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Wakey Wakey!
SOTT
An important note to
humanity:
Drop the remote for a minute and listen up. Over the
past few years, we have gone to significant lenghts
to highlight the fact that for most people on the planet,
living what has come to be known as 'a normal life'
will soon be untenable. Quite apart from the fact that,
since Bush came to power, terror attacks, war, death
and suffering, the passing of new draconian legislation
and a general aura of fear have all descended like a
black pall over most of the world, the past few years
has been witness to a seriously sharp rise in the number
of reported meteorite sightings and impacts.
What might be the cause of such a spike? Well, we could
be forgiven for thinking that it is just that; an innocuous
spike that will soon settle down. However, if we factor
in historical, geological and paleontological evidence
which suggests that our planet has in the past undergone
regular cyclical catastrophes that have metoerite impacts
(among other natural cataclysms) as their defining aspect,
AND that we seem to be overdue for another one, the
recent spate of space rocks visiting our planet's skies
and surface paints a rather different picture.
It seems more than a concidence also that this rise
in near earth comets, bollides and meteorites appears
to be occuring in concert with a definite increase in
the 'heat' in both political and climatological terms.
The conclusion we draw from this is that events on
earth may well be mirrored in the cosmos/solar system,
or, as it has been said, "Disasters involve cycles
in the human experiential cycle [...] The human cycle
mirrors cycle of catastrophe. Earth benefits in form
of periodic cleansing. Time to start paying attention
to the signs. They are escalating. They can even be
'felt' by you and others, if you pay attention."
So if we do NOT want a major bombardment of heavenly
bodies, we might all think about waking up to the truth
of what is really happening on our planet and the deliberate
machinations of the power elite who are aware of such
events and are doing everything in their power to prevent
you and I from figuring it out.
YREKA - At 2:20 Tuesday afternoon, callers began
alerting Yreka police and the Siskiyou County Sheriff's
Department to a "fire ball" that had come
from the sky and believed to have landed near the
city's corporation yard.
A golfer at the Rogue Valley Country Club in Medford,
Ore. was getting ready to make a shot off the second
tee, when he reported seeing a flaming object with
"blue and red flames coming off of it,"
fall from the sky. That observer thought that the
object had fallen somewhere near Shady Cove, Ore.
Callers also contacted the National Weather Service
offices in Medford and Roseburg, Ore. to report the
sighting.
PORTLAND -- According to the Cascade Meteorite Lab
at Portland State University, a fireball streaked
across the sky at 2:17 p.m.
The fireball was seen in Portland, Medford and most
likely most places in between.
A fireball is a meteorite that has entered our atmosphere
and is burning up. Most times it burns up totally
before hitting the ground but once in a while we get
a meteorite that lands on earth.
If you saw the fireball, the lab would like to hear
from you. You can call them at (503) 287-6733.
FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. -- An unusual rock that fell
out of the sky, through a shed and into a tractor
earlier this month appears to be a meteorite, says
a director with the Geological Survey of Canada. [...]
An afternoon picking strawberries took a bizarre
twist for Adeline Kelly on July 17 when a chunk of
rock plummeted from the sky, penetrating the tin roof
of a shed and piercing the manifold of a tractor on
her and her husband's Montney ranch, just north of
Fort St. John. The stone bounced several times after
landing. Adeline searched for the object and eventually
found a small, rough-surfaced black and grey stone
with specks of diamond-like material embedded in it.
Part of the stone had shattered, but much of it was
still intact.
Australia and the United States
have been secretly negotiating a new international pact
on greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol,
which they refused to sign, a minister said Wednesday.
The negotiations have also involved China, India and
South Korea, according to a report in The Australian
newspaper.
Environment Minister Ian Campbell said details of the
deal and the countries involved would be announced soon.
Greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere are
blamed for global warming, seen as one of the world's
greatest environmental dangers, and the refusal by the
United States and Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol
was widely condemned.
"The countries that are involved in any future
proposal will be announced when we announce the details
of the proposal," Campbell told reporters, adding
that this would be "in the very near future".
"Australia is, and I reassure the Australian people,
working on something that is more effective post-Kyoto,"
Campbell said. [...]
One of the US arguments against the present Kyoto format
is that it does not require big developing countries
such as China and India to make targeted emissions cuts
-- an absence that Bush says is unfair and illogical.
But developing countries say historical
responsibility for global warming lies with nations
that industrialised first, and primarily with the United
States, which by itself accounts for a quarter of all
global greenhouse-gas pollution.
The new alliance will bring together nations that account
for more than 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas
emissions, The Australian said. [...]
By KATHY MATHESON
The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 26, 2005; 9:52 PM
PHILADELPHIA -- A blistering heat
wave gave Philadelphia summer school students the equivalent
of a snow day Tuesday as temperatures climbed into the
upper 90s and so many homeowners cranked up their air
conditioners that their power grid set a record.
As a large swath of the United States suffered through
another miserably hot day, several western states and
parts of the Midwest began to feel the relief of a cold
front pushing out what had been days of triple-digit
temperatures.
But for the East, the cooler temperatures weren't expect
to arrive until Thursday.
That likely means another early dismissal Wednesday
for Philadelphia students stuck in summer school classrooms,
many without air conditioning, officials said.
The demand for cooling was evident at PJM Interconnection
LLC, which coordinates the movement of electricity between
13 states ranging from Illinois to North Carolina. The
power grid reported setting a record Tuesday with a
peak load of 135,000 megawatts - enough to power 108
million homes under normal conditions.
"It was 120 (degrees) in the direct sunlight,"
said Walt Arrison, a surveyor at the construction site
who kept a small key chain thermometer in his pocket.
Already the heat has been blamed for deaths across
the country, including 28 in the Phoenix area alone,
most of them homeless people.
At least four deaths have been blamed on the heat in
Missouri, including a woman found Sunday in a home without
air conditioning. Two young children left in hot cars
died in Oklahoma. A 29-year-old hiker died Monday in
Kentucky. And a 48-year-old woman was found dead Tuesday
in her non-air-conditioned apartment in Cincinnati.
[...]
BOMBAY - Landslides and floods
killed at least 30 people in India's western state of
Maharashtra, leaving dozens more missing, and crippled
normal life in the nation's financial hub, Bombay, a
state official said on Wednesday.
Most fatalities in the industrial powerhouse state
were in the coastal districts of Raigad and Ratnagiri,
where several villages were cut off after heavy monsoon
rains.
Maharashtra's relief secretary, Krishna Vatsa, said
the government had called in the army, navy and air
force to assist thousands of people who were stranded
and to pull out possible survivors of landslides.
"We have not been able to reach some villages
where more than several dozen people may be missing
in landslides," Vatsa told Reuters, confirming
at least 30 deaths in Raigad and Ratnagiri and adding
that electricity, telephone links and transport connections
had been cut off to those districts.
Press Trust of India reported 54 fatalities in Raigad
district alone due to floods and landslides. In coastal
Maharashtra, officials and media reported more than
1,700 people had been rescued since Tuesday.
Trading on Bombay's bond and currency markets was cancelled
and Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deskmukh declared
a state holiday saying conditions were very bad. The
government asked people to stay at home as further heavy
rains were forecast.
"The situation is so grave (that despite) these
human efforts, we are not in a position to reach out
to the people who are in the districts," Deskmukh
told NDTV television.
Late on Tuesday, another official said that in the
village of Juigao, about 150 km (95 miles) south of
Bombay, 150 villagers were feared buried after a landslide.
BOMBAY FLOODED
In Bombay -- home to the Bollywood movie industry --
and its suburbs, thousands of office workers had to
stay overnight in hotels, and schools were shut on Wednesday
as rain continued overnight, flooding roads and stalling
hundreds of cars. [...]
EXETER - There was
something odd in the sky last week, something that caused
a Navy veteran with 10,000 hours of flight experience
to have his own close encounter.
The former flight engineer, who wished to be identified
only as "David," said of the experience, "this
was like nothing I’ve ever seen before."
What the retired Navy chief petty officer said he saw
last Wednesday could only be classified as a UFO, an
unidentified flying object.
It was a bright and sunny afternoon, about 3:15 p.m.,
and David was outside preparing his lawnmower. He had
filled the mower with gas, checked the oil, and took
a sip from a glass of water he had poured. When he tilted
his head back to get the final sip, through the bottom
of the glass he saw a large cigar-shaped object hovering
in the sky.
David said windows were equally spaced around the object,
however he didn’t see anyone or anything inside.
The size of the object was enormous. By comparison,
he said, consider what an ultralight plane would look
like next to a Boeing 747. He said it was about the
size of two USS Nimitz aircraft carriers.
At first glance, through his empty glass of water he
thought it could have been the Hood blimp. "But,
the instant I put my glass down, I said, ‘that’s
not a blimp.’"
The object moved from west to east,
very slowly for something that size, he said. His initial
instinct was that the object was moving at about 100
knots, but something that big shouldn’t be able
to stay in the air if it’s going that slow, he
said.
The object began changing colors from
a bright silver to an orange-ish red. A strange cloud
of red and orange flames began surrounding the object,
and before he knew it the object stretched out like
a rubber band. It grew to about twice its original size,
and then it was gone.
The entire incident lasted about 10
minutes, he recalled Monday morning, but he is unaware
of the specific time because, "it felt like time
stopped."
He went into his house and first thought to call the
police. He decided not to because he didn’t think
they’d take him seriously. So he went on the Internet
and searched for "report UFO," and found the
Web site for the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting
Center.
Peter Davenport, director of the UFO reporting center,
said David’s report was astonishing because of
his history with flight. "I have no question on
his reliability."
He said he gets several accounts each year, but this
one stood out. The report was well written and scientific,
Davenport said.
"In my view, that’s one of the cardinal
rules of an account," he said.
The center was founded in 1974 by UFO investigator
Robert Gribble. The center’s Web site, www.nuforc.org,
has a large list of UFO sightings. According to the
site, the center’s primary function is to receive,
record, and to the greatest degree possible, corroborate
and document reports from individuals who have witnessed
possible UFOs. David’s report, which will soon
be on the Web site, will be among dozens of documented
sightings to be formally reported to the center.
Not the first time
The Exeter area is no stranger to UFO sightings. In
1965, two Exeter police officers and hitchhiker Norman
Muscarello, who was with them, gained national attention
after seeing a UFO hovering over Route 101 in Kensington.
The sighting was documented in a book called "The
Incident at Exeter."
And then there was the incident involving Barney and
Betty Hill, a husband and wife from Portsmouth who claimed
to have been abducted by aliens. The couple was driving
from a vacation in Canada in 1961 when they saw a UFO.
The object moved directly over their car, and before
they knew it they grew drowsy. They later claimed to
have been abducted by aliens and gave identical accounts
while they were hypnotized.
But for this recent sighting, David said he believes
that there is life beyond Earth. He said the galaxy
is so enormous, it’s hard to believe humans are
the only intelligent life.
