When people don't earn what they get, and don't get what they earn, a sickness develops, a corruption. Our society is set up so the middlemen get all the money. They don't earn their money, they steal it from others who do. But this is how the society has developed, and the entire human species has turned into a culture of parasites feeding on themselves, destroying the very conditions that sustain their lives with the deluded pretense of gathering "wealth."

That makes it difficult to appeal to their sense of reason, because their reason is to rape and plunder and not get caught.

The guy who said, "Crime doesn't pay," was a crook, because crime most definitely does pay, because it runs the whole world, and the best criminals — sociopaths posing as political leaders — often wind up running governments.

Everybody does only what they can do. Everybody tries to be as honest as they can. When you have to be slightly dishonest, or change the debate in order to cover up something you want to hide, you need to look at the thing you don't want everybody else to know, and understand how it poisons your life.

Are you happy profiting from someone else’s misery? A majority of us are. And that's where we are right now. That's the real war.

The real war presents the task of seeing what is real and what is not. At present the world pretends the freedom-loving American government is fighting terror all over the world. Precious few people understand that the freedom-loving American government has actually created the terror it pretends to fight, by combining with the subterranean intelligence agencies with its allies in corporate crime, Britain and Israel, to foment conflict in regions it wishes to further subjugate. That’s why they hire all those mercenaries.

Iraq is the classic example, as renegade Mossad hit squads roam the country bombing Muslim faithfuls and beheading their own superfluous gophers. And already reports of Mossad operatives in the Caribbean islands portend new war against Venezuela, whose leader calls the American president a killer psycho, and all intelligent humans have to agree with him.

For many, the real war is about coping with the death of your child, blown to bits by his own countrymen posing as Arab crazies called al-Qaeda. GET THIS STRAIGHT! Al-Qaida was created by Cheney and Rumsfeld for use as designated enemies to serve in their demonic plans to blow up those buildings in Oklahoma City and New York City. You only have to read any regular newspaper to know that, if you have a brain.

But for absolutely everyone, the real war is about personal mortality, and WHY we do WHAT we do.

I learned once that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is really a book about life, and that we are not prevented from learning all there is to know about possible multiple lives right now in this one, compacting all our possible lives into this one, and living everything we could possibly be right now. This is precisely the kind of attention our world needs right now.

We need to see through the delusions, and distinguish the superfluous human games from the genuine requirements of life, the necessary survival strategies for somewhat intelligent animals living on a garden planet.

By that I mean we need to see the difference between paving paradise for parking lots and feeling the exhilarating energy in food that you take through its cycle from the ground to your mouth. Then you get some idea of who you really are.

Otherwise, as I said at the top, you're just a pawn in somebody else's game. And if you keep doing it, without ever realizing who the hell you actually COULD be, the species will go extinct, made forever inept and superfluous because of its inability to transcend its own self-constructed delusions.

Otherwise, when you go into that room with Ma’at and the Feather of Truth (or whichever other mythological metaphor you choose to accompany you on your final journey on this planet), you may never realize what the stakes really are, or why you ever lived at all.

And that’s not only a bad thing for everyone and every thing, it’s precisely the reason why the world we pretend to love in is the condition it’s in right now.

And what about the economy? Do you think that the recent fall of the stock market, and the weakness in the economy, have been caused by the Sept. 11 attacks? Well, if you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you probably are brainwashed! If you answered “yes” to more than one, you are definitely a “goner.”

“But,” you, reply, “isn't that what most people think? Wouldn't they answer those questions the same way I do?” Well, the answer to that is, yes. But, we would remind you: Just because the majority of people might BELIEVE something to be true, doesn't make it true. All it means, is that you and most of your neighbours are suffering from a mass delusion--or, put more bluntly: YOU ARE BRAINWASHED. So, the question is, really, how did you get this way? How did you come to believe things like those statements in the first questions were true? “Well, I heard it on.... Well, I saw it on.... Well, I read it in....”

You needn't bother finishing those statements; we can do it for you: You, and your neighbours were told the “truth” by the mass media. The American “news” media, which is so proud of calling itself “free,” and has been patting itself on it back for the wonderful job it has done for all us during and after Sept. 11, is the largest, most expensive, mass-brainwashing machine ever assembled in human history. It is a machine that so completely brainwashes the nearly 300 millions Americans, that the Nazis' infamous Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels would be envious.

Here are the essential facts of what happened on Sept. 11: According to Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, whose assessment is shared by many competent specialists on terrorism and irregular warfare, in this country and around the world, what took place was not a terrorist attack, but strategic, covert special operation, organized to have the appearance of a “terrorist” attack. Mr. LaRouche and others concur that, given both its scope, and the extent of the cover-up and misdirection which followed, such an operation could not have been organized by any Arab terrorist cells or networks, nor by an Arab or Middle Eastern state, nor any combination of the above; it had to be organized from within the United States, with the participation and connivance of a rogue network within the Anglo-American intelligence and military establishment.

As with any such covert special operation, there is a psychological warfare component, intended to maximize its effectiveness against a targeted enemy, to confuse that enemy and misdirect him. In the case of the Sept. 11 attack, the targeted enemy is the POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES AND ITS CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT. The “psywar” component of the operation is being carried out by the American media-machine, with the intent to brainwash the American people INTO ACCEPTING THE ONGOING COUP D'ETAT AGAINST OUR CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT.

Does that mean that the directors of the U.S. mass media are involved in the operation? No; it doesn't work that way. As EIR explained and documented in a 1997 special report, the U.S. media are controlled and run as a cartel, by the Anglo-American establishment. As such, it routinely serves the interest of that establishment, reporting what it wants, and suppressing what it doesn't want reported; or slanting reporting to conceal reality. Thus, the media's performance before, during and after Sept. 11 could be pre-discounted by those who planned the operation, so as to become a feature of it; it were merely required to insert certain specific “psyops” content into this media - brainwashing apparatus, for it to be spread far and wide with the desired effects on you and your neighbours.

The brainwashing methods are relatively simple and classic. First, use the terror itself to put people into a state of shock, making them more susceptible to suggestion. Then resort to the “Big Lie” technique to repeatedly hammer home your psywar message--those affirmative answers to the questions we first asked. And most importantly, lie, by suppressing all counter-evidence, by refusing to report anything that might point to the assessment shared by Mr. LaRouche and others: the cover-up. All this has been done, along with initial softening of the population to the mass delusional suggestion of the enemy image and the alleged capabilities and motivations of the so-called terrorists, PRIOR TO THE LAUNCHING OF THE ATTACK ITSELF.

Don't be so hasty in dismissing the possibility of your own brainwashing. The enemy knows your profile and uses it. Doesn't that make you a bit angry--maybe for the right reasons, for the first time in a few weeks?

Our report below is designed to give you a view from inside this brainwashing process, to see how it has worked on you and your neighbours. And, while we can't yet say who precisely is behind what was done to this country--is still being done--we can show you how they think about brainwashing and use your weaknesses against you.

Psychological Terror as a Means of Warfare: Dresden Redux

Before discussing the brainwashing operation itself, we provide a little background on the use of terror against mass civilian populations. Not surprisingly, this was pioneered by the brainwashers of the Anglo-American establishment.

As commentators on the scene at "Ground Zero" of the World Trade Center (WTC) attack on Sept. 11 surveyed the devastation, they reached for metaphors to describe the incredible scene. “It looks like Dresden,” said one, referring to the firebombing of that German city by the Allies in 1944.

Dresden had no military value as a target. For centuries, it had been a center of German cultural heritage--a heritage that had everything to do with positive developments in human civilization, and nothing to do with the Nazi disease that had been imposed on Germany by the Anglo-American financial elite. Dresden was chosen for destruction as an act of TERRORISM, directed, not against the Nazis, per se, but the German people.

The firebombing of Dresden, creating a raging inferno of destruction that slaughtered more that 100,000 human beings, was conceived and directed by a group of social psychiatrists at the Strategic Bombing Survey, affiliated with the Special Operations Command of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This group was effectively overseen by the head of the British Psychological Warfare Directorate, Brig. Gen. John Rawlings Rees, the director of the Tavistock Clinic in London, which, since the 1920s, had served as a center of psychological warfare operations of the British Empire.

The team at the Strategic Bombing Survey, which included a host of U.S.-based Tavistock operatives, such as Kurt Lewin, Rensis Likert, and Margaret Mead, theorized that the terror inflicted on the German population through the “message of Dresden” would break their will to fight, leaving them fearful, frightened, and disorganized. They projected that it would have a lasting effect on Germany, removing that nation from among the great states of Europe, making it a permanently psychologically scarred entity. The German people, they argued, would be made to realize that “all that is German” could be wiped away, all of its culture and history, in an instant, as it were, by powers who would oppose an assertive future Germany.

In his 1941 book, “Time Perspective and Morale,” Kurt Lewin described the psychology behind the use of this terror tactic for mass effect:

“One of the main techniques for breaking morale through a 'strategy of terror' consists in exactly this tactic--keep the person hazy as to where he stands and what just he may expect. If, in addition, frequent vacillations between severe disciplinary measures and promises of good treatment, together with the spreading of contradictory news, make the cognitive structure of this situation utterly unclear, then the individual may cease to know when a particular plan would lead toward or away from his goal. Under these conditions, even those individuals who have definite goals and are ready to take risks will be paralyzed with severe inner conflicts in regard to what to do.”

As the pilots and their crews came to realize what they had done—the creation of a raging inferno, burning civilian targets and civilians—many returned to their bases horrified. At the instruction of the psyops warriors, the crews had not been fully briefed on the mission. Now, they were greeted by teams of psychologists and others, who would profile their responses to the terror they had unleashed; they were told, as the crews who later dropped, unnecessarily, atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, that it would “shorten the war.”

As one former intelligence officer remarked decades later, “we killed for pure terror, slaughtered people as A TERRORIST WOULD. And, it had no effect on shortening the war. In fact, it seemed to help rally the German people to the Hitler government. The fools who designed this mission probably extended the war” (emphasis added).

The attack on the U.S. Sept. 11, in particular the WTC attack, was designed for a similar PSYWAR brainwashing effect.

The Sept. 24 issue of “The New Yorker,” commented that, according to “defence experts,” the Sept. 11 strike “was clearly an example of what military strategists call 'psyops'; that is, a brand of warfare whose aim is not to disable military targets, but to sap the overall will of a nation and its people.”

The article goes on to quote from a 1999 paper by military strategist and analyst Joseph Cyrulik of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., “Asymmetric Warfare and the Threat to the American Homeland”: “By killing and wounding people, damaging and destroying their homes and communities, disrupting their jobs and economic livelihoods, and undermining their confidence and sense of security, an enemy can inflict pain to the point that people demand a change in their government's policies.

“Used at the right time and place ... an attack could destroy the people's faith in their government, their military, and themselves. It could become a decisive attack against the political will of an entire populace.”

Cyrulik is part of a network of “thinkers” who seek to change all military doctrine to meet alleged 21st Century threats; in so doing, this network wants to activate psyops, including “covert warfare” such as assassinations. While we can't say that such people are directly responsible for what occurred on Sept. 11, their assumptions about strategy, tactics, and the elevated value of psychological warfare, as well as the misdirection involved in their ascribing powers to “terrorist organizations” or “rogue states” fit nicely into the overall operation.

There are new methods, not available at the time of the Dresden attack, for maximizing the psychological effects of a TERROR CAMPAIGN that parallel standard brainwashing techniques. One involves the repetition of terrifying images, the kind that would make a person recoil, and then compelling that person to continue viewing them. Such terrifying images weaken the ability of the mind to reason, making it more susceptible to suggestion and manipulation.

