11 fact-finding movement know that there is a laundry-list of unanswered questions that are just as compelling as those put forth by Bergman. And there is also a laundry-list of whistle-blowers who have been fired and subsequently ignored. So it is not at all surprising that Bergman was removed from his investigative duties, and that his concerns were not publicly addressed.
Bergman's supervisor instructed him follow up on an unanswered question he had raised pertaining to an August 2, 2001 letter from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to the 12 Reserve Banks. This letter urged scrutiny of suspicious activity reports. Bergman learned of the pervasiveness of the warnings of the 9/11 attacks, and wondered how thoroughly these warnings had permeated the financial system.
In this capacity as Federal Reserve investigative point-man, and with his money-laundering portfolio being guided by his supervisor's directive, he asked the Board why they had issued their August 2, 2001 directive, and whether this related to any heightened intelligence of a terrorist threat. His position was then eliminated, and a crucial investigation was terminated before it could even begin.
Footnote 28 of the Staff Monograph on Terrorist Financing from the official 9/11 Commission Report states that the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 “didn’t mention terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages.”
True? No. The NMLS Report mentions it 17 times. One gets the impression that the commission staff (under Philip Zelikow) was trying to paint the picture that there wasn’t a lot of co-operation between those involved in counterterrorism and the banking regulators in 2001. Why do they paint this picture, inasmuch as the contrary is the case? In fact, anti-terrorism was an important element of the National Money Strategy, and it was included and emphasized in its Report annually. It may have been part of the reason why the August 2, 2001 letter urging scrutiny of suspicious activity reports was issued in the first place.
In turn, the billions in currency shipments of July and August 2001 are completely omitted in the 9/11 Commission Report. I make bold to point out that the official story-line is that the attacks were accomplished by "the evil-doers" on a shoe-string budget with little money changing hands. Therefore, according to Zelikow et al., it is pointless to look at large flows of money in an investigation of the attacks. That makes perfect sense—unless you happen to have a brain.
To state the obvious, there are two reasons why Zelikow et al. made the false statement regarding there having been no references to terrorism in the National Money-laundering Strategy Report. One reason could be to justify and encourage more scrutiny (legal or otherwise) of small transactions generally, e.g. via USAPA, and the other could be to establish (read: invent) a reason for missing the evidence pertaining to the attacks. ('Transactions too small. No one could find.') And since the real money trail points to foreknowledge within the financial community at large, and, possibly, the Federal Reserve specifically, the "low-budget terrorism" story-line that the 9/11 Commission had established needed to be protected.
If such a lack of attentiveness to a financial transaction of $5 billion goes unnoticed in August 2001, then a reason had to be established for this lack of attention. And Bergman’s attentiveness to the Board of Governor’s August 2 letter was the fly in the ointment, as this letter proves that the Board was indeed attentive to suspicious transactions, even very, very large ones. Bergman’s question of “Why” is therefore key to yet another avenue of inquiry.
Note that a few dollars sent to an Islamic charity could warrant arrests, investigations, front-page stories, and, sometimes, torture and many years in jail. That's Propaganda 101: 'Large amounts of money do not fund major acts of terrorism. Small amounts do. Small amounts covered the 9/11 tab, therefore large amounts didn’t.' The news coverage, creating high-profile prosecutions for relatively small transactions, reinforces this scenario.
With this in mind, we suggest that the reader follow the story of Mark Siljander (major coverage) on the one hand, and also follow the Times UK reports from Sibel Edmonds (verboten in the US mainstream press) on the other hand. Edmonds told me recently of the major foreign media outlets that had offered to report her story. Not one major outlet did so in the US. R.T. Naylor suggests, in his wonderful book Satanic Purses, that any major terrorist event that involves a lot of money is 'state terrorism,' and this is independently confirmed by Sibel Edmonds’ statements as to the enormous sums changing hands at the time of the 9/11 attacks. I suggest that her testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee (Leahy and Grassley) gave the lie to the official financial myth of 9/11. If Bergman had been allowed to continue his investigation, I suggest that he would have uncovered the same thing. Note that the drug money and other illicit transactions described by Edmonds occurred during the same time period, and the amounts in the billions are comparable.
To members of the constabulary: the operable statutes are 1) The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that imposed new financial reporting requirements to facilitate the tracing of questionable transactions and 2) the 1986 Money Laundering Control Act that criminalized the act of money-laundering. Also operable, and of particular relevance in a historical context, is the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act that was relied upon in October of 1942 to seize the assets of “Hitler’s Bankers in America,” Union Banking, (involving bank vice president Prescott Bush under his father-in-law and bank president, George Walker).
The law is not always followed, and the required “currency transaction reports” are sometimes not filed. The 9/11 Commission Report and the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 identify those who are involved with large cash transactions. Had the paperwork been done in August of 2001, or an investigation done into the crime of failing to file the “currency transaction reports,” then we would know who made the cash withdrawals in $100 bills amounting to the $5 billion surge.
Information about what transpired took years to develop after the fact. For example, the Federal Reserve fined United Bank of Switzerland and Riggs Bank in 2004.
Mr. Bergman states that he doesn’t want to be a dog barking up the wrong tree, but the authorities, apparently under orders from our top officials, are preventing a standard investigation and the most obvious prosecutorial methodology from going forth.
Congress could step in; a prosecutor could step up. But don’t hold your breath.
Bill Bergman currently works in Chicago as an equity analyst for a private sector firm. From 1998 to 2004 he was a senior financial market analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where his areas of expertise included Insolvency Issues in Derivatives Markets, Money Laundering, and Ethics and Payment System Policy. He holds an M.B.A. in Finance and an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago.
Clinton, Obama steal Bush’s final show
By Alexander Bolton
Posted: 01/29/08
All eyes were on Democratic presidential frontrunners Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) Monday night as spectators and pundits followed their every move during President Bush’s final State of the Union address.
Clinton set observers atwitter when she waded through the crowd before the speech to shake hands with Democratic dean and senior Sen. Edward Kennedy (Mass.), who made headlines Monday by endorsing Obama in the primary.
For the second year in a row, Obama sat next to Kennedy for the president’s annual address. Yet despite this, Clinton managed to miss Obama’s attention as she chatted with Kennedy while reporters looked on hungrily from the overhanging balcony.
The race between Obama and Clinton has become colored with growing animosity in recent weeks as each side has leveled veiled accusations that the other has used race as a political weapon.
But Obama and Clinton seemed to see eye to eye on Bush’s domestic agenda, sitting firmly on their hands through most of the first half of his speech.
“I think there is some consensus in the Democratic Party,” Obama said in an interview with CNN immediately after the State of the Union when asked about the lack of difference between him and Clinton on economic policy.
Clinton and Obama’s divergent views on the troop surge in Iraq, however, were plainly visible.
When Bush proclaimed, “Ladies and gentlemen, some may deny the surge is working, but among terrorists there is no doubt,” Clinton sprang to her feet in applause but Obama remained firmly seated. The president’s line divided most of the Democratic audience, with nearly half standing to applaud and the other half sitting in stony silence.
In one instance Clinton appeared to gauge Obama’s response before showing her own.
When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.
The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.
There also appeared to be some division among Democrats Monday over whether to continue to pump money into the Iraq war effort. When Bush said he would “ask Congress to meet its responsibilities to these brave men and women by fully funding our troops,” Obama and Clinton remained seated while Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) stood up behind them to applaud.
Dissension was not limited to Democratic ranks. Though a mostly united GOP caucus applauded Bush enthusiastically throughout the speech, the president received a mixed response from Republicans when he asked Congress to strengthen the No Child Left Behind Act, his signature legislative achievement in the area of education reform. While many Republicans clapped to endorse No Child Left Behind, Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee remained motionless. Grassley is one of seven Senate Republicans to cosponsor legislation that would significantly reform No Child Left Behind. The Bush administration opposes the bill.
While many Republicans applauded Bush’s announcement that he would issue an executive order directing his administration to ignore earmarks contained in conference reports accompanying future spending bills, some lawmakers voiced skepticism.
“We’ll see about that when the time comes,” said Hal Rogers (Ky.), a senior Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee.
After his speech, Bush sought out Kennedy, his former partner in education reform, to exchange greetings. He also shook Obama’s hand and said hello in typical Bush fashion: “Hey buddy, how’s it going,” he said, according to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who also sat next to Obama for the speech.