"To the point of not being obnoxious, it’d
be egocentric to think there is no other life out there."
Comment: For
an in depth look at the strange phenomena, earthly and
otherwise that we have been experiencing over the past
few years, don't miss our Signs Supplements available
on our site
map.
When it comes down
to it, who are you going to believe; members of the
British government who have recently been proven to
be unashamed liars (Downing Street Memos), or the people
who were actually on the London trains when the bombs
exploded? Okay, now that we've got that straight, lets
take a look at what eyewitnesses actually saw:
"The
policeman said 'mind that hole, that's where the
bomb was'. The metal was pushed upwards as if the
bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think
the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody
being where the bomb was, or any bag"
One
witness said the floor of the train he was standing
on was "blown out" and other witnesses spoke
of a huge hole being torn out of the floor.
"The
middle of the train was blown out and there were
people on the track. ... the floor of the train he
was on was blown out, it was just gone," he said."
So tell us, how does a bomb in a backpack, either on
the floor of the train or on the back of a person, blow
a hole in the floor of the train in such a way that
the metal of the floor is blown upwards?
It doesn't.
The only conclusion is that the bomb was underneath
the train, either attached to the underside or to the
tracks. Conclusion? The British government is lying
and knows full well that the bombs were not the result
of suicide bombers, yet they choose to tell the public
that this is the case.
Gary Younge in
New York
Wednesday July 27, 2005
The Guardian
New York's mayor, Michael
Bloomberg, has apologised to a group of British tourists
after armed police swarmed on
to an open-top sightseeing bus, handcuffed them and
forced them to kneel on Broadway.
The five Sikh tourists from Birmingham were ordered
off the bus on Sunday with their hands bound behind
their backs after a tour company employee called police
to report that they seemed suspicious.
The police cordoned off the block for 90 minutes, ordered
all 60 passengers off the bus, and searched their belongings
and then their bodies. The five men were then identified
by the employee and cuffed.
New York has been on heightened alert since the London
bombings and police recently started checking bags in
the subway.
Mr Bloomberg advised New Yorkers to use common sense
when reporting anything suspect and to avoid profiling
people.
"It turned out that these people did not present
any threat whatsoever," he said.
"The police, who have to react in this day and
age and take evidence at face value, had a show of force
that probably doesn't make good reading in the paper.
"It's a shame, and I certainly apologise on behalf
of the city of New York."
The tour bus company, Gray Line, stood by its supervisor.
"We have trained our employees to report suspicious
activity to the police," its spokesman, David Chien,
said. "That is all we did."
After the terrorist attacks of September 11 more than
400 Sikhs were attacked across the country, claims Amardeep
Singh, legal director of the Sikh coalition in New York.
He said reports "across the board" showed
Sikhs were being confused with Arabs and other Muslims.
[...]
Comment: Are
you getting it now? Are you beginning to understand
the reasons for this phony war on terror. There are
no terrorists to speak of, save those in the employ
of the American, British and Israeli governments.
Consider what ex-British Foreign Secretary Robin cook,
writing in the Guardian this month, said about the london
bombings and who the terrorists really are:
"Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental
miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout
the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the
Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation
of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database",
was originally the computer file of the thousands
of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with
help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably,
and with disastrous consequences, it never appears
to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was
out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn
its attention to the west."
One need not be a incontrovertible cynic to suggest
that this "database" is still maintained and
that, like the war against the Russians in Afghanistan
in the 80's, the current war on terror is yet another
proxy war that is being directed and funded by the same
Western intelligence agencies. We all must understand,
fear is the name of the game that is currently being
played out on the global stage. For government officials,
inspiring a visceral mortal fear in the population is
a vital tool when the goal is to railroad legislation
through parliament and ensure that your criminal behaviour
will not lead to a defeat at the polls as it rightly
should.
It's time we all grew up and faced the facts instead
of clinging desperately to childish notions that "they
wouldn't do that". The simple fact is that they
ARE "doing that" and have been for many years.
They just didn't want anyone to know. Now, however,
as they become more and more audacious in their crimes,
there is an opportunity for us all to catch a glimpse
of the man behind the curtain. Let's not waste it.
Michael Meacher
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian
The 9/11 attacks gave
the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global
domination
Massive attention has now been given - and rightly
so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against
Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why
the US went to war, and that throws light on British
motives too. The conventional explanation is that after
the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida
bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching
a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam
Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to
retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be
extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not
fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a
global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now
vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary),
Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George
Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief
of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's
Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative
think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military
control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein
was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict
with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the
need for a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed
to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage
advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership
or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role".
It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the
most effective and efficient means of exercising American
global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions
as "demanding American political leadership rather
than that of the UN". It says "even should
Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran
may well prove as large a threat to US interests as
Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime
change", saying "it is time to increase the
presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The document also calls for the creation of "US
space forces" to dominate space, and the total
control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies"
using the internet against the US. It also hints that
the US may consider developing biological weapons "that
can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological
warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful
tool".
Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints
North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and
says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide
command and control system". This is a blueprint
for US world domination. But before it is dismissed
as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it
provides a much better explanation of what actually
happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global
war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several
ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or
nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known
that at least 11 countries provided advance warning
to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts
were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the
CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing
a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001).
The list they provided included the names of four of
the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were
plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then
in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted
that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land
an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon,
the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas
in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head
of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that
since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas
to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing
them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan
war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6
2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan
war for other purposes. It is also reported that five
of the hijackers received training at secure US military
installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up.
French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now
thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August
2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious
interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When
US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical
Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer,
which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times,
November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI.
One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui
might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek,
May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on
the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such
slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking
was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last
hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am.
Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate
from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from
Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the
Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA
intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11.
Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military
launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious
aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement
that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its
flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding,
or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air
security operations have been deliberately stood down
on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?
The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus,
has said: "The information provided by European
intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive
that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or
FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious
attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late
September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's
two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition
to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official
said, significantly, that "casting our objectives
too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse
of the international effort if by some lucky chance
Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of
the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far
as to say that "the goal has never been to get
Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing
FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002)
that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November
2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida
and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times
over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to
attack because they did not receive permission quickly
enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled
evidence, all of which comes from sources already in
the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a
real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into
place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this
it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism"
is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider
US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair
himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison
committee: "To be truthful about it, there was
no way we could have got the public consent to have
suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for
what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17
2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain
a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate
occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking
Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed
(Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext
to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again
is quite clear that plans for military action against
Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11.
A report prepared for the US government from the Baker
Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that
"the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma.
Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow
of oil to international markets from the Middle East".
Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group,
the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable
risk to the US, "military intervention" was
necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The
BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former
Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American
officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that
"military action against Afghanistan would go ahead
by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the
US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of
stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction
of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields
in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan
and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with
the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US
representatives told them "either you accept our
offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet
of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some
have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as
creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan
in a war that had clearly already been well planned
in advance. There is a possible precedent for this.
The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt
used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor
on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks
was received, but the information never reached the
US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant
US public to join the second world war. Similarly the
PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process
of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant
force" is likely to be a long one in the absence
of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like
a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the
US to press the "go" button for a strategy
in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise
have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen
is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of
secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim
world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil
production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining
global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing,
so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign
oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which
in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy
demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs
by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could
be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005.
The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity
will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be
imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq
has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition
to its oil.
A report from the commission on America's national
interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising
new source of world supplies was the Caspian region,
and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia.
To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline
would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the
Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards
through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near
the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered
power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which
Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival
was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble
for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and
this may partly explain British participation in US
military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP,
warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil
companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October
30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi
in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that
"the UK does not want to lose out to other European
nations already jostling for advantage when it comes
to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya
(BBC Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be
that the "global war on terrorism" has the
hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the
way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world
hegemony, built around securing by force command over
the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.
Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in
this project really a proper aspiration for British
foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a
more objective British stance, driven by our own independent
goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all
the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
· Michael Meacher MP was environment minister
from May 1997 to June 2003
Bill
O'Reilly announced tonight that he will be exposing and
naming all the people and organizations he considers to
be helping the terrorists on his show each night.
He then offered all the accused a chance to come on to
defend themselves because he realizes that it's a serious
charge. O'Reilly appeared to be sincere in his belief
that he is entitled to make these accusations.
The first installment of BOR finger pointing included
the ACLU for their belief that the Geneva Conventions
should be respected. Also their concern about Abu Ghraib
and request for the release of more incriminating pictures,makes
them helpers of terrorism.
Then the first individual, Bob Herbert, recieved the
O'Reilly branding. According to O'Reilly, Herbert's writing
enables the terrorists but the real problem is his refusal
to condemn the ACLU . O'Reilly gave Herbert a slight pass
claiming that he is blinded by his hatred of President
Bush.
That was not enough for Bill who brought on Stephen Hayes
and Robert Pollack, Wall Street Journal, to point their
fingers at people. Hayes chose Michael Moore, Al Jazeera,
Cynthia McKinney, and Jim McDermott for his list of "terrorist
helpers". Robert Pollack chose Dick Durbin, BBC,and
the UN for his list. O'Reilly accepted these choices respectfully
as if it was a perfectly sane thing to do.
News Hounds' Comment: Has Bill O'Reilly lost his mind
completely? Will Fox News allow this to continue? First
off, let's talk plainly. Bill O'Reilly is calling people
traitors not "terrorist helpers" and he is doing
this on national television. The audacity of this act
is beyond belief. Bill O'Reilly actually believes that
he is entitled to do this to other people.
I suppose he and Michelle Malkin will be discussing plans
for internment camps for 'terrorist helpers" Your
fate is in Bill O'Reilly's hands.
Comment:
Now that the courts, with the help of Supreme Court nominee
John Roberts, have given Bush the dictatorial powers of
life and death over US citizens, free from those pesky
restrictions on civil liberties called Rule of Law, Due
Process, and the US Constitution, the shrill voices of
the Fascist Chorus are being raised. Dissent is treasonous.
Questioning the president is treasonous. Today, they are
"terrorist helpers", tomorrow they will be imprisoned
as "enemy combatants" with no right to counsel,
to being charged, to appearing in a public court to defend
themselves. They will be locked away until Bush changes
his mind (fat chance of that ever happening), or they
die while incarcerated.
Look at what has happened already. Those charged with
"terrorism" are not allowed to see the evidence
against them. Such evidence is hidden away because, according
to the same people who have lied all along the line to
the American people, it would be a threat to national
security to reveal it to the accused. After four years
of continuous lies, why should we start to believe these
warmongers now?
But, those of you who read this page regularly, know
that it is much more serious than that. The Zionists in
power in the US have faked the attacks of 9/11, killing
3000 people to justify their agenda of war, doing everything
in their power to provoke the so-called "Clash of
Civilisations" between the West and Islam. This war
is the goal of the Zionists, be they Jewish or Christian.
The false flag operations serve to paint the Muslims as
violent and savage beasts, non-believers who must be extinguished
before they overrun the West.