In the hours following the attack on the World Trade Center, every television media outlet in the United States broadcast, again and again, the images of the airplanes smashing into the Twin Towers, from all conceivable angles, and then, the shots of the two towers collapsing. It was easily the most terrifying real-life image that most Americans had ever seen.

A population induced into a state of terror and shock was then bombarded with SUGGESTION: images started to appear, the mugshot-like photos of the alleged perpetrators, and the image of the “evil mastermind” behind the deed, Osama bin Laden.

And, you still believe that you weren't brainwashed?

The Movies in Our Heads

“God, this is just like a movie,” exclaimed CBS anchor Dan Rather as the first of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. “Only, it's the real thing.” Did you have the sense, as you were witnessing the horror of the WTC attack, that you, too, had seen this before? You probably had--and that is part of the brainwashing operation.

In the last five years, there have been at least a half-dozen movies, whose plots have centered on a terrorist attack on the United States. Hollywood statisticians have estimated that these have been viewed, both in movie theaters and home videos, by more than 100 million people. And, many of these movies, in the recent period, have portrayed “Arabs” or “Islamic fundamentalists” as being behind the terrorist assaults.

Each of these latter films has some “expert” advisor, usually a “former counterterrorism expert” and, in some cases, someone who has worked in the military. While it would be a leap to say that the movie-production companies or the “experts” are necessarily witting accomplices in the current plot, the movies, with their “steered” scripts helped people believe that “Arab” terrorists might be capable of what was done on Sept. 11.

Long before there was television, images were placed, for “playback” in America's memory banks--first by the print media, and then, starting early in the 20th Century with the first of the real mass media, the movies. Hollywood is a component of the Anglo-American media cartel, a point made more obvious by recent creation of “entertainment conglomerates” through mergers and acquisitions. Thus, a mere handful of companies, with interlocking boards, comprised of people within the Anglo-American establishment, controls all of what we see in the multiplexes, on television, in the print media, and, more lately, on the Internet.

As movies were becoming a truly mass-media phenomenon, the Anglo-American commentator Walter Lippmann described their power, along with the power of media generally, in shaping “public opinion”--what you and your neighbours think. In his 1921 “handbook” on the mass manipulation of the public mind, “Public Opinion”, Lippmann, who had been trained by Rees, among others, at the British propaganda directorate during World War I, writes in his introductory chapter, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”:

“Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them.... The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationships, are their opinions. Those pictures acted on by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters.... The picture inside [the head] so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside.”

Somewhere in your memory banks, were planted the “pictures in your head” of the WTC attack. New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane writes in the magazine's Sept. 24 issue, “How often have we listened to these words [since Sept. 11]. The statement of fact: 'The worst terrorist bombing since Oklahoma City.' The promise: 'Make no mistake about it--we will hunt down the enemy, we will find the enemy, and we will kill the enemy.' The caution: 'You can't fight a war against an enemy you can't see.' And the ominous look ahead: 'This is a time of war; the fact that it is inside our border means that it is a new kind of war.' We have learned such sentiments like a script; that we have heard it again and again [in the days since Sept. 11] has not diminished the sternness with which we have given our assent.

“Just one problem: it IS a script. All the lines quoted come from 'The Siege,' a 1998 thriller directed by Edward Zwick.”

The plot of that movie involves a network of “Arab” terrorist cells, which commit acts of increasingly violent intensity, against civilian targets in New York City. Video clips of President Clinton commenting on the attacks launched, by his administration, against the networks of Osama bin Laden are spliced into the movie footage. As the terrorists wreak more havoc and kill more people, New York City is placed under martial law; anyone who looks “Arab” is rounded up and placed in internment camps, even as the violence continues.

In the end, the movie becomes a sermon on how to moderate attacks on the Constitution, and on ethnic profiling of Americans, while the nation goes on to fight the foreign, “Arab”-terrorist enemy.

When “The Siege” opened in November 1999, it was greeted with protests from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, who charged that it “portrays Arabs and Muslims as an homogeneous, threatening mass,” and labelled the film, produced by Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox, “dangerous and incendiary.”

Despite such protests, and relatively poor reviews, the movie sold several score millions of dollars worth of tickets and has done well in its video release. In remarking how successful the movie-brainwashing effort has been, Lane noted, in the “New Yorker,” that the majority of Americans reacted to those events with the same kind of unreasoned emotion that they express at the multiplex or in the home theaters:

“And the exclamations from below, from the watchers of the skies caught on video, as they see the aircraft slice into the side of the tower: where have you heard those expressions most recently--the wows, the whoohs, the `holy shits'--if not in the movie theaters, and even on your own blaspheming tongue.” Hollywood, through films like the “The Siege” and “Die Hard,” writes Lane, has provided a “sensory education ... fed to a hungry public.”

In the days following the attack, President Bush's approval rating shot up to above 90%, and stayed there, especially after his nationally televised address of Sept. 13. Following the speech, a CNN commentator observed that President's approval was so high because he was behaving the way Americans expected him to: “Like the President in 'Independence Day' [a blockbuster movie about an attack on Washington and the U.S. by aliens] or the guy from the `West Wing' [a popular television show].”

And, you think you haven't been brainwashed?

In the days and weeks leading up to the attack, media-watch organizations reported that the major U.S. television news outlets, including the cable networks CNN and Fox News, devoted an inordinate amount of what passes for their “international” coverage, to bin Laden, describing him as a “terrorist mastermind” or “terrorist controller,” almost always accompanied by a photo or video clips.

But his creation by the media as “terrorist mastermind” doesn't really begin there. To understand what happened, one needs to look at a nearly 30-year span of news reporting, that led us to this point, where some character, a former and current asset of U.S.-British-Israeli intelligence networks, operating from “caves” and other bases in one of the most remote and isolated areas of the world, has become U.S. “Public Enemy Number One.”

Look at the bin Laden enemy image as a morphing process that begins with the television image of the Black September terrorists of the 1972 Olympics. Then, continue to the 1973 images of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat; later, there are the images of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and the fanatic mullahs.

Think of someone in Hollywood central casting, trying to find a person to portray the terrorist archetype, given these past figures and images: An oil-rich, almost mystical clerical type (although he holds no religious position), who looks like a morph of “enemies” Arafat and Khomeini, gets the “part.”

The population has also been pre-conditioned to accept the “storyline” that terrorists who would do such things as took place on Sept. 11 MUST BE ARAB AND/OR MUSLIM FANATICS, as thousands of televised hours of misreporting has repeated. Arab organizations in this country report polling results showing that, by a large margin, Americans believe, even without supporting evidence, that any act of terrorism has “Arab” origins and “Arab” perpetrators.

As one intelligence source said this week, within minutes of the World Trade Center attack, Americans had decided that this was done by “Arab terrorists” connected to “terrorist mastermind” bin Laden. “They didn't need to be told to think this,” said the source. “They had already been conditioned to believe it.” Are such people not “brainwashed?”

We are told that our press is “free.” But isn't that a lie? How “free” can it be, if the most important event of our time is lied about, at almost every turn, misreported; if the truth is nowhere to be found among the smorgasbord of news outlets that comprise our glorious, “free press.”

In Nazi Germany, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels boasted that the press was free to report whatever it wanted. But, that press was “coordinated” through the operation of a “press trust,” that encompassed all media. The Nazis planted stories in the press to suit their ends, and the trust dutifully reported them, with various spins that might give the appearance that not all media were receiving information from the same spigot.

While Americans might find it hard to believe, THERE IS NO PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROPAGANDA OPERATION OF THE NAZI PRESS TRUST AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT CARTEL. It is not hard to slant the coverage of any event to suit almost any purpose--as long as that purpose fits the needs of those elites that control the media. All it takes is the planting of a few key items of content, which are then flushed down through the media sewer pipes. Before you know it, the poor citizen is deluged. In a certain sense, the Nazi operation was less insidious, because it was more overt; only fools would fail to realize that they were being fed the "line" by Goebbels and his crew. Here, the appearance of choice, the appearance of a flood of information, confuses the average citizen into believing that he MUST BE GETTING THE TRUTH, FROM SOMEWHERE.

But, even a cursory content analysis of all, or most of our news sources, especially the major television providers, shows that the general content line from all sources is basically the same. This has been the case, for example, in coverage of Lyndon LaRouche and his policies. In the major media, the coverage of LaRouche has followed the line dictated by the late Lazard Freres-linked Katharine Graham of the “Washington Post” to never cover LaRouche, unless it is to slander him. Similarly, the decision to black out the present global depression and financial collapse. While there may be no formal meetings among the controllers of the media cartel, where such policy is laid out, a policy consensus, nonetheless, ruthlessly enforces the content of the “news.”

In periods of crisis like the current one, however, some of the controls become more visible; less is left to chance.

It has been reported by some sources, that within a few hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, Executive Orders were issued that put the U.S. media under effective wartime censorship. That is not to say that government auditors of news reporting actually issued orders censoring reports; it is to say that they moved quickly to block any reporting that might have veered away from the official “line.”

(There was also coordination on the extent of coverage as well. It was reported that all broadcast media were given the recommendation to cease normal programming in favor of 24-hour coverage of the “Terrorist attack on the United States” and “America at War,” as the "ID logos" that appeared on all the networks. It is also reliably reported, that the White House and national security operatives participated in the decision to cancel all major sporting events.

What this translates into, we have been told, is that a muzzle has been placed on government sources, and that all information coming out about the attacks and the investigation, is under top-down control. This is understood by those who control the news reporting of the major media outlets, who have thus submitted to a voluntary censorship.

And you, of course, have managed to understand the truth in this brainwashing environment? As they say, “Give me a break.”

Beating the Drums for War

There was a brief interval, that morning of Sept. 11, as the great brainwashing machine allowed for the visual impact of the terrorizing message to sink in, before the signal was given for the talking heads to pronounce the name of the enemy.

If it appeared to some that no matter which channel--broadcast or cable--you tuned to in those first hours, you saw the same dozen or so spin doctors, you weren't mistaken: This has been confirmed by various media-watch outfits. For example, one media-watch organization tallied more than a dozen appearances by former CIA Director James Woolsey in the first few days after the attack, each repeating the message about the need to wage war against Iran, Iraq, and anyone else who allegedly sponsored the likes of bin Laden. An only slightly less strident Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) appeared numerous times; we lost count on Henry Kissinger.

As the media-watch group, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) stated, following Sept. 11, any hope that the media would present an unbiased account of what happened, that it might resist the drive for an ill-defined war, went out the window. Instead, FAIR documented how the print and broadcast media issued emotional tirades for war, echoing what they believed to be the sentiment of the American people; in so doing, there were no contrary views presented, and, in effect, Americans still have no clear idea about what happened, or exactly what the Bush Administration is proposing to do to protect them from future terrorist threats.

Look at these following selected examples, which could be amplified by many more:

Kissinger-clone Larry Eagleburger, appearing on CNN, on the day of the attack: “There is only one way to deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of them, even if they are not directly involved in this thing.”

The “New York Post”, the next day: “The response to this unimaginable 21st-Century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift--kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for the cities or countries of these host worms, bomb them into basketball courts.”

Sept. 14 op-ed in the "Washington Times" by Defense Intelligence Agency officer Thomas Woodrow: “At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration.”

FAIR commentator and media watcher Norman Solomon commented that many of the same people who were now calling for a “war against terrorism” and anyone who might support it (including many of the analysts who were appearing as talking heads and op-ed columnists) were themselves involved in assisting terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, when such efforts were official, if then-secret U.S. policy. “How can a long-time associate of terrorists now be credibly denouncing 'terrorism?'” he asks. “It's easy. All that is required is for media coverage to remain in a kind of history-free zone that has no use for facets of reality that are not presently convenient to acknowledge.”

