Butt darling

Go forth and multiply

2006-10-29T02:19:00.000-08:00

http://buttdarling.multiply.com/journal

Dear LiveJournal user pro2, Thank you for your reply. The subject line, "Christopher Darby needs killing," is indeed the piece of content we are referring to as being inciteful of violence, as the casual observer would read it to mean that you are encouraging individuals to kill Christopher Darby. Editing the entry to remove such references would be considered appropriate compliance as per the e-mail you received. Additionally, for privacy- and security-related reasons, we are unable to discuss with you the identity of the individual who reported you to the LiveJournal Abuse Team. Regards, Melisande LiveJournal Abuse Team Did this answer your question? YES: http://www.livejournal.com/support/etc NO: http://www.livejournal.com/support/etc If you are having problems using any of the links in this email, please try copying and pasting the *entire* link into your browser's address bar rather than clicking on it.

Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2006 8:36 PM Did you get my email offering to withdraw the heading yet? I will do this under protest while I make arrangements to move to a less arbitary and censorious blog environment. Any ' casual' reader can leave a comment under any of my posts to clarify any ambiguity. Also I believe any vexatious complainant should be put in direct touch with the accused as this is natural justice 101. The accused has a right to confront their accuser and settle their concerns before any formal proceedings are commenced - let alone sanctions! You are leaving yrself wide open for a quite disturbing ' Star chamber' style of abrupt censorship of an entire year or mores work and that is totally unacceptable. Maybe for some sort of 'enlightened-despotism' it could be acceptable but I thought you were better than that for some reason. Anyway please give me my 24 hours to fix this and then enough time to move right out. You make me sick and the smell in here is making me sicker.

Live journal Nazi's at work

2006-10-29T01:50:00.000-08:00

Dear LiveJournal user pro2,

Thank you for your reply. The subject line, "Christopher Darby needs
killing," is indeed the piece of content we are referring to as being
inciteful of violence, as the casual observer would read it to mean that
you are encouraging individuals to kill Christopher Darby. Editing the
entry to remove such references would be considered appropriate
compliance as per the e-mail you received.

Additionally, for privacy- and security-related reasons, we are unable
to discuss with you the identity of the individual who reported you to
the LiveJournal Abuse Team.

Regards,
Melisande
LiveJournal Abuse Team

Did this answer your question?
YES:
http://www.livejournal.com/support/etc
NO:
http://www.livejournal.com/support/etc

If you are having problems using any of the links in this email, please
try copying and pasting the *entire* link into your browser's address
bar rather than clicking on it.

Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2006 8:36 PM

Did you get my email offering to withdraw the heading yet?

I will do this under protest while I make arrangements to move to a less arbitary and censorious blog environment. Any ' casual' reader can leave a comment under any of my posts to clarify any ambiguity. Also I believe any vexatious complainant should be put in direct touch with the accused as this is natural justice 101.

The accused has a right to confront their accuser and settle their concerns before any formal proceedings are commenced - let alone sanctions!

You are leaving yrself wide open for a quite disturbing ' Star chamber' style of abrupt censorship of an entire year or mores work and that is totally unacceptable. Maybe for some sort of 'enlightened-despotism' it could be acceptable but I thought you were better than that for some reason.

Anyway please give me my 24 hours to fix this and then enough time to move right out. You make me sick and the smell in here is making me sicker.

True story

2006-10-29T01:22:00.000-08:00

There was this president from Texas in the sixties who was famous for her loud mouthed rants delivered while astride a toilet. She once famously accused a perceived opponent of relentlessly buggering a sow. While informed that the individual concerned was not into beastiality she then said, ' Yeah sure...I know that! But just let the sonuvabitch deny it!'
Well I can't deny anything you've said yet darling Enema CointelPRO.

I did fuck a sow up the arse once - I cannot tell a lie.

So I dobbed her in. Receipt no 12862541 means that at least she's right about one thing - I am a police informant...even if it took her repeated reminders. Thanks sweetheart - one good turn deserves another.

Just do us all a favour and get a blood test will you. You are freaking people out.

No appeal - no natural justice.

2006-10-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

The following post has status hidden:( @ Melbourne Indymedia )

Attempt to gag Aussie blogger
by pr • Friday October 27, 2006 at 05:16 PM

Well it was only a matter of time before the same ' Manchurian global' chickens that helped build the Golden Shield came home to roost

And on top of that the last empires, military-entertainment complex just declared war in cyberspace as well!
The timing to gag bloggers in the free world is a sign of just how desperate the last empire truly is. To think that we would just forget that millions died in WW2 so that we could express our opinions freely!

How pathetic of them. Here is whats happened so far...
Dear LiveJournal user pro2,

It has recently come to our attention that your journal entry, located
at http://pro2.livejournal.com/1634340.html, contains incitement to
cause violence on another individual. This is a violation of the Terms of
Service (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml), to which you agreed
when you created your account.

As such, we must require that you delete the entry as soon as possible,
but no later than Saturday, October 27th 2006 at 12:01AM EDT. Failure
to do so by this deadline will result in further action being taken
against your account.

Regards,
Melisande
LiveJournal Abuse Team

RESPONDED...

Sorry but I just don't see it.
Could you please specify where the incitement is exactly?
If you take the comment heading the wrong way I suppose that could mean I think Chris needs killing but thats not what I meant. I mean the organization he works for obviously needs kidnapping, torturing and yes, killing to maintain its funding. I can't help the fact that any language contains ambiguity but if you be a little more specific then I can edit the entry in a spirit of good faith and diplomatic compromise.
Also as confronting yr accuser is a well known and sound principle of natural justice and good faith dealings in any free democracy I would like to know who complained about this obvious misunderstanding. By dealing with them directly I might then help free up yr staff for more important and substantive breachs.
Yrs cordially
professor rat

I've received a reciept number for that response and will report further developments here when they pry my cold stiff fingers from the touchpad. Anyone aware of a blogging service that does not harrass it's members with vexatious and frivolous complaints - similar to that received by the ABC - then I would appreciate yr leads. TIA.
DAY LATER - checked email and should add that the receipt no I got was machine generated. I still have no response to my appeal for natural justice above and this looks pretty machine generated as well...

Dear LiveJournal user pro2,

On October 24th, 2006, we sent you an e-mail indicating that your
journal entry, located at http://pro2.livejournal.com/1634340.html, violated
the Terms of Service as it contained incitement to cause violence to
another individual. As you have failed to remove the incitement by the
deadline specified, we have been forced to suspend your account.

If you would like to have your account unsuspended, please reply back
to this e-mail with a date and time, including timezone, preferably 24
hours in advance when you will be available to remove the offending
content. Your journal will be unsuspended for 24 hours so that you may do
so.

Regards,
Melisande
LiveJournal Abuse Team

Now I've offered to scratch the whole post ( and will move it here asap ) so that is the state of play. I've also asked them if they got my first email. This process stinks if all the Saudies, Chinese or CIA have to do is complain anonymously to remove a blogger. Live journal you are not looking good at this point - please restore my faith in human nature, inalienable human and civil rights and natural justice by providing a little basic, bedrock, elementary due process post-dark ages.
TIA - pr

Live journal suspend blogger

2006-10-28T01:22:00.000-07:00

No appeal - no natural justice.

The following post has status hidden:( @ Melbourne Indymedia )

Attempt to gag Aussie blogger
by pr • Friday October 27, 2006 at 05:16 PM

Well it was only a matter of time before the same ' Manchurian global' chickens that helped build the Golden Shield came home to roost

And on top of that the last empires, military-entertainment complex just declared war in cyberspace as well!
The timing to gag bloggers in the free world is a sign of just how desperate the last empire truly is. To think that we would just forget that millions died in WW2 so that we could express our opinions freely!

How pathetic of them. Here is whats happened so far...
Dear LiveJournal user pro2,

It has recently come to our attention that your journal entry, located
at http://pro2.livejournal.com/1634340.html, contains incitement to
cause violence on another individual. This is a violation of the Terms of
Service (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml), to which you agreed
when you created your account.

As such, we must require that you delete the entry as soon as possible,
but no later than Saturday, October 27th 2006 at 12:01AM EDT. Failure
to do so by this deadline will result in further action being taken
against your account.

Regards,
Melisande
LiveJournal Abuse Team

RESPONDED...

Sorry but I just don't see it.
Could you please specify where the incitement is exactly?
If you take the comment heading the wrong way I suppose that could mean I think Chris needs killing but thats not what I meant. I mean the organization he works for obviously needs kidnapping, torturing and yes, killing to maintain its funding. I can't help the fact that any language contains ambiguity but if you be a little more specific then I can edit the entry in a spirit of good faith and diplomatic compromise.
Also as confronting yr accuser is a well known and sound principle of natural justice and good faith dealings in any free democracy I would like to know who complained about this obvious misunderstanding. By dealing with them directly I might then help free up yr staff for more important and substantive breachs.
Yrs cordially
professor rat

I've received a reciept number for that response and will report further developments here when they pry my cold stiff fingers from the touchpad. Anyone aware of a blogging service that does not harrass it's members with vexatious and frivolous complaints - similar to that received by the ABC - then I would appreciate yr leads. TIA.
DAY LATER - checked email and should add that the receipt no I got was machine generated. I still have no response to my appeal for natural justice above and this looks pretty machine generated as well...

Dear LiveJournal user pro2,

On October 24th, 2006, we sent you an e-mail indicating that your
journal entry, located at http://pro2.livejournal.com/1634340.html, violated
the Terms of Service as it contained incitement to cause violence to
another individual. As you have failed to remove the incitement by the
deadline specified, we have been forced to suspend your account.

If you would like to have your account unsuspended, please reply back
to this e-mail with a date and time, including timezone, preferably 24
hours in advance when you will be available to remove the offending
content. Your journal will be unsuspended for 24 hours so that you may do
so.

Regards,
Melisande
LiveJournal Abuse Team

Now I've offered to scratch the whole post ( and will move it here asap ) so that is the state of play. I've also asked them if they got my first email. This process stinks if all the Saudies, Chinese or CIA have to do is complain anonymously to remove a blogger. Live journal you are not looking good at this point - please restore my faith in human nature, inalienable human and civil rights and natural justice by providing a little basic, bedrock, elementary due process post-dark ages.
TIA - pr

ZIONAZI KERRY STOKES THREATENS INDY!

2006-08-05T04:39:00.000-07:00

The infamous criminal terrorist Kerry Stokes is threatening Indymedia with Singapore style totalitarian repression through the courts.

Typical behaviour from this low scummy fascist filth. SEE...

Dear Sirs
Mr Kerry Stokes
We act for Kerry Stokes who has been made aware of an article attributed to you on the Melbourne Indymedia website http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/116036_comment.php
The article is grossly defamatory of Mr Stokes. For example, it asserts he is a criminal and supplies funding to terrorists. On our instructions, the article is indefensible and Mr Stokes is entitled to expect a substantial verdict from the Court if proceedings are commenced.
Blah, blah, blah,etc, preliminary proceedings can be commenced against your Internet Service Provider to compel them to disclose details identifying your name and address.
( Iprimus say this isn't a problem...' we like to help the police')
Our client requests you take the appropriate steps for the immediate removal of the article from the Melbourne Indymedia website. If you refuse to comply with this request, our client will rely on this letter in any application he makes for aggravated and exemplary damages should proceedings be commenced.
In the meantime, our clients reserves his rights.
Yours faithfully etc...[Sgd] Mallesons Scumbags Stephen Jaques ( early August)

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/116036_comment.php

The following post has status hidden:

Deleted
by deleted • Monday July 03, 2006 at 05:37 PM

deleted - MIM eds

Sheesh - So was this the deleted epistle?

Kerry Stokes is an appalling human being and a terrible man - it's official. Kerry Stokes, Australia & New Zealand's 40 Richest - Forbes.com.
Kerry Stokes ranked 7 among Australia & New Zealand's 40 Richest In 2006. He owns WesTrac, one of the largest Caterpillar equipment dealers, with operations in Australia and northern China. Westrac, with a Caterpillar dealership in northeast China, has sales of $1bn a year. Seven Network media boss Kerry Stokes owns the company.

"Stokes is a terrible man and a terrible businessman. Everyone who has come into contact with him knows that he is an appalling human being."

Chief executive of Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, John Alexander.

Is Jill Singer a scat prostitute?
by pr • Friday June 16, 2006 at 02:10 AM

Im asking this because I love her so much I want her to improve her situation. Things could only look up...

Jills career so far includes an endless amount of spruiking for the inane crapology of Aussie rules, a marriage of sorts with Kerry Stokes ( see below) and recent appearences with the master of fascist disaster, Jon Faine. Were she to take up scat submission in a specialized Sydney brothel she could hardly do better.

I was reminded of the stoked lady by this...

Caterpillar Pressured Over 'Weaponized Bulldozers'
by Emad Mekay

The parents of a U.S. peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer built by the global machinery giant Caterpillar confronted the company Wednesday for the first time and urged shareholders at its annual meeting to end sales of "weaponized bulldozers to Israel."