Who interests are served by such a lie?
The United States has the best equipped military the
world has ever seen, at least in recorded history. They
are prepared to respond to the next "terrorist"
attack in the US with the use of nuclear arms. Neocon
polemicists have been discussing the "Clash of Civilisations"
for over a decade, preparing the minds of Americans for
a supposedly "inevitable" conflict, inevitable
because of the very nature of the Arab or the Muslim,
not because of the nature of Zionism.
Israel is the lone nuclear power in the Middle East,
ready to take the rest of the world with it should they
be attacked. However, they portray themselves as the victims,
as they kill yet another Palestinian child here or destroy
another olive grove or home, or keep a Palestinian farmer
from his land that happened to fall on the wrong side
of the illegal apartheid wall.
The battle is raging "over there", but don't
kid yourselves, the battle is also being fought "at
home". Those in the US who are vocal opponents of
the Bush Reich are being identified. The day will come
when they will be rounded up. The battle is being waged
in the UK where authorities have admitted that the shooting
of innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place
at the wrong time with the wrong skin colour or wearing
the wrong clothes is a necessary part of "saving
lives". Such slaughter of the innocents is being
justified, and don't you dare start to question it now
that an innocent Brazilian wearing a heavy coat has received
eight shots in front of passengers in the Tube.
Michelle Malkin, sometimes known
as Bill O'Reilly in drag, opened one of her recent syndicated
rants with this question:
"Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Civil-liberties activists,
anti-war organizers, eco-militants and animal-rights
operatives are in a fright over news that the nefarious
FBI is watching them. Why on earth would the government
be worried about harmless liberal grannies, innocent
vegetarians, unassuming rainforest lovers and other
'peaceful groups' simply exercising their First Amendment
rights?"
Ms. Malkin was referring to a lawsuit brought by the
American Civil Liberties Union, charging that the FBI
had amassed hundreds of pages of secret files on that
organization and similar groups.
Well, let me suggest that this cute-looking new darling
of the salivating right is asking the wrong question.
What she should want to know
is why the FBI is snooping on the ACLU.After
all, the rights the ACLU defends include those that
allow Ms. Malkin to write exactly what she wants to
write, no matter how misinformed.
Ms. Malkin is too young to remember, and obviously
hasn't read much American history, but if she wants
an answer to that question, there are lots of answers.
Here are a few.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI engaged in widespread
spying on ordinary Americans. The targets back then
were left-wing groups and individuals, civil rights
and anti-Vietnam activists and, of course, President
Nixon's "enemies list".
The leader of the pack was the FBI's powerful first
director, J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar started his witch-hunting
career in the 1920s under Attorney General Mitchell
Palmer. Palmer's infamous 'Red
Raids' were enabled by a national environment of fear
and suspicion and led to the jailing or deportation
of hundreds of communists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, and
other dissidents, including Emma Goldman, the well-known
Russian émigré poet.
The FBI under Hoover collected information on all America's
leading politicians. Known as Hoover's "secret
files", this incriminating material was used to
make sure that the eight presidents under whom he served
would be too frightened to sack him. The strategy worked
and Hoover was still in office when he died in 1972.
Not even Martin Luther King, Jr. got
a free pass. The FBI used wiretaps and a covert operation,
personally directed by Hoover, to unearth derogatory
information intended to destroy King as a national civil
rights leader.
In between the Red Raids and Martin Luther King, there
was the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during
World War Two – an action for which the United
States Government finally apologized, but which young
Ms. Malkin thinks was just a dandy idea.
Even earlier in the life of our Republic, there were
the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in 1798 under the
administration of President John Adams. They were sold
as measures to protect the United States from "dangerous"
aliens, but were actually used by the Federalists to
stop the growth of the Democratic-Republican Party.
The four laws making up the Act authorized the president
to imprison or deport any alien associated with any
nation the United States was fighting in a "declared
war, " and deport any alien considered dangerous,
even in peacetime, extended the duration of residence
required for aliens to become citizens, nearly tripling
it from five years to 14, and made it a crime to publish
"false, scandalous, and malicious writing"
against government or government officials.
These unambiguous violations of the First Amendment
were vigorously opposed by such well-known lefties as
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Ms. Malkin saves her fiercest invective for the "eco-radicals"
who urge their followers to take "direct actions"
against American military establishments, urban centers,
corporations, government buildings, media outlets, and
the financial centers of the country through "massive
property destruction", "online sabotage",
"physical occupation of buildings", and large-scale
urban rioting.
Ms. Malkin conveniently ignores
that fact that such eco-radicals have nothing whatever
to do with the ACLU's lawsuit. She also ignores
America's long history of civil disobedience –
which started with the Revolutionary War that created
the country, continued through the Civil Rights movement,
and is still alive and well today.
No one wants to see mass destruction
of anything by anyone, but Ms. Malkin would do well
to acknowledge that it was acts of civil disobedience
that gave her many of the rights she now enjoys.
Ms. Malkin concludes: "'Dissent
is patriotic' is a bromide no responsible agent can
swallow blindly. Tolerating the unfettered free speech
of saboteurs has threatened enough lives already."
How about your free speech, Michelle?
I forget who said it, but it's a statement Ms. Malkin
needs to think about: The greatest threat to democracy
is the unbridled power of government.
Funny how often small-government states-rights conservatives
like Michelle Malkin forget what it is they're supposed
to stand for!
WHEN I was Commissioner
of the Met it was my sad duty to end many, many years
of police tradition and bring in what's been called a
shoot-to-kill policy against suspected suicide bombers.
Of course, in reality it is a "shoot-to-kill-to-protect"
policy, to save innocent lives. I introduced it
after much soul-searching over a great deal of time.
Comment: All of
his soul-searching doesn't justify the practise. Perhaps
it just indicates that he has no soul.
Now the revelation that the man killed on Friday by an
armed police officer was, in fact, innocent of any bombing
intent may lead some to seriously question that policy.
But we are living in unique times
of unique evil, at war with an enemy of unspeakable brutality,
and I have no doubt that now, more than ever, the principle
is right despite the chance, tragically, of error. And
it would be a huge mistake for anyone to even consider
rescinding it. To understand why, put yourself
in the place of a police officer.
Brain
Previously, the standing instructions in firearms incidents
was for officers to fire at the offender's body, usually
two shots, to disable and overwhelm.
But I sent teams to Israel, and other
countries hit by suicide bombers, where we learned a terrible
truth.
Comment: Yes, where
else but in Israel would police learn how to murder innocents
in cold-blood along with the necessary justifications
for explaining it away. The Israelis are masters of the
trade. Think of all the children and teenagers on their
way to school who have been blown away by the IDF. Such
a great example for the UK police. In Palestine, these
murders are justified because the youth had a rock in
his or her hand, or came too close and were a threat.
In the UK, it's wearing a heavy coat in summer.
There is only one sure way to stop a
suicide bomber determined to fulfil his mission: Destroy
his brain instantly, utterly.
Which means shooting him with devastating
power in the head. Anywhere else and even though they
might be dying, they may still be able to force their
body to trigger the device.
My heart goes out to the officer who killed the man in
Stockwell Tube station. I've never yet met a firearms
officer who has killed in the line of duty who hasn't
been traumatised and haunted by the experience. To get
close enough to be certain of killing a fleeing man he
believed might have been about to trigger a suicide bomb,
that officer knowingly put himself in a position where
he thought he could be blown to tiny pieces, almost vaporised.
How horrifying, how terrifying...and, yes, despite the
way events unfolded, how brave.
Comment: Do you
see what is happening here? The sympathy for the killer,
not the dead man whose family will never be able to replace
his presence, who are condemned to mourn for the rest
of their lives the loss of a son.
Don't forget, either, that like every officer who fires
a weapon in a firearms incident his actions will now be
subject to a meticulous investigation.
Ultimately, I believe, officers like him will continue
to do their job because there's no choice—the danger
from real fanatics out there is too acute.
Let's look at the facts...
There are 8,000 active terrorists at
large in the world—and they're just the ones we
know about. And the vast majority of these people are
driven by the most perverted, evil version of Muslim extremism.
Comment: Ah, yes.
That evil threat that can arise at any time, anywhere
in the world. Notice how easily the words "driven
by the most perverted, evil version of Muslim extremism"
flow from his pen. We accept it now without thinking.
The circuit has been laid down in our brains since 9/11.
"Muslim = terrorist". They are "evil".
The Christians and the Jews are not. The crusade against
Iraq and the Taliban were matters of defence. Nothing
evil or perverted there. Nothing evil or perverted in
justifying the war through lies. Nothing evil or perverted
in justifying the whole crusade by faking 9/11 and blaming
it on 19 "Arab hijackers" and a crazy man in
a cave.
It's the kind of extremism that led four suicide bombers
to blow themselves and over 50 innocent people to death
in London on 7/7. The kind that led others to attempt—but
fail—to murder and maim again last Thursday.
Comment: Yes, it
is an extremism that led to this, but it is a Christian
and Jewish extremism, a State-sponsored extremism. That
this extremism calls forth a Muslim variant in reaction
is to be expected. The monotheistic religions need each
other, feed off of each other. But let's not kid ourselves
about where the real power in the world lies. It isn't
with the Muslim extremists.
And almost certainly the kind that has brought death
and destruction to Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt this weekend.
So what do we do about it?
One devastating fact we must address is there are EIGHT
MILLION stolen or lost passports floating around the world,
to be used and abused. So yet again the need for proper
border controls becomes obvious.
Comment: When it
comes to "lost" passports, it is once again
the Israelis who are the specialists. They have used Canadian
passports on a number of black ops. Israelis were recently
convicted in New Zealand of stealing passports. It is
state-sponsored terrorism that is the real threat.
Then there are ID cards. Over and again I heard terrorism
and crime experts this week sing their praises. For instance,
ID cards were a vital weapon used in Hong Kong to solve
their massive illegal immigration and human trafficking
problems.
Vital
Similarly, we should consider introducing at our borders
the kind of photographic system used in Pakistan which
automatically captured those airport arrival pictures
and passports of the two 7/7 bombers that were revealed
in the papers this week.
Yes these are expensive options. But in a dangerous world,
safety doesn't come cheap.
Then there is security at home. I said after 7/7 that
those bombers would be British-based and so, sadly, it
turned out to be. I believe Thursday's second batch will
be the same.
What these two incidents show is the need to further
engage the British Muslim community in the war against
al-Qaeda.
Communities defeat terrorism. And there's never been
a more vital time to realise that.
Comment:
Terrorism is a tactic. It is a tactic that is often used
by states to smear their enemies. It is used to scare
populations into accepting restrictions on their freedoms.
It is one tool among many used to better "manage"
society, to herd and manipulate, to bring everyone under
ever finer means of control. Unfortunately, many people
are susceptible to these tricks. No matter how many lies
their leaders tell them, they continue to believe the
next lie, they continue to believe that our leaders have
our best interests at heart, that if they propose such
draconian measures, it is because they have information
that we do not have, they know things that we do not know.