One of those “inconvenient facts” was the well-documented involvement of U.S. “special ops” people, and the Zbigniew Brzezinski crowd; then, later, Ollie North and the Bush people, with bin Laden, dating back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which amounted to the biggest “state sponsorship” of terrorism, or at least sponsorship by a then-dominant faction of our government and intelligence community. FAIR and other media-watch groups report that almost no one mentioned these “inconvenient” matters, amidst the vast flow of war propaganda; and if they did, it was only to lie that it was a policy that had long since been abandoned.

Similarly, much attention was given to reports about FBI and other agencies work in putting together the “conspiracy” behind the attack. To this date, no one in the major media outlets of the United States has mentioned that there is even a possibility of involvement of U.S. elements. Instead, the reporting has focussed on a combination of “spade work” on clues and leads, as well as, alleged connections to the bin Laden networks. FAIR remarked on such coverage, saying that the shots of bin Laden and his camps gave the impression that there had been more than circumstantial evidence linking them to attacks. The only proof offered was from “intelligence leaks” coming from the wartime propaganda apparatus created by the Executive Order or from assertions made by the talking heads and other “experts.”

The only characteristic, universal to all the coverage, is the cover-up of any possible trail leading to a domestic source for the control of the terrorism.

Is all reporting being so "coordinated and steered?" It is clear that some of the wackos, like Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, a particularly vile character, are simply being given free rein to vent their lunacy.

On Sept. 17, O'Reilly demanded that, if the Taliban do not turn over bin Laden, “the U.S. should bomb Afghan infrastructure to rubble—the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the roads....

“This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are responsible for the government that they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against their government, they starve, period.”

Comment: Yes, indeedy - and that means that Americans are responsible for Bush, Cheney, Rummy, etc.

He went to advocate, in that broadcast and others, to make the “Iraqi population suffer another round of intense pain” and to blockade Libya from all food supplies: “Let them eat sand.”

As is typical with a “grey psyops” propaganda campaign, the most extreme ravings are played off against those only slightly less lunatic, to make the latter appear sane by comparison. Thus, an O'Reilly makes a Woolsey look like a sober analyst, as he calls for a war to take out governments that support terrorism, and for “careful” and “calculated” escalating response against bin Laden.

To hold people's attention, to keep them on “message,” it were necessary to keep them in a highly emotional state. To do this, there was a steady stream of “human interest” stories about the grief of affected victims, about the courage of rescue workers and those who perished, along with shots of grieving citizens. While the courage and grief are real, the constant bombardment of these images is BRAINWASHING CONDITIONING. Without them, you would have, after a few days, turned off CNN and the “news” coverage.

Do you still insist that neither you, nor your neighbours, have been taken in by this?

'Crash? What Crash?'

Lost amid the war hysteria, or more precisely “spun” inside of it, is the coverup of what would otherwise be the biggest story of the day: the full-scale crash and blowout of the financial markets. The markets, at last look, had plunged nearly 20% since Wall Street reopened on Sept. 17. A fall that precipitous is normally called a “crash,” engendering widespread panic, not only among traders and brokers, but among the general population. But in the two weeks of this crash, not one commentator on a major network has used the term! Moreover, we are told, it is our patriotic duty to have faith in the eventual recovery of both the markets and the economy. “We can't let the terrorists defeat us and bring our economy down,” said financial commentator Louis Ruckeyser on his televised “Wall Street Week.”

As Lyndon LaRouche has stated, the crash would have occurred anyway, given the bankrupt state of world financial system, even without the Sept. 11 events. However, now the financial analysts who appear on the television news and in the print media are universally blaming most, if not all of what happened, on “Osama bin Laden.” This was to be expected, they claim, given what happened on Sept. 11, in what is the biggest “Big Lie” of them all.

As one trader reported, “My God! The bottom has fallen out and nobody calls it a crash. It's like it's your patriotic duty not to mention the word. Hell, the Dow's lost more than 1,500 points--that's a CRASH. But, if I'm overheard saying this, people look at me: 'Where's your American flag? Remember who you are and what's going on. Do you want to help Osama bin Laden in his plot to destroy our economy?' Unbelievable!”

But, as like many other media-brainwashed Americans, this trader was, in his words, “going with the program. It's not a crash, it's a terrorist event.”

A Clockwork Future?

Several nights after the Sept. 11 attacks, CNN flashed images on the screen of National Guard personnel patrolling the streets of Washington, and heavily armed special police in New York City, inspecting cars at a tunnel entrance. Then, images were flashed of Israeli military personnel on the streets of Jerusalem, inspecting cars. The voiceover, by CNN news-witch Greta van Susteren, a regular featured personality of that media sewer, along with Mossad-asset Wolf Blitzer, spoke of America, in response to the “terrorist threat,” becoming an increasingly “policed society,” where civil liberties had to be sacrificed for the protection of its citizens. We have seen this before, she said, not just in Jerusalem, but in Belfast, Northern Ireland, as a response to “political terrorism” of the IRA and Protestant militia. After a while, people get used to it, she said. “Life goes on.” Interviews were presented with Israelis who seemed to concur with the sentiment that, under conditions of “internal war with terrorists,” one needs to adjust to sacrifices in civil liberties. “Americans will get used to it, just like we did,” the Israeli said.

Thus, the media prepares--or more precisely, conditions--the country to accept a form of police state, justified by a threat that has not really been dealt with, and whose true source has been covered up. Not surprisingly, when Attorney General John Ashcroft, proposed legislation for a sweeping abridgement of civil liberties, it was given relatively short shrift by the same media. FAIR reports that two of the three network news broadcasts never reported it at all; while it was hardly mentioned on CNN or Fox News. The print media, while reporting it, maintained the theme of the “necessary sacrifice” of civil liberties for personal safety and security.

Back in the mid-1970s, Eric Trist and Fred Emery, two leading Tavistock brainwashers and “experts” on the effects of mass media, forecast that, by the end of the century, the United States were likely to become just such a fascist police state.

The two developed a theory of “social turbulence,” by which a society is delivered a series of “shocks”-- administered as shared, mass phenomena--energy shortages, economic and financial collapse, and TERRORIST attack. If the “shocks” were to come close upon each other, and if they were delivered with increasing intensity, then it were possible to drive the entire society, into a state of mass psychosis, Trist and Emery said. They said that individuals would become disassociated, as they tried to flee from the terror of the shocking, emerging reality; people would withdraw into a state of denial, retreating into popular entertainments and diversions, while being prone to outbursts of rage.

That rage could easily be steered, said the two brainwashers, by those who had access and control over the means of mass communication, most notably television.

It was the view of Trist and Emery, in two works widely circulated among the networks of brainwashers and social psychiatrists associated with Tavistock, and among the psychological-warfare operatives of the U.S. and Britain, that the process of watching television was itself a brainwashing mechanism. They cited their own studies, that regardless of content, habituated television viewing shuts down the cognitive powers of the mind, and has a narcotic-like effect on the central nervous system, making the habituated viewer an easy subject for suggestion and manipulation; in addition, they found that such effectively brainwashed “zombies” would hysterically deny that there was anything wrong with them, or, even, that such manipulation of what they “thought” were possible.

In a chilling metaphor, Trist and Emery proposed that the terrorized, violent society of the Anthony Burgess book, “A Clockwork Orange,” made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, was the logical societal outcome for an America that would, by the end of the century, have been subjected to more than 50 years of mass brainwashing by the “boob tube.” Burgess's world is one of perpetual violence and terrorism, as a daily part of life; it is accepted that, if you go out at a certain time, or walk in a certain neighborhood, you will be attacked and/or killed. There is no purpose to the violence--it is random and meaningless, and therefore all the more terrifying. The wealthy are protected; everyone else is told to go about their business with knowledge of the risk.

With terrorist youth gangs roaming the streets, people stay home, watching their televised entertainments, or go only to certain areas, which are heavily protected by police and military. The most sickening thing about Burgess's image is the sense of hopelessness, of inevitability, that nothing can be done about it--it is just “the way it is,”" as Dan Rather's predecessor as CBS News anchor, Walter Cronkite, used to remind us each night, as he closed his broadcast.

While the Trist-Emery thesis is not exactly required reading in the caves of Afghanistan, it is quite familiar to the psywarriors and brainwashers who have launched a war on the American population. There is a particular kind of oligarchical evil that would think like this, that would see a Clockwork Orange society as a necessary outcome, to protect their continued privilege and power. Are we Americans already so brainwashed that we would allow this to happen? The next weeks and months will determine whether we truly do have the moral fitness to survive.

“The end of the world. Details at 11. Now back to your regular programming.”

Remember: The first step in deprogramming yourself from mass-media brainwashing, to freeing yourself and your neighbours, from its evil clutches, is to recognize that you and they are, indeed, brainwashed. It gets a lot easier, and things begin to get much clearer from there on.

So, with the SANS Institute warning that hackers are changing their tactics and the NISCC, the British government body responsible for cyberprotection, claiming that foreign governments pose a serious threat to the U.K.'s critical infrastructure, we caught up with Schneier to get his take on the security landscape today.

Q: What do you think about the claim that foreign governments are a serious threat to the critical national infrastructure of a country, through government-led hacking?

Schneier: In general, these threats are overstated. Is there a danger to the critical national infrastructure from spying? Well, a lot of reports you read tend to be very muddled as to the details.

Do you think the threat from cyberterrorism is still overhyped?

Yes. The U.S. government gives a lot of money to fight terrorism, so cyberterrorism is hyped. I hear people talk about the risks to critical infrastructure from cyberterrorism, but the risks come primarily from criminals.

But at the moment, criminals aren't as "sexy" as terrorists. We should not ignore criminals, and I think we're underspending on crime. If you look at ID theft and extortion, it still goes on. Criminals are after money.

Hacking does seem to be more financially motivated now. Is there a "malicious marketplace," as SANS claims?

There is definitely a marketplace for vulnerabilities, exploits and old computers. It's a bad development, but there are definitely conduits between hackers and criminals.

Roger Cummings (director of the NISCC) said on Tuesday there is a danger that the links between criminals and hackers, and hackers and terrorists, will become stronger... Well, if we were making a movie, then that's what we'd do. I think that the terrorist threat is overhyped, and the criminal threat is underhyped.

What do you think about governments using the threat of terrorism to collect information on citizens and the implications of that on police powers?

It's very scary. This is a very complex issue--one I've written books about. My view is that we're faced with multiple threats. The worry is that while we are trying to defend ourselves against one threat (terrorism), we are actually making ourselves less secure. People are scared, and because they're scared they're handing over powers to the government and giving up their liberties. The threat of terrorism in the U.K. has led to national e-card debates and biometric passport discussions.

What are your views on biometrics in this context?

They're good for what they're good for, and bad for what they're bad for. They have their uses, and they have places where they're not useful. The all-important issue is that we think we're in danger and think that by using biometrics, we'll suddenly be safe. We should use them where they're valid.

How about ID cards?

In general, ID cards are a complete waste of money--a former MI5 (British internal security agency) director said that. It's all very well for me to say that, but it's nice to know Stella Rimington feels that way too.

The ID card debate in the U.K. is all about population control--it's about controlling immigration, not terrorism. It is unfortunate that the U.K. isn't having that debate properly.

So what will be the outcome?

There will be a massive erosion of freedoms in our culture. We are losing sight of the future. I know that's not good news--it's not fun, but it's true. We'll be less secure as a result, because we'll be in more danger from terrorists. There'll be an increase in the risk from terrorists we are creating, and we'll be giving the police state powers.

We waste money on electioneering that could be spent on actual security--investing in intelligence and better emergency response.

How can anyone feel safe in a world created by George Bush?

Sharon's new party, registered Wednesday under the name National Responsibility, picked up momentum with an announcement by Haim Ramon, a senior Labour party politician, that he is joining the group. Ramon is the first Labour legislator to switch to the Sharon camp.