Cindy and Craig Corrie, parents of the late Rachel Corrie, attended the meeting as proxy voters on behalf of Jewish and Christian institutional investors who have filed a resolution asking for greater corporate accountability from Caterpillar.

Activists supporting the parents who lost their daughter in 2003 say that the company sells machinery to the Israeli army in violation of its corporate accountability pledge and knowing full well that the equipment will be used for the destruction of Palestinian homes and farms.

"We are part of a growing movement for corporate responsibility in the United States," said Matt Gaines of the STOP CAT campaign in a telephone interview from outside the shareholders' meeting in Chicago.

"Getting the U.S. government to take action on this issue has been very, very difficult, even though we are still working on it. But we are taking it directly to the corporations involved that are sponsoring, aiding, or abetting war crimes," he said.

Caterpillar has become the poster child for U.S. companies that are being targeted in divestment drives for their role in human rights abuses by the Israeli army in occupied Palestinian land. It has said in the past that it bears no responsibility for how its products are used by clients. Spokespersons from the company were not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.

Rachel Corrie was killed in the town of Rafah while she and other members of the International Solidarity Movement were trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003.

Caterpillar, Inc. built the nine-ton bulldozer that ran over Corrie, a 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Wash. Her death made international headlines and triggered widespread condemnation. Israeli courts have yet to prosecute anyone for the incident.

The Illinois-based Caterpillar, which had annual sales and revenues of $36 billion last year – more than half from overseas business – has been reluctant to disclose how much money it makes from its dealings with Israel.

Peace activists estimate that since Israel occupied Arab land in the 1967 war, Caterpillar bulldozers have illegally razed the homes of more than 50,000 Palestinians. They say that in the past five years alone, Caterpillar equipment was used to uproot over one million olive trees owned by Palestinians.

The U.S. company has been repeatedly singled out by international human rights bodies such as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch for complicity in rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian land.

But it is the divestment campaign – mostly led by Christian institutional investors, including the Presbyterian Church USA, the World Council of Churches, the Church of England, and the Church of Scotland – that has most alarmed right-wing pro-Israel groups and the company.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, a right-wing Zionist organization, says that Corrie and other peace activists were hindering the army's work to track down suspected terrorists and weapons smugglers.

Peace activists counter that as well as homes and roads, the Israeli army destroys olive trees, farmland, and even water wells, hardly hideouts for terrorist suspects. They point to a number of actions that have aimed to muzzle publicity given to Corrie's death.

Recently, a play about Rachel Corrie's life that had two successful runs in London was banned from the New York Theater Workshop after protests from some Jewish groups.

Copies of the play, composed of letters and journal entries, and titled My Name Is Rachel Corrie, were taken off bookshelves and only a few are now available in the United States, the campaigners say.

And when Corrie's parents called on the State Department to investigate the killing, their plea was rebuffed.

Writing in the conservative Jerusalem Post, Elwood McQuaid, a self-styled "Christian Zionist" who served as the executive director of The Friends of Israel Ministry in the U.S., characterized the corporate responsibility campaign as part of a leftist conspiracy.

"What is at issue here has little to do with moral justice; but it has much to do with radical, liberal, leftist obsession," the pastor wrote.

His words have not dissuaded Christian groups from discussing the issue further on Christian and moral grounds. An intense debate is going on in Birmingham, Ala., where thousands of delegates to the Presbyterian General Assembly are to decide on future steps in their divestment drive.

Christian Zionist groups have also argued that divestment is the wrong approach and called for more investments to build neighborly relations between Palestinians and the Israelis.

But last week, the National Middle Eastern Presbyterian Caucus of the Presbyterian Church said in a statement that while a positive investment strategy can be constructive, it fails "to stop the Israeli government from confiscating Palestinian property and expropriating Palestinian land." END ARTICLE

A quick search reveals that who the local dealer is.

Kerry Stokes.

Maybe I'm being to harsh on Jill.

Maybe she is a recovering footieholic.

Maybe she even broke up with Kerry over him bulldozing her in bed.

Maybe she is ever-so-subtley undermining and sabotaging the Jon Faine fascist half hour.

I still reckon she'd be better off working as an honest shit whore. The work would be cleaner. END
pro2@optusnet.com.etc
printer friendly version | 132 reads

IANAL ( obviously ) but I understand that the owners of a BBS can't be held legally liable for everyfinks wots published there.
As the author I accept responsibilty but we are not living in Communist China or Fascist Singapore quite yet no matter how hard the creepy criminal scumbags like John Howard, Alan Jones and Kerry Stokes try.

Fuck them and their boat load of lawyers.

Peter and Mr Wolf

2006-03-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

Costellos pitiful moment
Greg Sheriden - the Australian
Peter Costello was a shallow, lazy and opportunistic Treasurer who did not deserve to run the country. Costello's foolish gratuitous, undisciplined and slyly offensive comment's about Muslim's in his windy speech on citizenship last week may well signal a change in the way he intends to pursue the prime ministership.
Instead of differentiating himself from John Howard on the left, Costello now seemed to be trying to differentiate himself on the right.
In his speech Costello was doing exactly what extremists wanted him to do - allowing them to define Muslim identity by equating the most extreme form of Islamic radicalism with Muslim's generally.
No wonder he was warmly applauded by Pauline Hanson.
Costello claims he's a great treasurer because the economy is doing well.
An alternative view was that he's been a lucky treasurer and a lazy treasurer, a high-taxing, high-spending treasurer with a modest reform record. That he is prepared to play around so irresponsibly on race and religion to further his leadership ambitions represents his most pitiful moment in politics.

Peter Costello - portrait of a pig

2006-02-25T08:10:00.000-08:00

Australian Cabinet Minister Suggests Gays Lucky Not To Be Arrested

Sydney, Australia) A senior Australian cabinet minister has outraged gays and lesbians by suggesting they should give up the fight for same-sex marriage and be content that homosexuality is no longer a crime.

During a gathering of the Sydney Institute, a conservative think tank that holds regular public seminars and panel discussions, Treasurer Peter Costello was questioned by a lesbian couple about his government's refusal to consider either marriage or civil partnerships.

The couple, Dr. Kerryn Phelps, a former president of the Australian Medical Association, and partner Jackie Stricker, were married in 1998 in a ceremony that is not recognized by the government.

Costello said that his government was right in blocking legalized unions for gay couples because marriage should only apply to opposite-sex partnerships.

The cabinet minister said gay partners have the right to access each other's pensions and that was about as far as the government was prepared to go.

He then said that "I think we do recognize the rights of gay and lesbian people in Australia. We do not criminalize conduct or behavior."

"I thought that was appalling. It was offensive. I found it suggesting that we were lucky that we weren't being thrown in jail," Stricker told the Australian Associated Press.

"We have in this country vast number of families with same sex couples as the parents. Their children don't have the same rights, the individuals in those relationships don't have the same rights, as people in heterosexual marriages."

Last year the Australian government passed legislation last year defining marriage as between a man and a woman. END

The same week this swine lashed out at Muslim Australians stridently insulting them in his arrogant racist manner. ' Love it or leave it'. The last refuge of the scoundrel and fittingly flattered by arch-fascist Pauline Hanson.

Peter Costello now stands starkly exposed for what he has been all along - a flying fascist pig that now needs severe puncturing. END

My day to day blog btw is at pro2 livejournal.

Direct action against the state

2006-01-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

A challenge to all the plastic fascists
by pr Wednesday January 11, 2006 at 02:47 AM

This is a direct action against the ALP/ Lib/Gnat/ FF/Dem/GP/SA, etc statists. All of them. The government - the state - the Aussi Taliban. FUCK YOU!

I HEREBY, with full knowledge of the laws and penalties contained in Schedule 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005, urge all readers of this column to arm themselves with the nearest blunt instrument, storm Parliament House and overthrow the Australian government by force.

( For easier updating I'm mainly using my live journal so try...

http://www.livejournal.com/users/pro2/

Do I seriously advocate violence, having become so angry that I have lost all sense of proportion, or am I using these words as a device to point out, "in good faith", an error or defect in the government of the commonwealth?

The answer to that question will determine whether you have to continue to put up with my column this year, or whether you don't hear from me again until I get out of prison in 2012.

The Anti-Terrorism Bill passed through both houses of Parliament late last year, so treason and sedition laws, together with seven-year prison terms, are now part of the law of the land in this country.

When ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope made the first cut of this Bill public via his website, against the express wishes of the Prime Minister, I held his actions up as an outstanding example of e-democracy, illustrating how the web has given an enormous boost to democratic processes by enabling immediate and widespread public access to information critical to the public interest.

Had Stanhope not done it, the general public would have been locked out of the debate, civil liberties groups and law associations would not have been able to prepare submissions, and the Bill probably would not have been amended.

Australians probably didn't get much democracy for their money in the end, given the minimal parliamentary debate, lack of ticker on the part of Labor and the fact that so many proposed amendments were simply dismissed out of hand, but they got something.

The original version, for example, included "bringing the sovereign into hatred or contempt" under seditious intention, so at least die-hard republicans can now celebrate their continuing right to mock the Queen.

The sedition laws are going to affect plenty of people who operate in cyberspace.

Young antiwar bloggers who habitually post emotive diatribes against the government might need some judicial counselling on language and style. Website administrators will need to think harder about content they host, or mirror, from anti-government sources.

No doubt Australian internet service providers will at some point be asked to participate in the enforcement process, as has already happened with pornographic content.

A conscious effort from all of these people, plus a dose of moral fortitude, may be necessary to prevent provocative, healthy dissent from being neutered in coming years.

I've trawled through the 137 pages of clauses and subclauses of the final Bill and there is still too much latitude for misuse, misinterpretation and mistakes.

While an improvement over version 1.0, the document remains a class A exhibit for ignorance, and that special type of amnesia that makes politicians block out historical precedents.

The mantra of "give us these powers and trust us to use them wisely" just doesn't cut it.

What's wrong with writing good laws now? If Mr Ruddock ever bothered to read this column, I expect he would dismiss the opening sentence as self-righteous, irrelevant piffle from a third-rate computer scientist, and he would probably be right on all counts.

But who will be doing the interpreting in three years, in what climate of fear and in what political circumstances?

I have to go now, because some men in dark suits are knocking at the door.

Bruce McCabe is an independent technology analyst and managing director of S2 Intelligence. END EXTRACT

On indulgence I request this article be reposted as a direct action challenge to the stupid pack of racist statist Galah's in Canberra to either put up or shut up. Bruce and I are calling yr bluff arseholes. Either you are the type of fascist fucks who are up to snuff or ...we call yr bluff right here - right now.

We know you chickenshits don't have the balls to go all the way so eat shit fuck off and die all you Liberal, gNat's, Family First arsefuckers and all yr hanging dags and running vomit eating dogs. Especially those vomit eating dogs like Mick Keelty.

You are GUTLESS!

We called you out and you piked you yellow stinking maggots!

FUCK YOU and all who sail in you. And fuck the brownosing corpse media - your all dead meat talking. Don't you know we're talkin bout a revolution.

And we are long past whispering.

Party Pooper or Magic Pudding?

2005-12-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/12/101180.php

Peter Costello Overqualified?

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/12/101174.php

Poor Peter pooped

All of us are lying in the gutters...

2005-12-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

...but only one of us is looking up Gerard's arse.

Latest Hot Poop on Pete News Squad

The NS News room is banging like a dunny door in a hurricane tonight with all the latest on the swelling tumescent Peter Costello sex scandal.

Petomane Costello - Australian rules ' Back pocket' legend. News Squad
When asked what they would do if Jesus returned the Liberal Party replied...' move Peter Costello to the Lodge?'

Hard Core Costello nominated for Porn ' Oscar's' News Squad
Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

First gay prime minister soon News Squad
Australia may soon have the first openly Gay prime minister...so what changes, if any, might we expect?

Peter Costello - The Pink Panzer M Kroger
' Who best understands us queer Nazi's? '

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/?display=f

Peter the great

2005-12-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

18 good Globocop's

2005-12-03T01:44:00.000-08:00

Saturday, December 03, 2005

18 GIs killed in 72 Hours
Anti-Prison Demonstrations in Baghdad

From Wednesday to Friday, guerrillas in Iraq killed 18 US troops. The most tragic single incident came on Friday, when guerrillas used old Baath rocket parts to make an enormous bomb that killed 10 Marines near Fallujah and wounded 11. CNN points out that Marine convoys tend to spread out to limit such casualties, so the death of 10 GIs in one incident suggests just a horrific explosion. There were said to be 600,000 tons of munitions stored in Iraq, one of the more militarized societies in the world, and over 200,000 tons are probably still unaccounted for.

On Wednesday, four GIs had been killed in separate incidents.

On Friday, as well, over a thousand Shiites and Sunnis held joint Friday prayers services and then mounted demonstrations downtown. The prayers were held at the mosque of Abu Hanifah in Adhamiyah. They demonstrated against the continued US military sweeps [of places like Ramadi].

