For the first time, the Signs Team's most popular and discerning essays have been compiled into book form and thematically organized.

These books contain hard hitting exposés into human nature, propaganda, psyop activities and insights into the world events that shape our future and our understanding of the world.

The six new books, available now at our bookstore, are entitled:

• 911 Conspiracy
• The Human Condition
• The Media
• Religion
• The Work
• U.S. Freedom

Read them today - before the book burning starts!

That Hissing Sound

By Paul Krugman

This is the way the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with a hiss.

Housing prices move much more slowly than stock prices. There are no Black Mondays, when prices fall 23 percent in a day. In fact, prices often keep rising for a while even after a housing boom goes bust.

So the news that the U.S. housing bubble is over won't come in the form of plunging prices; it will come in the form of falling sales and rising inventory, as sellers try to get prices that buyers are no longer willing to pay. And the process may already have started.

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

Then there are the numbers. Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.  

And Zoned Zone housing prices, which have risen much faster than the national average, clearly point to a bubble.

In the nation as a whole, housing prices rose about 50 percent between the first quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2005. But that average blends results from Flatland metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta, where prices rose 26 and 29 percent respectively, with results from Zoned Zone areas like New York, Miami and San Diego, where prices rose 77, 96 and 118 percent.

Nobody would pay San Diego prices without believing that prices will continue to rise. Rents rose much more slowly than prices: the Bureau of Labor Statistics index of "owners' equivalent rent" rose only 27 percent from late 1999 to late 2004. Business Week reports that by 2004 the cost of renting a house in San Diego was only 40 percent of the cost of owning a similar house - even taking into account low interest rates on mortgages. So it makes sense to buy in San Diego only if you believe that prices will keep rising rapidly, generating big capital gains. That's pretty much the definition of a bubble.

Bubbles end when people stop believing that big capital gains are a sure thing. That's what happened in San Diego at the end of its last housing bubble: after a rapid rise, house prices peaked in 1990. Soon there was a glut of houses on the market, and prices began falling. By 1996, they had declined about 25 percent after adjusting for inflation.

And that's what's happening in San Diego right now, after a rise in house prices that dwarfs the boom of the 1980's. The number of single-family houses and condos on the market has doubled over the past year. "Homes that a year or two ago sold virtually overnight - in many cases triggering bidding wars - are on the market for weeks," reports The Los Angeles Times. The same thing is happening in other formerly hot markets.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has become deeply dependent on the housing bubble. The economic recovery since 2001 has been disappointing in many ways, but it wouldn't have happened at all without soaring spending on residential construction, plus a surge in consumer spending largely based on mortgage refinancing. Did I mention that the personal savings rate has fallen to zero? Now we're starting to hear a hissing sound, as the air begins to leak out of the bubble. And everyone - not just those who own Zoned Zone real estate - should be worried.

Safe as Houses

By Paul Krugman

I used to live next door to a Russian émigré. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"

The answer, these days, is that we make a living by selling each other houses. Since December 2000 employment in U.S. manufacturing has fallen 17 percent, but membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 58 percent.

The housing boom has created jobs in two ways. Many jobs have been created, directly and indirectly, by a surge in housing construction. And rising home values have fueled a simultaneous surge in consumer spending.

Let's start with home building. Between 1980 and 2000, which was before the housing boom, spending on the construction of new homes averaged 4.25 percent of G.D.P. In the most recent quarter, however, the figure was 5.98 percent. That difference is equivalent to about $200 billion a year in additional spending, generating roughly two million extra jobs.

Then there's the jump in house prices. Over the past five years housing prices have grown much faster than the overall cost of living, adding about $5 trillion to the public's wealth. Typical estimates say that each additional dollar of housing wealth adds about 3 cents to annual consumer spending, as families reduce their savings and borrow against their newly valuable homes. So we're talking about an additional $150 billion in spending, and roughly 1.5 million more jobs.

Does anything else in the U.S. economy rival housing as a source of job creation? Well, there's also the military buildup. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that increased military spending over the past four years has created 1.3 million private-sector jobs.

And, yes, there are the Bush tax cuts, which the administration insists are the source of everything good in the economy. And it's true that some portion of the tax cuts, which amounted to $225 billion this year, must have been spent in ways that created jobs. Given reasonable estimates of the effect of tax cuts on spending, however, they were probably a smaller force for job creation than the military buildup, and dwarfed by the housing boom.

So it's an economy driven by real estate. What's wrong with that?

One answer is that it has been a pretty disappointing recovery. Two new reports, one from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and one from the Congressional Budget Office, compare the current economic expansion with other postwar recoveries. By any measure except corporate profits, which have done very well, this one comes up short.

Even the good months would have been considered subpar in the past: the administration hailed last month's job growth as something wondrous to behold, yet there were 68 months during the Clinton years when employment grew faster. Still, the economy is expanding.

But because that expansion depends so much on real estate - without the housing boom, the economic picture would look dismal indeed - you have to wonder how much to trust it.

I've written before about the reasons to believe that current house prices in much of the country represent a bubble. When that bubble begins to deflate, so will housing-related employment.

Beyond that, there's the disturbing point that we're paying for the housing boom (and the military buildup and tax cuts) with money borrowed from foreigners.

Now, any economics textbook will tell you that it's fine to borrow from abroad if the money is used to expand the economy's productive capacity. When 19th-century America borrowed from Europe to build railroads, it was also enhancing its ability to repay its debts later. But we aren't borrowing to build productive capacity. As a share of G.D.P., investment other than housing construction is below its average between 1980 and 2000, and way below its level at the end of the 1990's.

In other words, a fuller answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.  

How solid, then, is America's economic recovery? The British have a phrase that applies: "safe as houses." Our economy is as safe as houses. Unfortunately, given current prices and our dependence on foreign lenders, houses aren't safe at all.

Pop Goes the Weasel

Greenspan and the Housing Bubble

By Mike Whitney

It's strange that Alan Greenspan hasn't been blamed for the housing bubble. After all, he set the "easy money" policies that put the whole thing in motion and he's the one who should be held responsible when it goes up in smoke.

Let me explain.

Most people expect the Federal Reserve to lower rates when business is flagging to stimulate the economy by making loans more available for commerce, home buying, recreational spending etc. But, just as higher rates can stop the economy in its tracks by making money too expensive to borrow, so too, lower rates can have equally adverse consequences.

For example, when Greenspan lowered rates to 1% in 2002 he knew that money would surge into the economy and create the appearance that everything was hunky-dory. Predictably, the economy sputtered along from the economic activity generated by the housing boom and from the 30% increase in government spending.

But, what else did Greenspan's lower rates achieve?

Well, they achieved the results for which they were designed; they kept the economy humming along while Bush dragged the country to war, they kept the American people asleep while $400 billion per year in Bush tax cuts were siphoned from the US Treasury, and they generated what the "The Economist" calls this "the biggest bubble in history"; the housing bubble.

All of these were purely political choices made at the Federal Reserve under the auspices of Fed-chairman Greenspan.

Thanks, Alan.

Now, of course, Greenspan has signaled that the Happy Days are over and that the Fed will continue to ratchet up rates to strengthen the dollar. So far, the Fed has raised rates 10 times in the last 14 months. This eventually will strain the resources of all the poor slobs who took out ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) trusting is the soundness of the system. They will inevitably see their monthly payments go through the roof.

…The Fed seduces the public with cheap money, so that credit spending increases and, then, "presto", millions of Americans slip inexorably into indentured servitude.

Isn't this what's happening right now?

The American public is presently mortgaged up to the hilt with most of their personal wealth invested in their homes and with the highest level of personal debt in any period since the Great Depression.

Not good.

Especially when we consider that the current bubble is "larger than the global stock market bubble in the late 1990s (an increase over five years of 80% of GDP) or America's stock market bubble in the late 1920s (55% of GDP)." Or, when we consider that "over the past four years, consumer spending and residential construction have together accounted for 90% of the total growth in GDP." (The Economist")

Or, when we consider that 2 out of every 5 jobs in America are now related to construction. One blip in the housing market and we'll all be hawking pencils on the street corner.

Regrettably, this Greenspan-generated pyramid scheme is headed for the dumpster. The fundamentals for securing a loan have all been abandoned; putting traditionally unqualified applicants in a position to buy a home. 42% of all new home buyers cannot even come up with a few thousand dollars for a down payment. Equally disturbing is the fact that "nearly one third of all new mortgages this year call for interest-only payments (in California, it's almost half)" (NY Times)"

The Fed's "cheap money" policy has spawned a "creative financing" monster and the speculation in the housing market has grown accordingly. A full 36% of homes are bought either for investment or as second homes; "the very definition of a financial bubble." (Economist)

"Speculation"? Not according to Colonel Greenspan. According to him, it's just a bit of "froth" in the market.

"Froth"? The biggest bubble in history!?!

Of course, none of this even vaguely resembles the activities of a "free market". The market is not free when a privately owned banking system like the Federal Reserve sets the prime rate according to its own political-economic agenda.

Most people have no idea to what extent Greenspan has abandoned his principles to carry out his task as the country's foremost class-warrior. Earlier in his career, Greenspan proclaimed, "Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth".

Hmmmmm?

That, of course, was when deficits were used to pay for exorbitant social programs, like Welfare or Medicaid that benefited the broader American public. Greenspan has revised his thinking now that the deficits are a means for lining the pockets of his rich constituents.

Greenspan fully grasps the danger of his current strategy of flooding the market with, what he once called, "easy money". As he noted in an article he wrote in 1967 "Gold and Economic Freedom":

"After a mild business contraction in 1927 the fed decided the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market -- triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in breaking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed."

Let's see if we got that right?

"The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economytriggered a fantastic speculative boom.which collapsed the American economy".

Sound familiar?

…Greenspan has worked exclusively to serve the interests of American elites. He has helped shape the policies on taxation, minimum wage and Social Security that have enriched the wealthy and battered the middle class. His lowered interest rates have perilously expanded credit and produced the "largest speculative market of all time". Whatever economic calamity befalls the American people certainly bears his imprimatur.  

The nation now faces the end of the Greenspan epoch and the very real prospect of an economic tidal wave greater than 1929. The bubble was manufactured by Greenspan and his colleagues at the Fed to swindle millions of working-class Americans out of their life-savings and to facilitate the greatest transferal of wealth in American history.

The lesson of the housing bubble is simple: whenever monetary policy is put into the hands of privately owned institutions like the Federal Reserve, those policies will invariably reflect the narrow interests of the men who own them and the members of their class.

That's why Thomas Jefferson warned, "Banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies."

He undoubtedly had the Federal Reserve in mind.

Actions speak. Words lie. Action follows motive. Motivation is a microscope. You must think like a spook in order to understand the totality of these crimes. This report will challenge you to focus like a genius intelligence operative, to look a few moves ahead...and behind.

We've been caught in a web of deceit, so intricate, so devious, so arrogant and dark that there may actually be no escape. If "we the people" don't make those responsible for Treasongate pay for their sins against this country, we deserve everything they've got planned for us down the road to perdition.

ANATOMY OF THE ALLEGED "SMEAR CAMPAIGN"

For the last two years, we've all heard about "the smear campaign" hurled upon Joe Wilson by the Bush administration to punish him for writing the New York Times oped concerning the fake Niger documents. Revenge and political payback is the motivation universally attributed to the Bush syndicate.