Israel's elder statesman, Shimon Peres, reportedly decided to stay in Labour despite his defeat by union boss Amir Peretz in a race for party leader earlier this month.

Sharon's aides said Wednesday he would campaign on the U.S.-backed "road map" plan, which calls for Palestinian statehood as part of a peace deal. However, aides Lior Horev and Eyal Arad insisted that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas must dismantle militant groups before Israel has to start meeting its obligations, such as freezing West Bank settlement construction and removing outposts.

Palestinian officials said Sharon's approach will lead to deadlock and is a cover for Israel drawing its borders unilaterally, including by building a separation barrier in the West Bank. "I think this is more lip service and diversional tactics than a political platform," said Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.

In the leaderless Likud, meanwhile, the race for the top spot was heating up, with Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz sharply attacking rival Benjamin Netanyahu over his social spending cuts as finance minister under Sharon. The Likud primary, tentatively set for Dec. 19, is expected to be waged over economic issues. Mofaz, who comes from a working class background, also disparaged what he said was Netanyahu's "silver spoon" upbringing.

In Palestinian politics, parliament rejected a proposal to change the election law at the last minute, clearing the way for parliament elections to be held as scheduled on Jan. 25.

Legislators voted 20-10 against the proposal from the ruling Fatah movement, which had wanted to have all candidates compete on party lists. Under the current system, half compete on party lists and the others at the district level.

The Islamic militant group Hamas is dominant in Gaza, and Fatah activists there feared they would do poorly in competition at the district level. Approval of the changes would have delayed the vote by several weeks. Abbas is under strong pressure at home and abroad to hold the election on time.

In Israel, Sharon's decision to leave Likud shocked the country and accelerated the move toward early elections. Sharon wants a quick vote, apparently in part to allow Likud little time to regroup.

The March election comes eight months ahead of schedule, forced by a rebellion in Likud over Sharon's Gaza withdrawal and a decision by his coalition partner, the moderate Labour party, to leave the government.

On Monday, Sharon asked President Moshe Katsav to call new elections by decree. Parliament, in turn, said it had the authority to dissolve itself and did not want to be pre-empted by the president.

After several days of wrangling over procedure, Katsav and Parliament Speaker Reuven Rivlin reached a final agreement on holding the election March 28. On Wednesday afternoon, Katsav signed a decree for the dispersal of parliament. formalizing the agreement.

For decades, Israel's body politic has been split almost evenly between those who favour concessions for peace with the Palestinians and those who oppose them. Sharon, leader of the hardliners, suddenly broke with Likud's hawkish ideology with the Gaza pullout this summer. A good showing by Sharon's new party, combined with increased support for the traditionally dovish Labour, could break the long-standing stalemate.

It is very sad to admit that the broad realisation of the notion of peace in terms of harmony and reconciliation is totally lacking within the Israeli mindset. For the Israelis, shalom means applying a strategy that would guarantee personal and national refuge to the Jewish people. For the Israelis, shalom means living in peace, nothing more or less than that. How shalom is achieved or maintained isn’t a real concern for the Israelis. The fact that millions of Palestinians are subject to state terrorism in a form of major war crimes committed by the IDF, isn’t a practical concern either. In short, rather than harmony and reconciliation, shalom is a set of political and military manoeuvres that silence the enemy of the Jewish people.

This very ‘shalom’ philosophy stands in the very core of the Zionist left school. It is this very perception that led the Israeli left to believe that ‘two states for two people’ is a viable option. Clearly the two state solution promises shalom: it pledges personal security as well as a refuge to the Jewish people. A year ago, in the days leading towards the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, Sharon declared: “we (the Israelis) want shalom but we want to define its terms and conditions”. Sharon’s idea is not that remote from Shalom Now’s agenda (‘Shalom Now’ is an Israeli left Shalom seeking movement that is mistakenly translated into “Peace Now”). Sharon’s comprehension of the term shalom
isn’t that different from Peres’s philosophy and in categorical terms, it isn’t that afar from Uri Avnery’s Gush Shalom perception. The Israeli shalom seekers always want to ‘define the terms and conditions’. True, Avnery’s, Peres’s and Sharon’s ‘terms and conditions’ are varied, yet, they all believe in partitions between people. They all believe in two states for the two people. They may dispute the borders but they all aim to resolve the Jewish question both in personal and national terms. The entire shalom movement is concerned with different methods of division between the Jew and the goy. This is the real meaning of the Israeli shalom. Sadly enough, just as separateness is the central purpose of Zionism, this bizarre self-centric political worldview stands at the core of Israeli left thinking. This is the logic behind the Israeli shalom movement’s collective dismissal of the Palestinian cause, i.e. “the right of return”. One may ask how it is possible that the Israeli left ignores the cause of their foes, the people they intend to make shalom with? How can the Israelis ever establish harmonious relationships with their neighbours? The answer is simple: the Israeli left isn’t interested in reconciliation and harmony. They are interested in shalom and shalom is not peace.

Six months ago Bush called Sharon a ‘man of peace’. Apparently, Bush was not that wrong, he was just lost in translation. Sharon isn’t a man of peace, he is a man of shalom. Being a militant nationalist Jew as well an experienced tactician, Sharon managed to grasp the biggest paradox within Zionist political thought. Within the Zionist discourse, it is the left who are leading towards a hard-core national and racist state. The hawks, on the other hand, push forwards towards a multi-national reality of ‘one state’. As bizarre as it may sound to some, it is the Jewish settlers who engage in the creation of an indivisible social reality of a one state, albeit with a vast Palestinian majority. It is the settlers who are bringing the Jewish national state down. Sharon, himself a historic mentor of the settler movement, has managed to diagnose this very flaw within the settler philosophy. The old man now realises that the maintenance of the Jewish state and its salvation from a demographic catastrophe is totally dependent on the immediate disengagement from the Palestinian population. Sharon and the shalom camp want a solid Jewish state with a clear Jewish majority. This realisation matured recently into a pullout from Gaza, it would mean as well a withdraw from the West Bank in the near future. Sharon has indeed joined the Israeli shalom movement but this isn’t to say that he has become a peace lover. As it seem, the real meaning of the word peace doesn’t translate into modern Hebrew. The meaning of peace doesn’t translate into the Israeli reality.

Furthermore, not only does peace not translate into shalom, the Israeli sincere aim towards shalom guarantees nothing but the continuation of war. If the outcome of shalom is indeed the division of the land between two people, it can never bring harmony and reconciliation to the region. The reasons are obvious. Shalom can never address the both the Zionist and the Palestinian causes: it fails to address the morally grounded Palestinian right of return. But it fails as well to address the outrageous Jewish nationalist demand to settle in the entire land of greater Israel at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians. Shalom is thus the continuation of war. Sharon is certainly a shalom seeker. This is probably the reason that Blair and Bush are so excited about him. With Sharon in power, and it looks as if Sharon will remain in power, shalom will prevail. A unilateral shalom will be imposed on the Palestinians. Shalom that would allow the endless merciless bombardment of the Palestinians who insist upon returning to their homeland. What will be left behind of the Holy Land is a merciless shalom killing of whoever decides to live in peace.

Their protests seen worldwide on TV during the last weeks can be attributed not so much to losing their stolen property, but to the money offered to them being not enough for their insatiable avarice. And, many of those protesting the "loss" of their homes are American jews who have come to reap the windfall of Palestinian property stolen by the Israelis and financed by the Americans. They had never before been in Palestine.

Today morning, the Israeli government jailed 40000 Palestinian inhabitants in the old city of Hebron by closing all the main entrances of the old city with iron gates. The old city of Hebron has been converted into a concentration camp for all Palestinian families who could or would not flee.

During the previous week, a locked iron door was installed at the tunnel entrance near the robbed vegetable market, near Beit Romano settlement. This iron door locks the tunnel which is the passage to my robbed house in the old city, where I used to live.

In the service of 400 armed and criminal squatters living in the city of Hebron, 40000 Palestinians are crushed end imprisoned into a small closed bottle.

Here is the Press release from Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (or here in Arabic):

Early this morning, the Israeli Military forces have closed all main entrances to the Old City of Hebron. The forces fixed closed metal and iron gates to close these entrances. This new measure left no access to either cars or pedestrians to the Old City and its hundreds of years old markets.

This action would literally convert the center of Hebron into a big jail; citizens of the Old City are now locked into their houses and wondering how to get into and out from the city and how they will have a life!. While we consider this action as a very dangerous precedent, all the community of Hebron is wondering about the reasons behind this measure!?

We believe that by closing the old city by sealing all its entrances and exits, the Israeli authority are aiming at evacuating the old city from its original inhabitants by making their lives impossible, so they can enforce their racial and expansionist plans by giving more space and free hands for the settlers and their enclaves in the old city.

With this action, the Old City of Hebron became like a big prison, the situation now is very dangerous, inhuman and unbearable, all efforts must be gathered and mobilized in a very serious way to stop this illegal violation and help Hebron city and its center.

Hebron Rehabilitation Committee urges all peace loving and human rights organizations and individuals to practice pressures on Israel to stop its aggression against the old city and seeks your intervention with Israeli authority and the international community to have the Israeli forces stop this action which will be of great danger on the peace and the stability in the city.

Some pictures of the now shut down old city of Hebron, submitted by the Hebron Rehabilitation Commettee, follow. The pictures below show spots in Hebron which before "featured" checkpoints of the IDF. Now the residents have just been jailed in their city and the streets blocked.

National director of the anti-defamation league, Abraham Foxman, which campaigns against anti-semitism, said yesterday: "It is sad that Jackson is infected with stereotypical ideas of Jews as money-grubbing and manipulative."

The message, aired on Good Morning America, was taped two years ago. It was provided by the lawyer of Dieter Wiesner and Marc Schaffel, both ex-advisers to Jackson who are suing the star. Tapes from Mr Schaffel, a gay-porn producer, also reveal Jackson begging for money that would be delivered to him in cash in fast food bags. Good Morning America said it could not verify Mr Wiesner's tapes beyond any doubt but had fully verified the voicemail messages made to Mr Schaffel.

Mr Wiesner filed a civil case against Jackson in Los Angeles for $64m (£37m), claiming fraud and breach of contract. Jackson's attorney, Brian Oxman, has not denied it was the singer on the phone but insisted the "conversations were recorded without permission". Jackson moved to Bahrain after he was acquitted of child molestation charges. Mr Wiesner and Mr Schaffel used to help the singer get around banking restrictions so he could have more money. Jackson tells Mr Schaffel in one message. "Please, I really like you. I love you... Mark, I really need you to get...7m for me as soon as possible."

It appears that Putin and his advisors have decided that, rather than spend considerable time and manpower on trying to root out the foreign state actors in Russia, they would much rather just ban all foreign NGOs (and probably lots of Russian ones too) and have them all re-present their credentials to state authorities. In this way, Putin can have some degree of protection against the activities of phony revolutionaires.

The letter, faxed in part to The Associated Press by the office of lawmaker Alexander Krutov, said, "The negative assessments by Russian patriots of the qualities and actions against non-Jews that are typical of Jews correspond to the truth ... The statements and publications against Jews that have incriminated patriots are self-defense, which is not always stylistically correct but is justified in essence."

The stunning call to ban all Jewish groups raised concerns of persistent anti-Semitism in Russia.

Jewish leaders have praised President Vladimir Putin's government for encouraging religious tolerance, but rights groups accuse the authorities of failing to prosecute the perpetrators of anti-Semitic and racial violence.

Russia's chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, said lawmakers were looking for support "by playing the anti-Semitic card."

The prosecutor general's office could not immediately be reached for comment on the letter, which the Interfax news agency said was signed by lawmakers from the nationalist Rodina and Liberal Democratic parties as well as the Communist Party.