Al-Zaman says that they were demanding the trial of the official in charge of the Jadiriyah Prison where 150 largely Sunni detainees had been tortured and starved. They said that Abu Karim Alwandi, the head of intelligence for the Badr Corps paramilitary, who presided over Jadiriyah, had to be held to the rule of law. Some placards angrily charged that Iraqis had been tortured on Iranian orders. This allegation comes about because the prison was in the charge of the Ministry of Interior, controlled by Bayan Jabr Sulagh, a prominent member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had been based in Iran 1982-2003. Some placards accused the minister of being an American puppet. The crowds also demanded the release of detainees held by the US in Iraq.

The Shiites involved were likely followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who have a rivalry with SCIRI and who have sometimes engaged in a politics of pan-Islam, hooking up with Sunni fundamentalists for anti-imperial purposes.

posted by Juan @ 12/03/2005 06:30:00 AM 0 comments
Friday, December 02, 2005

Guerrillas Gather at Ramadi
US Riposte

Iraq has banned non-Iraqi Arabs from coming to Iraq in the build-up to the December 15 elections. I think they would have been better off banning all civilians of any nationality from coming in; this way of doing it smacks of racism.

Aljazeera is reporting, based on video released by guerrillas that the latter have taken over Ramadi and attacked US troops there. I saw on CNN International a rebuttal of this claim by Gen. Lynch, who alleged that the Zarqawi group is very good at propaganda and is obscuring what is really going on in Iraq. He said that on the day the videotape claimed there were several attacks on US positions around Ramadi, there was actually just one rocket propelled grenade attack on a US base.

My suspicion is that the truth lies in the middle. FROM Juan Cole @ Informed comment

Smell that Victory!

Chimp didn't fall far from the tree

2005-12-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

Barbara Bush is allegedly TICKED off at Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Andy Card, nearly all of them -- except Karen Hughes -- for how her boy is faring in the hearts and minds of Americans.

The matriarch of the Bush clan is colder than North Pole ice right now to those around her son who she thinks have undermined him. I'll tell who my sources are if Patrick Fitzgerald gives a call and makes me -- but the sources are very close to Poppa Bush (41), who has been traveling a bit with some of his old entourage, including Brent Scowcroft and others of the first Bush regime.

While TWN has been able to confirm that Laura Bush's mother-in-law wants to do more than put coal in the stockings of the Vice President and the other top handlers of her son's White House, we have not been able to confirm a slightly stronger bit of the rumor, which is that Barbara -- not Laura -- was planning to call on Nancy Reagan just to get a refresher lesson on how she took on and kicked out then Chief-of-Staff Donald Regan. (I embellish here; Barbara Bush is not going to take lessons from Nancy, it just sounded good. My source told me that Barbara was about to "pull a Nancy Reagan" on these attendants.)

Cheney may be tougher to dump than Don Regan, but then again, Barbara Bush is one of those wonders of nature (we hear) who knows no limits and can easily surge beyond category 5 hurricane winds.

Should be interesting to watch the role of the First Mother in the coming couple of months. Watch for a lot to change right after the State of the Union address, I've been told.

Steve Clemons - Posted by steve at December 1, 2005

Bar is evil incarnate, but take on Big Time? Don't think so.

Posted by: Red_Neck_Repub at December 1, 2005 06:35 PM

Wasn't it Nixon who said of Barbara Bush,
"She really knows how to hate"?

Posted by: Buford P. Stinkleberry at December 1, 2005 06:43 PM

Poor Babs! people are picking on her little boy. He's getting sticks and stones thrown at him.

To bad, he didn't serve his time in the service. Maybe, just maybe he'd have learned how to cope with out his Mommy

Posted by: gwili brunner

Pardon me for not sparing too many drops of my heart's blood for poor outraged Bar, or Poppy, or even Saint Laura Dostoevsky. Those people knew better than anyone else that Georgie's great gift in life is for stepping on his own scrotum -- I've mislaid the article in which Laura was described as saying her husband was incapable of changing a light switch -- and they could have put the kibosh on his presidential ambitions, had they so chosen. But, no; THE DYNASTY had to prevail, and so here we are. As for Bar's housecleaning: Card's ready to bail anyway, Rove's on a slow boat to indictment anyway, and Cheney's not going anywhere without a shove from Fitzgerald.

Posted by: penalcolony at December 1, 2005 07:28 PM

She doesn't care about George. It's Jeb she's worried about. If the Bush name gets dragged through the mud thoroughly enough, the dynasty's next emperor won't be able to rise to the throne.

Posted by: Garbo
Having Barbara Bush gunning for you is the stuff nightmares are made of. I wish Steve hadn't of posted this, I may wake up in cold sweats imagining her looming in my bedroom doorway with an ax. Perhaps I better rethink my habit of calling her little darling "Monkey Boy".

Barbara, if you're reading this, trust me, I understand. The poor little man is doing the best he can with what God gave him, and I apologize if I have been too harsh on the poor dear. In the future I will try to refrain from insulting his lack of brains and integrity, and will focus my disdain on the evil doers around him that have maliciously taken advantage of his mental handicaps.

Perhaps you could recommend Ala-non to those in his immmediate sphere, and they might know better how to treat the little dear.

Posted by: Pissed Off American at December 1, 2005 08:05 PM

She doesn't care about George. It's Jeb she's worried about. If the Bush name gets dragged through the mud thoroughly enough, the dynasty's next emperor won't be able to rise to the throne.

No doubt.

Country or La Familia Bush?
The choice for this crime family is simple.

That is EXACTLY what the Harriet Miers nomination was all about. You never can tell when your family might need a Supreme Court Justice.

Aunt Harriet, gushing over Boy George, could be trusted to do the family's bidding for years and years.

Posted by: koreyel at December 1, 2005 08:06 PM

She' gonna go Nurse Wratchet on their asses.
Rove will end up throwing Washington's marble bust through a West Wing window in order to escape her shock therapy.

Posted by: draculich
Young Babs = Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate.

Posted by: Bill Brock - Chicago at December 1, 2005 09:56 PM

A real man doesn't get his elderly Mom to clean up his messes.

Pathetic. At least Jonah Goldberg will understand.

Posted by: Tim B. at December 1, 2005 10:32 PM

This could be the stuff of Wagnerian opera - Bar as The Valkyrie?

Posted by: Jim Faith
Even with Ronnie in the early stages of Alzheimers Nancy made sure VP Bush never got close to power. She figures out, correctly, that allowing VP Bush to get close to power would cause complications for her husband. Nancy kept VP Bush castrated and at arms lenght throughout Ronnie's presidency. She also did not allow anyone on her husband's staff to get too powerful.

Laura seems more like the Pat Nixon type. She looks and acts like a Stepford Wife.

I don't think Babs will get anywhere with Cheney. Not with Lynne around. She has met her match with Lynne. They are both mean and vicious.

Posted by: Nan
I hope we will all keep in mind that today 4 MORE American soldiers were MURDERED in Iraq today by the actions of her coke sniffing AWOL COWARD of a son. 4 more DEAD. Four more families wracked BY GRIEF over the holidays. Four more mothers, fathers, wifes, sons or daughters who will mourn the UNNECCESARY death of their loved one.

And, as Cindy Sheehan would ask of this lying son of a bitch in the White House.....

WHAT IS THE NOBLE CAUSE THEY DIED FOR????

AND WHY WON'T THIS PATHETIC EXCUSE OF A MAN MEET WITH SHEEHAN AND ANSWER HER QUESTIONS???

(And, how many Iraqis DIED TODAY because of this coward's actions??? Oh, gee, thats right, we don't keep count.)

Posted by: Pissed Off American at December 1, 2005 11:51 PM

Cheney will be joining Dan Quayle and Dana Carvey on the dead-player pile...may turn up in a Moby video...

Posted by: Ace Loves Gary at December 1, 2005 11:55 PM

A lady who went to my church (in ALaska) that I knew casually dated GW while he was up there in the 70s. I didn't get there until 82, but I heard stories of the white powder flowing. I'm not talking about snow. And what did this lady
and GW do on dates? Drink of course! I also heard second hand that she was very worried when
he became President.

Posted by: librarylady at December 1, 2005 11:56 PM

First they have to get to the State of the Union address.

Posted by: ll
Richard M. Nixon said of this woman, "That is a woman who really knows how to hate!" Kind of makes a person wonder what she has in store for old Dick and CO. We are so lucky to be living in such times you can't pay for entertainment like this.

Posted by: Craig
hate to burst everyone's balloons, but according to the t.v. Dick Chicanery will be out giving three speeches for Bu$h this coming week, so it looks like Mr. insider has been fed a line of crap.

And BeelzaBaBs Bu$h apparently still has no influence with Georgie, he will keep the pals he runs with, screw his reputation, he's only there for the money and Dick delivers.

Posted by: Shannon
Babs is one mean bitch. I hold her personally responsible for the anti-intellectual position of the rest of her family--43 was reasonably well educated and had a head on his shoulders, but 41-W is dumb as a stump.

On the other hand, looking over the comments so far, I share the general sentiment that if there is anyone who has the balls to rip off Cheney's, it's Bab's. Of course, Lynne may already have them in a jar hidden somewhere right next to his heart in another jar. The good news, 43 is on anti-psychotics, Laura's on downers, Dick's on nitro--to say the least, and TurdBlossom's on a hot seat. Babs could still use something to fix her thyroid herself, but all she has to do is play keepaway with Cheney's meds and she can easily outlast him at that game. :-0

Posted by: buck turgidson
That blue haired battle ax is indeed a bitch and the Chimp didn't fall far from his tree. I think some of their problems are genetic.

Read Justin A. Frank's book "Bush on the Couch". The man's right - Basically the Chimp is a Sociopath and you can see right where he got it from.

Babs is a cross between the Borgias and Elizabeth Bathory. Bathory bathed in the blood of virgins.

Babs is contentedly bathing in the blood of the 1,100+ young men and women who have already died for her psycho son's lies.

This family is Pure Evil and one day they're gonna have to answer for it. I hope he ends up before the Hague on War Crimes charges.

Posted by: Rockin in Afghanistan

Andrew Bolt ASIO agent?

2005-12-02T20:47:00.000-08:00

I see this in the paper today...' ...longstanding ASIO agent and informant Denis Warner of the Melbourne Herald...'

Warner is retired and the Herald was folded into the Herald-Sun where Andrew Bolt now operate's today.

Bolt was reported to have been investigated by the AFP in relation to documents leaked about intelligence whistleblower, Andrew Wilkie. Bolt's counterparts in terms of leaking in the United States might be Novak and Jeff Guckert/Gannon.

Bob Carr/ Kim Beazley approved urban renewal

2005-12-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

FALLEN SAINTS

On Tuesday, St Agnes Place, Kennington - the oldest squatted
street in London - was evicted by bailiffs and hundreds of riot
police. On Wednesday the area including the park was still
cordoned off, and it is believed demolition was taking place.
Supporters turned up, but there was very little they could do due
to the sheer scale of the police operation. A wake for the death
of St Agnes Street was held at Lambeth Town Hall in the afternoon.
The eviction took a full twelve hours with the last few remaining
residents brutally beaten by the cops, resulting in one losing
consciousness and being taken away by ambulance.

Police also evicted the Pirate TV bus, despite being unable to
find anything wrong with the paperwork or the bus, except that it
couldn't start. The cops instructed it be towed away but luckily
the boys from the recovery firm managed to get it going and save
it from the police compound.

Not content with evicting a whole street, police and bailiffs then
evicted a squat in nearby Bolton Crescent, despite the fact the
court case for the eviction was not due to be held till 16th
December, making the eviction illegal: nice to see the boys in
blue upholding the law.

There was predictably little mainstream coverage of the eviction,
and the journos around were "embedded" with the police, and only
shown what the police chose to show. The eviction marks the ends
of the thirty year old vibrant community and leaves 150 people
homeless with winter already here. It will instead be replaced by
a soulless estate and a sports centre. It is reckoned that "unpaid
rent" on the properties amounted to £4m over the years and that,
according to Lambeth Council, they were "paying nothing to the
community" - as if paying rent for your home to some landlord was
more important than actually being a thriving community not based
on capitalist exploitation. www.stagnesplace.net

Johhny Bega

2005-12-02T19:33:00.000-08:00

A MEETING to determine the degree of concern felt within the community regarding the Government's proposed changes to the Anti-terrorism Bill will be held in the Bega Town Hall next Friday, December 9.

A meeting in Bermagui last weekend was well attended with people from as far afield as Batemans Bay and Pambula.

The meeting, convened by Laurel Lloyd-Jones, the executive director of the Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust, (a philanthropic foundation that works for human rights, social justice, the environment and the care of all people), was in response to anxiety expressed by many people regarding the changes and the effect that they may have on individual freedoms in this country.

The meeting was unanimous in the decision that a larger public meeting should be held as a matter of urgency to the public to be better informed regarding the consequences of the new bill.
The meeting will be held next Friday, December 9, at Bega Town Hall at 5.30pm.

Mrs Lloyd-Jones said she believed the proposed changes to the bill would change the texture of Australian society as we know it.