It's bullshit. Joe Wilson was not smeared. He went from relative obscurity to national fame, book deals, talk show circuit, hero status accepting, freedom fighting, whistleblowing, saintly coronation. None of it is deserved.

Joe Wilson is in cahoots with the Bush Administration along with David Corn, Bob Novak and Valerie Plame Wilson, a cast of spooks who have only just been outed with the writing of this article. They've carefully scripted this entire affair to sield themselves from prosecution for monolithic treasons against US citizens and our military. Treasongate, Rovegate, Leakgate, whatever you want to call it, is, in reality, an intricate version of hide and seek where the "perpetraitors" have been controlling both sides of the game.

Regardless of the crimes committed by this and past administrations, as long as their spin can divide the people on political lines, justice, true justice, will never be served. If the crime can be given a political spin, the perps can literally get away with any crime, even Treason. They've carefully crafted both sides of this national debate to give both liberal and conservative pundits enough ammunition to keep a heated firefight going in the media. The smokescreen generated by this firefight has diverted our attention from examining:

1. The controlling laws applicable to these facts.

2. The motivations of the Bush administration, Joe Wilson and his wife, and the two news villains responsible for initiating this ruse; Bob Novak, and David Corn.

3. The damage to our national security caused by the leaking of Plame's name and front company (Brewster Jennings & Associates) as well as the damage caused by other leaks which show a Bush Administration Modus Operandi (MO) of outing intelligence assets for nefarious purposes.

Their media ruse has, so far, been a complete success. Not one major publication has examined the controlling laws, Espionage statutes found in 18 USC 793 and 794. They've steered the country away from analyzing Plame's outing as espionage by repeating ad nauseam that the
motivation for the leak was "political payback." This has enabled them to divide and conquer "we the people" along party lines.

Political payback can be spun, espionage cannot. This is why Joe Wilson, David Corn and all of the liberal media have steered wide of calling this leak exactly what it is, Treason:

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, JOSEPH WILSON, ROBERT NOVAK, DAVID CORN,VALERIE PLAME ET ALS HAVE CONSPIRED TO EXPOSE NETWORKS OF GENUINE INTELLIGENCE AGENTS AND THEIR SOURCES WHO WERE CLOSING IN ON TREASONOUS ACTS PERPETRATED BY THE WHITE HOUSE TO FURTHER AN INSIDIOUS AGENDA OF EMPIRE EXPANSION THROUGH STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM DESIGNED TO CREATE A THIRST FOR REVENGE AND JUSTICE IN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

The meticulous outing of Plame and the media circus that ensued was designed as a smokescreen to cloud the truth and the law while they exposed CIA networks operating to stop WMD proliferation. Genuine agents and sources were left out in the cold while targets were warned and allowed to escape.

This is not easy to comprehend. So it's imperative to suspend judgment while you examine this. You must be an impartial juror. Listen objectively to the facts. Analyze the application of those facts to the law. Consider the motives of those involved and then look for MO to back it up.

WHAT LAWS ARE INVOLVED AND WHAT ARE THE PENALTIES?

The one law everybody has heard of regarding this matter is the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (IIPA). In my two part series, TREASONGATE: The Controlling Law

From Kaminsky's blog :

"Meeting Joe Wilson (Part 1 of 2)

On Thursday night, the venerable and most definitely left-leaning Harvard Book Store held a lecture/question and answer session/book signing event with Ambassador Joseph Wilson...

First of all, Ambassador Wilson has every confidence in the dedication and prosecutorial skills of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

However, Wilson concedes a point many of the Administration's defenders make: it will be extremely hard to convict anyone of violating the most serious (and most often discussed) of the applicable laws, namely the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (United States Code, Title 50, Sections 421-426). Rather, Wilson thought that a prosecutor wanting a winnable case would have to settle for the weaker charge of disclosure of classified information (United States Code, Title 18, Section 798)...While technically disclosure of classified information can be a felony carrying the same maximum penalty of a fine and 10
years imprisonment as violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, it apparently can also be prosecuted as a misdemeanor charge, and this is what Wilson thought likely..."

Hey Joe, you're quick on your feet whipping out that 18 USC 798 softball law along with the IIPA, so why don't you flip a few sections back to 793 and 794?

Wilson might answer, "Well Spook, thing is, this was a smear, I tell ya. I was shmeered, Spook. They shmeered me, man. They wanted to hurt me and my CIA wife real bad because I'm an award winning courageous patriot who stood up to their forgeries and told the world from the beacon of the New York Times. It's not espionage. It's a smear campaign. I don’t think we really need to distract the population with the Espionage act Spook, do we?"

Well, Joe, I think we do need to distract the population. I mean, after all, you told David Corn that one of our "star" intelligence assets was outed thereby crippling many operations, scattering agents to the four winds and possibly the grim reaper's door, crushing national security.

"This is the stuff of Aldrich Ames".

Sorry Joe, but motive, while an excellent tool of analysis, is irrelevant to the determination of whether the Espionage laws were broken. The law doesn't give a rats ass what the Bush administration's motive was for breaking the law.

The law does not provide a motive defense. They can tell the judge and jury at trial, "Yeah, so we outed her network, but we did it to shmeer Joe Wilson, not to cause damage to national security." But the cold hard fact remains,18 USC 794 doesn't care. There's no "motive" requirement. Sorry Joe, this is treason. You said it yourself, "This is the stuff of Aldrich Ames". What an amazing quote.

The cold, made of steel, unbendable law, 18 USC 794, is the reason Wilson has been guiding American attention spans to the IIPA. As long as we were focused on the IIPA, convictions would be very hard to come by.

Wilson was running protection.

Back to Kaminsky's report on Wilson's book signing:

"Wilson offered two reasons for his pessimism:

1. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act explicitly says that it is a valid defense versus prosecution to claim an operative's identity has previously been revealed...

It is clear that the Administration's defenders intend to use this defense...

But anyways, when all is said and done, this isn't the main reason why Ambassador Wilson is pessimistic about the prospects of a successful prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Instead, his main reason is:

1. Right at its outset, the Act qualifies that disclosing a covert operative's identity is illegal only if it is done intentionally and in the knowledge that the government is still actively maintaining a cover for operative...

Wilson said he believed that anyone accused under the Act thus could successfully mount the defense that he or she knew only that Valerie Plame was employed by the CIA and not that the CIA actively maintained a cover (or covers) for her as a operative in the Clandestine Service who was active in the last 5 years."

Look at Wilson go. He's got that spin down pat. On the one hand, he's literally crying in public over the outing of his CIA wife, "If I could give you back your anonymity....", while on the other hand, he creates the Bush admin defense all in one gasp of legal puke. He exhibits a knowledge of various US Code as well as a perfect analysis of the IIPA, while steering the entire country away from the controlling law, 18 USC 794 and 793.

Have a look at Joe Wilson's book, "The Politics of Truth", and look for any mention of 18 USC 793 or 794. It's not there.

His books starts with a section called, "Anatomy Of A Smear":

"...a vindictive government has used the press in order to try to destroy an opponent." (pg. 2)

The Plame leak only made the Bush administration appear guilty as sin regarding the Niger documents and the fraudulent reasons for going to war, and I submit to you that this is exactly what the Bush administration and its operatives intended. The decision to go to war
was a political issue, and the country is divided along party lines, so it's safe for them to risk the appearance of guilt by "outing" Wilson's wife and looking guilty as long as Wilson, Corn and everybody else repeats the mantra that it was done for revenge, political payback, etc. But the true motivation was to stop the agents she was working with from gathering evidence of mass murder; past present and future.

To smear Wilson is ridiculous considering the possible penalty for Treason, and to smear him knowing it makes you look guilty of fixing the intelligence is even more insane unless that's exactly what you were trying to do...look insane.

To out Plame and smear Wilson as a smokescreen for a greater sin, a greater Treason, a Treason of past and future murder of innocent citizens...now that is a motivation that warranted risking their violation of 18 USC 794.

Their gambit was centered on Wilson controlling the media circus, steering everybody towards the IIPA, and away from 18 USC 794.

If Wilson, cast in the starring role as the husband filled with anger for the damage and danger put on his wife, was talking about the IIPA, well then, who could argue with him? Who had more motivation for wanting the leakers put away than Joe Wilson?

Nobody,...if you believe this crap.

And Joe Wilson not only took the baton from David Corn regarding the IIPA, but he further protected the Bush leakers even from prosecution under that irrelevant law by stating his opinion that convictions were unlikely due to the "wiggle room" written into the IIPA.

Mr. Wilson, you brought up the name Aldrich Ames, so why don't you bring up the law he was convicted under? In the two plus years this script (and that is exactly what he's reading from) has been played out, you haven't mentioned the controlling law, 18 USC 794 and 793. You haven't called for the people responsible for outing your wife and her entire CIA network to be thrown in jail with Aldrich Ames for life. No, instead you've conspired to fool the country into burying its head in your smokescreen.

Chris Matthews told Joe Wilson that Karl Rove said, "Wilson's wife is fair game."

From Wilson's book, page 1:

" ' Wilson's wife is fair game.' Those are fighting words for any man..."

And you fight back with the lame Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Wilson? Your actions don't back up your words. Your motivation must be lacking since you could have responded in kind with your own fighting words. Had you responded as follows, perhaps we could believe you, Joe Wilson. Here's what you should have said:

"The people who outed my wife are traitors, no different than Aldrich
Ames who was convicted under 18 USC 794. They deserve to be put away for life in the same cell block for Treason."

But you didn't say that Mr. Wilson. And if I'm wrong about you and your wife, let's see you start saying it. Get in your Jaguar and ride, bang the drums for Treason, Treason that exposed your wife endangering her life and the lives of her network. Your family was cast in the spotlight by the Bush administration who exposed your loved ones to dangerous covert agents the world over. Why aren't you demanding justice and prosecutions under 18 USC 794(b) for such a dastardly deed?

Wilson's book references the IIPA on pages; xxxviii-xxxix, xl, 4, 346, 349, 350-351, 358-360, 384-385, 388, 395-396, and 445. Do you know how many times 18 USC 793 and 794 are mentioned? None, nada, zero. Why do you think that is? Because Wilson never heard of these laws? No. This CIA couple know the law inside out. And they know the carnage that outing her caused to the operations and operatives she was overseeing, people that trusted her whose lives were in her hands.

From page 446 of Wilson's book:

"We worry about our personal security, but there is little we can do."

But nobody dared publish a photo of Plame...until she posed with her husband for the January '94 issue of Vanity Fair. Wasn't it bad enough that her name got out, that her front company was exposed? Why would she follow through by mugging for the camera in Vanity Fair? Isn't that just putting her in more jeopardy? Isn't that making it even easier for enemy agents both here and in foreign lands to reconcile her likeness?

You'd think, out of respect for her fellow agents she'd lay low and stay out of the spotlight, but "Valerie was always a star in her profession". (page 446)

Now more than ever.

It's open season on the NOCS she supervised, the NOCS out there in the field gathering evidence on who?

Who do you think?