Krutov, a Rodina member, is deputy chief of the Duma's Committee on Information Policy.

With Putin planning to join events this week commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops, Russia's Holocaust Foundation head Alla Gerber said it was "horrible that as we're marking the 60th anniversary of this tragic and great day ... we can speak of the danger of fascism in the countries that defeated fascism."

While the Russian state itself is no longer anti-Semitic, there are "anti-Semitic campaigns that are led by all sorts of organizations," she said.

"The economic situation is ripe for this. An enemy is needed, and the enemy is well-known, traditional," Gerber said.

Echoing anti-Semitic tracts of the Czarist era, the letter's authors accuse Jews of working against the interests of the countries where they live and of monopolizing power worldwide. They say the United States "has become an instrument for achieving the global aims of Judaism."

"It is possible to say that the entire democratic world today is under the monetary and political control of international Judaism, which high-profile bankers are openly proud of," the letter says.

Along with outlawing Jewish organizations, the lawmakers call for the prosecution of "individuals responsible for providing these groups with state and municipal property, privileges and state financing."

The press statement, made available before release to other media, was described by a diplomat as a summary of what Britain, France and Germany would tell a closed session of the 35-country board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which started meeting Thursday.

It criticizes Tehran for possessing suspicious documents that "have no other application than the production of nuclear weapons."

The statement offered new negotiations meant to defuse tensions over Tehran's insistence that it be in full control of uranium enrichment - a possible pathway to nuclear arms.

"But Iran should not conclude from this that the board or the EU is prepared to give Iran a blank check," said the statement, meant for delivery by Peter Jenkins, the chief British delegate to the IAEA.

"Failure to make progress" on easing international concerns about Iran's nuclear program "will hasten the day when the board decides that a report to the Security Council must be made," said the statement.

The European Union also reserves the right to call an emergency board meeting before the next scheduled gathering in March - for possible Security Council referral - "if Iranian behaviour makes it necessary," said the statement.

The statement alluded to new revelations of concern contained in a report drawn up for the board meeting by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, including a finding showing the Iranians in possession of what appeared to be drawings of the core of an atomic warhead.

But the main issue is Iran's refusal to give up its right to enrichment, which can be used to generate power but also to make weapons-grade material for nuclear warheads. Iran says it wants only to make fuel, but international concern is growing that the program could be misused.

A plan floated in recent weeks foresees moving any Iranian enrichment plan to Russia. There, in theory, Moscow would supervise the process to make sure enrichment is only to fuel levels.

But Iran insists it wants to master the complete fuel cycle domestically.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters in Tehran on Wednesday that, while his country was willing to resume formal talks with key European powers on its nuclear program, "naturally we aim to have enrichment on Iran's territory."

Currently, Iran's enrichment program is frozen. But negotiations between Iran and France, Britain and Germany - the so-called EU-3 - broke off in August after Iran restarted a linked activity - the conversion of raw uranium into the gas that is used as the feed stock in enrichment.

While the Americans and Europeans publicly insist they want a negotiated solution with Iran on enrichment, they have acknowledged in background conversations that they would expect additional support from countries now opposed to Security Council referral if Tehran continues to dig in its heels.

In a sign that some of those key nations were now listening to U.S. and European concerns, American and European officials have divulged that Washington and its European allies are gradually enlisting Chinese support on how to deal with Iran and its suspicious nuclear activities.

Beijing's backing would add additional clout to an ambitious international Iran strategy that recently has seen Russia join the Americans and Europeans in pressuring Iran to give up technology that could make nuclear arms.

For months, Iran has relied on Beijing and Moscow to fend off a U.S.-backed push to have it hauled before the UN Security Council. While the Americans and Europeans have opted not to lobby for referral at Thursday's meeting of the IAEA board, they could resume their efforts at a later board session if they judge that the Russians, Chinese and other key nations will not stand in their way.

A European official said that "the Chinese are very, very constructive and on board with the (U.S.)-European position" - engaging Iran on giving up uranium enrichment, while indirectly keeping the possibility of Security Council action alive.

In Beijing on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters that his country did not think "it is appropriate now to refer this question to the UN Security Council."

ElBaradei, in comments to the board meeting in Vienna, suggested, he, too, opposed referral, for now, calling for "robust verification" of Iranian nuclear activities, combined with "active dialogue."

"Clarification" of aspects of Iran's nuclear program "is overdue, after three years of intensive verification efforts," he said.

The EU statement made available to the AP said Iran's "failure to provide full transparency ... continues to undermine its claim that its program is exclusively peaceful in nature." part of referral opponents to listen to the U.S.-European strategy.

"No aircraft from the CIA has landed with the government's permission or knowledge on Portuguese territory," since the Socialist government came to power in March, Foreign Ministry spokesman Antonio Carneiro Jacinto told Reuters.

Fernando Rosas, a parliamentary leader from the Left Bloc opposition party, requested that Foreign Minister Diogo Freitas do Amaral appear before parliament's constitutional and rights commission to explain the photos.

Neighboring Spain has said a judge is investigating allegations that the CIA used a Spanish airport as a base for transporting suspected Islamic radicals.

Rosas said one of the airplanes pictured in Focus was one "of the ones that was responsible for the scandal that prompted Spanish authorities to order an official investigation of the issue," according to state news agency Lusa.

Focus carried pictures of an airplane at a small airport outside Lisbon and three aircraft that had landed at the mid-Atlantic Azores Islands.

The Washington Post newspaper reported this month that the CIA had been interrogating suspected al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in eastern Europe that was part of a covert global prison system with sites in eight countries.

The wayward graphic, which CNN said lasted for about one-seventh of a second, appeared during the network's live coverage of Cheney's speech on Monday addressing critics of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in
Iraq.

Word of the snafu quickly surfaced on the Internet, including still photos of the image posted by online columnist Matt Drudge, along with a story suggesting that some who saw the momentary "X" thought it might have been deliberate.

CNN, a unit of Time Warner Inc., later issued a mea culpa saying an investigation by senior management concluded "this was a technical malfunction, not an issue of operator error" and expressing regret for the incident.

The network followed up with a special on-air segment during its "CNN Live Today" broadcast, in which anchor Daryn Kagan joined the network's technical manager, Steve Alperin, in the control room to offer a fuller explanation.

The "X" image, a place-holding marker used by technicians to cue up graphics, is not supposed to be visible to viewers but was inadvertently projected onto the screen by a malfunction in a "switcher" device, they explained.

"So, for all the conspiracy theories out there," Kagan said, " ... that's not what this is about. It's a computer bug that people deal with everyday. It's just that ours was in front of millions of people."

A spokesman for the vice president said Cheney had no comment on the incident.

Of course, the obstacles facing journalists attempting to report the situation in Iraq are real enough. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk (whose work, in the context of the mainstream media, is exceptional in every sense) describes some of the challenges: "When I travel outside Baghdad by road it takes me two weeks to plan it, because the roads are infested with insurgents, checkpoints, hooded men and throat-cutters. If I go to see someone in any particular location, I give myself 12 minutes, because that is how long I reckon it takes a man with a mobile phone to summon gunmen to the scene in a car. So, after 10 minutes I am out. Don't be greedy. That's what reporting is like in Iraq."(2)

In September 2004, Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal told friends in an email that "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest…. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, … can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, …. can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. [...]

At times diGenova has been remarkably strident, sounding more like an angry defense attorney for George W. Bush’s White House than someone who could have plausibly worn the title “independent” when he investigated an alleged abuse of government power by George H.W. Bush’s administration a dozen years ago. [More on that below.]

For instance, during a Nov. 16, 2005, appearance on Fox News, diGenova lashed out at Fitzgerald following the admission by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that a Bush II administration official had told him about the identity of CIA officer Plame in mid-June 2003. That apparently was before former vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby began peddling information about Plame’s identity to other reporters.

Citing Fitzgerald’s statement at an Oct. 28, 2005, press conference that Libby was then the first known official to begin talking to reporters about Plame, DiGenova argued that Woodward’s admission justified the dismissal of Libby’s five-count indictment on charges of perjury, lying to FBI investigators and obstruction of justice.

“By alleging that Mr. Libby was in fact the initial source, [Fitzgerald] publicly bootstrapped his case on that fact,” diGenova said. “That is now totally false and it requires him now, under Justice Department guidelines, to seriously consider dismissing the case because you cannot indict when there's a reasonable doubt and I believe now that there is reasonable doubt about Mr. Libby's state of mind.”

Though Fitzgerald had only said that as of Oct. 28 Libby was the first “known” official to tell reporters about Plame – and that fact seems to have little bearing on Libby’s alleged deceptions – diGenova echoed the arguments of Libby’s defense team that Fitzgerald’s news conference comment was somehow important.

“I think this it is a very serious development for the prosecutor,” diGenova said. “I can predict that he will be holding no further news conferences because he has just been hoisted by his own petard from the last news conference he held.”

Even Fox News anchor Brit Hume was perplexed by diGenova’s hostility toward Fitzgerald. “You are quite sharply a critic of him,” Hume noted. “Why?”

“Because I believe that that news conference was a disgrace,” diGenova responded.

DiGenova’s comments spread quickly around right-wing blogs adding more fuel to the animosity Bush’s defenders are directing at Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago who was named by the Justice Department to handle the Plame case in December 2003 because then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was too close to the leak suspects.

But another question raised by diGenova’s intemperate comments is how a partisan Republican prosecutor could have been named independent counsel to handle a sensitive political investigation in 1992, when top aides to George H.W. Bush were implicated in a scheme to destroy Bill Clinton’s candidacy by violating the Democratic candidate’s privacy rights in a government search of his passport file.

Parallel Cases

In retrospect, the so-called Passport-gate affair and the Plame-gate investigation have many parallels, both involving White House abuse of its access to government secrets and calculated leaks to the press to undermine a political adversary. But the two prosecutors – diGenova and Fitzgerald – approached their duties very differently, with diGenova seemingly determined not to find wrongdoing in contrast to Fitzgerald's dogged strategy to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The two cases occurred at politically sensitive moments for the two Bush presidents.

George W. Bush's aides allegedly leaked classified information about Plame's CIA work in mid-2003 to undermine her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, because he had emerged as a leading critic of Bush's case for war with Iraq. Wilson had challenged Bush's claims about Iraq seeking enriched uranium from Africa, just as it was becoming apparent that Iraq lacked the weapons of mass destruction that Bush had cited as the principal justification for his invasion.

In 1992, George H.W. Bush was trailing Clinton in the polls and Bush's advisers hoped to assure the president's reelection by finding derogatory information in Clinton's passport file. Under White House pressure, State Department officials conducted a late-night search of Clinton's passport file, looking for a rumored letter that Clinton supposedly had written while a college student at Oxford College seeking to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

Though the letter proved non-existent, Bush aides seized on staple holes and a tear in the corner of Clinton’s passport application – most likely where a check or photo had been attached – to fashion a criminal referral around the possibility that a Clinton friend had tampered with the file to remove the apocryphal letter.

Bush operatives then leaked to Newsweek the existence of the confidential criminal referral and got the newsmagazine to go with the spin about a Clinton friend possibly tampering with the file. George H.W. Bush and other Republicans then linked the FBI probe with other “suspicions” about Clinton’s patriotism, causing the Democrat to sink in the polls. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Backfiring

The passport gambit might have worked, except that some House Democrats smelled the odor of a Republican dirty trick and exposed the extraordinary late-night search of the passport files of Clinton and his mother. The FBI also rejected the criminal referral, further causing the attack on Clinton’s patriotism to backfire.

In the days after Bush’s electoral loss to Clinton, the State Department’s inspector general Sherman Funk cited possible criminal violations surrounding the passport search. Because of the political sensitivity of the case, the law at the time required that the case be referred to a three-judge panel for the selection of an independent counsel.

