GRINS

THE ROAD TO RUIN? - HYDROGEN HIGHWAY USA, HYDROGEN ROAD NORWAY

2005-07-11T19:27:00.000+02:00

THE HYDROGEN HIGHWAY, USA and THE HYDROGEN ROAD, NORWAY ???

06.29.05 HONDA BULLETIN: (full article below)
Honda Delivers FCX Fuel Cell Vehicle to World's First Individual Customer
World's First
* Honda sets advanced-technology and environmental standards by offering first fuel cell powered car to individual customer in Los Angeles
* Zero-emissions FCX is the only fuel cell vehicle certified by the U.S. EPA and CARB for regular commercial use
* Los Angeles-area family are first private citizens to utilize California's Hydrogen Highway refueling stations

Hydrogen i Norge, OUR FUTURE???
The artist’s rendering of a hydrogen filling station in Norway looks like they have a giant vent-pipe for the “leaking hydrogen,” another problem, also solvable by magne-hydrogen macromolecular structure.

Note from Sam:
[ THE ACCURATE TITLE OF ALL THIS SHOULD BE:
“USA and Norway Taking Us Down the ROAD TO RUIN”
IT IS EMPIRE BUILDING, Big and small, to be sure!
California Hydrogen Highway [to be in place by 2010, this scheme is exact cooperative redundant parallel to the Norsk implementation of the so-called “Hydrogen Road” across southern Norway, Oslo to Stavanger, announced recently in Norway, run by NorskHydro, with the tacit blessings of Bellona! Clearly Bellona needs to read Santilli’s article on oxygen depletion, to know it is in bed with snakes. It is like the ‘stay-behind’ operation of the USA in Norway after WW2, extended to the corporate/energy sector. Examine the funding below:
See: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/05/norway_funds_it.html

“Norway is allocating NOK 48.6 million (US$7.5 million, €6.0 million) for testing alternative fuels and environmentally friendly technology. Of that, 62%—NOK 30.2 million (US$4.6 million, €3.7 million)—will go to the HyNor project, which wants to build a hydrogen highway between the cities of Oslo and Stavanger.” “Christopher Kloed from Norsk Hydro is leading the project. Some NOK 16.2 million (US$2.5 million, €2.0 million) is targeted for Hydro’s establishing a hydrogen filling station in the industrial area of Grenland in Porsgrunn. The filling station may be located in close proximity to Hydro’s research park there, and could utilize surplus hydrogen manufactured by established industry in the area.”

Do the math, 61% of the funding for “alternative fuels” is going to the pockets of HyNor (i.e. NorskHydro) project, and fully 30% will go just to establish a HYDROGEN FILLING STATION!!!
A massive subsidy to insure OIL COMPANY DOMINATION of future energy plans. Repeating the OIL COMPANY SCENARIO, which with great irony, is all being SOLD by BELLONA(Norway) as ENVIRONMENTALISM!!! see propaganda page: http://www.hydrogen.no/ and pdf link: http://www.hydrogen.no/downloads/brosj1.pdf ]

NorskHydro raking in the cash with record intake in Oil division!
Graph from: http://www.hydro.com/no/investor_relations/analytical_info/oil_energy/index.html

In 2005, beyond this staggering profit growth of 2003-04, the First Quarter operating income for Oil & Energy increased by 26 percent compared to the same period last year to NOK 9,842 million. The record results for the quarter mainly resulted from the continuing very high oil and gas prices, yet during this period, the price was averaged at $46/bbl. Data from: http://www.hydro.com/en/investor_relations/financial_rep/2005_q1/oil_energy.html

NOTE: THE BULLETIN BELOW WAS JUST RELEASED FROM HONDA MOTOR CORPORATION, YOU CAN READ MORE PROPAGANDA FOR THE HYDROGEN HIGHWAY REFUELING STATIONS,
http://corporate.honda.com/press/article.aspx?id=2005062944530
and
http://www.hydrogen.no/ and pdf link: http://www.hydrogen.no/downloads/brosj1.pdf

Daimler-Benz and BMW are also on the “hydrogen road” to nowhere.
-RWB

06.29.05 HONDA BULLETIN:
Honda Delivers FCX Fuel Cell Vehicle to World's First Individual Customer
World's First

* Honda sets advanced-technology and environmental standards by offering first fuel cell powered car to individual customer in Los Angeles
* Zero-emissions FCX is the only fuel cell vehicle certified by the U.S. EPA and CARB for regular commercial use
* Los Angeles-area family are first private citizens to utilize California's Hydrogen Highway refueling stations

Marking a historic achievement in the evolution of the automobile and the advancement of future transportation technology, American Honda Motor Co., Inc., today announced the lease of its revolutionary FCX, an advanced hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicle, to the world's first individual customers, Jon and Sandy Spallino of Redondo Beach, California. The Spallinos become the world's first fuel cell family, having signed an agreement to lease a 2005 Honda FCX for a period of two years. Honda is the only automotive manufacturer to certify its fuel cell vehicle for regular daily use and the first to offer its technology to an individual customer. The Spallinos will use the FCX in everyday normal use, including commuting to work to Orange County, trips to school for their children, shopping and household errands.

"American Honda Motor Co. is thrilled to introduce the world's first full cell family," said John Mendel, senior vice president, automotive operations, for American Honda. "We're pleased to be taking this historic step forward in the further advancement of our fuel cell program. Our advanced fuel cell technology has been proven and tested through a successful fleet sales partnership over the last three years. With this announcement, Honda furthers its commitment to the continued advancement of this technology for the benefit of society, with the ultimate goal of achieving large-scale commercialization of fuel cell vehicles."

California Hydrogen Highway

The Spallino family, living in the Los Angeles area, will be among the first individuals to begin utilizing the first of California's Hydrogen Highway refueling stations, a statewide infrastructure build out underway to offer hydrogen refueling station access to private individuals. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the state's commitment to a Hydrogen Highway in April of this year, creating a public and private partnership to build California's Hydrogen Highway by 2010.

"We applaud the Governor and his administration for their environmental vision and their commitment to keeping California on the cutting edge of new technology development," said Mendel. "Without this initiative, we could not be taking the steps we are today."

Honda FCX on the Road

As the next natural step in deployment of Honda fuel cell technology, the lease of the FCX to the Spallino family will be the first of several FCX vehicles to be leased to individual customers over the next year. Honda's leadership in hydrogen vehicle technology also extends to a fleet of 13 FCX fuel cell vehicles in regular daily use with six public municipal customers in California, New York and Nevada.

"With its outstanding environmental benefits, advanced technology, and safety-tested performance, the FCX is proving every day its viability as the transportation technology of the future," said Mendel. "The Spallino's experience with the FCX will provide Honda engineers with real-world driving experience and feedback by an individual family, which will be invaluable as we design future models."

"I'm looking forward to commuting to work and running the kids around in the FCX," said Jon Spallino, the first retail customer to lease the FCX. "We're really excited about the opportunity to lease this car. The FCX drives just like any other vehicle on the road -- without the emissions."

The Honda FCX is the first and only hydrogen vehicle to ever be certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and California's Air Resources Board (CARB). The EPA certified the 2005 FCX as a Tier-2 Bin 1, and CARB certified the FCX as a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV).

The 2005 FCX model is powered by Honda's originally developed fuel cell stack (Honda FC Stack) with the breakthrough capability to start and operate at sub-freezing temperatures as low as -4 degrees Fahrenheit, along with increased performance, range and fuel efficiency compared with earlier models. The FCX was the first fuel cell vehicle to be listed in the EPA's fuel economy guide in 2003. The 2005 FCX carries an EPA city/highway rating of 62/51 miles per gallon and a range of 190 miles.

Commitment to Environmentally Friendly Vehicles

Honda's extensive history of environmental leadership includes recognition as the "Greenest Automaker" by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in its 2001, 2003 and 2004 rankings of corporate environmental performance with the lowest average emission levels and highest average fuel economy of any automobile manufacturer.

Honda also leads the automotive industry with the most gas-electric hybrid models: the Insight, America's first hybrid vehicle; the Civic Hybrid, the first truly mainstream hybrid model; and the Accord Hybrid, the world's first V6-powered hybrid vehicle.

In April 2005, Honda announced it had begun limited retail sales of its natural gas-powered Civic GX Sedan paired with a revolutionary new home-refueling appliance called Phill. The Civic GX is the cleanest internal combustion vehicle ever certified by the U.S. EPA and, with the introduction of home refueling, has the lowest fuel cost per mile of any new vehicle. The Phill appliance, manufactured and marketed by FuelMaker Corporation, is an affordable home refueling appliance that allows drivers the convenience of refueling their vehicles at home using their existing natural gas supply. Phill is available for lease through 17 authorized Honda Civic GX California dealers.

Honda (NYSE: HMC) is one of today's leading manufacturers of automobiles and power products and the largest manufacturer of motorcycles in the world. With more than 120 manufacturing facilities in 30 countries worldwide, Honda now attracts nearly 20 million customers annually. More than 75 percent of the automobiles and light trucks that Honda sells in the U.S. are built in North America using domestic and globally sourced parts. Increasingly, many of these products are developed in America as well, including the Honda Ridgeline, Civic Coupe, Element and Pilot, and the Acura TL and MDX.

For more information or downloadable high-resolution images of the FCX and other Honda vehicles, please visit www.hondanews.com. Consumer information is available at www.hondacars.com. Additional resources for items mentioned in this release include www.epa.gov and http://www.arb.ca.gov/homepage.htm.

RWB: footnote: How the USA/NORSK hydrogen highway was spawned:

http://www.h2cars.biz/artman/publish/article_527.shtml

U.S. and Norway: Agreement on Hydrogen and Clean Fuels
By PEB based on material from DOE
May 23, 2004

U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham this weekend signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Norwegian Minister of Petroleum and Energy Einar Steensnaes that will enhance each country's research in a number of areas of mutual benefit, including carbon sequestration, hydrogen and clean fuels, among other energy topics.

"This MOU marks a significant advancement in our efforts to improve energy security in the United States and Norway, as well as the entire world," Secretary Abraham said. "I think this agreement is particularly significant because the United States was the first nation to recognize the independent state of Norway and, through this agreement, we will expand our cooperation in the field of energy security. We've worked very successfully with the Norwegians in the past in the fields of carbon sequestration and hydrogen research, and this agreement will build on those achievements."

Secretary Abraham and Minister Steensnaes signed the MOU while attending the International Energy Forum (IEF), held in Amsterdam May 22-24. The IEF is a high-level biennial informal gathering that brings together energy-producing and energy-consuming nations to discuss the world's energy issues. The IEF expects delegations from 80 countries to participate, with approximately 500 attendees.

Under the non-binding MOU, the U.S. and Norway will conduct joint research in a number of energy areas that are of mutual interest and benefit. These include carbon sequestration, the two countries also have existing cooperative agreements through the auspices of the International Energy Agency, but this is the first formal agreement between the U.S. and Norway to advance energy research and development projects. Additionally, Norway is a charter member of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum and the International Partnership for a Hydrogen Economy.

Democracy Now! | Debt Slavery?Congress Approves Bush's Bankruptcy Bill

2005-04-15T19:54:00.000+02:00

FULL STORY HERE: Democracy Now! | Debt Slavery? Congress Approves Bush's Bankruptcy Bill: "A major overhaul of the nation's bankruptcy laws won final congressional approval Thursday, in a move that will make it harder for Americans to rid themselves of debt by filing for bankruptcy. We speak with Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) and David Swanson of DebtSlavery.org. [includes rush transcript]"

Democracy Now! | NY Law Enforcement Caught Doctoring Video of RNC Arrests

2005-04-14T17:11:00.000+02:00

Democracy Now! | NY Law Enforcement Caught Doctoring Video of RNC Arrests: "New York law enforcement is caught doctoring video of arrests made during the Republican Convention. We speak with Alexander Dunlop, whose charges were dropped after the edited video was exposed, his lawyer Michael Conroy as well as a member of I-Witness Video who helped find the footage that eventually vindicated Alexander. And we get response from the NYPD."

A CALL TO CONSCIENCEMartin Luther King, Jr. Speeches

2005-04-14T16:50:00.000+02:00

A Call to Conscience:
The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. - STANFORD WEBSITE LINK HERE

Cuba Documentation Project

2005-04-14T06:51:00.000+02:00

Anti-Castro Cuban Exile Tied to Deadly 1976 Airline Bombing Seeks Political Asylum in U.S.
Listen to DemocracyNow! Segment: HERE
Luis Posada Carriles applied for political asylum Tuesday after spending the last 40 years trying to violently overthrow the Castro government. He has been tied to bombings that have killed at least 74 people and has been imprisoned in Venezuela and Panama. We talk to Cuban expert Peter Kornbluh about Posada's request and what it means for President Bush's "war on terrorism." [includes rush transcript] One of the most notorious militant Cuban exiles applied Tuesday for political asylum in the United States. Luis Posada Carriles is a 77-year-old former CIA operative who was trained by the U.S. Army at Fort Benning in Georgia. He has been trying to violently overthrow Fidel Castro's government for four decades. Three weeks ago he entered the United States after years of hiding in Central America and the Caribbean.

Posada has been connected to the 1976 downing of a civilian airliner that killed 73 passengers; a series of 1997 bombings of hotels, restaurants, and discotheques in Havana that killed an Italian tourist; and a plot to assassinate Castro five years ago.

In 1998 Posada told the New York Times "The C.I.A. taught us everything... They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage."

On Tuesday Democratic Congressman William Delahunt of Massachusetts called for a federal investigation into how Posada entered the country. He also called for Posada to be arrested and deported. Delahunt said that if the U.S. facilitated Posada's entry into the country it would "obliterate America's credibility in the war on terrorism." Delahunt said that if the U.S. grants Posada asylum it would suggest "that we share the views of those who support al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' "

* Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project. LINK HERE to Cuba Documentation Project

Democracy Now! | Three People Forcibly Removed From Bush "Town Hall" Meeting on Social Security

2005-04-08T22:25:00.000+02:00

Democracy Now! | Three People Forcibly Removed From Bush "Town Hall" Meeting on Social Security
As President Bush continues touring the country to promote his plans for overhauling social security, we speak with one of the three people forcibly removed from Bush's Town-Hall-Style "Conversation on Social Security," in Denver on last month. [includes rush transcript] As President Bush continues touring the country to promote his plans for overhauling social security, some have begun to ask questions about the costs and the procedures determining who is permitted to attend these publicly funded events. Yesterday, an article in the Washington Post reported that this tour may be one of the most expensive in memory, costing millions of tax-payer dollars.

Representative Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, wrote a letter to the Government Accountability office, asking for the exact cost of the tour and questioned whether the administration had crossed the line from education to propaganda. Waxman's letter stated in part: "There is a vital line between informing the public as the President did in his State of the Union address, and commandeering vast resources of the federal government to fund a political campaign for social security privatization."

Another member of Congress, Rep. Diana Degette, has requested that that the House Government Reform Committee investigate the exclusion procedures at these events. In North Dakota and Arizona, people expressing contrary political views were denied access to the Bush events. The latest incident happened on March 21st in Denver where three Coloradoans were ejected from President Bush's social security town hall meeting.

* Alexander Young, one of the three people forcibly removed from President Bush's Town-Hall-Style "Conversation on Social Security," in Denver on March 21st. More information at: DenverThree.org.

Liberty Beat by Nat Hentoff - Defendant Rumsfeld

2005-03-20T03:48:00.000+01:00

Village Voice > News > Liberty Beat by Nat Hentoff
Secretary of Defense sued for torture while media cover Michael Jackson trial

U.S. Military Says:26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicides

2005-03-16T15:41:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide
At least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials.

The number of confirmed or suspected cases is much higher than any accounting the military has previously reported. A Pentagon report sent to Congress last week cited only six prisoner deaths caused by abuse, but that partial tally was limited to what the author, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy, called "closed, substantiated abuse cases" as of last September.

The new figure of 26 was provided by the Army and Navy this week after repeated inquiries.

Aarhus Kunstmuseum

2005-03-14T17:45:00.000+01:00

Aarhus Kunstmuseum
Boy
One of the great medium-sized cities of the world, Aarhus, Danmark, has a fantastic new art museum, opened last year, -- the website is a delightful place to wander around, and is available in an English edition here:
http://www.aros.dk/?setlanguage=2

"VNR's" - State Propaganda:A New Age of Prepackaged TV "News"

2005-03-14T17:13:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > Washington > Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News
See Also LINK HERE: PRWATCH.ORG
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
LINK TO IN-DEPTH STORY HERE: State Propaganda - Report on Democracy Now!

JUDGE SAYS POISONING 150,000 VIETNAMESE CHILDREN IS NO CRIME

2005-03-10T23:43:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | Agent Orange legal case dismissed
BBC - A US federal court in New York has dismissed a legal action brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs over the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The plaintiffs had sought compensation from the firms that manufactured the chemical, which allegedly caused birth defects, miscarriages and cancer. They said use of the defoliant - to strip away forest cover during the war - was a war crime against millions.
But Judge Jack Weinstein ruled there was no legal basis for their claims.
The civil action was the first attempt by Vietnamese plaintiffs to claim compensation for the effects of Agent Orange, which has been linked to a multitude of heath problems, including diabetes. However, the chemical companies said no such link had been proved. The defendants - including Dow Chemical and the Monsanto Corporation - also argued that the US government was responsible for how the chemical was used, not the manufacturers. They maintained that US courts could not punish corporations for carrying out the orders of a president exercising his powers as commander-in-chief.
In a 233-page ruling, Judge Weinstein threw out the case, saying:

"There is no basis for any of the claims of plaintiffs under the domestic law of any nation or state or under any form of international law."

Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction?