| January 30, 2008 |
| Presidential Pantomime No words are needed to know where the candidates stand |
by Justin Raimondo |
| The president's State of the Union speech was pointedly ignored, even while it was going on, according to the report filed by The Hill, the Beltway's newspaper of record. All eyes were on the two Democratic presidential aspirants, whose closely watched nonverbal cues acted out a political pantomime: "When Bush proclaimed, 'Ladies and gentlemen, some may deny the surge is working, but among terrorists there is no doubt,' Clinton sprang to her feet in applause but Obama remained firmly seated. The president's line divided most of the Democratic audience, with nearly half standing to applaud and the other half sitting in stony silence." So here the lines are clearly drawn. In the presence of Power, a candidate who spun and twisted her own rapidly shifting position on the Iraq war is suddenly struck with an attack of wordless honesty: applauding the mythical "surge" and the war she'll inherit and prosecute to the fullest, while her challenger sits on his hands and stares into futurity. Ah, but she still had the presence of mind to calculate her responses somewhat, even as the truth serum worked its way through her system: "In one instance Clinton appeared to gauge Obama's response before showing her own. When Bush warned the Iranian government that 'America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf,' Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama's direction before slowly standing." A kumbaya moment for the Democrats, as they all stood and saluted the main plank in the War Party's platform: the centrality of our newly conquered Middle Eastern possessions. If Obama wins, his "New Frontier" will be a new frontier of empire, and he's cool with that. So are his followers, or the great mass of them: they'll follow him into battle in yet another overseas crusade to make the world safe for America's hubris. As he enunciates platitudes as if they were profundities, his fans swoon. They'll fall for practically anything he says, as long as he says it as if he were John F. Kennedy channeling Martin Luther King. Once in office, President Obama will be declaring that we'll "pay any price, bear any burden" faster than you can say "we shall overcome." The Hill reminds us: "The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran's Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran." Yet it seems that the division between the candidates on this issue isn't that great, after all. Obama's campaign rhetoric was appealing to the base, without mentioning that he agrees in principle with the Clintons (and Bush) that our "vital interests" include everything from the beaches of the Mediterranean to the salty shores of the Caspian Sea. All are united in their fealty to the Empire. What they disagree is on how to manage it and how to go about expanding it: "There also appeared to be some division among Democrats Monday over whether to continue to pump money into the Iraq war effort. When Bush said he would 'ask Congress to meet its responsibilities to these brave men and women by fully funding our troops,' Obama and Clinton remained seated while Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) stood up behind them to applaud." Forget the television ads, the speeches, the promises, the debating points – this Kabuki play performed at the Capitol Hill Theater tells us all we need to know about what really matters in an American president. Our celebrity politics minimizes serious discussion of foreign policy issues, as the media floods the airwaves with endless speculation as to whether Hillary was really crying or if Obama is "black enough." It takes a Washington moment such as this to dramatize where the lines are drawn and where they're blurred. On the Republican side of the aisle, things are bleaker still. John McCain, a vainglorious braggart with a volcanic temper and dangerous foreign policy views, is attacking Mitt Romney for wavering in his support of the "surge," and the campaign has been turned into a warmongering competition. McCain is sure to be the winner in that contest. Whether that will be enough to earn the reluctant nod of the Republican establishment remains to be seen. I was saddened by the inglorious fate of the Kucinich campaign: is this what the alleged left wing of the Democratic Party has come to? One thinks of Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, politicians of some stature and with some appeal. Today, there is nothing comparable. It's tragic, really, and I wonder if anyone will ever again fill that vacuum in American politics, the space a principled, old-style leftist would occupy. I'd settle for another Norman Thomas. If anti-imperialism of the Left is moribund, then the same sort of "isolationist" sentiment is stirring on the Right. Ron Paul is the avatar of this rising movement, which derives a strict non-interventionism from an even stricter reading of the Constitution. There is no provision for an empire anywhere in that document, and therefore Paul is against it: that, at least, has been the thrust of his campaign. The candidate himself, however, is much more general in his critique of what he and his followers call the "welfare-warfare state." The campaign's failure to get into double-digit territory is a real disappointment for many antiwar activists, on the Left as well as the Right, and this shortcoming is due precisely to a lack of emphasis on the war issue. Aside from the organizational problems that arise in a spontaneous movement on the verge of taking on a mass character, the campaign failed to pose the question point-blank: Do we want a republic, or an empire? As Garet Garrett – editor, journalist, and sometime novelist of the Old Right – put it in 1952: "Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people." Call me naïve, but I truly believe that if it ever comes to a vote on the question, the republic will win – hands down. Yet these are problems with the campaign, not the candidate. Rep. Paul is the most principled politician in American politics; even his enemies will grant him that. When it's just the candidate speaking extemporaneously, as in the debates, the issue of war and peace is always front and center, much to the despair of his more conservative supporters (and would-be supporters). That's why he's so beloved by all those "Paul-tards" out there, who, if enthusiasm could be measured and translated into votes, would catapult Paul into the Oval Office with the greatest of ease. What is needed, however, is a more solid movement, one that incorporates non-electoral means to achieve its goals, as the essential element of a long-range strategic vision for the growing Left-Right alliance against imperialism abroad and authoritarianism on the home front. That is the real challenge, and electoral politics matters, at this stage, only insofar as it furthers a larger organized movement operating on many fronts. The merger of identity and celebrity politics is blinding many liberals to the essential similarity of the Democratic contenders when it comes to the vital realm of foreign policy. The ritualized gestures and nonverbal proclamations of the cartoon candidates that pass for "front-runners" in the presidential sweepstakes tell the whole story with no need for words. The unspoken pact of the two wings of the War Party is unity even in division, unity on the one overriding issue that concerns them all: global hegemony as America's manifest destiny. Whether it's done in the name of exporting democracy or acting out our self-image as righteous humanitarians, unilaterally or through the UN, U.S. military intervention around the world is retained as a prerogative by all the "major" presidential candidates and all "serious" policy analysts in Washington. We're all preemptionists now. Well, nearly all: there is a remnant, on both the Left and the Right – think of, oh, fans of Glenn Greenwald and avid readers of The American Conservative – that is developing into a significant factor, with much potential for growth. Given the right strategy and organizational discipline, this rising trend could easily fill the vacuum left in American politics by the demise of mass opposition to overseas adventurism: the Brahmin anti-imperialists of New England, who opposed our first foray into empire-building; the old-style left-wing populist upsurges, from William Jennings Bryan to SDS, which were invariably energized to a large degree by anti-imperialist fervor; and the Old Right tradition stretching back to the America First Committee and such heroic figures as John T. Flynn, about whom I have written extensively. The Paul campaign represents another chapter in this continuing history, and by that measure it is a resounding success. One needn't vote for him – or vote at all – to realize that the energy generated by Paul could move mountains. It will take time, dedication, and the kind of intellectual and political entrepreneurship that comes with building a genuinely broad-based yet principled movement, and in increasingly troubled times, at that. The leadership of such a movement will be tested and tested again, and some will be found wanting, while others will rise. Yet the knowledge that we represent a valid, vital, and even hallowed tradition in American politics, one that deserves to be revived and will yet have its moment, is what will carry us forward, well beyond this election year. |
While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy. | |
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In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now. Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle. This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. “Climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the power of the advanced industrial world” This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the American nuclear regulatory commission speeded up its process of licensing; there is an imminent wave of nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see in the story about CO2 causing climate change an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl. More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries. For example, the Indians have just produced an extremely cheap car called the Tata Nano, which will enable poorer Indians to get about more easily without having to load their entire family on to a bicycle. Greens have already attacked the car, and it won’t take long for the WTO and the advanced powers to start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its carbon emissions and so on. The politics of climate change also has potential impacts on farmers. Third World farmers who don’t use seed strains or agricultural procedures that are sanctioned by the international AG corporations and major multilateral institutions and banks controlled by the Western powers will be sabotaged by attacks on their ‘excessive carbon footprint’. The environmental catastrophism peddled by many who claim to be progressive is strengthening the hand of corporate interests over ordinary people. Here in the West, the so-called ‘war on global warming’ is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; BA hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch. This kind of behaviour is demented. What is sinister about environmental catastrophism is that it diverts attention from hundreds and hundreds of serious environmental concerns that can be dealt with - starting, perhaps, with the emission of nitrous oxides from power plants. Here, in California, if you drive upstate you can see the pollution all up the Central Valley from Los Angeles, a lot of it caused, ironically, by the sulphuric acid droplets from catalytic converters! The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, the politicians didn’t want to take on the power companies, so they fixed their sights on penalising motorists who are less able to fight back. Decade after decade, power plants have been given a pass on the emissions from their smoke stacks while measures to force citizens to change their behaviour are brought in. Emissions from power plants are something that could be dealt with now. You don’t need to have a world programme called ‘Kyoto’ to fix something like that. The Kyoto Accord must be one of the most reactionary political manifestos in the history of the world; it represents a horrible privileging of the advanced industrial powers over developing nations. “You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt” The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to public light as a shill for two immense power schemes in the state of Tennessee: the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. Gore is not, as he claims, a non-partisan green; he is influenced very much by his background. His arguments, many of which are based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part of a political and corporate outlook. In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation - do you really want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly. One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument. Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for the Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years. There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus. This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer; of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is a witch-hunting element in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use of the word ‘denier’ to label those who question claims about anthropogenic climate change. ‘Climate change denier’ is, of course, meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier. This was contrived to demonise sceptics. The past few years show clearly how mass moral panics and intellectual panics become engendered. “Many cite peer-reviewed science because they're afraid to have the intellectual argument” In my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear, I explore the link between fearmongering and climate catastrophism. For example, alarmism about population explosion is being revisited through the climate issue. Population alarmism goes back as far as Malthus, of course; and in the environmental movement there has always been a very sinister strain of Malthusianism. This is particularly the case in the US where there has never been as great a socialist challenge as there was in Europe. I suspect, however, that even in Europe, what remains of socialism has itself turned into a degraded Malthusian outlook. It seems clear to me that climate catastrophism represents a new form of the politics of fear. I think people have had enough of peer-reviewed science and experts telling them what they can and cannot think and say about climate change. Climate catastrophism, the impact it is having on people’s lives and on debate, can only really be challenged through rigorous open discussion and through a ‘battle of ideas’, as the conference I spoke at in London last year described it. I hope my book is a salvo in that battle. Alexander Cockburn was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Cockburn is co-editor of Counterpunch and a syndicated national columnist whose work appears regularly in the Nation, the New York Free Press, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He spoke at the Battle of Ideas conference in London in October 2007. His new book, A Short History of Fear, will be published in March. The publisher has provided the following taster: The idea that things are always getting worse, that Armageddon - in one form or another - is just around the corner, has been a common refrain since the very beginnings of Western culture. And, more often than not, the forces allegedly sending us to hell in a proverbial hand basket are shadowy conspiracies whose features are as murky as their nefarious power is supposedly all-encompassing. Enter renegade journalist Alexander Cockburn to illuminate the darkest corners of our collective cultural unconscious. In his usual, take-no-prisoners-style, he battles an impressive collection of fearmongers and the irrationalities they espouse. Likening the soul-saving Indulgences sold by the medieval Catholic Church to today’s carbon credits, Cockburn traces his subject through the ages, showing how fear is used to distract us from real problems and real solutions. Skewering doomsters on both the left and right, A Short History of Fear tackles: 9/11 conspiracy theories; the twentieth-century witch craze of ‘satanic abuse’; eugenics; the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other ‘inside jobs’; terrorism; the ‘Great Fear’ of the eighteenth century; today’s eleventh-hour predictions of planetary decline; and much more. Scathing, often hilarious, and always insightful, this is Cockburn at the top of his controversial game. A Short History of Fear, by Alexander Cockburn is published by AK Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)). | |
Focus on Hallucinogens: This is a little gem I've held onto since my friends Ken and Glen mailed it to me as part of a care package when I was working in Alaska after high school. It's from 1991 and out of print but still in near-perfect condition. I wrote children's science books for two years but never wrote one as fun or useful as this. It explains to 9-year-olds everything from neurons to shamans. Rad!