The outgoing Bush administration was lucky, however, because Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist recently had shaken up leadership of the panel, replacing moderate Republican Judge George MacKinnon with right-wing Republican Judge David Sentelle, a protégé of Sen. Jesse Helms and an appointee of Ronald Reagan.

To investigate Passport-gate, Sentelle recruited a fellow Reagan appointee, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, to act as the independent counsel. DiGenova was named in a sealed order on Dec. 14, 1992.

Though diGenova’s appointment was made under court seal, an order that barred disclosure of the investigation, diGenova promptly alerted the Bush White House. According to a White House phone log, diGenova called presidential counsel Boyden Gray at 2:40 p.m. on Dec. 16. DiGenova left an “urgent” message which read: “Not at liberty to give subject b /c [because] of court order.”

When I asked diGenova about the unusual message, he said he called to inform Gray that a subpoena for White House records would be forthcoming.

DiGenova also recalled that he had contacted Gray only after word of the appointment had appeared in the Washington Post. I informed diGenova, however, that the Post story didn’t break until the evening of Dec. 17, more than a day after the phone call.

DiGenova called me back a few days later with a more formal answer: “One of the first things I did was to call the White House counsel’s office to advise him [Gray] that there was a criminal investigation and he was to protect and preserve documents in the White House. … They had to know there was an investigation.”

Whatever diGenova’s intention, however, the call did not spur Gray to issue an immediate order to White House staff about protecting records.

According to another document I obtained, Gray notified the White House staff about the need to “preserve and maintain documents” only on Dec. 21, five days after diGenova’s early warning and only after the White House had received formal notification of the Passport-gate investigation.

Later, diGenova’s investigation did find that some relevant White House files were erased, but it was not clear if the erasures occurred between the time of diGenova’s first call on Dec. 16 and Gray’s letter to the staff on Dec. 21.

Relieved White House

While diGenova’s early call may not have prompted an immediate protection order, the call apparently did reassure Gray that the White House had little to worry about.

On Dec. 17, after President Bush heard about the independent counsel appointment, he called Gray, and Gray “said that the special prosecutor [diGenova] is a good and fair person and that the thing is mainly at the State Department – the handling of the Clinton matter,” according to Bush’s diary.

As part of the investigation, diGenova conducted two formal interviews with former President Bush at his office in Houston.

Handwritten notes from the first interview on Oct. 23, 1993, stated that diGenova first assured Bush that his staff lawyers were “all seasoned prof[essional] prosecutors who know what a real crime looks like. … [This is] not a gen[eral] probe of pol[itics] in Amer[ica] or dirty tricks, etc., or a general license to rummage in people’s personal lives.”

The FBI’s typewritten report of the interview noted that Bush acknowledged his personal interest in turning up derogatory information about Clinton and having it released, but he denied giving a direct order for the passport search.

“Although he [Bush] did not recall tasking [chief of staff James] Baker to research any particular matter, he may have asked why the campaign did not know more about Clinton’s demonstrating” against the Vietnam War, the FBI interview report stated.

As for his knowledge about some conservative journalists filing Freedom of Information Act requests for Clinton’s passport records, “President Bush remembered a general discussion that people were trying to get some information … although he could provide no details as to who may have mentioned this to him. …

“The President advised that … he probably would have said, ‘Hooray, somebody’s going to finally do something about this.’ If he had learned that the Washington Times was planning to publish an article, he would have said, ‘That’s good, it’s about time.’ … Based on his ‘depth of feeling’ on this issue, President Bush responded to a hypothetical question that he would have recommended getting the truth out if it were legal.”

George H.W. Bush said he could not recall if he had heard about the Clinton passport search before it appeared in the press. But he added that he might have indirectly encouraged his subordinates to pursue those anti-Clinton rumors.

“The President added that he would not have been concerned over the legality of the issue but just the facts and what was in the files,” the FBI wrote.

Bush clearly was disappointed that the searches uncovered so little. “The President described himself as being indignant over the fact that the campaign did not find out what Clinton was doing,” the FBI report stated.

As the interview ended, two of diGenova’s assistants – Lisa Rich and Laura Laughlin – asked Bush for autographs, according to the handwritten notes.

DiGenova's Conclusions

After the Bush interviews, diGenova began work on his final report. Despite the evidence that Clinton’s files had been exploited to influence the outcome of a presidential election, diGenova concluded that there was no wrongdoing by anyone in the Bush administration.

DiGenova added “that certain White House personnel may have indirectly encouraged the search for Clinton’s passport files by making inquiry about the status of responses to [FOIA] requests.” As for the Oval Office, diGenova “found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter.”

DiGenova reserved his toughest criticism for State Department Inspector General Funk for suspecting that a crime had been committed in the first place. DiGenova castigated Funk for “a woefully inadequate understanding of the facts.”

John Duncan, a senior lawyer in Funk’s office, protested diGenova’s findings of no criminal wrongdoing.

“Astoundingly, [diGenova] has also concluded that no senior-level party to the search did anything improper whatever,” Duncan wrote. “The Independent Counsel has provided his personal absolution to individuals who we found had attempted to use their U.S. Government positions to manipulate the election of President of the United States.”

While there are many parallels between the Passport-gate and Plame-gate affairs, one striking difference is how the two prosecutors – diGenova and Fitzgerald – handled journalists who had received the government leaks.

DiGenova refused to pressure Newsweek reporters to divulge the government sources who had leaked the confidential criminal referral on the supposed tampering with Clinton’s passport file. That meant a central set of facts – who in George H.W. Bush’s administration was smearing Clinton – was never discovered.

By contrast, Fitzgerald demanded that journalists who received the Plame leaks provide testimony. Officials in George W. Bush’s administration were pressed to sign waivers and otherwise grant reporters permission to talk.

The testimony from these journalists, including New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time correspondent Matthew Cooper, revealed that senior White House officials Lewis Libby and Karl Rove were among the sources disclosing Plame’s identity amid a broader campaign to discredit her husband.

The history of the Passport-gate investigation also might help explain why George W. Bush seemed so confident early in the Plame-gate affair that the investigation would fail to identify the senior administration officials who had leaked Plame’s identity.

“I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is – partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers,” Bush told reporters at a news conference on Oct. 7, 2003.

Bush’s comment, however, came about two months before Attorney General Ashcroft recused himself and the investigation was turned over to Fitzgerald. Because of Fitzgerald’s tenacity – in marked contrast diGenova’s laxity a dozen years ago – Bush’s prediction has not held up too well.

Twenty-four later, the Mirror and all other British papers had been subjected to a "gag order" under Section 5 the Official Secrets Act at pain of prosecution.

"The Daily Mirror was yesterday told not to publish further details from a memo marked 'Top Secret', which revealed that President Bush wanted to bomb an Arab TV station," wrote Kevin Maguire in Tuesday's edition of the paper.

"The gag by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith" the same attorney general who changed his pre-Iraq War legal opinion after being badgered by US government lawyers to do so "came nearly 24 hours after the Mirror informed Downing Street of its intention to reveal how Tony Blair talked Bush out of attacking satellite station Al Jazeera's HQ in friendly Qatar" in the spring of 2004.

The White House has characterized the Mirror's reporting as "outlandish", but if that's the case, one wonders why Downing Street has gone into crisis mode not only prosecuting two of its own civil servants David Keogh and Leo O'Connor under the Official Secrets Act but also threatening editors of British newspapers with prosecution an historical first according to Richard Taylor-Norton of the Guardian.

So while Bush is attempting to brush off the incident, the British government is appearing more as though it has its hand in the cookie jar with damage control its first priority.

When asked to comment on the memo Downing Street refused to do so saying it doesn't commented on leaked documents. Be that as it may - and provided the Mirror story is false - then, surely, an absolute denial by the Prime Minister would put the story to bed and quash the rumors.

But gag order or not this story doesn't look like it's going to disappear into the ether like so many others.

Peter Kilfoyle, Blair's former Minister of Defense, has challenged Downing Street to publish the transcript. "I believe that Downing Street ought to publish this memo in the interests of transparency," he said.

"If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn't embedded with coalition forces".

For instance, Al Jazeera owned by the ruler of Qatar - is motivated to keep the story alive, since if it is true, the network along with its editors, anchors, reporters and technicians, could have been wiped off the map in the event Tony Blair hadn't succeeded in putting a damper on Bush's alleged ambitions.

Tuesday's Al Jazeera programming was red hot on the subject with experts, politicians and callers, demanding that the British government publish the memo's contents in full, which, quite honestly, hardly seems unreasonable.

And let's be clear, the White House may want us to believe the contents of the leaked memo fanciful but, unfortunately, there are precedents for believing otherwise.

When during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan Al Jazeera's Kabul office was bombed by an American 'smart bomb', Matt Wells of the Guardian asked "did the US mean to hit the Kabul offices of Al Jazeera TV? Some journalists are convinced it was targeted for being on the 'wrong side'.

And in April 2003 when the Iraq was in full flush, Al Jazeera's Baghdad office was hit by a US missile, killing cameraman Tariq Ayoubi and wounding Zuhair Al-Iraqi.

Then, the network's chief editor said: "Witnesses in the area saw the plane fly over twice before dropping the bombs. Our office is in a residential area and even the Pentagon knows its location."

Indeed, after the Kabul incident, Al Jazeera had made certain to pass on the coordinates of its Iraqi HQ. Moreover, on that same day the Baghdad office of Abu Dhabi television was also hit.

It's also interesting to note that prior to the invasion of Iraq former BBC war correspondent Kate Adie one of the most respected journalists in her field - told Irish Radio that the Pentagon had threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq.

Adie also said that when she questioned a Senior Pentagon office concerning the consequences of this action, he replied, 'Who cares. They've been warned".

Moreover, the former CEO of CNN Eason Jordan was forced to resign his post early this year for telling a panel at the Davos Economic Forum that he knew of 12 journalists who had been killed by coalition forces in Iraq".

Like his CNN colleagues April Oliver and Peter Arnett, as well as CBC's former producer Mary Mapes, Jordan had crossed the line by seemingly criticizing the US military, and had to go.

But does the Bush administration have a motive for wishing Al Jazeera off the planet? Take a look at some of the comments made by senior government and military officials and be the judge.

In June this year, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Al Jazeera of pounding the United States' image "day after day".

In his 2004 State of the Union address, Bush referred to Al Jazeera and other Arab networks as "hateful propaganda coming out of the Arab world".

Concerning the US 'pacification' of Fallujah when Al Jazeera reported US marines had killed hundreds of civilians which according to the leaked British memo triggered Bush's desire to finish off al Jazeera Rumsfeld said: "I can definitely say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable."

In March 2003, Gen. John Abizaid lashed out at an Al Jazeera reporter during a press conference because marines captured by the Iraqi military were aired sitting around drinking tea. Abizaid called the coverage "totally unacceptable" and "disgusting" prompting an American reporter to ask the general whether Al Jazeera should be classed as "hostile media".

In March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney said the network ran the risk of being labeled "Osama's outlet to the world"

So the motive is there, there are historical precedents of physical attacks on Al Jazeera by the US military, and the British government is currently engaged in a massive cover-up, yet we are still expected to believe that the contents of the leaked memo are a mere fabrication. Do you?

If the allegations contain any veracity, then the implications are enormous.

Imagine that the free world's top dog ostensibly out to promote democracy, freedom and 'our way of life' - whatever that is - wants to bomb an independent television station on the soil of one of its closest allies, owned by the ruler of that allied country.

Not only that the British lap dog of the top dog, who loves nothing more than to wag his fingers at "evil ideologies" is actively engaged in dowsing the story with help from erstwhile legal mandarins.

What are the implications for journalists that refuse to toe the coalition line? What about free speech and freedom of the press issues?