2005-03-10T23:26:00.000+01:00

UPI News "An alleged ex-Marine who claims to have participated in the capturing of Saddam Hussein says the public version of his capture was fabricated, United Press International is reporting. 'Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well,' UPI quoted Abou Rabeh as saying."

PENTAGON ABUSE/TORTURE INVESTIGATIONUS GOVT WHITEWASH of interrogation methods

2005-03-10T18:12:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | US interrogation methods cleared
A Pentagon investigation into the interrogation of prisoners detained in the war on terror has found its policy did not lead to abuse.
"We found no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse," the review concluded.
Human rights campaigners and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee said they were dissatisfied with the findings.

BBC | Hostage fears troops targeted herJournalist Sgrena Rejects US Account

2005-03-06T18:06:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Europe | Hostage fears troops targeted her, Full Story Click HERE

"Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena has suggested US troops deliberately tried to kill her moments after she was released by her kidnappers in Baghdad.
Ms Sgrena, described how her car came 'under a rain of fire'.
At that moment, she said she recalled her captors' words that some Americans 'don't want you to go back'."

BBC | Nicola Calipari: An 'extraordinary hero'

2005-03-06T18:00:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Nicola Calipari: An 'extraordinary hero': "On Friday, Nicola Calipari was an unknown Italian secret agent, close to completing another successful mission for his country. A few hours and a selfless and fatal act later, he had become a hero mourned by his entire nation.

Calipari was on the verge of delivering Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena to safety after her hostage ordeal in Iraq, when their car came under US army fire. She recalled that he 'fell on top of me to protect me, and immediately, I repeat immediately, I felt his last breath and he died on top of me'."

Rule Change Lets C.I.A. Freely Send Suspects Abroad to Jails

2005-03-06T04:50:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > Rule Change Lets C.I.A. Freely Send Suspects Abroad to Jails
The Bush administration's secret program to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation has been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency under broad authority that has allowed it to act without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice Departments, according to current and former government officials.
The unusually expansive authority for the C.I.A. to operate independently was provided by the White House under a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the officials said.
The process, known as rendition, has been central in the government's efforts to disrupt terrorism, but has been bitterly criticized by human rights groups on grounds that the practice has violated the Bush administration's public pledge to provide safeguards against torture.

Scott Ritter says US attack on Iran planned for June 2005United for Peace of Pierce County, WA

2005-03-04T17:18:00.000+01:00

United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - FULL STORY HERE
Scott Ritter says US attack on Iran planned for June 2005
Written by Mark Jensen
"On Friday evening, Feb. 18, in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail. -- Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has 'signed off' on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. -- NOTE: This article has generated extraordinary public and media interest. -- As of 5:00 p.m. on Mar. 3, it has received 80,180 hits; the volume of hits caused the UFPPC web site to crash several times on Feb. 21. -- The article, or parts of it, have also been posted on more than 3,000 web sites. -- It has been cited or alluded to by many publications and journalists, including the Economist, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and a commentator for Salon.com (see below), as well as by web sites around the world, including in Iran, and inquiries have been from ABC News, Pacifica Radio, etc. -- Some believe that President George W. Bush's remarks at a Brussels news conference on Feb. 22 (the birthday of George Washington), at which he said that the idea of U.S. military action against Iran 'is simply ridiculous,' then provoked laughter by adding immediately afterwards, 'But having said that, all options are on the table,' had some connection to Scott Ritter's assertions...."

FBI Files: Lennon, Einstein, The Kennedys, Marilyn, Chavez, Gracie Allen!!!www.fbi.gov/famous.htmFreedom of Information Act Library Request

2005-03-04T16:23:00.000+01:00

Federal Bureau of Investigation Files on Famous Americans HERE http://foia.fbi.gov/famous.htm - published in accord with the Freedom of Information Act

What the hell were/are they thinking? Read the files, published here at the FBI website, in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act.

How Private Health Care in JailsCan Be a "Death Sentence" for PrisonersHarsh Medicine: NY Times | Democracy Now!

2005-03-04T15:42:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | Harsh Medicine: New York Times Exposes How Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a "Death Sentence" for Prisoners:
"We take an in-depth look at the for-profit health care in prison and jails in this country. The New York Times published a series titled 'Harsh Medicine' based on a yearlong investigation of Prison Health Services, the nation's largest for-profit provider of prisoner medical care, that exposes how inadequate care has resulted in death and suicides by prisoners. Today, we are going to take an in-depth look at for-profit health care in prison and jails in this country. Prison Health Services or PHS is the nation's largest for-profit provider of inmate medical care - a 2 billion dollar a year industry. They have 86 contracts in 28 states and care for 237,000 inmates - which is one in every 10 people who are incarcerated.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a series, titled 'Harsh Medicine.' The articles, based on a yearlong investigation of PHS, expose how the company provided medical care that was widely inadequate in some cases - and deadly in others. The articles detail a range of problems with PHS' medical services - some of which resulted in death or suicides by inmates. The list of problems include: skeletal medical staffs, under qualified doctors and nurses, doctors who were practicing without proper certification, prescription drugs being withheld from patients, and employee misconduct that went unpunished."

American Jails in Iraq Bursting With DetaineesNew York Times

2005-03-04T15:29:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > International > Middle East > American Jails in Iraq Are Bursting With Detainees:
"ABU GHRAIB, Iraq, March 2 - The American military's major detention centers in Iraq have swelled to capacity and are holding more people than ever, senior military officials say.
The growing detainee population reflects recent changes in how the military has been waging the war and in its policies toward detainees, the officials say.
The military swept up many Iraqis before the Jan. 30 elections in an attempt to curb violence and halted all releases before the vote. Other detainees have been captured in ambitious recent offensives across the Sunni Triangle, from Samarra to Falluja to the Euphrates River valley south of Baghdad."

Fossett sets solo flight recordBBC NEWS | Science/Nature

2005-03-03T21:50:00.000+01:00

Fossett sets solo flight record He completed his mission despite a fuel shortage, landing the Virgin GlobalFlyer at 1948 GMT in Salina, Kansas, where he took off on Tuesday.
BBC NEWS: VIDEO-Watch footage of the GlobalFlyer plane HERE

BONO, Next President of World Bank? - LA Times

2005-03-02T20:58:00.000+01:00

Link to story HERE

U2's Bono should head World Bank, paper urges

By Kevin Krolicki
LOS ANGELES, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Could the only person ever nominated for an Oscar, a Grammy, a Golden Globe and the Nobel Peace Prize now take over at the World Bank?
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times devoted its lead editorial to the proposition that Bono, the Irish frontman of rock band U2, "should be named the next president of the World Bank."

Watching YOU: ChoicepointNow Mr. Smith wants your DNA

2005-02-27T21:39:00.000+01:00

Mr. Smith of Choicepoint, the closest thing to Big Brother you are likely to see.
Card from GREGPALAST.COM

Full article about Choicepoint and Mr. Derek Smith may be found here: Greg Palast's Website www.gregpalast.com

Archbishop Desmond Tutu Speakson South Africa, Poverty and Militarism

2005-02-27T20:42:00.000+01:00

Watch/Listen/Read HERE: Democracy Now! | Archbishop Desmond Tutu on South Africa, Poverty and Militarism: Nobel Peace prize-winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks after receiving an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Fordham University.
He says, 'South Africa, improbably, divinely amusingly, has become a beacon of hope. If peace could come to South Africa, then peace could come any- and everywhere."
-- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, speaking in New York City, February 23, 2005.
We turn now to the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He was one of the leading figures in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and served as chair of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A Nobel Peace laureate, Tutu has been a longtime campaigner for human rights and the eradication of poverty across the globe.
On Wednesday, he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Fordham University in New York City. After receiving the award, he spoke in the University Church about South Africa, global poverty and militarism.

Third 'gorilla breast' woman suesBBC News | Americas

2005-02-27T02:08:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | Third 'gorilla breast' woman sues: "All three women allege that Ms Patterson pressured them to expose their breasts to Koko - allegedly on the basis of sign language requests from the gorilla, who is said to use a vocabulary of 1,000 gestures to communicate with humans."

The Daily Show's Stephen ColbertOLD EUROPE vs. NEW EUROPEMuseums or Rocco's Adventure #8 ?

2005-02-25T08:26:00.000+01:00

Watch video HERE: COMEDY CENTRAL: Old Europe vs. New Europe, by Stephen Colbert, Sr. European Bureau Chief.
With any luck, you will be laughing out loud.

JUST SAY NO! to Drug Company Scams10 Voters on Panel Backing Pain PillsHad Industry Ties

2005-02-25T06:40:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > Washington > 10 Voters on Panel Backing Pain Pills Had Industry Ties
Ten of the 32 government drug advisers who last week endorsed continued marketing of the huge-selling pain pills Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drugs' makers, according to disclosures in medical journals and other public records.
If the 10 advisers had not cast their votes, the committee would have voted 12 to 8 that Bextra should be withdrawn and 14 to 8 that Vioxx should not return to the market. The 10 advisers with company ties voted 9 to 1 to keep Bextra on the market and 9 to 1 for Vioxx's return.

WMDS FOUND. . . THEY'RE ON THE INTERNET

2005-02-25T00:28:00.000+01:00

United Nuclear - Scientific Supplies - http://www.unitednuclear.com/
from Sam Smith at Progressive Review:
WMDS FOUND. . . THEY WERE ON THE INTERNET ALL ALONG
UNITED NUCLEAR - New URANIUM Samples - All new Uranium ore samples from Low level all the way up to Super High Level have arrived. See our updated Radioactive Ore section. . . Nuclear Spinthariscope! - See Actual Atoms Splitting! The World's only nuclear powered educational toy!
{At the bottom of the page is this note: "Can't find what you're looking for? Contact Us and let us see if we can find it for you!"}

HEAVEN CAN'T WAIT: by Ed Helmsfrom The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

2005-02-24T23:58:00.000+01:00

CLICK HERE to watch: COMEDY: ED HELMS - Heaven Can't Wait, The Rapture, from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
A MUST SEE from our best friends in TV-land -- the Jon Stewart Daily Show Staff!!!
- sam spade

Revealed: the Rush to Warfrom Guardian Special Reports

2005-02-23T12:27:00.000+01:00

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Revealed: the Rush to War:
"The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal.
The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted it set up a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court.
And a parliamentary answer issued days before the war in the name of Lord Goldsmith - but presented by ministers as his official opinion before the crucial Commons vote - was drawn up in Downing Street, not in the attorney general's chambers.
The full picture of how the government manipulated the legal justification for war, and political pressure placed on its most senior law officer, is revealed in the Guardian today."

WAR CRIMES:Commander-in-Chief of Torture and LiesLiberty Beat by Nat Hentoff

2005-02-23T12:08:00.000+01:00

Village Voice > Liberty Beat by Nat Hentoff: "Congress dozes while detainees are sent to other countries to be tortured"
by Nat Hentoff, February 22nd, 2005 2:28 PM

There cannot be an absence of moral content in American foreign policy. Europeans giggle at this, but we are not European, we are American, and we have different principles.
-- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Telegraph, London, February 5, 2005

"It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture . . ."
-- Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, a U.S. statute implementing Article 3, International Convention Against Torture, which the United States of America has signed.

Supreme Court to Consider Oregon Law on Assisted Suicides

2005-02-23T02:38:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > Washington > Supreme Court to Consider Oregon Law on Assisted Suicides
The justices will hear arguments in the court term that begins this October. They will decide whether to overturn a ruling last May by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the law. The Bush administration has tried to overturn the law in the courts.
You can see a powerful Multimedia Interactive Feature, from the New York Times, here:
Multimedia Feature "At Life's End - Oregon's Suicide Option"

Murder in the Amazon: A U.S.-Born Nun and Environmentalist is Gunned Down in Brazil For Opposing Rainforest Logging

2005-02-22T18:40:00.000+01:00

Listen/Watch/Read here: Democracy Now! | Murder in the Amazon: A U.S.-Born Nun and Environmentalist is Gunned Down in Brazil For Opposing Rainforest Logging:
"We go to Brazil to speak with a friend and colleague of the slain nun Dorothy Stang. Her killing has brought new interest in the struggle to preserve the Amazon rainforests. Last week Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed decrees setting aside 8 million acres to create two massive new rain forest reserves. [includes rush transcript] Police in Brazil have arrested a second man over the killing of a US-born Catholic nun in the Amazon rainforest."

Democracy Now! | The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements

2005-02-21T20:58:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 'Missing' Chapters from His Autobiography
On this the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, we spend the hour with historian Manning Marable who has spent a decade working on a new biography of Malcolm X. He is one of the few historians to see the three missing chapters from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" that he says paint a very different picture than the book with Alex Haley and Spike Lee's film. Marable has also had unprecedented access to Malcolm's family and documents that shed new light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI and possibly the CIA in Malcolm X's assassination. Manning today called on the federal government to release all remaining classified documents on Malcolm X. [includes rush transcript - partial]

American Gorilla Demands Health Care'Talking' gorilla demands dentist

2005-02-20T17:44:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | 'Talking' gorilla demands dentist
Perhaps we could get Koko to lobby Congress for health care for Americans?
"When Koko the gorilla realised she had toothache, she simply called for the dentist.
The ape, famed for her language and communication skills, managed to let her handlers at the Gorilla Foundation in California know that she was in pain."

America Struggles with its Breast Issues'Gorilla breast fetish' women sue

2005-02-20T17:26:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | 'Gorilla breast fetish' women sue
"Two women sacked from their jobs caring for a gorilla in the US have sued their ex-employer for allegedly ordering them to show the animal their breasts.
Nancy Alperin and Kendra Keller claim they were told to show their nipples to the gorilla, Koko, as a way of bonding.
Sign language requests from Koko, the 'talking' gorilla, were allegedly relayed to the women by the Gorilla Foundation's head, Francine Patterson.
The Gorilla Foundation, based in San Francisco, strongly denies the claims."

Treating US Soldiers with Ecstasystory from Democracy Now!

2005-02-19T20:13:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for February 18, 2005
U.S. Soldiers to Be Given Ecstasy
"The [USA] Food and Drug Administration has given the go-ahead for soldiers traumatized by their time in Iraq and Afghanistan to be offered the party drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares. The soldiers would take the drug as part of an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder."
Hold it, I've got an idea: Why not give the whole dang White House, Congress, and the Pentagon ecstasy and psychotherapy, PREEMPTIVELY, and maybe they will stop making the bloody wars that traumatize the soldiers in the first place?!!
-- never-so-humbly yours, Sam Spade in Scandinavia

Bush Tort Reform: Executive Clemency For Executive Killers

2005-02-19T01:37:00.000+01:00

Bush Tort Reform: Executive Clemency For Executive Killers - by GREG PALAST at GregPalast.com: "It's a great day for the Eichmanns of corporate America. President Bush minutes ago signed the ill-named 'tort reform' bill into law, limiting class action suits. Doubtless, Ken Lay, former Enron CEO, is grinning as are the corporate suite killers at drug maker Merck who are now safer from the widows and orphans of Vioxx victims. Closing the doors of justice to the ruined and wrecked families of boardroom bad guys is nothing less than executive clemency for executive executioners.
You think my accusation is over the top? Well, please talk with Elaine Levenson.
Levenson, a Cincinnati housewife, has been waiting for her heart to explode. In 1981, surgeons implanted a mechanical valve in her heart, the Bjork-Shiley, "the Rolls-Royce of valves," her doctor told her. What neither she nor her doctor knew was that several Bjork-Shiley valves had fractured during testing, years before her implant. The company that made the valve, a unit of the New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, never told the government." -- Greg Palast

Holy Deja Vu, It's a Mushroom Cloud !!!

2005-02-17T23:23:00.000+01:00

Iran Calls Blast Scare U.S. 'Psychological Warfare' - (REUTERS)

NYTimes: White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

2005-02-17T23:19:00.000+01:00

FRAUD as Reality TV; the White House caught again: The NY Times >Frank Rich: The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

The Social Security PRIVATIZATION HOAX

2005-02-17T20:45:00.000+01:00

The Vermont Greens - Issues
Readers: Because this issue is of paramount importance I am going to publish the entire text of this article, so that you may easily copy and paste it to your friends in an email, to help them understand the GREAT HOAX that is being marketed, in the tradition of Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush Privatization Schemes to transfer wealth from the people to the wealthy money-managers and their clients.
-- Sam Spade

The Social Security Privatization Hoax
By Norman D. Livergood

Politicians and Wall Streeters are peddling the Big Lie that Social Security is inevitably going bust. It is not!

The Social Security System (SSS) runs at a surplus of $100-$120 billion annually and will continue to do so throughout the twenty-first century! This trust fund system is one of the few programs set up by the federal government that works. In 1999, SSS received $383 billion in checks, $436 billion in taxes, and an additional $49 billion in interest. Instead of red ink, Social Security made almost $102 billion in profit, to add to the more than $652 billion it had in surplus from previous years.

On December 6, 1996, Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, called for "prompt action to rescue the financially threatened Social Security system." Greenspan endorsed the privatization scams which would require workers to put their Social Security retirement payments into the stock market.

Greenspan certainly isn't obsessed with the hobgoblin of consistency. On December 5, 1996 - the previous day - Greenspan announced that the stock market was in trouble because of what he called "irrational exuberance." In other words, one day Greenspan intimates that the stock market may be in for a new speculative disaster on the order of the Great Crash of 1929. The next day Greenspan declares that American workers ought to put their retirement money into this same treacherous stock market that that very day lost witless investors between $700 million and $1 trillion.