It's basically a My First Reader version of D.M. Turner's The Essential Psychedelic Guide, minus the special section on how much ketamine to inject when you're on DMT and nitrous. The prose is lucid, but the pictures crack me up. Take the cover. Look kids, in a drug free zone, you can do all kinds of things, like play tic-tac-toe. Or even watch people play tic-tac-toe! And remember, friends don't let friends wear non-footie pants.
In some cases the book might be counterproductive: "Have you ever looked at yourself in an amusement park mirror? Look what happened to you! Now, try to imagine that the whole world looked that way to you." Awesome! Where can I get some?
The best pictures are in the chapter on LSD.
The text above this one reminds me of an Ali G interview with a drug expert:
Ali G: And what is its effects?
Guy: You can go paranoid, which means you think people or things are coming at you. It makes your heart race. Your blood pressure can go low, so you can feel a bit woozy sometimes. It’s got a lot of medical effects on the body.
Ali G: And is there any negative effects?
Ali G: Which is the type of acid that actually make you fly?
Guy: No acid makes you fly. Acid can make you think you fly.
Ali G: But ain't there one, cause me mate Dave said that he took this type, and he flew all around the room and then his mum told him to get some ciggies from the shop, and he actually flew there and flew back and was back in like five seconds or whatever, but he'd forgotten to buy ciggies.
This picture just makes me wonder what's wrong with this dude's friends. I mean, he's obviously flipping out about something, and they're just standing there waving at him with those shit-eating grins. Seriously kids, that is your brain on tic-tac-toe.
January 29, 2008
On a fall evening in a cotton field in Nicaragua, a group of armed men placed a series of torches in a line of planters along a makeshift runway.
About half an hour later, around 9 p.m. that evening, Friday, Nov. 26, 2004, a twin-prop Beechcraft King Air 200 touched down on that rural runway and came to a stop. The assembled men began to unload the plane, which was packed with cocaine, while holding the sole witness to the event, a local field hand, captive.
 The Beechcraft King Air 200 on a runway in Nicaragua. Photo: Humboldt Rescue Organization |
Several days later, Nicaraguan law enforcers apprehended a truck headed for Honduras carrying 1,100 kilos of cocaine. The driver was arrested and the cocaine payload seized. The Nicaraguan law enforcers said the source of the seized dope appeared to be the Beech 200 found abandoned in the cotton field. Police had found traces of cocaine onboard the aircraft as well.
The Beech 200, undamaged by the attempt to set it ablaze, was eventually turned over to the Nicaraguan military for use in future drug war efforts in that nation.
That’s the storyline provided to the Nicaraguan newspapers (links here and here) that reported on the Beech 200 incident more than three years ago. Those same newspaper reports included photos of the abandoned aircraft and list the tail number variously as MN-167-NT or MN-168-NT. However, the photos are taken from angles that fail to show the Beech 200’s tail number.
Narco News ran the press stories about this Beech 200 by a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent, who has experience working in Latin America. The source’s first reaction was to laugh out loud.
ICE, by the way, is apparently connected to ongoing operation in Latin America called the Mayan Express, which Narco News has previously reported played a role in another cocaine plane shipment — the Gulfstream II jet that crashed in Mexico last September with some 4 tons of coke onboard.
The press reports about the Beech 200 incident just didn’t smell right, given that members of a nonprofit Venezuelan search and rescue group also obtained their own own photo of the abandoned aircraft. That photo (link here) does show the Beech 200’s tail number: N168D, which Federal Aviation Administration records indicate is registered to a North Carolina company called Devon Holding and Leasing Inc.
According to press reports and an investigation conducted by the European Parliament into the CIA’s terrorist rendition program, Devon Holding is a CIA shell company and N168D is a tail number to a CIA aircraft.
The former ICE agent went on to explain the cause of his humor over the Nicaraguan press reports. He said if the armed men involved in the cocaine shipment were indeed real narco-traffickers, they would not have left a witness alive to talk, nor would they have bungled the attempt to burn the plane — which is not a hard thing to accomplish considering the flammable nature of the fuel that feeds it. Most telling, he says, they would never leave behind their guns.
“Those guns are their only protection,” the ICE agent says. “And an AK-47 is a prized possession in their world.”
The former agent says the press was fed a big fat lie, and they bit on it hook, line and sinker, because it made for good ink. The ICE agent adds that, to him, the Beech 200 incident has all the markings of a government-run operation. He says the reason the plane was not burned up is that the plan all along was to reuse the aircraft for use in a future government operation — and it was, according to the press reports, turned back over to the Nicaraguan government after all.
The CIA-linked tail number on the Beech 200, then, raises some serious questions as to the ultimate destination of the cocaine onboard as well. Similar questions have been raised about the planned destination of the nearly 4 tons of cocaine onboard the Gulfstream II jet that crashed in the Mexican Yucatan last fall. A CIA asset named Baruch Vega claims the Gulfstream II was part of a U.S. government operation (the Mayan Express) that utilized a well-known Colombian narco-trafficker turned informant named Jose Nelson Urrego.
Urrego was arrested on money laundering charges by Panamanian police about a week prior to the Gulfstream II’s crash landing. Urrego claims he worked for the CIA, according to Panamanian press reports — a fact Vega also confirms. Greg Smith, one of the owners of the Gulfstream II, according to its bill of sale, also has been linked to past ICE, DEA and CIA operations in Latin America, Narco News reported previously. And the Gulstream II itself has been linked to past use in the CIA’s terrorist rendition program, according to European investigators.
Given these realities, attorney Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with U.S. Customs, ICE’s predecessor agency, speculates that the Mayan Express operation is not controlled by ICE at all, but is, in fact, a CIA-run operation using ICE as a cover. He adds that the CIA has agents operating inside many federal law enforcement agencies utilizing what is known as an “official cover.”
The former ICE agent who spoke with Narco News about the Beech 200 also suspects CIA is running the show in these drug plane operations. He says ICE is a perfect vehicle for the CIA because it can provide the Agency with a free pass through U.S. ports of entry.
“All an ICE agent has to do is make a call and the cargo will be cleared through the checkpoint,” he says.
Journalist and author Doug Valentine recently revealed the inner workings of these CIA cover methods within DEA in a story he penned for Counterpunch.
From Valentine’s story:
By 1977, some 125 “former” CIA officers had been infiltrated into the DEA at every level of the organization, especially in intelligence units, making everything possible— from black market arms exchanges, to negotiations with terrorists, to political assassination. It also put the CIA in total control of targeting.
Leutrell Osborne, a former CIA case officer, told Narco News essentially the same thing when he conveyed his concern about the merging of spook and law enforcement agendas.
“Law enforcement and intelligence operations have become one and the same,” Osborne says. “We as citizens are all affected by this because it has a major impact on civil and human rights.”
The Beech 200 and Gulfstream II cocaine planes, both now linked to CIA planes and/or assets, raise the specter of this merged law enforcement/intelligence approach to the war on drugs — an approach that tolerates or even enables drug running for the sake of some perceived higher value in the dirty world of covert action. This curious connection is magnified further by the fact that a third cocaine aircraft also appears to be in the mix: A DC-9 jet apprehended in Mexico in April 2006 with some 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard.
Given the evidence bubbling to the surface due to public faces of these cocaine jets, the pattern seems to be self-evident, even if officially our government continues to deny the evidence.
The European Parliament, which undertook an exhaustive study of the CIA’s terrorist rendition program, provided the following overview of that program in a report it issued in 2006:
Ultimately, in this inextricable net, there is also the possibility that single aircrafts change their registration numbers (as for the Gulfstrean V, from Richmor Aviation, registered as N379P, then, N8068V and then N44982).There are indeed 51 airplanes alleged to be used in the extraordinary renditions, but, according the Federal Aviation Administration records, there would be 57 registration numbers. It comes out that some of them are registered more than once.
Among the 51 airplanes alleged to be used by CIA:
- 26 planes are registered to shell companies and sometimes supported by operating companies.
- 10 are designed as “CIA frequent flyers”, they belong to Blackwater USA, an important CIA and US Army “classified contractor”. It provides staff, training and aviation logistic. In this case there is no intermediation of shell companies.
