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"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan |
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y |
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© Reuters
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Donald Hunt
November 28, 2005
Gold closed at $497.10 an ounce on Friday, up 2.2% from $486.40 at the previous week’s close. The dollar closed at 0.8547 euros, up 0.6% from 0.8495 the week before. The euro closed at 1.1700 dollars compared to $1.1772 at the end of the previous week. Gold in euros, then, would be 424.87 euros an ounce, up 2.8% from 413.18 euros the Friday before. Oil closed at $58.03 a barrel, up 1.4% from $57.21 at the end of the previous week. Oil in euros would be 49.60 a barrel, up 2.1% from 48.60 the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.57 up 0.8% from 8.50 at the end of the previous week. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.44%, down six basis points from 4.50 the Friday before. In U.S. stocks, the Dow closed at 10,931.62, up 1.5% from the previous week’s 10,766.33. The NASDAQ closed at 2,263.01, up 2.5% from 2,227.07 the Friday before.
The week ended strong for the U.S. economic numbers partly due to a strong gain in Friday-after-Thanksgiving retail sales over the same day last year:
Weekend Sales Jump 22% to $27.8 Billion, NRF Says
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. retail sales jumped 22 percent to $27.8 billion during the post-Thanksgiving weekend, as shoppers flocked to stores to buy electronics, clothing and books, the National Retail Federation said.
Shoppers spent an average $302.81, the Washington-based trade group said today in a statement. It said 145 million shoppers went to stores and the Internet, as retailers offered substantial discounts.
The statement followed positive reports from retailers as they offered giveaways and price cuts to generate the 6 percent holiday sales growth forecast by the NRF. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, said yesterday that November comparable-store sales at its U.S. outlets rose about 4.3 percent, helped by a strong start to the holiday shopping season.
"Even though many retailers saw strong sales this past weekend, companies will not be basking in their success," said Tracy Mullin, the NRF's chief executive. "Stores are already warming up for the next four weeks because the holiday season is far from over."
In a separate statement issued yesterday, Visa USA said retail spending on Visa credit and debit cards rose 12 percent on the Friday after Thanksgiving, led by purchases of electronics and computers. Research-company ShopperTrak RCT Corp. said sales on Black Friday were little changed from a record set a year earlier. The day after Thanksgiving got its name because it's when many retailers were said to become profitable for the year.
Consumers were shopping for a variety of merchandise, with the electronics category showing the largest year-over-year jump, the NRF said. About 37 percent of shoppers bought in that category, up from 33 percent a year ago, it said.
Once again, we see generally good short term numbers together with a frightening longer-term situation. Last week, for example, saw the announcement Monday of cutbacks at General Motors of some 30,000 employees. Coming on the heels of layoffs at Ford and the problems of Delphi Auto Parts, it is becoming clear that we are seeing more than just a cyclical downturn in U.S. auto manufacturing, we are seeing the complete restructuring of the economic landscape and of the whole social contract in the United States:
GM job cuts will devastate North American cities
By Joseph Kay and Barry Grey
23 November 2005
General Motors' plan to eliminate 30,000 hourly jobs by 2008, announced Monday in Detroit, will have devastating consequences for cities in the United States and Canada, and its ripple effects will hit working class communities throughout the two countries. The closure of twelve facilities will reduce the auto maker's manufacturing jobs in North America by nearly a third.
Taken together with hourly and salaried job cuts already announced this year by GM, Ford and the auto parts makers Delphi and Visteon, Monday's announcement brings the total of auto jobs targeted for destruction to 60,000, and this does not take into account the impact of Ford's downsizing plan, to be made public in January. The number two US auto maker has made clear that it intends to eliminate thousands of jobs and permanently close a number of factories.
Since 2000, more than 100,000 hourly and salaried automotive jobs have been eliminated in the US. The latest GM cuts are part of a longer-term trend in which corporations have wiped out jobs that once provided a relatively stable livelihood for manufacturing workers. Through major struggles in the 1930s and into the post-war period, workers were able to win concessions in pay and benefits. This was particularly the case in the auto industry.
For the past quarter century, beginning with the Chrysler bailout of 1979-80, the auto companies have been downsizing their work forces, closing plants, and using the prospect of unemployment as a club to impose wage concessions and chip away at health and pension benefits, as well as previously established improvements in working conditions.
They have been assisted by the United Auto Workers union, which has collaborated in the destruction of jobs and the undermining of wages and benefits in order to boost the competitiveness of the US auto companies against their European and Asian rivals.
This process has reached a new stage, marked by the decision of Delphi, which was spun off by General Motors in 1999 and remains GM's main parts supplier, to file for bankruptcy protection and demand pay cuts of 60 percent. The company is also demanding sweeping cuts in health benefits and pensions, and plans to eliminate 24,000 - or nearly two thirds - of its US hourly work force.
...The measures announced on Monday will be only the beginning for GM workers. On Tuesday, the company's stock fell for the second straight day, as analysts on Wall Street made clear that the cuts would not be sufficient to satisfy banks and investors.
Ron Tadross of Bank of America continued to give GM stock a "sell" rating, saying he still anticipated the company to end up in bankruptcy. John Casesa of Merrill Lynch said, "It will likely get worse before it gets better. We believe GM's announced restructuring plan is only the first step in the long process."
The downsizing of the US auto industry has already produced socially catastrophic consequences in parts of the country, particularly in Michigan, the historical center of automobile production. The Detroit Free Press on Tuesday cited an astonishing statistic, noting that, according to US census data, "Michigan's median household income has fallen by $9,914 - 19 percent - between 1999 and 2004, more than any other state."
This figure crystallizes a historic decline in working class living standards - one that precedes the impact of the new and more drastic assault on jobs and wages.
Giving a sense of the mood among GM workers in the region, the newspaper quoted Robert Paulk, an hourly worker at the Tech Center in Warren, Michigan, who said, "There are a lot of people that are really mad. They think this is the thing that revolutions are made of."
...The city of Flint is slated to lose over 700 jobs with the shutdown of the Flint North engine line in 2008. The Flint North complex once employed 20,000 workers, including the Buick City complex that closed in 1999. The number of active GM workers in the city has declined from a peak of over 80,000 to just a few thousand today.
Flint will also be hit by Delphi's plans to close its Flint East plant, which employs 3,400 people. The company has already shut down production at its Flint West plant.
Once known as "Vehicle City," Flint has become a ghost of its former self. Over a quarter of the population, including nearly 38 percent of children under 18, live below the poverty line. The official unemployment rate stands at 12 percent. Both of these figures - comparable to those found in Detroit - understate the devastation that has overcome the city in the past two decades.
Another Michigan city to be hit by the plant closings is Lansing. The Lansing Metal Centre, which employs 1,360, is slotted to be shut down by 2007, and the Lansing Craft Centre, which employs 450 workers, will close by 2007. Nearly 3,000 jobs were eliminated when the Lansing Car Assembly plant was shut down last year.
Also in the Midwest, GM is planning on eliminating the third shift at its SUV plant in Moraine, Ohio in 2006, a move that is expected to cost 1,000 jobs.
Thousands of jobs will be lost in southeastern Ontario, Canada. GM announced that it will close its Oshawa No. 2 plant by 2008, eliminating 2,500 jobs. It will also eliminate a shift at its No.1 plant, leading to a loss of an additional 1,000 jobs. About 140 jobs will be lost with the shutdown of a parts plant in St. Catharines, Ontario.
An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Tuesday noted that the entire economy of the region will suffer. "About half of Canada's critical auto parts industry lies exposed to the shock waves emanating from the planned closing," the newspaper reported. According to the article, GM contracts are responsible for half of the 100,000 jobs in the Canadian auto parts industry. An estimated 12,000 jobs in the parts industry may be eliminated as a result of the job cuts at GM.
The economic impact will extend beyond these parts jobs to wider sections of the economy. "Jan Myers, chief economist for Canadian Manufactures & Exporters," the Globe and Mail reported, "estimates that about nine jobs are created directly in Canada for every auto assembly position. That means the sector generates about 20 to 25 per cent of the total jobs in Canadian manufacturing."
Outside of the US Midwest and Canada, several major plants will be closed in southern states. GM will sharply scale back production at its Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, resulting in some 1,500 job losses. Over 2,500 jobs will be eliminated in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma when a plant there is closed in 2006. And 3,000 workers will lose their jobs in Doraville, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.
Furthermore, it is hard to get too excited about retail sales numbers in the United States when you think about where the money is coming from: unsustainable debt from an inflated real estate market. Here's Peter Schiff on the housing bubble:
Contributing to the housing mania is the artificial boost to consumer spending (80% U.S. GDP,) the bubble itself has produced. This acts as a self-perpetuating, "virtuous" circle where increased consumer spending drives housing prices higher, which in turn provides the impetus for still more consumer spending. Through the wealth effect, growing home equity both increases the willingness of homeowners to spend while reducing their perceived need to save. The bubble mentality is "why save when my house is doing it for me." In the past being a homeowner increased the need to save, as inherent in homeownership are costly repairs. Today homebuyers not only do not need any savings to buy a house, they no longer need any to maintain one either. Is it any wonder that our national savings rate is negative, homeownerships so wide-spread, and real estate prices are so high?
The impetus to spend is not simply the result of a state of mind. The ability to cash out equity enables homeowners to convert paper appreciation into real purchasing power. However, since this extra purchasing power was not derived from legitimate increases in American productivity, the result has been a massive, unsustainable, and completely unprecedented rise in our nation's trade deficit.
In addition, lower interest rates, and the proliferation of adjustable rate mortgages, have allowed homeowners to temporarily suppress mortgage payments, freeing up additional income for discretionary spending. This temporary boost to consumer spending has been a "shot in the arm" to the economy, increasing employment, incomes, housing demand and home prices, enabling additional cash-out refinancing, and thus perpetuating the cycle.
In Europe, on the other hand, consumer spending has begun to fall, as European consumers seem to still have some grasp of reality:
Consumers set to spend less across Europe
By Elizabeth Rigby in London and Ralph Atkins in Frankfurt
November 22 2005
Signs of a squeeze on Europe's consumers increased on Tuesday as France and Germany reported slowdowns in household spending and a consultancy said retailers faced difficult trading this Christmas.
The figures highlight the fragility of the recent pick-up in economic activity in the 12-nation eurozone and will sharpen concern over the likely impact of the European Central Bank's signalled interest rate rise.
The bad news for retailers comes in a report from Deloitte, the business advisory firm, which said spending on gifts was expected to dip by an average 3 per cent year-on-year across nine European countries. In Germany spending on gifts was projected to tumble 9 per cent. Of the nine countries surveyed, only in Ireland and Spain are shoppers expected to increase spending on presents.
Gilles Goldenberg, partner at Deloitte, said: "Spending was growing year-on-year until 2003 but since then there has been a change which seems to be turning into a trend. European consumers were told that 2005 would be a good . . . they were sold a recovery that has not taken place. The anticipation for 2006 is gloomy and spending power is perceived to be reduced."
Mr Goldenberg said Europeans were anticipating a drop in disposable incomes on the back of low wage increases and rising household costs, echoing comments last week by Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. He said spending in the UK was being squeezed by higher taxes and the cost of "boring" items such as petrol and mortgages.
