Editor's note: This Sott.net editorial is being 'flash-backed' as a result of the recent Portland 'terror' scare. Details of that incident can be read on Sott.net here. This article shows in abundant detail the efforts that the US government and associated 'Intel' agencies have made over the years to manufacture 'home-grown terrorism'

Like most normal people, by the 100th day of the Obama administration I had hoped that Bush-era freaks like Dick Cheney would have respectfully withdrawn from public view and ultimately (and ideally) ended up parked in an old people's home where staff would joyfully beat them twice a day. But alas, like a recurring nightmare, Mr. Cheney at least seems unwilling to spare us his disturbing presence just yet.

Reading his recent rants on Obama's (now reversed) plans to release more prisoner abuse photos and roll back illegal wiretapping and close Gitmo etc, we get the impression that behind Cheney's anger lies fear (I'm generously presuming that there actually is something more to old snarly face than pure primal anger). But what could provoke fear in man whose idea of private conflict resolution is to try and blow your face off with his shotgun?

While Dick is undoubtedly frustrated at the thought of an end to the vicarious pleasure he surely derives from his personal (if indirect) involvement in the water-boarding, sodomising or plain ol' beating to death of innocent people, not to mention an end to his personal assassination squad, the many degrees of separation between an order from the office of the VP and the 'enhanced interrogation' room where the 'fun' takes place ensure that Cheney need not fear any jail time for his 'enhanced misdemeanors' (especially under the increasingly pusillanimous Obama aka 'Judas Goat').

Brace yourselves, commuters - body scanners may be coming to trains, subways and boats, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

"[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through," Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on Charlie Rose. She said as aviation security tightens, "we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime."

Her comments were a response to a question about what terrorists would be thinking in the future. She didn't elaborate on what enhanced security at train stations might look like, however.

Trains have already been terrorist targets in England, Russia and Spain, with catastrophic results; just last month, a Pakistani-American was arrested after a thwarted plot to bomb the Washington, D.C. metro system. So it's somewhat surprising the government took this long to acknowledge our other modes of transport are also at risk.

Despite the firestorm of controversy over the use of high-tech body scanners at airports, the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Transportation Security Administration is spending or looking to spend on them makes it unlikely that they'll be getting shelved anytime soon.

Each scanner costs about $130,000 to $170,000, the agency said, and President Obama's budget request for this year calls for $88 million to buy and install 500 new scanners.

The TSA already has already spent $80 million on body scanners, including $73 million received in stimulus funds.

Needless to say, the technology is big business, and the two companies that supply the scanners to the TSA, L-3 Communications and Rapiscan Systems, have a record of using high-powered political operatives and lobbyists to influence lawmakers. A number of other companies also are vying for future government contracts.

A self-described "rule follower" went through an airport pornoscanner wearing a panty-liner (she was menstruating). Because the hygienic item obscured the screener's view of her vagina vulva, she was made to endure a humiliating fondling, "so invasive that I was left crying and dealing with memories that I thought had been dealt with years ago of prior sexual assaults."

These new scans are so horrible that if you are wearing something unusual (like a piece of cloth on your panties) then you will be subjected to a search where a woman repeatedly has to check your "groin" while another woman watches on (two in my case - they were training in a new girl - awesome). So please, please, tell the ladies not to wear their liners at the airport (I didn't even have an insert in). I'm a strong, confident woman; I'm an Army vet (which is why those camo liners crack me up), I work full-time and go to graduate school full-time, I have a wonderful husband, and I don't take any nonsense from anyone. I don't dramatize, and I don't exaggerate. I'm trying to give you a sense of who I am so you won't think that this is a plea for attention, or a jumping on the bandwagon about the recent TSA proposed boycott. I just don't want another woman to have to go through the "patting down" because she didn't know that her glad-rag would be a matter of national security."

President Nicolas Sarkozy was yesterday accused of calling French journalists "paedophiles" in a furious off-the-record exchange at the Nato summit in Lisbon last week.

The Elysée Palace denied that the President had ever used the word but a news magazine and an investigative website reported that Mr Sarkozy had lost his temper when questioned about "Karachigate" - allegations of kickbacks on French submarine sales to Pakistan in the 1990s.

The magazine L'Express and the website Mediapart said that President Sarkozy was briefing the Elysée press corps on Friday night about developments at the Nato summit. A journalist asked him a question about the latest developments in the Karachigate affair: allegations that the cancellation of commissions on a French submarine contract led to a bomb attack in Karachi in May 2002 in which 11 French engineers and four Pakistanis died.

Mr Sarkozy is then reported to have launched into a tirade about press ethics and the use of unnamed sources. "You say ridiculous things. You check nothing," he said to the journalist who asked the question.

"I have nothing against you but it seems that you are a paedophile. I am personally convinced of that fact. I have spoken to the security services but I won't tell you which ones. I have seen someone but it was just a verbal exchange. But now I am personally convinced that you are a paedophile."