From page 447 of Wilson's book:

"We had assumed that on the day the Novak article appeared, every intelligence office in Washington, and probably all those around the world, were running Valerie's name through their databases. Foreign intelligence services would not attack us, but they might as well
threaten any contacts Valerie might have made in their countries, and they would certainly be eager to unearth operations she might have been involved in.

International terrorist organizations were a different story, however. There was a history of international terrorists attacking exposed officers."

So they go on the cover of Vanity Fair like this was a bad episode of Jane Bond.

And Wilson goes on the Daily Show for jokes with Jon Stewart. From page 358:

"Jon was so humorous that I found myself laughing heartily right along with the audience..."

From page 384:

"An officer had been exposed, an act that threatened many intelligence professionals."

It's hilarious, isn't it, Mr. Wilson?

In "The CIA at War", by Ronald Kessler, the Vanity Fair photo was discussed on pages 344-345:

"Their claims to have been victimized by the Bush white house were destroyed when they agreed to be photographed sitting in their Jaguar for the January issue of Vanity Fair. Wilson claimed that the fact that his forty-year old wife wore sunglasses and a scarf disguised her. But anyone she dealt with overseas could clearly recognize her..."

" 'They risked undermining any possible prosecution by their public statements and appearances,' said John L. Martin who, as Chief of the Justice Department's counterespionage section, was in charge of supervising leak investigations. 'The scarf and the sunglasses worn in the Vanity Fair picture was a sham.' "

"In fact, the CIA never would have given permission to appear in a photograph. No doubt because of that, she never asked. Agency officials were stunned."

"...Not only had Wilson and Plame subverted their own posturing as victims of the Bush White House, they had undermined the integrity of the CIA's clandestine program to collect intelligence using covert officers. If a CIA officer took her duty to remain in a clandestine
role so lightly it could make agents leery of risking their lives to provide intelligence to other CIA officers."

Wilson and Plame behaved as if they were trying to make the Bush administration's case for a defense to the IIPA. By showing up in public as they have done, they lend credence to the Bush talking points which argue that Plame's status at the CIA was not covert and that blowing her cover was no big deal. Their gambit was based on the arrogant self belief they could trick the nation into believing its laws against espionage don't exist.

Under 18 USC 794, it doesn't matter if she was covert, it only matters whether her name and position were "related to the public defense". Don't forget that State Department memo though. The paragraph her name appeared in was marked "(S)" for secret, and according to a Bush Executive order, that meant her name and job were classified info. The memo is prima facie proof of her status.

The Instpundit (December 3rd, 2003) has some interesting insights about the actions of Plame/Wilson:

"OKAY, I'M OFFICIALLY PRONOUNCING THE PLAME SCANDAL BOGUS:

Former ambassador Joseph Wilson has been quite protective of his wife, Valerie Plame, in the weeks since her cover as a CIA operative was blown.

'My wife has made it very clear that -- she has authorized me to say this -- she would rather chop off her right arm than say anything to the press and she will not allow herself to be photographed,' he declared in October on 'Meet the Press'.

But that was before Vanity Fair came calling.

The January issue features a two-page photo of Wilson and the woman the magazine calls 'the most famous female spy in America,' a 'slim 40-year-old with white-blond hair and a big, bright smile.' They are sitting in their Jaguar...

Sorry -- if you're really an undercover spy, and really worried about national security, you don't do this sort of thing...

Serious people don't do self-promoting spreads in Vanity Fair where important questions of national security are involved...Not knowing the underlying facts, I have to make my judgment by the behavior of the parties. And judging from that, the scandal is bogus, and Wilson is a self-promoter who can't be trusted. That's my judgment on this matter. Yours, of course, may vary. But if you see Wilson as anything other than a cheesy opportunist, well, then yours really varies...."

Mine really does vary, I see him as a facilitator of Treason, the ringleader on an intricate plot to both expose Plame's WMD network and to also protect her and the Bush administration from serious legal scrutiny of their collective Treason.

The Vanity Fair publicity, the book deal, the Daily Show appearance, the awards he's accepted...all of it was designed by these spooks to provide cover under the IIPA to distract those honest, conservative leaning citizens and media personnel, who might have been sympathetic to Plame being exposed.

The actions of Wilson, despite his tough words, have been calculated to divide the left and the right. You have to give these spooks credit for bravado and hutzpa.

More from Instapundit:

"Tom Maguire says I told you so. He also notes that saying that Wilson is bogus isn't quite the same as saying that the scandal is bogus. I guess that's right, in theory. But the claim that Plame was endangered is what drove this scandal, and it came from Wilson, who seems to be, well, bogus... I suppose it's still theoretically possible that somebody in the White House deliberately and illegally outed Plame as a way of getting revenge on Wilson for his dumb -- and deeply unprofessional -- oped about his "mission" to Niger. But if you assume that nothing that Wilson says can be relied on because he's a self-promoter who'll stretch a fact to get attention, which seems extremely plausible, then you're not left with much evidence. And the Wilson/Plame couple certainly isn't acting like Plame's life is in danger. They're acting like opportunists milking their 15 minutes and hoping for a lucrative book contract. So pardon me if I conclude that their actions speak louder than Wilson's words..."

Wilson and Plame engaged in a course of action that was designed to discredit the investigation.

Are you starting to get the picture?

THE TREASON OF CORN

Corn was the first person to put the IIPA in the public eye. David Corn was now on my radar. I examined Wilson's book and found out, for the first time, that David Corn has been a big player in Treasongate. From The Politics of Truth, page 4:

"David Corn, from The Nation magazine, had alerted me and later written the first article pointing out that the disclosure by way of the Novak article might have violated the 1982 IIPA. But whether illegal or not, it was still an unwelcome intrusion into my wife's private life..."

So David Corn was the first pawn used to disseminate the spin that the IIPA was the controlling law. And look at Wilson sew the subtle innuendo "whether it was illegal or not." On page 349, Wilson explains Corn's purpose:

"Corn then published a detailed exploration of the law to ensure that other journalists, as well as regular readers of The Nation, understood all of the legalities involved."

That's some damning evidence right there. Because we know that statement is a bold faced lie carefully designed to continue the illusion that the IIPA was the controlling law.

ALL OF THE LEGALITIES INVOLVED? "ALL"???

There’s more to Corn and The Nation than meets the eye. "Nobody owns The Nation" says the commercial being aired on Air America Radio. Bullshit.

The Nation also held a special function to present Joe Wilson with the first Ron Ridenhour award for Truth-Telling. It's just so damn transparent.

Clifford May's article, "Who Exposed Secret Agent Plame?" published in National Review online, July 15th 2005, makes a strong case that, while Novak was the first person to expose "Wilson's wife", Corn is actually the journalist responsible for first publishing Plame's undercover/covert status:

"This just in: Bob Novak did not reveal that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the CIA.

Read— or reread — his column from July 14, 2003. All Novak reports is that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson is 'an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction'...

So if Novak did not reveal that Valerie Plame was a secret agent, who did? The evidence strongly suggests it was none other than Joe Wilson himself. Let me walk you through the steps that lead to this conclusion.

The first reference to Plame being a secret agent appears in The Nation, in an article by David Corn published July 16, 2003, just two days after Novak’s column appeared. It carried this lead: 'Did Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security — and break the law — in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?'

Since Novak did not report that Plame was 'working covertly' how did Corn know that’s what she had been doing?

Corn does not tell his readers and he has responded to a query from me only by pointing out that he was asking a question, not making a 'statement of fact.' But in the article, he asserts that Novak 'outed' Plame 'as an undercover CIA officer.' Again, Novak did not do that.
Rather, it is Corn who is, apparently for the first time, 'outing' Plame’s 'undercover' status.

Corn follows that assertion with a quote from Wilson saying, 'I will not answer questions about my wife.' Any reporter worth his salt would immediately wonder: Did Wilson indeed answer Corn’s questions about his wife — after Corn agreed not to quote his answers but to use them only on background? Read the rest of Corn’s piece and it’s difficult to believe anything else. Corn names no other sources for the information he provides — and he provides much more information than Novak revealed...

On what basis could Corn 'assume' that Plame was not only working covertly but was actually a 'top-secret' operative? And where did Corn get the idea that Plame had been 'outed' in order to punish Wilson? That is not suggested by anything in the Novak column...

The likely answer: The allegation that someone in the administration leaked to Novak as a way to punish Wilson was made by Wilson — to Corn. But Corn, rather than quote Wilson, puts the idea forward as his own.

Corn’s article then goes on to provide specific details about Plame’s undercover work, her 'dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material.' But how does Corn know about that? From what source could he have learned it?"

Don't misinterpret the meaning of Corn's involvement. Novak is not off the hook, he's responsible under 18 USC 794(b) for intentionally communicating information, related to the public defense, to the enemy, in a time of war, and he's also guilty of violating 18 USC 794(c) for "conspiracy" to violate 18 USC 794(b), so he's in big trouble.

Corn's July 16th report, wherein he outed Plame's status as an "undercover CIA officer", puts him on the hook for violation of 18 USC 794(b) and (c) as well, since Plame's "status", that of "undercover CIA officer", was first published by Corn, not Novak.

Corn was the media ringleader on the left. Novak held that title on the right. And together they pulled the wool over the eyes of the Nation.

Moreover, it's no defense under 18 USC 793 and 794 that the perp have knowledge that the information communicated was officially classified as being "Secret" as long as the information was "related to the public defense" and was intentionally communicated to the enemy, in a time of war.

Also, federal case law, particularly US v. Morison, holds that First Amendment "freedom of the press" arguments are not a defense for violators of the Espionage statutes, 793 and 794. Corn and Novak are both guilty of Treason, if not directly under 794(b), indirectly, under 794(c) for conspiracy.

Clifford May raised another interesting question:

"Corn concludes that Plame’s career 'has been destroyed by the Bush administration.' And here he does, finally, quote Wilson directly. Wilson says: 'Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.'

Corn has assured us several times that Wilson refused to answer
questions about his wife, refused to confirm or deny that she worked for the CIA, refused to acknowledge whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee. But he is willing to say on the record that 'naming her this way' was an act of treachery? That’s not talking about his wife? That’s not providing confirmation? There is only one way to interpret this: Wilson did indeed talk about his wife, her work as a secret agent, and other matters to Corn (and perhaps others?) on a confidential basis.

If Wilson did tell Corn that his wife was an undercover agent, did he commit a crime? I don’t claim to know. But the charge that someone committed a crime by naming Plame as a covert agent was also made by Corn, apparently for the first time, in this same article. No doubt, the independent prosecutor and the grand jury will sort it out."

It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. Who will turn (has turned?) State's evidence first, second, third?

Valerie Plame will be the toughest conviction in this treason conspiracy. I suppose a creative prosecutor, if he establishes that Plame's likeness was information related to the public defense, could successfully prosecute her for transmitting that information to the enemy by agreeing to be photographed for the cover of Vanity Fair. If Fitzgerald were to bring witnesses from the CIA to testify that they never would have given her permission to be photographed for the cover of a major magazine, and those witnesses could bring evidence that her likeness "might be used", or was used, by the enemy, she could be prosecuted under 18 USC 793 and 794(b) and (c).