In France household spending on manufactured goods fell 0.6 per cent in October against a 0.3 per cent fall the previous month, although overall the three months to September had seen robust growth.
In Germany household consumption fell by 0.2 per cent in the three months to September, the third consecutive quarterly contraction. Erik Nielsen at Goldman Sachs, said: "While companies are cash-rich and boosting profits, real incomes have not seen much improvement and have been hit by higher oil prices. The recovery is really fragile and I can't really see it taking root across the eurozone without private consumption."
The European Central Bank's decision to press ahead with a rate increase next month was indicated by Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB president, last week.
The move prompted speculation that he had been bounced into exerting his authority by signs of disagreement among members of its 18-strong governing council.
Jean-Marc Lucas at BNP Paribas, said French consumption was expected to slow in the fourth quarter. He said that with no sign of an improvement in wages, spending patterns would depend, crucially, on whether consumers used savings instead.
Deloitte's survey, which covered 7,000 consumers, said 49 per cent of Europeans believed their economies were in recession.
The contrast in consumer psychology between the United States and Europe couldn't be clearer. Europeans see low wage increases, troubling political storms on the horizon with the French riots, and real danger of a world war breaking out in the Middle East, and they cut back on spending a bit. Maybe they begin to think about using their savings. But Europeans have maintained social memory about real and complete devastation in the twentieth century and have felt an anxious need to save even during good times. United States consumers see widespread wage cuts and the massive export of middle-class jobs yet they are able to increase spending. In the United States, we have gone through our savings a long time ago and have been borrowing on our inflated houses to maintain consumer spending. Oddly enough, this spending in the United States may no longer be based on optimism but on fatalism. Polls have shown that most in the United States think the economy is getting worse and the country is on the wrong track. Why not enjoy things while we can, seems to be the attitude. Fear and uncertainty seem to make Europeans save and North Americans spend. As we saw last week, though, the plans made for the majority of the people on both continents by the elite seem to be the same: serfs in a new, high-tech capitalist feudalism.
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FOXNews
Friday, November 25, 2005
NEW YORK (Reuters) — With the price of gold inching toward $500 an ounce for the first time in 18 years, investors might be in a quandary: whether to buy gold bullion or shares in gold mining companies.
"We have done better owning gold than shares," said Jay Taylor, publisher of an industry newsletter, J Taylor's Gold & Technology Stocks.
"In the '70s there were dramatic profit margins — a 10 percent move in the gold price would result in maybe 30 percent increase in share price," he said. "If anything, it's gone the other way and now there are shrinking margins."
However, Peter Spina, who operates goldseek.com, a gold industry Web site, said more investors appear to be getting into gold shares, attracted more by profits than the security that often comes with owning the precious metal.
"The Newmonts and Freeports will always attract institutional funds, the big money," he said. "Traditionally, stocks have led the gold price by three to six months. But recently we are seeing more investment capital entering the market."
Shares in the so-called seniors — the big companies that mine gold — are at or near year highs. But there were mixed results in the third quarter as spiraling costs, especially for energy, nibbled at profits.
Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp. (NEM), the world's biggest gold producer, reported a drop in profit, citing not only high energy costs but also a shortage of miners and environmental protests in Peru that delayed exploration.
And Placer Dome Inc. (PDG), Canada's No. 2 gold producer, said it was hurt by higher energy costs and a loss on hedging against metal price fluctuations.
But Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX) saw third-quarter profit more than triple, and Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. reported higher profit and forecast fourth-quarter gold sales would more than double.
Newmont stock is trading at roughly 55 times estimated 2006 earnings — above the sector average of 53. Barrick is at 51.5 and Placer Dome at 81, according to Reuters data. On Wednesday, Placer Dome rejected an unsolicited $9.2 billion takeover bid from Barrick.
Gold closed at $495.70/496.40 in London on Friday after hitting a fresh 18-year high of $496.75. U.S. gold markets were closed Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Asked if a rise in the gold price automatically attracted more stock investment, Taylor was skeptical. "It's not been the case in the last six months as energy costs have gone up faster than the gold price. If there is a pullback in energy costs, then I would be more optimistic."
He said bullion and gold share investors were two distinct groups. "The bullion guys are very sophisticated ... and American investors are clueless with respect to gold."
Frank Holmes, chairman and chief executive of U.S. Global Investors, which holds mining and gold company stocks, is bullish on mining company equities.
"The gold market is in deficit, demand is greater than supply from the mines," he said. "It takes time to explore and develop mines, which would account for the takeovers in the industry. There is a scramble for assets now."
In the short term, he sees a correction, with gold maybe passing through $500, then dropping back. "The real test will be if it goes through $520-$525, in which case it probably runs up to $650," Holmes said. "We're in a bull market for commodities, about one quarter the way through a 20-year cycle."
Taylor agreed that gold is in a bull market. Asked whether he would choose to invest in physical gold or gold company stocks, he said, "I would want some bullion for its pure wealth as it retains its value and is a means of liquidity."
"On stocks, if costs are not rising faster than the gold price, then you should start to see wider profit margins."
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By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press
Mon Nov 28, 3:09 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Many of America's inner cities continue to hemorrhage jobs despite years of federal programs designed to improve their economies.
Nearly half of the country's 82 largest municipalities lost jobs from 1995 to 2003, according to a new Harvard University study. By comparison, only one of the surrounding metropolitan areas lost jobs during the same period.
A separate analysis by The Associated Press found that most inner cities targeted by the federal government's primary urban economic programs lost jobs as well.
In fact, the best-performing cities were not part of the federal empowerment zone and renewal community programs, which provide businesses with billions of dollars in tax incentives to expand and hire workers.
"It's sobering," said Michael Porter, a Harvard business professor who did the study for the university's Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. "It suggests that there are relatively few inner cities that are thriving in the sense of job growth."
Porter and his team analyzed how many jobs were added or lost in inner cities with more than 50,000 residents. They found that only 10 added jobs at a higher rate than surrounding metropolitan areas. All 40 inner cities that lost jobs did so faster than surrounding areas.
Among the best performing: Jersey City, N.J.; Long Beach, Calif.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Anaheim, Calif. Among the worst: Detroit; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Rochester, N.Y.; and Miami.
Thirty-two of the inner cities studied also had neighborhoods that were designated federal urban empowerment zones or urban renewal communities.
Of those, 12 showed an increase in jobs from 1995 to 2003. Only one, Mobile, Ala., added jobs at a higher rate than the surrounding metropolitan area.
"Whatever these programs were, the research and the experience suggests that their impact was marginal at best," said Alan Berube, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.
Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said many businesses and communities have benefited from the programs. He said HUD is trying to better promote the tax incentives, especially among small-business owners.
But, Sullivan said, many communities could do more to remove local barriers to development, such as cumbersome regulations.
"We're not trying to preach to people that you are over-regulating," he said. "But it is true that in some parts of the country the regulatory climate puts out the unwelcome mat."
Examples?
"Take your pick," Sullivan said. "I don't want to point fingers."
Economic development experts agree that tax incentives alone will not revive urban areas with chronically depressed economies.
The cities should improve services and schools, build affordable housing and enact reasonable business regulations, Harvard's Porter said.
"There's no silver bullet," he said. "To get it right you've got to work on the fundamentals."
The Clinton administration launched the urban empowerment zone initiative in 1994, designating six zones, in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Baltimore.
Each was awarded $100 million for a host of programs, including job training, social services and tax incentives for businesses. Fifteen more empowerment zones were designated in 1998, each receiving about $25 million.
A HUD-commissioned assessment of the first empowerment zones found mixed results from 1995 to 2000. Although many individual projects were creating jobs and reviving neighborhoods, the study found no widespread, sustained job creation.
"There is little evidence to indicate that major reform or 'reinvention' occurred," the assessment said.
After President Bush took office in 2001, grants were phased out in favor of tax incentives.
"You can give somebody a one-time grant, but if you can cut their taxes each and every year, that's serious coin, potentially," HUD's Sullivan said.
Today, there are 59 federally designated urban empowerment zones and renewal communities, from Boston to Cleveland to San Antonio and Los Angeles.
But HUD said it has not compiled the necessary data for a comprehensive review.
The department announced in 2002 that businesses in those zones were eligible for an estimated $17 billion in federal tax incentives through 2009. But it is unable to say how many companies are taking advantage of the incentives — or how much money they are saving.
One tax credit, for hiring workers who live in empowerment zones and renewal communities, generated $207 million in credits in 2002, according to the
Internal Revenue Service.
Sullivan said HUD is working with the IRS to generate more data on the tax incentives.
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AP
Nov 28 8:04 AM US/Eastern
BERLIN - EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini warned Monday any EU nation found to have operated secret CIA prisons could have their EU voting rights suspended.
"I would be obliged to propose to the Council (of EU Ministers) serious consequences, including the suspension of voting rights in the Council," Frattini said at a counter-terrorism conference.
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By Mark Trevelyan
Reuters Security Correspondent
Sun Nov 27, 8:30 AM ET
BERLIN - A wave of investigations into whether the CIA broke laws and violated human rights while using Europe as a hub for secret transfers of terrorist suspects poses awkward questions for both European governments and Washington.
Pressure has grown on all sides in the past week to explain dozens of flights criss-crossing the continent by CIA planes, some suspected of delivering prisoners to jails in third countries where they may have been mistreated or tortured.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, preparing this week for his first trip to Washington since taking office, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper the reports gave "grounds for concern."
The European Union and at least eight member states said last week they were seeking answers from the United States over the use of bases on the continent for such secret transfers, known as "renditions."
The Council of Europe, a leading human rights watchdog, set governments a three-month deadline to reveal what they know about the mystery flights and about a Washington Post report saying the CIA ran secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
A European diplomat specializing in security issues said there had certainly been cases where European airports had been used as staging posts during renditions. "The question is how many, and where to, and under what circumstances?"
LOSE-LOSE
The diplomat said governments were in a lose-lose situation.
If they acknowledged they knew of such transfers at the time, they would face a political outcry.
But if they said they knew nothing about what was happening on their own soil, they would appear ineffectual and come under strong pressure to tighten controls over use of their airports and bases by the United States, or even to deny U.S. access.
Governments in Europe and beyond are coming under increasing pressure. Canadian opposition legislators accused the government on Friday of trying to hide the fact that planes used by the CIA to transport prisoners for interrogation had landed at Canadian airports.
In Germany, a report by the Berliner Zeitung newspaper last week said 85 CIA flights had taken off or landed at the U.S. Rhein-Main air base in Frankfurt between 2002 and 2004. Baghdad, Kabul and the Jordanian capital Amman were among the most frequent points of origin and destination.
But a flurry of similar reports, while unearthing more and more flights, did not establish whether they had prisoners on board or were simply carrying CIA personnel and equipment.
The United States has acknowledged using renditions to help in its declared war on terrorism but denies charges by human rights groups that delivering suspects for interrogation in third countries amounts to "outsourcing torture."
In the most advanced investigation to date, Italian prosecutors this month requested the extradition of 22 U.S. citizens, suspected of being CIA operatives, who are charged with snatching an Egyptian man on the streets of Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he later said he was tortured.