In the months to come similar "experts" will warn us that the Social Security System is facing disaster. Every day the feeding frenzy continues, with columnists and other sycophants falling into step. Fortunately, some leaders have the courage to speak the truth. Robert M. Ball, former Commissioner of Social Security from 1962-1973 and a member of the Advisory Council on Social Security, said "there is no financial crisis in Social Security." As Ball explained, the system is today accruing substantial surpluses and total income will exceed outlays until about the year 2020. After that Social Security reserves--estimated at $3 trillion--will be used to pay ongoing benefits that exceed the level of current taxes. By 2070, benefits are projected to exceed taxes by about 5.5 percent of taxable wages.

The sky is not falling. The fact is that the Social Security System is doing fine and faces only the danger that the public might believe the big lies that Greenspan, Congress, and Wall Street are mounting against it.

Big Lie # 2: The Social Security System will run out of money by the year 2029 (or 2034 or 2037).
The Truth: These projections are based on totally unrealistic projections made by so-called bipartisan (but not nonpartisan) commissions packed with Wall Streeters, bankers, and financiers. George W. Bush's Social Security panel has eight Democrats and eight Republicans, but all of them were picked because they agreed with Dubya's social security Wall Street scam: stock market "personal retirement accounts." Dubya's panel is chaired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D:NY) and AOL Time Warner's CEO, Richard Parsons. This notwithstanding AOL Time Warner's payment of $5.5 million in 2000 to settle a lawsuit alleging the company illegally denied pension and health benefits to its workers.

Panel projections take the Social Security System trustees' worst-case scenario and claim it to be the only realistic picture of the future for the SSS. The so-called independent studies of Social Security funding have been financed by the very Wall Street firms who want to grab the money. For example, the Cato Institute Project on Social Security Privatization was funded by American Express, the brokerage house of Alex Brown and Company, and the giant American International Group. The co-chairmen of the Cato Institute project are William Shipman, a senior officer at the Boston State Street Bank, and Jose Piñera, the man who privatized Chile's social security system, resulting in a $1.5 billion loss to Chilean citizens in 1995.

As Robert Dreyfuss shows in his 1996 article in Mother Jones ("The End of Social Security As We Know It?" Nov/Dec, 1996), the Chilean "model" is a clear warning to Americans, with the Chilean workers losing four percent of their investments in the privatized social security scam while the corporations managing the accounts earned profits of more than twenty percent! The Chilean military dictatorship foisted the social security privatization scam on the workers through their total control over the public media.

How ridiculous is this worst-case projection? Over the past seventy-five years the American economy has been growing at about 2.8% annually. Even during the worst economic times in the U.S. - during the 1930s depression - the economy grew at 1.9%. Now these doomsayers insist that the U.S. economy will only grow at 1.4% annually over the next 75 years! So, if you predict that our economic growth will fall below even the all-time low of the 1930s depression, the Social Security System gets into financial trouble in about the year 2037. But if you take a more realistic view of the U.S. economy, even a modest 2% growth rate, the Social Security System will stay solvent, in fact reap a surplus, throughout the entire twenty-first century.

The impact of Social Security benefits on the lives of citizens and on local economies is incalculable. In 1995 Social Security paid $340 billion in benefits. Forty-two percent of American senior citizens are kept from living in poverty by their Social Security payments. Nearly one in five Americans receives Social Security benefits and ninety-five percent of Americans have the Social Security benefit protection program.

Big Lie # 3: The only way out of disaster for Social Security is privatization.
The Truth: Privatization schemes are PIRATIZATION scams.
The same Wall Street firms who contribute big bucks to the campaigns of presidents and senators now want to loot the Social Security System of trillions of dollars and jeopardize the survival of millions of retired Americans. These self-appointed leaders established a 40-member Public Pension Reform Caucus in Congress, co-chaired by Representative James Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, and Representative Charles Stenhold, Democrat of Texas. In July, 1996, Representative Nick Smith, Republican from Michigan, introduced H.R. 3758, the "Social Security Solvency Act," which would begin the piratization process by diverting about one-sixth of workers' Social Security contributions into private retirement funds. The amount would increase to 80% over a period of a few years. Other bills now being considered would increase the rate of looting at an even faster clip. Most bills follow the Chilean model, requiring workers to pay an additional 1% annual management fee to the private brokerage firms.

It would be insane for Americans to allow Wall Street brokerage firms to handle the Social Security System trust fund. These same brokerage firms now manage private pension funds by investing the assets in their own stocks and bonds swindles, often leaving insufficient money in place to pay pensions. They have lost and continue to lose money in Wall Street gambling schemes such as the global derivatives market, still an ongoing $3.5 trillion a day fiasco, despite scandals and a bad press. Private pension fund losses because of brokerage firm derivatives speculation have already been exposed in Wisconsin, Virginia, Connecticut, and Louisiana.

One of the privatization schemes has been created by a group whose name is right out of 1984: the Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security. They plan to have individual workers put 5% of their income into a private IRA, leaving the other 1.2% for the Social Security fund. So you lose your retirement fund through your IRA gambling scheme - and who's going to take care of you?
Wall Street is pumping millions of dollars into a small band of organizations, public relations firms and "think tanks" whose mission it is to undermine public confidence in Social Security and push for privatization. Among the Wall Street trading firms, insurance companies and corporate donors working to undermine Social Security are:

Merrill Lynch
T. Rowe Price
Aetna
American Express
Morgan Stanley
Oppenheimer Funds
Quick and Reilly
Watson Wyatt Worldwide
State Street Bank and Trust
Investment Company Institute
DuPont
Motorola
Securities Industries Association
American International Group
National Association of Manufacturers
Fidelity Investments
Blackstone Group
AIG Life
American Council of Life Insurance
Teleos Asset Management
Digital Equipment
I.B.M.
Alex Brown and Sons
Rockport Financial

Social Security Snake Oil Salesmen - Professional Budget Hysterics
"Just two years ago a wide array of Washington organizations, including the Cato Institute, the Concord Coalition, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, Third Millennium, and Citizens for a Sound Economy advocated massive cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid as the only way to reduce the Federal budget deficit. These organizations dismissed, out of hand, any notion that economic growth could balance the budget or that a very modest tax increase could put the federal budget back into alignment.

"Since then, economic growth and modest tax increases have eliminated the federal budget deficit. But like a snake oil salesman with only one patent medicine, the Washington-based budget hysterics have not changed their remedy -- they have only changed the disease. Now, in order to "fix" Social Security's possible long-term actuarial problems, these same organizations are pushing for massive benefit cuts in order to finance the multi-trillion dollar cost of switching to a "privatized" system. And once again, when asked about economic growth and modest tax increases as a curative, they simply dismiss these solutions out of hand as "unrealistic" or 'not politically feasible.'" - National Council of Senior Citizens, "Wall Street Affluence Buys Washington Influence"

Wall Street's Green Hornet and Its Trusty Side-Kick, Cato
The point-man for Wall Street's Social Security scam is Jose Piñera, who was the minister of labor from 1978 to 1980 under the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Alfredo Pinochet in Chile. Piñera is currently president of the International Center for Pension Reform and Co-Chairman of the Cato Project on Social Security Privatization. The Cato Institute, a right-wing think-tank, claims to be "libertarian," If you wonder why a "libertarian" organization is the spearhead for the privatization scam, you have only to be aware that Merrill Lynch is the chief contributor to Cato's expenses. Piñera and other Wall Street paid agents tout Chile as the role model for the U.S. to follow in "reforming" its Social Security "crisis." Let's take another close look at the so-called Chilean model:
• Nearly half of Chilean workers choose not to make regular Social Security contributions, because they have little reason to believe that money taken from their checks by the government will ever be returned to them in the form of promised benefits decades into the future
• The benefits citizens in Chile receive are so breathtakingly low they amount to a national disgrace
• Under Chile's new pension system salary deductions are higher than FICA taxes levied in the United States. In Chile, workers must put 10 percent of their earnings into individual retirement accounts, and give 7 percent of their earnings to finance health benefits, and deduct 3.3 percent of their earnings to finance survivor and disability payments. An average worker in Chile, then, pays 20.3 percent in payroll taxes versus 7.65 percent for U.S. workers (15.3 percent including the employers' side).
• In Chile, between 10 and 20 percent of worker contributions to the pension funds go to fund administrators, resulting in smaller returns than "gross revenue" statistics would suggest. Between 1982 and 1995, for example, the average rate of return on pension investments in Chile totaled 12.7 percent. After factoring in commissions to fund handlers, however, the average real rate of return of Chilean pension fund investments totaled less than 2 percent! Under the current U.S. system, Americans pay no commissions; and administrative costs eat up less than 1 percent of a workers' contributions.
• The average rate of return on Chilean pension accounts in 1995 was negative 2.5 percent!
• The Chilean stock market lost nearly 20% of its value in the first half of 1998, on top of a steep drop which followed the October, 1997 global financial shock
• The Chilean pension fund has dropped from the $33 billion at its high point in 1997 to $29 billion today

Having stolen the presidential election, George W. Bush now wants to steal the taxpayers' social security as well by having them invest in Wall Street, which in March, 2000, saw investors losing $4 TRILLION. The Bush plan calls for diverting 2% of today's workers' Social Security payroll taxes into private Wall Street accounts, the same accounts. Bush and his Wall Street flunkies want you to think that this refers to a measly 2% of the entire Social Security reserve fund, but it actually means 2% of the 12.4 percentage points of total salary that now go into Social Security payroll taxes--one-sixth of the total payroll tax money. Under this scenario, Social Security would lose one-sixth of the money that now flows in, representing a staggering $74 billion loss to Social Security the very first year!
Individual stock market accounts would cost a bundle. We'd have to pay for two Social Security systems at the same time: today's program for current beneficiaries and the privatized system. To cover the price tag, we make adjustments--or some mix of these bad choices.

If you want to see what a catastrophe privatization of retirement funds has proved to be, you need go no further than the horrible example of Britain.

Big Lie # 4: There's nothing Americans can do about this crisis - it's bound to happen.
The Truth: First, there is no present crisis - other than the real possibility that Americans will be confused by all the smoke and mirrors created by the very Wall Street people who want to pillage the Social Security System. There is no crisis over the solvency of Social Security; it is a fight over the future of a program started in 1935 that means the difference between life and death for more than 32 million elderly Americans.

American workers must wake up to this present frenzied effort on the part of Big Money to take over the trillions in social security funds. Americans of all ages must tell our congressional representatives that we don't want the Social Security System to be piratized and that we hold them responsible for making sure it doesn't happen. We must speak out against this conspiracy wherever we can.
Contrary to the Big Lies, the sky is NOT falling; the Social Security System is alive and well. But we must protect it from the "defenders of the public good" who are out to plunder it.

The Vultures Are Circling Social Security
The Wall Street Journal let the cat out of the bag, announcing that even under moderate privatization plans, $60 billion a year would flow into mutual funds managed by Wall Street, instead of going into the Social Security Trust Funds. Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute (read big money think tank), let slip the other incriminating evidence when he admitted that along with Bank of America, Citicorp, Chase, insurance companies, the Investment Company Institute (ICI), and securities firms like Salomon Brothers, Cato's $2 million privatization project is being funded by "large employers concerned about payroll tax increases." Privatization of Social Security would mean billions of dollars for Wall Street mutual funds managers and employers. The gang that brought you the 1929, 1987, 1998, and 2000 stock market crashes resulting in hapless investors losing billions of dollars are now trying to con Americans into putting their retirement earnings into Wall Street.
But with the billions in profits at stake the big money people are mounting a campaign to convince Americans that Social Security is dead or dying. As usual, they suppose that if they tell a big enough lie American citizens will swallow it.

The Investment Company Institute, which by the way, "donated" $245,264 to federal candidates in the 1996 election; Peter G. Peterson, an investment banker, Nixon's commerce secretary, and president of the conservative Concord Coalition; and the libertarian Cato Institute are leading the pack. Their uninformed disciples repeat their propaganda in newspaper letters to the editor and commentaries and magazine articles. The newest cons include trying to convince citizens that Social Security funds invested in U.S. Treasury bonds don't really exist and that the Chilean privatization plan is a model America should adopt.

If you have money in U.S. Treasury bonds or other securities, you expect to get your interest and capital when you redeem them. But, mysteriously, Social Security funds in those same instruments can't expect a return on the investment. Why? Because the scam artists say so. In fact, following the lead of the Concord Coalition and the Cato Institute, the disciples are claiming that Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme. Doesn't make sense, I know.

Let's Eradicate The Vultures
So far, no new Social Security privatization (read piratization) legislation has been passed, though dozens of bills are now being pushed by Wall Street's bought-and-paid-for congresspersons and George W. Bush ran on a platform to "allow Americans to invest their social security savings in Wall Street."
Fortunately, not all Senators or Congresspersons have sold out to Wall Street's piratization schemes. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota went on record ("The People's Trust Fund" by Paul Wellstone, The Nation, July 17/August 3, 1998) as supporting Social Security against the Wall Street vultures.

Dubya has now begun to raid the Social Security fund with his new "war on terrorism" budget. This so-called war is entirely of Bush's making and is only for the purpose of giving billions of taxpayers's dollars to his defense industry supporters. Unfortunately, hardly anyone is speaking out against Bush's insane raid on Social Security.

American citizens of all ages must begin fighting now to make sure that Social Security remains in place as it is. Social Security was created to protect society from the social and economic burdens associated with widespread old-age poverty and misery as seen during the 1930s Depression which was precipitated by the 1929 stock market crash.

By and large, Americans with incomes under $25,000 a year get back more in benefits than they pay in the form of Social Security payroll taxes. Those with incomes of more than $50,000 a year get back somewhat less. The U.S. Social Security system is a progressive system — a system designed to improve the economic condition of those on the very bottom of the U.S. economic ladder and reduce economic stratification.

American citizens need to remember President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reply when he was asked why he had set up Social Security as a worker contribution system: "We put those contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

Right on, Franklin!

Pope-ulance

2005-02-17T17:54:00.000+01:00

pope-ulance
Originally uploaded by GRINS.

Well, John Paul is certainly the "comeback kid", as featured in the POPE-ULANCE on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in Stephen Colbert's "This Week in God" segment, 16 Feb 2005.

How The World Is Warming

2005-02-16T15:53:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | In pictures: How the world is changing:
Glacial change

While the effect of human activity on the global climate is hotly debated, physical signs of environmental change are all around us. Some scientists say an increase in the rate of melting of the world's glaciers is evidence of global warming. Argentina's Upsala Glacier was once the biggest in South America, but it is now disappearing at a rate of 200 metres per year.

BBC NEWS | Iran, Syria 'Form Common Front'

2005-02-16T15:42:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran, Syria 'form common front': "Iran and Syria say they are to form a common front to face challenges and threats from overseas.
'We are ready to help Syria on all grounds to confront threats,' Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Reza Aref said after meeting Syrian PM Naji al-Otari."

"Coffee Is Our Friend" - quote from the movie Conspiracy Theory

2005-02-16T14:36:00.000+01:00

Coffee May Help Prevent Liver Cancer: "WASHINGTON (AP) - That hot cup of coffee may do more than just provide a tasty energy boost. It also may help prevent the most common type of liver cancer. A study of more than 90,000 Japanese found that people who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank coffee. "

International Federation of Journalists - VIOLENT INTIMIDATION

2005-02-16T13:24:00.000+01:00

International Federation of Journalists - http://www.ifj.org/

Giuliana Sgrena, Italian journalist, still held hostage
"The latest kidnapping of an Italian journalist in Iraq, the second high profile media victim in recent weeks, is again forcing media to make “hard choices” about how to cover the country, says the International Federation of Journalists.
“Media organisations face hard choices. They must ensure that their people are not in harm’s way,” said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary, “but they cannot ignore the story. Journalism must not be intimidated.”
The IFJ says the country’s transition to democracy lacks all credibility when terrorists and bandits are targeting journalists. Giuliana Sgrena was kidnapped at around 2 p.m. near a Sunni mosque in the Al-Jadriya district, near Baghdad university. She was in a car with her interpreter, and she was on her way to interview a group of refugees from Fallujah."

COST OF WAR - BUSH'S "Emergency Spending" Request

2005-02-15T23:19:00.000+01:00

HOW MUCH IS $80 BILLION DOLLARS, REALLY?
"President Bush has officially asked Congress for $80 BILLION DOLLARS in "emergency spending" to pay for the increasing costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington Post reports it is one of the highest requests for emergency spending in the nation's history. The sum exceeds the COMBINED budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development."
-- Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! news 15 February 2005

Who's on first? Syria or Iran?The Bush Clan Maneuvers for a Strike

2005-02-15T19:32:00.000+01:00

t r u t h o u t - Robert Fisk | The Killing of 'Mr. Lebanon'
Will we ever know who really carried out this attack? Perhaps not. But if we look at who benefits from weakening Syria's position at this time, it is clear that the USA and Israel would certainly like to see Syria cast in the role of suspect in a murder investigation, which could be used as part of a pretext for the next step in the Imperial plan for isolating, sanctioning, and/or attacking Syria and/or Iran, without having to address the root issues of the troubles, --among them, the continuing series of imperialist occupations of the region, including those carried out by England and the United States.
"It is still unclear who is responsible for the attack. A little-known group calling itself Victory and Jihad in Greater Syria issued a statement saying it carried out the bombing because of Hariri's ties to the Saudi Royal family. The claim has not been verified" --Amy Goodman, Democracy Now
"We're going to turn up the heat on Syria, that's for sure,' said a senior State Department official. 'It's been a pretty steady progression of pressure up to now, but I think it's going to spike in the wake of this event. Even though there's no evidence to link it to Syria, Syria has, by negligence or design, allowed Lebanon to become destabilized.'" -- NY Times report

t r u t h o u t - Howard Zinn | Changing Minds, One at a Time

2005-02-15T01:02:00.000+01:00

t r u t h o u t - Howard Zinn | Changing Minds, One at a Time
Sam Smith's comment on this essay by Zinn:
"What can I do?" The question is thrust at me again and again as if I possessed some mysterious solution unknown to others. The odd thing is that the question may be posed by someone sitting in an audience of a thousand people, whose very presence there is an instance of information being imparted which, if passed on, could have dramatic consequences. The answer then is as obvious and profound as the Buddhist mantra that says: "Look for the truth exactly on the spot where you stand."