THE MODUS OPERANDI OF PRIOR BUSH ADMINISTRATION LEAKS

Daithí Mac Lochlainn of Melbourne Indymedia; first alerted me to the Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan leak situation. Daithi is organizing a petition to gather support insisting that the Government investigate this incredible treason.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com; has written a very interesting report on that leak: Who 'Outed' Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan?:

"Khan, dubbed a 'computer geek' on account of his technical prowess, functioned as a one-man information hub for Al Qaeda, coordinating and forwarding messages between the top leadership and Bin Laden's foot-soldiers worldwide. Once captured, Khan 'flipped' and agreed to cooperate. CIA interrogators had him sending emails to his former confederates all day Sunday and Monday of last week, and getting back encrypted replies. On Monday morning, however, the Times came out with its story, naming Khan and reporting his disclosures as the real basis of the code orange security alerts issued by Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge. The Times cited both Pakistani and U.S. government officials.

It is hard to know what to make of this. Either these unidentified officials had certain knowledge that Bin Laden's New York Times subscription had run out, or else someone deliberately sabotaged a top secret anti-terrorist operation while it was in progress.

As is so often the case with this administration, one is faced with the question: is it incompetence, or is it treason?"

It's treason. Stop saying it's incompetence. Don't be naive. They hijacked the Executive Branch. They're cold, calculated, evil geniuses.

Antiwar.com:

" '[CNN's Wolf] Blitzer then revealed that he had discussed the Khan case with U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on background. He reported that she had admitted that the Bush administration had in fact revealed Khan's name to the press. She said she did not know if Khan was a double agent working for the Pakistani government.'

What a profoundly weird remark...

What I'd like to know, however, is who is working as a double agent inside our own government? Because someone has sure sabotaged the hunt for Bin Laden and his cohorts just as effectively as if they'd been working for the Islamists."

An American website posted what it purported to be the names of 74 members of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, yesterday.

It was not clear last night what action British intelligence officials or lawyers will take to try to get the names taken off the website and prevent further dissemination of them. However, they are likely to conduct a damage limitation exercise and warn those individuals who have been identified. Eighteen of those named on the website have held the rank of ambassador.

The website lists the names under a message thanking someone who it refers to simply as "A".

It is not the first time names claimed to be of former or serving MI6 officers have been posted on an American website. About six years ago, the former MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, was alleged to have given a long list of names to a website address. Mr Tomlinson, who was jailed for breaking the Official Secrets Act, denied the allegation.

He was sentenced after revealing classified information about MI6. He later left Britain and wrote a book which was published in Moscow and Edinburgh.

More recently, newspapers in Croatia have published the names of alleged MI6 officers serving in that country.

The names were published against the background of a bitter feud in the Croatian military and security services over the hunt for alleged war criminals.

The D Notice committee, which advises editors on security and intelligence matters, asks the British media not to name MI6 officers even if they have been named elsewhere.

In America it is an offence to deliberately reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent. A grand jury investigation was launched after the identification of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose name was given to several journalists by an unnamed source in the US government in 2003. A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was jailed recently for refusing to reveal the identity of the source.

If your partner seems to be ignoring you after a flash of nudity on the television screen, it might not be his or her fault: A new psychological study finds that when people are shown violent or erotic images they frequently fail to process what they see immediately afterwards.

Two studies that explore this effect, called attentional rubbernecking, were conducted by Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald and Yale University researchers Steven Most, Marvin Chun and David Widders. The results are described in the August issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

"We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after viewing neutral images," says Zald, assistant professor of psychology and member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development.

Anyone who has ever slowed down to look at an accident as they are driving by – or has been stuck behind someone who has – is familiar with the "rubbernecking" effect. Even though we know we need to keep our eyes on the road, our emotions of concern, fear and curiosity cause us to stare out the window at the accident and slow to a crawl as we drive by.

In two separate experiments, Zald and his colleagues set out to determine if the rubbernecking effect carries over into more minute lapses of attention.

In the first experiment, research subjects were shown hundreds of pictures that included a mix of disturbing images along with landscape or architectural photos. They were told to search the images for a particular target image. An irrelevant, emotionally negative or neutral picture preceded the target by two to eight items. The closer the negative pictures were to the target image, the more frequently the subject failed to spot the target. In a follow-on study, which has not yet been published, the researchers substituted erotic for negative images and found the same basic effect. "This suggests that emotionally arousing images impact attention in similar ways whether they are perceived as positive or negative," said Most.

According to Zald, this appears to be an involuntary effect: "We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through."

Previous studies have demonstrated that there are limits to how much information people can hold in their visual short-term memory. As a result, we often miss visual images that pass right before our eyes when we are paying attention to something else. The new research indicates that we can also miss what we are searching for if we are shown an unexpected image that impacts us emotionally, a situation the researchers call "emotion-induced blindness."

This effect can explain some common human behaviors. "If you are simply driving down the road and you see something that is sexually explicit on a billboard, the odds are that it is going to capture your attention and – for a fraction of a second afterwards – you will be less able to pay attention to other information in your environment," Zald says. "So you might not see that car coming at you or the person crossing the street because your bottleneck has been jammed."

In the second experiment, the researchers sought to determine if individuals can override their emotion-induced blindness by focusing more deliberately on the target for which they are searching. In this experiment, the subjects undertook two different trials. In one they were told specifically to look for a rotated photo of a building. In the other they were told to look for a rotated photo of either a building or a landscape.

The research team hypothesized that the more specific instruction – to look for the building only – would help research subjects override their emotion-induced blindness. After running the tests, the researchers discovered that they were partially right: Specific instructions helped some subjects control their attention, but it didn't help others.

Furthermore, the researchers determined that an individual's ability to control his or her attention was directly linked to an aspect of his or her personality that involves reaction to negative or frightening stimuli. Psychologists use a scale called "harm avoidance" to measures this characteristic. Those who score high on this scale are more fearful, careful and cautious. Those who score low are more carefree and comfortable in dangerous or difficult situations. The researchers found that those with low harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on the targets than those with high harm avoidance scores.

Zald believes one explanation for the differences in performance during the experiment is that individuals that tend to be more harm avoidant have more trouble disengaging from emotional images than their more carefree counterparts, causing their attention to linger on an emotional image even when it is no longer visible.

"We increasingly are suspicious that people who are more neurotic or harm avoidant may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a greater difficulty suppressing that information," Zald said.

Most studies done on violence and video games support the conclusion that violent video games can increase aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, especially boys, researchers said on Friday.

An analysis of 20 years of research shows the effects can be both immediate and long-lasting.

"The majority of the studies would suggest there are effects," said Jessica Nicoll of Saint Leo University in Saint Leo, Florida, who worked on the study.

One study showed that children who played a violent game for less than 10 minutes and then took a mood assessment test rated themselves with aggressive traits and aggressive actions shortly after playing.

Teachers of 600 8th and 9th graders, aged 13 to 15, said children who spent more time playing violent video games were more hostile than other children and more likely to argue with authority figures and other students. [...]

Sometime in late 1980, then-Col. Paul E. Vallely, the Commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group, United States Army Reserve, Presidio of San Francisco, Ca., co-authored a discussion paper, which received wide and controversial attention within the U.S. military, particularly within the Special Operations community. The paper was titled "From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory," and it presented a Nietzschean scheme for waging perpetual psychological warfare against friend and enemy populations alike, and even against the American people.

The "MindWar" paper was provoked by an article by Lt. Col. John Alexander, which appeared in the December 1980 edition of Military Review, advocating the introduction of ESP (extra-sensory perception), "tele-pathetic behavior modification," para-psychology, psychokinesis ("mind over matter"), remote viewing, out of body experiences, and other New Age and occult practices into U.S. military intelligence. Alexander's paper was titled "The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock."

But the subsequent paper co-authored by Vallely went way beyond ESP and the other paranormal techniques advocated by Alexander: "Strategic MindWar must begin the moment war is considered to be inevitable," the document stated. "It must seek out the attention of the enemy nation through every available medium, and it must strike at the nation's potential soldiers before they put on their uniforms. It is in their homes and their communities that they are most vulnerable to MindWar....

"To this end," Vallely and co-author continued, "MindWar must be strategic in emphasis, with tactical applications playing a reinforcing, supplementary role. In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe—neither through primitive 'battlefield' leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics—but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course the electronic media—television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur [King Arthur's magical sword—ed.], we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to enhance civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.

"MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war."

Leaving nothing to the imagination, the document concluded by emphasizing that MindWar should employ subliminal brainwashing technologies, and weapons that directly attack the targetted population's central nervous system and brain functioning: "There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves," the paper concluded.

The "MindWar" paper was disturbing, for reasons beyond its fascistic and occultist content. For one thing, Colonel Vallely's co-author was a PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader named Maj. Michael A. Aquino. Five years before the circulation of the MindWar paper, Special Forces Reserve officer Aquino had founded the Temple of Set, a Satanic organization which was the successor to Anton Szandor LeVay's Church of Satan. Aquino would soon be grabbing headlines, which persisted throughout the 1980s, as a leading suspect in a nationwide Satanic pedophile ring, that particularly targetted daycare centers on such military bases as Fort Bragg and the Presidio (see article, p. 21).

Furthermore, Vallely and Aquino's MindWar scheme is remarkably similar to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program launched by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon, under the direction of Irangate figure Adm. John Poindexter. Ostensibly, the Total Information Awareness global propaganda and mega-data-mining plan was scrapped after a series of negative news stories, but Pentagon sources have reported that the program was merely "taken into a black box."

Indeed, on Aug. 16, 2005, The New York Times' Philip Shenon revealed that a super-secret Pentagon "special action program" called Able Danger had tracked Mohammed Atta and three of the other Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers a year prior to the attacks; but Pentagon lawyers with the Special Operations Command refused to allow the information to be shared with the FBI, for fear of exposing the data-mining program to any public scrutiny. The Times learned of Able Danger from Lt. Col. Anthony Schaffer, who was the program's liaison to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time.

'Nuke Iran!'

Colonel Vallely's association with Aquino did little to stall the former's military career advancement. A West Point graduate, Vallely retired in 1991 as deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army of the Pacific. From 1982-86, he headed the 351st Civil Affairs Command, placing him in charge of all Special Forces, Psychological Warfare, and Civil Affairs Military units in the Western United States and Hawaii.
Today, he is practicing what he and Satanist Aquino preached in the MindWar paper, and is one of the leading propaganda assets in Vice President Dick Cheney's push for military confrontation with Iran—one that could see the United States carry out the first pre-emptive nuclear attack in history.

General Vallely, now retired from the military, is a senior military commentator for Rupert Murdoch's shrill Fox TV News; is a "client" of Benador Associates, the premier public relations firm for the neo-conservative cabal in Washington; is the Military Committee chairman for Frank Gaffney's neo-conned Center for Strategic Policy; and is the co-founder, along with Gen. Thomas McInerney (USAF-ret.), another Benador client, of the Iran Policy Committee. IPC is yet another neo-con front group that: 1) promotes the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a group on the State Department's list of International Terrorist Organizations (for assassinating a number of U.S. military officers in Iran); and 2) demands U.S. military action to impose "regime change" 1n Tehran, through such measures as a massive bombing campaign against Iran's purported secret nuclear weapons labs, and a U.S. Naval blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. Recently General Vallely co-authored a book with General McInerney, titled Endgame—Blueprint for Victory for Winning the War on Terror, which borrows, philosophically, from his and Aquino's original MindWar rant (see interview with Vallely on p. 13).