"My deep concern is that so many people are unaware of just how these new laws will impact upon their lives and their families," she said.

"No longer will evidence be required in order to imprison, detain and control a citizen, merely suspicion will be sufficient, and habeas corpus (the requirement to show cause) will be removed.

"Individuals will be required to 'dob-in' family, friends, or colleagues, and provide records about people.

"Such people will not be allowed to disclose this to their immediate family members or they will be liable to imprisonment for up to seven years therefore encouraging a public culture of secrecy and distrust.

"One can imagine the problems this would create in murder or criminal abduction cases as the new laws would make the local police, who will be told nothing, unlikely to act in the critical hours and days after such events as they could assume that such people were being detained under these new laws.

"Also, should one parent be informed, then they are unable to inform the other without being subject to imprisonment, and for example, should a detained person fail to appear at a Centrelink office then the family would lose their benefits.

"The Australian Federal Police are not required to reveal the reason for preventative detention of citizens and a person may be locked up for days or months without knowing why.

"A detained person will be allowed to contact one family member, or an employer to state 'I am safe but unable to be contacted'.

"Should that person disclose anything regarding this, they also may be imprisoned.

"No longer will an Australian citizen have the right to a lawyer of choice and all client-lawyer communication will be monitored.

"These laws will act to suppress public comment which is unfavourable to government policies or actions and under the proposed sedition laws anyone criticising the government will be subject to arrest.

"This applies to journalists, writers, cartoonists, comedy satirists and public speech or written comment by any Australian citizen."

Mrs Lloyd-Jones said that the Government's current track record and the complete rejection and ridicule of any opposing comments about Government policies by well qualified experienced and respected people within our community did not provide us with any confidence.

"The potential for future misuse and political manipulation and control of the Australian public and the media is a matter which should concern us all at this time," she said.

Burmese torture horror's

2005-12-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Prisoners reveal horror of torture in Burma - By Sebastien Berger in Mae Sot.
Torture techniques used by Burma's security services to terrorise the regime's opponents are revealed in unprecedented detail in a report released today.

Based on the testimony of 35 former political prisoners, it describes beatings, electric shocks, burning with lighters, water tortures and attempts to use dogs to rape male prisoners.

Aye Aye Moe with pictures of the regime's prisoners
Aye Aye Moe was arrested and beaten for visiting her brother

"I can forgive my torturers everything but the sexual abuse," said a victim of the last method. "No religion permits such an act. It has destroyed my self-esteem, my dignity."

Another man was told by his tormentors: "Moe Aye, think carefully and tell us the truth. If you don't, we will make you a homosexual."

The document is published as the UN Security Council prepares to debate Burma for the first time at the request of the US, which specifically cited the country's 1,100 political prisoners.

The most prominent prisoner is Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy leader. This week, the Nobel peace prize winner had her house arrest extended for another six months.

The new report on torture was compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), an exile group based in Mae Sot, just over the Thai border.

"The military regime seeks not only to break down the identity of former political prisoners, but also to make them walking advertisements for the consequences of speaking out against the regime," it says.

"Many former political prisoners repeatedly explain that once they are a political prisoner, they are always a political prisoner."

One stress position used to torture victims it describes is "the aeroplane", whereby prisoners balance on one foot holding out their arms and other leg.

Another is "the motorcycle", where they must balance on the balls of their feet, often with pins beneath their feet, while making engine noises.

A third, "the Semigwa dance", is based on a traditional Burmese performance but involves crawling over gravel on knees and elbows.

Women are not exempt and have been threatened with rape. One female prisoner quoted in the report said: "The officer slapped me a number of times and other officers punched me on the back.

"After that, he threatened that I shouldn't forget I was a virgin. This terrified me more than the beatings."

One of those interviewed for the report, Myo Myint, yesterday described his ordeal in an interview in Mae Sot.

As a Burmese soldier, he lost a foot, hand and most of his remaining fingers fighting Communist insurgents.

But his military record was no defence once he turned against the government.

"As soon as they arrested me they sent me to an interrogation centre," he said. "They punched and hit my face and chest, then they put me on the see-saw."

Tied to what would normally be a playground toy, he was laid head-down and beaten for hours, until his skull pounded with the pressure of blood.

"They showed me the people who had been beaten, all bloody. One of my colleagues was beaten to death."

Released in 1997, he was re-arrested within a month. "The second time was worse. At first they didn't say anything, they just tied me up, kicked and hit me. For 11 days I was not allowed to sleep.

"An iron bar was rolled along my shin until the skin ripped - it really hurt."

Threatened with a third arrest earlier this year and unable to face any more torture, he fled.

Aye Aye Moe, who was not involved in politics but arrested aged 23 after visiting her activist brother, was subjected to surreal questioning and kicked in the breasts and stomach.

"I asked them why I had been arrested," she said. "They asked me why I was there."

A Western diplomat in Rangoon said it was widely known that torture was used by the military regime but its extent was unclear.

While the report covers events dating back to 1988 and seeks to extend the definition of torture to include poor prison conditions and healthcare, Bo Kyi, joint secretary of the AAPP, pointed out that an NLD member was beaten to death earlier this year.

No one at Burma's ministry of information was available to comment yesterday.

Chinese Commie Torture technique's

2005-12-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

BEIJING — Fu Minhai was questioned by police in Heilongjiang province nearly a decade ago along with several others on suspicion of theft, burglary and rape. After eleven days in custody and massive damage to his kidneys and related soft tissue, the 24-year-old was dead.

Alleged torture in Chinese police custody is not unusual. But in a rare legal victory for victims and their families, a court in September found two officers, Tan Xiaobo and Song Lintao, guilty of extracting a confession from Fu by force and sentenced them to seven years in prison.

"The family came under a lot of pressure for bringing this case," said Peng Bai, the Fus' attorney and a member of the Heilongjiang Far East Group law firm. "Ultimately, though, the fact could not be denied that he died because of police torture."

In another rare move, Beijing has allowed the United Nations' special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, to conduct an 11-day inspection tour of Chinese prisons, mental hospitals and other detention facilities.

The trip, which wraps up Friday, is the culmination of a decade-long U.N. effort to send a representative to China, an effort frustrated by repeated excuses. Nowak, an Austrian law professor, said earlier that he expected to have broad access to facilities and prisoners.

China outlawed torture in 1996, but activists and lawyers say the practice remains widespread. This has led some to question why the communist government would allow Nowak's potentially embarrassing visit to take place now.

Analysts say several factors appear to be at work.

"They've played hide-and-seek with the U.N. for over a decade," said Nicolas Becquelin, Hong Kong-based research director with Human Rights in China, a civic group. "The fact that the visit has gone ahead shows it has top support."

Allowing outside scrutiny is part of a broader effort to make the Chinese legal system more accountable and reputable. The hope is that the growing social frustration over land seizures, corruption and the economic gap between rich and poor can be swept off the streets and into the courts, where it is less threatening to Communist Party rule. Beijing reported 74,000 protests across the country last year, up from 58,000 in 2003.

Reformist elements in the police force, led by Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang, also are keen to see their ranks become more professional, analysts say. A series of embarrassing cases has undercut the force's reputation, the analysts add, whereas broader public support would help the police garner bigger budgets at a time when crime rates are rising and social pressures are becoming increasingly complex.

The visit also may have propaganda value. China has allowed the tour after one of its harshest human rights critics, the United States, imposed so many conditions ahead of a similar inspection of U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that Nowak refused to go. It also comes as the Bush administration is voicing opposition to a measure introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would bar cruel or degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.

Beijing also has an interest in burnishing its international reputation at a time when critics have used its human rights record to justify a continued European ban on the sale of weapons to China. Domestically, the government is aware that its legitimacy increasingly depends on persuasion and the delivery of social services rather than force.

Although the visit and China's ratification of the U.N. Convention Against Torture represent a start, experts do not expect significant change on the ground anytime soon. China has a host of impressive laws and regulations that are not enforced, and local areas have a centuries-old tradition of resisting central control.

Human rights activists say torture is a crutch for police not accustomed to proving their cases. Local public security bureaus traditionally have dominated the criminal justice system, a situation summed up by a Chinese expression: "The police cook the rice, the prosecutor delivers the rice and the court eats the rice." Legal experts say local officials would resist careful review of their methods by a more vigilant judiciary.

Torture also is deeply entrenched under a system heavily reliant on confessions and rapid-fire justice to exert control. As far back as the 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party had initiated a "cleansing anti-revolutionaries" movement under which party members were arrested, beaten and fed chili peppers until they confessed and implicated others, according to a new biography of Mao Tse-tung.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences legal scholar Chen Yunsheng outlined in a 2000 book various forms of torture used more recently. These included beatings with fists, boots and batons, sometimes involving cases of pregnant women losing their babies; false executions using unloaded guns; force-feeding of excrement; and "riding the motorcycle," in which victims are ordered to assume a crouching martial arts position that becomes extremely painful over a prolonged period.

The nine-year battle for justice by the Fu family, ending in the conviction of the two policemen, required the victim's parents to visit dozens of government offices and make repeated visits to Beijing from their home in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. To make ends meet, they often slept under bridges on their trips.

According to the Shenghuo Bao newspaper, court documents and the family's lawyer, Fu Minhai was picked up by the police Jan. 26, 1996. The procurator's investigation found that the policemen, Tan and Song, beat Fu with a wooden baton, damaging his arms, legs, lower back and kidneys. A doctor surnamed Li who saw Fu shortly before his death told a local newspaper that the police refused to transfer the prisoner to the hospital.

Fu's older brother was allowed to visit him Feb. 6. The authorities reportedly told the brother that Fu was gravely ill and no longer able to urinate, but that he could be saved if they received a payoff.

"I can't take it anymore," Fu reportedly said to his brother. "Tan and Song beat me most ruthlessly."

After much pleading by the brother, Fu was transferred to a hospital, where he died that evening of his injuries. The hospital report cited acute kidney failure, soft-tissue damage and degeneration of the heart as the cause of death.

The family is now fighting for compensation and believes the seven-year sentences handed down by the Yichun People's Court were too light given the nature of the crime.

In a further twist, one of the two defendants has so far evaded the law. Seven months before the final decision was handed down, Tan escaped from a fourth-floor lavatory at the courthouse.

Those in favor of reform say cases such as this successful prosecution and the visit by the U.N. rapporteur are hopeful signs, but more needs to be done.

"There's a misperception that when police commit a crime, it's just a minor mistake," said Peng, the Fu family's attorney. "We need more protection for victims and independent third parties to keep the government clean.

"There are many torture cases in China, and many are discovered, but the judgment is often insufficient," he added. "The real challenge is to restructure the system and change old ways of thinking."

Post Platformism Please!

2005-12-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

For Post-Left Anarchism and Green Anarchy

Post-left anarchism is the only essential hyphenated anarchism I can see the need for at the moment in the West. ( Even though I'm partial to the tag ' Pan-anarchist'. ) Post-left anarchism appears necessary in the Anglosphere imho especially because some anarchists are ignorant about their principles.
Let's be very clear about why we are not Leftists no matter how much DNA we share - for the same reason we are not Chimpanzee's...or slime mould.
The term 'Left' arose during the French Revolution. During one of the earliest representational political chambers those who sat on the right generally represented the ' Ancien regime' or reactionaries and conservatives. The forward looking, the progressive and the radical reformists sat on the Left.
Now as anarchists have consistantly opposed representational politics in favour of direct action and where meetings and decisions are required anarchists call for revocable, recallable rotatable delegates WITHOUT VOTING POWERS to report back to smaller constituent assemblies and individual's. This is far closer to direct democracy and consensus and is ( or should be ) the default anarchist ' political' position.
Clearly it is neither ' left' nor ' right' as it is NON REPRESENTATIONAL.
' No God - No Master '
The great Mahknovista movement of South Central Ukraine was not ' Left'.
Most of the Left back then was bourgeois and urban. ( Still is )
The great Spanish peoples revolution was not left from the July 1936 battle for Barcelona to November when a some of the most prominent anarchists felt the need to ally with the Left ( and the state ) Most anarchists continued to aquit themselves well in spite of the mistakes made by some ' leader's' , some of whom were bourgeois and urban.
The point needs to be made again and again that the task of liberating and emancipating the peasant's is the task for the peasant's themselves.
The Left has invariably been urban and bourgeois ( middle class ) from the start and so also been representational as far as the vast majority of the population is concerned.
A quick word on the terms ' Socialist' and ' Communist'. It has long been mantained that the term ' Anarcho-socialist' was a stupid redundancy - ALL anarchists being socialists ( Libertarian - socialists )
You might think the same logic applies to the redundancy that is ' Anarcho-communist' , however this is contested by some of the Neo-Marxists splitters, wreckers and entryists in the movement today.
Suffice to note for now that a great debate raged between the Wars about the differences between ' socialism' and ' communism'. In the end it was agreed that there were NO substantative differences worth spit.