We are meant to trust them one more time, to take them
at their word after they have shown over and again that
their word means nothings.
THe manipulation and use of scare tactics to better "manage"
the herd is shown in quite a blatant way by this next
article on how the Bush Reich is adapting to the fall
in support among Americans for the imperial, Zionist adventure
in Iraq. They aren't changing that violence, they are
simply dressing it in different terms, presenting a few
new slogans to replace the outworn "global war on
terrorism".
The
Bush administration is abandoning the phrase "war
on terror" to better express the fight against al-Qaeda
and other groups as an ideological
struggle as much as a military mission.
While the slogan - first used by President George W Bush
in the wake of the 9/11 attacks - may still be heard from
time to time, the White House says
it will increasingly be couched in other language.
In recent days, senior administration
figures have been speaking publicly of "a global
struggle against the enemies of freedom", and of
the need to use all "tools of statecraft" to
defeat them.
The shift in terms comes at a time when
the US public is increasingly pessimistic about the war
in Iraq - and sceptical about its links to the fight against
terrorism.
One White House official told the BBC the move did not
mark a change of approach, but was intended to give a
broader perspective to the "evolving nature"
of the struggle.
'Economic influence'
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke in the new language
on Friday, praising a retiring Navy officer who had served
as "our country wages the global
struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of
civilization".
Comment: Ummm, "civilisation".
What a loaded term. It relates back to Samuel Huntington's
theses that there exists a "clash of civilisations"
between the West and Islam. While the Zionist ideologues
have been preparing the ground for many years, this shift
in vocabulary marks a shift in the ideological propaganda
war. As we look back, we can see that it may well have
been the intention all along, the goal of phase one, the
phase that opened on September 11, 2001. The London bombings
of July 7 are the marker for phase two.
Many opponents of the Zionists are
openly stating that the London bombings are linked to
the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Over 80% of Britons
believe this to be the case. By shifting the terms of
the propaganda war to "freedom" and "civilisation",
the Bush Reich is telling us that we are all potential
victims of "Islamic terror". It has nothing
to do with US policy in the Middle East, but is related
to a generalised fanaticism among Muslims who are against
"freedom" and "civilisation". Israel
is the outpost of "freedom" and "civilisation"
in the Middle East. Israel has been attacked because of
this, not because of its genocide against the Palestinians.
The Muslims, the Arabs, are not reacting in a rational
way to outside invaders raping, pillaging, killing, and
stealing the land and the livelihood of people who have
been there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They
are doing this because they are savages; they are not
"civilised".
But this shift also means that anyone
in the West is a potential victim, any country, whether
they are in Iraq or not, whether they support the Zionists
or not, is a potential target. And when the intelligence
agencies of the new Zionist axis set off a bomb in Paris
or Berlin, we will be given the "proof" that
the Muslims are completely crazy.
The next day, national security advisor Steven Hadley
co-wrote a piece for the New York Times in which he set
out the current thinking.
"Military action is only one piece of the war on
terrorism," Mr Hadley wrote.
"At the same time, however, we must bring all of
the tools of statecraft, economic influence and private
enterprise to bear in this war.
"Freedom-loving people around the world must reach
out through every means - communications, trade, education
- to support the courageous Muslims who are speaking the
truth about their proud religion and history, and seizing
it back from those who would hijack it for evil ends."
The country's top military officer spoke in a similar
vein on Monday.
General Richard Myers told a meeting at the National
Press Club: "The long-term problem is as much diplomatic,
as much economic, in fact more diplomatic, more economic,
more political than it is military.
"And that's where the focus has to be in the future."
Comment: Yeah, sure.
Now that the US is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, let's
do politics! Just don't ask us to remove our troops!
Tough talking
Earlier this month, former British Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook criticised the language employed by the US
president, saying that instead of isolating terrorists,
he had upset Muslims around the world.
Mr Cook - an opponent of the war in Iraq - told the BBC:
"I think the problem with George Bush's approach
is that he does keep talking about it as a war on terror
as if there is a military solution and there isn't."
But while the president has continued to talk of "taking
the fight to the enemy", his recent speeches have
also emphasized freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash
of ideas.
A White House official said: "We are constantly
reviewing how we can best protect our citizens from terrorism
and we need to adjust our approach to achieve this.
"The 'war' is more than a military response, it
is a battle of ideas and a struggle
against extremism, and all aspects of the US Government
and its allies around the world need to be called upon
in fighting it.
"In Afghanistan, the extremist Taleban regime no
longer has a base of operations, a clearly identified
location that requires a war - there is now a democratically-elected
government there.
"It's a different situation again in London where
you've got, say, a second generation British Muslim influenced
by the preachings of a radical cleric."
Comment: Who are
the real extremists? Who believes that Yahweh gave them
the Holy Land three thousand years ago and base their
violence upon that contract. Who believes that Jesus is
coming back when the conditions are fulfilled and that
they will be raptured out of here before the End Times
come? Or who are willing to use these beliefs in other
people to manipulate them for their own ends? Isn't that
a form of extremism? The new State extremism that is officially
sanctioned?
Slow evolution
Meanwhile, Lieutenant General James T Conway, a senior
US military commander, told a Pentagon briefing there
had been "philosophical discussions" with US
allies over the use of the phrase.
"We've been told, actually, that
"global war on terrorism" translates pretty
well into the various languages," he added.
"So I think that continues to make
it a part of the discussion."
A Pentagon spokesman said the title of a new manual for
combatant commanders suggested a slow evolution in the
recasting of the mission away from its military aspect.
The National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism,
issued in March, directs commanders to focus on eight
areas essential to terrorists.
These include areas like funding and ideological support,
safe havens, communications and movement.
The phrase "war on terrorism"
was first widely used by the Western press to refer to
the efforts by Britain to end a spate of attacks in the
British mandate of Palestine in the late 1940s.
Comment: Here is
a very clever piece of propaganda, a brief throw away
line tying the phrase "war on terrorism" with
Palestine back in the 1940s. With no qualifiers, it leaves
the reader with the impression that those savage Arabs
have been at it for over fifty years. Of course, the problem
is that the "terror" described by the Western
press at that time was a Jewish terror, a Zionist terror,
led by future leaders of the Zionist state of Israel against
the British troops and the Palestinians. The "terrorists"
became "statesmen" after the founding of Israel,
and Zionist terror was carefully expunged from the public
discourse. It became the right of Israel to defend itself,
to ensure a permanent status of victim with the rights
to do what it wanted, where it wanted, when it wanted.
Sounds a lot like the same ideology
that is driving Bush and Co.
Later, it was frequently employed by US President Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s.
But since the 9/11 attacks it has become a slogan for
the protracted, US-led struggle to terrorists and the
states that aid them, usually expressed as "the global
war on terror".
Comment:
The "global war on terror" is the slogan of
the new fascists. As with any product, when the old ad
campaign begins to fizzle, the marketers sit down and
try to rebrand the product. We are being sold into slavery
under the banner of the "war on terror", and
now that more and more people are refusing to buy the
product, we are being subjected to the newest PR campaign.
"It isn't about war. Really!!! It's political!!!
We're going to talk and use 'tools of statecraft'!!"
The biggest 'tools of statecraft' are the leaders of
the US, Britain, and Israel.
WASHINGTON, July 26
(Xinhuanet) -- US military dog handlers in Iraq's Abdul
Ghraib prison used dogs to terrify detainees, and at least
two of them were bit by these dogs, witnesses said at
a pretrial military hearing on Tuesday.
Witnesses testified at the Fort Meade military base
hearing outside Washington that Sergeant Santos Cardona
and Sergeant Michael Smith were involved in the incidents.
They described events in which unmuzzled dogs were released
by military dog handlers in a competition to frighten
prisoners into urinating on themselves.
Private Ivan Frederick, convicted of abusing prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, testified by phone from a military prison
about one incident in which Cardona's dog bit a naked
inmate on the left and right thighs.
Private Sabrina Harman, who is serving a six-month sentence
for her involvement in the Abu Ghraib scandal, testified
that she also witnessed a dog attack on a detainee and
said that one bite was so severe it required 12 stitches.
The pretrial military hearing will determine whether
Cardona and Smith will be court-martialed. Both are charged
with cruelty and maltreatment, aggravated assault, dereliction
of duty, and making false statements. If convicted, Cardona
could face up to 16 and a half years in jail, and Smith
could face a sentence of up to 29 and a half years.
So far eight US Army reservists have been convicted
for their roles in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Comment:
"Geez, can't the prisoners understand that the dogs
need their exercise, too? What are all those liberal wimps
getting worked up about? They're only Arabs!"
Unfortunately, we each probably know someone who would
have such a reaction to this news. Nothing we can say
or do is going to change their ideas. In fact, they are
entitled to their ideas, as we are entitled to ours. People
can choose to remain subjective, to allow their emotions
to colour their perceptions, to be brainwashed by the
television and Fox News. Many people do. For many, they
will continue to hold onto these ideas even as their homes
comes crashing down around them, even as they lose their
jobs and are thrown into the street, even as their neighbors
are carried off to detention centres. After they lose
everything else, the only thing they'll have left is their
certainty that they were correct to follow Bush. All problems
will be blamed on the liberals and the terrorist huggers
who blame America first.
But there are others who are seeking for the answers.
They react with horror at stories such as this because
they are beginning to see the lies, or they are ashamed
that their country is becoming the world's bully and its
dark heart is appearing undisguised.
But what to do? Where is the real opposition in the United
States? It certainly isn't the Democratic Party. It isn't
the unions, organisations that have long since lost any
of their militancy.
There is no organised opposition. The 9/11 Truth movement
has factionalised into groups and people who hang on to
one or another point as the conclusive bit of evidence,
who characterise others as splitters, or who have abandoned
9/11 for other matters they have decided are more urgent,
such a "Peak Oil". Not that there isn't some
truth in these accusations at times. Obviously, the shadow
government, the people responsible for 9/11, knew that
there would be intrepid individuals searching for the
real answers of that day's events, and so they sent in
the hounds to lay down false trails and spawn spurious
theories. Counter-Intelligence 101. Nothing to be surprised
about there. So, between our own mechanical natures and
need for ego gratification of wanting to be known as the
person who found the conclusive piece of evidence and
the work of the black ops, there is no strong, organised
opposition.
That's what happened in Germany. Hitler kept making demands.
The government in power didn't give in completely, but
passed measures going in the direction that Hitler was
demanding, then when he came to power, the people now
in opposition crumbled. There was no organisation of the
German people to oppose Hitler. There was a vacuum.
Although the situation is not exactly the same in the
details, there are many similarities. The Reichstag fire
and 9/11. The appeal to nationalism and patriotism. The
accusations of treachery against those who opposed Hitler
and the Nazis. The alliance between the fascists and the
Zionists. Today, however, the mass media has much more
power. The people were cowed and brainwashed long before
Bush came to power. There has not yet been the need for
the type of explicit arrests that marked Hitler's first
weeks in power to sow terror and fear in the population.