The 'Jedi Warriors'

General Vallely, Colonel Alexander, and Lt. Colonel Aquino (ret.) are but three leading figures within the Special Operations community, who have promoted the application of New Age and outright Satanic practices to the art of war, conducting experimental programs aimed at creating a Nietzschean "Übermensch warrior."

In preparation for this article, EIR has interviewed a number of senior retired military and intelligence officers, who have identified, from their own personal experiences, a number of other leading military officers who promoted these efforts and funnelled massive amounts of Pentagon money into "black programs," testing the military applications of a whole range of bizarre "non-lethal" techniques and technologies. Some of the top-secret programs funded by taxpayer dollars over the past 25 years betray a significant degree of outright "spoon-bending" lunacy. Others lead directly to the doorsteps of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib military detention centers, where prisoners have been turned into human guinea pigs for experimental torture techniques, drawn from the same New Age bag of tricks.

And The New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in a Jan. 24-31, 2005 article on "The Coming Wars," mooted that the Special Forces "black programs" may now have ventured into the field of "pseudo-gang warfare," in which counterinsurgency methods blur with insurgency.

Quoting from a September 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article by Naval Postgraduate School defense analyst and Pentagon counterinsurgency advisor John Arquilla, Hersh hinted that U.S. Special Forces units were being unleashed to create their own terrorist "pseudo gangs" to more easily infiltrate terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. Arquilla wrote: "When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These 'pseudo gangs,' as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists' camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult."

Arquilla added, for good measure: "If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with al-Qaeda [a reference to John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Talibani—ed.], think what professional operatives might do."

The 'Gang of Four'

Four of the names most often cited as promoters of programs like the "Goat Lab," the "Jedi Warriors," "Grill Flame," "Task Force Delta," and the "First Earth Battalion," have held top posts within the military intelligence and Special Operations commands:

Gen. Albert Stubblebine III was the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, INSCOM (Intelligence and Security Command), from 1981-84, during which time he launched a series of secret projects at Fort Meade, Md., involving remote viewing and other occult practices. General Stubblebine was, perhaps, the U.S. Army's most senior and loudest advocate of the full gamut of New Age warfare.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the current U.S. Army Chief of Staff, was Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command (1994-96), Commander of the United States Army Special Operations Command (1996-97), and Commander in Chief of the United States Special Operations Command (1997-2000). According to a well-researched book exposing the New Age penetration of the U.S. military, The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004), General Schoomaker has created a think-tank, under the sponsorship of the SOC office, to expand the application of these bizarre occult and para-normal operations throughout the U.S. Army, as his contribution to President George W. Bush's Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).

Gen. Wayne Downing also was the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, and earlier directed all special operations during the December 1989 invasion of Panama, when some of the MindWar techniques were used, during the siege of the Vatican compound where Gen. Manuel Noriega had taken refuge. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Downing was named National Director and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combatting Terrorism in the Bush-Cheney White House, a post he held until June 2002.

According to military sources, General Downing left the White House as the result of a conflict with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over plans for the invasion of Iraq. Downing had argued that Saddam Hussein could be overthrown by a massive "shock and awe" bombing campaign, followed by an invasion by a force of no more than 25,000 Special Forces troops. The "Downing Plan" was rejected by the Chiefs as "sheer madness," according to one senior military source familiar with the events.

Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin was the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, N.C., from 1998-2000. Prior to that, he was the Commander of the elite counter-terror unit, Delta Force, from 1992-95. He was, in that capacity, in charge of the Special Forces units in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the famous 1993 "Black Hawk Down" incident, in which a number of Special Forces soldiers were beaten to death by warlords, and dragged through the streets of the city. Here, some of Lt. Col. John Alexander's non-lethal systems, including "Sticky Foam," were directly put to the combat test—and failed. From March 2000 until June 2003, General Boykin headed the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. He was then named Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a post he still holds.

According to The New Yorker piece by Hersh, Boykin and his immediate boss, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, are directly in charge of the Special Operations search-and-kill squads touted by John Arquilla in his pseudo-gang promo.

Shortly after his appointment to the Deputy Undersecretary position, General Boykin drew fire, for remarks he delivered—in uniform—at a fundamentalist Christian church, in which he smeared Islam as a "Satanic" religion, and characterized the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a religious "crusade." He also said that "God had placed George W. Bush" into the Presidency, provoking serious debates about his own sanity and a Pentagon Inspector General's Office probe.

First Earth Battalion—Where It All Began

According to author Jon Ronson, in 1977, Lt. Col. Jim Channon, a Vietnam War combat veteran, wrote a letter to Lt. Gen. Walter Kerwin, then the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff, proposing a fact-finding mission to unearth ways for the U.S. military to become more "cunning." Channon was given an open-ended assignment, a small Pentagon budget, and spent the next two years, by his own accounts, exploring the depths of the New Age movement, seeking military applications. Channon visited over 150 New Age facilities during his travels, with such countercultural names as: Gentle Wind, Integral Chuan Institute, Dayspring, Inc., The Center of Release and Integration, Postural Integration Reichian Rebirthing, the New Age Awareness Fair, Beyond Jogging, Aikido with Ki, the Biofeedback Center of Berkeley, and the Esalen Institute.

Channon particularly spent a good deal of time training under Michael Murphy, the co-founder of Esalen, which was the leading West Coast New Age psychological experimentation center, testing a wide array of mind-control methods, many involving the use of psychotropic drugs. Cultist mass murderer Charles Manson spent Aug. 5, 1969 at Esalen, just four days before he unleashed the "Helter Skelter" murder spree, for which he is still serving a lifetime jail sentence. Manson had been tracked, from his years in state prison, by military psychologists, who were studying behavioral patterns of what they dubbed the "pathologically violent five percent."

In 1979, Lt. Colonel Channon presented his findings to the Army brass in a 125-page document, complete with slides, called "The First Earth Battalion." While the document was laced with New Age vocabulary ("The First Earth is not mission oriented, it is potential oriented. That means we shall continue to look everywhere to find non-destructive methods of control."), Channon did propose an array of non-lethal techniques that would be soon adopted by the military, including the use of atonal noises as a form of combat psychological warfare, oriental martial arts and spiritualist instruction, and widespread experimentation with psychoelectronics and other means of debilitating enemy forces.

Channon's First Earth Battalion slide show was brought to General Stubblebine, the head of INSCOM, by Colonel Alexander, the author of the Military Review article on "The New Mental Battlefield," and, by 1981, Stubblebine established a secret "psychic spies unit" at Fort Meade, to test out such dubious techniques as remote viewing.

Two years later, General Stubblebine traveled to Fort Bragg, to pitch the Channon/Alexander program to the top leadership of the Special Operations community. By now, Stubblebine was convinced that, with the application of the right "mind over matter" techniques, he could personally walk through walls. As of this writing, he has not yet apparently succeeded. The Fort Bragg session, as he would later recount it to author Ronson, was a fiasco, and no action was taken to implement his program—or so Stubblebine thought.

In reality, Fort Bragg, by 1978, was already a hotbed of mind-war experimentation. Among the programs carried out at remote corners of the sprawling special operations base: the Goat Lab, where a team of New Age-trained Special Forces soldiers attempted to burst the hearts of goats, in an adjacent holding pen, through the power of psychic concentration. Veterinarians working on the base were horrified that Special Forces planes were airlifting goats up from Central America, without going through the normal Customs inspections. The goats were used in the training of combat medics. The goats would be shot, their limbs would be amputated, and, on some occasions, they were "de-bleated" by having their tongues cut out or their throats slashed. Then, they were subjected to the Goat Lab psychic warfare tests.

Keying off of Channon's blueprint, a Special Operations experimental team, dubbed "Jedi Warriors," after the Star Wars craze, were trained in a wide array of Eastern oriental martial arts and meditation techniques, combined with super-strenuous physical training programs. Outside "experts" like Dr. Jim Hardt, were brought in to train the "Jedi Warriors" to heighten their mental telepathy skills through Zen. Following Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion recipe, Stuart Heller, a New Age psychologist, who gave classes in stress control to corporate executives and officials at NASA, was brought in to provide similar schooling to the commandos. Channon had been introduced to Heller by Marilyn Ferguson, the author of the 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, which peddled a New Age version of H.G. Wells' original Open Conspiracy concept of mass social control and cultural paradigm-shifts.

Not all the instructors of the "Jedi Warriors" were counterculture psychologists. Michael Echanis, a Green Beret who was badly wounded in Vietnam, but later developed advanced martial art skills, was brought in to train the "Jedi" in Hwa Rang Do, a combat technique that emphasized "invisibility." Echanis would be killed in 1978 in Nicaragua, while working as a mercenary for the regime of Anastasio Somoza. He had been the martial arts editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine, a well-known hiring hall for ex-soldiers and wanna-be's, seeking their fortunes as mercenaries.

By 1983, between the INSCOM program and the black box efforts at Fort Bragg, a fairly extensive network of military "spoon-benders" had been assembled, to the point that Task Force Delta was created, to stage quarterly meetings of as many as 300 military occult practitioners, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Col. Frank Burns launched Meta Network, one of the first "chat rooms" run through DARPA's (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) computer networking system, that would ultimately evolve into the internet.
The scheme to create a breed of Nietzschean "super soldiers" employed some very far-out characters, like the Israeli "spoon-bender" Uri Geller, a one-time stage magician, who was brought into the U.S. intelligence community under the original patronage of Dr. Andrija Puharich, a doctor who had been conducting work on parapsychology and telepathy for the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division, since the 1950s. Dr. Puharich ran the Round Table Foundation of Electrobiology, which experimented with the manipulation of brain waves. He worked closely with Warren S. McCulloch, one of the founders of Cybernetics, and with the British intelligence counterculture guru, Aldous Huxley.

Wolfowitz Peddles Non-Lethal Warfare

According to author Ronson, in an October 2001 interview in London, Uri Geller confided to him that he had been "called back" to work for the U.S. government, immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. It seems that the Bush Administration decided that the "psychic spies" could play a productive role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and in efforts to prevent a replay of the terror attacks on New York and Washington.

In fact, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had been a big advocate of some of Alexander and Channon's ideas, while serving as the chief policy advisor to then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the George Herbert Walker Bush Pentagon. On March 10, 1991, Wolfowitz wrote a memo to Cheney, "Do We Need a Non-Lethal Defense Initiative?" in which he wrote, "A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world." While Wolfowitz apparently made no mention of the more bizarre practices promoted by Colonel Alexander, the guru of the non-lethal weaponry campaign, at the time of Wolfowitz's memo, Alexander had retired from active duty, and had been named head of the Non-Lethal Weapons Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In 1990, Colonel Alexander had also come out with a book, The Warrior's Edge, in which he promoted a variety of unconventional methods to promote "human excellence and optimum performance" among soldiers, based on a course he taught in 1983 called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Among the students in that course were then-Senator and later Vice President Albert Gore, Gen. Max Thurman, and General Stubblebine. By his own accounts, Alexander and Gore became close friends in 1983, and remain so today.

Colonel Alexander wrote that the goal of The Warrior's Edge was to "unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world, must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality. We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system—the power to manipulate reality. We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future."