German prosecutor Eberhard Bayer is investigating the same case because the man was first flown from Milan to Ramstein airbase in Germany.
But his probe into "deprivation of freedom and coercion" is so far directed against unknown persons because he does not know which, if any, of the 22 Americans identified by Italy took part in any crime on German soil.
"I can only conduct an investigation against people I can prove got out in Ramstein and transferred the kidnapped person onto another plane," said Bayer, who has been told by U.S. authorities at the base that they are not authorized to respond to his inquiries.
"At the moment there are grounds for investigation, but how far we will get with it, I don't know," Bayer told Reuters.
Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, a Swiss member of parliament, was also pessimistic about U.S. co-operation.
"It doesn't seem like the U.S. government is helping us in this case," said Marty, who is looking into suspect flights by 31 aircraft.
"They can't confirm or deny. They say they are at war, so it will be difficult to obtain information from their side," he told reporters on Friday.
"It's a pity, because a certain transparency would be to the advantage of everybody, including the U.S."
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By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 26 5:25 PM US/Eastern
CRAWFORD, Texas - A repeat of last summer's dueling rallies against the war and in support of President Bush drew much small crowds to Crawford on a cool, rainy Saturday.
About a dozen Bush supporters stood downtown with signs, one reading: "Real America won't wimp out." Throughout the morning, shoppers and a few tourists leaving souvenir stores stopped in the tent to voice their support for the president.
Closer to the Bush ranch, where the president celebrated Thanksgiving with his family, about 200 people rallied around Cindy Sheehan in a continuation of California woman's summer protest against the war that claimed her son.
They used the same private lot, near one of two Secret Service checkpoints, where Sheehan held part of the 26-day August vigil that reinvigorated the anti-war movement and made Sheehan a national figure.
Some 20 demonstrators also stood in a ditch beside the other checkpoint about a mile away, avoiding violating recently passed roadside camping bans that led to 12 arrests a few days ago.
"We have both of his exits covered," said Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq last year and who called on her supporters to resume the protest this week to coincide with Bush's ranch visit.
"We are exercising our patriotic duty to dissent," she said.
The scene Saturday was far different from the last weekend in August, though, when several thousand Bush supporters and war protesters held separate rallies in the one-stoplight town of 700 residents. Both sides attributed Saturday's low turnout to the holiday weekend and rainy weather. [...]
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Paul Joseph Watson
November 28 2005
Moviegoers in the upcoming months will be bombarded by films about the Iraq war and 9/11. These movies will uniformly reinforce the official party line that 9/11 was carried out by 19 Arabs with box cutters and that the invasion of Iraq was a heroic act of liberation in the defense of America.
The Associated Press reports that several productions are set to hit both big and little screens, including the dramatized story of what happened on Flight 93.
The official story that passengers intercepted hijackers and crashed the plane into an empty Pennsylvanian field as the ultimate sacrifice has been thoroughly discredited by the alternative media.
Numerous credible individuals including former military and commercial pilots have come forward and stated that the plane was shot down.
However, the movie version will reinforce the "let's roll" myth, ignoring such obvious evidence of a shoot down as the fact that the debris field of Flight 93 was eight miles wide, which is impossible unless it was shot down in mid-air and then traveled for a short period, raining down debris as it descended.
Other productions will prop up the government conspiracy theory that 19 men, at least seven of which are still alive, and men who couldn't even fly puddle-jumping Cessnas conducted the biggest terror attack in history and that it was all planned from a cave in Afghanistan.
We will be subjected to tear jerking scenes where innocent people scream in terror as buildings crumble around them, without for a second stopping to ask why three steel buildings collapsed from "fire damage" for the first and only time in world history.
The criminal elements of the government that carried out 9/11 are hopeful that these re-enactments will put people to sleep and reduce skepticism of their fairy tale official version of events. We the alternative media should prepare ourselves to counter these psy-op propaganda flicks as and when they are released.
If your stomach isn't already convulsing, Newsmax is reporting that arch Neo-Con Bruce Willis is planning to produce a pro-war Iraq film that relates "the success" of liberating the Iraqi people. This is all the more vomit inducing on the day that former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, himself a former school bus bomber and CIA stooge, admitted that human rights in Iraq are in a worse state now than they were under Saddam.
Willis is at pains to portray Iraq as a virtual paradise and he can't understand all the negative media coverage of what is happening on the ground. Again, barf bags on standby, every Bush worshipping Neo-Con that lauds around righteously proclaiming "I visited Iraq and everything's fine and dandy" is given a carefully planned and screened 30 minute tour around the green zone, the only secure site in the country, and comes home indignantly recommending the country as a holiday resort.
The reality, as 100,000 plus Iraqis and 2,000 plus of our own troops have discovered, is somewhat different.
But Bruce's latest venture has the full support of the Pentagon because it's a recruiting poster for more American boys and girls to go and perish in a desert for the New World Order empire builders.
It is common knowledge in Hollywood that if you want access to military bases and military technology and hardware, as a movie producer you have to bend over backwards to the Pentagon and allow them majority control in scriptwriting.
Pentagon support translates into millions of dollars shaved off the film budget. In many cases, the absence of that support means the film doesn't get made. This means that movie producers are at the mercy of backroom DoD directors who can effectively re-write historical events and broadcast them to millions as accurate depictions of the real thing.
Decades old psychological studies confirm that when you're watching television the higher brain regions (like the midbrain and the neo-cortex) are shut down, and most activity shifts to the lower brain regions. These lower brain regions cannot distinguish reality from fabricated images (a task performed by the neo-cortex), so they react to television content as though it were real.
Therefore the warped fictional portrayal of a historical event becomes the only truthful depiction of that event in the mind of the viewer.
Black Hawk Down was a big favorite amongst the top brass, portraying the military in a positive light. The Pentagon shipped four Black Hawk helicopters and 35 Army Rangers to the filming location in Morocco.
Portraying war or the military in a bad light in any scene merits an immediate blacklisting from the Pentagon. If the film isn't an out and out recruiting campaign then they're not interested.
The producer of Independence Day, Dean Devlin, went to extraordinary lengths to get Pentagon support for his 1996 release. In a letter he wrote, "Just wait, there has never been any aerial footage like this before, if this doesn't make every boy in the country want to fly a fighter jet, I'll eat this script."
The Pentagon were not interested because the military were portrayed as inept in a handful of scenes in the movie. Similarly, Apocalypse Now, with its strong anti-war message was rebuffed by the DoD.
They make prostitutes of us all because they want us to sell out to their point of view," said filmmaker Oliver Stone, who was refused military assistance for his Vietnam War-era films Platoon, Born on the Forth of July and Heaven and Earth.
"They want a certain kind of movie made," Stone said. "They don't want to deal with the down-side of war. They assist movies that don't tell the truth about combat, and they don't assist movies that seek to tell the truth about combat. Most films (about the military) are recruiting posters. They are such lies."
The state cringes when movies that actually make people think hit the big screen, and there is a growing movement within Hollywood to push the genre firmly in that direction, but they salivate when an audience can be hoodwinked into buying their crap through the medium of entertainment.
Fewer and fewer people read newspapers. Less people are watching TV news. The majority of the propaganda has shifted to television programs and movies. Watching back to back Simpsons episodes this weekend, the viewer is left with the impression that lesbian marriage is wholesome and normal and in the next instance, only a global government can save us from global warming.
We must increase our vigilance of where the propaganda is emanating from and, as in John Carpenter's They Live, shut it off right at the source.
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DRUDGE REPORT
SUN NOV 27 2005 17:05:23 ET
The TV networks are getting edgier in their '06 pilot plans.
The nets have filled their development slates with a bevy of brave ideas and bold format experiments, VARIETY reports on Monday, including shows about THE END OF AMERICA!
ABC alone has at least two would-be shows set in post-apocalyptic America ("Resistance" and "Red & Blue") while Gavin Polone and Bruce Wagner are teaming for the comfy-sounding plague drama "Four Horsemen" at CBS (which also is developing "Jericho," about life in a small town after America is destroyed).
Says Fox exec VP Craig Erwich: "The creative community appears to be really inspired this year," he says. "It was an exciting time to be buying. I came away pretty encouraged about network TV."
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DRUDGE REPORT FLASH
SUN NOV 27 2005 17:05:23 ET
A CNN switchboard operator was fired over the holiday -- after the operator claimed the 'X' placed over Vice President's Dick Cheney's face was "free speech!"
"We did it just to make a point. Tell them to stop lying, Bush and Cheney," the CNN operator said to a caller. "Bring our soldiers home."
The caller initially phoned the network to complain about the all-news channel flashing an "X' over Cheney as he gave an address live from Washington.
"Was it not freedom of speech? Yes or No?" the CNN operator explained.
"If you don't like it, don't watch."
Laurie Goldberg, Senior Vice President for Public Relations with CNN, said in a release:
"A Turner switchboard operator was fired today after we were alerted to a conversation the operator had with a caller in which the operator lost his temper and expressed his personal views -- behavior that was totally inappropriate. His comments did not reflect the views of CNN. We are reaching out to the caller and expressing our deep regret to her and apologizing that she did not get the courtesy entitled to her."
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Aljazeera
10/18/2005 8:46:00 PM GMT
Americans have become increasingly frustrated with their President’s Iraq policy.
According to most recent surveys, just 28 percent of Americans think the president is doing a good job, the lowest in a decade. But pollsters say that even without running a poll; just wandering down to the local coffee shops you will see the amount of anger and frustration as a result of Iraq war, the mounting casualties, skyrocketing energy prices and the government’s policy.
"More and more Americans are angry," says retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004.
"They are angry about the president's incompetence and his general unwillingness to acknowledge with some humility that he has made some terrible and tragic mistakes regarding the mission in Iraq."
Last month, thousands of American anti-war protesters, carrying signs that read "Bush Lied, Thousands Died," and "End the Occupation," rallied in Washington and other U.S. cities demanding the return of U.S. troops and the end of Iraq war- It was the largest gathering since the war began in March 2003.
"We believe we are at a tipping point whereby the anti-war sentiment has now become the majority sentiment," said Brian Becker, national coordinator for ANSWER, a famous antiwar group.
It's not just the Democrats or liberals who're angry at Bush's policy, but also conservatives and Republicans show increasing dissatisfaction with Bush's policy.
Steven M. Warshawsky, a conservative commentator says that "Bush clearly has retreated from the promise he made to the country on September 20, 2001, the night he declared the War on Terror".
"The entire conceptual framework underlying the Bush Doctrine has been replaced, in just a few short years, with a Vietnam-era retread. RIP the Bush Doctrine."
"Our country today finds itself more bitterly divided than at any time since the Viet Nam War. From the party of the loyal opposition on down, we have been what I suspect is a silent majority of dissenters. But the time for silence is now over," says Jeff Birkenstein in Counterpunch. "The silence is ending and the people are beginning to make their voices heard."
We all see the wide gap between what Bush's administration states and battlefield realities. Contrary to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's prewar prediction that the fighting "could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months," most of the U.S. military deaths took place since Bush declared "major combat" was over in May 1 2003.
There has long been frustration among the Americans, but what's new today is that frustrations about Bush's Iraq policy are being voiced by those who originally backed and encouraged the war.