- The other 15 planes are from occasional rental from private companies working with CIA as well as with other customers.
2. COMPANIES INVOLVED
Shell Companies 6,
• CROWELL AVIATION TECHNOLOGIES, INC
• PATH CORPORATION
• RAPID AIR TRANS, INC.
• STEVENS EXPRESS LEASING, INC
• AVIATION SPECIALTIES, INC
• DEVON HOLDING AND LEASING, INC
• BAYARD FOREIGN MARKETING, LLC.
• KEELER & TATE MANAGEMENT, LLC
The rotating tail number scenario seems to have played a role in the Beech 200 incident. The number on the plane, N168D, as shown in the photo from the Venezuelan nonprofit group, actually is registered to a different aircraft, according to FAA records. That tail number, N168D, FAA records show, belongs to a large cargo plane known as a CN-235-300, and its registered owner is the same CIA shell company, Devon Holding, referenced in the European Parliament’s report.
A photo and further background on this CIA plane can be found at this site.
The Beech 200’s real tail number, the Venezuelan search and rescue group reports, is N391SA — which is registered to a company in St. Petersburg, Fla., called Skyway Aircraft Inc., FAA records show.
Coincidentally, the DC-9 jetliner apprehended in Mexico in April 2006 also is linked to a Skyway Aircraft Inc. in the Tampa/St. Pete metro area. That Skyway Aircraft, based in Clearwater, is an affiliate of Skyway Communications Holding Corp., which has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings since June 2005. (Journalist Daniel Hopsicker has reported extensively on Skyway Communications’ role in the mystery of the cocaine jets.)
Skyway Communications, the parent company of Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, arranged to purchase the DC-9 (tail number N900SA) via a stock swap with a Costa Rica-based firm called Dupont Investment Fund #57289, in November 2004, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, the jet was ultimately registered with the FAA in August 2005 by a company called Royal Sons Inc. prior to being sold to an unknown Venezuelan buyer only days before it was apprehended in Mexico on April 10, 2006, with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard.
Royal Sons President Frederick J. Geffon is a shareholder in Skyway Communications and his company is a major creditor in the Skyway Communications bankruptcy (links here and here). In addition, Royal Sons and Skyway Communications previously teamed up to purchase a separate DC-9 via a joint loan agreement, a January 2004 SEC filings shows. That DC-9, tail number N120NE, is now registered to a company in Houston called AIRCRAFT GUARANTY TRUST LLC TRUSTEE, FAA records show.
The paper trail is complex, but it all boils down to several individuals who conducted business with each other via several South Florida companies that all intersect with Skyway Communications, the parent company of Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, Fla. Those individuals are the following:
The Kovars all intersect through a company called Skyway Global LLC, which licensed the wireless technology to Skyway Aircraft that was the basis of a proprietary air-to-ground communications system that Skyway Communications marketed as its exclusive product. The Kovars, according to a 2002 SEC filing, are all officers of Skyway Global.
Skyway Communications CEO Kent also has an interesting background, SEC records show:
Mr. Kent served in various government contract management positions providing financial and program management services supporting national communications and intelligence projects for the Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and Department of the Navy.
And Skyway Communications itself is linked to the nation’s national security apparatus, according to a press release the company issued through Business Wire in May 2004:
As previously announced, SkyWay Communications Holding Corp. (OTCBB:SWYC), and its wholly owned subsidiary, Sky Way Aircraft Inc., have entered into a sales and marketing partnership agreement with The Titan Corporation, a multi-billion dollar US defense industries contractor who presently manages more than 2,500 contracts with a backlog of more than $4 billion dollars in the areas of Homeland Security and Anti-Terrorism, Command, Control and Communications Systems, Aircraft Defense Systems, Network Communications, as well as other information and communications systems and solutions associated with national defense.
Finally, Brent Kovar appears to have a special relationship with the movers and shakers of the U.S. political system, according to this August 2003 press release:
Congressman Tom Delay, Majority Leader, has appointed Brent C, Kovar, to serve as the Honorary Chairman, Business Advisory Council. Officials from the National Republican Congressional Committee announced that Mr. Brent C. Kovar has been appointed to service on the Business Advisory Council in recognition of his valuable contributions and dedication to the Republican Party.
Skyway Communications lost some $40 million between 2002 and its eventual bankruptcy filing in 2005. But it did manage to directly or indirectly acquire two DC-9 aircraft, one of which eventually found its way to Mexico, via Royal Sons and then an unknown Venezuelan owner, with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard.
Royal Sons’ Geffon claims he is a victim of Skyway Communications debacle and stresses that he knows very little about the DC-9 coke jet and has no responsibility for the cocaine found onboard since his company did not own the jet when it was apprehended in Mexico.
“I just chalked it all up to a bad experience,” he says.
 Brent Kovar, in a promotional video for Skyway Aircraft. Photo: St. Petersburg Times |
It turns out that Mitchell in 1996 served as the president of a Panamanian investment company called The Firm of Marc Harris, according to SEC filings. Mitchell left Harris’ firm about a year later due to a business dispute, court records show.
That was probably a stroke of luck for him given the eventual fate of the founder of The Firm of Marc Harris. Marc Harris, was arrested in Nicaragua in June 2003 on money laundering charges and is currently serving a 17-year stint in U.S. federal prison.
The Kovars could not be reached for comment. The phone number for Skyway Communications is now disconnected. Geffon says he knows only that Brent Kovar resides in the tony St. Petersburg community of Tierra Verde.
Brent Kovar’s address in Tierra Verde is 121 6th St., according to corporation records filed with the state of Florida.
Brent Kovar, who served as president of Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, lives a short distance away from the home of Larry Peters, who owns a company with an identical name (Skyway Aircraft Inc.) in St. Petersburg.
Peters’ address in Tierra Verde is 615 Monte Cristo Blvd., Florida, corporation records show.
Like the DC-9 linked to Skyway Communications that was eventually sold to a buyer in Venezuela, Peters’ company sold the Beech 200 to a Venezuelan purchaser as well, in October 2004, about a month before it was apprehended in a Nicaraguan cotton field linked to a payload of some 1,100 kilos of cocaine. In addition, since 2004, Peters’ Skyway Aircraft has sold four additional planes to Latin American buyers, according to FAA records — the most recent a Gulfstream jet exported to Panama in June 2007.
(However, this is not the same Gulfstream II that crashed in Mexico last September.)
Like Geffon, Peters says he has no control over what happens to an aircraft his company sells after it leaves the country.
 DC-9 with tail number N900SA, shown here two years before its aprehension in Mexico with 5.5 tones of cocaine. Note the Skyway logo toward the front door. Photo: D.R. 2004 Michael Cater, Airliners.net |
“When we sell a plane, it is deregistered and it leaves my place,” Peters told Narco News. “I sell about five planes a month all over. I also have a business in Brazil that does refurbishing work on planes.”
Interestingly, the Gulfstream II jet that was ditched in Mexico’s Yucatan last September was sold to a company controlled by two Brazilian businessmen prior to being flipped to Greg Smith (a U.S. government-connected pilot) and his partner, Clyde O’Connor. However, that is likely just another coincidence in a series of coincidences involving the three cocaine aircraft.
Peters adds that he has no personal relationship with Brent Kovar, though he does know they are neighbors in the waterfront neighborhood of Tierra Verde. In fact, Peters claims he was troubled by the fact that Kovar operated a company with the same name as his company, which is something Peters says the state of Florida should not have allowed.
“I followed him [Brent Kovar] home one day,” Peters says. “He drives a Hummer with the Skyway name on it, and I followed him home, and then contacted my lawyer.”
Peters adds, however, that he chose not to take the matter to court because he could not afford an extended, costly litigation battle.
He also declined to disclose any information about the Venezuelan buyer of the Beech 200.
“I have no idea who we exported that plane to in Venezuela and I wouldn’t release that information anyway,” he says. “…There’s nothing I can do to control what happens after I sell an airplane to someone.”
So, it seems, this entire paper trail of coincidence leads back to some half dozen supposedly abandoned AK-47s in a cotton field in Nicaragua. And the odds are, if a former ICE agent is to be believed, those weapons, if they existed at all, were likely a red herring used to bait a gullible media.
Journalist Valentine, in his recent Counterpunch story, offers some insight into the possible nature of this complex trail of coincidence:
With Bush’s war on terror, the situation has only gotten worse. In Afghanistan and South West Asia, the DEA is entirely infiltrated and controlled by the CIA and military. DEA headquarters is basically an adjunct of the Oval Office. And the Establishment continues to keep the lid on the story. After sending my manuscript to two reviewers—one with CIA connections, the other with DEA connections—my publisher has stopped communicating with me. I think my editor just wants me to go away.One can only wonder how deeply America will descend into this vortex of fear and subservience to state security before it vanishes altogether.
So, what does this intersection of government agencies and assets, money launderers, narco-traffickers, cocaine jets, and public and private companies really reveal, and how does it relate to Valentine’s own revelations? What was the CIA’s true interest in these drug flights, and how many drug shipments has the agency protected toward that end?
For now, we will have to keep digging, since nobody in our government, including the Congress, seems inclined to investigate the matter. As a result, the drug war will continue as one immense cover story that makes for good ink — and fiction.