PRELUDE TO ATTACK - will the Empire strike?U.S. Imperial Drones Violate Iranian AirspaceWashington Post report

2005-02-14T16:40:00.000+01:00

U.S. Uses Drones to Probe Iran For Arms
(washingtonpost.com)
"The (Imperial Fascist) Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort.
The small, pilotless planes, penetrating Iranian airspace from U.S. military facilities in Iraq, use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible by satellites, the officials said. The aerial espionage is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack..."

Bush Urges Renewal of so-called 'Patriot Act'

2005-02-14T16:35:00.000+01:00

AP News By NEDRA PICKLER
WASHINGTON (AP) - "Mr. (chief fascist) Bush on Monday urged Congress to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, the Justice Department's widely criticized anti-terrorism law.
We must not allow the passage of time or the illusion of safety to weaken our resolve in this new war'' on terrorism, Bush said at a swearing-in ceremony for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the Justice Department."

Lynne Stewart CONVICTED! We are in trouble!Helen Caldicott SPEAKS on Nuclear DangerKPFA Flashpoints

2005-02-14T15:29:00.000+01:00

KPFA - Flashpoints Archives
Feb 4 2005, Helen Caldicott speaks on the new nuclear danger on our new environmental segment
Feb 10 2005,Noted human rights activist and defense attorney Lynne Stewart found guilty on trumped-up terrorism charges. We’ll hear from Lynne Stewart, speaking right after the guilty verdict, and an interview Mumia Abu Jamal did with Lynne Stewart about her case; we’ll also speak with members of the defense committee about the appeal; and, as North Korea announces that it has nuclear weapons and it’s willing to use them, just like the US, we’ll feature a brand-new documentary and book by internationally-renowned anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott.

Harvard Study: Soaring Medical BillsAccount for Half of All U.S. Bankruptcies

2005-02-08T17:48:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | this story examines why the USA needs a National Health Program
Includes transcript of interview
Also see this website:
Physicians for a National Health Program
Source for the Study (available in pdf also): HERE

"Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity and there is an obligation for society to ensure that every person be able to realize this right." - Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Chicago Archdiocese

Bush's budget boosts coal, hydrogen, nuclear funding

2005-02-07T23:22:00.000+01:00

As predicted by GRINS this fall, you will see the push for a "hydrogen solution" but it will be a disaster in the combustion (see www.i-b-r.org), and will be used to resurrect NUCLEAR plants, since the electricity generated by NUCLEAR plants will be needed to make the hydrogen, which will be sold to us at "the COMPANY PUMP" It is already happening in Norway, for example, a string of hydrogen filling stations.
From Market Watch we have this report:
"The president's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative would receive an additional $35 million in funding in fiscal 2006, bringing total funding to $260 million. In 2003, Bush proposed $1.2 billion over five years to further the development of technologies to produce hydrogen and store hydrogen energy.
Nuclear revival
The budget calls for $511 million to revive the nuclear power by funding advanced nuclear-energy technologies, according to a summary released by the Office of Management and Budget.
This request represents a $25 million, or 5.2 percent increase, in the budget for nuclear programs, according to the Energy Department.
The nuclear industry has been dormant for more than 20 years following the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island site in south-central Pennsylvania.
The 2006 request includes a 13 percent increase for the Nuclear Power 2010 program. The president launched this government and industry cost-sharing program in 2002 with the hopes of locking in new orders for nuclear reactors by 2005 and to have plants operational by 2010."

FROM PROF. RUGGERO M. SANTILLI -- this warning:
"Hydrogen combustion permanently removes breathable oxygen from our atmosphere and turns it into H2O, by therefore causing an extremely serious environmental problem called "oxygen depletion," while gasoline combustion produces CO2 that is at least in part recycled by plants into breathable oxygen O2 via the chlorophyll cycle so well known to technicians, but ignored in public statements and newsreleases until now.

Needless to say, oxygen depletion can be avoided via the production of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water and the free release in the atmosphere of all oxygen produced, in which case the subsequent combustion of hydrogen leaves unchanged the oxygen content of our atmosphere. However, oxygen produced in this way is currently sold, and no restrictions governing these so important environmental aspects of electrolysis exist or are under consideration at the moment, to the authors best knowledge."

For the record, the "oxygen depletion" caused by hydrogen combustion was first identified by Prof. Santilli in his scientific works, as one can see, for instance, in his contribution to the 2000 World Hydrogen Conference held in Munich, Germany GO HERE FOR COMPLETE ARTICLE ON HYDROGEN PROBLEMS, http://www.magnegas.com/technology/part6.htm

The Democrats' Rebuttal: Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi

2005-02-03T13:00:00.000+01:00

The New York Times: The Democrats' Rebuttal: Following are excerpts from statements by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, as prepared for delivery:

Mr. Reid

"I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada in a tiny town called Searchlight. My dad was a hard-rock miner. My mom took in wash. I grew up around people of strong values - even if they rarely talked about them. ...I want you to know that when we believe the president is on the right track, we won't let partisan interests get in the way of what's good for the country. We will be first in line to work with him. But when he gets off track, we will be there to hold him accountable.
And that's why we so strongly disagree with the president's plan to privatize Social Security. Let me share with you why I believe the president's plan is so dangerous. There's a lot we can do to improve American's retirement security, but it's wrong to replace the guaranteed benefit that Americans have earned with a guaranteed benefit cut of 40 percent or more. Make no mistake, that's exactly what President Bush is proposing.
The Bush plan would take our already record high $4.3 trillion national debt and put us another $2 trillion in the red. That's an immoral burden to place on the backs of the next generation.
But maybe most of all, the Bush plan isn't really Social Security reform. It's more like Social Security roulette. Democrats are all for giving Americans more of a say and more choices when it comes to their retirement savings. But that doesn't mean taking Social Security's guarantee and gambling with it. And that's coming from a senator who represents Las Vegas."

Ms. Pelosi

"And as we protect and defend the American people, we must also protect and defend our Constitution and the civil liberties contained therein. That is our oath of office."

Bush warns Syria and Iran over terror

2005-02-03T11:44:00.000+01:00

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush warns Syria and Iran over terror
IT IS TIME TO WATCH THE FILM WAG THE DOG ONCE AGAIN. IT WILL EXPLAIN THE "PURPLE FINGER" AS A FINE PIECE OF HOLLYWOOD PRODUCING, like a 'good old Shoe'. If you haven't seen it lately, I heartily suggest renting the video.

"President George Bush last night issued clear warnings to Syria and Iran that they were next in his sights in his declared mission to spread democracy around the world."
"Many Republican members of Congress raised fingers that had been dipped in purple ink, emulating Iraqi voters."

Four shot dead in Iraq jail riot--neo-con 'export-democracy' comes witha side order of USA PRISON CULTURE

2005-02-01T01:07:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Four shot dead in Iraq jail riot

Judge backs Guantanamo challenge-- review by higher court likely

2005-02-01T01:06:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | Judge backs Guantanamo challenge

Condi Rice: Misrule of Law

2005-01-31T19:44:00.000+01:00

Liberty Beat, Nat Hentoff, Village Voice:
"At her confirmation hearing, Senator Christopher Dodd told Dr. Rice: 'I'd like you to spend about 15 minutes with John McCain'—who was tortured for years by the North Vietnamese."

OIL GIANT SHELL MAKES LARGEST PROFIT IN UK CORPORATE HISTORY

2005-01-30T22:43:00.000+01:00

The Observer, London, England:
"Oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell will this week unveil the largest profit in UK corporate history. Despite last year being the Anglo-Dutch group's 'annus horribilis', thanks to the reserve downgrades scandal, it is expected to report its best-ever results."

C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi FilesProject "Paperclip" Finally Comes OUT

2005-01-30T11:12:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files
A book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," that was released by the working group in May provided a partial picture of those dealings. It has shown that the American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II.

Homeland Security Nominee Michael ChertoffGave Advice to the C.I.A. on Torture Laws

2005-01-29T13:49:00.000+01:00

The New York Times reports "Security Nominee Gave Advice to the C.I.A. on Torture Laws"

Democracy Now! | Michael Ratner reports:Gonzales "Has His Hand Deep in the Blood of the Conspiracy Of Torture"

2005-01-29T11:47:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | Complete Story HERE:
read, listen, watch, download

Gonzales 'Has His Hand Deep in the Blood
of the Conspiracy Of Torture'

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Alarm at new climate warning

2005-01-29T11:33:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Alarm at new climate warning
By Richard Black
BBC environment correspondent
"Global temperature simulation climateprediction.net
The study used a programme that ran on PCs around the world
Temperatures around the world could rise by as much as 11C, according to one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run.
This figure is twice the level that previous studies have suggested."

Ramsey Clark Calls For Bush Impeachment:"Imperative Challenge of the American People"

2005-01-22T10:03:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark Calls For Bush Impeachment: to read, watch, listen, CLICK HERE
We hear a speech by former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, speaking at an anti-inauguration protest staged by the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition at John Marshall Park in Washington DC.
[rush transcript]

"The Constitution says that the President, Vice President, and other officials of the United States shall be removed from office upon impeachment for and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors. If you care about the Constitution, you better start talking to your member of the House of Representatives and say impeachment now is now essential to the integrity of the United States government, and to the future of the United States.
I think that the imperative challenge of the American people now is to live up to the Constitution." -Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General

RAMSEY CLARK: Ready to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We have to take the Constitution back, back from crimes against peace, from war crimes, and crimes against humanity. You know, the Nuremberg tribunal called the war of aggression the supreme international crime, and it is. And George W. Bush has waged a war of aggression against Iraq. He has killed more than 100,000 people. Are their lives worth nothing? Can we have a moment of silence in memory of all of the people that have died in Iraq, because the criminal acts of George W. Bush in waging this war of aggression? Every moment of their lives is fraught with danger right now because of us. The world is the most dangerous place it's ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back. We can't wait four more years. There can't be any more Fallujahs. Fallujah is the 21st century equivalent of Guernica. We just went in and destroyed that city, drove the people out, killed them, thousands. We don't know how many. They won't even bother to count who's been killed or how many, or estimate how many. They just keep killing. Almost every day we're reading about another checkpoint where some family got wiped out. Because they didn't do what they were supposed to do according to the military there. Abu Ghraib is unbelievable in the innocent times of 1961. That we would torture people that way and on the instructions of the President of the United States and his highest legal advisers, torture is okay, they said. Go for it, fellas. If we can't renounce that and remove it from office, then the Constitution doesn't work anymore. We have got to do more than take back the Constitution; there has to be accountability for what's happened. The Constitution says that the President, Vice President, and other officials of the United States shall be removed from office upon impeachment for and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors. If you care about the Constitution, you better start talking to your member of the House of Representatives and say impeachment now is now essential to the integrity of the United States government, and to the future of the United States. We've had more than 500,000 people sign on, "Vote to Impeach." We need to get 5 million, and we need to get 5 million on there quick, and then the Congress will react. The Congress understands something when the people demand it. And the power is in the people. Always has been. The question is whether the people have the will to exercise it. I think that the imperative challenge of the American people now is to live up to the Constitution and demand the impeachment of George W. Bush and the other officials of the government responsible for these crimes. Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, protesting the second inauguration of President George W. Bush.

RUPPERT DECLARES: "no sanctions, indictments or criminal prosecutions will ever be handed down"

2005-01-21T07:57:00.000+01:00

RUPPERT says in speech:
"LOOK BEYOND 9/11...THE WINDOW ON 9/11 HAS CLOSED.
SIMPLE AS THAT."
Full Story CLICK HERE
January 19, 2005 (FTW) -- On Saturday night, January 15th, at Kane Hall, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, a standing room only crowd of almost 1000 witnessed a new and aggressive presentation by Michael C. Ruppert, as he began the healing process of moving forward from the 9-11 focus many had associated him with for years. In front of a wildly enthusiastic throng of supporters, listeners, activists, and those just needing to learn and listen, Ruppert explained to them that although the 9-11 cause is still alive it is no longer useful as a political tool by activists. The window on 9/11 has closed. Simple as that.

The event, sponsored by the Citizen's Truth Alliance and the 9/11 Visibility Project was widely endorsed throughout the Seattle area by groups including Seattle Thunder. Mike was introduced by 9/11 colleague and 9/11 Visibility leader Emmanuel Sferios who also serves as the webmaster for www.911truth.org.

Even though 9-11 and all that goes along with it, as well as his book Crossing the Rubicon are useful and important, he believes that no sanctions, indictments or criminal prosecution will ever be handed down. Rubicon, he says, remains a base map of the decades before and the years since 9/11. But now he says we must look at the herd of elephants charging at us, instead of the one elephant that just ran us over.

Mike told the crowd to be prepared for a tremendous devaluation of the dollar; that the housing boom is ending; that we should begin to look at putting our money, or whatever cash we have left, into precious metals; that we must rid ourselves of debt, get out of the stock market and begin to think about a more self-sufficient living style. We must reduce personal consumption. We should understand that OIL and natural gas are the governing issues that control what the present administration does and we should stop the pipedreams of launching criminal action against the Cheneys, Bushes, et al., because it just isn't going to happen. Not in this version of America.

PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR - Part I

2005-01-21T06:22:00.000+01:00

PROMIS SOFTWARE, 9-11 AS AN "OP"; The Global Information Grid (GIG),... and MORE, CLICK HERE
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM MICHAEL C. RUPPERT, by Jamey Hecht, with research assistance by Michael Kane and editorial comment by Michael C. Ruppert. published online at http://www.fromthewilderness.com on January 20, 2005.
FULL STORY CLICK HERE
To refer others to this story or send the link, you can use this address: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012005_ptech_pt1_summary.shtml

And while you are at it, check out Greg Palast's latest posting, at:
http://www.gregpalast.com

And Sam Smith's latest comments, at:
http://www.prorev.com

Crossing the Rubicon:Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney

2005-01-21T06:08:00.000+01:00

Crossing the Rubicon: Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011805_simplify_case.shtml
The following is a synopsis of the case against Dick Cheney who was named as the prime suspect in the crimes on 9/11 by Michael C. Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon.

MEANS: Dick Cheney and the Secret Service
Cheney was Commander in Chief on 9/11 calling the shots via Secret Service.

* Secret Service has the legal authority to take supreme command over all agencies in the United States in time of a national emergency on U.S. soil. Even the Air Force recognizes Secret Service supremacy.
* Secret Service has the highest technological communication systems of any agency in the U.S. - as it should.
* On 9/11 Secret Service had the technology to see FAA radar screens in real time.
* Secret Service was in the decision-making loop as early as 8:15am on 9/11, no later than 8:45am.
* Everything was in place on 9/11 for the Commander in Chief to have full supreme control of the Air Force via the Secret Service communication systems and legal mandate to take supreme command.
* However, Bush was reading about goats in Booker Elementary School. Secret Service was within arms' reach, and they chose to keep him there as the 9/11 plot unfolded. Bush's Secret Service detail was in full communication with Cheney's Secret Service agents in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) as the 9/11 plot unfolded.
* Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11 and Secret Service was the supreme command.

MOTIVE: Peak Oil
The world is about to start running out of oil.

* Half of the world's oil has been, or is about to be, exhausted.
* Once that midpoint is crossed, every barrel of oil will be harder to find, and more expensive, as demand grows. Controlling the last remaining oil reserves is the key to controlling the world.
* Almost everything in modern society - vehicles, buildings, bridges, weapons, consumer products, and much more - consumes oil in its manufacture, its operation, or both.
* Cheap and abundant hydrocarbon energy keeps the industrial world warm and cooks our food. Most houses are heated with natural gas.
* We "eat" oil and natural gas: For every 1-calorie of food energy produced, 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy is consumed.
* Four days after becoming Vice President, Dick Cheney convened his National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) in which he received extensive information on Peak Oil from world-renowned experts. He has refused to release the documents from those hearings to Congress or the American people. FTW has always contended that the deepest, darkest secrets of 9/11 lie in those documents.
* Dick Cheney knew about Peak Oil at least as early as 1999. He knows the economic impact of oil depletion and the catastrophic effects that will result.
* 9/11 made possible what Dick Cheney called, "The war that won't end in our lifetimes." This is a war that is chasing the last remaining hydrocarbons across the globe. The "war on terror" is in reality an energy war and 9/11 was its pretext.

OPPORTUNITY: 9/11 War Games
Cheney was managing multiple war games and terror drills on 9/11 that paralyzed U.S. Air Force response.

* In May of 2001 Dick Cheney was placed directly in charge of managing the "seamless integration" of all training exercises throughout the federal government and military agencies by presidential mandate.
* The morning of 9/11 began with multiple training exercises of war games and terror drills which Cheney, as mandated by the president, was placed in charge of managing.
* War games & terror drills included live-fly exercises with military aircraft posing as hijacked aircraft over the United States, as well as simulated exercises that placed "false blips" (radar injects indicating virtual planes) on FAA radar screens. One exercise titled NORTHERN VIGILANCE pulled Air Force fighters up into Canada simulating a Russian air attack, so there were very few fighters remaining on the east coast to respond. All of this paralyzed Air Force response ensuring that fighter jocks couldn't stop 9/11.
* An unknown individual or command center referred to by Major Don Arias of NORAD as the "maestro" coordinated the war games. It is possible there was more than one maestro, but no one will name names. FTW has asked this question of everyone in relevant government and military positions, to no avail. Our investigation has found the maestro was either Dick Cheney, General Ralph "Ed" Eberhart, or both.
* Whoever was coordinating the Air Force war games was under the management and direction of Dick Cheney, who was also in charge of managing a terror drill being set up on the West Side of downtown New York on 9/11 titled Tripod 2. This exercise set up a command and control center on 9/11 that was configured exactly like the one lost that morning in WTC 7. It was the perfect command center to respond to the crisis, and it was under Dick Cheney's management before the hijackings occurred. How convenient.
* Dick Cheney was one of the main government officials deciding that such extensive war games would take place on 9/11. This was when American intelligence had collected dozens of warnings from governments and intelligence agencies indicating that terrorists were planning to hijack civilian aircraft and crash them into American targets on the ground during the week of September 9th, 2001.