Uri Geller was not the only "psychic warrior" called back to government service after 9/11. Jim Channon, the original First Earth Battalion New Age super-soldier, according to author Ronson, began holding a series of meetings in early 2004 with the new Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Pete Schoomaker. Schoomaker had been commander of Special Forces at Fort Bragg when the "Goat Lab" and "Jedi Warrior" programs were under way. Ronson wrote that "The rumor was that General Schoomaker was considering bringing Jim back from retirement to create, or contribute to, a new and secret think-tank, designed to encourage the army to take their minds further and further outside the mainstream." Ronson described it as a revival of Task Force Delta. Ronson soon received an e-mail from Channon, confirming the rumor, and explaining that the think-tank idea had been floated "because Rumsfeld has now openly asked for creative input on the war on terrorism ... mmmm." Channon elaborated:
"The Army has requested my services to teach the most highly selected Majors. The First Earth Battalion is the teaching exemplar of choice. I have done that in the presence of General Pete Schoomaker.... I am in contact with players who are or have recently been in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have sent in exit strategy plans based on Earth Battalion ideas. I talk weekly with a member of a stress control battalion in Iraq who carries the manual and uses it to inform his teammates of their potential service contributions...."

Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib ... and al-Qa-im

The International Committee of the Red Cross has published a series of studies and sponsored several international conventions, to evaluate just how "non-lethal" the non-lethal technologies are that have been promoted by Alexander, Channon, and their ilk. According to a 1998 ICRC presentation before the European Parliament, non-lethal weapons are simply defined as weapons with a less-than 25% fatality rate. Such now widely used non-lethal weapons as lasers, extremely low frequency (ELF) weapons, and various chemical, biological, and audio stun weapons, can cause permanent damage, such as blindness, deafness, and destruction of gastrointestinal systems, which, the ICRC insists, require serious study and a new set of international treaties and conventions.

Indeed, according to both Ronson and The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, many of the torture techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib, and at such less-well-known locales as al-Qa-im near the Syrian border in Iraq, are based on Channon and Alexander's non-lethal schemes, but with lethal consequences in some cases.

Ronson confirmed that a facility at al-Qa-im was conducting "interrogations" of captured Iraqi insurgents, after playing, non-stop, for days at a time, the theme song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur, "I Love You." Ronson is convinced that the music was a cover for subliminal frequencies, very high- or very low-frequency sounds that affect brain functioning, to break prisoners' resistance. The prisoners were kept in metal shipping containers in the scorching sun, blindfolded and in crouching positions, surrounded by barbed wire, with the music (and subliminals) blaring.

In an article published in the July 11-18, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, Mayer revealed that Special Forces psychologists from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg had been brought to Guantanamo Bay, to oversee interrogation strategies. The SERE psychologists formed a core of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT, or "Biscuits") that "reverse engineered" the techniques that were used on Special Forces soldiers, to train them to survive enemy torture/interrogations, as part of the advanced special warfare program at Fort Bragg.

Jim Channon confirmed, in another e-mail exchange with author Ronson, that many of the ideas adopted by the Army Intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and al-Qa-im came right out of his First Earth Battalion blueprint.

'Living Embodiment' of First Earth Battalion

At one point in his probe of the military's spoon-benders, author Jon Ronson asked Stuart Heller, the friend of Marilyn Ferguson and Jim Channon, if he could name one soldier who was "the living embodiment" of the First Earth Battalion. Without a second thought, Heller replied: "Bert Rodriguez." "Bert's one of the most spiritual guys I've ever met," Heller told Ronson. "No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He's occultic. He's like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you."

As Jon Ronson reported, "In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Bert's uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Bert's military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it."

Ziad Jarrah presented himself as a Lebanese businessman, who traveled a great deal and wanted to protect himself. "I liked Ziad a lot," Rodriguez later told Ronson. "He was very humble, very quiet. He was in good shape. Very diligent." Rodriguez taught Jarrah "the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you'd die for, a do-or-die desire." Rodriguez added, "Ziad was like Luke Skywalker. You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it's there. And if you do believe it it is there. Yeah, Ziad believed it. He was like Luke Skywalker."

Rodriguez trained Ziad Jarrah for six months, and gave him copies of several knife-fighting books he had written. Jarrah shared them with a friend, Marwan al-Shehhi, who boarded with him at the Panther Motel and Apartments in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah took control of United Airlines flight 93, and crashed it in a field in Pennsylvania. Marwan al-Shehhi commandeered United Airlines flight 175 and crashed it into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A leading Republican senator and prospective presidential candidate said Sunday that the war in Iraq has destabilized the Middle East and is looking more like the Vietnam conflict from a generation ago.

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts and other military honors for his service in Vietnam, reiterated his position that the United States needs to develop a strategy to leave Iraq. Hagel scoffed at the idea that U.S. troops could be in Iraq four years from now at levels above 100,000, a contingency for which the Pentagon is preparing.

"We should start figuring out how we get out of there," Hagel said on "This Week" on ABC. "But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur."

Hagel said "stay the course" is not a policy. "By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq ... we're not winning," he said.

President Bush was preparing for separate speeches this week to reaffirm his plan to help Iraq train its security forces while its leaders build a democratic government. In his weekly Saturday radio address, Bush said the fighting there protected Americans at home.

Polls show the public growing more skeptical about Bush's handling of the war.

In Iraq, officials continued to craft a new constitution in the face of a Monday night deadline for parliamentary approval. They missed the initial deadline last week.

Other Republican senators appearing on Sunday news shows advocated remaining in Iraq until the mission set by Bush is completed, but they also noted that the public is becoming more and more concerned and needs to be reassured.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., another possible candidate for president in 2008, disagreed that the U.S. is losing in Iraq. He said a constitution guaranteeing basic freedoms would provide a rallying point for Iraqis.

"I think this is a very crucial time for the future of Iraq," said Allen, also on ABC. "The terrorists don't have anything to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq. All they care to do is disrupt."

Hagel, who was among those who advocated sending two to three times as many troops to Iraq when the war began in March 2003, said a stronger military presence by the U.S. is not the solution today.

"We're past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," Hagel said. "The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

Allen said that unlike the communist-guided North Vietnamese who fought the U.S., the insurgents in Iraq have no guiding political philosophy or organization. Still, Hagel argued, the similarities are growing.

"What I think the White House does not yet understand - and some of my colleagues - the dam has broke on this policy," Hagel said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities (to Vietnam) are going to come together."

The Army's top general, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that the Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq - well over 100,000 - for four more years as part of preparations for a worst-case scenario.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said U.S. security is tied to success in Iraq, and he counseled people to be patient.

"The worst-case scenario is not staying four years. The worst-case scenario is leaving a dysfunctional, repressive government behind that becomes part of the problem in the war on terror and not the solution," Graham said on "Fox News Sunday.

Allen said the military would be strained at such levels in four years yet could handle that difficult assignment. Hagel described the Army contingency plan as "complete folly."

"I don't know where he's going to get these troops," Hagel said. "There won't be any National Guard left ... no Army Reserve left ... there is no way America is going to have 100,000 troops in Iraq, nor should it, in four years."

Hagel added: "It would bog us down, it would further destabilize the Middle East, it would give Iran more influence, it would hurt Israel, it would put our allies over there in Saudi Arabia and Jordan in a terrible position. It won't be four years. We need to be out."

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said the U.S. is winning in Iraq but has "a way to go" before it meets its goals there. Meanwhile, more needs to be done to lay out the strategy, Lott said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I do think we, the president, all of us need to do a better job, do more," Lott said, by telling people "why we have made this commitment, what is being done now, what we do expect in the process and, yes, why it's going to take more time."

CRAWFORD, United States - US President George W. Bush, besieged at his ranch by relatives of US soldiers killed in Iraq, launched a five-day campaign to defend the war to an increasingly skeptical US public.

In his weekly radio address from his Prairie Chapel property, Bush said that the war would help avert another attack like the September 11 terrorist strikes and that the best way to honor fallen US troops was to defeat global terrorism.

"We must finish the task that our troops have given their lives for and honor their sacrifice by completing their mission," said Bush, whose approval ratings have slipped to some of the lowest levels of his presidency.

More than 1,800 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq and thousands more wounded in a conflict with a price tag in the tens of billions of dollars.

A recent poll found that a majority of Americans -- 57 percent -- believe that the war has made the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, despite Bush's frequent arguments that the conflict has made them safer.

US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan "know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war, and they know we will prevail," he said. [...]

Comment: Perhaps Bush is giving a little hint of what is to come in the US? Another terrorist event in America would be an easy way to erase any dissent regarding the war on Iraq...

Bush was to travel to Utah on Monday to address a major veterans group, and head to Idaho Wednesday to speak with members of the Idaho National Guard, as well as praise forces who played a key role in the Afghanistan campaign.

The president said he would commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of fighting in the Pacific theater of World War Two -- a conflict he frequently compares to the war on terrorism.

In his radio remarks, Bush noted that the four-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes was coming up and said he would be marking that event and thanking US soldiers he said were "on the front lines."

He did not mention efforts by Iraqi political leaders to craft a constitution, or their failure to nail down a charter by last Monday's deadline.

"Like previous wars we have waged to protect our freedom, the war on terror requires great sacrifice from Americans," especially those serving in the armed forces, said Bush.

"In this war, many of these brave men and women have given their lives to defend their fellow citizens and to bring the hope of freedom to millions who have not known it. We owe these fallen heroes our gratitude, and we offer their families our heartfelt condolences and prayers."

Faced with increasing pressure to say when US troops will come home, Bush has rejected setting a precise timetable, saying that training fledgling Iraqi security forces is a prerequisite for leaving.

Bush argued for invading Iraq because dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- but none have been found, and US investigators have declared the pre-war intelligence "dead wrong."

(AP) - A Utah television station is refusing to air an anti-war ad featuring Cindy Sheehan, whose son's death in Iraq prompted a vigil outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch.

Also, a patriotic camp with a "God Bless Our President!" banner sprung up in downtown Crawford, Texas Saturday, countering the anti-war demonstration started by Sheehan. The camp is named "Fort Qualls," in memory of Marine Lance Cpl. Louis Wayne Qualls, 20, who died in Iraq last fall.

The anti-war ad began airing on other Salt Lake City-area stations Saturday, two days before Bush was scheduled to speak in Salt Lake City to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

However, a national sales representative for KTVX, a local ABC affiliate, rejected the ad in an e-mail to media buyers, writing that it was an "inappropriate commercial advertisement for Salt Lake City."

In the ad, Sheehan pleads with Bush for a meeting and accuses him of lying to the American people about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction and its connection to al Qaeda.

"I love my country. But how many more of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war?" a weary-looking Sheehan asks in the ad. "I know you can't bring Casey back. But it's time to admit mistakes and bring our troops home now." The ads were bought by Gold Star Families for Peace, co-founded by Sheehan.

Salt Lake City affiliates of NBC, CBS and Fox began running the ad Saturday.

In a statement Saturday evening explaining its decision, KTVX said that after viewing the ad, local managers found the content "could very well be offensive to our community in Utah, which has contributed more than its fair share of fighting soldiers and suffered significant loss of life in the this Iraq war."

Bush carried nearly 70 percent of the vote last fall in Utah, one of the most conservative states north of the so-called Bible Belt.