Stay tuned…
“We Can’t Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans”
Sibel Edmonds on Marc Grossman
By Gary Leupp
Over 120 Israelis were detained after 9/11, some failing polygraph tests when asked about their involvement in intelligence gathering. But they were not held or charged with any illegal activity but rather deported. As former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has revealed, there was a curious failure of the government before 9/11 to act upon intelligence pertaining to an al-Qaeda attack. Most importantly Edmonds, defying the gag order that former Attorney General Ashcroft imposed on her in 2002, is implicating Marc Grossman, formerly the number three man in the State Department, in efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to Pakistan and Israel. She suggests this was done through Turkish and Pakistani contacts, including the former head of Pakistan’s ISI who funneled funds to Mohamed Atta! Now there’s a conspiracy for you.
Edmonds claims that during her time at the FBI (September 20, 2001 to March 22, 2002) she discovered that intelligence material had been deliberately allowed to accumulate without translation; that inept translators were retained and promoted; and that evidence for traffic in nuclear materials was ignored. More shockingly, she charges that Grossman arranged for Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students to acquire security clearances to Los Alamos and other nuclear facilities; and that nuclear secrets they acquired were transmitted to Pakistan and to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” who in turn was selling nuclear technology to Libya and other nations.
She links Grossman to the former Pakistani military intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad, a patron of the Taliban, who reportedly arranged for a payment of $100,000 to 9/11 ringleader Atta via Pakistani terrorist Saeed Sheikh before the attacks. She suggests that he warned Pakistani and Turkish contacts against dealings with the Brewster Jennings Corp., the CIA front company that Valerie Plame was involved in as part of an effort to infiltrate a nuclear smuggling ring. All very heady stuff, published this month in The Times of London (and largely ignored by the U.S. media).
She does not identify Grossman by name in the Times article, but she has in the past, and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi does so in an extremely interesting article in the American Conservative. From that and many other sources, I come up with the timeline that appears below.
But first, some background on Grossman. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara and the London School of Economics, he was a career Foreign Service officer from 1976 when he began to serve at the US embassy in Pakistan. He continued in that post to 1983, when he became the Deputy Director of the Private Office of Lord Carrington, the Secretary General of NATO. From 1989 to 1992 he was Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Turkey, and from 1994 to 1997, US Ambassador to Turkey. As ambassador he strongly supported massive arms deals between the US and Ankara.
Thereafter he was Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, responsible for over 4,000 State Department employees posted in 50 sites abroad with a program budget of $1.2 billion to 2000. In 1999 he played a leading role in orchestrating NATO’s 50th anniversary Summit in Washington, and helped direct US participation in NATO’s military campaign in Kosovo that same year. As Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from the beginning of George W. Bush’s administration to January 2005, he played a bit role in the Plame Affair, informing “Scooter” Libby of Plame’s CIA affiliation.
Grossman is close to the American Turkish Council (ATC) founded in 1994 as a sister organization to the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Its founders include neoconservatives involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, as well as Henry Kissinger, Brent Snowcroft and former congressman Stephen Solarz. (Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc. Perle was at one point making $600,000 per year from such activity). Edmonds says this is “an association in name and in charter only; the reality is that it and other affiliated associations are the US government, lobbyists, foreign agents, and Military Industrial Complex.” (M. Christine Vick of Grossman’s Cohen Group serves on the Board of Advisors.) Grossman is also close to the American Turkish Association (ATA), and regularly speaks at its events.
Both ATA and ATC have been targets of FBI investigations because of their suspected ties with drug smuggling, but Edmonds claims she heard wiretaps connecting ATC with other illegal activities, some related to 9/11. The CIA has investigated it in connection with the smuggling of nuclear secrets and material. Valerie Plame and the CIA front group Brewster Jennings were monitoring it when Bush administration officials leaked her identity in July 2003. Edmonds, Giraldi, and researchers Christopher Deliso and Luke Ryland accuse him of suspiciously enriching himself while in government service. Nevertheless he was awarded the Foreign Service’s highest rank when President Bush appointed him to the rank of Career Ambassador in 2004, and received Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award the following year.
A dual Israeli-American national, Grossman has promoted the neocon agenda of forcing “regime change” in the Middle East. “[T]he time has come now,” he declared on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “to make a stand against this kind of connection between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. And we think Iraq is a place to make that stand first . . . the great threat today is the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.” But he has not been as conspicuous a war advocate as Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Libby, Bolton, and some others. (Perle and Feith, one should note, were also deeply involved in lobbying activities on behalf of Turkey as well as Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Edelman was ambassador to Turkey 2003-05 where, chagrined by the Turkish failure to enthusiastically support the US occupation of Iraq, he deeply offended his hosts.) Grossman seems less an ideologue driven to make the world safer for Israel than a corrupt, amoral, self-aggrandizing opportunist. Anyway, here is an incomplete chronology of his alleged wrongdoing, along with other relevant details.
2001
As newly appointed Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Grossman assists Turkish, Israeli and other moles — mainly Ph.D. students — godfathering visa and arranging for security clearances to work in sensitive research facilities, including the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico. FBI taps his phone 2001-2, finds he is receiving bribes (one for $15,000). Edmonds states: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”
Between August and September: Grossman warns his Turkish associates seeking to acquire nuclear secrets that Brewster Jennings (for whom CIA agent Valerie Plame works) is a CIA front.
Sept. 4: Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the chief of Pakistan ’s intelligence service (ISI) arrives in US, meets with Grossman and other U.S. officials.
Sept. 10: Report by Amir Mateen in Pakistani newspaper Dawn ( Karachi ): “[Ahmad] also held long parleys with unspecified officials at the White House and the Pentagon. But the most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. US sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed ‘matters of mutual interests.’”
Sept. 11: Gen. Ahmad is having breakfast in Washington with Congressman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) and Senator Bob Graham (D) when attacks occur.
(Goss had had 10 years in clandestine operations in CIA and later — September 22, 2003-May 5, 2006 — heads the organization. Graham and Goss later are the co-chairs of the joint House-Senate investigation that proclaimed there was “no smoking gun” as far as President George W. Bush having any advance knowledge of September 11.)
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, FBI arrests people suspected of being involved with the attacks — including four Turkish and Pakistani associates of key targets of FBI’s counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Grossman: “We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.” Grossman facilitates their release from jail and suspects immediately leave US without further investigation or interrogation.
Sept. 12-13: Meetings between Ahmad and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Armitage threatens to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” unless it cooperates in US attack on Afghanistan. Ahmad also meets Secretary of State Colin Powell. Agreement on Pakistan’s collaboration is secured.
Sept. 20: Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old Turkish-American, hired as a translator by the FBI.
According to Edmonds, she overheard an agent on a 2000 wiretap discussing with Saudi businessmen in Detroit “nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama,” and stating: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.” She also claims she listened to recordings of a high official (Grossman) receiving bribes from Turkish officials.
Early October: Indian intelligence reports that Gen. Ahmad had in summer of 2001 ordered Saeed Sheikh (convicted of the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl) to wire US$100,000 from Dubai to one of hijacker Mohamed Atta’s two bank accounts in Florida. FBI confirms story, reported on ABC news.
Oct. 7: US-led Coalition begins air strikes against Taliban.
Oct. 8: Gen. Ahmad, Taliban supporter and an opponent of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, forced to retire from his post as director-general of ISI.
Late Oct.: Pakistani government arrests three Pakistani nuclear scientists, all with close ties to Khan, for their suspected connections with the Taliban.
2002
Early March: Edmonds sends faxes to Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee, is called in for polygraph test; Department of Justice inspector general’s report states “she was not deceptive in her answers.”
March: Grossman keynote speaker at ATC conference.
March 22: Edmunds fired, allegedly for shoddy work, security breaches.
Oct. 27: Edmonds appears on CBS’ 60 Minutes program.
Dec: Grossman visits Turkey, approves $3 billion US aid to Turkey for the Iraq Cooperation deal.
2003
March 3: In interview for Dutch television, Grossman says, “[T]he time has come now to make a stand against this kind of connection between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. And we think Iraq is a place to make that stand first . . . the great threat today is the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.”
May 29: Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff “Scooter” Libby asks Grossman for information about news report about the secret envoy sent by the CIA to Africa in 2002. Grossman requests a classified memo from Carl Ford, the director of the State Department’s intelligence bureau, and later orally briefs Libby on its contents.
Mid-June: Powell and his deputy secretary Richard Armitage may have received a copy of the Grossman memo.
June 10: Grossman asks the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) for a briefing on the Niger uranium issue, and specifically the State Department’s opposition to the continuing White House view that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake. The resulting memo is dated the same day, and drawn from notes on the February 19 meeting at the CIA on the Wilson mission and other sources. Memo is classified “Top Secret,” and contains in one paragraph, separately marked “(S/NF)” for “Secret/No dissemination to foreign governments or intelligence agencies,” two sentences describing in passing Valerie “Wilson’s” identity as a CIA operative and her role in the inception of the Wilson trip to Niger. This June 10 memo reportedly does not use her maiden name Plame.
June 17-July 9: Senate Judiciary Committee holds unclassified hearings on Edmunds’ allegations.
June 19: letter from Senior Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, and Senior Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy to Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concerning Edmonds’ allegations.
July 14: Robert Novak reveals Plame’s CIA identity.
July 22: Edmonds files suit against the Department of Justice, the FBI, and several high-level officials, alleging that she was wrongfully terminated from the FBI in retaliation for reporting criminal activities committed by government employees.
Aug. 13: letter from two senators to Attorney General Ashcroft concerning Sibel Edmonds’ allegations.
Aug. 15: 600 victims of the 9/11 attacks file suit (Burnett v. Al Baraka Investment & Dev. Corp.), request from Edmonds deposition providing evidence for US government foreknowledge of 9-11 attacks.
Sept. 22: Goss made CIA Director (resigns May 5, 2006).