Most Americans go willingly to the slaughterhouse. They
pay their own way. And many of those who have qualms don't
see how bad the situation really is. They can't believe
that "it could happen here".
It is happening in the United States; it is happening
in the UK. They are the laboratories for testing how to
control the people, how to bring them along one step at
a time, willingly, to their own deaths or the death of
the ideals they continue to believe they defend.
We think that now that the social experiment is proceeding
so successfully in the Anglo-Saxon world, the temperature
will be turned up in other Western countries.
PARIS, July 26 (Xinhuanet)
-- The French government decided
Tuesday to soon tighten anti-terrorist measures in the
wake of bombing attacks in London and Egypt, especially
concerning video surveillance and phone data.
While high officials warned that
France is not excluded from terrorist attacks,
French President Jacques Chirac convoked Tuesday the Interior
Security Council (ISC), grouping Prime Minister Dominique
de Villepin and his principal ministers.
The ISC decided to maintain the red level alert and
deploy moreforces in public places and transport.
France raised its four-level security
system (yellow, orange, red, scarlet) to "red"
alert after July 7 London bombings that killed 56 people
and injured 700 others, and border control has been reinforced
since July 9.
Chirac's office said that the ISC also decided to reinforce
the fight against terrorism, especially in the fields
of check of risky individuals and networks and video surveillance
as well as conservation of telephone data.
Chirac asked his ministers to implement the decisions
as soon as possible.
The French government underlines the necessity to keep
a close eye on the Islamic radicals in the territory and
extradite those who call for violence. It also hopes that
data relative to communication and email could be kept
for years.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called Monday
a meeting of anti-terrorist officials and public transport
services, urging for biometric visas and identity cards
with biometric data (two index fingerprint, digital photo
and electronic signature).
JERUSALEM, July 27
(Xinhuanet) -- A group of extreme
rightists said they had held a ceremony and placed a death
curse on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Jerusalem
Post reported Wednesday.
Twenty people reportedly took part
in the ceremony on Tuesday when the participants believed
that Sharon will die in the coming 30 days, or else all
those who took part in the ceremony would die, said the
report.
The curse first came to light in Israel when far-right
rabbis pronounced it during the turbulent period that
preceded the death of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
who was assassinated in a peace rally in 1995.
Tuesday's ceremony organizers included
Rabbi Yosef Dayan, who was among the rabbis who had placed
a death curse on Rabin.
After Rabin's assassination, Dayan was arrested for
threatening to place a curse on Shimon Peres.
In addition to seeking the death of Sharon, the extremists
also sought to profit from offering their video for sale
to the media.
Starting Tuesday morning, the extremists attempted to
sell the video to one of the country's main commercial
media outlets, namely Channel 2 TV, Channel 10 TV, Yedioth
Aharonot and Maariv, for 5,000US dollars. Channel 2 finally
purchased the video.
Israeli left-wing Peace Now movement on Wednesday accused
a Channel 2 television news magazine program of funding
incitement for the video and called on the TV director
general to prevent the broadcast of the video on Wednesday
evening.
Comment:
Given that the assassination of Rabin was most likely
the work of people within Israeli intelligence, one should
not treat such a curse lightly. Even if Sharon escapes
death in the next thirty days, such a curse portrays him
as a "reasonable man", as a "man of peace"
in the words of his friend GW. As long as there are people
who denounce Sharon, he can claim to be the great mediator.
His own extremism is taken for the norm, as acceptable.
Charges
have been brought against the son of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon over the funding of one of his father's election
campaigns in 1999.
Accused of creating shell companies to conceal illegal
donations, Omri Sharon has reportedly admitted overspending
but questioned party funding limits.
The charges relate to Ariel Sharon's successful campaign
to lead the Likud Party and to be its candidate for PM.
The authorities earlier decided not to indict the prime
minister himself.
If found guilty, Omri Sharon faces up to five years in
prison over charges of violating campaign finance laws,
fraud, breach of trust and perjury.
Ariel Sharon had always denied knowledge of the financing
of his campaign, saying it was run exclusively by his
son.
Comment: Yeah, right.
Can you spell "P-L-A-U-S-I-B-L-E D-E-N-I-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y"?
Waiving immunity
Now a member of parliament, Omri Sharon says he will
waive his immunity from prosecution and stand trial, reports
Haaretz newspaper.
On Monday, Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed a
law authorising the prosecution of its members (MKs) without
having to request parliamentary immunity to be stripped.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz had been unable to push
forward with the case because MKs were immune from prosecution,
the AFP news agency reports.
In his first public response to the allegations against
him, quoted in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, Omri Sharon
admitted he had overspent in his father's primary campaign
and was ready to receive his punishment.
However, he added, the limitations on campaign
contributions and spending according to the Political
Parties Law, which was passed in 1992, were unrealistic
and impossible to honour, the paper says.
"Experts say reasonable spending to run
a campaign like the 1999 primaries is 10 times higher
than the sum fixed by the law," wrote Omri Sharon.
"The law was therefore a decree the public could
not fulfil."
He added that since the law was so unreasonable, he was
certain it had never been enforced before.
"I am the first person to be put on trial for breaking
this law," he said.
Comment:
"It wasn't my fault! It's the law that's the problem!"
At least the Sharon's are consistent. His father applies
the same logic to international law.
Several years ago, I had dinner
at Galileo, a Washington restaurant, with Steven Rosen,
who was then the director of foreign-policy issues at
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The group,
which is better known by its acronym, AIPAC, lobbies
for Israel's financial and physical security. Like many
lobbyists, Rosen cultivated reporters, hoping to influence
their writing while keeping his name out of print. He
is a voluble man, and liked to demonstrate his erudition
and dispense aphorisms. One that he often repeated could
serve as the credo of K Street, the Rodeo Drive of Washington's
influence industry: "A lobby is like a night flower:
it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."
Lobbyists tend to believe that legislators are susceptible
to persuasion in ways that executive-branch bureaucrats
are not, and before Rosen came to AIPAC, in 1982 (he
had been at the rand Corporation, the defense-oriented
think tank), the group focussed mainly on Congress.
But Rosen arrived brandishing a new idea: that the organization
could influence the outcome of policy disputes within
the executive branch - in particular, the Pentagon,
the State Department, and the National Security Council.
Rosen began to court officials.
He traded in gossip and speculation, and his reports
to AIPAC's leaders helped them track currents in Middle
East policymaking before those currents coalesced into
executive orders. Rosen also used his contacts to carry
AIPAC's agenda to the White House. An early success
came in 1983, when he helped lobby for a strategic cooperation
agreement between Israel and the United States, which
was signed over the objections of Caspar Weinberger,
the Secretary of Defense, and which led to a new level
of intelligence sharing and military sales.
AIPAC is a leviathan among lobbies, as influential
in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and
the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs,
although it is, by comparison, much smaller. (AIPAC
has about a hundred thousand members, the N.R.A. more
than four million.) President Bush, speaking at the
annual AIPAC conference in May of 2004, said, "You've
always understood and warned against the evil ambition
of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new
century, your work is more vital than ever." AIPAC
is unique in the top tier of lobbies because its concerns
are the economic health and security of a foreign nation,
and because its members are drawn almost entirely from
a single ethnic group.
AIPAC's professional staff - it employs about a hundred
people at its headquarters, two blocks from the Capitol
- analyzes congressional voting records and shares the
results with its members, who can then contribute money
to candidates directly or to a network of pro-Israel
political-action committees. The Center for Responsive
Politics, a public-policy group, estimates that between
1990 and 2004 these PACs gave candidates and parties
more than twenty million dollars.
Robert H. Asher, a former AIPAC president, told me
that the PACs are usually given euphemistic names. "I
started a PAC called Citizens Concerned for the National
Interest," he said. Asher, who is from Chicago,
is a retired manufacturer of lamps and shades, and a
member of the so-called Gang of Four - former presidents
of AIPAC, who steered the group's policies for more
than two decades. (The three others are Larry Weinberg,
a California real-estate developer and a former owner
of the Portland Trail Blazers; Edward Levy, a construction-materials
executive from Detroit; and Mayer "Bubba"
Mitchell, a retired builder based in Mobile, Alabama.)
AIPAC, Asher explained, is loyal to
its friends and merciless to its enemies. In 1982, Asher
led a campaign to defeat Paul Findley, a Republican
congressman from Springfield, Illinois, who once referred
to himself as "Yasir Arafat's best friend in Congress,"
and who later compared Arafat to Gandhi and Martin Luther
King, Jr.
"There was a real desire
to help Findley out of Congress," Asher said. He
identified an obscure Democratic lawyer in Springfield,
Richard Durbin, as someone who could defeat Findley.
"We met at my apartment in Chicago, and I recruited
him to run for Congress," he recalled. "I
probed his views and I explained things that I had learned
mostly from AIPAC. I wanted to make sure we were supporting
someone who was not only against Paul Findley but also
a friend of Israel."
Asher went on, "He beat
Findley with a lot of help from Jews, in-state and out-of-state.
Now, how did the Jewish money find him? I travelled
around the country talking about how we had the opportunity
to defeat someone unfriendly to Israel. And the gates
opened." Durbin, who went on to win a Senate seat,
is now the Democratic whip. He is a fierce critic
of Bush's Iraq policy but, like AIPAC, generally supports
the Administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Durbin says that he considers Asher to be
his "most loyal friend in the Jewish community."
Mayer Mitchell led a similar campaign, three years
ago, to defeat Earl Hilliard, an Alabama congressman
who was a critic of Israel. Mitchell helped direct support
to a young Harvard Law School graduate named Artur Davis,
who challenged Hilliard in the Democratic primary, and
he solicited donations from AIPAC supporters across
America. Davis won the primary, and the seat. "I
asked Bubba how he felt after Davis won," Asher
said, "and he said, 'Just like you did when Durbin
got elected.' " Mitchell declined to comment.
AIPAC's leaders can be immoderately frank about the
group's influence. At dinner that night with Steven
Rosen, I mentioned a controversy that had enveloped
AIPAC in 1992. David Steiner,
a New Jersey real-estate developer who was then serving
as AIPAC's president, was caught on tape boasting that
he had "cut a deal" with the Administration
of George H. W. Bush to provide more aid to Israel.
Steiner also said that he was "negotiating"
with the incoming Clinton Administration over the appointment
of a pro-Israel Secretary of State. "We have a
dozen people in his" - Clinton's - "headquarters
. . . and they are all going to get big jobs,"
Steiner said. Soon after the tape's existence
was disclosed, Steiner resigned his post. I asked Rosen
if AIPAC suffered a loss of influence after the Steiner
affair. A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed
a napkin across the table. "You see this napkin?"
he said. "In twenty-four hours, we could have the
signatures of seventy senators on this napkin."
Rosen was influential from the start. He was originally
recruited for the job by Larry Weinberg, one of the
Gang of Four, and he helped choose the group's leaders,
including the current executive director, Howard Kohr,
a Republican who began his AIPAC career as Rosen's deputy.