World fears new Bush era

2005-01-20T06:20:00.000+01:00

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports:
Poll shows unease in 18 out of 21 nations

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Thursday January 20, 2005

George Bush will be sworn in as president of the United States for a second term today in a lavish Washington ceremony, amid mounting international concern that his new administration will make the world a more dangerous place.

A poll of 21 countries published yesterday - reflecting opinion in Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe - showed that a clear majority have grave fears about the next four years.

Fifty-eight per cent of the 22,000 who took part in the poll, commissioned by the BBC World Service, said they expected Mr Bush to have a negative impact on peace and security, compared with only 26% who considered him a positive force."

THE COMING WARS:Evil Empire Attack Plans Continue with IRAN

2005-01-19T11:39:00.000+01:00

The Coming Wars, from The New Yorker: Fact by Seymour Hersh
READ THE GRINS POST BELOW THIS ONE FOR COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH SEYMOUR HERSH, by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
"George W. Bush’s re-election was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way."

Democracy Now! | Seymour Hersh: U.S. Conducting Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike

2005-01-19T11:23:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | Seymour Hersh: U.S. Conducting Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

We speak with investigative journalist Seymour Hersh who is reporting that the Pentagon has already secretly sent in forces to Iran to identify possible future military targets. According to Hersh, the president has authorized the Pentagon to send secret commando forces into as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The secret forces could potentially carry out combat operations or even terrorist acts. [includes rush transcript] Just days before President George W Bush's second inauguration in Washington, a new report reveals the Bush administration's intentions for military action against another member of his so-called axis-of-evil: Iran."

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is reporting in The New Yorker magazine that the Pentagon has already secretly sent in forces to Iran to identify possible future military targets. Hersh wrote that he had been repeatedly told by intelligence and military officials, on condition of anonymity that "the next strategic target was Iran."

One government consultant told Hersh "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible." The secret reconnaissance missions have been underway since at least last summer with aided by Pakistan as well as Israel.

According to Hersh's article, the president has authorized the Pentagon to sent secret commando forces into as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The secret forces could potentially carry out combat operations or even terrorist acts. Bush reportedly used the Pentagon for the missions instead of the CIA to avoid having to report to Congress.

On Monday, the Pentagon criticized major aspects of the article, saying in a written statement "Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed." But President Bush told NBC News that he would not rule out taking military action against Iran.

Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New Yorker. His most recent article appears in this week's New Yorker. It is entitled "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret." He is the author of "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: NBC's David Gregory sat down with the President at the White House and asked him about Iran.

DAVID GREGORY: About Iran, will you rule out the potential for military action against Iran, if it continues to stonewall the international community about the existence of its nuclear weapons program?

GEORGE W. BUSH: I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh is on the line with us now, investigative reporter for The New Yorker magazine. Your response to what President Bush has said?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I mean, that's -- the thing that's wonderful about that is that, of course, if he really hopes we're doing something politically, he should join in with the talks that have been underway for more than a year. Since 2003, the E.U., the European Union, primarily led by England, France and Germany, have been in extensive negotiations with the Iranians. I think there's an understanding that Iran has ambitions to become a nuclear power. It's not there yet. The goal of these talks is to offer them, I guess, to use a cliche, the carrot they need in terms of increased trade and increased credits and dual-use goods, goods that they have been denied by sanctions because of their activities, in exchange for a commitment to stop. The United States has not joined in those talks, absolutely has nothing to do with them. In the article, as I'm sure you know, I quoted senior western diplomats – everyone’s so nervous about being quoted about anything these days with this administration -- anyway, a senior European diplomat said to me, we're in a lose-lose position, because as long as America doesn't join in these negotiations we really don't have the leverage. What kind of a commitment can we make for Iran's security if America stays out of it. And as long as they don't join in, we're -- we'll eventually going to have to go to the United Nations for sanctions because we can't do it through diplomacy to stop them, and at that point, everybody understands that Russia and China will probably veto it, and then the Bush administration can claim, “A-ha, U.N. is not working again,” which is analogous to what happened in 2003 when we went into Iraq. We didn't give the negotiations there a chance to work. So, if you really are interested in negotiations, it's simple. Start talking to Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, can you explain where the C.I.A. and the Pentagon fits into this picture?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that's actually to me the most interesting part to the story that I wrote, not about Iran, because you can almost argue that, of course, we're doing surveillance. I'm sort of amazed that it became such a big story in the last 24 hours or 36 hours. The real issue is that in -- what the story is about is the fact that the diminuation of the C.I.A. is unbelievable, the President has really gone after the agency with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and at this point, as I say, there's never been more significant or more intellectual or more intelligence capability for not only operations, but for analysis. More is totally centralized in the White House and the Pentagon than since the rise of the national security state after World War II in the Cold War. We now have the White House and a Pentagon that basically dominates the process. The C.I.A. has been marginalized. All of the noise that you heard about the new C.I.A. director, Goss, going after people in the operations division, so-called dirty tricks division, really has masked what's going on. His real mission, his real agenda – and it wasn't his, he was carrying out a White House agenda -- was to get rid of a number of analysts, senior analysts who work for the intelligence side of the C.I.A., old-timers who have been skeptical of many of the White House's and Pentagon's operations, and so, as somebody said to me, they really went after the apostates, and they want only true believers in there. That's what the mission has been. The Pentagon now, under a series of Pentagon -- on the series of presidential formal findings and also just declarations, you know -- I think the President's got a lot of legal power here. The way the world shakes down is this, when it comes to covert secret operations abroad. If the C.I.A. does it, under the law now they must tell the President. The President has to issue a finding approving it, and the Congress has to be told. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have to be briefed. If the military does a covert operation, their interpretation of the law is simply that the President's rights as Commander-in-Chief trump any other requirement. That is, the military is there to prepare the battlefield with these operations. This is a military deal, totally. Nothing to do with intelligence. No need to inform anybody. So, now Rumsfeld has won a major bureaucratic fight. He is now operating, as you said in the intro, in up to ten countries. He is sending in covert teams. That is -- the word they use inside is “wiped clean.” The soldiers are wiped clean. Their I.D.’s are totally non-American and non-military. They're going in to make contact with groups inside various countries, set up operations, trying to do some war games, some terrorism themselves. You have to -- you run with the bad boys to find the bad boys is the way somebody said to me. In other words, look like bad boys to attract other bad boys so we find out who they are. We can't find the terrorists too often. This is one way of getting at them. And we're going to be doing that with military people. We're not going to be telling the American ambassador in the country. We’re not going to be telling the C.I.A. station chief. It's going to be done by Rummy and his people. That's a huge shift, an unprecedented shift, in the last 60 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, when it comes to Iran, the role of Pakistan and Israel?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, Israel's role is simply to say, yeah, if you guys don't do it, we're going to do it. Nobody wants that. And so Israel is sort of there. Israel is playing it very cleverly, and they understand that a lot of Americans, pro- and anti-Israel, are troubled by the Israeli connection to this administration as it played out in the Iraqi invasion. There's a lot of questions about whether Israel was a major player in this or a major factor. So, they don't want that scene replicated in case we do something in Iran. So, they have been low-balling it, but the reality is they have been putting a lot of pressure. The message really to us is either you do it or we do it. Nobody wants them to do it. That would be chaotic. I don't know why they think it's much better for us to do it, but in any case – And so their role, the Pakistani role, is much more -- much more devious in a way, much more complicated, because Musharraf is allegedly our ally in the hunt for bin Laden and all that. Meanwhile, he's going along, making weapons, more nuclear weapons, but he has given us access to some of the Pakistani scientists who work in Iran. One of the things that we learned -- one of the reasons we learned about Iran's secret ambitions is the International Agency for Atomic Energy, I.A.E.A., the watchdog in Europe in Vienna, a non-proliferation regime, of which by the way, Iran is a member of the N.P.T., Pakistan is not. Anyway, I.A.E.A. announced a couple of years ago that they discovered there was cheating, you know, gambling on the premises, that not only was Iran cheating, but they had been working with the Pakistanis for years. That all ended, but Musharraf has given us some of the Pakistani intelligence, some of the information they know from their own work about where certain facilities are inside Iran. The exchange is we are laying off A.Q. Khan. A.Q. Khan is the sort of – the mythical, it’s not quite real, but we always call him the father of the Pakistani bomb, actually another man named Khan did much more with it. Nonetheless, A.Q. Khan was the guy that generated the dual-use goods, the materials they needed to get nuclear in the 1970s and 1980s. He is a famous person, and he was caught out in Libya doing this kind stuff a couple of years ago. There was a public ceremony where Musharraf had him – A.Q. Khan went and apologized. Now he has been under house arrest. Musharraf has not given us or the I.A.E.A. in Vienna access to this guy. So we don't know what he's doing. My friends inside tell me we made a Faustian bargain. We told Musharraf, give us the intelligence we need to get more information about sites, nuclear sites, the suspected sites in Iran, and we will not pressure you on A.Q. Khan, coughing him up to us or the I.A.E.A. And meanwhile, of course, Musharraf is making more bombs. My other people tell me that people that know Pakistan, former Pakistanis tell me that he's going and doing more work with the plutonium route. And, of course, they're into the international black market buying the parts right now. So it's amazing. We're sort of playing the short run game. We need the intel. I think the reason we need the intel is simply this, this president – you just have to listen to what he says -- in the Washington Post last weekend an astonishing interview, he's going ahead with the war on terror. He's continuing to do what he thinks is right to bring democracy. He almost basically -- Iran, he said, is eagerly -- they're eagerly awaiting our help in becoming secular, or something like that, he said in, the Washington Post. I think we don't want to get the wrong targets. We don't want to be embarrassed again as in Iraq with not coming up with W.M.D. when we need to. I think it all sort of fits together.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. We have to break for just one minute. When we come back, I want to ask you quickly, about the conviction of Charles Graner, and also about Jerry Boykin's role in plans for Iran.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN:As we continue our discussion with investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. His latest piece is in The New Yorker magazine this week. It is called, “The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do In Secret” and talks about Pentagon plans to deal with Iran. Is it fair to say to attack Iran? Seymour Hersh?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Of course they're planning to attack Iran. The goal of the -- the, you know, what we always call the neo-conservatives -- the Paul Wolfowitzes and Doug Feiths in the Pentagon, the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. Their theory is: Look, one of the things They’ve learned in Iraq (they have learned something) which is that regime change by overwhelming force isn't working so well. So the goal in Iran, since it's also three times as large as Iraq, and it does have a large secular population and there's a lot of reason to believe that if we hadn't gone into Iraq, there would be a lot of dissent right now in Iran over the leadership; but nonetheless, I think their thinking is, that if we hit three or four dozen targets in the spring -- [sneezes] excuse me -- in the summer, late spring or summer, which I think is the tentative plan -- that would be roughly at the time Sharon is beginning his pullout of Gaza, and so their -- the theory is in the Pentagon there would be more good feelings towards America in the Muslim world once this begins. And if Iraq can be stabilized, which they think it will (I don’t know why, but they do.) after the elections, if that gets stabilized, then the goal is you hit three or four targets quickly and cleanly and you be sure you’re right and you have evidence to show that the Iranians are cheating more than they might -- than the world [inaudible] knows, this could lead to the secular population, those millions of young people, et cetera, who don't like the clerical leadership, to overthrowing or beginning to agitate against the mullahs once again. And the only problem with that thinking, of course, is that it's pretty much unique to those group of civilians in the Pentagon; because almost everybody else I talked to, in and out of the government, were scathing in their critique of this, saying it's absolutely hogwash, that what's going to happen, of course, is that the White House and the Pentagon is ignoring the nationalism that exists, the enormous feelings of togetherness inside Iran and love for country. And, essentially, the reason I think people talk to me -- because it's very clear with this group that's now in the White House and in the Pentagon, you can’t get to the meetings unless you drink the Kool-Aid. And so, if you don't agree with them, you can’t get in. And so, yeah, I think they really believe this is one way -- sort of on the cheap, without committing a lot of troops, an air raid, maybe some commandoes, you know, some guerrillas, American S.E.A.L.S or other teams go in with the Israelis, some of Israeli commando units go in to certain targets about which we’re not clear. But, basically, they think that's the ticket.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the other countries that the Pentagon is operating secretly in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you know, unfortunately, one of the things I do is, I like to avoid writing about anything where there's any chance that Americans there, this -- you know, I can’t say there's any Americans going in and out of Iran right now. I know it started last summer, so that's – there’s plenty of protection there, besides which, they don't go in as Americans; but in the other countries, the countries I name, I can tell you we just did something in Algeria. What we are doing is we’re sending in teams that are completely disguised as terrorists, and their -- the C.I.A. has a number of rules they have to live by, which is they cannot, under the rules, they cannot have their assets, their people, posing as journalists or clerics. And there's no such rules for the Pentagon. So, you know, the military people going in could be journalists, they could be religious people, they could be plain tourists undercover. And I think North Africa is a place of enormous interest for us, because we -- the Bush administration believes there's a lot of al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like terrorist activities there. So, that's an area of concern, you know, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. Obviously, they're still interested in the Philippines and Indonesia, and there's other countries where we have an enormous amount of interest.

AMY GOODMAN: The government has finally responded to your piece, if it didn't when you actually were calling the White House for response, saying, “It's so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of [your] entire report has been destroyed.”

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah. I heard that.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I mean, my response is pretty much the same as, I must say, even the mainstream media. To their everlasting credit it is all pointed out that while it's wonderful to go after me personally, none of the attacks dealt with the substance of what I was writing about. Are we operating in Iran? Is there a new understanding of what the Pentagon can do? All of that is not dealt with. So, you know, I'm really very untroubled by what the Pentagon spokesmen say. I think that when I did my stuff on Abu Ghraib and suggested that what was going on in The New Yorker, I suggested, and there were a bunch of articles I wrote, suggesting that what went on in Abu Ghraib was certainly not just there, it went on into Guantanamo in Cuba, into Afghanistan and other places in Iraq and led to the highest leadership. When I wrote that stuff, they accused me of throwing mud up, I think it was mud, against the wall and seeing what sticks. So, you know, we can just -- you know, I -- you know, you cannot worry about what public relations people say.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, the conviction of Charles Graner, sentenced to ten years in prison for torture at Abu Ghraib.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there's a couple of thoughts. One, of course, is that just last week, somebody got one year for murdering somebody in Iraq. It was a manslaughter case. So there's always a question of somebody else who plead guilty got eight years, which are most of the people who committed -- who shoot prisoners are getting three years or so. There's that question of that, the fairness of the sentencing. Look, Graner was obviously -- was certainly at fault, moronic, etc., but until this government -- he is -- there are eight people have now been accused of activities in Abu Ghraib. A couple have plead guilty, three or so, a couple are waiting trial, and a couple are found guilty. They’re all enlisted people. This is an operation that -- what happened in Abu Ghraib, which was excessive, went on for three or four months. Everybody knew what was going on in the night shift at the prison. I’m sure the same thing was going on in the day shift. Officer after officer was -- there's all sorts of allegations about visiting the site. As even including the major general or the three-star general in charge of the whole Iraqi operation. So, we have all of -- Sanchez, I'm talking about. We have all of these allegations. Not one officer has been charged. Graner's defense was moronic, but one of the things his lawyer did raise, they tried very hard to get some officers as witnesses, and of course they all plead -- the military equivalent of the fifth and they were excused. They didn’t testify. So we really don't -- this trial doesn't do anything to get us -- I thought the coverage in The Washington Post, by the way, which I read -- I thought was really quite brilliant because they kept on focusing in the trial, the Graner trial, about higher-ups. I didn't see as much of that in the Times unfortunately, but in the Post, it was really terrific coverage. Because that was the real theme of what Graner was saying, is there were a lot of other people involved. Until we deal with that in a legal way -- the army -- and prosecute some people – you know, we're still in the scapegoat business here. You know, I -- it's hard to have much sympathy for Graner, but I learned when I did a lot of work on My Lai, I initially started out thinking all those kids in Lieutenant Calley's company who murdered people were the worst sort of people. In the end, I came to realize they were as much victims as the people they executed, because of the wrong war, wrong time, wrong training, wrong everything. And there is a lot more responsibility than just Charlie Graner.