Oct. 18, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft invokes the State Secrets Privilege (requested not by Justice Department but by State department) in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds’ work on the grounds that it would endanger national security, and asked that her wrongful termination suit be dismissed, in effect placing Edmonds under a gag order.
Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) expresses outrage at gag order, promises that a Democratic majority in Congress would conduct hearings. (This has not been done.)
Oct. 28: Letter from two senators to FBI Director Robert Mueller concerning Sibel Edmonds’ allegations.
Dec. 11, 2003, Attorney General Ashcroft again invoking the State Secrets Privilege, files a motion calling for Edmonds’ deposition in Burnett v. Al Baraka case be suppressed and for the entire case to be dismissed. The judge, seeking more information, orders government to produce any unclassified material relating to the case. In response, Ashcroft submits further statements to justify the use of the State Secrets Privilege.
Dec: Grossman back in Turkey to approve Turkey ’s eligibility to participate in tenders for Iraq’s reconstruction.
2004
Grossman achieves Foreign Service’s highest rank when President Bush appoints him to rank of Career Ambassador.
Patrick Leahy calls for investigation; Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican Chairman of the Senate, blocks it.
May 13: Ashcroft retroactively classifies all material that had been provided to Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000 relating to Edmond’s lawsuit, as well as the senators’ letters that had already been posted on-line by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
June 23: POGO files lawsuit against Justice Department for classifying material it had published; Justice Department fails to get the case dismissed.
July 6: Edmonds suit dismissed on state secrets grounds.
July: Edmonds files appeal. On same day, Inspector General releases unclassified summary of a highly classified report on an investigation that had concluded “that many of her allegations were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI’s decision to terminate her services. . . Rather than investigate Edmonds’ allegations vigorously and thoroughly, the FBI concluded that she was a disruption and terminated her contract.”
August: Edmonds founds the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) to address US security weaknesses.
December: Grossman the key speaker at an ATC Conference held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel.
2005
Grossman receives Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award.
January: Grossman quits his government job. Eric Edelman, another former ambassador to Turkey, takes job of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy.
January: Pakistani nuclear engineer A.Q. Khan confesses to having been involved in a clandestine international network of nuclear weapons technology proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Feb. 5: Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf announces he has pardoned Khan. US response is mild.
March: Grossman made vice-chairman of Cohen Group.
Feb. 18: Justice Department under new attorney general backs away from claim that documents posted by POGO were classified.
April 21: In the hours before the hearing of her appeal, three judges issued a ruling that barred all reporters and the public from the courtroom. During the proceedings, Edmonds was not allowed into the courtroom for the hearing.
May 6: Edmonds’ case dismissed, no reason provided, no opinion cited.
May 14: In open letter, Edmonds states the governments wants to silence her to “protect certain diplomatic relations” and to “protect certain U.S. foreign business relations.” Says the “foreign relations” mentioned in the gag order “are not in the interest of, or of benefit to, the majority of Americans, but instead serve and protect a small minority.”
June 20: Edmonds writes: “(In) April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden. For almost four years since September 11, officials refused to admit to having specific information regarding the terrorists’ plans to attack the United States. The Phoenix Memo, received months prior to the 9/11 attacks, specifically warned FBI HQ of pilot training and their possible link to terrorist activities against the US. Four months prior to the terrorist attacks the Iranian asset provided the FBI with specific information regarding the ‘use of airplanes’, ‘major US cities as targets’, and ‘Osama Bin Laden issuing the order.’ Coleen Rowley likewise reported that specific information had been provided to FBI HQ.”
July 20: Unidentified as a “retired state department official” Grossman tells AP that a classified State Department memo disputed the legitimacy of administration claims that Iraq sought to acquire uranium from Niger, also contained a few lines about Plame Wilson’s CIA employment, marked as secret.
August 5: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) petitioned for the Supreme Court of the United States to review the lower courts’ application of the State Secret Privilege in both lawsuits. The ACLU claims that the courts conflated the State Secrets Privilege and the Totten rule.
Sept. 28: Washington Post cites unnamed former administration source (Grossman) as stating that the outing of Plame was “Clearly . . . meant purely and simply for revenge.”
Oct. 28: In Patrick Fitzgerald’s indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Grossman is the Under Secretary of State mentioned as giving information about Plame to Libby.
November: Grossman attends lavish Turkish Ottoman Dinner Gala, receives award from Turkish lobby group, the Assembly of American Turkish Association (ATAA) in Chicago.
Nov. 28: the Supreme Court declined to review the decisions made in the Edmonds case.
2006
March: Grossman the key speaker at the ATC annual conference.
June: Grossman key speaker at MERIA Conference, discussing Turkey’s importance to US and Israel.
Sept. 2006: a documentary about Sibel Edmonds’ case called Kill The Messenger (”Une Femme à Abattre”) premiers in France. (watch film here)
2007
January 24: Grossman first to testify in Libby trial. Says he informed Libby of Plame’s involvement “in about 30 seconds of conversation” in June 2003.
November: Grossman subpoenaed by defense in AIPAC trial.
Nov. 26: Grossman, now Vice Chairman of the consulting firm the Cohen Group, attends a major Security Conference in Riga, Latvia.
2008
January: Edmonds posts, without comment, photos of current and former officials and Turkish associates on website: Richard Perle, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman, Brent Snowcroft, Larry Franklin, Ex-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Roy Blunt (R-Mo), Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Tom Lantos (D-Ca.), Bob Livingston (ex-House Speaker, R-La.), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), Graham Fulle (RAND), David Makovsky (WINEP), Martin Markovsky (WINEP), Yusuf Turani (president in exile of Turkmenistan), Prof. Sabri Sayari (Columbia University, WINEP), Mehmet Eymur (former head of Turkish counter-terrorism).
Jan. 6: The Times of London carries story, “For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets.” States that a high official “was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.” Claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials — including household names — who were aiding foreign agents.
“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials.”
Jan. 22: White House issues statement declaring its intention to approve sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey; Joshua Frank writes on January 25, “It appears the White House has been spooked by Edmonds and hopes to absolve the US officials allegedly involved in the illegal sale of nuclear technology to private Turkish ‘entities’.” Frank identifies Grossman as one of these officials.
* * * * *
Edmonds is tirelessly and fearlessly campaigning for Congressman Waxman, now chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to hold hearings. She says that FBI agents and even former Turkish intelligence officials are willing and able to validate her charges. But the congressman hesitates, perhaps fearing the storm of indignation that explosive evidence will produce in a country sick of its politicians, the lying neocons, and the war. Should they discover that, while disseminating disinformation about foreign nukes in order to fearmonger and build support for aggressive war, some of these officials were actually peddling nuclear secrets — committing treason while receiving honors for their patriotic service — the response could be explosive.
The Office of Special Plans under Abram Shulsky and Douglas Feith cherry-picked the intelligence vetted through the New York Times to terrify people into supporting an attack on Iraq. Democratic leaders have in the past urged an investigation of that spooky office, but furnished the opportunity since November 2006, they have declined to hold hearings. The Italian parliament conducted a study of the Niger uranium hoax, fingering neocon Michael Ledeen as a key suspect in forging documents designed to provide a casus belli before the Iran attack. Congress does nothing to follow up. In effect they are saying that the administration has a right to lie to the people. The presidential pardon granted Libby is a clear statement that it’s okay to punish whistleblowers like Joseph Wilson. The Supreme Court refuses to hear Edmonds’ appeal. It seems that all three branches of government compete to coddle the most unscrupulous and lawless officials, while marginalizing or punishing honest citizens who expose the rot.
The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate undercutting the administration’s case for attacking Iran indicates that there are in the US intelligence community persons alarmed by the administration’s lies and efforts to justify more aggression based on lies. It enrages the neocons who, with Norman Podhoretz in the lead, have been praying for Bush to bomb Iran. The arrest and conviction of Feith subordinate Larry Franklin shows that within the FBI there are forces disturbed at the close connections between the neocons, Israeli intelligence, and the Israel lobby and are willing to take action against lawbreaking. But Feith and Perle have both been investigated before, Perle for discussing classified information with Israeli Embassy staff in an FBI-monitored phone call in Washington in 1970. But the cases dropped for apparent political reasons. Perhaps the Grossman story will gain some traction. Maybe it will prove egregious enough that the tide will turn. Maybe Bush’s last year of office will see the neocons’ thorough exposure, humiliation and defeat.
Or maybe Waxman, Rep. Conyers and others in positions to honestly confront this most mendacious of administrations will continue to dither, feeding the assumption of the most vicious, cynical and corrupt that they are indeed above the law. And earning the contempt of those naïve enough to expect serious congressional oversight of a rogue regime.
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.
January 30, 2008 at 9:28 am
(Ben Heine © Cartoons)
I woke up this morning and saw that Jerusalem was covered with snow… and it’s still coming down. Truly a winter wonderland. It reminded me of my many years of living in Northern Ontario in Canada.
For Giuliani, the Trip South Started Early
By Michael Leahy and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 30, 2008; A01
In presidential politics, a candidate's irrelevance immediately precedes his annihilation.
Rudolph W. Giuliani's creeping irrelevance in the Republican race for the White House began to be felt, fatally, 10 days before the Florida primary. Few in his tepid crowds seemed even to know that, by then, the man once regarded as the front-runner for the party's nomination had already been campaigning in the state for seven weeks.
"Mayor, how do you like being back campaigning in Florida?" he was asked welcomingly after a Saturday afternoon speech in a central-state retirement community called the Villages. Giuliani winced. "I'm not back in Florida," he said, laughing wanly. "I've been here for quite some time."