Following WW2 it was noted that ANY class could be revolutionary in its time and place...and also that trad anarcho-syndicalism had it's work cut out for it in a booming Anglo and Eurosphere.
Post-left anarchism was given it's modern boost by the bankrupt and banal activities of ' Municipalists' in the seventies and eighties who wanted to run for local elections and ' Workerists' who wanted to revive anarcho-syndicalism ( using a violent electric storm presumably ).
These dead end's and cul-de-sac's were clearly not progressing anarchist theory and praxis in the Anglosphere.
Post-left anarchism did because it worked in with Green anarchy, then taking off from the fag end of the Hippie era.
Green anarchy brings insights from biology, anthropology, Sociology, molecular physic's, ecology, ergonomics, indigenous studies, appropriate technology studies and many other varied specialized fields all networked and interacting and all given massive impetus by, first PUNK ROCK; DYI PUNK and then much later the by the first internet.
Post-left anarchism that is based on science is no easy strawman for leftists to push over. Post-left anarchism is revolutionary not just against the god and the state but also the entire rationale for clapped out and staggering bankrupt, stale and flat Leftism.
The biggest most sustained leftist challenge to post-left anarchism is a sour resentful and throuroughly Leninist sort of neo-marxism called ' Anarchist-communism' also known as ' Platformism'. It's critiques buy into the right wing strawman image of ' Primitivism' and also attack revolutionary anarchism in other ways. By pouring scorn on all the great Propaganda of the deed anarchists for example. These dogmatic, leftist, workerist purists owe more than a little to the Trotskyist roots many of them share.
The original Leninists were pretty good at entryism too!
Still anarchism has survived the worst red-fascist Leninism and brown-fascist Hitlerism could throw at it. A few ' dead-enders' won't hold us back now. Post-left anarchists are pragmatist's and practical and inventive in the finest inventive Yankee, Aussi, Irish sense.
They want to know what will work to take out god and the state tomorrow. And not just make that ' work' in their revolution of everyday life but also they want to play without retraint and live without dead time.
Now we have the Freenet's and Wildnet's the sky's the limit for an unhyphented inclusive BIG BROTHEL, sorry, BIG TENT anarchism that can, not only regain the great peak's we achieved in 1936 but go on to scale even greater heights. The world anarchist revolution eluded us then but thats no matter...tomorrow we'll run faster...stretch out our arms farther.

Enough rope

2005-12-02T17:12:00.000-08:00

We're giving them enough rope - Sian Powell, Jakarta correspondent December 03, 2005

NGUYEN Tuong Van's execution in Singapore yesterday morning will shine a revealing light on capital punishment in Asia and on Australia's failure to condemn all death sentences in all cases.

In the months leading to his execution, attention focused on Australia's diplomatic and judicial efforts to prevent Australians following in Van's tragic footsteps. Twelve Australians are on trial across the world on charges that carry the death penalty. A further two have already been convicted and await their fate.

Yet the effort to block this terrible march to execution has been hampered, activists say, by the Australian Government's tacit approval of the death sentence for the Bali bombers and those convicted of bombing the Australian embassy in Jakarta.

Although the Australian Government recently won reprieves for two Australians sentenced to death in Vietnam, its position on the Bali bombers will have far more resonance in Indonesia, where nine Australians are on trial for heroin smuggling, a crime that carries the death penalty.

Legal experts note, too, that there is room to improve the fate of those who will be arrested in the future. Agreements on consular access could be overhauled to ensure embassies are immediately told of the arrests of all Australians. And Australia could recommend expert lawyers rather than simply providing a list.

Singapore has perhaps the world's highest rate of executions per capita. Serious drug convictions carry mandatory sentences, giving judges no latitude for leniency. Clemency is rare. Death sentences have been commuted to life in prison perhaps six times since Singapore's independence, activists say. Eleventh-hour pleas for Van's life left the Singapore Government unmoved.

Amnesty International's Tim Goodwin says Singaporeans may doubt the strength of Australia's opposition. The Straits Times, a newspaper known to publish the Government's line, has questioned Australia's abhorrence of the death penalty, Goodwin says, noting it seems to apply only to Australians on death row, not to those of other races, such as the Bali bombers.

"Our concern is with the Government's approach. There must be universal and principled opposition to the death penalty," Goodwin says.

The death sentences for Bali bombers Mukhlas, Amrozi and Imam Samudra won tacit approval in Australia, from the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister among others.

"It's not, of course, the policy of the Australian Government to support the death penalty, but in these particular circumstances we won't be making any representations against the sentence," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said following Samudra's death sentence in 2003.

These sentiments were echoed after the sentences of Ahmad Hasan and Rois over the Australian embassy bombing in Jakarta last year. "Whatever we may think about the death penalty, the fact that these people have been convicted is a very good thing," Downer said when Hasan was sentenced to death this year.

While the stance probably played well in ordinary Australian living rooms, it may prove a hindrance in the battle to win clemency for the Australians now on death row.

Indonesians have long memories for Australian hypocrisy and most Australian politicians know how sensitive Indonesian opinion can be; John Howard warned drugs convict Michelle Leslie to keep her Bali story to herself in case she influenced the trials of other Australians in Indonesia. Eight Australian men and one Australian woman - the so-called Bali nine - will almost certainly be convicted for heroin smuggling and perhaps sentenced to death.

Indonesia has been very tough on drug crimes recently. Two Thais and an Indian were executed for drug crimes last year in Indonesia, and there is a growing clamour for ever-tougher punishments. Agitators picketed drug smuggler Schapelle Corby's trial in Bali, demanding her execution. If the nine Australians are spared, there will be an outcry in Indonesia, and there is little doubt Australian reaction to the Bali bombers' death sentence will be revisited.

Kevin O'Rourke, from the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, says it's likely Australian politicians will regret their failure to condemn the Bali bombers' death sentences.

"Those comments, particularly, were unfortunate to say the least," he says. "Anything that looks as though Australia is giving tacit support to the death penalty should be avoided."

The death penalty is in retreat across the world but has remained a force in Asia. In Thailand, the death-row population has tripled during the past two to three years. In Indonesia, the Government has resumed executions after a years-long hiatus and the numbers on death row keep growing.

While it may be tempting for politicians to make an exception for terrorists, it should be remembered that 30-year-old Sydneysider Tallaal Adrey is on trial on terrorism charges in Kuwait. If convicted, he is likely to be sentenced to death. Adelaide man David Hicks has been languishing for years without trial in Guantanamo Bay, accused of terrorism. His fate is unclear. Yet another Australian is on trial for murder in Lebanon and could also face execution.

Most Australians facing the death penalty, though, have been charged over drug crimes. Two Australians are on death row for drug crimes in Vietnam, 46-year-old Melbourne man Mai Cong Thanh and 45-year-old Sydney permanent resident Nguyen Van Chinh. Sydneysider Trinh Huu, 56, is on trial in Ho Chi Minh City on drug charges that carry the death penalty.

Addressing slowly mounting Australian anger over Van, Downer has repeatedly said how hard the Australian Government worked to persuade the Singaporeans to grant the young man clemency.

Goodwin agrees the Government made repeated representations to Singapore, especially after public and media pressure began to mount.

However, some activists remain unsure if sufficient pressure was applied early enough and expert lawyers retained in time, which could be a key point, especially with Singapore's mandatory sentencing.

A spokesman for the Foreign Minister says Australia set to work for Van from the start: "Our work began more than two years ago when he was first arrested, when we made representations to the Singaporeans to have him charged with a lesser charge that didn't carry the death penalty. Our representations have continued at the highest level ever since."

However, O'Rourke, among others, has experience of at least one case in which consular representatives weren't immediately told of an Australian's arrest and counsel wasn't appointed until after the accused had signed a statement, perhaps as long as 24 hours after his arrest. Gordon Vuong, then 16, arrested with narcotics in Cambodia, was convicted this year and sentenced to 13 years' jail.

Rod Smith, of the Department of Foreign Affairs' consular division, says an international convention requires all signatory nations to inform consular authorities "without delay" of arrests. "In the Cambodian case you refer to, the embassy was advised of the person's arrest and granted access within 18 hours, and a consular officer was present while he was interviewed by police," Smith says.

O'Rourke believes justice would be better served if the Australian Government developed multilateral protocols that included time frames for the notification of consular officers (for instance, within an hour of arrest), and regulations that all interrogations must wait until a lawyer is present.

He also believes that consular officers should be able to advise on which lawyers should be retained. At the moment all they can do is offer a list of English-speaking lawyers, they cannot advise which are the best.

"It's a bit like handing over the Yellow Pages and saying: 'How about one of these?"' O'Rourke says. "They can't say who is bad, who is good, who will be able to help you."

Kay Danes, who spent 10 months in a Laotian prison on charges that were later dropped and who now works with the Foreign Prisoner Support Service, worries that Van's execution will signal worse to come.

"I'm worried about what happens, and what message that sends to Indonesia," she says. "In my own case, the Australian Government certainly bent over backwards. We [Danes and her husband, Kerry] got tremendous support, but I'm starting to think it depends on what you're detained for. Some aren't getting the same treatment.

"I just wish our Government would have a bit of backbone, negotiate a bit harder. The US went in and cleaned their people out of Thai jails.

"The Brits got theirs out of Guantanamo Bay. What are we? The deputy bloody sheriff?"

Filthy corrupt police lie all the time

2005-12-02T17:02:00.000-08:00

SUEZANNE Hayman served 3 1/2 years' jail on a drug-smuggling confession that a corrupt police officer later told the Wood royal commission was "straight fiction".

The New Zealand-born woman was raising three teenage children in Sydney at the time of her arrest in 1986, but in 1992 - a year after completing much of her sentence in maximum security - the punishment continued. She was deported over the conviction of conspiracy to import heroin.

Seven years since the sham conviction was quashed and 13 years since being forced to separate from her children and grandchildren and return to New Zealand, Ms Hayman, 56, was told this week she was no longer blackbanned from returning to Australia.

"It's just been horrendous, from the first step that (policeman) took," Ms Hayman said on the phone from her home at Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand.

When an Immigration Department official called on Tuesday night to give her the news, it was the final victory in a battle that separated her from her children when she was sent to Mulawa women's prison in western Sydney in 1988.

She lived for a year in Sydney after her release and met her future husband, Chris Hayman, but was deported on a 24-hour passport. "It was done very quickly and very maliciously, in front of my family and in front of my children. It came as an absolute shock," she said.

In 1995, Detective Sergeant Paul William Deaves admitted that the unsigned confession in which she had admitted to importing heroin from Thailand was a fabrication.

After the conviction was quashed in 1998, she sued the NSW and federal police over wrongful imprisonment and malicious prosecution. All she would say of the confidential settlement was that she was happy.

Ms Hayman's three children and their families have all moved to live within an hour of her Kerikeri property and she has no plans to settle back in Australia, but she can now return for her stepson's wedding after Christmas.

"Everything's fine now, everything's great. It's like a chain being taken off my neck," she said.

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone apologised for the delay in lifting the ban.

Deaves told the Wood royal commission that police had "made our mind up" to charge her, and that the confession was "straight fiction". In exchange for his admissions, Deaves was granted immunity from prosecution.

Police telling Porkies

2005-12-02T16:51:00.000-08:00

To grab more power...UK case for holding terror suspects 'misleading'

The UK government's stated case for holding terror suspects longer than 14 days without charge is misleading, according to a top computer security specialist.

When home secretary Charles Clarke was trying to persuade the House of Commons to extend the detention period to 90 days, he argued that this was needed to break into encrypted files on suspects' computers. MPs voted against the government's planned increase, but backed a compromise 28-day limit.

But Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge, says that breaking into highly encrypted material is no longer possible. "You find the key lying around, or you give up."

Police investigators might usefully "spend a couple of days tossing a dictionary at the encryption software", he says. This could provide access to a file containing the encryption key itself, but only if the suspect had been careless enough to choose an easily guessed password to protect it.

Investigators might then spend a few more days trawling through the hard disc for passwords and clues, he adds. They would hunt, for example, for copies of the key left behind in the "swap file" that many computers use when they run out of memory. But all this could be done within the existing 14-day limit.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Thomas of Gresford has told New Scientist that he will raise the issue when the bill is discussed in parliamentary committee next week.

Bush to invade Antigua?

2005-12-02T16:46:00.000-08:00

Antigua to develop Internet gambling - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. JOHN'S, Antigua -- Antigua will continue developing its Internet gambling industry despite pressure from the United States to prohibit the practice, the finance minister said Wednesday.
Finance Minister Errol Cort said at least 10 new online gambling companies will open on the Caribbean island next year, joining 14 that already have been granted operating licenses.
Cort said the new companies will generate some 500 new jobs and more than $2 million in gambling licenses fees.
The United States contends that Internet gambling should be prohibited because it violates some state laws. Antigua says the U.S. position is contrary to global trade rules.
Antigua's has taken the dispute to the World Trade Organization, which has yet to rule on the matter.
Addressing Parliament during his annual budget presentation, Cort said the government will tightly regulate Internet gambling to meet "the most stringent international ... practices."