After a stunned silence, the briefing moved on to other subjects. Before he left, President Sarkozy is reported to have said to the journalists: "So long paedophiles, see you tomorrow."

An oil find in Irish waters in May this year has been virtually ignored by the Irish media. Serica Energy plc, in partnership with RWE, the German utility, made the discovery while drilling for gas in the Slyne basin, off Mayo. This find is heralded as the first discovery of oil in Irish waters in 28 years.

Oil lakes and gas have been known to exist in Irish waters for the last decade and more, but at depths too deep for recovery at that time. The technology to exploit these deepwater natural resources now exists. Has our government gambled NAMA on exploitation of these resources?

The Norwegian government ensured that the Norwegian people would participate in, and profit from, the riches of an oil find. Since 1996, every krone the Norwegian government earns from oil has gone into a savings fund to guarantee the future well-being of Norway's 4.8 million citizens. The fund now totals some €260 billion. Norway has other energy investments - the Norwegians own 25.5% of the gas from the Irish Corrib field - that is 25.5% more than the Irish people own. It is to be hoped that the Irish government will have the Irish citizens' best interests at heart in the negotiation of the new round of exploration licences.

This cannot be taken for granted. We could be one of the wealthiest countries in Europe if the government deals in the interests of the Irish as a people, and not just in the interests of a chosen few.

The article below from the Irish Independent, informing the Irish people that they must go to the IMF, coming from a former chief economist from the IMF, is nothing less than a pathetic, thinly disguised piece of propaganda portraying the pirates of the IMF as benevolent bankers who care for the welfare of the Irish people.

Ask any ordinary person in the Third World after these gangsters have moved in and crippled them with debt if they think the IMF is a good thing and I think you'll find an overwhelming majority, discounting the corrupt despots running these countries, who have seen their natural resources raped by international corporations, who have looted and pillaged every country they've gone into at the IMF's behest for their international banker criminal cartel, you'll find a resounding rejection of any such notion.

The so called 'Irish' government are as despotic and corrupt as any of the Third World leaders. The only difference is that they don't openly slaughter large numbers of people in the process, although poisoning of the water supply, our air and our food is also a less overt way of killing off the 'undesirables'.
Yep, that's you and me folks and don't think for a second that there aren't those in power in Ireland who know this is going on. If visitors to this website can find the information, then surely the apparent 'creme de la creme' of Ireland who are supposedly running the country can find out too?

The nation's workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.

American businesses brought in $1.66 trillion at an annual rate in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms. Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.

This breakneck pace can be partly attributed to strong productivity growth - which means companies have been able to make more with less - as well as the fact that some of the profits of American companies come from abroad. Economic conditions in the United States may still be sluggish, but many emerging markets like India and China are expanding rapidly.

It doesn't take a bureaucrat long to create an empire. John Pistole, the FBI agent who took over the Transportation Security Administration on July 1 told USA Today 16 days later that protecting trains and subways from terrorist attacks will be as high a priority for him as air travel.

It is difficult to imagine New Yorkers being porno-screened and sexually groped on crowed subway platforms or showing up an hour or two in advance for clearance for a 15 minute subway ride, but once bureaucrats get their teeth in the bit they take absurdity to its logical conclusion. Buses will be next, although it is even more difficult to imagine open air bus stops turned into security zones with screeners and gropers inspecting passengers before they board.

Will taxi passengers be next? In those Muslim lands whose citizens the US government has been slaughtering for years, favorite weapons for retaliating against the Americans are car and truck bombs. How long before Pistole announces that the TSA Gestapo is setting up roadblocks on city streets, highways and interstates to check cars for bombs? That 15 minute trip to the grocery store then becomes an all day affair.

Indeed, it has already begun. Last September agents from Homeland Security, TSA, and the US Department of Transportation, assisted by the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, conducted a counter-terrorism operation on busy Interstate 20 just west of Atlanta, Georgia. Designated VIPER (Visible Inter-mobile Prevention and Response), the operation required all trucks to stop to be screened for bombs. Federal agents used dogs, screening devices, and a large drive-through bomb detection machine. Imagine what the delays did to delivery schedules and truckers' bottom lines.

For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class. It's been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared. But even that pretense is now being abandoned. The President's National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of working and middle class wealth and will take whatever steps are necessary to seize it. If allowed to succeed, their plan will reduce Americans to a state of serfdom.

Ronald Reagan began the war on the middle class with his "supply-side" economics. Its very purpose, according to David Stockman, Reagan's Budget Director, was to transfer wealth and income upwards. It cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war. The results were two-fold: massive federal debt and an astonishing rise in the share of income and wealth going to those who were already the wealthiest people in the world.

The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992. George W. Bush would repeat Reagan's policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008. Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%. The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled. We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.