AMY GOODMAN: And your belief in having written Chain of Command, the book, how far up it goes?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh my god, I don't think there's any question that I would never say that anybody in the White House or Pentagon knew. Civilian leadership knew what was going on in Abu Ghraib, but that everybody from the President on down understood that as -- the cliche was, the gloves are off. Rumsfeld kept on saying that we were going to get very tough with prisoners. There's no question, it was widespread inside, and as you know, as you remember, we talked about it, the book I wrote begins with the meeting with Condoleezza Rice about this issue. There was a lot more high-level information. You know, this President's hard for to us reach. We don't know -- we don't know where he is at any time. But I am increasingly convinced, and I have enough data that I'm getting. I’m just talking, not writing, that the President, when it came to prisoner interrogation issues and the intelligence from it and operational stuff, is much more actively involved in a way we don't see than we might think. We always see him as sort of not really getting tuned in. I think in this stuff, he's really more tuned in, but I -- you know, I have to prove that.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, as we move into the Condoleezza Rice confirmation hearings today in the Senate, that opening scene in your book, Condoleezza Rice.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. Condoleezza Rice convenes. She was convinced, to her credit, to hold a meeting on all these allegations that came out of Guantanamo, a C.I.A. official going down to Guantanamo. We're talking about in the summer of 2002. Six, nine months before the invasion of Iraq, long before Abu Ghraib, went down without clearance. Went down and just spent time. Most of the Congressional people and other visitors to Guantanamo were seeing what amounted to Potemkin Village. They would clean it up and give them the show and tell and hide what was really going on, the kind of daily brutality. He saw it and wrote a report. It got circulated. He was in the C.I.A. It ended in Condoleezza Rice's hands. People with a lot of integrity inside the N.S.C., National Security Council, insisted that it be dealt with. She convened a meeting. Rumsfeld came. He said he would do something about it. Nothing happened. Everybody was disillusioned. Everybody knew, and it just kept on going. It just never – you know, it’s one of those issues. She did have a meeting about it, but nothing happened. It just sort of whittled away, and people kept on whacking people. So, the guys in the inside in the White House, including a four-star general, were discouraged by it. And then when I wrote about Abu Ghraib, I learned about all of this, and that was what I wrote about. That's actually the whole scene, the first 30 or 40 pages of the book is about this. Where does responsibility lie? Condoleezza Rice was not at Abu Ghraib sticking feathers in people, but she certainly knew in general that things were not basically going right, and we were mistreating prisoners, and also it's real simple. Two simple rules every military guy knows. One is you don't do to them what you don't want done to your soldiers. And two, you cannot get good intelligence from people that want to fly airplanes into the buildings to kill the infidels, to kill us. You can't get it by pushing them around. They have a story and they will just give you the story. You have to convince them otherwise. You have to establish rapport. Everybody knows that. That's one of the -- anybody who argues that torture is acceptable is really missing the boat on that issue. Most of the really good guys in the profession, which is one reason some of the guys in the F.B.I. protested so much, because they knew that you -- you know, if you are rational and smart, you don't get it by pushing people around. In any case, you know, it remains -- I must say in the last six months, thank god for the American A.C.L.U., and Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, they have really pressed this issue. There's a group, a bar group in New York, Scott Horton involved in it, a legal group that's also doing a lot of work. People at N.Y.U. There's an awful lot of stuff going on now to try and hold, you know, in some way, because Congress isn't going to do it. The one thing we know is Congress is not going to do its job.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Investigative reporter, wrote the latest piece in The New Yorker magazine.

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968

2005-01-18T03:31:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! listen and read here
War & Peace Report ...
Hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

Monday, January 17th, 2005.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968

"Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Day. He was born in 1929. Last week, he would have turned 76 years old. In the early 1960s, King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South where police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods were used against Southern blacks seeking the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. After passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without 'human rights' -- including economic rights."

USA Social Security Funds Used to Push Its Own Revision!!!

2005-01-16T20:44:00.000+01:00

The New York Times > Social Security Agency Is Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision:
"Social Security Agency Is Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision"
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SOCIAL SECURITY
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BUSH USING SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND
TO PUSH ATTACK ON SOCIAL SECURITY!!!

ROBERT PEAR, NY TIMES - Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution. The agency's plans are set forth in internal documents, including a "tactical plan" for communications and marketing of the idea that Social Security faces dire financial problems requiring immediate action. . .

Agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program.
They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy.

IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLESHARING ALL THE WORLD!

2004-12-31T17:22:00.000+01:00

johnandyoko
Originally uploaded by GRINS.

In memory, for Brother John
Born
October 9, 1940
Assassinated
December 8, 1980
All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance!
We All Shine On,
Like the Moon and the Stars and the Sun!

To: Humanity

Imagine
John Lennon Day
Peace And Love On Earth

"Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky, Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too, Imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."

John said this:
"Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko.
And we stand a better chance under that guise
because all the serious people like Martin Luther King
and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot."
"Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me,
it was not an accident."

Here is a letter from Mark Elsis:
The heartbeat of humanity is music. Let us honor our greatest singer songwriter and the most influential political artist of our time with an International holiday celebrating his message for us of Peace and Love on Earth. Starting on Sunday October 9th 2005, the 65th birthday of John Lennon and thereafter every October 9th shall be known as the John Lennon Day for Peace and Love on Earth.

I was at the Dakota on December 8th 1980 from 11:45pm till 8:45am the next morning. These 9 hours were the longest and saddest of my life. That night I promised John I would give the rest of my life to Changing the World by filling it with Peace and Love. This is why this petition is online, to gather the more than 10 million signatures that will be needed to make this dream a reality. Imagine all the people of Earth honoring John Lennon, a man who gave his life for spreading the message of Peace and Love. This holiday is for all the people of Earth to celebrate together in harmony, One Love in the spirit of Christmas time.

When there are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 10 million signers of this petition it will be sent to the heads and governing bodies of every Country on Earth and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Following each Countries own official process, we will ask them to proclaim every October 9th, John Lennon Day.

Mark Elsis
Executive Director: http://www.Lovearth.net
John Lennon Day
Peace And Love On Earth - THE PETITION:
I agree that there should be an International holiday every October 9th to celebrate the life's message of John Lennon, to be known as the John Lennon Day for Peace and Love on Earth. Every October 9th Imagine shall be played on TV, radio and websites in all 24 the world's time zones at their local noontime. There's nothing you can do that can't be done. You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned

ONLINE LISTENING with RealPlayer:
YOKO ONO, Give Peace a Chance, REMIX
PAUL McCARTNEY, Tribute to JOHN, medley
GEORGE HARRISON, Tribute to JOHN, All Those Years Ago
NEIL YOUNG, Imagine
EVA CASSIDY, Imagine

Democracy Now! | Intel Agent Strapped to Gurney and Flown Out of Iraq by U.S. Army After Reporting Torture of Detainees

2004-12-10T01:07:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! FULL REPORT Listen/Watch/Read CLICK HERE
A veteran sergeant who told his commanding officers that he witnessed his colleagues torturing Iraqi detainees was strapped to a gurney and flown out of Iraq - even though there was nothing wrong with him. We speak with the reporter - former U.S. Army counterintelligence agent David DeBatto - who broke the story. [includes rush transcript]

The Plot Against Sex in America"a new cultural twilight zone"

2004-12-09T13:40:00.000+01:00

The FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE - New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The Plot Against Sex in America
"Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples."

Memos Say 2 Officials Who Saw Prison Abuse Were Threatened

2004-12-08T01:15:00.000+01:00

FULL STORY CLICK HERE, New York Times: WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - Two Defense Department intelligence officials reported observing brutal treatment of Iraqi insurgents captured in Baghdad last June, several weeks after disclosures of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison there created a worldwide uproar, according to a memorandum disclosed today.

The memorandum, written by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to a senior Pentagon official, said that when the two members of his agency objected to the treatment, they were threatened and told to keep quiet by other military interrogators. The memorandum said that the Defense Intelligence Agency officials saw prisoners being brought in to a detention center with burn marks on their backs and complaining about sore kidneys.

Death Sentences in Texas Cases Try Supreme Court's Patience

2004-12-05T19:53:00.000+01:00

The New York Times
In the past year, the Supreme Court has heard three appeals from inmates on death row in Texas, and in each case the prosecutors and the lower courts suffered stinging reversals.
In a case to be argued on Monday, the court appears poised to deliver another rebuke.
Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, will appear before the justices for the second time in two years. To legal experts, the Supreme Court's decision to hear his case yet again is a sign of its growing impatience with two of the courts that handle death penalty cases from Texas: its highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans.
FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE: Death Sentences in Texas

INFORMATION for the 21st Century:The Politics of Physics,Energy, and Humankind's FutureRoot Problems & Going Beyond Wars for Oil

2004-11-16T23:19:00.000+01:00

I have been fortunate to come across some prophetic writing, the full meaning of which will only be understood widely in years to come, a small piece of which is so simple, yet so important to the understanding of some of the reasons why we are still "stuck" in the "age of oil." In hopes of stimulating thinking and action with integrated honesty from all angles, here it is. -- Sam

"Until the end of the 20th century there has been a general tolerance of organized academic interests intent in preserving the exact validity of quantum mechanics, special relativity and general relativity for all conditions existing in the universe via the discrediting of qualified research for their generalization; abuse of academic credibility, and other means.
However, during the last part of the 20th century it became evident that said organized academic interests on pre-established doctrines constitute a genuine threat to society unless by-passed or contained.
The first historical case occurred in the late 1970s when the U.S. Military elected to terminate the conduction of primary military research by academia, a decision that lead to the formation of ERDA in 1978, to be followed a year later by the current U.S. Department of Energy.
No serious physicist can express doubts on the fact that the research currently conducted by the U.S. Military is dramatically more advanced than that conducted by U.S. academia precisely in view of the removal in military circles of any restriction for the research to be strictly compatible with Einsteinian doctrines and quantum mechanics.
It is little known that, a few decades later, various U.S. corporations have followed research policies similar to those adopted by the U.S. military, namely, of conducting research beyond Einsteinian doctrines and quantum mechanics without any public disclosures of the used theories and solely disclosing the industrial results, as the author can personally attest.
The above policy by U.S. corporations (and perhaps others around the world) is enforced, in particular, in industrial research on new energies and fuels, all requiring the necessary surpassing of Einsteinian doctrines and quantum mechanics for genuine advances.
An illustration of diverging research interests between academia and industry is given by the production of environmentally acceptable fuels via [special methods], in which...deviations...[ranging from] seven to fourteen times...from the established doctrines of the 20th century have been established by rigorous, repeated measurements beyond credible doubts.
Deviations of the above magnitude between preferred academic theories and [military and] industrial realities illustrate the reasons for an increasing number of U.S. industries to follow the lead of the U.S. military and conduct advanced research without its full disclosure to academia.
In the hope of contributing to the termination of this unreassuring pattern, a main scope of this... work... is to show that the resolution of the currrent environmental problems, such as:

a) the development of new clean energies based on light nuclei,

b) the recycling of nuclear waste via it stimulated decay,

c) the need for new clean fuels necessarily without... replacement of hydrocarbons with other hydrocarbons,

All these societal needs, and others, crucially depend on suitable generalizations of quantum mechanics and special relativity, as well as the abandonment of the representation of gravity via curvature in favor of broader views."

-- Ruggero Maria Santilli, 2004
http://www.i-b-r.org

Introduction to Professor Dr. Ruggero M. Santilli

2004-11-16T23:15:00.000+01:00

Dedicated to the wise use of science in the interest of realizing the full creative potential of Humanity, and especially
With profound gratitude to Dr. Prof. Ruggero Maria Santilli, whose contributions to humanity are so vast and deep, that in all likelihood they will be understood only in the fullness of time.

A recent photo of Prof. Santilli

Santilli is the sole scientist in history who was capable of discovering a series of structural generalizations of pre-existing mathematics based on generalized units and products, and then apply them to a series of structural generalizations of physics, superconductivity, chemistry, biology, astrophysics and cosmology. By comparison, numerous other scientists discovered new “individual” mathematical structures (such as Hamilton and his quaternion, Jordan and his algebras, Lie and his theory), but not a comprehensive structural generalization of the entire mathematical and physical knowledge as achieved by Santilli. Numerous theories now carry his name, such as: Santilli’s isounits and isoproducts; Santilli’s iso-, geno-, and hyper-numbers and their isoduals; Hamilton-Santilli iso-, geno- and hyper mechanics; Lie-Santilli iso-, geno-, and hyper theories; Lorentz-Poincare’-Santilli iso-, geno-, and hyper-symmetry; Minkowski-Santilli iso-, geno- and hyper-geometries; Santilli’s iso-, geno-, and hyper-symplectic geometries; Heisenberg-Santilli iso-, geno- and hyper equations; Pauli-Santilli iso-, geno- and hyper matrices; Schroedinger-Santilli iso-, geno- and hyper-momentum; Santilli’s hadronic energy; Santilli’s magnecules; Santilli’s magnegas; etc. An inspection of the data-base on quotations indicate that Santilli is one of the most quoted author at this moment. Besides thousands of papers quoting Santilli, five monographs have been published by various authors with Santilli name in the title.The inclusion of vast plagiarisms of Santilli work in various scientific journals generally done in full knowledge of their editors (such as the river of papers on q-deformations without quotations of their origination by Santilli in 1967 and virtually all generalizations of Lie-quantum structures which are a particular case of Santilli’s Lie-admissible structures due to their proved direct universality), there is no “individual” scientist today whose influence on contemporary science can even partially compare with that by Santilli.

Santilli has been nominated for the NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS by numerous scholars around the world since 1985 for his construction of Hadronic mechanics and other motivations, and he has been recently nominated for the NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY for his construction of Hadronic chemistry and his discovery of the new chemical species of magnecules.

Santilli has received a GOLD MEDAL from the University of Orleans for his achievements in Science and various similar honors from several scientific academies;

Because of the above achievements SANTILLI has BEEN NOMINATED BY THE ESTONIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS APPLIED MATHEMATICIANS OF ALL TIMES, jointly with Gauss, Weyerstrass, Hamilton, Jordan, Lie, etc.). In particular, Santilli is the ONLY scholar of Italian origin appearing in the entire list.
-- Sam

Election Day Late Afternoon Numbers-- As reported by MSN online

2004-11-15T21:18:00.000+01:00

It was stolen, plain and simple.
As predicted, the fix was in before the vote.
Updated Late Afternoon Exit Poll Numbers--
As reported on MSN News are online to view, at: http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2109053&. By Jack Shafer

TWO ARTICLES by LARRY CHIN

2004-11-15T17:02:00.000+01:00

From the Online Journal by Larry Chin, Associate Editor
CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE #1:
The 'Make Us Safe' believers:
Enabling their own march into fascism
AND
CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE #2:
The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell.
"Getting To Know You", US-style

SNAP OUT OF IT! by Michael C. Ruppert

2004-11-14T15:12:00.000+01:00

SNAP OUT OF IT! CLICK HERE to read FULL ARTICLE
The Day to Forget the Nov. 2nd Election Forever, is Nov. 3rd
by
Michael C. Ruppert

November 5, 2004 1900 PDT (FTW) - The rest of the world has known for some time that it is pointless to oppose this Empire either militarily or electorally. They haven't the resources for the former and are legally barred from the latter. I think it's time the American people adopted the same philosophy. We are, after all, legally barred from inspecting electronic voting machines. The rest of the world has been fighting with money and public relations because these tactics work and work well. This is a lesson that American activists and true patriots should have learned four years ago. Now the tempo of battle will increase just as surely as the stakes have been raised both globally and domestically for us all.
While everyone waits for the administration's first move a Rubicon has been crossed and there is no turning back. America will fight for oil wherever it feels the need.

Now the real Fourth World War begins. Sorry to disappoint all the scriptwriters and futurists who were thinking exclusively in terms of bombs, plagues, famine etc. The first weapons of mass destruction in this war will be economic and they will be devastating beyond imagination.

I feel good now, three days after the election. It was much easier for me to recover than most because FTW and its readers had less invested in the election than most. But I am not so glib or cavalier as to overlook the massive disillusionment that weighs like a wet blanket on all who had hoped that their prodigious efforts might oust the Neo-cons.

The biggest blessing today is that the disillusionment is so deep, so fundamental, that at last people who have bound themselves to ineffective political strategies may rethink their deeper core beliefs; their beliefs about what America was supposed to be versus what it has become. They will redraw their maps. Perhaps with that process - painful as it might be - will also come a willingness to abandon strategies which no longer work for entirely different ones that do. In order for that to happen, however, those on the left, as well as those conservative and libertarian voices who wanted to return a degree of sanity to the Republican party, will have to admit that America is not America anymore.

We are living in a foreign land; a nation that is behaving like our enemy; a nation which has weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

New York Times -- PREFERS TO BURY THE TRUTH !!!

2004-11-13T03:31:00.001+01:00

The New York Times > Washington > "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried" an article by TOM ZELLER Jr., Published: November 12, 2004.