____________________________________________________________
Rudy Giuliani had nothing going for him in a national campaign except his own inflated opinion of himself. Plus a 9-11 legacy that was quickly turning, if not to a 9-11 indictment, a total meltdown evidencing error after error and nearly endless self-aggrandisement at the expense of police and firemen.
Other issues kept him in the race.
Name recognition and his security consultancy business were two. Outside New York, who knew Rudy? Inside New York, it seems they knew him too well. If Giuliani Partners was going to do big business internationally (and there was plenty of big business to be done), clients had to know who it was when Rudy gave them a jingle.
Preparedness--Communication--Courage--Accountability was the pitch on the company stationery, but there was still the name thing? "Rudy who? Ask him to leave a message."
Then, of course, there's the money. There's always the money and candidates get to keep what's left from campaign contributions once they quit. Three and a half months ago (the last reporting date) Rudy had raised $47,253,521, spent $30,603,695 and had nearly $17 million in the old coffers.
The 'old coffers' is a George Bush term for what he intends to get out there and fill, once this annoying presidency of his is over.
If Rudy was wise and raised anywhere near as much in Florida as he spent, there's still a mother-lode of money out there for retirement and to pump into Giuliani Partners.
So--for a guy who had way too much baggage to drag around trying to be president, it's not been a bad deal. There'll be speaking engagements at reasonable fees and name recognition when he gets on the phone.
If they giggle a bit and raise an eyebrow, what the hell, it's still business.
You can't understand the Bush legacy until you come to grips with the GOP mentality best summed up thus: just keep repeating failed strategies, just keep on doing whatever makes you sick, just keep on drinking from the poisoned well.
Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” — only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran.It's not only in Iraq that the GOP hitched its wagon to a falling star. "It's the economy stupid". Though every GOP tax cut since 1982 are causally connected with huge deficits, slow growth and obscene inequalities, the GOP is on the stump for tax cuts. Naomi Klein reports that "the fix is in" and the National Association of Manufacturers must be ecstatic to know that whomever the GOP nominates, he will put more tax cuts at the top of "to do" list. Given Ronald Reagan's record and given the Chinese origin of the crap I find in Wal-Mart, I am somewhat surprised to learn that there remains in this country enough "manufacturers" to make up an association! A GOP sacred word is "stimulus" and people naively support them expecting a trickle down effect which never comes. Dogs are trained by giving them a treat at the end of a trick. It is doubtful that a dog will jump through the hoop if there is nothing on the other side. Humans and especially the GOP inclined are not nearly so smart. Year after tiresome year, those susceptible to GOP propaganda will fall for the same old GOP bullshit: let's give business a "stimulus" and wait for the trickle down that never comes. I am weary of posting, year after year, the cold hard stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (primarily) that prove conclusively that there has never been a "trickle down" effect from any of those sacred GOP stimuli. GOP stimulate the economy because they not equitable; they never reach the people whose work and purchases drive the economy. GOP "stimuli" stop trickling at the bottom of an increasingly tiny elite.
The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.... Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.And to this day, Adam Smith, of "invisible hand" fame, is the guardian angel of conservative economics. Since that time Ricardo articulated the most clear-cut, effective statement of the labor theory in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The produce of the earth—all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community; namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.Ricardo eliminated the confusion between labor, a source of exchange-value and wages as a component of price. Modern conservatives will never forgive Ricardo his having been cited by Karl Marx, the American right wing's boogie man of choice for some 150 years....
The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.-David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
Insofar as modern socialism, no matter of what tendency, starts out from bourgeois political economy, it almost without exception takes up the Ricardian theory of value. The two propositions which Ricardo proclaimed in 1817 right at the beginning of his Principles, 1) that the value of any commodity is purely and solely determined by the quantity of labour required for its production, and 2) that the product of the entire social labor is divided among the three classes: landowners (rent), capitalists (profit), and workers (wages)--these two propositions had ever since 1821 been utilized in England for socialist conclusions, and in part with such pointedness and resolution that this literature, which had then almost been forgotten and was to a large extent only rediscovered by Marx, remained surpassed until the appearance of Capital.American capitalists, otherwise called "robber barons", never really subscribed to "laissez-faire" economics. Rather, they preferred monopoly if they could pull one off or, failing that, oligopoly. Bush's failures in Iraq as well as his numerous calamities in the economic sphere are bound up with one another as well as with his every other failure. The panoply of right wing calamities cannot be considered in isolation. All parts make up a gestalt, a whole of many parts --lies, myths, tortured logic, simplistic homilies, slogans, platititudes, claptrap, propaganda, and class warfare. The Iraq quagmire, for example, is not merely a war of naked aggression, it is an economic vampire sucks the life out of the US economy, harming the middle and lower income class most. Bush is unconcerned. His job has been to make Iraq safe for the robber barons of big oil. Bush proposes to do it with permanent bases. Trickle down theory will be disproved yet again. The oil profits that will ensue will only enrich the Dick Cheneys of this word. The "people" will continue to pay higher prices at the pump, they will continue to lose ground vis a vis the upper ten percent of the upper 20 percent (the upper quintile). That's why we fought the war. Should --God forbid --another Republican steal the White House, he will go back to well. Indeed, the GOP candidates are on the stump preaching the same old crap. Nothing, absolutely nothing has been learned from the Bush debacle. Republican remorse is akin to crocodile tears. Republican are, indeed, sorry; they are sorry that Bush got caught. They are sorry that the failures and inadequacies of right wing economics have been laid bare.--Karl Marx
But of all the cynical scrambles to package pro-business cash grabs as "economic stimulus," the prize has to go to Lawrence B. Lindsey, formerly President Bush's assistant for economic policy and his advisor during the 2001 recession. Lindsey's plan is to solve a crisis set off by bad lending by extending lots more questionable credit. "One of the easiest things to do would be to allow manufacturers and retailers" — notably Wal-Mart — "to open their own financial institutions, through which they could borrow and lend money," he wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.Klien has picked up the trail, researching "a little-explored area of economic history". She is interested in how manufactured "crises" are exploited by the right wing and, in fact, have "paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe." Social Security, as I have pointed out repeatedly, is a case in point. The GOP will break Social Security in order to "fix" it. But the fix will enrich only Wall Street Insiders and leave retirees worse off. Even now lemmings in the financial establishment are demanding that because Bush's deficits are so huge, "spending" on Social Security will have be cut dramatically. I wonder --does this include the benefits already being paid to current recipients? If so, how is this justified morally? Or --is it a threat to those who, because of GOP lies and fiscal incompetence, have only Social Security to look forward to? Thanks to the Bush's immoral blunder in Iraq, this issue will loom large. Bush, if he indeed leaves the White House, will leave the nation this horrible legacy, a stench that will befoul the air and hang around, like an unwelcome, unkempt guest who moves in, stays, and refuses to just go away. Down and Out in Beverly Hills comes to mind.--Naomi Klein, Why the Right loves a disaster
More and more, I put less and less faith in the Constitution as an instrument to protect our individual rights. I think it is time we stopped fooling ourselves that a mere piece of paper with some words on it is going to ever be an effective barrier to those who would enslave us. After all, politicians and lawmakers dedicate their entire lives to learning how to most effectively influence the thinking of the greatest number of people, and one of their favorite tactics is to twist and change the meanings of words, to deny their opponents the ability to formulate an answer that most people can understand. I am by no means the first to come to this conclusion. Kenneth W. Royce aka Boston T. Party has espoused this viewpoint for some time as has, to a lesser extent, John Silveira.
One of the things that caused me to start thinking seriously about this is the recent elation among some gunowners that the US Supreme Court may actually condescend to “decide the issue” of whether or not the second amendment applies to individuals. Now, I have my own thoughts on that matter, but I'm not going to address them here because it's irrelevent to this discussion. Instead, for those folks who think this is a wonderful development, I have a question: What are you gonna do if they decide the answer is no? More to the point, what are you going to do if it's yes?
If you assign any weight to what the black-robed activists decide on the Second Amendment, first of all, you must be willing to turn in your guns to the government on demand, if they decide the answer is no, and to forevermore concede that you were mistaken, and in fact never had a right to keep and bear arms. To do otherwise would be dishonest, and cheating on the question is in itself an admission that you don't really believe in what you claim to stand for.
But now let's consider the flip side of the coin: what if the answer is yes? What are you gonna do? I'm not talking about those of you who live in a “shall issue” jurisdiction and have paid your money to take a certified gun safety class (“certified” being the operative word, because we can't be trusted to learn gun safety through self-study or from our fathers or whatever, can we?) and then paid more money for a license (“License: a permission granted by competent authority to engage in a business or occupation or in an activity otherwise unlawful” -Webster's) because in applying and paying for that license or permit, you have already conceded and given up any claim to a right in favor of a government-controlled privilege.
Let me expound on that point, just a little more. Any jurisdiction that offers a permit or license to carry a gun in any manner, does not uphold your right to bear arms. Instead, they are offering to “allow” you to do so, subject to their rules and requirements, and revocable at any time with or without notice, but only if you will accept and concede that they, not you, decide whether or not you may do so. In so doing, you are also giving them your tacit consent to arrest and prosecute (and kill, if they deem it necessary) anyone who does carry a gun in their jurisdiction without first obtaining their permission. Ain't democracy wonderful?
But what about those of you who, for whatever reason, feel constrained from bearing that arm? If the Supreme Court were to decide today that the Second does indeed refer to an individual right, would you strap on that arm tomorrow and head out into the world to conduct your business as usual? I wouldn't recommend it, because I can just about guarantee the cops would arrest your butt and confiscate your gun just as quick as they would have yesterday; maybe even quicker, to set an example.