Rosen, who can be argumentative and impolitic, was never
a candidate for the top post. "He's a bit of a
kochleffl" - the Yiddish term for a pot-stirrer,
or meddler - Martin Indyk, who also served as Rosen's
deputy, and who went on to become President Clinton's
Ambassador to Israel, says. Rosen has had an unusually
eventful private life, marrying and divorcing six times
(he is living again with his first wife), and he has
a well-developed sense of paranoia. When we met, he
would sometimes lower his voice, even when he was preparing
to deliver an anodyne pronouncement. "Hostile ears
are always listening," he was fond of saying.
Nevertheless, he is a keen analyst of Middle East politics,
and a savvy bureaucratic infighter. His views on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not notably hawkish;
he once called himself "too right for the left,
and too left for the right." He is a hard-liner
on only one subject - Iran - and this preoccupation
helped shape AIPAC's position: that Iran poses a greater
threat to Israel than any other nation. In
this way, AIPAC is in agreement with a long line of
Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
who fears Iran's nuclear intentions more than he ever
feared Saddam Hussein's. (AIPAC lobbied Congress
in favor of the Iraq war, but Iraq has not been one
of its chief concerns.) Rosen's
main role at AIPAC, he once told me, was to collect
evidence of "Iranian perfidy" and share it
with the United States.
Unlike American neoconservatives, who have openly supported
the Likud Party over the more liberal Labor Party, AIPAC
does not generally take sides in Israeli politics. But
on Iran AIPAC's views resemble those of the neoconservatives.
In 1996, Rosen and other AIPAC staff members helped
write, and engineer the passage of, the Iran and Libya
Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on foreign oil
companies doing business with those two countries; AIPAC
is determined, above all, to deny Iran the ability to
manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran was a main focus of
this year's AIPAC policy conference, which was held
in May at the Washington Convention Center. Ariel Sharon
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others,
addressed five thousand AIPAC members. One
hall of the convention center was taken up by a Disney-style
walk-through display of an Iranian nuclear facility.
It was kitsch, but not ineffective, and Rosen undoubtedly
would have appreciated it. Rosen,
however, was not there. He was fired earlier this year
by Howard Kohr, nine months after he became implicated
in an F.B.I. espionage investigation. Rosen's lawyer,
Abbe Lowell, expects him to be indicted on charges of
passing secret information about Iranian intelligence
activities in Iraq to an official of the Israeli Embassy
and to a Washington Post reporter. A junior colleague,
Keith Weissman, who served as an Iran analyst for AIPAC
until he, too, was fired, may face similar charges.
The person who, in essence, ended Rosen's career is
a fifty-eight-year-old Pentagon analyst named Lawrence
Anthony Franklin, who is even more preoccupied with
Iran than Steven Rosen. Franklin, until recently the
Pentagon's Iran desk officer, was indicted last month
on espionage charges. The Justice Department has accused
him of giving "national-defense information"
to Rosen and Weissman, and classified information to
an Israeli official. Franklin has pleaded not guilty;
a tentative trial date is set for September. If convicted,
he will face at least ten years in prison.
I first met Franklin in November of 2002. Paul Wolfowitz,
then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was receiving
the Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson award from the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs, a conservative-leaning
group that tries to build close relations between the
American and Israeli militaries. In the ballroom of
the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Pentagon City, a shopping
mall, were a number of American generals and the Israeli
Ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon.
Franklin, a trim man with blond hair and a military
bearing, is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve who spent
several years as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence
Agency. He has a doctorate in Asian studies and describes
himself as a capable speaker of Farsi. In addition,
he was a Catholic in a largely Jewish network of Pentagon
Iran hawks.
Franklin was particularly close to the neoconservative
Harold Rhode, an official in the Office of Net Assessment,
the Pentagon's in-house think tank. Franklin was also
close to Michael Ledeen, who, twenty years ago, played
an important role in the Iran-Contra scandal by helping
arrange meetings between the American government and
the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen,
now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
is one of the most outspoken advocates in Washington
of confrontation with the Tehran regime.
The conversation at the banquet, and just about everywhere
else in official Washington at that time, centered on
the coming war in Iraq. "We may well hope that
with the demise of a truly evil and despotic regime
in Iraq, we will see the liberation of one of the most
talented peoples in the Arab world," Wolfowitz
said in his speech. Franklin
did not seem especially concerned with the topic at
hand. As we stood outside the banquet hall, he said
that Iran, not Iraq, would turn out to be the most difficult
challenge in the war on terror.
Then, as now, the Administration was divided on the
question of Iran. Many of the political appointees at
the Defense Department hoped that America would support
dissidents in an attempt to overthrow Iran's ruling
clerics, while the State Department argued for containment.
Even within the Defense Department, many officials believed
that it would be imprudent to make regime change in
Tehran a top priority. "There are neocons who thought
Iran should come sooner and neocons who thought it should
come later," Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American
Enterprise Institute, told me. As for Franklin, Gerecht,
a former Iran specialist in the C.I.A.'s Directorate
of Operations, said, "It's fair to say that Larry
was impatient with Bush Administration policy on Iran."
In the Pentagon's policy office, I learned later, it
was sometimes said that Franklin inhabited a place called
Planet Franklin. Gerecht referred to him as "sweet,
bumbling Larry."
A year later, on a reporting assignment in Israel,
I ran into Franklin at the Herzliya Conference, which
is the Davos of the Israeli security establishment.
He said that he was there on Defense Department business.
We talked briefly about Iraq - it was eight months after
the invasion - and, as we spoke, General Moshe Ya'alon,
then the Israeli Army chief of staff, swept into the
room surrounded by bodyguards and uniformed aides. "Wow,"
Franklin said.
We stepped outside, and he talked only about Iran's
threat to America. "Our
intelligence is blind," he said. "It's the
most dangerous country in the world to the U.S., and
we have nothing on the ground. We don't understand anything
that goes on. I mean, the C.I.A. doesn't have anything.
This goes way deeper than Tenet" - George Tenet,
who was the director of central intelligence at the
time. He continued, "Do you know how dangerous
Iran is to our forces in the Gulf? We have great force-concentration
issues now" - the presence of American troops in
Iraq - "and the Iranians are very interested in
making life difficult for American forces. They have
the capability. You watch what they're doing in Iraq.
Their infiltration is everywhere."
Franklin seemed more frustrated with American policy
in Iran than he had the year before. "We don't
understand that it's doable - regime change is doable,"
he said. "The people are so desperate to become
free, and the mullahs are so unpopular. They're so pro-American,
the people." Referring to the Bush Administration,
he said, "That's what they don't understand,"
and he added, "And they also don't understand how
anti-American the mullahs are." Franklin was convinced
that the Iranians would commit acts of terrorism against
Americans, on American soil. "These guys are a
threat to us in Iraq and even at home," he said.
Franklin was not a high-ranking Pentagon official;
he was five steps removed in the hierarchy from Douglas
Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. For two years,
though, he had been trying to change American policy.
His efforts took many forms, including calls to reporters,
meetings with Rosen and Weissman and with the political
counsellor at the Israeli Embassy, Naor Gilon. According
to Tracy O'Grady-Walsh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, he was
not acting on behalf of his superiors: "If Larry
Franklin was formally or informally lobbying, he was
doing it on his own."
Franklin also sought information from Iranian dissidents
who might aid his cause. In December of 2001, he and
Rhode met in Rome with Michael Ledeen and a group of
Iranians, including Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, who
helped arrange the meeting, told me that the dissidents
gave Franklin and Rhode information about Iranian threats
against American soldiers in Afghanistan. (Rhode did
not return calls seeking comment.) Franklin was initially
skeptical about the meeting, Ledeen said, but emerged
believing that America could do business with these
dissidents.
Franklin's meetings with Gilon and with the two AIPAC
men make up the heart of the indictment against him.
The indictment alleges that Rosen - "CC-1,"
or "Co-Conspirator 1" - called the Pentagon
in early August of 2002, looking for the name of an
Iran specialist. He made contact with Franklin a short
time later, but, according to the indictment, they did
not meet until February of 2003. In
their meetings, according to several people with knowledge
of the conversations, Franklin told the lobbyists that
Secretary of State Colin Powell was resisting attempts
by the Pentagon to formulate a tougher Iran policy.
He apparently hoped to use AIPAC to lobby the Administration.
The Franklin indictment suggests
that the F.B.I. had been watching Rosen as well;
for instance, it alleges that, in February of 2003,
Rosen, on his way to a meeting with Franklin, told someone
on the phone that he "was excited to meet with
a 'Pentagon guy' because this person was a 'real insider.'
" Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman met openly four
times in 2003. At one point, the indictment reads, somewhat
mysteriously, "On or about March 10, 2003, Franklin,
CC-1 and CC-2" - Rosen and Weissman - "met
at Union Station early in the morning. In the course
of the meeting, the three men moved from one restaurant
to another restaurant and then finished the meeting
in an empty restaurant."
On June 26, 2003, at a lunch at the Tivoli Restaurant,
near the Pentagon, Franklin reportedly told Rosen and
Weissman about a draft of a National Security Presidential
Directive that outlined a series of tougher steps that
the U.S. could take against the Iranian leadership.
The draft was written by a young Pentagon aide named
Michael Rubin (who is now affiliated with the American
Enterprise Institute). Franklin did not hand over a
copy of the draft, but he described its contents, and,
according to the indictment, talked about the "state
of internal United States government deliberations."
The indictment also alleges that
Franklin gave the two men "highly classified"
information about potential attacks on American forces
in Iraq.
In mid-August of 2002, according to the indictment,
Franklin met with Gilon - identified simply as "FO,"
or "foreign official" - at a restaurant, and
Gilon explained to Franklin that he was the "policy"
person at the Embassy. The two met regularly, the indictment
alleges, often at the Pentagon Officers' Athletic Club,
to discuss "foreign policy issues," particularly
regarding a "Middle Eastern country" - Iran,
by all accounts - and "its nuclear program."
The indictment suggests that Franklin was receiving
information and policy advice from Gilon; after one
meeting, Franklin drafted an "Action Memo"
to his supervisors incorporating Gilon's suggestions.
Gilon is an expert on weapons proliferation, according
to Danny Ayalon, the Israeli Ambassador, and has briefed
reporters about Israel's position on Iran. According
to Lawrence Di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, it is part
of the "job description" of Defense Department
desk officers to meet with their foreign counterparts.
"Desk officers meet with foreign officials all
the time, not with ministers, but interactions with
people at their level," he said. The indictment
contends, however, that on two occasions Franklin gave
Gilon classified information. [...]