Orally men

2005-12-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

Bill O'Reilly's with us!...'...against the "hateful liars" who "spit out" "blatant propaganda" that is "picked up by the mainstream media, and rammed down the public's throat."

But the bromide-heavy speech that President George W. Bush gave yesterday at the Naval Academy presents a clear strategy for quagmire and eventual disaster. Despite the gathering storm of opposition to his approach to the war in Iraq, the speech was bereft of new ideas, calling to mind the words of Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

"My whole life I've lived above board," Corrupt crony capitalist Cunningham pleaded. "I've never even smoked a marijuana cigarette."

The Duke may not have treated his lungs with ganja, but he did attend one of the most infamous orgies in Pentagon history, the 1991 Tailhook Symposium in Las Vegas, the annual gathering of Navy flyers, Pentagon bigwigs, congressional kingpins and defense contractors. Over the course of that September weekend at the Vegas Hilton, at least 83 women were stripped, forced to run a gauntlet of drunken, groping pilots, and sexually molested, with some being forced to "ride the butt rodeo", a Tailhook euphemism for having a pilot bite your buttocks until you can shake yourself free.

KKK street

2005-12-02T04:16:00.000-08:00

Abramoff, lobbyists linked to troubled multibillion-dollar Homeland Security contract
John Byrne
It was supposed to be “the deal of the century.”

The Transportation Security Administration awarded a $1 billion contract to Unisys to devise a cutting-edge computer network linking hundreds of airports to the TSA’s state-of-the-art security centers. The contract was ideal, they argued, because if the company failed to meet its goals, Unisys would pay money back to the agency.

It didn’t turn out that way. In October, the Washington Post revealed the Pennsylvania-based information services company had overcharged the government for a whopping 117,000 hours -- billing $131 an hour for employees who were paid less than half that amount. Officials now see the project costing taxpayers as much as $3 billion.
Unisys’ prime lobbyists? A team from the Greenberg Traurig lawfirm led by Neil Volz, former chief of staff to Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) -- which included indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

RAW STORY has found that Unisys acquired the contract, said riddled with fraud, in a process that included backroom dealings and almost no competitive bidding, and former Abramoff associates say his lobbyists had a hand in the deal. The investigation also found that the man who brokered the TSA deal, a company president, was later a buyer of Abramoff’s posh Washington restaurant.

According to campaign finance filings, Volz’s team included seven staffers – among them individuals now under scrutiny in various probes, including Abramoff. Two Senate committees are currently investigating Abramoff, an erstwhile conservative superlobbyist who was indicted in Florida for conspiracy and wire fraud.

Details of Volz’s role are vague. Washington Business Forward reported that the firm listed Unisys as a client in October 2002. The TSA contract was awarded in August of that year.

Unisys, however, did not register Greenberg Traurig as a lobbyist until January of 2003, six months after the TSA contract. Corporations are not required to register if they are lobbying executive branch agencies below the level of political appointees.

Associates say Abramoff firm lobbied for contract

According to former associates, Volz and his team were charged with acquisition of government contracts and not with legislative work. One associate confirmed that Greenberg lobbyists had helped Unisys acquire the TSA contract but asserted that there had not seemed to be anything 'suspicious' about Abramoff's work. Another denied Abramoff had a role but was less confident about the role of Greenberg's other lobbyists.

Greenberg Traurig declined to comment.

Unisys paid Greenberg Traurig $596,000 in 2003 and 2004; Greenberg is the highest-paid lobbying firm the company has retained since 1998. A spokesman for Abramoff declined to comment.

Unisys spokesman Guy Esnouf told RAW STORY the firm had decided not to disclose the dates they retained Abramoff’s firm or any information regarding their interaction.

“I wouldn’t be able to comment at all,” Esnouf said.

This September, Unisys publicly lauded Greenberg for their lobbying work – an anomaly in the post- Abramoff climate. According to Influence Magazine, the firm remains a “satisfied customer.”

The lead broker of Unisys' TSA bid, now-president of Unisys' public sector division Greg Baroni, bought a share of bought Abramoff’s Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant, Signatures, when the lobbyist sold it in July of this year. He was promoted to corporate vice president by the company’s board in 2004.

A sweetheart deal

A report at the time stated some of the TSA’s decision making in awarding the contract involved “backroom negotiations.” The deal was not awarded using traditional competitive bidding.

Instead, the project was awarded from a pool of pre-qualified corporate “partners” selected under Information Technology Omnibus Procurement II, a government-wide General Services Administration acquisition contract. Only fourteen companies were qualified for the work under the terms of the task order.

As Information Technology partners, Unisys and Electronic Data Systems Corp. were the only firms to compete. According to an article in GovExec.com, a government watchdog, “insiders said Unisys had the inside track.”

Unisys was awarded the contract in August 2002. Celebrations were muted, however, since TSA was mired in a budget dispute. Two weeks earlier, the Office of Management and Budget had frozen funding for various technology projects. So a week later, according to GovExec, officials from “TSA and the White House met on a Sunday night in Baroni's office.” Within 48 hours, administration officials had given the green light to unfreeze TSA's budget.

At the time, the chief of staff to the General Services Administration was David Safavian, a former Abramoff colleague and later chief of federal procurement who was arrested in September for obstructing an investigation into the Abramoff's attempts to buy government property.

Safavian’s attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, said her client had no interaction with Unisys and was not in a position to unfreeze TSA's budget.

Lobbying reports compiled by the Center for Public Integrity show Unisys paid Greenberg $480,000 in 2003 and $116,000 in 2004.

A troubled history

Unisys has a history of legal trouble with regard to federal contracts. In 1991, Unisys pled guilty in U.S. District Court to using fraud, bribery and illegal campaign contributions to obtain billions of dollars in defense contracts. An investigation the Justice Department started in 1986 known as Operation Ill Wind resulted in the prosecution of seven companies, nine government officials and 42 individuals; Unisys' fines and penalties totaled up to $190 million.

Nine Unisys employees were indicted and pled guilty to using fraudulent practices to obtain government contracts. The company and its predecessor, mainframe computer manufacturer Sperry Corp., billed the government $17 million in consulting fees, diverted money to offshore accounts, and used the money to bribe Pentagon officials.

The product of a 1986 merger between Sperry Corporation and Burroughs, Unisys maintains offices in nearly every U.S. state and more than 60 countries. They say they're happy with Greenberg's work, now that the lobby shop has dismissed Abramoff from their stables.

"As long as they terminated the relationship [with Abramoff], that was my principal concern," Unisys vice president of government relations David Pingree told Influence Magazine.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Fortune 500 company has accrued some $10.7 billion in federal contracts since 1990, and has worked with the CIA, the EPA and the Navy among myriad other government agencies.

Jason Leopold contributed reporting for this article. RAW Story.

Brutal and Backward Amerikkka

2005-12-02T03:52:00.000-08:00

Incident at Oglala, 30 Years Later - The Long Struggle of Leonard Peltier

By JOE ALLEN and PAUL D'AMATO

Leonard Peltier, one of America's longest-serving political prisoners, turned sixty-one-years-old on September 12, 2005. Peltier has spent nearly thirty years in federal prison, the result of one of the most infamous political frame-ups in modern U.S. history. He was convicted of killing two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Believing he could not receive a fair trial in the U.S., he fled to Canada. The Canadian government extradited him in 1976, and he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to two life terms in 1977.

Many of today's progressive-minded people will find themselves unfamiliar with the details as well as the significance of the Peltier case. This is a tragedy, given the widespread opposition to the Patriot Act and the heightened fear of political repression by opponents of the Bush administration. The rush of events since 9/11, instead of bringing the Peltier case back into focus, seems to have pushed it further into the margins of political consciousness, where it has unfortunately been for two decades. This is something that needs to be corrected.

Leonard Peltier, a citizen of the Lakota and Anishinabe nations, was an active member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the early 1970s in the upper Midwest, where he was born, and on the West Coast, where he lived and worked off-and-on for several years. AIM was a product of the militant struggles of the 1960s against racism and the Vietnam War (many of its members were Vietnam Veterans). Its most important leaders during the seventies-Dennis Banks and Russell Means-were inspired by the civil rights movement and, more importantly, the Black Panthers. Formed in 1968 by Anishinabe Indian activists in Minneapolis, AIM quickly sprouted chapters across the country, and moved from civil rights to issues of Indian sovereignty and pride.

Two events put AIM on the map. In 1972, on the eve of Richard Nixon's landslide reelection to the presidency, AIM led a nationwide caravan, called the "Trail of Broken Treaties," that culminated in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. The BIA had long been a source of hatred for its flagrant embezzlement of funds that were supposed to go to impoverished Native Americans and for its legalizing of the theft of reservation land.

The following year, at the request of its residents, AIM led the armed occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation, the site of the historic massacre of Sioux men, women, and children in 1890. The event marked the coming together of urban Indian radicals with reservation traditionals who resented the corruption and abuse of the BIA-sponsored tribal administration, as well as its denigration of native traditions. During the ensuing seventy-one-day standoff, BIA police, FBI, and U.S. military fired 500,000 rounds of ammunition at the entrenched Indian encampment, killing two AIM members. While the siege provided little in tangible concessions from the federal government, it succeeded in publicizing AIM and generated a surge of popular interest in Native American issues and history. It also resulted in AIM becoming a greater target of ferocious government repression.

The FBI led the attack on AIM as part of its Counter Intelligence Program (COINTEPRO), begun in the mid-1960s under its director J. Edgar Hoover, and used with terrifying effectiveness against the Black Panther Party. COINTELPRO employed many dirty tricks against its targets including wiretapping, assassination, and the use of agents provocateurs-all in coordination with state and local police forces. The goal, according to FBI documents, was to "neutralize" the leadership. AIM members across the country faced constant harassment and frame-ups that drained the organization's resources and, eventually, broke its leadership. One of the AIM members caught up in this dragnet was Leonard Peltier.

During Wounded Knee II, Pine Ridge Tribal Chair Dickie Wilson formed the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (literally and boastfully GOON), paid for with a $62,000 BIA stipend, and launched a reign of terror on AIM and its supporters at Pine Ridge. Not by coincidence, at this time the BIA was interested in using Wilson to sign over a portion of the reservation known to be rich in uranium and molybdenum to the U.S. Forest Service. >From 1973 to 1976, more than sixty AIM members and supporters, many of them traditionals, were murdered without a finger lifted by the state government or the FBI to investigate their deaths. A new generation of rabidly racist and self-proclaimed "Indian fighters" emerged in South Dakota led by William Janklow, who declared: "The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to the AIM leaders' heads and pull the trigger." He would eventually become South Dakota's attorney general, governor, and, later, the state's only congressman. (Last year, Janklow finally stepped down from his House seat after he was convicted and sentenced to 100 days in jail for slamming his speeding car into, and killing, a motorcyclist. In addition to his history of racism, Janklow apparently has a long history of reckless driving-thirteen traffic citations since 1990-and the judge in the case could have given Janklow ten years. But witnesses convinced him of Janklow's good character and solid contributions to the community.)

In the desperate and highly charged atmosphere of repression after Wounded Knee II, the traditional leaders on Pine Ridge appealed to AIM for help to defend themselves. Leonard Peltier was among the dozens of AIM members and supporters who went to Pine Ridge. AIM also provided support such as cutting firewood, collecting water, and preparing meals for the many elderly residents who lived in the most remote parts of the reservation. They provided protection from attacks by Wilson's GOONs, which usually took place late at night, making late evening hours a nightmare of gunfire and screams for help. AIM activists, including Peltier, were armed for their own protection as well as that of the residents.

What has now gone down in history as "the incident at Oglala" occurred on June 26, 1975, when two unmarked cars chased a red truck onto the Jumping Bull compound near the village of Oglala. Without identifying themselves, the FBI agents in pursuit of the red pick-up began shooting at it. The FBI later claimed that the agents were in pursuit of an Indian named Jimmy Eagle, for allegedly stealing cowboy boots. When the agents then began firing on the ranch, Peltier and others, who were defending the compound against GOON violence, fired back, not knowing who the men were or what they wanted. Within minutes, more than 150 FBI SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, and GOONs had surrounded the ranch. The quick response has led many to believe that the "incident" was a deliberate provocation by the FBI.

Peltier and others escaped the encirclement. When the FBI occupied the ranch they found AIM member Joe Killsright Stuntz and two FBI agents, Jack Koler and Ron Williams, shot dead at close range. No one has ever been convicted for killing Stuntz.

The largest manhunt in FBI history ensued, eventually resulting in the arrest of three AIM members, Dino Butler, Robert Robideau, and Leonard Peltier, for the murders of Koler and Williams. None of the defendants ever denied being at the Jumping Bull ranch that day or firing in self-defense, but all denied killing the FBI agents. Butler and Robideau were the first arrested and charged, and the first sent to trial while Peltier fought extradition in Canada. Robideau and Butler were tried in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, who believed that the white working class and lower middle class residents of this small provincial city would easily convict them. On July 16, 1976, to the shock of the government attorneys, the jury found Butler and Robideau not guilty of murder, accepting the argument for self-defense put forward by their famed radical attorney, William Kunstler.