This is a contemptible and shallow whitewash of a very serious problem, written with obvious disregard for the long work of Bev Harris and others, in which Tom Zeller attempts to dismiss them all as having "dark ideas," which he claims were dreamed up in the days after the election by "disheartened Democrats." Tom Zeller needs some serious fact checking and education! (His article is featured on the online front page as the lead story in the 'Washington' section.)
May Tom Zeller and the NY Times be forgiven for this act of ignorance in aiding a coverup of historic proportions; -- but not before justice has its day!
-- Sam Spade

The ever vigilant Sam Smith, of prorev.com, reports skillfully on this NY Times and Washington Post attempt to bury the truth, writing:

"WATCHING THE COUNT: BLAME IT ON THE BLOGS"

SAM SMITH -- The NY Times has picked up where the Washington Post left off with a misleading story headed "2004 Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried." The story is of a genre the wise reader should approach with the greatest skepticism: one which purports to know the truth without any real investigation and which declares the case closed when it is anything but. The article is particularly slimy because it chooses some easy targets of disdain while ignoring the questions being raised by others which it couldn't dismiss so easily if they were actually considered.
What the Times and Post are doing, in Len Downie's infelicitous neologism, is "storifying" the story in such a way that the message is clear: anyone who questions the results of this election is a nut. The very fact that the two papers are engaged in domestic psyops of this nature - rather than simply reporting the facts, corrections, and anomalies as they develop - is a sign that there may be more at stake here than meets the eye and that, in any event, these two journals are not to be trusted on the matter.
And what an irony, since the NY Times was one of the first to raise serious questions about computerized voting nearly two decades ago. If it read its own clip file it would not be as like to engage in such semiotic sleight of hand.
As a case in point, we have a report from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Steven Freeman, published by Buzzflash, which states: "As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." In fact, the odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to Freeman, "250,000,000 to one."
Freeman concludes: "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
Thanks to Sam Smith, prorev.com

WWW.SOLARBUS.ORG/STEALYOURELECTION/Investigating the Vote: ELECTION FRAUD

2004-11-13T03:31:00.000+01:00

MAIN PAGE: COMPLETE LINKS TO ELECTION FRAUD DATA and MEDIA COVERAGE
THIS IS A GREAT SITE, with LOTS of LINKS.
-- check it out.
-- Sam

Iraq on Fire: Resistance Spreads as the Fallujah Death Toll Rises

2004-11-13T03:30:00.000+01:00

Democracy Now! | Iraq on Fire: Resistance Spreads as the Fallujah Death Toll Rises; Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3 || Watch 128k stream || Read Transcript Friday, November 12th, 2004
As the US siege of the Iraqi city of Fallujah continues, Iraqi resistance fighters are stepping up their campaign against the US occupation across Iraq. We go to Baghdad to speak with Dahr Jamail, one of the few independent reporters in Iraq. [includes rush transcript] As the US siege of the Iraqi city of Fallujah continues, Iraqi resistance fighters are stepping up their campaign against the US occupation across Iraq. In Fallujah, at least 18 US soldiers have been killed since the start of the American ground attack on the city on Monday while more than 100 US soldiers seriously wounded during the offensive arrived in 2 planeloads at the US military hospital in Germany with more expected to arrive over the weekend. The injured soldiers are the latest in a steady stream of arrivals at the hospital since the siege of Fallujah began. The military claims it has killed more than 600 resistance fighters in the city. But with almost no unembedded journalists operating in the city, independent information is very difficult to obtain. The reporting of journalists embedded with the US military is subjected to heavy restrictions from US forces. But Fallujah residents who have managed to escape the city describe the bodies of dead civilians laying in some streets and aid groups say the city is now facing a humanitarian catastrophe. There are an estimated 50,000 civilians remaining in Fallujah. Many of the city's 300,000 residents fled the city ahead of the US offensive. Meanwhile, a Pentagon spokesperson says that 2 US Super Cobra helicopters have been downed in separate incidents.

In other areas of Iraq, the resistance has taken control of some key areas of the country, raising questions about the US counterinsurgency strategy. Some analysts say the recent gains by the resistance are a direct result of the US focusing its campaign in a city where most of the fighters had already moved to other areas of Iraq. It now appears that the US is facing a dramatic escalation of a coordinated resistance across the country. In Iraq's third largest city, Mosul, five Iraqi police stations were bombed and the Iraqi resistance has taken over major portions of the city. Reuters is now reporting that the US has begun airstrikes in Mosul. Meanwhile, parts of Ramadi and Sammarah have now been seized by the Iraqi resistance. In Baghdad, The Asia Times is reporting that resistance groups have taken control of several suburbs on the outskirts of Baghdad. We go now to the Iraqi capital where we are joined by independent journalist Dahr Jamail, one of the few unembedded journalists in Iraq right now.

Suez Canal Shut Off, Oil Prices To Soar

2004-11-13T03:22:00.000+01:00

Suez Canal Shut Off, Oil Prices To Soar
Original story: http://www.neftegaz.ru/english/lenta/show.php?id=52076
November 12, 2004 1400 PDT– SUEZ CANAL CLOSED – Want to understand How Fragile the Oil Production and Delivery System Really Is? Who Needs a Bomb to Threaten the US Economy? Whether accidental or intentional, the point is clear.
Shipping through Suez Canal, the world's most important thruway, had been stopped after a Russian company Sovkomflot's oil tanker named Tropic Brilliance struck ground. Tuesday morning already 135 ships had beenblocked, and now many law suits threaten Russia. Sovkomflot is a state-run company. The law suits may be brought not only by Egyptian government, but by shipping companies and oil companies, who are suffering losses due to their contracts' defaults. At the least estimate, the suits may surpass $2 billion.

INTRODUCTION TO STEALING YOUR ELECTIONAn Excellent Introduction to the Facts and the latest developments

2004-11-13T02:31:00.000+01:00

WAS THE 2004 ELECTION STOLEN? CLICK HERE FOR AN EXCELLENT INTRODUCTION TO THE FACTS
http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/stolen-election-intro.html
INCLUDES: a brief summary of the key points, followed by links to articles with more details and information. This website will be updated as more information becomes available.

VOICES FROM FALLUJA - reported by BBC NEWS

2004-11-12T01:53:00.000+01:00

Sent out to you by Sam Spade, 02:00am, mountains above Lillehammer, Norway
BBC NEWS | Voices from Falluja - click here for full story
The BBC News website spoke by phone to Fadhil Badrani, an Iraqi journalist and resident of Falluja who reports regularly for Reuters and BBC World Service in Arabic.
Fadhil Badrani, journalist, writes:
"There are more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is getting stronger.
A house some doors from mine was hit during the bombardment last night. A 13-year-old boy was killed.
It is very dangerous to try to leave the city at the moment.
We are completely cut off from the outside world - no electricity, no water.
People are dying from their injuries because there is nowhere to go for treatment.
A clinic that was serving as the last hospital in the city was bombed two nights ago.
Some families have begun burying their dead in gardens and backyards."

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
WORD from Sam Smith at prorev.com
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There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
˜ Howard Zinn

BBC NEWS | Vanunu arrested by Israeli police for speaking to press

2004-11-12T01:50:00.000+01:00

FULL BBC STORY CLICK HERE
The Israeli former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, released in April after 18 years in jail, has been re-arrested, police say. Vanunu has repeatedly been in contact with journalists and was interviewed on BBC television just over two weeks ago. The bishop said some Swedish pilgrims visiting St George's Church had been shocked to tears by the police operation.
"They invaded the cathedral close," he said. "Some of them climbed over the fences, others came through the main gate.
"They terrified, terrorised the guests and the pilgrims, none of whom knew why this invasion happened with machine guns."

MoveOn.org: INVESTIGATE THE VOTE --SEND YOUR EMAIL NOW

2004-11-11T19:17:00.000+01:00

MoveOn.org: Investigate the Vote
Six prominent members of Congress have requested an investigation into the integrity of the vote. The decision could come as soon as Monday. Sign our petition demanding a full investigation into whether the election was conducted honestly or not. Also, share your personal story if you have one -- members of Congress will use it in their call for an investigation.
IT IS SIMPLE, SEND THIS EMAIL TO YOUR REP IN CONGRESS: "Congress must investigate the integrity of the voting process in the 2004 election."
CLICK HERE TO SEND YOUR EMAIL, http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

MARINE APC's/TANKS APPEARAT ANTI-WAR PROTEST IN WESTWOOD, CA

2004-11-11T18:13:00.000+01:00

LA INDYMEDIA REPORTS: MARINE APC's/TANKS APPEAR AT ANTI-WAR PROTEST IN WESTWOOD, CA
LOS ANGELES, November 9, 2004 - At 7:50 PM armored personnel carriers, looking like tanks (i.e., with turret and long gun; see photo above), showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood.
The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered.
Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police quickly cleared the street.
The people continued to protest the presence of the tanks, but after about ten minutes the tanks drove off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this location.

Fallujah: More Death from the EVIL EMPIRE

2004-11-10T23:36:00.000+01:00

Steve Bell, Guardian, UK

VOTE SCANDALS CONTINUE TO EMERGE

2004-11-10T23:35:00.001+01:00

<>Wednesday, November 10th, 2004
<>The Ohio Factor: Did Homeland Security and the FBI interfere With the Vote Count?
<>http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/10/1536254
<>Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
<>Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript
<>

------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Warren County, Ohio, election officials took a rather unprecedented action on November 2: They locked down the building where the votes were being tallied, blocking anyone from observing the vote counting process. President Bush won 72% of the vote in the county. We speak with the reporter who broke the story. [includes rush transcript]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Earlier this week on Democracy Now!, we reported on a story in Ohio's Franklin County. In one precinct, 638 people cast ballots. Yet, George W Bush got 4,258 votes to John Kerry's 260. In reality, Bush only received 365 votes. That means Bush got nearly 3,900 extra votes. And that was just in one small precinct. This in a state that Bush officially won by only 136,000 votes. Elections officials blamed electronic voting for the extra Bush votes.

Now, questions are being raised across the state of Ohio. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the County's website shows its 29 precincts had more votes than voters. In fact, it wasn't just a handful. It registered a whopping 93,000 more votes than voters. In Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland, only 13,342 people were registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.

Meanwhile, in Warren County, Ohio election officials took a rather unprecedented action on November 2. They locked down the building where the votes were being tallied, blocking anyone from observing the vote counting process. County officials said they took the action in response to a terror threat warning from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. County Commissioner Pat South said they were told by an FBI agent that the county was facing a level 10 security threat on a scale of 1 to 10. George Bush won 72% of the county's more than 92,000 votes.

As Vote Scandals Continue to Emerge Could John Kerry 'Un-concede?'
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/10/1537201
Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream Read Transcript

------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Kerry may have conceded but the Electoral College still hasn't cast its vote. We look at the ongoing controversy over voting problems on November 2nd in Florida and elsewhere with nationally-syndicated radio talk show host Thom Hartmann and statistician Kathy Dopp. [includes rush transcript]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the resignations of Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, President Bush is beginning the process of reshaping his cabinet for his second 4-year term.

But, controversy continues to rage over the fairness of the November 2 presidential election. Stories are still emerging from states like Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and New Mexico of widespread problems with vote counting, voter suppression and malfunctions of electronic voting machines. There are now multiple activist campaigns urging John Kerry to un-concede.

In response to scores of emails he received as part of these campaigns, John Kerry's brother Cam sent out a mass email that said: "I am grateful to the many people who have contacted me to express their deep concern about questions of miscounting, fraud, vote suppression, and other problems on election day, especially in Florida and Ohio. Their concern reflects how much people care about the outcome of this election. I want to you to know we are not ignoring it. Election protection lawyers are still on the job in Ohio and Florida and in DC making sure all the votes are counted accurately. I have been conferring with lawyers involved and have made them aware of the information and concerns people have given me. Even if the facts don't provide a basis to change the outcome, the information will inform the continuing effort to protect the integrity of our elections."

Democracy Now! | Black Box Voting to ConductMassive Freedom of Information Request

2004-11-08T01:39:00.000+01:00

LARGEST Freedom of Information Action IN HISTORY
Democracy Now! November 8, 2004 UPDATE CLICK HERE - We speak with Johns Hopkins University professor Aviel Rubin and investigative reporter Bev Harris. [includes rush transcript]
ALSO SEE THESE BACKGROUND STORIES, and VISIT http://blackboxvoting.org today.
Democracy Now! | Headlines for November 5, 2004
Black Box Voting Seeks Electronic Voting Records
In election news, the group Black Box Voting has announced plans to conduct the largest Freedom of Information action in history in order to monitor how effective electronic voting machines worked on election day. The group has previously warned that the machines could be programmed in ways to alter the actual voting results. The group is filing 3,000 freedom of information requests from individual counties and townships that used the electronic voting machines. They are seeking to obtain internal computer logs and other documents.

Electronic-Voting Critics Scrutinizing U.S. Election
By charlie smith
ARTICLE HERE: http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=6199
A Seattle-based nonprofit organization has announced that it is conducting the largest freedom-of-information action in U.S. history to examine computer voting in the November 2 U.S. election. Bev Harris, a founder of www.blackboxvoting.org/, told the Straight that her group plans to file requests for the internal audit logs of all computerized voting machines used across the country.
"Any system that is counted by computer has the vulnerability that some programmer somewhere, who we don't know, has some sort of proprietary code that we can't review," she alleged.
Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century, said that her group recently obtained records from the King County primary election six weeks ago and discovered that three hours had been deleted from the audit log. "The audit log is like the black box in an airplane," she said. "It automatically generates reports of who got access into the system and the different types of actions they took. So when you have an audit on election night that has had three hours deleted, you've got to raise your eyebrows."
She estimated that 20 million votes were counted using electronic voting machines across the U.S. on November 2. She claimed that one of the biggest risks of tampering occurs when results are sent by telephone modem from polling stations to a central election site.
Harris claimed that it's possible to tamper with results because voting records are copied and stored in different repositories inside the program. "We found that counties didn't realize the access phone number is very sensitive information," she said. "You get that number and you can dial in and control the server."
In July 2003, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University released a paper alleging that people can access the touch-screen system off-site and vote repeatedly. The manufacturer of the most widely used touch-screen system, Ohio-based Diebold, issued a lengthy technical response on its Web site (www.diebold.com/) on July 25, 2003, offering assurances about its system.
"A continuous or unmonitored internet or modem connection would be necessary in order for last minute or stealth changes to be downloaded to a voting terminal," the company stated at the time. "As installed by Diebold, this voting terminal contains neither. Diebold does not connect its voting terminals to the internet."
Harris said it's "insane" that the U.S. conducts elections without any formal way of auditing the votes. She said that no candidate should concede an election until after this occurs.
She added that her group welcomes any help from Canadians in gathering internal audit logs from the recent U.S. election. "After all, we are your neighbour down here, and we're in trouble," she said.

The Essence of USA Foreign Policy, Iraq 2004,

2004-11-06T18:46:00.000+01:00

= BOMBING, AIRSTRIKES and MILITARY ASSAULTS

A German professor after WW II, said this:

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . .

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted'.

Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

-- with thanks to Sam Smith for his essay, Getting Through The Bad Times, which can be found at http://prorev.com/badtimes.htm

CIA/MILITARY FIRM PROGRAMMED SECURITYIN VOTING MACHINES

2004-11-06T05:25:00.000+01:00

projectcensored.org - Newsflash
"The real winners November 2 are the military industrial complex, who will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar military trough and the corporate media, whose coffers were filled with billions of dollars for campaign ads.
And can we be sure we actually had a fair election among those who did vote? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including:

- Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council
- Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
- Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

So we have a CIA/military private firm that programmed the security in the voting machines for companies owned by some of the largest military contracts in the country. No wonder the Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Susan Truitt said November 3: 'Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case.'"

SAM SMITH - Our Greatest Daily Essayist

2004-11-06T05:22:00.000+01:00

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GETTING THROUGH THE BAD TIMES
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From a talk at the Shelter Rock Unitarian Universalist Congegration, Manhasset, NY,
delivered one week before the election of 2004
by
Sam Smith

This is a time for metaphors. A time for parallels and parables.

Logic has failed us, theories have failed us, technology has failed us, policy has failed us, diplomacy has failed us, our military, our leaders in government, media, and the intelligentsia. . . even our faith seems to have failed us.

And so we yearn for stories that makes sense, that help to end the madness. . .

We seek allegories and anecdotes and allusions to turn things right. . . .

But it does no good if the tales and the metaphors are delusional. . . if they drag us even further into a psychopathic state that veers wildly between arrogance and fear.

It does no good if it sends us deeper into a new middle ages where reality is ignored or sent to the inquisition while myth becomes the dominant truth. . . only this time propagated not by the church but by cable TV.

We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an adhocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity, a term from Latin America where they know it well - a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

It's crazy, it happened so fast, it's like in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern when Rosencrantz asks shortly before his death: "What was it all about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? . . . We've done nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we? . . . There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.. . . Well, we'll know better next time."

Yet we have seen it all before. And it came with stories. A German professor after the World War II described it this way to journalist Martin Mayer:

What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . .

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.'

The German professor went on:
Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. "

Soon after September 11, people began talking about Pearl Harbor. Our leaders and much of our media then drew the conclusion that our salvation lay in world dominance, in empire.

Within just days we moved from tragic reality to delusional myth. Empires don't have their major military and economic icons damaged or destroyed by a handful of young men with box cutters. Empires don't turn suddenly phobic at everything foreign, everything sharp, every place crowded. Empires don't jettison their Constitution and turn on their own people out of blind fear. Empires don't get hopelessly bogged down invading two small countries they have invaded. . . one which had a military budget less than two percent of ours, the other with a gross domestic product smaller than the cost of the bombs we were dropping on it.

No, it wasn't Pearl Harbor. It was more like Dien Bien Phu. The journalist Bernard Fall early in our Vietnam conflict noted that the French, after their failed battle at Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because we can still afford to. Or think we can.

One of these mistakes has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable practical dilemma, because, for example, while there are solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to resolve the crisis.

In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because decentralized low tech guerillas with a cause will always have another trick to play on a centralized, technology-dependent society that has lost its way.

There is a good way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the constituency of the most bitter by dealing honestly and fairly with the complaints and despair of the most decent and rational. As we have demonstrated in the Middle East, one need not even reach a final solution as long as incremental progress is being made. But once that ceases, as happened when Bill Clinton in his last weeks declared the efforts there a failure and then George Bush showed he didn't care, the case for freelance violence quickly strengthened and people simply forgot that peace was possible.

The answer - humiliating as it may seem over the short run but wisely courageous as it really would be - is not yet another war of empire against the Muslim world, but to end the one we have covertly conducted for a half century and more.

To get an idea of the price of the alternative we have chosen instead, consider this. In the mid 1950s, while in high school, I played the role of an IRA commandant in the "Informer" - a play written thirty years earlier. It is now almost 50 years later yet that character and the subject matter remain depressingly contemporary.

Here, on the other hand, is what France did. A few years after Dien Bien Phu, General Charles DeGaulle came to power. He had initially sought an Algerie francaise but within one year in office was supporting full Algerian self-determination. He held to this despite an attempted coup by members of the Foreign Legion and a secret army organization determined to keep Algeria French. Within a few years the French empire had been dismantled.

By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire." The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the Americans would.

DeGaulle understood the difference between the illusion and reality of empire. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Yet like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies or solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get the chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naiveté but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works better for everyone.

