Puppet Masters
David Morgan
ReutersWed, 22 Feb 2006 12:00 UTC
Rep. Jane Harman of California
A top intelligence official was prepared to brief the House of Representatives intelligence committee about President George W. Bush's domestic spying program last December but was stopped by White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, a leading House Democrat said on Tuesday.
Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said she and fellow Democrats on the panel sought a briefing from deputy U.S. intelligence chief, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, soon after Bush confirmed the existence of the surveillance program.
"Gen. Hayden said he was prepared to brief the full committee but our request was disapproved by White House Chief of Staff Andy Card," Harman said in a statement issued by her office.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said she was not aware of any conversations about a possible intelligence briefing in December. A spokeswoman for Hayden declined to comment.
The Bush administration said that journalists can be prosecuted under current espionage laws for receiving and publishing classified information but that such a step "would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly," according to a court filing made public this week.
"There plainly is no exemption in the statutes for the press, let alone lobbyists like the defendants," Justice Department lawyers wrote in response to a motion filed last month seeking to dismiss charges against Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Comment: Remember the Judy Miller case at the New York Times? Miller had been used by the neo-cons, and she is herself a neo-con, to funnel out fake info about Saddam and his weapons of mass invisibility. She was becoming a disgrace when her antics became public. Then, last summer, she was resurrected as a hero for refusing to give her sources in the Valerie Plame leak case.
She heroically did her time until "Scooter" Libby admitted that he was her source.
Here we have a case of Israeli spying on the US, something that goes on regularly and consistently. We see the attempt to pull the same switcheroo in a way to white wash Israel's spying on the US.
The Bush regime will attempt to use the case to clamp down yet again on the rights of US citizens while those interested in the freedom of information will be maneuvered into supporting the spies!
A bomb attack in Iraq has badly damaged one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, sparking furious protests.
Thousands of Iraqis have gathered at the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, where two men blew up the famous golden dome in a dawn raid.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual head of Iraq's Shia Muslims, has called for a week of mourning.
Shias in Baghdad attacked at least five Sunni mosques in reprisal raids, with disturbances reported in other cities.
The BBC's Jon Brain in Baghdad says the attack was almost certainly designed to raise the existing tensions between the majority Shia and minority Sunni populations.
Comment: Ask yourself, who wants civil war in Iraq? This attack is very clearly the work of the black ops boys in the CIA, MI5 and Mossad. See yesterday's
editorial for more on this aspect of the phony "war on terror".
Washington - Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has signaled that he plans to intensify a campaign to influence global media coverage of the United States, a move that is likely to heighten the debate over press freedom and propaganda-free reporting.
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week, Rumsfeld said that Washington will launch a new drive to spread and defend U.S. views, especially in the so-called war on terror.
He cited the Cold War-era initiatives of the U.S. Information Agency and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, widely viewed outside the United States as sophisticated propaganda outlets, as a model for the new offensive.
If similar efforts over the past five years are any example, the campaign is likely to take place in two main areas -- the U.S. media and the press in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where Washington sees its strategic influence as pivotal.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld also said that the Pentagon is "reviewing" its practice of paying to plant good news stories in the Iraqi news media, contradicting a previous assertion that the controversial propaganda programme had been halted.
The military interest in new brain-scanning technology is beginning to show a sinister side
Brain scientists are on a roll. Concern about rising levels of mental distress have resulted in unprecedented levels of funding in the US and Europe. And a range of new technologies, from genetics to brain imaging, are offering extraordinary insights into the molecular and cellular processes underlying how we see, how we remember, why we become emotional.
Brain imaging has become familiar. Scanners, known by their initials - CAT, PET, MRI - began as clinical tools, enabling surgeons to identify potential tumours, the damage following a stroke or the diagnostic signs of incipient dementia. But neuroscientists quickly seized on their wider potential. The images of regions of the brain 'lighting up' when a person is thinking of their lover, imagining traveling from home to the shops, or solving a mathematical problem, have captured the imagination of researchers and public alike. What if they could do more?
Comment:
Such trends may be relatively innocuous, but the increasing state interest in what the images might reveal is less so. Specifically, what if brain imaging could predict future behaviour, or indicate guilt or innocence of a crime? There are claims, for example, that it could reveal potential 'psychopathy', that the brains of men convicted of brutal murders show significantly abnormal patterns.
In the current legislative climate, where there have been attempts to introduce pre-emptive detention for 'psychopaths' who have not yet been convicted of any crime, such claims need to be addressed critically. They are and will be resisted by the judiciary, but recent developments suggest that this may be a frail defence against an increasingly authoritarian state.
The real problem is that if those in power are psychopaths, they're not going to be pushing technologies that could be used to incriminate them. They would do the exact opposite.