Station General Manager David D'Antuono said the decision was not influenced by the station's owner, Clear Channel Communications Inc.

Celeste Zappala, who with Sheehan co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace, said she was puzzled by the decision.

"What stunned me was that it was inappropriate to hear this message," she said. "How is it that Salt Lake City should hear no questions about the war?"

The e-mail read: "The viewpoints reflected in the spot are incompatible with our marketplace and will not be well received by our viewers." It added that the spot didn't qualify as an issue advertisement.

For the ad to have been considered an "issue" advertisement a ballot measure would have had to be at stake, D'Antuono said.

Mark Wiest, vice president of sales for NBC-affiliated KSL television, said that in the interest of freedom of speech, his station didn't hesitate to run the ad. KSL is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"The bigger picture is, by suppressing the message are we doing what is right under the First Amendment and in an open democratic society?" Wiest said.

Salt Lake City's Mayor Rocky Anderson used e-mail this week to call for "the biggest demonstration this state has ever seen," when President Bush appears at the convention Monday.

Anderson says Bush policies are disastrous for the country and that to stay quiet during the president's visit would be send a message of apathy.

The mayor's e-mail called for a collaboration of health care advocates, seniors, gay and lesbian advocates, anti-Patriot advocates, civil libertarians and anti-war folks to protest outside the VFW convention.

Mike Parkin, senior vice commander of a VFW post in Salt Lake City, says the move makes Anderson look unpatriotic.

Comment: Yup, those darn Americans who dare to question the president and pay attention to the pesky facts are branded "unpatriotic". Never mind that America prides itself on an alleged freedom of speech...

The Vietnam vet, who says he voted for Anderson, but won't again, says the protest will offend veterans and embolden enemies of the U.S.

In Crawford, Gary Qualls, the father of a slain soldier, explained his reasons for supporting the pro-war camp. "If I have to sacrifice my whole family for the sake of our country and world, other countries that want freedom, I'll do that," said Qualls, who is friends with the local business owner who started the camp. He said his 16-year-old son now wants to enlist, and he supports that decision.

Qualls' frustration with the anti-war demonstrators erupted last week when he removed a cross bearing his son's name that was among hundreds the group had put up along the road to Bush's ranch.

Qualls called the protesters' views disrespectful to soldiers, and said he had to yank out two more crosses after protesters kept replacing them.

As Gary Hart points out there is indeed a rich history of protest in America. From our Founding Fathers to abolitionists to suffragettes to labor strikers to civil rights marchers, protesters have repeatedly challenged the status quo and changed our society for the better.

So why are the mainstream media having such a hard time covering Cindy Sheehan?

It's as if the simple, direct, and starkly emotional nature of her stance is too raw for them to handle in any of the standard ways. So they've taken to treating her with a strange mix of detachment, condescension, distortion, and aggression.

Paula Zahn referred to her as "this woman." Edmund Morris alluded to her in the New York Times as an "emotional predator." And Dana Milbank wanted to "determine, once and for all, whether Cindy Sheehan is Rosa Parks or Lyndon Larouche."

It's one thing for the O'Reillys and the Limbaughs to spew anti-Cindy venom. The problem arises when, under the pretense of offering both sides, MSM figures regurgitate the GOP attack machine's most contemptible hits ("she's a puppet," "she's anti-Israel," "her own family is against her") as if there are always two legitimate sides to every story. I wonder if the civil rights protests were happening today, who at the cable shows would feel compelled to give equal time to the John Birch Society?

And what to make of the attempt to paint the nascent anti-war movement as a "special interest group." Leaving aside the fact that Sheehan is clearly nobody's pawn and has been raising her voice in protest long before Fenton and MoveOn and Ben Cohen arrived on the scene to lend their support, the use of the term "special interest" is blatantly misleading. Thinking that the war is a lousy idea -- as a majority of Americans now do -- does not qualify one as a "special interest group."

So you can imagine what a pleasure it was watching Keith Olbermann this week, who, instead of offering a "balanced," "on the one hand, on the other hand" look at Sheehan, named Limbaugh "today's worst person in the world" for his despicable Sheehan attack, saying "I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics."

And it's about time we put an end to the absurd double standard wherein a private citizen, staging a courageous and selfless protest, has every word she's ever uttered dug up and scrutinized more closely than some residual DNA on CSI while public officials making life and death decisions are allowed to say the most ludicrous things without being held accountable.

So Cindy might have used the "f-word" when talking about the administration that sent her son to die in Iraq. Big f*cking deal. Is it really worthy of a banner headline on Drudge or cackley chatter on right wing blogs?

Certainly not while Don Rumsfeld's ludicrous comparisons between Japanese kamikaze pilots and Iraqi insurgents go unchallenged.

It's truly amazing: the MSM want to hold Sheehan's feet to the fire on statements she's denied making about Israel while allowing Dick "last throes" Cheney, Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice, George "slam dunk" Tenet, Alberto "quaint" Gonzalez, and George "Mission Accomplished" Bush a free pass.

Now that Sheehan has had to interrupt her vigil due to her mother's stroke, the media should take the opportunity to look in the mirror and reassess their handling of her story. Because while Sheehan's Crawford protest has been interrupted, the public's outcry against the president's war in Iraq has only just begun.

A Jewish group has filed a complaint to the University of Ottawa against one of its professors after the discovery of content on his website that blames Jews for the terrorist attacks on the United States, and claims the numbers who died at Auschwitz are exaggerated.

The website, www.globalresearch.ca, also reprints articles from other writers that accuse Jews of controlling the U.S. media and masterminding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other postings suggest Israel, the U.S. and Britain are the real perpetrators of the recent attacks on London.

The site, which is not hosted by the university, is run by Michel Chossudovsky, a controversial left-leaning economist, and came to the attention of B'nai Brith Canada after public complaints to the advocacy group and the Citizen.

"The material on the site is full of wild conspiracy theories that go so far as to accuse Israel, America and Britain of being behind the recent terrorist bombings in London," said Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada. "They echo the age-old anti-Semitic expressions that abound in the Arab world, which blame the Jews for everything from 9/11 to the more recent tsunami disaster."

The organization singles out a discussion forum, moderated by Mr. Chossudovsky, that features a subject heading called "Some Articles On The Truth of the Holocaust." The messages have titles such as "Jewish Lies of Omission (about the 'Holocaust')," "Jewish Hate Responsible For Largest Mass Killing at Dachau," and "Did Jews Frame the Arabs for 9/11?"

Another posting suggests the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz during the Second World War is inflated.

None of the postings is written by Mr. Chossudovsky himself.

Under Canadian law, website owners can be liable for material they knowingly post, even if they haven't produced it themselves.

"I know this isn't his own writing, but he's certainly got a responsibility for the website, which, I checked, is registered in his name," said Anita Bromberg, B'nai Brith's legal counsel and human rights co-ordinator.

The site identifies Mr. Chossudovsky as the director of the Centre for Research on Globalization and editor of globalresearch.ca. His wife, Micheline Ladouceur, is listed as associate editor. They manage the site out of Montreal.

The site does not mention Mr. Chossudovsky's position at the university, nor does his website at the U of O refer to globalresearch.ca. However, an Internet search of Mr. Chossudovsky's name shows he is listed as an adviser for a Swedish-based group called the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. Its website contains a biography of Mr. Chossudovsky, his contact information at the U of O and a link to globalresearch.ca.

When reached in South Korea, where he is on a research trip, Mr. Chossudovsky said the offending messages were removed from the forum after he was made aware of them by the Citizen.

But as of late yesterday, some of the postings remain on the site. A discussion thread about 9/11, contained a message that casts doubt on the Auschwitz death count. Other postings under a forum on globalization have titles such as "The Hilarious Auschwitz Story" and "The HolyCo$t Lie is Finished."

Mr. Chossudovsky indicated that despite monitoring the forum "periodically," he did not know about the inflammatory messages, even though they had been posted since March. He added that while he has received complaints before about offensive content on the site, the volume of messages on the forum makes it difficult for him to control what is posted.

"We don't choose the articles that go up, and when we see that there are texts which are racist or hateful, we do, to the best of our abilities, try to remove them."

Mr. Chossudovsky described himself as being of Jewish descent, and said he has relatives who were Holocaust victims. "I'm the first person to withdraw any kind of hate material directed against the Jewish people."

He went on to defend the reprinted articles that have also sparked complaints, saying they are legitimate commentary representing views that are "anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic."

"It's an analysis of Israeli policy which we don't support," said Mr. Chossudovsky, an antiwar commentator and an outspoken critic of U.S. and Israeli policies.

He also noted the site contains a disclaimer saying the articles posted don't necessarily reflect his views as editor.

Jewish students at the University of Ottawa said they have so far received no complaints about the site, but maintain Mr. Chossudovsky has not gone far enough to ensure the website is free of material they consider offensive.

"As an organizer of the site, especially if he is of Jewish descent and his family has gone through the atrocities of the Holocaust, he should take a more active interest in what is posted and published on the site," said Nicole Advocat, an executive member of the university's Jewish Students Association.

Ms. Advocat, a second-year international relations major, worries other students will stumble on to the site.

"Students will come here looking for research information on the topic of globalization. I know as a globalization student, I'm often looking for different sites that can help me find articles and relevant information. And for students who aren't educated about the Holocaust, they could look at this information and say, 'This is the truth.' "

Ms. Bromberg said despite Mr. Chossudovsky's efforts to distance the website from the university, there is a chance students could happen upon it.

"The bottom line is, he is a professor at a leading university, which gives him credibility. ... It worries me what students, who may be very ill-equipped, face. He has an obligation as a professor towards the young minds he teaches."

B'nai Brith is monitoring the website closely, and putting pressure on the U of O to act. "His connection with the university might put some responsibility on the university to hold him to a certain standard of acceptable civil discourse," said Ms. Bromberg.

A U of O spokesman said the university has not yet received a complaint from B'nai Brith, and is not prepared to intervene. "Until we're approached, it's something that we just don't see a role for us to be involved in," said Bob LeDrew.

A specialist in globalization and the economics of developing countries, Mr. Chossudovsky, 59, has a reputation for producing radical critiques often out of step with the views of his colleagues.

Since 1968, when he left his native Switzerland to take a position at the U of O, Mr. Chossudovsky has produced research that keeps him on the margins of mainstream academia, but wins praise from anti-establishment intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky.

While he is rarely quoted in mainstream academic journals, Mr. Chossudovsky is a popular figure among anti-globalization activists, and is widely quoted in newspapers. He writes regularly for the French-language monthly Le Monde diplomatique, and his books, published by a small printing house in Britain, have been translated into 11 languages.

Students who take his courses rave about his unorthodox views, going so far as to dub him "Canada's Chomsky."

More recently, Mr. Chossudovsky's research has turned his attention to terrorism. He has written articles accusing the U.S. of plotting to conquer the world with Britain and Israel, and suggesting Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset.

A forthcoming book entitled America's "War on Terrorism" In the Wake of 9/11 is described on globalresearch.ca as an expose that "blows away the smokescreen, put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an 'intelligence failure.' "

But even sympathetic colleagues familiar with his work admit they are uncomfortable with many of his ideas.