An editorial at The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, says that "In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed its soldiers," "we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let him. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes."
"For us to be loyal Americans, we can't be random and hypocritical about it. For years, being American has supposedly meant being unified as one and supporting equality on all levels, from gender to class to race. The land of the free and the equal seems to be the land of the confused and the phony. Let's get it together."
The Americans need to step back and think, is their president taking their nation to prosperity or to hell?
On the other hand, the U.S. is trying to interfere in the Middle East policy despite the firestorm of criticism from many of Arab nations because of its intervention, by imposing American-style reforms, claiming it's part of its mission to bring democracy to the Third World Nations.
Bush's admin needs to concentrate on the U.S. internal problem before it loses the little support left from the American public.
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By SAUL LANDAU
November 26, 2005
George W. Bush returned from a brief but difficult November learning foray in Latin America: "Wow, Brazil is big." Meanwhile, U.S. citizens grew impatient with his performance. CBS polls rated him at 35% approval in early November. Even his supporters acknowledge that Bush's policies have created enormous ill will throughout the world. More ethically worrisome, cried his critics, those policies don't represent who we really are.
Most Americans, for example, abhor torture. So, on November 7, Bush flatly declared: "We don't torture"--just as front page stories appeared with details of how the Pentagon charged five U.S members of an elite Army unit with kicking and punching detainees in Iraq.
Few Washington insiders expressed shock over Bush's not having heard of the massive evidence compiled by The Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International and the Red Cross about routine U.S. military and CIA torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Nor did he seem upset over reports of secret prisons set up by the CIA in other countries in which methods that the United States and most other nations had agreed by Treaty to never practice. The CIA had stashed prisoners in a series of secret, "black-site" prisons around the world, where U.S. officials "punished" them in ways prohibited by the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. (Washington Post 11/2/05)
CIA interrogators abroad used "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," banned by both the U.N. and by U.S. military law, such as "waterboarding," making a prisoner believe he or she is drowning (WP11/2/05).
The Post also claimed that "a small circle" of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials "approved this policy" and tried to affirm that "Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."
On November 7, Bush said he didn't want the enemy to know what might happen to them. "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law." (CNN)
Bush dodged military service and Cheney had "better things to do" than risk his life in Vietnam. Senator John McCain, on the other hand, who experienced torture, led the fight to ban it.
"Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop," McCain said. "Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy. ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public."
On October 7, 89 other Senators joined McCain in condemning torture, nine voted for it. Radio bigmouth Rush Limbaugh said the torturers were just "having a good time," getting "emotional release." In his May 4, 2004 show, a caller commented to Rush: "It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men."
LIMBAUGH: Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
One day before, Limbaugh called the women soldiers accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners "babes." Why, the published photos of this alleged mistreatment looked like something "you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage."
The outspoken radio host even satirized the tortures scandal as something you'd "get an NEA grant for. Something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center. Maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean."
This is not who we are? Was the 19th Century torture and massacre of Indians just a bit of venting by frustrated U.S. troops? Did the murder and torture of Filipinos between 1892 and 1932 represent no more than a fraternity hazing party?
Why, journalists should have asked, did Bush want to exempt the CIA from the torture ban? To claim he didn't want enemy prisoners to know what might happen to them appears contradictory to his public statement: "we don't torture." "They," Bush declared, "use violence and torture." We're free and democratic.
In June in Istanbul, I heard a group of students challenge a U.S. academic to explain how democratic people could elect Bush. "Bush doesn't really represent the American people," the American academic replied. The Turkish students pressed him about the Iraqi invasion for oil and demanded to know how Americans could have possibly voted for "the butcher of Baghdad."
"That's not who we are," he assured them.
It's not? Decent people have repeated that line to distance themselves from atrocious crimes since the 17th Century. Henry David Thoreau and Harriet Beecher Stowe insisted that slavery and the massacre of Indians did not define us. After reports that the U.S. firebombed German and Japanese cities and dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, many citizens said: That's not who we are.
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson went to Nuremberg to try to ban future wars. "We must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of war, for out position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." (Aug 12, 1945)
Other legal scholars drafted the UN Charter to maintain peace and helped revise President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (speech and expression, religion; freedom from fear and want) into the UN Covenants on Human Rights.
Meanwhile, other U.S. officials carried out nuclear weapons tests for use in future wars and helped circumvent the actual Senate ratification of the covenants.
Law vies with lawlessness. The Bush Administration tried to get legal UN cover for its invasion of Iraq before breaking both international codes and Justice Jackson's denunciation of aggressive war. Then he painted a rhetorical veneer of democracy over his naked aggression.
In late September, to show the Middle Easterner who we really are, Bush dispatched Karen Hughes, to promote the real U.S. image in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey.
Hughes found it tough to sell democracy and human rights as reports surfaced of systematic, routine U.S. torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The armed forces tried and convicted more than 200 bottom level personnel. Not a single general or civilian official, including those who authorized torture has faced trial.
As Karen Hughes "sold" Bush's America, alternate salespeople on Al Jazeera highlighted the U.S.' rising deficit and towering debt and featured stories on how poor blacks continue to get the short end of every government stick.
Americans believe they live in a model of freedom, opportunity and prosperity not available in older cultures. The 37 million living under the poverty line shocked them. As do the three-plus million millionaires.
The typical white family has $80,000 in assets; the average black family about $6,000. Some 46 million can't afford health insurance, 18,000 of them will die prematurely because of it.
The U.S. ranks 43rd in world infant mortality ratings. Beijing babies have far greater chances of reaching their first birthdays than those born in Washington. The survivors face rotten schools. Reading and math tests for 15-year-olds placed the U.S. 24th out of 29 rich nations.
Meanwhile, 18 corporate executives went to prison for corporate accounting fraud and looting. Bush's Enron pals will also soon face trial for practicing their "greed-is-good" culture.
The war costs $6 billion a month. In five years the conflict will have cost each American family $11,300. Bush will cut programs for the poor to pay for the war, but he will not reverse his tax cuts.
Throughout U.S. history, truly pious and sensible down-home Americans have shared church space with zealous nuts and bigots. Cotton Mather, the Puritan witch hunter and Roger Williams who pleaded for religious freedom in the 17th Century have as their warped descendent Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who gloat over having one of their own kind running the country. On the democracy and freedom side, William Sloan Coffin and the Berrigan brothers decry imperial aggression and suppression of liberties.
Threads of racism and imperial aggression characterize U.S. growth and expansion from 13 colonies to the world's greatest power. So does democracy. This inextricably interwoven love of freedom developed hand in glove with racism and imperialism.
Who are we? Racists, imperialists and democrats. The struggle now, as in the past, pits those who want the democracy element to prevail and bury the evil that has emanated for the other two threads of our history.
Saul Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.
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By Louay Safi
Washington Report, November 2005
Three militant neocon pundits spoke vehemently against the Bush administration’s gesture to include American Muslim leaders in discussions on how to deal with the rising tide of anti-Americanism and restore the level of trust and support the United States enjoyed prior to the missteps the administration took at the neocons’ urging.
Frank Gaffney issued a warning to Karen Hughes, the newly appointed undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, demanding that she not attend the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention. Ignoring the false alarm he set in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Times, Hughes did meet with Muslim leaders and discussed her ideas for bridging the deepening divide between the United States and Muslim countries (see p. 69of this issue).
Gaffney told Hughes point bank: “Don’t go there.” Joel Mowbray, another neocon who is apparently more aware of effective tactics of misinformation, gave Hughes the benefit of the doubt, allowing her to make one mistake one time: “Given that it is highly unlikely Hughes knew exactly what she was walking into,” Mowbray wrote, “she deserves the benefit of the doubt—this time.”
Gaffney belongs to a small but vocal group of militant pundits driven by deep-seated hate of Islam and Muslims, and bent on maligning Muslim leaders and organizations in a bid to marginalize and isolate mainstream American Muslims. He joined Mowbray and Daniel Pipes, two other well-known Muslim-bashers, in demonizing ISNA and the leaders of the national Muslim organizations who met with Hughes.
Utilizing several conservative publications, including the Washington Times, the trio leveled serious allegations against mainstream Muslim organizations, accusing them of supporting terrorism and promoting radicalism. The men have been active in feeding lies to the public and inciting government officials and law enforcement agencies to conduct investigations, then using these investigations as a basis for further maligning law-abiding and patriotic American Muslims.
Last year Pipes accused the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) of being “part of the militant Islamist lobby,” contending that it was “well-disguised, and has brought in all the Islamist trends, giving them a patent of respectability.”
After conducting a thorough investigation of his accusations, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP)—of which Pipes is a former board member, thanks to a recess appointment by President George W. Bush—issued a statement that brought out the irresponsible nature of Pipes’ attacks. “The Institute was aware of and took seriously the accusations made against CSID and some of the speakers at the event,” Kay King, the director of Congressional and Public Affairs at USIP wrote. “These allegations were investigated carefully with credible private individuals and U.S. government agencies,” she went on, “and found to be without merit. The public criticism of CSID and the speakers was found to be based on quotes taken out of context, guilt by association, errors of fact, and innuendo.”
Gaffney, likewise, employed misinformation and factual error to justify his demands that the Bush administration isolate the most inclusive and mainstream Muslim convention. In a recent article he contended that the Senate Finance Committee “listed ISNA as one of 25 American Muslim organizations that ‘finance terrorism and perpetuate violence.’” He failed to disclose, however, that the Finance Committee never found ISNA guilty of such allegations, and that he is referring to a Dec. 22, 2003 letter sent by the committee chairman and ranking member asking the IRS to investigate Muslim charities for possible links to terrorist financing. Eighteen months have elapsed since the investigation’s Feb. 20, 2004 deadline, with no action, or even a Finance Committee hearing conducted on the matter.
Half-Truths and Omissions
Mowbray, also resorting to half-truths, quotes taken out of context, and innuendo, cited a Freedom House study that found Saudi publications in 12 mosques—of 3,500 throughout the country—that made bigoted references to followers of other religions. Mowbray omits the fact that Freedom House, responding to complaints by American Muslim leaders of the misleading nature of the report title, stressed that its study was intended to uncover the bigotry of the Saudi publications, and was never intended to implicate U.S. mosques. Freedom House even went a step further and invited two ISNA leaders to a meeting for consultation on its report and to explore the question of religious extremism.
These shameless attempts by Gaffney, Mowbray and Pipes to malign mainstream Muslim organizations and leaders are driven not by rational and objective considerations, but by paranoia, prejudice, and irrational fear of Islam and Muslims. Such irrational and emotional anti-Muslim posturing only serves—as it is intended—to confuse the public and identify the fight on terrorism with the fight on Islam. It thus plays into the hands of those anti-American pundits who thrive on the missteps, and counterproductive actions and postures, urged by Gaffney and his ilk.
Mainstream American Muslims already have taken a principled and firm position against the senseless killings of unarmed and defenseless civilians. But their ability to succeed in drying the swamp of extremism that feeds into terrorist attacks can only succeed if the Jewish and Christian communities confront their own bigots and extremists, and dry the ponds of bigotry in their midst.
It is heartening to realize that most Americans are able to see through the militant pundits’ paranoia and bigotry—as Karen Hughes has amply demonstrated by ignoring the false alarm set off on the eve of her meeting with Muslim leaders during the ISNA convention.