In June of 2004, F.B.I. agents
searched Franklin's Pentagon office and his home in
West Virginia, and allegedly found eighty-three classified
documents. Some had to do with the Iran debate,
but some pertained to Al Qaeda and Iraq. (A separate
federal indictment, citing the documents, has been handed
down in West Virginia.) According
to a person with knowledge of Franklin's case, the agents
told Franklin that Rosen and Weissman were working against
America's interests. Franklin faced ruin - the
documents found in his house could cost him his job,
the agents said. Franklin, who did not have a lawyer,
agreed to cooperate in the investigation of Rosen and
Weissman, although apparently he was not given in return
a specific promise of leniency. Soon, he was wired,
and was asked to contact the two AIPAC employees. On
July 21st, Franklin called Weissman and said that he
had to speak to him immediately - that it was a matter
of life and death. They arranged to meet outside the
Nordstrom's department store at Pentagon City.
A month before that meeting, The New Yorker had published
an article by Seymour Hersh about the activities of
Israeli intelligence agents in northern Iraq. Franklin,
who held a top-secret security clearance, allegedly
told Weissman that he had new, classified information
indicating that Iranian agents were planning to kidnap
and kill the Israelis referred to by Hersh. American
intelligence knew about the threat, Franklin said, but
Israel might not. He also said that the Iranians had
infiltrated southern Iraq, and were planning attacks
on American soldiers. Rosen and Weissman, Franklin hoped,
could insure that senior Administration officials received
this news.It is unclear
whether what Franklin relayed was true or whether it
had been manufactured by the F.B.I. The Bureau has refused
to comment on the case.
Weissman hurried back to AIPAC's headquarters and briefed
Rosen and Howard Kohr, AIPAC's executive director. According
to AIPAC sources, Rosen and Weissman asked Kohr to give
the information to Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle
East official on the National Security Council. Kohr
didn't get in touch with Abrams, but Rosen and Weissman
made two calls. They called Gilon and told him about
the threat to Israeli agents in Iraq, and then they
called Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent at
the Washington Post, and told him about the threat to
Americans.
A month later, on the morning of August
27, 2004, F.B.I. agents visited Rosen at his home, in
Silver Spring, Maryland, seeking to question him. Rosen
quickly called AIPAC's lawyers. That night, CBS News
reported that an unnamed Israeli "mole" had
been discovered in the Pentagon, and that the mole had
been passing documents to two officials of AIPAC, who
were passing the documents on to Israeli officials.
Within days, the names of Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman
were made public. The F.B.I. informed Franklin that
he was going to be charged with illegal possession of
classified documents. Franklin was said by friends to
be frightened, and surprised. He said that he could
not afford to hire a lawyer. The F.B.I. arranged for
a court-appointed attorney to represent him. The lawyer,
a former federal prosecutor, advised him to plead guilty
to espionage charges, and receive a prison sentence
of six to eight years.
At about this time, Franklin received a call from Michael
Ledeen, his ally in matters of Iran policy. "I
called him and said, 'Larry, what's going on?' "
Ledeen recalled. "He said, 'Don't worry. Sharansky'
" - Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident
- " 'survived years in the Gulag, and I'll survive
prison, too.' I said, 'What are you talking about?'
He told me what was going on. I asked him if he had
a good lawyer." Ledeen called the criminal-defense
attorney Plato Cacheris. "I knew him from when
he served as Fawn's attorney," Ledeen said, referring
to Fawn Hall, who was Colonel Oliver North's secretary
at the time of the Iran-Contra affair. Cacheris has
also represented Monica Lewinsky and the F.B.I. agent
Robert Hanssen, who spied for Moscow. Cacheris offered
to represent Franklin pro bono, and Franklin accepted
the offer.
AIPAC launched a special appeal for donations - for
the organization, not for Rosen and Weissman. "Your
generosity at this time will help ensure that false
allegations do not hamper our ability or yours to work
for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a safe and
secure Israel," AIPAC's leaders wrote in the letter
accompanying the appeal.
But in December four AIPAC officials, including Kohr,
were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Alexandria,
Virginia. In March, AIPAC's principal lawyer, Nathan
Lewin, met with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District
of Virginia, Paul McNulty, who agreed to let Lewin see
some of the evidence of the Pentagon City sting. According
to an AIPAC source, an eleven-second portion of the
telephone conversation between Rosen, Weissman, and
the Post's Glenn Kessler, which the F.B.I. had recorded,
was played for Lewin. In that conversation, Rosen is
alleged to have told Kessler about Iranian agents in
southern Iraq - information that Weissman had received
from Franklin. In the part of the conversation that
Lewin heard, Rosen jokes about "not getting in
trouble" over the information. He also notes, "At
least we have no Official Secrets Act" - the British
law that makes journalists liable to prosecution if
they publish classified material.
Prosecutors argued to Lewin
that this statement proved that Rosen and Weissman were
aware that the information Franklin had given them was
classified, and that Rosen must therefore have known
that he was passing classified information to Gilon,
a foreign official. Lewin, who declined to comment
on the case, recommended that AIPAC fire Rosen and Weissman.
He also told the board that McNulty had promised that
AIPAC itself would not be a target of the espionage
investigation. An AIPAC spokesman, Patrick Dorton, said
of the firing, "Rosen and Weissman were dismissed
because they engaged in conduct that was not part of
their jobs, and because this conduct did not comport
with the standards that AIPAC expects and requires of
its employees."
When I asked Abbe Lowell, Rosen's lawyer, about the
firings, he said, "Steve Rosen's dealings with
Larry Franklin were akin to his dealings with executive-branch
officials for more than two decades and were well known,
encouraged, and appreciated by AIPAC."
Last month, I met with Lowell and Rosen in Lowell's
office, which these days is a center of Washington scandal
management. (He also represents the fallen lobbyist
Jack Abramoff.) Lowell had instructed Rosen not to discuss
specifics of the case, but Rosen
expressed disbelief that his career had been ended by
an F.B.I. investigation. "I'm being looked at for
things I've done for twenty-three years, which other
foreign-policy groups, hundreds of foreign-policy groups,
are doing," Rosen said, and went on, "Our
job at AIPAC was to understand what the government is
doing, in order to help form better policies, in the
interests of the U.S. I've never done anything illegal
or harmful to the U.S. I never even dreamed of doing
anything harmful to the U.S." Later, he said, "We
did not knowingly receive classified information from
Larry Franklin." Lowell added, "When the facts
are known, this will be a case not about Rosen and Weissman's
actions but about the government's actions." Lowell
said that he would not rehearse his arguments against
any charges until there is an indictment.
Rosen said that he was particularly upset by the allegation
that, because he had informed Gilon that Israeli lives
might be in danger, he was a spy for Israel. "If
I had been given information that British or Australian
soldiers were going to be kidnapped or killed in Iraq,
I think I would have done the same thing," he said.
"I'd have tried to warn them by calling friends
at those embassies." He wants to believe that he
could return to AIPAC if he is exonerated, but this
does not seem likely. AIPAC leaders
are downplaying Rosen's importance to the organization.
"AIPAC is focussed primarily on legislative lobbying,"
Dorton told me. Rosen's severance pay will end in September,
although AIPAC, in accordance with its bylaws, will
continue to pay legal fees for Rosen and Weissman.
Rosen's defenders are critical of AIPAC for its handling
of the controversy. Martin Indyk, who is now the director
of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a think
tank within the Brookings Institution, thinks that AIPAC
made a tactical mistake by cutting off the two men.
"It appears they've abandoned
their own on the battlefield," he says. "Because
they cut Steve off, they leave him no choice."
Indyk wouldn't elaborate, but the implication was clear:Rosen and Weissman will defend
themselves by arguing that they were working in concert
with the highest officials of the organization, including
Kohr.
Until there is an indictment, the government's full
case against Rosen and Weissman cannot be known; no
one in the Justice Department will comment. The laws
concerning the dissemination of government secrets are
sometimes ambiguous and often unenforced, and prosecutors
in such cases face complex choices. According to Lee
Strickland, a former chief privacy officer of the C.I.A.,
prosecutors pressing espionage charges against Rosen
and Weissman would have to prove that the information
the two men gave to Gilon not merely was classified
but rose to the level of "national-defense information,"
meaning that it could cause dire harm to the United
States. Yet a reporter who called the Embassy to discuss
the same information in the course of preparing a story
- thus violating the same statute - would almost certainly
not be prosecuted. [...]
Strickland, who said that he
had spent much of his career at the C.I.A. "shutting
down" leaks, called the AIPAC affair "uncharted
territory."It is
uncommon, he said, for an espionage case to be built
on the oral transmission of national-defense information.
He also said, "Intent is always an element. If
I were a defense attorney, I would argue that this was
a form of entrapment. The F.B.I. agents deliberately
set my client up, put him in a moral quandary."
He added, however, that although a jury might recognize
the quandary, the law does not. "Just because you
have information that would help a foreign country doesn't
make it your job to pass that information."
Even some of AIPAC's most vigorous critics do not see
the Rosen affair as a traditional espionage case. James
Bamford, who is the author of well-received books about
the National Security Agency, and an often vocal critic
of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, sees the case as
a cautionary tale about one lobbying group's disproportionate
influence: "What Pollard did was espionage. This
is a much different and more unique animal - this is
the selling of ideology, trying to sell a viewpoint."
He continued, "Larry Franklin is not going to knock
on George Bush's door, but he can get AIPAC, which is
a pressure group, and the Israeli government, which
is an enormous pressure group, to try to get the American
government to change its policy to a more aggressive
policy." Bamford, who believes
that Weissman and Rosen may indeed be guilty of soliciting
information and passing it to a foreign government,
sees the case as a kind of brushback pitch, a way of
limiting AIPAC's long - and, in Bamford's view, dangerous
- reach.
Other AIPAC critics see the lobby's behavior as business
as usual in Washington. "The No. 1 game in Washington
is making people talking to you feel like you're an
insider, that you've got information no one else has,"
Sam Gejdenson, a former Democratic congressman from
Connecticut, says. When Gejdenson opposed a proposal
to increase Israel's foreign-aid allocation at the expense
of more economically needy countries, AIPAC, he said,
responded by "sitting on its hands" during
his reelection campaigns, despite the fact that he is
Jewish. "It's like any other lobbying group,"
he said. "Its job isn't to come up with the best
ideas for mankind, or the U.S. It's narrowly focussed."
AIPAC officials insist that the case has not affected
the organization's effectiveness. But
its operations have certainly been hindered by the controversy
of the past year, and the F.B.I. sting may force lobbyists
of all sorts to be more careful about trying to penetrate
the executive branch - and about leaking to reporters.
And AIPAC now seems acutely sensitive to the appearance
of dual loyalty. The theme of
this year's AIPAC conference was "Israel, an American
Value," and, for the first time, "Hatikvah,"
the Israeli national anthem, was not sung. The only
anthem heard was "The Star-Spangled Banner."
BAGRAM, Afghanistan
(CP) - Hundreds of protesters chanting "Die America!"
and throwing stones tried to batter down a gate at the
U.S. military's main Afghan base Tuesday, adding to anxieties
in a country worried that fighting with insurgents could
disrupt elections.