Consider the recent 9th Circuit court decision concerning home-built machine guns. Any student of constitutional law is aware that the entire excuse for the existence of the BATFE rests on the “interstate commerce” clause. So the question that finally made it to the 9th Circuit court was, is it legal for an individual to build himself a machine gun, for his own otherwise-legal use, if it never crosses state lines? The court ruled that it is indeed legal. So are people all over Arizona and California now building their own machine guns and showing up at local shooting ranges with them? No. Why? Because they know that they would still likely end up with a lengthy prison sentence, $250,000 fine, forfeiture of the privilege of ever owning a gun of any kind again, etc., regardless of that 9th Circuit ruling.
Because deep down we all know that any question of what the Constitution means is academic, because it is gonna be applied or not applied according to the whims of any government entity from the Feds all the way down to Jim Bob the local cop with whom you went to school; and nobody is gonna come rushing to your aid. Unless, of course, you have millions of dollars with which to grease the rails of justice.
I use the Second Amendment because it is the most contested of our rights, or at least the most in the public eye. But it is not the only one of our rights that are being denied. Take the Fourth for example, the right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure (by whose estimation? Why, by those doing the searching and seizing, of course!). Let's just say you are driving your car on the government-owned and controlled roads (that used to be public, that is, owned by the people. Right to travel? Oh, I'm sorry, that's a privilege. The DMV told me so. ) and you are stopped and detained at a police checkpoint so they may check all your papers to ensure you are properly licensed, insured, registered, haven't been consuming anything the law doesn't approve of, don't have any guns in the vehicle, etc. and they claim to see something they want to look closer at; the way the laws are now they can pull you out of your car and search the car, and the Fourth doesn't apply. Why? Because the State has decided that, for our protection, our cars are considered "public areas". Also, I won't go into any of the various ways cops can insinuate themselves into your living room without a warrant (OK, I'll offer a couple: they could claim that a neighbor reported hearing a scream from inside your house. Of course, they can't tell you which neighbor. Or, they could bang on the door when you aren't immediately available, and your teenage kid isn't able to deny them entry, strongly enough) but either way, once they are inside, the courts have upheld their right, nay DUTY to look around for anything that may give them an excuse to search even further. For, uh, their protection, which ALWAYS trumps our rights, since they are such heroes and so much better than us lowly civilians.
So how are we lowly peasants going to make a difference? Well, there are a number of things we can do (besides educating ourselves, of course) without getting ourselves in trouble, but the first is to think about what they need from us, in order to oppress us. First, our tax support. The most basic tenet of Possum Living is to live on the least amount of the legal tender that we can manage, within the constrains of what we consider an acceptable lifestyle. Spend less. Scavenge more. Build more of our own stuff. Buy more of what we need from flea markets and garage sales. Barter more, both goods and services. That way, we are not paying sales taxes. If we buy land, find the area with the cheapest property taxes, within the general area of where we want to live. It helps that those are the areas that are also least likely to harass us for living offgrid, living in a structure they haven't inpected and approved, raising livestock, etc.
The government regularly instructs us to spend more, for the good of the economy. In my opinion, we should work towards spending less, for our own good and to reduce our financial support of the programs that steal our freedom.
Just something to think about.Addiopizzo – Addiotasse
by Anthony I.S. Alexander
Exclusive to STR
January 30, 2008
One of the headlines on the Yahoo News home page on 13 January was "Website and crackdowns weakening Mafia's grip on
In the summer of 2004, some young people in
"Un intero popolo che paga il pizzo e un popolo senza dignita."
An entire people who pay the pizzo is a people without dignity.
Several business leaders rallied to their cause; and the result is an organization -- Addiopizzo -- Good-by to the Pizzo – dedicated to ending the Sicilian Mafia's reign of extortion, fear, and death.
Many businesspeople in
The Mafia makes life miserable for people who do not pay the pizzo. But now the tables are being turned: some business organizations are making life miserable for people who continue to pay the pizzo. It appears that the Sicilian Mafia is finally on the defensive.
So far, so good. Most people applaud the Addiopizzo organization, its agenda, and its courageous leaders. But these same people would be surprised to learn that there is a larger, more fundamental, and much more important dimension to the concept of Addiopizzo: Addiotasse -- Good-by to the taxes.
* * *
No one signs a contract with the Mafia: there is no explicit understanding of the pizzo transaction; the "protection" provided by the Mafia is bogus; and the victims who pay the pizzo gain only a short respite before the pizzo extortion cycle begins again.
No one signs a contract with the Government; there is no explicit understanding of the tax transaction; the "protection" provided by the Government is bogus: the riots, the revolutions, and the wars continue. Indeed, the taxes cause the riots and the revolutions, and make the wars inevitable. And the victims who pay the taxes gain only a short respite before the tax extortion cycle begins again.
There is one crucial difference between the Mafia and the Government: The Government controls the education system, and teaches everyone to believe that the laws and the taxes are legitimate, but that the decrees of the Capo Mafioso and paying the pizzo are not legitimate. The Mafia cannot compete with the Government's propaganda machine.
* * *
The Italian Government has much greater resources and support than does the Italian Mafia. Why hasn't the Italian Government destroyed the Italian Mafia -- long ago?
The Russian Government has much greater resources and support than does the Russian Mafia. Why hasn't the Russian Government destroyed the Russian Mafia -- long ago?
The American Government has much greater resources and support than does the American Mafia. Why hasn't the American Government destroyed the American Mafia -- long ago?
Because these Governments need their respective Mafias. One of the alleged purposes of Government is "to fight organized crime." But if a Government destroyed its Mafia, it would have one less reason to exist, one less rationale to collect its taxes, one less excuse to control its citizens. Therefore, all Governments need their respective Mafias; and all Government programs to fight organized crime are basically bogus, which is why the Italian Mafia, the Russian Mafia, and the American Mafia are still in business.
The Mafia needs the Government too. The Mafia provides certain goods and services that are demanded in the marketplace, but which have been declared illegal by the Government: drugs, prostitution, etc. The laws against these goods and services increase the risk of providing them; and this "risk premium" is passed on to the Mafia's customers in the form of higher prices for drugs, prostitution, etc. If drugs were legal, and if prostitution were legal, that risk premium would disappear; prices for drugs and prostitution would be much lower; and the incentive for the Mafia to provide these goods and services would also disappear. The result would be less drugs and prostitution. Once again, the Mafia needs the Government.
And so we conclude that the Government and the Mafia need each other. The Government and the Mafia are partners in a Brotherhood of Evil.
* * *
Consider the "protection" offered by the Mafia and the Government.
The Capo Mafioso in
The Capo Mafioso in
The Mafia and the Government are running "protection" rackets; all of these "protection" rackets routinely fail. The greatest failure of the Mafia "protection" racket was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which lasted six seconds and killed six thugs. But the greatest failure of the Government "protection" racket was World War II, which lasted six years and killed sixty million human beings, none of whom understood the organized criminal nature of all forms of Government, nor the futility of their own suffering and death. Now, which form of "protection" do you prefer?
* * *
The Mafia extorts pizzo money by threatening its victims: "Pay or die." It succeeds by instilling fear in its victims. The Government extorts tax money by miseducating its citizens to pay taxes and then threatening them: "Pay or go to jail." Like the Mafia, the Government succeeds by instilling fear in its victims. The truth is obvious: Most people fear the Mafia and most people fear the tax collector. The modus operandi of the Mafia and the modus operandi of the Government are similar, because the Mafia and the Government are similar. The only difference between a Mafia pizzo and a Government tax is the Government miseducation which brainwashes everyone to believe that the Government tax is legitimate. A tax may be legally legitimate, simply because the Government has decreed it to be so. But no Government tax is morally legitimate, because no one has ever agreed -- voluntarily, explicitly, and contractually -- to obey and to pay. In a rational society of sovereign individuals, a person is morally accountable and financially responsible only for those actions to which he/she has explicitly and contractually agreed.
Here's the bottom line: The pizzo is a legally illegitimate tax, and the Mafia is a legally illegitimate Government. A tax is a legally legitimate pizzo, and the Government is a legally legitimate Mafia. But neither the Mafia nor the Government is morally legitimate -- because no one ever voluntarily signs an explicit contract with either the Mafia or the Government -- to obey, to pay, to fight, and to die.
* * *
During the Twentieth Century, the Mafia killed a few thousand people. But during that same century, the Governments of the world killed more than two hundred million people, most of whom were their own citizens who believed the Myth of The State: they obeyed the laws, they paid the taxes, they fought the wars -- and they died.
The Addiopizzo organization is ending the Mafia's reign of extortion, fear, and death. But where is the Addiotasse organization to end the Government's reign of extortion, fear, and death?
* * *
The home page of www.addiopizzo.org makes this incisive statement:
"As long as somebody continues to pay the pizzo, we will not be free. Because if my baker pays the pizzo, I am giving money to the Mafia when I buy bread too, and so I submit myself to the Mafia."
That should be paraphrased as follows:
As long as somebody continues to pay the taxes, we will not be free. Because if my baker pays the taxes, I am giving money to the Government when I buy bread too, and so I submit myself to the Government -- and to all of the Government's scandals, riots, revolutions, and wars.
Un intero popolo che paga le tasse e un popolo senza liberta.
An entire people who pay the taxes is a people without liberty.
Addiopizzo: Good-by to the pizzo.
Addiotasse: Good-by to the taxes.
Freedom in our time.