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By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page A06
The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.
The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.
The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public.
"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.
Wyden has since persuaded lawmakers to change the legislation, attached to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill, to address some of his concerns, but he still believes hearings should be held. Among the changes was the elimination of a provision to let Defense Intelligence Agency officers hide the fact that they work for the government when they approach people who are possible sources of intelligence in the United States.
Modifications also were made in the provision allowing the FBI to share information with the Pentagon and CIA, requiring the approval of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, for that to occur, and requiring the Pentagon to make reports to Congress on the subject. Wyden said the legislation "now strikes a much fairer balance by protecting critical rights for our country's citizens and advancing intelligence operations to meet our security needs."
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon much greater access to the FBI's massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage.
The measure, she said, "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."
Lt. Col. Chris Conway, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said that the most senior Defense Department intelligence officials are aware of the sensitivities related to their expanded domestic activities. At the same time, he said, the Pentagon has to have the intelligence necessary to protect its facilities and personnel at home and abroad.
"In the age of terrorism," Conway said, "the U.S. military and its facilities are targets, and we have to be prepared within our authorities to defend them before something happens."
Among the steps already taken by the Pentagon that enhanced its domestic capabilities was the establishment after 9/11 of Northern Command, or Northcom, in Colorado Springs, to provide military forces to help in reacting to terrorist threats in the continental United States. Today, Northcom's intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas fuse reports from CIFA, the FBI and other U.S. agencies, and are staffed by 290 intelligence analysts. That is more than the roughly 200 analysts working for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and far more than those at the Department of Homeland Security. [...]
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Simon Jenkins
The Sunday Times
(a disinfo rag)
So why invoke the Official Secrets Act to ban such material? Here the plot thickens. Blair is desperate not to have any split with Washington on public view. He senses that a dam may be about to burst, revealing Anglo-American splits over Iraq just when Bush’s policy there is facing domestic opposition.
We assume from this and from Downing Street’s use of the Official Secrets Act against the Mirror memo that it knows of more high explosive lurking in the bomb bays of Fleet Street. Retired generals, SAS soldiers, Downing Street aides, diplomats and spies are queueing up, eager for profit or revenge. Blair will pay dearly for his lavish entourage of cronies and his contempt for discreet civil servants.
Confidences well kept are a sign of sound leadership. When discipline crumbles it is a sign of decay.
So George Bush wants to bomb Al-Jazeera. So Tony Blair hates the Welsh. So John Prescott can’t pronounce Kosovo. So Cherie Blair thinks the Queen’s Flight not good enough for her. So the British Army finds the Americans heavy-handed in Iraq. On it goes, the babbling gossip of the air, the small talk of the great, the tittle-tattle of top people. Fascinating.
But stop right there, Jenkins. Not a word more. Tony Blair’s personal Tulkinghorn, Lord Goldsmith is watching, leathery writ in scrawny hand. The attorney-general has threatened all who traffic in such material with the Official Secrets Act. He has warned newspapers not to repeat any Blair-Bush intimacies on the subject of bombing Al-Jazeera. He is dragging David Keogh, a former civil servant, and Leo O’Connor, a former political aide, before the Bow Street magistrates for allegedly leaking a memo to the Daily Mirror. As Tulkinghorn would intone, “The reputation of one of England’s noblest families is at stake.” The name of the Blairs must be protected at all costs.
Goldsmith risks going down in history as the most miserable holder of his Janus-faced office. He is supposedly an “independent law officer” and adviser to the government (as over Iraq). Yet he also enjoys the patronage of the prime minister as his private legal counsel (as over Iraq). The conflict of interest is glaring.
We know from past leaks that Goldsmith’s advice on invading Iraq was so unpalatable to Blair that he had to change it. His independence was utterly compromised. Now Downing Street claims that Goldsmith’s decision to prosecute over a leaked memo about bombing Al-Jazeera in April last year was a spontaneous act of legal combustion. We are told that Goldsmith thought that old carthorse, the Official Secrets Act, needed a fresh trot round the paddock. This had nothing to do with the smoke coming from Downing Street’s ears.
That Blair and Bush should have discussed bombing the Al-Jazeera building in Qatar is hardly surprising. They agreed to bomb the headquarters of Serbian television during the Kosovo war. In 2001 they sent a cruise missile to flatten Al-Jazeera’s offices in Kabul, whose co-ordinates they knew, after the station had filmed the casualties of cluster bombs. When Al-Jazeera showed footage of captured US servicemen in Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon bizarrely cited the Geneva convention. There followed a direct hit on the Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing its correspondent. The station was later banned from operating in Iraq because of its “bias”. No charge of bias was laid against any western news media.
Al-Jazeera, with a hotline to Al-Qaeda, was plainly a pain in the neck and an obsession to Blair and Bush. So what was more natural than that the two men should discuss eliminating it? The official line is that the (carefully minuted) discussion was actually a joke. If so it was a joke by Blackadder out of Dr Goebbels. Given the previous treatment of Al-Jazeera, we can take this with a pinch of salt.
What is heartening is that Blair appears to have opposed the attack, albeit for motives that were pragmatic rather than principled. He rightly thought that obliterating the Qatar offices might be counterproductive. The Qataris might object to being bombed by their closest Gulf ally. Bush eventually agreed. According to the memo, Blair took the same view, supported by the British Army, of the heavy-handed American siege of Falluja. Here he was less influential, although his view was vindicated by events. Britons will surely welcome this evidence of Blair’s much-vaunted “cojones” on display in Washington.
So why invoke the Official Secrets Act to ban such material? Here the plot thickens. Blair is desperate not to have any split with Washington on public view. He senses that a dam may be about to burst, revealing Anglo-American splits over Iraq just when Bush’s policy there is facing domestic opposition. So far discipline has held on this front. Britain’s military and diplomatic elite may excoriate Pentagon policy in Iraq and excoriate Blair for failing to use leverage over it. But the public line has held that there is “not a rice paper” between the two leaders.
This explains the remarkable difference in the vetting of Sir Christopher Meyer’s book, DC Confidential, from that of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, his diplomatic colleague. The first was passed by Whitehall for publication unaltered. It revealed copious embassy confidences and depicted Blair as Bush’s poodle, trotting in the president’s train. But it offered no evidence of a split between the two men, just mutual admiration.
Greenstock’s book was a different matter. It is a high-minded case history of diplomacy in action, devoid of Meyer’s dinner table gossip. But its account of dealings between British and American policy makers, notably during Paul Bremer’s disastrous rule in Baghdad, drew blood. Dealings were not always amicable. The book was far too “relevant to current diplomacy” and thus potentially harmful to Anglo-American relations. While Meyer was cert-18 for gossip it was barely PG for political sensation. Greenstock was the reverse. His book was ruled “too good to pass”. So large were the required cuts that he decided to withdraw and await another day.
We assume from this and from Downing Street’s use of the Official Secrets Act against the Mirror memo that it knows of more high explosive lurking in the bomb bays of Fleet Street. Retired generals, SAS soldiers, Downing Street aides, diplomats and spies are queueing up, eager for profit or revenge. Blair will pay dearly for his lavish entourage of cronies and his contempt for discreet civil servants.
I believe that governments are entitled to keep their secrets, at least for a while. Secrecy and trust among colleagues are crucial to the circulating blood of power. Total transparency threatens that circulation and the open debate that should go with it. Any organisation depends on confidence among participants. Leaks gradually confine plain speaking to ever tighter circles of personal cronies. This applies even to democratic government. There is a public interest in privacy.
Yet this public interest cannot be defined or policed except by government itself and that policing will always tend to exaggeration. Confidences well kept are a sign of sound leadership. When discipline crumbles it is a sign of decay. The leak of Gordon Brown’s rejection of Lord Turner’s pensions review last week was far more devastating to government authority than any gossip out of Washington. But I doubt if any Treasury or No 10 aide will be appearing at Bow Street.
The job of the press is to test this discipline, not respect it. Disclosure of the processes of government is its “public interest”. As secrecy aids the blood flow of those in power, so combating it aids those seeking to improve the flow of public debate. Presented with a scoop, the reporter does not stop and ask whether it might embarrass a prime minister. Embarrassment starts from the moment the reporter knows it, for his task is to pass what he knows into the public domain.
Sometimes revealed material is mere gossip of “interest to the public”. Sometimes it meets the higher test of public concern, of helping people to understand what rulers are doing in their name. Far more material is now vulnerable to freedom of information, itself policed by government. Much is revealed to such investigative surrogates as the Hutton inquiry or the High Court, as in the Railtrack case. Nothing that officials write down can any longer be regarded as truly private. But that is government’s business. Secrets that government cannot keep, it cannot expect others to keep for it.
The Official Secrets Act is a reasonable tool of internal Whitehall discipline. But it cannot be an appropriate punishment for members of the public or reporters, once a secret is out. This week the act is being used by the attorney-general to avenge and protect an embarrassed prime minister. There can be no public interest in that. The Iraq war merits intense scrutiny. If it is indeed the subject of levity or humour, surely we can be let in on the joke.
The true measure of this war is that its participants no longer trust each other to keep its conduct secret. They are tumbling their stories into the public domain. Since publicity is the one accountability that modern government seems to fear. Long may they tumble.
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From correspondents in Washington
November 28, 2005
The White House has admitted it has an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was "remarkably similar" to its own.
The Bush administration also signalled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country.
The statement late on Saturday by White House spokesman Scott McClellan came in response to a commentary published in The Washington Post by Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said US forces will begin leaving Iraq next year "in large numbers."
The United States will move about 50,000 servicemen out of the country by the end of 2006, and "a significant number" of the remaining 100,000 the year after, according to Senator Biden's article.
Speaking on US television overnight, Senator Biden said that with or without a near-term troop withdrawal, the window is rapidly closing on the opportunity for a US success in Iraq.[...]
"Are we going to have traded a dictator for chaos? Or are we going to have traded a dictator for a stable Iraq? That's the real question. And that depends on the president's actions from here out," said Senator Biden.
The plan calls for leaving only an unspecified "small force" either in Iraq or across the border to strike at concentrations of insurgents.
In the White House statement, which was released under the headline "Senator Biden Adopts Key Portions Of Administration's Plan For Victory In Iraq," Mr McClellan said the administration of President George W. Bush welcomed Biden's voice in the debate.
"Today, Senator Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror," the spokesman went on to say.
Mr McClellan added that as Iraqi security forces gain strength and experience, "we can lessen our troop presence in the country without losing our capability to effectively defeat the terrorists."
Mr McClellan said the White House now saw "a strong consensus" building in Washington in favour of Bush's strategy in Iraq.
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By CHRIS TOMLINSON
Associated Press
November 28, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq - An American citizen has been reported missing in Iraq, the U.S. Embassy said Monday, a day after a Canadian Parliament official said that four humanitarian workers had been kidnapped. [...]
U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Elizabeth Colton said only that an American had been reported missing. The person's name was not immediately released.
McTeague refused to name the organization the two Canadians worked for or the location where they were kidnapped in order to protect the safety of the individuals involved.
Briton Norman Kember was among the four, the British government said Sunday. His wife said he was representing a number of groups in the country and was a longtime peace activist.