But the most worrying question is this: If the alleged bombing of Al Jazeera had gone ahead, with consequent deaths and injuries, wouldn't this equate the US administration with the terrorism it purports to hate?

Excuse the repetition but I would like to stress that Al Jazeera is owned by an ally of the US and staffed with respected editors and journalists from around the world, including many who formerly worked for the BBC.

These people are not terrorists or insurgents; they are not uniformed military or intelligence personnel. They are simply people trying to tell it like it is in an environment plagued by censorship, and judging by Al Jazeera's 50 million regular viewers and the ire they provoke from regional governments, they are doing something right.

I'll leave you with a hypothetical question based on Bush's alleged plan having been given the green light to proceed. Would the US have confessed to its role in the aftermath or would the mythical Abu Musab Al Zarqawi have been set up to take the fall? Think about it.

And, finally, if the Qatari government doesn't react strongly to this memo and demand answers, won't this put an indisputable stamp on the de facto US occupation of the Gulf?

After a first reading of the bill, the lower house national assembly approved the articles allowing video cameras to be set up in public locations including on the transport network, in places of worship and in shops.

Companies would also be allowed to film the outskirts of their premises and police would be able to access the footage under the new law, which will be put to a final vote in parliament on Tuesday.

State-appointed regional governors, or prefects,
would also be able to ask for surveillance cameras to be installed on sites considered at risk of an attack -- such as transport hubs and industrial or nuclear plants.

France currently has just 60,000 video cameras in public places compared to four million in Britain.

Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who drew up the legislation following the attacks on London's transport network in July, was reportedly inspired by British investigators' use of video footage to identify the perpetrators.

Sarkozy has insisted the bill strikes the right balance between security and the respect of personal freedoms -- despite protests from Green party deputy Noël Mamère that it paves the way for an "Orwellian" society.

The interior minister warned as he presented the bill on Wednesday that France faced a "real" threat of an extremist attack, and that it needed to raise its defences.

The country is particularly concerned about the threat posed by young French Muslims who go to fight alongside insurgents in Iraq -- of whom intelligence services know of 22 so far -- and return to France with a radicalised agenda.

France has also been singled out as a target by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Algerian insurgent group with links to the Al-Qaeda Islamist terror network.

The national assembly was to vote on the bill's provisions one by one, before putting the full text to the vote on Tuesday.

If approved, it will then need to be ratified by the upper house senate in order to become law.

"Sexism, racism and anti-Semitism are no more acceptable in song lyrics than in written or spoken words," the deputy behind the initiative, François Grosdidier of the ruling centre-right UMP, told AFP.

"This is one of the factors that led to the violence in the suburbs," he said, arguing that rap music "conditions" listeners into a violent frame of mind that can spur them on to action.

In a petition co-signed by 152 deputies and 49 senators, the deputy drew the attention of justice minister Pascal Clement to seven rap singers and bands whom he accuses of inciting racism and hatred.

The complaint singled out the song 'FranSSe' by the rap artist Monsieur R, whose lyrics describe France as a "bitch" to be "screwed until she drops".

Its author, Monsieur R, whose real name is Richard Makela, is already facing a separate court case for "outrage to social decency" over the song, brought by another ruling-party deputy.

The complaint also targets the singers Smala, Fabe and Salif and the rap groups Lunatic, 113, and Ministère Amer.

French rap artists have been using hip hop music as a medium to protest about conditions in France's tough suburbs since the early 1980s.

References to police harassment, drugs, inequality, violence and "a day of reckoning" for the injustices of life all litter their songs.

Following the weeks of violence that broke out in poor, high-immigration French suburbs in late October and early November, their lyrics warning of violence and railing against discrimination have appeared eerily prescient.

The terrorism threat in France is "unfortunately a real concern," Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, the director of the DST domestic intelligence agency, told RTL radio, as France's parliament prepared to examine a new anti-terrorism law.

He said this was "because a certain number of organisations have singled us out as an enemy, and also because our own investigations reveal day after day that networks already in place are working to set up terrorist projects hostile to our country."

Part of the current threat could be traced to Iraq, Florian said, warning that the conflict was acting as a "magnet for would-be holy warriors" from other countries, including France, to create a new generation of Islamic extremists.

"For the past two years, at a fairly regular pace, we have seen young French nationals and French residents leaving for Iraq," Florian said, adding that his services had identified 22 such youths so far.

"When they return, if they return, they are experienced and determined enough to represent a threat on our territory. We do not want France to become a land of jihad," he said.

Florian said the French intelligence services were aware of, and were monitoring some of the channels used to recruit young Islamic warriors in France and tried to prevent youths from leaving for Iraq whenever possible.

Florian ruled out any involvement by Islamic extremists in the recent wave of rioting in high-immigration French suburbs, saying that although some extremists were thought to have supported the rioters, "it is not their fight".

France's parliament was on Wednesday to start debating a new anti-terrorism law, inspired in part by British police's success in identifying the London suicide bombers using video-surveillance footage.

The new legislation, drawn up following the July bombings in London and approved by the French cabinet last month, aims to give the authorities greater access to modern technological tools in investigating terrorism cases.

The law's most visible outcome is likely to be a big increase in the number of video cameras installed in public places in France, which currently has only some 60,000 cameras compared to four million in Britain.

Alain Robert, 43, dashed from a taxi to the 46-story Houston Center but was stopped just as he was starting his ascent. Police said a reporter had tipped them off to his plans.

"A tall officer was able to grab his ankles. He was about one or two steps from getting away," Houston police spokesman Alan Wright said.

Robert's Web site claims he has climbed some 70 buildings including the Eiffel Tower; the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; London's Canary Wharf Building; the Empire State Building in New York and Chicago's Sears Tower.

Last December he defied stiff winds and rain to climb the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, in Taiwan's capital.

Houston police charged Robert with criminal trespass and possession of narcotics. They said Xanax tablets were in his bag and it was unclear if he had a doctor's prescription for the anti-anxiety drug.

Dewey: Rod, you talked about a, you said that Scott never saw a murder before, did you see a murder before then?

A: I've fucking seen murders like all my life, every since I was five cause my grandfather for one, he's never been caught either.

Q: You saw these people murder other people?

A: He's part of an organization called the Black Mask. Whenever I was five they chose me as the Guardian of the Black Mask and the Guardian has to become one with everybody. In other words, they raped me. And they have to sacrifice a human to the Guardian so they sacrificed someone right in front of me.

Q: What city was that in?

A: It was in Murray.

Q: Would you call that a cult?

A: Yeah.

Q: These guys that are with ya, are they, have you indoctrinated them into the ways of the cult or you just ah their friends that your run with? What about Scott?

A: No, I never became part of them.

Q: Kind of tough even when you're hard core, isn't it man?

A: Two things bother me: what happened whenever I was five and the fact that I never will get to see Che after this... I've been hanging around gangs and cults and all that shit all my life, so I've seen like sacrifices and drug buys...

Q: I'm just asking, Rod.

A: Killing is a way of life, animals do it, and that's the way humans are, just the worst predators of all actually.

...

Q: To be straight up with ya, yeah, it's probably going to entail the death penalty.

A: Petty.

Q: Yeah, there you go.

A: I'm sorry, this is just like a big fucking joke. My life seems like a dream. My childhood was taken away at five, I don't know whether I'm asleep or dreaming anymore so whatever, for all I know I could wake up in five minutes.

Ferrell had been raised by his young mother, Sondra Gibson, and her parents after his father abandoned the family and joined the military. Besides the rape, occult torture and human sacrifice Ferrell alleges he'd suffered at the hands of his grandfather's circle, Gibson's second husband is also said to have been "engaged in satanic rituals," and his mother sought to become a vampire herself. The Smoking Gun

has one of Gibson's love letters to the 14-year old brother of Stephen Murray, who had "crossed" Ferrell over to vampirism. Murray's mother turned the letters over to the police. She wrote of longing for him to cross her over, to make her his bride, and so "become a vampire, a part of the family."

Ferrell was the youngest ever consigned to execution by the State of Florida. (He left death row in 2002.) Most who remember his name likely regard him as just another eff'd-up Goth who played Dungeons and Dragons too many times. Prosecutor David Harrington said "I think you had a group of kids that just wanted to be a part of something, wanted to belong to a group, and it went too far. Hopefully, it's over." At his sentencing the judge declared Ferrell proves "there is genuine evil in the world." I'd like to know how long that judge has served on the Bench, because I'd say the case was made somewhat earlier. It must have been made rather convincingly to the five-year old "Guardian of the Black Mask," delivered by his grandfather into paedophile rape and torture. ("Two things bother me: what happened whenever I was five....")

Another generation, another generational cult.

Ferrell, testified a psychologist at his trial, "felt he was able to get powers from this book." That would seem to have been the lesson of his abuse: obtain power, and make it stop.

"The Black Mask," "The Hand of Death," The Atlanta child murder ring, the "Friends of Hecate," the Four Pi Movement and the "Black Cross"

and more: they go by many names, and some by none at all. And too frequently for it to be coincidence or fantasy we read how members include "well-known" and "respected" citizens of the community.

From prison Ferrell said he never expected there to be consequences to his crimes. A reasonable assumption, given his grandfather and the "Black Mask" have apparently never faced any themselves. ("I've fucking seen murders like all my life, every since I was five cause my grandfather for one, he's never been caught either.") Prosecution of occult crime seems to match the conduct of the "War on Drugs": arrest the end users of narcotics and child porn; make showcase arrests, frequently of patsies; and never implicate the respected figures at the top.

In his 1978 essay entitled "Some Considerations on the Paperback Publication of the NECRONOMICON" (quoted in Harms and Gonce's The Necronomicon Files), William S Burroughs said that "with some knowledge of the black arts from prolonged residence in Morocco, I have been surprised and at first shocked to find real secrets of curses and spells revealed in paperback publications for all to see and use." Burroughs concludes with the thought that this is a good thing: public disclosure will keep the dark secrets from being monopolized by corporations and government agencies.

There is a certain logic to that. But there's certainly madness, too. Because, I would expect, whenever the dark secrets are employed, the result will always be darkness. That's what Ferrell did when he took up the Necronomicon in occult imitation of his abusers. It was learned behaviour.

From an email I receieved this week from a reader recounting his experience with the Necronomicon, and reproduced with permission:

Once I realized I wouldn't be hearing much about Cthulhu in the book, my interest waned somewhat, but I finished reading anyways. That was when things started to get odd. I began hearing noises, and by noises I mean loud ones, such as feet running over the roof of the house while I was home alone, noises outside my bedroom window, etc. The belief was that until a person burned the book, they would be plagued by the demons released by reading it. I sought to endure this as long as possible, but eventually I reached my breaking point, and after a couple weeks of "haunting" that never exceeded what you have refered to as "prankster behavior", I burned the paperback in my grandparent's front driveway, which was where I lived at the time, and bringing the episode to and end.

One last thing about this experience, and one I was highly reticent to admit in your blog, was when I burned this book, I stood and watched it go up. What I saw I've never sufficiently reconcilled with my "understanding of things":

The pages burned blank. By this I mean that as the book burned and page after page burned off the top, each page beneath the last was completely empty of ink.

No words.

Magick is something of an intermediary between psychology and religion, and it's hard sometimes to know where the psi ends and something Other takes over. Teens experiment, and sometimes find power, and may not ask from where it comes. But the occult is recognized as its battery. And not just by teens.

I'll quote again Dion Fortune, from her book What Is Occultism? (a compilation of essays published in the 1920s):

Black occultists may be divided into two classes, those who deliberately say to Evil, Be thou my good; and those who stray onto the Left-hand Path more or less unintentionally, and having got there, stay there, often deluding themselves.... Fortunately, the Christs of Evil are as rare as the Christs of Good. Supreme achievement in any walk of life is attained by but few.