The rioting erupted just hours after an overnight battle
in southern Afghanistan that a provincial governor said
killed at least 50 suspected Taliban rebels and two Afghan
soldiers.
More than 800 people have died in a surge
of rebel attacks and government offensives since March,
and U.S. and Afghan officials have warned that the violence
is a threat to parliamentary elections scheduled for Sept.
18.
The latest clashes were reported as Canada began sending
some 250 soldiers to another volatile region - Kandahar,
where Taliban fighters are on the loose. More than 100
soldiers departed Tuesday from Edmonton. They'll join
the Canadian military unit that will rebuild the shattered
infrastructure in Kandahar.
Police in eastern Paktika province said a legislative
candidate was killed Tuesday by a roadside bomb that blew
up next to his vehicle as he drove his sick mother to
the hospital. The woman was wounded.
The clash in Bagram was unusual. The area an hour's drive
north of the capital has been largely peaceful since a
U.S.-led military campaign toppled the Taliban regime
in late 2001 for harbouring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida
terrorist camps.
Rioting broke out in a crowd of more
than 1,000 people who gathered to protest the detention
of eight villagers at the base, where thousands of U.S.
and other foreign soldiers live behind razor-wire fences
and landmines left from Afghanistan's civil war.
Demonstrators hurled stones at a passing convoy of six
U.S. military vehicles, smashing some windows. As soldiers
inside the cars fired handguns in the air, the vehicles
sped into the base and the protesters chased behind, trying
to push down a metal gate guarded by Afghan troops.
Guards used sticks to drive back the mob as other troops
fired into the air with assault rifles and shouted at
the protesters to go home. Most of the protesters then
dispersed.
It was not clear if there were any casualties, though
an Associated Press reporter was hit and kicked by protesters
who accused him of being a spy for the Americans and an
AP photographer was punched by other demonstrators.
The eight detained men were "suspected of planning
and conducting attacks against U.S. and Afghan forces"
and had "materials used to make improvised explosive
devices in their possession," the U.S. military said
in a statement.
The demonstrators said they were angry that U.S. troops
arrested the villagers late Monday without consulting
local authorities.
"We have supported the Americans
for years. We should be treated with dignity," said
Shah Aghar, 35. "They are arresting our people without
the permission of the government. They are breaking into
our houses and offending the people. We are very angry."
[...]
Comment:
Once more we see the traces of Israeli training: ignore
the customs of the Muslims, break into their houses, treat
them like cattle, and haul them off to jail. No attempt
to work though the local officials because that is a sign
of weakness for the Americans. "No one tells US what
to do!"
Matthew Tempest, political correspondent
Wednesday July 27, 2005
Cherie Booth, the prime
minister's wife, last night warned Britain must not "cheapen"
its reputation for civil liberties in response to the
London bombings, while her husband called for tougher
judicial attitudes.
In a speech in Malaysia, Ms Booth told an audience it
would be "all too easy" to undermine Britain's
"deeply held values" with an unduly hasty response
to the attacks. The remarks could be interpreted as a
shot across the government's bows as it drafts emergency
anti-terrorism measures.
Earlier, the prime minister suggested to journalists
there had been "too great a caution" from the
judiciary in dealing with terror-related deportation cases.
His wife's intervention - in a tour of the far east which
had already proved controversial - adds fuel to the debate
over the extent to which the home secretary should be
allowed to clamp down on potential terrorists.
Yesterday a meeting of the three
main party leaders - Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles
Kennedy - appeared to reach a consensus on new measures
to introduce new offences of committing acts preparatory
to terrorism, and incitement to terrorism. The
parties planned a further meeting for September, before
the return of parliament in early October.
Last night in a speech to 1,000 lawyers, diplomats and
civil servants in Malaysia, Ms Booth - who uses her maiden
name when appearing in her professional capacity as a
barrister - said: "It is all too easy for us to respond
to such terror in a way which undermines commitment to
our most deeply held values and convictions and which
cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilised nation."
However, she prefaced her remarks by saying: "Nothing
I say here could possibly be construed as making light
of those horrible acts of violence" - the London
bombings - "or of the responsibility imposed on the
UK and other governments to keep the public safe, or of
the difficult and dangerous task performed by the police
and intelligence services."
Ms Booth said judges made rulings in a way that taught
citizens and government about the "ethical responsibilities"
of participating in a true democracy committed to "universal
human rights standards".
She went on to praise the way the House of Lords blocked
recent anti-terror legislation which could have seen foreign
suspects detained without trial.
"What the case makes clear is that the government,
even in times when there is a threat to national security,
must act strictly in accordance with the law," she
said.
In his monthly press conference yesterday, Mr Blair made
it clear he sometimes felt frustrated by both the Lords
and the judiciary in his attempts to pass and implement
new legislation.
He said: "We have tried to get rid [of people who
are inciting terrorism] and been blocked ... I think there
has been too great a caution in saying 'Sorry, this is
unacceptable'."
The Conservatives declined to comment today on Ms Booth's
speech. The tour of Malaysia had already provoked unwelcome
headlines when Ms Booth was invited to, but did not attend,
the opening of a luxury shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur.
Three years ago Ms Booth, a QC, was attacked for saying
that as long as young Palestinians felt they had no hope
"but to blow themselves up" no progress would
be made against terrorism in the Middle East.
When asked about her latest comments, the prime minister's
office this morning told the BBC they were "comfortable"
with them.
Comment:
Perhaps taking a tip from the Bushes, the Blairs are attempting
to humanise Tony through his wife. Let her play the role
of good cop, show how compassionate and concerned she
is, and then the prols will say, "By gosh, if she's
married to the PM, he can't be all that bad!"
People
who illegally share music files online are also big spenders
on legal music downloads, research suggests.
Digital music research firm The Leading Question found
that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for
music downloads than average fans.
Rather than taking legal action against downloaders,
the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives,
the report said.
According to the music industry, legal downloads have
tripled during 2005.
In the first half of 2005, some 10 million songs have
been legally downloaded.
Music 'myth'
More needs to be done to capitalise on the power of the
peer-to-peer networks that many music downloaders still
use, said the report's authors.
The study found that regular downloaders of unlicensed
music spent an average of £5.52 a month on legal
digital music.
This compares to just £1.27 spent by other music
fans.
"The research clearly shows that
music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers,"
said Paul Brindley, director of The Leading Question.
"It also points out that they are
eager to adopt legitimate music services in the future."
"There's a myth that all illegal
downloaders are mercenaries hell-bent on breaking the
law in pursuit of free music."
In reality hardcore fans "are extremely
enthusiastic" about paid-for services, as long as
they are suitably compelling, he said.
Carrot and stick
The BPI (British Phonographic Industry) welcomed the
findings but added a note of caution.
"It's encouraging that many illegal file-sharers
are starting to use legal services," said BPI spokesman
Matt Philips.
"But our concern is that file-sharers'
expenditure on music overall is down, a fact borne out
by study after study.
"The consensus among independent research is that
a third of illegal file-sharers may buy more music and
around two thirds buy less.
"That two-thirds tends to include people who were
the heaviest buyers which is why we need to continue our
carrot and stick approach to the problem of illegal file-sharing,"
he said. [...]
Comment:
If overall sales are down, perhaps it is because people
have the chance to listen before purchasing and are therefore
not buying trash they may have purchased before, or buying
the one good song off of a disk that in earlier times
they would have purchased in its entirety.
The war on the net must continue, and the facts be damned.
If they are going to shut it down little by little, they
need their excuses, and the whole issue of music pirating
is one of the juiciest because it transforms almost everyone
into criminals.
David Adam, science correspondent
Wednesday July 27, 2005
The Guardian
The Dalai Lama is at
the centre of an unholy row among scientists over his
plans to deliver a lecture at a prominent neuroscience
conference.
His talk stems from a growing interest
in how Buddhist meditation may affect the brain, but researchers
who dismiss such studies as little more than mumbo-jumbo
say they will boycott the Society for Neuroscience annual
meeting in November if it goes ahead.
Jianguo Gu, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida
who has helped to organise a petition against the Dalai
Lama's lecture, said: "I don't think it's appropriate
to have a prominent religious leader at a scientific event.
"The Dalai Lama basically says the body and mind
can be separated and passed to other people. There are
no scientific grounds for that. We'll be talking about
cells and molecules and he's going to talk about something
that isn't there."
Dr Gu and many of the scientists
who initiated the protest are of Chinese origin, but say
their concern are not related to politics. The
Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since he fled Chinese
troops in Tibet in 1959.
"I'm not against Buddhism," said Dr Gu, who
has cancelled his own presentation at the meeting. "People
believe what they believe but I think it will just confuse
things."
The Dalai Lama has long had an interest in science and
once said that if he had not been a monk he would have
been an engineer. Over the past decade he has encouraged
western neuroscientists to study the effects of Buddhist
meditation, originally through meetings at his home and
more recently by attending conferences at major US universities.
Buddhist monks typically spend hours in meditation each
day, a practice they say enhances their powers of concentration.
Trained meditators claim to be able to hold their attention
on a single object for hours at a time without distraction,
or to shift attention as many as 17 times in the time
it takes to snap your fingers.
Both claims go against current scientific
thinking, which says attention cannot be held as long
or switched so quickly, and some neuroscientists have
started investigating whether they have a biological basis.
Some believe the monks' skills could be down to plasticity,
the ability of even fully formed adult mammalian brains
to change and adapt.
The research peaked in November last year when a team
led by Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison, published research in the US journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggested
networks of brain cells were better coordinated in people
who were trained in meditation.
The scientists included Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk
at the Shechenm monastery in Nepal, who has a PhD in molecular
biology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. They said
the brain differences they observed might explain the
heightened awareness reported by meditating monks.
Mr Davidson helped to arrange the Dalai Lama's talk at
the neuroscience conference, which is the first in a series
billed as dialogues between neuroscience and society.
The protesters say the team's research is flawed because
it compared monks in their 30s and 40s with much younger
university students.
Their petition reads: "Inviting the Dalai Lama to
lecture on neuroscience of meditation is of poor scientific
taste because it will highlight a subject with hyperbolic
claims, limited research and compromised scientific rigour."
It compares the lecture to inviting the Pope to talk
about "the relationship between the fear of God and
the amygdala [part of the brain]" and adds "it
could be a slippery road if neuroscientists begin to blur
the border between science and religious practices".
Carol Barnes, the president of the Society for Neuroscience,
said: "The Dalai Lama has had a long interest in
science and has maintained an ongoing dialogue with leading
neuroscientists for more than 15 years, which is the reason
he was invited to speak at the meeting. It has been agreed
that the talk will not be about religion or politics.
"We understand that not every member will agree
with every decision and we respect their right to disagree."
Comment:
The materialist will fight any discussion of consciousness
that goes beyond what we already know. Their minds are
made up. We are just animals with more complex brains,
and it is this complexity that gives us consciousness.
The brain dies, so does consciousness. This is the organic
portal's view of his consciousness, and it may be
true for them. But to attribute this state of everyone
is a mistake.