Most international organizations fled Iraq last year following a wave of kidnappings and beheadings of foreign and Iraqi hostages. Many of them were carried out by al-Qaida in Iraq, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Meanwhile, two Britons were killed and three injured Monday when gunmen attacked a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims south of Baghdad, police and hospital officials said.
The gunmen attacked the bus when it neared a checkpoint in the Dora neighborhood, police Capt. Talib Thamir said. The bus was carrying Shiite Muslim pilgrims to religious sites south of the capital, he said.
Four men and one woman, apparently of South Asian heritage and carrying United Kingdom passports, were taken to Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital, an official there said. [...]
Also Monday morning, a mortar shell fell in central Baghdad's Green Zone and two others fell nearby, just hours before Saddam Hussein's trial was set to begin. There were no report of injuries from the shelling, police Lt. Bilal Ali Majeed said.
A roadside bomb also detonated next to a passing U.S. Army convoy in northeastern Baghdad Monday, setting fire to a Bradley fighting vehicle. Police Capt. Mohammed Abdul-Ghani said three soldiers were injured, but no other information was immediately available.
The U.S. military reported that a Marine assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing was killed Saturday when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb near Camp Taqaddum, 45 miles west of Baghdad. At least 2,106 U.S. military personnel have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Near Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division found more than 2,700 mortar rounds buried near an abandoned Iraqi Army base, a U.S. statement said. Troops were excavating similar mounds Monday in search of more weapons.
In an interview published Sunday, Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite Muslim, told the London newspaper The Observer that fellow Shiites are responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said brutality by elements of Iraqi security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police.
"People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing," the newspaper quoted Allawi as saying.
Allawi's allegation of widespread human rights abuses follows the discovery this month of up to 173 detainees, some malnourished and showing signs of torture, in a Shiite-led Interior Ministry building in Baghdad.
"People are doing the same as Saddam's time and worse," he said. "It is an appropriate comparison."
His remarks appeared aimed at winning favor among the Sunni Arab minority as well as secular Shiites ahead of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. Allawi is running on a secular ticket that includes several prominent Sunnis.
During his tenure as prime minister, Allawi lost the support of many Shiites because he brought former members of Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime back into the security services to bolster the fight against insurgents.
There was no comment from Shiite politicians on Allawi's interview. However, the leader of Iraq's biggest Shiite party said allegations of torture were distortions and might be designed to draw attention away from the Saddam's trial, which resumed Monday after a five-week break.
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By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Some Veterans Feel Lives Enlarged by Wartime Suffering
"If you think about all of the heroes and heroines in cultures across the world . . . all of them, in one sense or another, faced some sort of a dragon," said Matthew J. Friedman, director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School. "The transformation from that encounter has been celebrated from antiquity."
As Hilbert Caesar told his harrowing war story one night recently in the living room of his apartment, he patted the artificial limb sticking from a leg of his business suit. "This, right here," he said, "this is a minor setback."
Eighteen months after Caesar's right leg was mangled by a roadside bomb near Baghdad, and after weeks of coming to terms with what he thought was the end of his life, the former Army staff sergeant believes he has emerged a richer person -- wiser, more compassionate and more appreciative of life.
Asked whether he would endure it all again, he replied: "The guys I served with were awesome guys. . . . I would go through it again -- for the guys that I served with. Yes. Absolutely. I wouldn't change it for the world."
Although the shattering psychological impact of war is well known, experts have become increasingly interested in those who emerge from combat feeling enhanced. Some psychiatrists and psychologists believe that those soldiers have experienced a phenomenon known as "post-traumatic growth," or "adversarial" growth .
Although war left him with a leg of plastic and steel, Caesar, 28, of Silver Spring, appears to be among those who return home with psyche intact and a sense that they are in some mysterious way improved.
"I'm the same person," he said, "but I'm a different person now."
Combat's potential to inflict psychic wounds has been recognized as far back as the ancient Greeks, but so has its ability to exhilarate, intoxicate and instruct those who experience it, experts say.
"If you think about all of the heroes and heroines in cultures across the world . . . all of them, in one sense or another, faced some sort of a dragon," said Matthew J. Friedman, director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School. "The transformation from that encounter has been celebrated from antiquity."
University of North Carolina psychologists Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, who have studied post-traumatic growth for 20 years, said they are careful in describing what occurs.
"We're talking about a positive change that comes about as a result of the struggle with something very difficult," Calhoun said. "It's not just some automatic outcome of a bad thing."
Calhoun said their studies suggest that for growth to occur the trauma must be severe. "We tend to use the metaphor of an earthquake."
He said the person first ponders the details of what happened. "And then there's a much more abstract process of finding some higher meaning . . . in what has transpired," he said.
Tedeschi said there can be feelings of spiritual development, improved relationships, a sense of personal strength, a better appreciation of life and new interests and priorities.
Both men stressed that growth is not necessarily a goal, nor is trauma "good." Calhoun said: "Post-traumatic growth occurs in the context of . . . suffering. We hope everybody who goes to Iraq comes back safe and sound and doesn't have any traumas to grow from."
Although scientists continue to worry about war's impact on mental health, experts say research now shows that most people exposed to combat and other traumatic events do not develop chronic mental health problems.
"It used to be thought that virtually everybody who experienced these kinds of catastrophic events would go on to develop" PTSD symptoms, said Lt. Col. Charles C. Engel Jr., a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. "That was kind of a post-Vietnam War assumption. What we've learned over time is that probably, on average, really about two-thirds to three-fourths don't develop PTSD."
Friedman, of Dartmouth, said that research on the issue has not been that extensive and that the "deleterious" effects of trauma have received the most attention.
But that is changing. "The whole field, in the last four years, has shifted to a certain extent [to focus on] resilience, on human potential," he said.
Friedman said studies of World War II veterans often showed that they valued the experience, even though they had serious post-combat stress: "Yes, I've suffered," he said men would report, "but I wouldn't have given up this experience for anything in the world. . . . The things I experienced have made me a better man today."
Studies of Vietnam War POWs have shown similar sentiments. One study, in 1980, found that 61 percent of American POWS in North Vietnam believed their experience was ultimately beneficial.
Tom McNish, a former Air Force pilot who was a prisoner in North Vietnam for six years, said: "There is no question in my mind that the experience I had in Vietnam has had an overall very positive effect on my life. But I don't recommend it for anybody else. And I don't want to have to do it again."
Wounded veterans of the Iraq war say similar things. Adam Replogle, 25, of Wellington, Colo., a former Army sergeant and tank gunner who lost his left hand and the vision in his left eye in a battle in Karbala in 2004, said that he still has ups and downs but that after his experience in Iraq, not much worries him.
"Sometimes it takes people a lifetime to realize what it's all about and what's important and what's not," he said. "And you go through something like this and it grows you up a little bit and makes you realize that stuff a lot earlier in life."
Caesar, a native of Guyana who grew up in New York City, was a six-year Army veteran and a section chief in a field artillery unit in Iraq. He was in charge of a long-range, self-propelled 155mm howitzer -- a huge vehicle with treads that resembles a tank.
He was out on patrol in the self-propelled gun when the explosion occurred April 18, 2004. When the black smoke cleared, he looked down at his leg. It was flipped backward and "just dangling by the skin," he said. "It was severed at three different places in the knee. . . . The bone was splintered in different places. I knew there was no way they could put that back together."
He tried to hand his machine gun to a comrade but realized it was bent. He could hear gunfire and yelled for the hatches to be closed. He thought: "Oh, man. This is it. My life is over."
But it wasn't. The insurgents who staged the ambush melted away. He was medevaced to safety, and six days after the attack, he arrived at Walter Reed.
There, he was all right, except when he was alone. Then he would worry about the pain -- and the future. He was an athlete but realized that he might never run again. He wondered how women would react to a man with an amputated leg. It was depressing. Again, he said he would think, "My life is over."
A few days after he reached Walter Reed, he got more bad news: Eight men from his platoon had been killed by a car bomb in Baghdad. They were men he knew. One, in particular, had been a role model. "I was really devastated," he said.
Not all mental health experts believe in post-traumatic growth. Some think such positive attitudes simply stem from individual resilience or a natural course of psychological recovery.
George Bonnano, a psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, is skeptical of the growth theory. He said such reactions to trauma are better explained by personal resilience.
"I'm saying most people are able to maintain equilibrium pretty well after a traumatic event," he said. In addition, "it's fine to just recover," he said. "Bad things happen, and we get over them. We get better, and we put it behind us, and we move on."
In the weeks after his arrival at Walter Reed, Caesar met other severely injured soldiers and heard stories about their recoveries. "You start to build your confidence up," he said. "You start to shift focus.
"I'm a positive person," he said. "I try to look for the best. It could be worse. I lost a few friends out there. I made it back with just one missing limb, and I'm grateful for that. I'm thankful for just being here. Period."
At the same time, he said, he believes that he has changed. "It makes me appreciate life a whole lot more. . . . I'm looking forward to settling down, having a family."
Caesar said he has a friend who lost both arms in the war. Caesar said his friend once told him: "I would give anything to lose a leg. I would give both of my legs to have one of my arms" to be able to hold a child someday, should he ever become a father.
"Things like that make you think," Caesar said. "I can't complain. I haven't lost enough to complain."
Since being wounded, Caesar became a U.S. citizen last year, participated in three marathons using a racing wheelchair that he pedals with his hands, left the Army in January and landed a job with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
His leg still bothers him, and he walks with a pronounced limp.
At times, the opaque plastic socket of his artificial limb, which fits over his stump, lacerates his skin. The stump hurts when the thigh bone pokes against the skin. And he still gets down when he thinks about his dead buddies.
"It was a long journey back," he said. "I'm still not fully there. I'm still not 100 percent. I'm never going to be 100 percent. But at the same time, I can get as close to it as possible."
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Drudge Report Flash
SUN NOV 27 2005 17:05:23 ET
Senior Bush administration officials have considered the unthinkable: What if Saddam Hussein is found not guilty in his trial?
"There will be more charges filed against him, and more charges after that, if needed... he has committed tremendous crimes," a top Bush source explained last week from Washington.
Saddam and seven of his former henchmen currently face charges of crimes against humanity over a 1982 massacre of Shiite villagers.
A defiant Saddam has refused to recognize the court and has declared himself president of Iraq.
Prosecutors hope to win a conviction by using videotape of Saddam issuing assassination orders.
Meanwhile, Iraqi police say they have captured an Al-Qaeda cell plotting to kill the chief judge in charge of building the case.
The trial resumes Monday after a five-week recess.
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By: Associated Press
11/27/2005 1:37 PM
WASHINGTON -- The labels inside U.S. Border Patrol uniforms have been making many federal agents feel uneasy.
It's not the fit or feel of the olive-green shirts and pants, but what their labels read: "Made in Mexico."
Agents and lawmakers are concerned about the consequences if the uniforms for agents charged with combating illegal immigration fall into the hands of criminals or terrorists.
U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock, worries about how easy it might be for people to cross the border if they stole a uniform.
Customs officials say they haven't detected any security breaches or misuse of the uniforms. Strict security measures are in place, including on-site inspections at the Mexican plant.