Joe Quinn
Sott.netTue, 21 Feb 2006 12:00 UTC
In what has tragically become a commonplace event, today yet another car bomb exploded in Baghdad. The UK Guardian reports:
Baghdad bomb kills 22
At least 22 people were killed and 28 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a busy outdoor market in the Iraqi city of Baghdad today.
Iraqi police said the bomb exploded at 4.45pm local time in Dora, a south-west district of the city. It is believed the attack was aimed at a police patrol but missed its target.
The injured were taken to hospital where a source said the death toll could be much higher. Dora is one of the most dangerous parts of Baghdad, with car and roadside bombings occurring daily since a Sunni-dominated insurgency began in the summer of 2003.
Notice that a "Baghdad bomb" killed at least 22 Iraqi civilians today, and that "car and roadside bombings occur almost daily". In reading this account, you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that "Baghdad bombs" have a life of their own and need no help from any human agency to wreak their bloody carnage. Perhaps the problem is that there is never any
reliable claim of responsibility for these attacks, and journalists and commentators are just mystified as Iraqi civilians about what kind of "Iraqi insurgent group" would deliberately kill their own neighbors - the very support base that they rely on to resist the American occupation.
The fact is that anonymous bombings that target civilians in the midst of a volatile society such as occupied Iraq is by no means a new phenomenon. All over the world over the past half century (and longer), wherever big Western governments had something to gain (or lose), bombs have been exploding and killing innocent civilians, leaving their friends and families not only traumatised, but completely confused as to
why such violence was committed against them.
Yesterday, during his whistlestop tour of Iraq, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw
made a couple of very interesting admissions, although undoubtedly he would not see them as such.
Joe Quinn
SOTT.netMon, 20 Feb 2006 12:00 UTC
There can be little doubt that the very same Western powers that created the modern-day Middle East are now in the process of destroying it. Yet it is a constant source of amazement to us how a Middle East plan that began with then British Secretary for War Winston Churchill
employing chemical weapons to 'placate' the indigenous Arab tribal population of then Mesopotamia, can have continued on so seamlessly for almost 100 years of the history of the political elite, until today, when Churchill's heir finds himself slavishly devoted to the same destructive impulse. What mechanism exists that can ensure the success of such a nefarious generation-spanning agenda?
Donald Hunt
SOTT.netMon, 20 Feb 2006 12:00 UTC
Gold closed at 555.20 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 0.2% from 554.20 for the week. The dollar closed at 0.8375 euros Friday, down 0.3% from 0.8401 at the end of the previous week. That puts the euro at 1.1940 dollars, compared to 1.1904 the Friday before. Gold in euros would be 464.99 euros an ounce, down 0.1% from 465.56 the week before. Oil closed at 59.88 dollars a barrel, down 3.3% from $61.84 for the week. Oil in euros would be 50.15 euros a barrel, down 3.6% from 51.95 the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.27 up 3.5% from 8.96 at the end of the previous week. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 11,115.32, up 1.8% from 10,919.05 the Friday before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,282.36, up 0.9% from 2,261.88 the week before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.54 down four basis points from 4.58 last Friday. There was much optimism about the U.S. economy from mainstream analysts last week, buoyed by rising stocks and falling oil prices (down 3.3%) and, for a while, falling gold prices (gold actually ended up a bit). The hope is that fresh quarterly earnings reports from major retailers this week will keep the U.S. stock market rising:
In this week's podcast we discuss what we have identified as the very first problem that must be solved in order for positive changes to be undertaken in America and elsewhere in the world: the Media. Knowledge is power. Those who control information can control the masses - it's that simple. As we researched the subject of the media, we came across The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. As everyone knows, this is a vicious anti-Semitic hoax. We agree. We do not for a minute think that this represents Judaism or ordinary Jewish people. What was shocking for us was our realization that the Protocols is being implemented almost line by line by many of the members of the Bush Administration and the various government 'think-tanks' that formulate their policy. In other words, the Protocols is not a hoax because it is nonsense, but rather it is only a hoax because it was attributed to Jews. (Part 2 of 2)
Running Time: 00:38:19
Download: MP3
Comment: Remember the Judy Miller case at the New York Times? Miller had been used by the neo-cons, and she is herself a neo-con, to funnel out fake info about Saddam and his weapons of mass invisibility. She was becoming a disgrace when her antics became public. Then, last summer, she was resurrected as a hero for refusing to give her sources in the Valerie Plame leak case.
She heroically did her time until "Scooter" Libby admitted that he was her source.
Here we have a case of Israeli spying on the US, something that goes on regularly and consistently. We see the attempt to pull the same switcheroo in a way to white wash Israel's spying on the US.
The Bush regime will attempt to use the case to clamp down yet again on the rights of US citizens while those interested in the freedom of information will be maneuvered into supporting the spies!