"Among people who work on terrorism, there certainly is not much that resembles his work," said Michael Dartnell, a political scientist at York University. "The thing that disturbs me about what he's doing is there is a conspiratorial element to it. And I can't prove or disprove it."

Nonetheless, added Mr. Dartnell, Mr. Chossudovsky's ideas reflect a public sentiment that is suspicious of the motives of government.

"He wants, probably for very sincere reasons, to formulate a substantive critique of what the U.S. government is doing. I'm just not really clear that he's successful in doing that."

Australian soldiers will undergo extreme training, including being threatened with dogs, to prepare them for the possibility of capture and torture.

Members of the elite Special Air Service (SAS) will be blindfolded, stripped naked and threatened with dogs for up to three hours as part of training exercises approved at the highest level of government, The Weekend Australian reported.

Defence Minister Robert Hill had authorised interrogators to use threats of physical and sexual abuse during the simulated training sessions, the newspaper said.

"When approved by the exercise director, working military dogs that are muzzled and short-leashed may be used during advanced RTI (resistance to interrogation) training, in the presence of RTI trainees (including naked trainees), in order to create realism," Hill said.

"In no circumstances are RTI trainees kept naked for a period longer than three hours in aggregate during the RTI exercise," Hill said in a written response to a question from parliament, according to the paper.

The training upgrade, the first since 2001, is in response to the threat of enemies who will not respect the Geneva Conventions, the paper said.

Some 190 SAS soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan within a month, ahead of that country's parliamentary elections. More than 1,000 Australian military personnel are already serving in the Middle East, including in Iraq.

The use of dogs by the US military personnel against detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison provoked worldwide outrage.

TEHRAN: Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday denied fresh US allegations that the Islamic republic was linked to bombings in Iraq, and instead pointed the finger at US occupying forces.

"We support the government of Iraq. We are very disturbed by the lack of security in Iraq, especially the daily killings of the Iraqi people," Khamenei said in a sermon at Tehran University.

"American machine-guns are criminal, but those elements who plant bombs are also criminals," he added.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that US forces had found Iranian weapons inside Iraq on more than one occasion over the past couple of months, accusing Tehran of seeking to replicate its own Islamic regime in Iraq by backing insurgents.

But Khamenei said the US was behind the regular bombings, arguing that Washington needed a "pretext" to stay put in Iraq.

"For us, the prime suspect in these incidents is America, because terrorism in Iraq functions under the eyes of the US. Thousands of American forces are spread across Iraq and if they wanted to eradicate insecurity they could have," he said. "There are some signs which point to the spy services of the US and Zionist regime," he said.

MADRID - A contingent of Spanish soldiers left for Afghanistan on Monday to replace 17 troops who were killed when their helicopter went down in the west of the country last week, the defence ministry said, adding that the crash was still being treated as an accident.

A total of 22 troops flew out of the Torrejon de Ardoz base near Madrid and will replace both the 17 killed in the aircraft that crashed and the five who were injured when a second helicopter made a crash landing nearby.

The ministry also said that investigators were still leaning towards an accident as the cause of the disaster. The most likely hypothesis was that the helicopter, which was on maneouvres, was hit by a powerful gust of wind as it was flying at very low altitude, it said.

There had been unconfirmed reports that the helicopter, which crashed near the city of Herat, had been shot down. [...]

A group of up to 2,000 common dolphins has been spotted off the coast of west Wales.

Marine experts said it was "massively unusual" to see so many off the Pembrokeshire coast, and the reason remained a mystery.

Cliff Benson, who runs Sea Trust, the marine branch of the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, said it had been an incredible sight.

"It's fairly normal to see a hundred or so, but not thousands."

Mr Benson, who carries out regular survey work on cetaceans - dolphins, whales, and porpoises - was on his boat when he saw the dolphins approaching.

"It was like a volcanic eruption," he said. "There were dolphins of all ages - adults and mothers with their babies - and they were leaping out of the water.

"It's a mystery as to why there were so many. It could be because the waters are so rich in food, and that there aren't many predators.

"They could be coming here specifically to breed because the conditions are so right." [...]

Just days after the sighting of around 2,000 dolphins off the west Wales coast, a school of giant fin whales has been spotted fishing in the Irish sea.

The sighting by an Oxford University team was described as "unique" as they are normally on their own or in pairs.

Zoologist Dr Peter Evans said the sea "teeming with food" has put west Wales on the whale watching map.

"It was an experience of a lifetime. I see whales all around the world but this was really spectacular."

Steve Lewis whose safari company ran the trip, added: "These huge animals are normally seen singularly or in pairs.

"This is the biggest sighting of fin whales ever spotted in UK waters."

"The boat we were in was 35 feet long, and the biggest of the whales was bigger than that. It must have been 40ft plus.

"For the UK this a unique experience. There's no record of them being seen in these numbers before."

The fin whale is the second largest animal on the planet after the blue whale.

They are born at 21ft (6m) and can grow to be 85ft (26m) in the Antarctic. They weigh between 30-80 tonnes and at this time of year consume up to 35 grams of food for every kilogramme of body weight - every day.

Experts say it is that which holds the key to their arrival off the coast of west Wales.

Dr Evans, from the zoology department of Oxford University, leads the Sea Watch Foundation expeditions to Pembrokeshire.

Describing the Irish Sea as "teeming with food" this summer, he explained that it was large schools of mackerel and herring which are attracting the unusual numbers of larger visitors.

"Everywhere you look there are fish," he said.

"When we were out we were surrounded by thousands of sea birds, gannet and Manx shearwaters, all feeding in the same area."

The fin whales have been the third unusual marine sighting reported in West Wales in two weeks.

At the weekend a group of up to 2,000 common dolphins was spotted, which marine experts described as "massively unusual."

And last week two humpback whales were seen, 100 metres off the beach at Llangranog.

"We have seen unusual numbers of minke whale too," he said. "We often get one or two, but this week we've have seen up to 10.

"The increased wildlife may be because of changes in the currents off our coast," he added. "The reverse change is taking place in Scotland where the spawning grounds for sand eels and sprats are failing."

It is the sand eels that attract the mackerel and herring and the mackerel, herring and plankton that form the diet of the fin whales.

Anxious Kiwis are stockpiling the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to protect themselves against a lethal world bird flu epidemic which experts say is inevitable.

Doctors say many patients are collecting supplies of the drug for themselves and their families.

Auckland GP Dr Simon Cotton has ordered more than $2500-worth of Tamiflu - 40 packets - for himself, family, friends and colleagues.

He is convinced the epidemic will kill many New Zealanders.

"I don't think it's a question of if this will come, it's when. It could be tomorrow."

Little is known about how the virus will behave, but the Health Ministry says up to 35 per cent of New Zealanders - 1.4 million people - could be infected.

The disease has a 20 per cent mortality rate, so up to 280,000 could die.

The government has ordered 800,000 doses, enough to cover 20 per cent of the population. These will probably be used to treat health workers first.

Tamiflu works by stopping a flu virus from spreading and infecting other cells. It is unknown how effective it would be against the bird flu, which is now infecting Asian and Russian bird populations. Experts say it could mutate into a virulent strain easily spread among humans.

Tamiflu manufacturer Roche says prescriptions for the drug have increased about 500% in the last year on top of the government order.

Cotton said many GPs did not trust the Health Ministry to make government stocks available, so were ordering stocks themselves.

Most GPs would feel morally bound to look after their patients in an epidemic, despite the risk to themselves and their families.

Cotton said he was staggered by the lack of information for doctors on how to prepare for bird flu, or how the government was planning for the epidemic.

Britain's Department of Health is to send information packs to every GP practice with a 50-page guide on how to handle the possible epidemic and pamphlets for the public.

In Asia, doctors are worried that western countries will grab the lion's share of the drugs needed to fight a bird flu epidemic.

A Wellington mother said she asked her doctor for prescriptions for herself and her husband, her two children and her mother "as an insurance policy". She said that at about $85 for 10 tablets it had been expensive, but it was worth it for peace of mind.

Auckland GP Jonathan Simon knew several doctors and patients had asked for the drug.

Another world flu epidemic was inevitable, and most likely in a northern hemisphere winter - summer in New Zealand. [...]

The anti-viral needed to be taken every day during an epidemic, which was likely to come in up to five waves lasting six weeks each.

No country would have enough of the drug for its entire population, and the best weapon was isolation and containment.

The Health Ministry was working diligently to plan and prepare for pandemic control. "Tamiflu is not a saviour. Our biggest saviour is to try to delay this virus until we have a vaccine."

Cameron had not bought any Tamiflu, but had decided if the epidemic hit, he would keep away from his family.

"It's a nasty, nasty bug. The world will survive, we will survive, but there will be deaths. We have to make sure that we minimise the impact on this country."

Roche spokesman Stuart Knight the company had delivered half the Health Ministry's 800,000-dose order, and the rest would arrive by the end of the year.

LYON, France - A fire-fighting aircraft crashed Saturday as it was tackling a blaze in southeastern France, killing the two crew members on board, French officials said.

The accident was the latest of several this year involving aircraft battling forest fires in France.

The Grumman Tracker aircraft went down "on the edge of the fire" near Valgorge in the Ardeche region, where 15 hectares (37 acres) of forest were burning Saturday morning, officials said, as witnesses spoke of apparent engine trouble.

The victims were a 43-year-old trainee pilot, Albert Pouzoulet, and his 45-year-old instructor, Regis Huillier, who were married with two and three children respectively, said civil defence spokesman Major Eric Soupra.

It was not yet known which of the two men had been at the plane's controls, he said, adding that this would be up to investigators to determine.

Valgorge mayor Bernard Bonin quoted witnesses as saying they heard noises as if an engine was failing.

Another witness quoted by the regional authorities said the red and white plane appeared to have an engine problem after dropping its load of fire retardant on the blaze. [...]

Conditions were good despite some wind, he said.

Bonin alleged that the fire had been deliberately set. [...]

On August 1, the pilot and co-pilot of a Canadair plane died when the aircraft crashed on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. On July 19, a Tracker crashed in the southeastern Var region but the pilot escaped unhurt.

On August 14, a Dutch pilot for a private company died when his small plane hired by local authorities crashed into the sea just after dropping two loads of fire-retardant chemicals on a fire at an unauthorized gypsy camp near the Mediterranean town of Serignan.

The twin-engined Tracker, a Canadian-developed fire-fighting version of a US Navy carrier-borne anti-submarine aircraft, has been in service with the French civil defence for more than 20 years, according to the website of the squadron based at Marignane, near Marseille.

Although re-engined, the basic airframes, either Canadian or US-built, are some 50 years old, according to the site.

ROME (Reuters) - An earthquake shook Rome and nearby coastal towns on Monday, rattling buildings and sparking panic throughout the region, witnesses said.

The earthquake registered 4.4 on the Richter scale, a spokesman at Italy's Civil Protection unit said.

Italy's National Geographic Institute said the epicentre appeared to be under the sea bed southwest of Rome near the coastal town of Anzio.

"It felt very strong, my legs are still shaking," Valentina, an employee at Anzio city hall told Reuters. "We ran outside when it started so we still don't know the effects."

Residents and workers throughout Rome fled their homes and offices as buildings in the Italian capital shook for around five seconds shortly after 2 p.m. (1200 GMT).