For more than a year, the shirts and pants worn by agents and inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been made in Mexico.
The uniforms are supplied by VF Solutions of Nashville, Tennessee, which subcontracts its work to plants in the U.S., Mexico, Canada and the Dominican Republic.
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Bloomberg
Nov. 28, 2005
Mexico probably will surpass the U.S. in obesity rates for the first time next year as the Latin American nation adopts the fast food and sedentary lifestyles of its neighbor to the north.
The brewing health crisis prompted Mexico's congress this month to move toward making school exercise mandatory. Mexico City has called in a Texas doctor to wean kids off pizza and fries, while Health Ministry ads warn fat can lead to diabetes and heart disease.
"Obese and overweight adults went from nowhere in 1990 to 62 percent in 2000," said Barry Popkin, an economist and nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, citing a Mexican government study.
"You are talking about an astronomical increase coming at a very fast rate and it's continuing."
Weight-related illnesses pose a growing threat to Latin America's second-largest economy, said Juan Rivera, who's leading Mexico's second national obesity study at the National Institute of Public Health, due in 2006. Diabetes alone, the most common disease associated with excess weight, cost Mexico as much as $15.1 billion in 2000, mostly in reduced productivity and lost wages because of premature death, according to a World Health Organization estimate.
A report this year by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development compared obesity rates among OECD member nations. Only the U.S., where 66 percent of people are overweight or obese, ranks higher than Mexico, the group reported, using the 2000 data from Mexico and 2002 numbers from the U.S.
Chronic Diseases
"The causes of death in Mexico have changed from infectious to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular illnesses and diabetes," said Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos, president of the Heath Committee of Mexico's Congress. "In most cases these diseases share the common cause of obesity."
Incomes in Mexico have grown as the economy expands. Gross domestic product rose 3.3 percent in the third quarter from the same period a year ago. Average salaries, in inflation-adjusted terms, have climbed to 188.74 pesos ($17.80) per day from 146.19 pesos per day four years ago.
Mexicans' growing weight is largely a byproduct of rising consumer spending aided by U.S. free trade, said Rivera, a nutritionist. A North American lifestyle that features cars and television accounts for much of that, he said. At the same time, the spread of fast food and soft-drink consumption in place of traditional beans and tortillas has paralleled the typical waistline expansion, he said.
Fast Food
The first Mexican franchise of Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's Corp. opened in 1985 and there are now 304 outlets, according to the company's Web site. Miami-based Burger King's first restaurant opened in 1991 and has 260 sites. Louisville, Kentucky-based Yum! Brands, Inc., which operates Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC franchises, had 467 restaurants in Mexico at the end of 2004, according to a company report.
Fast-food restaurants in the U.S. deny their products directly cause obesity or health problems.
"Holding restaurants and food companies legally responsible for choices all of us freely make each day such as what to eat, when to eat and how much to eat, is irrational," Steven Anderson, chief executive of the Washington-based National Restaurant Association, said in a statement.
Coke Replaces Water
Mexico is the world's leading per-capita consumer of Coca-Cola, according to the World Health Organization. In 1998 Mexicans drank more than 400 milliliters per day of the Coca- Cola Co. soft drink, according to a report by the organization, up from 275 milliliters in 1992.
"Drinking water to quench thirst in Mexico is very rare," said Rivera of the National Institute of Public Health. About 95 percent of Mexico's schools don't offer access to free water, he said.
"So what does a child do?" Rivera said. "He goes to the school store and sees that a soft drink costs the same or a little less than a bottle of water."
A government study of income and spending showed Mexicans, whose traditional diet is based on corn and beans, spent 29.3 percent less on fruits and vegetables in 1998 than in 1984. In the same period, soft drink purchases increased 37.2 percent.
Researchers conducting the nation's second study on obesity, due to be published next year, said the percentage of obese and overweight Mexicans probably rose as high as 85 percent of women and 75 percent of men -- possibly the highest rates of any major economy.
The sole national study in Mexico that tracked weight gain over time looked at only women between the ages of 18 and 49. It found 59.6 percent were overweight or obese in 1999 compared with 33.4 percent in 1988.
'Worried'
In addition to eating more calories and fat, the average Mexican is exercising less, said Lupe Aguilar, head of physical education for the capital's public schools. Children and adults have cut back on walking and other outdoor activities, a trend reinforced by the rising crime rate, she said. Nine of 10 Mexico City residents polled in July by Consulta Mitofsky ranked security as the city's No. 1 problem.
"We can't expect a parent to tell their children to go play in a park," Aguilar said. "We are now worried that physical activity is only happening in the school."
Aguilar is implementing a new exercise and education program in the city. The regimen, approved this month by the lower house of congress and sent to the senate, would require that students exercise before classes.
Schools in Mexico City already asked San Antonio physician Robert Trevio for help getting students to slim down. Trevino started a bi-lingual program used in more than 200 South Texas elementary schools that combines nutrition education with exercise requirements.
Schools in the program stopped serving sweetened beverages at lunch and offer French fries and nachos only once a week, Trevino said.
"It wasn't easy," he said. "The food services are profit centers, they have to make money."
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By COLLEEN SLEVIN
Associated Press
November 28, 2005
DENVER - Blizzard conditions wreaked havoc from Colorado to the Midwest, and tornadoes ripped through Arkansas and Kansas as a burst of treacherous weather damaged homes, turned roads into ice rinks and sent cars spinning off highways.
A driver was killed Sunday near Little Rock, Ark., when a suspected tornado scattered wood from a lumberyard across a highway and overturned cars, police said.
A 150-mile stretch of Interstate 70, the major east-west corridor, was closed from Denver to the Kansas line, stranding travelers headed home after Thanksgiving. Officials shut the highway after up to 25 cars were involved in an accident as visibility in the blowing snow dropped to nearly zero.
"We'll just go when it's safe. We have a four-wheel drive vehicle but that doesn't make you any safer in this," said Julie Ward of Wichita, Kan., who got one of the last rooms available at the Tyme Square Inn in Limon, Colo.
A blizzard warning was in effect until Monday afternoon in three counties along the Nebraska border.
The biggest trouble spot for travelers stretched from Colorado through Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, where blizzard conditions and freezing rain turned roads into icy swaths.
Drivers were stuck for miles around Fargo, N.D.
"It is bumper to bumper," North Dakota Transportation Department district supervisor Bruce Nord said. "There's slush on the road. It's just unbelievable, the traffic. When one goes in the ditch, it takes three or four people along."
High wind or tornadoes destroyed at least eight homes in Arkansas. Officials would assess other reports of damage Monday.
In Fort Riley, Kan., more than 30 homes were damaged when a tornado swept through town. Fort spokesman Army Maj. Christian T. Kubik said 17 families were left homeless.
"We were fortunate nobody was hurt," he said. About 7,500 homes were without power in Arkansas late Sunday, Entergy spokesman James Thompson said.
In Texas, wind gusts of more than 50 mph toppled a 66-foot tall Christmas tree in Fort Worth and fed grass fires that destroyed at least six homes. No injuries were reported. [...]
As much as 3 inches fell near Amarillo in north Texas, the
National Weather Service reported.
Cpl. Pam Jetsel, a sheriff's department spokeswoman, said a fire that started west of Cleburne, Texas, spread north and burned 1,000 acres and six homes. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Grass fires also were reported in north Texas — some of them reportedly sparked by power lines downed by the strong winds.
"When the conditions are so dry and the wind is so high, any kind of spark can be dangerous," said Tom Reedy, a spokesman for the Denton County Sheriff's Department.
In the Northwest, nine people were hospitalized, though none seriously, after a series of accidents on Interstate 5 about five miles north of Arlington, Wash. The accidents happened when a wave of rain and sleet blew through the area.
Rain delayed flights out of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport up to an hour and a half Sunday morning, Chicago Department of Aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams said. Some 210,000 passengers were expected to pass through its concourses Sunday.
Two cross-country skiers missing overnight near the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness about 25 miles north of Steamboat Springs, Colo., were found in good condition. Their names were not released.
Up to 18 inches of snow have fallen in that area, which is at about 7,500 feet in elevation.
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Reuters
By Alireza Ronaghi in Tehran
November 28, 2005
TEN people were killed and about 50 injured when an earthquake razed mud-brick villages on the Gulf island of Qeshm off Iran's south coast yesterday, officials and state media said.
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27.11.05
By David Eimer
In the eastern province of Jiangxi, an earthquake yesterday killed 14 people and injured nearly 400.
The quake, which measured 5.7 on the Richter scale, struck at 8.49am and was followed by two aftershocks, damaged 130,000 homes and forced the evacuation of 420,000 people, according to initial reports.
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By JULIET WILLIAMS
Associated Press
Sun Nov 27, 3:23 AM ET
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Carrying rosary beads and cameras, the faithful have been coming in a steady stream to a church on the outskirts of Sacramento for a glimpse of what some are calling a miracle: A statue of the Virgin Mary they say has begun crying a substance that looks like blood. [...]
Since then, Truong said he has been at the church day and night, so emotional he can't even work. He believes the tears are a sign.
"There's a big event in the future — earthquake, flood, a disease," Truong said. "We're very sad."
On Saturday, tables in front of the fenced-in statue were jammed with potted plants, bouquets of roses and candles. Some people prayed silently, while others sang hymns and hugged their children. An elderly woman in a wheelchair wept near the front of the crowd.
A red trail could be seen from the side of the statue's left eye to about halfway down the robe of concrete.
"I think that it's incredible. It's a miracle. Why is she doing it? Is it something bothering her?" asked Maria Vasquez, 35, who drove with her parents and three children from Stockton, about 50 miles south of Sacramento.
Thousands of such incidents are reported around the world each year, though many turn out to be hoaxes or natural phenomena.
The Diocese of Sacramento has so far not commented on the statue, and the two priests affiliated with the church did not return a telephone message Saturday.
The Rev. James Murphy, deacon of the diocese's mother church, the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, said church leaders are always skeptical at first.
"For people individually seeing things through the eyes of faith, something like this can be meaningful. As for whether it is supernatural or a miracle, normally these incidences are not. Miracles are possible, of course," Murphy said. "The bishop is just waiting and seeing what happens. They will be moving very slowly."
But seeing the statue in person left no doubt for Martin Operario, 60, who drove about 100 miles from Hayward. He took photos to show to family and friends.
"I don't know how to express what I'm feeling," Operario said. "Since religion is the mother of believing, then I believe."
Nuns Anna Bui and Rosa Hoang, members of the Salesian Sisters of San Francisco, also made the trek Saturday. Whether the weeping statue is declared a miracle or not, they said, it is already doing good by awakening people to the faith and reminding them to pray.
"It's a call for us to change ourselves, to love one another," Hoang said.
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By Neil Mackay
Sunday Herald
Scotland
27 November 2005
As the Pope’s astronomer, Guy Consolmagno must reconcile faith and science, then work out what to do if ET phones Rome
Even in the 1950s, priests knew that aliens and the Church didn’t compute. If there were extraterrestrials out there, their existence could effectively herald the death of God – cutting the ground from beneath key biblical truths, not least of which is the claim that humankind was made in God’s image.