This state is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we have chosen.

Now many these days blame our problems on George Bush. It's a convenient and perhaps useful way to think about it, but historically it falls short as Bush himself revealed during one of the debates when he defended the Patriot Act by saying, "As a matter of fact, the tools now given to the terrorist fighters are the same tools that we've been using against drug dealers."

He was right: the unconstitutional principles of the war on drugs were the warm-up act for the Patriot Act - steps so small, so inconsequential, so well explained, as the German professor would have put it.

Four years before 9/11, I wrote an article titled, "How You Became the Enemy," about how America was drifting into the situation in which we now find ourselves. Here were some examples - all pre-Al Queda and during a Democratic administration:

- Many paramilitary police units were conducting between 200 to 700 warrant or drug raids a year- almost exclusively no-knock entries.

· A paramilitary unit in Chapel Hill NC conducted a crack raid of an entire block in a black neighborhood. Up to 100 persons were detained and searched, all of whom were black (whites were allowed to leave the neighborhood). There were no prosecutions.

· Police in Fresno CA refer to their beat as "the war zone."

- The National Guard was deeply involved in the War on Drugs.

- The military was being used to train police officers, inevitably increasing the tendency of citizens to be regarded by these officers as "the enemy."

- The century-old posse comitatus act, designed to keep the military out of civilian law enforcement, appeared to be on its last legs.

· Eight-nine percent of the county's police departments, had paramilitary units.

- Plans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the 1980s to take over the country in an ill-defined emergency appeared to have been only partially dismantled. Among the most striking aspect of these emergency plans was the absence of any provision for a legislature or judiciary.

The real turning point, though, for America was the Reagan administration. Reagan was a brash voice for the wealthy, the greedy, and the lucky, a Bill O'Reilly with charm. By the time he ran for president, the overt crudity and the covert cruelty had been transformed into a faith, a philosophy, and a political platform. Reagan transformed American politics into show business and the media was glad to join the cast. The fatuous banalities passing for sound philosophy or ex cathedra statements pretending to be arguments passed deep into the mind of America. Reagan had taught us that truth and reality were no longer important.

Here are just a few things that have happened since then:

- More than two-thirds of older households had someone earning a pension in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did

- In the 1980s about two-thirds of corporations included health care benefits with their pensions. Today only about a third do.

- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. By 2002, six corporations did.

- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real dollars than in 1984.

- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 2000 there were two million.

- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a recent male high school graduate declined 28% between 1973 and 1997.

- Anti-trust laws, once considered the great mediator of commercial excess, have been steadily eroded.

- Organized labor has become a mere shadow of its former self

- Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. per capita spending on schools increased 32%. The per capita spending on prisons grew 189%

Every president after Reagan - including Bill Clinton - moved this country to right until we found ourselves with George Bush who is not so much the cause of our troubles as their grimmest and most recent manifestation. Placated by Prozac, persuaded by prevarication and pacified by prohibition, we have ignored our drift towards the mean and the brutish and continued to accept the lie that we are the better for it.

Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the frustrations, failures, damage and human casualties involved in constantly butting up against reality like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home.

Peter Ustinov in 'Romanoff and Juliet' says at one point: "I'm an optimist: I know how bad the world is. You're a pessimist: you're always finding out." Or as GK Chesterton put it, "We must learn to love life without ever trusting it."

Happiness, courage and passion in a bad time can only be based on myth as long as reality does not intrude. Once it does, our indifference to it will serve us no better than it does the joyriding teenager whose assumption of immortality comes into contact with a tree.

But this does not mean that one must live in despair. There are other stories - true stories of real people - that can lead us elsewhere.

Like the former LA narcotics detective I know who learned to face danger while investigating corruption and the involvement of intelligence agencies in the drug trade. He had two bullet holes in his left arm and one in his left ear. He said he had borrowed a trick another cop had taught him; when in danger he simply considered himself already dead. Then he was able to move without fear.

Such an ability to confront and transcend -- rather than deny, adjust to, replace, recover from, or succumb to -- the universe in which you find yourself is among the things that permits freedom and courage. This man, with Buddhist-like deconstruction and Christian-like rebirth, had taken apart the pieces of his fear and dumped them on the ground -- a mercy killing of dreams and nightmares on behalf of survival.

I grew up with someone like that. Ann had come to our house during World War II as a nine year old child from Britain. It hadn't been easy for her to get to Washington in July of 1940. Sixty years later she wrote me about it:

I set sail in the Duchess of Atholl in convoy. There was a slight skirmish with a submarine. I remember feeling the ship shudder as depth charges were dropped but we were unscathed and pressed on, though I remember seeing icebergs and wondering. My mother told me we might well be sunk. If I was dragged underwater, not to struggle. I would come to the surface naturally, then not to strike out to England or America but float on my back, as I had learned at school, until I was picked up.

Within two months, no more British children were sent to America because the Nazis had started torpedoing the ships and even machine gunning the children in the water.

After the war, Ann came back and lived with us becoming a virtual sister. She would marry man, quite a bit older, who had been a young doctor during the Battle of London. The doctors were given colored tags to attach to the feet of air raid victims. Each tag represented one bed and each color one hospital in London. When the tags were gone so were the beds. Think about that when you worry about your flu shot.

Ann was one of the first people I thought about as I watched the World Trade Center go down because she had learned to face the grim with stolidity but the rest of life with passion and pleasure. I was in my home when it happened, six blocks from another intended target, the US Capitol, and I recalled how much I had learned from her, even as a child, about getting through the bad times.

To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power are not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise.

But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list. "You don't have to change the world," the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. "Just keep the world from changing you."

Oddly, those who instinctively understand this best are often those who seem to have the least reason to do so - survivors of abuse, oppression, and isolation who somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle around them. They have, without formal instruction, learned two of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry and philosophy:

You are not responsible for that into which you were born..

You are responsible for doing something about it.

These individuals move through life like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.

In Washington we have a neighborhood known as Shaw where for decades just such a form of survival thrived. It has been a particular interest of my historian wife, Kathy. Until the modern civil rights movement and desegregation, this African-American community was shut out without a vote, without economic power, without access, and without any real hope that any of this would change.

Its response was remarkable. For example, in 1886 there were only about 15 black businesses in the area. By 1920, with segregation in full fury, there were more than 300.

Every aspect of the community followed suit. Among the institutions created within these few square miles was a building and loan association, a savings bank, the only good hotel in the Washington where blacks could stay, the first full-service black YMCA in the country, the Howard Theatre (opened with black capital twenty years before Harlem's Apollo became a black stage) and two first rate movie palaces.

There were the Odd Fellows, the True Reformers, and the Prince Hall Lodge. There were churches and religious organizations, a summer camp, a photography club, settlement houses, and the Washington Urban League.

Denied access to white schools, the community created a self-sufficient educational system good enough to attract suburban African-Americans students as well as teachers with advanced degrees from all over the country. And just to the north, Howard University became the intellectual center of black America. You might have run into Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, or Duke Ellington, all of whom made the U Street area their home before moving to New York.

All this occurred while black Washingtonians were being subjected to extraordinary economic obstacles and being socially and politically ostracized. If there ever was a culture entitled to despair and apathy it was black America under segregation.

Yet not only did these African-Americans develop self-sufficiency, they did so without taking their eyes off the prize. Among the other people you might have found on U Street were Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, laying the groundwork for the modern civil rights movement.

Older residents would remember the former neighborhood with a mixture of pain and pride -- not unlike the ambivalence found in veterans recalling a war. None would voluntarily return to either segregation or the battlefield but many would know that some of their own best moments of courage, skill, and heart had come when the times were at their worst.

Another example. Last summer, I went to Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome remarkably indifferent to 500 years of its history, where even the homes and whole villages seem to grow like native plants out of the rural earth rather than being placed there by human effort. It was as if I had been transported back several centuries while still being allowed to take along a car and my Diet Coke. I hadn't felt such stability for a long time, certainly not since September 11.

Yet the Umbrians have been invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths, Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini, the German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade organization. Umbria is a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history's tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American these days.

We don't have to go that far back, though. Consider the increasingly cited novel, 1984. Orwell saw it coming, only his timing was off. The dystopia described in 1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents of Oceana didn't live in it. Orwell gives the breakdown. Only about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in the Outer Party. The rest numbering some 100 million were the proles.

It is amongst the latter that Winston Smith and Julia find refuge for their trysts, away from the cameras (although not the microphones). The proles are, for the most part, not worth the Party's trouble. Says Orwell:

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is . . .

Orwell's division of labor and power was almost precisely replicated in East Germany decades later, where about one percent belonged to the General Secretariat of the Communist Party, and another 13% being far less powerful party members.

As we move towards - and even surpass - the fictional bad dreams of Orwell and the in many ways more prescient Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World,', it is helpful to remember that these nightmares were actually the curse of the elites and not of those who lived in the quaint primitive manner of humans rather than joining the living dead at the zenith of illusionary power.

This bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite that is alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - an elite willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with minimal weapons.

In the wake of September 11, this trend became even more prominent. Our country's policies and budgets have been strongly skewed in the interest of protecting New York and Washington (and the natural resources and economic machinery that support their activities). There has not been much mention of a terrorist threat to St Louis or Des Moines, at least in the national media. After all, St. Louis and Des Moines are in the countryside that is filled with persons who, if left to themselves, will, in the words of Orwell, "not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is."

This is not to say that St. Louis or Des Moines won't be a target, only that it is far from what the war on terrorism is really about, which is to defend those things, people, and places that the elite hold most dear - starting with themselves. Six blocks from my house, for example, they are building a bunker for congressmen at the cost of $1 million a member, congressmen already guarded by the most expensive police force per capita and per acre in the world. A friend who works a block away must go through several roadblocks a day. But walk east just a bit towards my house and nothing has changed.

Strange as it may seem, it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political and economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of those who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.

Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern Methodist University has described Orwell's underclass this way:

The Proles were the poorest of the groups, but in most regards were the most cheerful and optimistic. The Proles were also the freest of all the groups. Proles could do as they pleased. They could come and go, and talk openly about whatever they felt like without having to worry about the Thought Police. . .[Orwell] also concluded that the hope for the future was contained within this group."

As a Washington native I often find myself thinking of part of my city as occupied and robotic, and part still free and human. I roughly define the free portion as that having buildings I can enter without having to prove in some direct way that I am not a terrorist. While the occupied city encompasses much of downtown Washington, the consumptive fear of those in power is so concentrated on their own safety that they leave the better part of us alone.

I'm not so naïve as to think that the government or its enemies couldn't at any moment suddenly expand their interests. Still, upon leaving Washington I'm quickly struck by the question: where did the war on terror go? The further I get from this supposed democratic apex the more I feel as if I'm in a democracy again.

There is plenty of evidence of the divide in America. More than 130 communities have passed resolutions challenging post 9/11 draconian laws such as the Patriot Act.

There is nothing new in this. Almost all great changes in American politics and culture have had their roots either in the countryside or among minorities within the major cities. From religious 'great awakenings' to the abolitionist movement, to the labor movement, to populism, to the 1960s and civil rights, America has been repeatedly moved by viral politics rather than by the pyramidal processes outlined in great man theories of change promulgated by the elite and its media and academies.

Successfully confronting the present disaster will require far more than attempting to serially blockade its serial evils, necessary as this is. There must also be a guerilla democracy that defends, fosters, and celebrates our better selves - not only to provide an alternative but to create physical space for decent Americans to enjoy their lives while waiting for things to get better. It may, after all, take the rest of their lifetimes. We must not only condemn the worst, but offer witness for the better. And create places in which to live it.

We have, as in all authoritarian regimes, become increasingly dependent upon those who hold us down and back. But the potential is always there, even under the worst circumstances. I was reminded of this not long after September 11, as I found myself reflecting on the Solidarity movement of Poland. We will get out of this mess, I thought, when we can do in our own way what the Poles did in theirs.

At the heart of the Solidarity achievement was something with which the Internet has made us familiar - a form of politics that spread not by the precise decisions of a small number of leaders but by the aggregated tiny and vaguer decisions of a mass of citizens. In a sense, Solidarity was an early and unwired flash mob or internet meetup.

The variety of techniques used by Poles in the their search for freedom were impressive. For example, John Rensenbrink in his contemporaneous book, described how kissing women's hands became popular primarily because it annoyed the Soviets.

And his description of Poland's dilemma in the 1980s seems strikingly applicable to our own situation:

It is the struggle of a state in ludicrous pursuit of a nation that it cannot seem to find. And, it is the struggle of a nation trying to find a way to meet the state, not in the posture of supplicant or avenger, but in the posture of free citizen.

John Rensenbrink tells me that some of Solidarity's early organizing took place on the trains that many of the workers rode to the shipyards, where they had time to drink coffee and talk. In our own history, there are innumerable examples of change owing a debt to the simple serendipity of people of like values and sensibilities coming together. For example, the rise of Irish political power in this country was aided considerably by the Irish bar's role as an ethnic DMZ and a center for the exchange of information.

CS Lewis says somewhere that we read to discover that we are not alone. That discovery is a necessary for change as well. Part of the dreadful force of southern segregation, for example, was that it prevented poor whites and poor blacks from discovering how much they had in common.

We tend to discount the importance of unplanned moments because of our fealty to the business school paradigm in which change properly occurs because of a careful strategic plan, an organized vision, procedures, and process. During the past quarter century when such ideas have been in ascendancy, however, America has demonstratively deteriorated as a political, economic, and moral force. In reality, many of the best things happen by accident and indirection. While it may be true, as the Roman said, that "fortune smiles on the well prepared" part of that preparation is to be in the right place at the right time. In other words, it is necessary to create an ecology of change rather than a precise and often illusory process.

The beat generation understood this. Unlike today's activists they lacked a plan; unlike those of the 60s they lacked anything to plan for; what substituted for utopia and organization was the freedom to think, to speak, to move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately taken care of all such matters. To a far greater degree than rebellions that followed, the beat culture created its message by being rather than doing, rejection rather than confrontation, sensibility rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements, words and music instead of acts, and informal communities rather than formal institutions.

The full-fledged uprisings that followed could not have occurred without years of anger and hope being expressed in more individualistic and less disciplined ways, ways that may seem ineffective in retrospect yet served as absolutely necessary scaffolding with which to build a powerful movement.

One of these ways, for example, is music. Billie Holiday was singing about lynchings long before the modern civil rights movement. And Rage Against the Machine was engaging in anti-sweatshop protests some years before most college student had ever heard of them.

Another way is found in the magic of churches. During the 1960s I edited a newspaper in a neighborhood 75% black and mostly poor in which I came to assume that churches were the sina qua non of positive change. We had over a 100 of them in a two square mile area and you just came to rely upon them as part of the political action, including the Revolutionary Church of What's Happenin' Now and the Rev. Frank Milner, part-minister and part-taxicab driver who would come to community meetings in an outfit complete with clerical collar and a metal change-maker on his belt.

How important one church can be is illustrated with a little known story from Birmingham Alabama. Responding to Rosa Parks' mistreatment, sleeping car porter E.D. Nixon called up a young preacher and asked if he could use his church for a meeting. The minister said he would think about it. A few days later, Nixon called back and the minister agreed. E.D. Nixon's reply was something like this, "Thank you Reverend King, because we've scheduled a meeting at your church next Monday at 6:30 pm."

It is for such reasons we must learn to stand outside of history. Quakerism, for example, prescribes personal witness as guided by conscience - regardless of the era in which we live or the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And the witness need not be verbal. The Quakers say "let your life speak," echoing St. Francis of Assisi's' advice that one should preach the gospel at all times and "if necessary, use words."

There are about as many Quakers today in America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000. Yet near the center of every great moment of American social and political change one finds members of the Society of Friends. Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year after year between those great moments. Because they have been willing in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth answering that of God in every one "

The existentialists knew how to stand outside of history as well. Existentialism, which has been described as the idea that no one can take your shower for you, is based on the hat trick of passion, integrity and rebellion. An understanding that we create ourselves by what we do and say and, in the words of one of their philosophers, even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.

Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it.

Would we have been abolitionists in 1830?

In 1848, 300 people gathered at Seneca Falls, NY, for a seminal moment in the American women's movement. On November 2, 1920, 91 year-old Charlotte Woodward Pierce became the only signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions who had lived long enough to cast a ballot for president.

Would we have attended that conference in 1848? Would we have bothered?

Or consider the Jewish cigar makers in early 20th century New York City each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. The leader of the cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, would later become the first president of the American Federation of Labor. And those like him would become part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left.

These are the sort of the stories we must find and tell each other during the bad days ahead. But there is a problem. The system that envelopes us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it." Or as Matthew Arnold put it, trapped between two worlds, one dead, the other unable to be born.

We are overpowered and afraid. We find ourselves condoning things simply because not to do so means we would then have to -- at unknown risk -- truly challenge them.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.

How one does this can vary markedly, but one of the bad habits we have acquired from the bullies who now run the place is undue reliance on traditional political, legal and rhetorical tools. Politically active Americans have been taught that even at the risk of losing our planet and our democracy, we must go about it all in a rational manner, never raising our voice, never doing the unlikely or trying the improbable, let alone screaming for help.

We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. Unitarian church basements. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.

Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We must rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.

Portions of this talk come from Sam Smith's book "Why Bother?," which deals with getting through the bad times including chapters on despair, rebellion, personal witness, and guerrilla democracy.

PERMANENT LINK HERE:
http://prorev.com/badtimes.htm

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

2004-11-06T01:33:00.000+01:00

CNN STORY - ELECTRONIC VOTING ERROR BENEFITS BUSH IN OHIO
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.
Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.
State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

At Least We Can Still Surf In Peace...

2004-11-04T20:00:00.000+01:00

SURFIN' USC... the United States of Canada?