That's one consolation, I suppose.

McCusker, 26, was dismissed from the school after telling school administrators she was pregnant and did not plan to marry.

She and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a wrongful dismissal complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Monday asserting the firing was "intentional and unlawful discrimination based on McCusker's sex and pregnant status."

In a statement, McCusker said she did not "understand how a religion that prides itself on being forgiving and on valuing life" could fire her for choosing to have a baby.

In a termination letter to McCusker dated October 11, Theresa Andersen, the school's principal, cited the school handbook's provision on morality, but also praised McCusker's "high degree of professionalism."

In a further irritant to fractious US-Venezuelan relations, officials from the South American country signed a deal to ship 12m gallons of home heating oil to low-income Americans in Massachusetts, part of a plan by Mr Chávez to embarrass the Bush administration in the wake of its lacklustre response to Hurricane Katrina. The fuel will be sold at about 40% below market prices to thousands of homes during the winter.

Spain's Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, gave the arms deal his personal backing earlier this year, saying it was "of benefit to the people" and would help Venezuela to fight drug-trafficking. But Washington has signalled that as some of the military hardware being sold contains US technology, it may prevent the sales.

"Those air or naval platforms include US technology," the American ambassador to Madrid, Eduardo Aguirre, said yesterday. "We have not yet decided whether to grant our permission for obtaining that technology." He made clear that Washington did not want the deal to proceed. "We hope, in the end, that the transaction will not be carried out," he said. "We're worried that the sale could be a destabilising factor in the region."

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is also on record as saying that Spain is making a mistake over the sale to Venezuela. The US components in the Spanish aircraft reportedly amount to half or more of those planes. News reports say the planes' manufacturers could use EU or Israeli technology, but it is more costly.

The deal is being closely watched in the arms industry, as the US has shown itself increasingly willing to block sales between its allies and third countries.

Mr Chávez, a former paratroop colonel, has accused the Bush administration of seeking to overthrow his socialist government. He has pledged "revolutionary" measures to overcome poverty and has railed against oil industry "oligarchs" and multinationals.

Under the cheap oil deal, a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company will supply oil at 40% below market prices at a time when Americans are braced for for high winter heating bills. The fuel will be distributed by two non-profit organisations, Citizens Energy Corp and the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance, which will means-test consumers.

A Democratic congressman, William Delahunt, who helped to broker the fuel deal in a meeting with Mr Chávez in Caracas in August, rejected criticism that the move was politically motivated. He described the agreement as "an expression of humanitarianism at its very best".

"This is a gesture about people," Mr Delahunt told reporters after a ceremony outside the house of the intended recipients. This is going to alleviate the fears of people who were wondering whether they were going to be able to get through our bitter New England winter."

A decision has been made to move the islanders to the larger nearby Bougainville island, four hours' boat ride to the southwest. Ten families at a time will be moved, over one to two years, once funds are allocated for the resettlement program.

A United Nations panel of more than 2,000 scientists has predicted that average sea levels are likely to rise between 9 and 88 cm (3.5 to 35 inches) by 2100, mainly because of a build-up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. . . At the higher end of the forecast, the sea would overflow the heavily populated coasts of countries such as Bangladesh, and cause low-lying island states like the Indian Ocean's Maldives and South Pacific's Kiribati and Tuvalu to disappear.

"They're saying, 'Come down here and we'll kick your butt,' or 'You better watch where you walk.' A lot of vulgarity," Kusky told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Kusky predicted that in 90 years New Orleans will be 15 to 18 feet below sea level with enormous levees protecting it from the Gulf of Mexico. He described the future city as a "fish bowl."

Critics point out that Kusky, although he has written a book on geological disasters, is not a coastal geologist. Charles Groat, a former U.S. Geological Survey director quoted by Kusky on "60 Minutes" disagreed with his conclusions in a Times-Picayune article headlined "Not So Fast, '60 Minutes.'"

"No, no, no," Groat said. "You've got a lot of things between the city of New Orleans and the edge of the sea, and they're not going away."

On the other hand, some geologists told "60 Minutes" that Kusky was, if anything, conservative in his dire prediction

It's the latest advance in "synthetic biology," a disputed research movement launched largely by engineers and chemists bent on genetically manipulating microscopic bugs into acting like tiny machines, creating new, powerful and inexpensive ways to make drugs, plastics and even alternatives to fossil fuel.

The field seeks to go beyond traditional genetic engineering feats where a single gene is spliced into bacteria and other cells to manufacture drugs. Synthetic biologists are trying to create complex systems that function as logically and reliably as computers.

Mainstream biologists, however, scoff that biology — life itself — is too unpredictable and prone to genetic mutation to understand, let alone tame and turn into miniature factories.

Bioethicists, meanwhile, fret that synthetic biologists are attempting to create new living creatures and are inventing technology that can readily be used by terrorists.

Still, a growing number of engineers are jumping into the nascent field, whose chief goals include breaking down microbes and other living things into smaller components and reassembling those parts into useful machines.

"There is kind of a hacker culture behind all of this," said Chris Voigt, a University of California, San Francisco researcher who, at 29, was the senior author on the bacteria-as-film paper in Nature.

Voigt and colleagues took from algae light-sensitive genes that emit black compounds and spliced them into a batch of E. coli bacteria. The organisms were then spread on a petri dish that resembles a cookie sheet and placed in an incubator. A high-powered projector cast photographic images of the researchers through a hole on top of the incubator, exposing some of the bacteria to light.

The result: Ghostly images like traditional black-and-white photographs of the researchers responsible for the invention, at a resolution Voigt said was about 100 megapixels, or 10 times sharper than high-end printers.

The work, though, isn't intended for commercial markets.

"They aren't going to put Kodak out of business any time soon," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Drew Endy, a leading synthetic biologist.

Instead, the creation will be used as a sensor to start and stop more complex genetic engineering experiments. The idea is to create a genetically engineered cell that lays dormant until a laser is shined on it, prompting it into action.

Such an accomplishment would add to the growing success of a field that is making strides around the world, in such projects as:

- Scientists in Israel made the world's smallest computer by engineering DNA to carry out mathematical functions.

- J. Craig Venter, the entrepreneurial scientist who mapped the human genome and launched the Rockville, Md.-based research institute named after himself, is attempting to create novel organisms that can produce alternative fuels.

- With a $42.6 million grant that originated at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Berkeley researchers are engineering the E. coli bug with genes from the wormwood plant and yeast to create a new malaria drug.

Even as they wrestle with scientific hurdles like controlling genetic mutations, thorny ethical issues are cropping up.

It's cheap and easy to buy individual genes online. They cost about $1 each, down from the $18 apiece charged just a few years ago. Researchers last year created a synthetic polio virus by simply stitching together these mail-order genes.

National security experts and even synthetic biologists themselves are concerned that rogue scientists could create new biological weapons — like deadly viruses that lack natural foes. They also worry about innocent mistakes: organisms that could potentially create havoc if allowed to reproduce outside the lab.

Researchers are casting about for ways to self-police the field before it really takes off. Leaders in the field have organized a second national conference to grapple with these issues this coming May and the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation in June handed out a $570,000 grant to study the social implications of the new field.

"This is powerful work and we live in an age that many tools and technologies can be turned into weaponry," said Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. "You always have the problem of dual-use in every new technology. Steel can be used to make sewing needles or spears."

This church near Chicago and others like it number their congregations in the thousands on any given Sunday in stadium-size sanctuaries; but in the end a major appeal of America's megachurches may be the chance to get small.

Institutions like California's Saddleback Church, Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois and Houston's Lakewood Church, each drawing 20,000 or more on a weekend, offer not just a vast, shared attraction but a path that tries to link individuals on a faith-sustaining one-to-one level beyond the crowd, observers and worshipers said.

Rick Warren, founder of California's Saddleback Church and author of the best-selling book "The Purpose-Driven Life," told a seminar held earlier this year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that about 20 churches in America have more than 10,000 in weekend attendance.

"These churches can do a ton of things that smaller churches can't," said Nancy Ammerman, professor of the sociology of religion at the Boston University School of Theology.

"They have the resources to produce a professional-quality production every weekend, with music (often specially composed for the occasion and backed by a professional ensemble) and video and lighting and computer graphics and a preacher who knows how to work a crowd," she said.

But they also support "dozens or even hundreds of specialized opportunities for people to get involved in doing things with a small group of others. If you want someone to talk to who really understands what it is like to parent an autistic child, you may find a whole support group in a megachurch," she added.

MORE CHOICE

"Or if you really love stock car racing, but hate being surrounded by drunken rowdies, you can go with a busload of your church friends. I wouldn't say that there are fewer rules in most of these churches. Most of them really expect people to get involved in ways that can have a profound impact on their lives. It's just that there are so many paths into involvement that a smaller church just can't match," Ammerman said.

That's part of what Richard and Nancy Sauser of Schaumburg, Ill., said they found at Willow Creek where they have been members for more than 10 years. They attend regularly with their daughters, ages 5 and 7. The 30-year-old church draws 20,000 weekend worshipers.

"Anything they put their minds to, they can pretty much do," he said, marveling at the power inherent in size. But he added, "Willow Creek has the resources to effectively execute on multiple facets of church life," through more than 100 different ministries.

Sauser said he does not attend Willow Creek for its size but for the teaching and the ministry.

When the thousands at Willow Creek break into smaller groups for Bible study, the men's ministry, the special needs ministry and the adult ministry, a lot of life change occurs. "In the small groups, that is where it really gets good," Sauser said.

When the crowds head for Willow Creek's parking lot, attendants in orange vests direct processions of cars into smoothly paved parking lots ahead of the 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. services. Inside, the throng moves through the hallways and up and down escalators and stairs, welcomed by smiling greeters.

Some drop off children at Sunday school.

On the first floor Danielle Jackola of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a mother of two who recently moved to the area from California, has come in search of a church. After listening to dynamic lead pastor Gene Appel speak on family and passing the baton of faith from one generation to the next, she liked the message -- and the entertainment.

"I had never been to something like that. I think that is one of the ways of getting your numbers up ... to get the message across but to keep it fun and upbeat. And more contemporary to get more young families involved," she said a few days later -- after deciding to join the church.

SEARCH FOR MEANING

Scott Thuma, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, said his research indicates there are at least 1,200 U.S. Protestant churches which claim more than 2,000 weekly attendees.

Megachurches are addressing the needs of Americans who are disinterested in "traditional church" yet want to deepen a sense of meaning in their lives. Classes and volunteer ministry opportunities lead to a deeper commitment, he said.

"They have opened worship to the seeker and the unsaved rather than reserving Sunday worship for the saved and sanctified," Thuma added.

The three largest churches are Saddleback, Willow Creek and Houston's Lakewood. But Warren said the world has far larger churches, pointing to mammoth Christian congregations in Nigeria, South Korea and elsewhere.

Warren said U.S. Protestants have returned to the 19th century roots of the evangelical movement, emphasizing social issues such as caring for the sick, the poor and the powerless, and not just concentrating on personal salvation.

"The small group structure is the structure of renewal in every facet of Christianity, including Catholicism," Warren told the Pew forum. He said his church has 9,200 lay ministers leading more than 200 different ministries all over southern California with 2,600 small groups in 83 cities.

Lockheed said she initially was terrified of Sam when she agreed to take him in as a rescue dog six years ago on a 48-hour trial basis. Although she fell in love with him, his appearance repulsed her then-boyfriend and prompted the man to break up with her.

Later, however, Sam became a matchmaker by bringing together Lockheed and her current beau, who saw a picture of the two on an online dating site.

Lockheed said she had Sam euthanized after she learned Sam's heart was failing.

She said she's felt a little lost ever since, and is sleeping with Sam's favorite toy — a stuffed bear he picked up and carried home.