Consolmagno has been granted a special dispensation from the Church to produce a book called Intelligent Life In The Universe? Catholic Belief And The Search For Extra-Terrestrial Life. Published by the Vatican’s Catholic Truth Society, it explores an issue which could – theoretically – reduce the spires and steeples of Rome to rubble.
MY grandfather, a rampant atheist, liked nothing better than savaging the priests that my devout Irish Catholic grandmother invited home in the hope of saving his soul. After laying into them about the dubious credibility of immaculate conceptions and self-replicating loaves and fishes, he’d declaim, with a flourish: “And what the bloody hell is Genesis chapter six all about, eh?”
For those not up to speed on the Old Testament, this part of the creation story deals with a category of creatures called “the Nephilim”, a non-human race that apparently inhabited the Earth around the time Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden. My grandfather would holler: “What are these things? Little green men from outer space?” At which point, the deflated priest would be led from the house as my grandmother crossed herself in the face of her husband’s wickedness. Even in the 1950s, priests knew that aliens and the Church didn’t compute. If there were extraterrestrials out there, their existence could effectively herald the death of God – cutting the ground from beneath key biblical truths, not least of which is the claim that humankind was made in God’s image.
Half a century on, the Catholic Church is finally getting round to asking what it would mean for their religion if humankind were to establish the existence of intelligent aliens. The question weighs heavily on the mind of Guy Consolmagno. Sitting among his telescopes in Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace, Consolmagno is puzzling over whether or not the Catholic Church could – or should – baptise an alien. Were such creatures discovered, ought the Pope to consider ordaining an ET? And if the human race ever masters interstellar travel, should missionaries be sent into outer space ... ?
Consolmagno, a 53-year-old Jesuit brother from Detroit, is the Pope’s astronomer, with the run of the Vatican’s observatory here at Castel Gandolfo, in the hills outside Rome. Despite the aristocratic-sounding name and the arcane, slightly eldritch subjects he immerses himself in, Guy Consolmagno appears surprisingly Earth-bound: a self-confessed “nerd” from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who’s into Star Trek.
It’s his job to reconcile the wildest reaches of science fiction with the flint-eyed dogma of the Holy See. Right now, he’s off on a mental meander about “the Jesus Seed” – a brain-warping theory which speculates that, perhaps, every planet that harbours intelligent, self-aware life may also have had a Christ walk across its methane seas, just as Jesus supposedly did here on Earth in Galilee. The salvation of the Betelguesians may have happened simultaneously with the salvation of the Earthlings.
“Is original sin something that affected all intelligent beings?” he asks. “Is there a sort of ‘cosmic’ Adam predating even life on Earth? Is Jesus Christ’s redemptive sacrifice sufficient for the whole universe? Would there be a parallel history of salvation on other planets?”
Consolmagno’s job is to shore up the crumbling edifice of the Church against the acidic drip, drip, drip of rationality and science . “To me there is no clash between faith and science,” he says. “My religion teaches me that God created the universe, but my science teaches me how he did it. Religion doesn’t become obsolete like a science text book. In 3000 years, people will still be reading the Bible, but they will not be reading the science texts of today.”
That tension between science and religion is the backdrop to his life’s work, and Consolmagno has been granted a special dispensation from the Church to produce a book called Intelligent Life In The Universe? Catholic Belief And The Search For Extra-Terrestrial Life. Published by the Vatican’s Catholic Truth Society, it explores an issue which could – theoretically – reduce the spires and steeples of Rome to rubble.
The Roman Catholic Church has, in the past, been obliged to rue its mistakes: the Crusades, the Inquisition, wartime acquiescence by certain clergy with Nazism. But it was the scientific cock-ups, not the moral ones, that really threatened the institution’s authority. Having taken more than 350 years to admit its mistake in convicting Galileo of heresy for insisting that the Earth orbited the sun, the Church seems keen to demonstrate that it is no longer the natural haven for scientific dunces: hence, Consolmagno and his peculiar little book.
It’s Consolmagno’s job to finesse any looming doctrinal difficulties that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may present for His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. For instance, if aliens were discovered, then why would the Bible – supposedly the word of God – contain no information about his non-Earthly creations? If they turn out to be green blobs or sentient gaseous spirals, what’s all that talk in the Bible of humankind being created in God’s image? What if the aliens wanted to convert us to their God? And do ETs go to heaven? Consolmagno’s role is to scientifically, metaphysically and theologically take the lethal sting out of such a debate; to marry Christian faith with the possibility of discovering a talking crab in the next galaxy.
But how does the prospect affect other faiths? According to Dr Mona Siddiqui, senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at Glasgow University, the discovery of aliens would merely signal that the human race had learned a fraction more about the universe. “The question wouldn’t be: ‘What does this say about our relationship to God?’, but: ‘What does it say about us in the cosmos?’.
“God would remain, but the way we think about his ‘creation’ – the universe and everything in it – would change.” Unless humankind finds a way to communicate with the creator, says Siddiqui, “then the mystery of God remains”, no matter what discoveries we make about intelligent life elsewhere in the void.
Ephraim Borowski, former head of philosophy at Glasgow University and current director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, also remains sanguine. “My gut tells me that the discovery of alien life would have no more impact on faith than the discovery of Australia,” he says. “When that land was discovered and people of different racial characteristics were found, there was no problem in recognising them as human. If an ET was discovered, would it be that much different?
“Even if we take Genesis literally – with the story of the creation of the sun, moon and stars – we are not told what was going on on those planets.” Although Judaism sees humans as the only creature gifted a soul, Borowski has a fanciful explanation for how humanity could reconcile something physically vastly different from ourselves – a giant self-aware spider with a gift for pottery, say – with evidence that the alien creature was just as capable of love, fear, jealousy and abstract thought as us.
“If we came across an alien with whom we could enjoy a visit to the National Gallery,” he muses, “then we might take the view that this creature was a different shape to a human and so not biologically like us, but it functioned like us – or even better than us – and so could be seen to have a soul; to be effectively human.”
Only the Church of Scientology waxes enthusiastic about the prospect of extra-terrestrial life. The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland refused to participate in a debate related to a Sabbath Day newspaper , and the Church of Scotland was reticent in putting forward a spokesperson on the subject.
Dr Richard Holloway – the controversial former primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church – insists that only a faith which has embraced modernity could cope with the daisy-cutter level fire and brimstone that would rain down on organised religion in the event of a flying saucer landing on the Esplanade outside Edinburgh Castle. “Christianity has dealt with dinosaurs, Darwin and the emancipation of women,” Holloway says. “It gulped momentarily and moved on. Good religion is not hermetically sealed. A religion that is held with lightness and less intensity can adapt. It won’t be stuck in time, but move with the times.” Ultimately, he believes, the discovery of aliens would just underscore how big a mystery the universe and its creation – or creator – remain to us mortals who are just passing by.
The central question posed by the discovery of aliens would be: “Are they fallen like us?” If so, says Holloway, did they have their own version of Adam and Eve? Did they have a saviour? If they aren’t fallen, then are they living in some pre-Edenic paradise with no need of a saviour? “The biggest fact that plays against the belief in a benign creator,” says Holloway, “is meaningless pain and suffering. If we discovered intelligent life on a planet that believed in no God and was just as brutal as our own planet, then that might be seen by some as the ultimate definition of a Godless universe.”
For the Vatican and Consolmagno, the theological puzzle is more tricky. As a scientist, Consolmagno can’t reject the possibility of alien life. But as a theologian he has to perform an intellectual somersault in order to make sure that the chance of an ET cropping up somewhere in the universe doesn’t shunt the Christian God to the outer fringes.
Consolmagno says he believes in ETs – and that they too are God’s creatures and no challenge to Rome’s authority. His belief is a bit like his faith: he can’t prove it, but he’s certain nonetheless. “I can’t be sure I’m right,” he says, “indeed I could well be wrong, but still, I have a hunch that sooner or later, the human race will discover that there are other intelligent creatures out there in the universe.”
At the core of Consolmagno’s reconciliation between science and religion is an almost hippy way of thinking about spirituality and the universe. He cites the opening lines of John, Chapter One: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything.” He interprets this as meaning that the word of God – the spirit of the essence, the meaning of God – existed before anything else, and is part of everything in the natural universe: even a giant mindworm on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.
“After all, we are all made of stars,” Consolmagno says, quoting the US singer, Moby. His thinking is this: just as the word of God echoes from “the beginning” until now, in all of us, so the stuff that formed the first stars remains present within the minerals from which we are all made. In Consolmagno’s worldview, God and science are one. Apart from certainty in God the creator and Christ the saviour, he believes almost everything else is unknowable. It means Consolmagno can maintain his faith in God, but still believe in the Big Bang. The Lord is an infinite physicist – an all-knowing Stephen Hawking – who started the whole process of life, the universe and everything else by flicking a switch, triggering an almighty explosion some 10 billion-plus years ago and allowing his creation to unfold in accordance with his omniscient, and highly mathematical, plan.
Consolmagno considers himself a free thinker, who wears both a dog collar and his MIT graduation ring as evidence that he can be a “fanatic and a nerd at the same time”. He’s happy to point out Biblical disparities – including the bit of Genesis about the Nephilim that vexed my grand father – and say it’s just silly fiction. Nor does the Bible’s failure to mention dinosaurs mean that Christians have to question the existence of T-Rex. “The Bible doesn’t tell you how to programme your VCR either, but you know it’s there,” he adds.
Consolmagno’s natural audience, he says, is the devout. “They are the people who fear even thinking about science, as it might make them question their faith. But a faith that is afraid of the truth has no faith.” Part of his mission is to show the blinkered that even the most fantastical of scientific discoveries would, at least in his opinion, not trash the teachings of Christ and the prophets. “The discovery of extraterrestrial life will not destroy the Church,” insists Consolmagno. “What it might do is help us discard the bad ideas in religion – the narrow views, the hubris, the divisiveness.”
But what about the deep-rooted paranoia evident in so many science fiction works, that alien life, if it’s out there, might one day attempt to destroy humankind? “We’ve seen when human cultures interact that nobody comes out superior,” Consolmagno says. What about the genocide of Native Americans when white Europeans “interacted” with their culture? “Hmmm,” he says, “it could happen, I suppose, but the important thing is that the Native American culture did survive.”
Consolmagno, it seems, remains the eternal optimist. God is great. And for him, the Church, in the face of everything that we know, is safe, secure and a source of succour for the souls of us all – no matter what planet we’re on.
Intelligent Life In The Universe? (Catholic Truth Society, £1.95) is out now
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SOTT
November 28, 2005
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
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On the fourth
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
announced the availability of her latest book:
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books
have sought to explore the truth behind the official
version of events that day - yet to date, none of
these publications has provided a satisfactory answer
as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately
responsible for carrying them out.
Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura
Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of
the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and
ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks
played out.
9/11: The Ultimate
Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September
11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered
the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been
many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed
and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless
individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative
aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as
a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to
keep us confused and distracted to the reality of
the man behind the curtain.
Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk
eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear
evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural
cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity
to the brink of destruction in the present day.
For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core
of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to
be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation
that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover
their tracks, 9/11:
The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE
definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's
true implications are for the future of mankind.
Published by Red Pill Press
Order the book today at our bookstore. |
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