In their humiliation, the FBI was determined to convict Peltier, who was captured by the Mounties on February 6, 1976. To obtain Peltier's extradition, the U.S. government presented to the federal Canadian court affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to be Peltier's lover and to have witnessed Peltier shoot the FBI agents. Though it was later revealed that Poor Bear's testimony was coerced out of her by the FBI, the Canadian court turned Peltier over to the United States.

In March 1977, Peltier went to trial before an all-white jury in North Dakota and a hostile Judge Paul Benson, who refused to allow use of the self-defense argument and ruled repeatedly in favor of the government. The judge and prosecution suppressed all evidence favorable to Peltier.

Even though the lead prosecutor, the aptly named Assistant U.S. Attorney Lynn Crooks, failed to produce a single witness who could identify Peltier as the gunman who killed the agents, the jury found Peltier guilty and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. In the nearly thirty years since Peltier's false conviction, the case against him has continued to unravel. For example, a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the early 1980s turned up a concealed ballistics report showing that the gun Peltier allegedly used during the incident could not be matched with the bullet casing found near the agents. In 1985, when the Eighth Circuit Court held oral arguments on a motion filed by Peltier for a new trial, Lynn Crooks admitted, "we can't prove who shot those agents." Though the court found that the jury in Peltier's trial might have acquitted him had the FBI not withheld this evidence, they refused to grant him a new trial.

In 2000, when President Clinton announced that he was considering clemency for Peltier, he began making plans for his release. His friends even began planning to build him a new house. But after the FBI mobilized a campaign that included a march of 500 agents in front of the White House, Clinton backed down. Peltier's appeals have been denied more than ten times, and he remains in prison. But his spirit is not broken. Not long after Clinton's betrayal, he wrote:

Since that dark Saturday, I have managed to get up and dust myself off, and begin to lift my spirits once more. I am just as determined now to fight for my freedom as I was on February 6, 1976 when I was first arrested. I will not give up. This is the second time in the span of my incarceration that I made it to the top of the hill and saw that freedom was in view, only to be kicked right back down to the bottom again.

Peltier's experience in prison has been one of constant harassment and hardship. A Leonard Peltier Defense Committee statement aptly noted that,

Over the last year, Leonard has suffered the passing of several relatives and been denied many basic human rights. He has been placed in solitary confinement for no reason, denied phone privileges, religious rights, and visitation privileges, and was even unable to write letters to family and friends. Peltier's health has deteriorated in the last year and he has repeatedly been denied adequate medicine. Without reason, Leonard has been moved to several prisons with no concern for his health.

On June 30, Peltier was moved, without notice to his family or his attorneys, to the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, from the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. And on August 15-despite ailing health-he was moved to the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2008, Leonard Peltier comes up for parole, but the FBI and other forces will resist his release tooth and nail. If we are going to get any measure of justice for Leonard Peltier, we will have to be out in front of the White House when the time comes.

To find out more about Leonard Peltiers case, go to www.freepeltier.org/. The best books to read on Leonard Peltier's case are Peter Matthiessens In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and The Trial of Leonard Peltier by Jim Messerschmidt. Peltiers own book, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance, is also excellent.

Joe Allen is a member of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago. Paul D'Amato is associate editor of the ISR. - They can be reached @counterpunch

Hillary gets her war on

2005-12-02T03:44:00.000-08:00

Women hold up half the lie ... Beautiful. I am in receipt today of a mailing from the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign. This is different from the letter she sent out by e-mail in a rush. I don't know who got the e-mail. She announces it is 1,600 words long. That much of her sentences could end reading. The letter I got is more than a dead dry political mailing. I found it such compelling reading that I drop everything and share with you promptly and thus prominently.

It is a four-page questionnaire with the headline, "2005 Critical National Issues Survey." I thought that this was about the more than 2,000 dead in Iraq. Not even close. I read on, thinking that the pamphlet might tell me what Hillary stands for, as she is pretty much a blank thus far.

The questionnaire begins with a statement that we can't let Republican political attacks distract Hillary from her efforts in the Senate to address the critical issues our nation needs to address. Then there is the normal space for contributions by check or credit card. The amounts are from $25 to $100 and "other." Fine so far.

Here are the critical issues:
"Economy/jobs. Environment. Social Security/Medicare. Education. Homeland Security. Health Care. Tax Cuts. Reproductive Rights. Separation of Church and State."

Absolutely marvelous. Nothing about Iraq. Or the life and death of young Americans in Iraq. Or troop withdrawals from Iraq.

I go through the rest of the pamphlet.

"How concerned are you that President Bush is not doing enough to get Americans back to work, create more jobs and get the economy moving again?

"How concerned are you that the massive budget deficits caused by Republican economic and tax policies will inevitably result in drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicare, education and social services?"

Absolutely beautiful!

There are, as stated earlier, now more than 2,000 young Americans who have died in Iraq. She wants to be a candidate for president and she doesn't even mention our dead, or our next dead.

Wait. Here is question 9:

"How concerned are you that the administration's unilateral policies have reduced our number of allies and endangered our national security?"

How absolutely marvelous!

"It depends on what your definition of 'is' is," her husband said when he was questioned about rolling around on the office carpet with a young office worker.

And she not only copies, but clearly surpasses. She deals with something important.

Hillary Clinton today holds the new North American record for fakery.

She copies. She sneaks and slithers past you with her opinion on a war that kills every day.

Hillary Clinton is in favor of the war and of executions. Sensational!

The other day, when Rep. John Murtha of Johnstown, Pa., called for a withdrawal from Iraq, and obviously did so with half the Pentagon behind him, Hillary said, no, we shouldn't pull out at this time. Oh, it would cause so much violence.

We must stay. It takes a national Alzheimer's for her to be able to try to get away with things like this.

If Hillary Clinton wants this war to go on, then she should send her daughter to fight in Iraq.

We have had in New York as United States senators, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacob Javits and Daniel Moynihan.

We now have Hillary Clinton blowing on her fingers as she goes about cracking the combination to another safe. If the one hand glistens, it is from the wedding ring that she has used to hypnotize the public so far. Beautiful. FROM ' Where's Hillary on Iraq? ' Jimmy Breslin.

World exclusive for the RAT Foundation

2005-12-02T03:33:00.000-08:00

World Exclusive* Nov 30 2005--Venice,FL. by Daniel Hopsicker

http://www.madcowprod.com/11302005.html

The MadCowMorningNews has learned that California Republican Congressman Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham steered $500 million in defense contracts in less than a decade, according to the company’s own website, to a start-up San Diego software firm which—and here’s the beauty part—doubled as a lobbying firm.

The lobbying firm then gratefully kicked back —at a bare minimum— hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to a Jack Abramoff-directed Washington D.C. lobbying and consulting firm run by two former senior staffers of Texas Republican Tom DeLay.

It offered, in other words, one-stop shopping.

While the focus was on the $2 million in bribes paid to Cunningham after his guilty plea, the question of just what the Congressman had done for all that long green received scant media attention.

The GOPMOB's Magic Horn of Plenty.

But as the extent of the damage to America’s national security wrought by the bribes which crossed Cunningham’s greasy palm begins to come into focus, the fraud being revealed is orders of magnitude greater than has been hinted at so far.

Here’s how it worked:

Money budgeted for U.S. Defense went in at the ADCS end of something called the “Wilkes Corporation” for services which the Pentagon protested it never requested, and out the other end came a magical cornucopia of bribes, kick-backs, campaign contributions, yachts, Lear jets and Rolls Royce’s.

Over the course of almost an entire decade, from 1994 to 2001, Cunningham’s Appropriations Committee repeatedly added funding to the Pentagon budget for a previously non-existent (prior to 1995) software company, ADCS, owned by the “Wilkes Corporation,” a private company (natch) owned by San Diego businessman Brent Wilkes.
The money then made a short trip—courtesy the wonders of modern accounting—from one of Brent Wilkes’ pants pocket to another, called “Group W Advisors,” which proceeded to obligingly send hundreds of thousands of dollars in ‘client fees’ annually to The Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying and consulting firm currently under scrutiny in the Justice Department's investigation of Casino Jack Abramoff.

"A little trouble keeping the company names straight, is all."
Wilkes himself even seems to have had trouble distinguishing between his various legal fictions...

Newspaper reports state his deal grew out of requests from the House National Security Committee, of which Cunningham was then a member, for the military to add an automated-document program to its budget.

His firm ADCS, according to Government Computer News, began by selling $5 million in document conversion software to the Pentagon. But the website of his lobbying firm, Group W Advisors, claims it is the entity "instrumental in introducing (digital document) technology to the Department of Defense,” as well as that the company's document-automation work, which began as a small “congressionally-mandated pilot project," has since generated more than $500 million in appropriations.

If you're wondering which company deserves the "credit," you may be missing the point.

Picture the memorable scene in the movie “Chinatown” where Fay Dunaway explains to Jack Nicholson what may have been a similarly-complicated state of affairs...

“She’s my sister! (Slap.) She’s my daughter! (Slap.) She’s my sister AND my daughter!”

See, the pea is under one of the shells; it doesn't really matter which.

In its blatant disregard for anything resembling reality, the scheme resembles nothing so much as the blatantly phony Abramoff-sponsored Institutes, Foundations, and political “think tanks” (whose ‘scholars in residence” turn out to be lifeguards and yoga instructors) which were exposed in recent Senate Hearings as vehicles used to move money through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides.

"Thinking outside the think tank"

Not one to rest when America's national security can be used as a cover for making a buck, Cunningham was also steering Pentagon money to a second tiny “defense contractor,” MZM Inc, which had the great good fortune to go from zero dollars in Federal contracts to $169 million in two short years, through the simple expedient of indulging Cunningham’s taste for expensive yachts and a new $2 million dollar mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe, California, to go with the trophy wife, also on the payroll.

Here's a photo taken of a Washington D.C. bask thrown by MZM Inc to further U.S.-Panama friendship. MZM Inc founder Mitchell Wade is the beefy fellow with the self-satisfied smile.

And why not? He's dining out on your money.

While the story has its humorous aspects, the money involved is nothing if not serious... A (highly preliminary) total of almost $700 million earmarked for national security going to “defense contractors” which just a few years earlier didn’t exist which provide services the Pentagon didn’t ask for or presumably need.

The companies involved would also share another characteristic as well: they were very very grateful.

The point man on the Group W “account” for the Alexander Strategy Group, which received almost $200,000 of gratitude for "client services," was former DeLay aide Karl Gallant, who apparently made a specialty of stealing money from widows and orphans, having signed Enron Corp. to a $750,000 lobbying contract a few years earlier.

(Maybe he can someday share a cell with Ken Lay. We hope its not in one of those federal tennis camps. Pelican Bay might do nicely.)

"Eschewing the soft sell"

"Buckham and that crew, they were Tom DeLay,” a senior GOP House member, careful to remain anonymous, told Congressional Quarterly Weekly.

“The Alexander lobbyists' sales pitch was, ‘Either you hire me or DeLay is going to screw you,’” said a top Republican lobbyist. "It was not really a soft sell."

Alas for Karl Gallant, his chances of pleading lack of premeditation are dimmed somewhat by his participation way back in 1990 in a Heritage Foundation report entitled, no doubt with tongue place firmly in cheek,

We only mention this because we found it so funny: "Defense contractor cum lobbyist" Brent Wilkes was recently appointed by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the State Race Track Leasing Commission, which oversees thoroughbred racing at Del Mar Race Track near San Diego.

Del Mar of course was where FBI head J. Edgar Hoover used to vacation yearly as the guest of Texas oil man Clint Murchison. A Senate committee discovered in 1955 that 20 per cent of Murchison’s Oil Lease Company was owned by Mob Boss Vito Genovese.

A sordid episode involving Hoover at Del Mar was relayed to author Anthony Summers in “The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover," by veteran film producer Joe Pasternak.

"He was a homosexual," Pasternak told Summers. "Every year he used to come down to the Del Mar racetrack with a different boy. He was caught in a bathroom by a newspaperman. They made sure he didn't speak. . . Nobody dared say anything because he was so powerful."

La plus ca change.

"Great humanitarians know how to spread it around."

Wilkes is also the proud papa of his very own foundation (de rigueur in certain circles.) The Wilkes Foundation sponsored the second annual San Diego Tribute to Heroes Gala recently, we discovered. It honored the no doubt heroic Congressman Duncan Hunter, who just happens, as they say, to currently be chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

For the Congressman's sake, we hope he doesn't dock a yacht anywhere near Duke Cunningham's

We thought he was exaggerating when former Ambassador Wilson wrote in his recent book that the sordid spectacle we have all been forced to witness has been caused by “a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system.”

Guess what? He's not...

A news account in the San Diego Union-Tribune about the Lear jet used by Cunningham and DeLay, paid for by you and I from money "passed through" to San Diego "businessman" Wilkes, told of a flight DeLay flew from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., to John Wayne Airport in Orange County to appear at a campaign dinner for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach.

Dana Rohrabacher will appear again (several times) in our story... He gave a sterling personal recommendation, for example, to Adam Kidan, the "dunsky (John Gotti's phrase) about to be indicted for paying for the brutal murder of Sun Cruz Casino Line owner Gus Boulis... with a check.

The original bad penny.

Rohrabacher was there when the cult first began to do business as The Enterprise, in Angola, for example, with Jack Abramoff... and Oliver North.
The same group involved in the Cunningham affair will soon be seen to have their fingerprints all over the Boulis hit, as well as a host of recent activities of individuals for whom the noun “baseball bat” is a verb...

As in: "We shoulda baseball-batted him."

Emilia DiSanto is a staffer on Capital Hill working for Senator Charles Grassley, currently investigating Abramoff. She was attacked with a baseball bat on November 8 by a mysterious masked man trying to hide his identity by wearing a hood and black gloves, who said nothing and made no demands before attacking the 49-year-old staffer. The FBI is investigating it as being “work-related.”

Or FRANK Mosco, a whistleblower whose testimony convicted another figure in the Cunningham scandal, a man named Thomas Kontogiannis, to whom Cunningham sold his yacht at an inflated price, just as he’d sold his house to Mitchell Wade of MZM Inc.

Today Mosco won't leave his home without his bulletproof vest. He started wearing body armor a few months ago after four goons attacked him on a Queens street, bashing him on the head, pummeling him to the ground and throwing him into a van, where he was threatened to "keep [his] mouth shut."

The brazen beating occurred just days after Queens District Attorney Richard Brown issued grand jury subpoenas to targets of a massive kickback and corruption probe which eventually fingered Duke Cunningham.

When Cunningham learned that the prosecutor in the case against Kontogiannis knew of the attack, he wrote telling him that there may be a political agenda against the school official (who he now admits had been paying him bribes) by what he termed a "disgruntled contractor (Mosco.)

A crime spree by the "baseball bat boys"

A short list of recent violent crime suspected of having been committed by Abramoff associates makes for fascinating reading, and we will regale you with it at a later date. But we just wanted to mention it now, in case anyone thinks we may be being too hard on a former war hero who's become a broken man who simply misplaced his moral compass, or as Rush Limbaugh characterized it, "made a mistake."

Locking your keys in your car is "making a mistake."

When the San Diego Union-Tribune detailed charges of Congressman Cunningham’s questionable activates in December 1997, Cunningham told the paper’s reporter that anyone who questioned his actions in lobbying for ADCS could “go to hell.”

After Cunningham's sniveling performance yesterday, its safe to assume he was still at that point exhibiting the bravado of the not-yet indicted.

Less we forget, most of this happened during a time period in which the U.S. was to war, after 3000 innocent people were murdered in an attack which our nation, which spends more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined, was unable to thwart.

Its a good thing for Cunningham that people seem willing to cut him some slack, because of his service as an ace Navy pilot during the Vietnam War, a decade-long attempt to keep the U.S. West Coast from being invaded by fleets of Viet Cong sampans that somebody must have feared mightily, given the costs of that struggle to our nation.

Otherwise there might be calls for Cunningham to be indicted for treason.

President in Disneyland speech

2005-12-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

Didn't play to well in Peoria apparently. Oh well. There's always Orange County...Oh wait.
A Pathetic Performance by Alan Bock

I really should have learned by now. The White House offers some tantalizing hints that this time the president is really going to lay things out in a way the American people can understand, demonstrate that he is conversant with the facts on the ground and how to overcome them. He might even offer a modicum of frankness that demonstrates he understands not everything has gone swimmingly but we are fixing problems. There's even the hint that he will offer something of an exit strategy that involves a draw-down of troops.

Silly me.

http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=8195

'...isn't it rather pathetic that this president now appears in public only before a military crowd? (All right, he also spoke before federal border enforcement officers and a fundraiser for a conservative Colorado congresswoman.) It suggests that even though the president himself seems to be securely insulated from reality – and to be fair, that's a phenomenon that happens to most presidents, although this one has cultivated and even demanded it from the outset – somebody at the White House can read the polls and decipher the signs suggesting that this war and this president are not exactly popular these days.

From a PR perspective, there are advantages for a president to speak at military installations, but there are downsides as well. On the positive side, you can reliably anticipate that at the very least the crowd will not erupt in catcalls, and it is likely that there will be genuine enthusiasm, especially at a service academy where auditors have not yet had the sometimes exhilarating but definitely fantasy-puncturing experience of actual combat. And there is a substantial segment of the population that still views the military with something approaching reverence, and will see a president explicitly identifying with it as a sign that he is the right kind of guy.

On the other hand, there is also a substantial segment – although few may be on the fence about Dubya these days – that sees such explicit identification with the military as distasteful if not downright alarming. You don't have to be trembling in fear of an imminent military dictatorship to see that there's something exploitative in the appearances, sort of like a CEO facing a scandal only appearing before groups of employees whose very livelihood depends on him emerging relatively unscathed.

The president is in part using the military, which is supposed to be the supremely nonpartisan institution dedicated to the country rather than to a particular president or party (I'm old enough to remember when career officers made it a point of pride not to vote because they were pledged to obey the commander in chief and didn't want to have even the scintilla of mixed feelings about loyalty that might arise from having voted for his opponent) to help revive his sagging political fortunes. This is supremely cynical, and there must be some in those crowds who recognize and resent it, but they can be counted on to swallow their resentment and be polite if not enthusiastic.

More than cynical, however, the image of a president who avoids crowds of civilians and ordinary American workers and taxpayers is pathetic. I don't know if Seymour Hersh is right that, unlike LBJ at a similar point in his presidency, this president is blissfully unaware that he has become a prisoner in the White House...'

'...the president – I don't know about others in the administration – still seems not just clueless but determined not to learn or to know anything that conflicts with the rosy scenario he tries to convey to the American people...'

'...The president will have to do a lot better than this if he wants to restore flagging public support for this ill-advised war. I think he's a goner, that he will serve out his term as an increasingly ineffective and pathetic figure...'

Maybe Florida Disneyworld next time? Cane' season over Jebbie boy?

Punch and Judy show

2005-12-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

Dowd: We've moved on and everything's fantastic at NYT
Texas Monthly
Dowd
From Maureen Dowd's TV interview with Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith:

SMITH: Anything about Judith Miller or about her reporting or that incident that you hadn’t already written? Because you have been quite open about your feelings about that.
DOWD: Judith who? ...
SMITH: You really are moving on.
DOWD: As Bill Keller said in an interview the other day, he has Judy fatigue. I do, too. Everything I had to say was in the column. And Judy is a very forceful, intriguing woman and she’s going to have a great second chapter in whatever she decides to do.
SMITH: Did you read her response to what you wrote on her web site?
DOWD: Well, she emailed me that after I did it. So she emailed me a few times and I emailed her. So more email pals.
SMITH: Are you? Well, pals of some sort anyway.
DOWD: Don’t start a catfight, Evan.
SMITH: No. No. I’m just a spectator, Maureen.
DOWD: As Seinfeld said, men love catfights because they always think that somebody’s going to end up kissing at the end. But that’s not going to happen.

Posted at 1:20:05 PM POYNTERS

Check out this thread for a laugh...

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001129.html

' Don't ever go against the family! '

Laos bombing levels and Death squads

2005-12-02T02:30:00.000-08:00

Robert Dreyfuss has a scoop in The American Prospect:

"The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists—up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq."

So with this recycled Phoenix assassination program and Cambodian style bombing runs on the terrorists sanctuaries in Syria, Iran and all the other countries bombed during the initial ' liberation'... ( The greatest since Mussolini liberated Abbyssinia? )
countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, ' Iraqization' is proceeding apace.

Everything old is new again.

Advancing in diversity

2005-12-02T02:15:00.000-08:00

Striking in unison

December 2, 2005 - Profusion of Rebel Groups Helps Them Survive in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS - BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 1 - Here is a small sampling of the insurgent groups that have claimed responsibility for attacks on Americans and Iraqis in the last few months:

Supporters of the Sunni People. The Men's Faith Brigade. The Islamic Anger. Al Baraa bin Malik Suicide Brigade. The Tawid Lions of Abdullah ibn al Zobeir. While some of them, like the Suicide Brigade, claim an affiliation with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Al Qaeda claims them, others say they have acted alone or under the guidance of another group.

While on Wednesday President Bush promised nothing less than "complete victory" over the Iraqi insurgency, the apparent proliferation of militant groups offers perhaps the best explanation as to why the insurgency has been so hard to destroy.

The Bush administration has long maintained, and Mr. Bush reiterated in his speech Wednesday, that the insurgency comprises three elements: disaffected Sunni Arabs, or "rejectionists"; former Hussein government loyalists; and foreign-born terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Iraqi and American officials in Iraq say the single most important fact about the insurgency is that it consists not of a few groups but of dozens, possibly as many as 100. And it is not, as often depicted, a coherent organization whose members dutifully carry out orders from above but a far-flung collection of smaller groups that often act on their own or come together for a single attack, the officials say. Each is believed to have its own leader and is free to act on its own.

Highly visible groups like Al Qaeda, Ansar al Sunna and the Victorious Army Group appear to act as fronts, the Iraqis and the Americans say, providing money, general direction and expertise to the smaller groups, but often taking responsibility for their attacks by broadcasting them across the globe.

"The leaders usually don't have anything to do with details," said Abdul Kareem al-Eniezi, the Iraqi minister for national security. "Sometimes they will give the smaller groups a target, or a type of target. The groups aren't connected to each other. They are not that organized."

Some experts and officials say there are important exceptions: that Al Qaeda's leaders, for instance, are deeply involved in spectacular suicide bombings, the majority of which are still believed to be carried out by foreigners. They also say some of the smaller groups that claim responsibility for attacks may be largely fictional, made up of ragtag groups of fighters hoping to make themselves seem more formidable and numerous than they really are.

But whatever the appearances, American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential structure of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified. They say this central characteristic, similar to that of terrorist organizations in Europe and Asia, is what is making the Iraqi insurgency so difficult to destroy. Attack any single part of it, and the rest carries on largely untouched. It cannot be decapitated, because the insurgency, for the most part, has no head. Only recently, American and Iraqi experts say, have they begun to grasp the new organizational structure that, among other things, is making the insurgency so difficult to stop.

( Reminds me of Aqulilla/Rondfeldt's Netwars spiel )

"There is no center of gravity, no leadership, no hierarchy; they are more a constellation than an organization," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. "They have adopted a structure that assures their longevity."

Yeah...very RANDy.

Off world kick murder squad

2005-12-02T02:11:00.000-08:00

Trophy Video Could Prove Costly for Aegis by Tom Griffin

A new spotlight has been thrown on the army of private military operators in Iraq, following the emergence of footage that appears to show security guards shooting up civilian cars on "Route Irish," the notorious Baghdad Airport road.

The so-called trophy video now circulating widely on the Internet shows a series of clips of shots being fired from the back of a utility vehicle, set to a soundtrack of the Elvis Presley song "Mystery Train." In one clip, Iraqi civilians are seen fleeing after a targeted car swerves and crashes into another vehicle.

Anti-mercenary campaigners have condemned the footage, which first emerged on a Web site belonging to a former employee of Aegis Defense Services, one of the largest private security companies operating in Iraq.

"If the video does turn out to involve Aegis personnel, it provides a clear demonstration that such mercenary services have little to do with providing ‘security’ for ordinary Iraqis, and everything to do with profiting from war at the expense of human rights and innocent lives," said Mike Lewis of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. "Private military companies are even less accountable than regular armies – privatizing war makes it even harder to stop the abuse and killing of innocent civilians. It's time that private military companies were properly regulated, not actively encouraged by the UK and U.S. governments."

Aegis announced this week that it has established a formal board of inquiry, in cooperation with the U.S. military authorities, to investigate "whether the footage has any connection with the company and, should this prove to be the case, under what circumstances any incident took place."

"Aegis is contracted in Iraq by the U.S. government to provide a wide variety of services including, critically, the protection of both civilian and military personnel traveling throughout the country, in a very hostile environment under circumstances of often great personal danger," the company said in a statement.

"Typically in one week, Aegis carries out over 100 escort assignments covering approximately 18,000 miles. Aegis' personnel have substantial military and peacekeeping experience and all operate under strict and accountable Rules of Engagement of the Coalition Military (CENTCOM), and the U.S. Department of State, as well as Coalition Provisional Authority Order Memo 17."

"These Rules of Engagement allow for a structured escalation of force to include opening fire on civilian vehicles under certain circumstances. All incidents of the use of such escalation of force which includes the use of firearms are logged and investigated to ensure that there has been strict adherence to the Rules of Engagement. Should any incident recorded on the video footage have involved Aegis personnel, this too will be subject to scrutiny by the Board of Inquiry."

The trophy video scandal comes at a damaging time for Aegis, which has been trying to shake off the mercenary image of its founder and chief executive Lt. Col. Tim Spicer. The company recently acquired a new chairman, the former chief of the UK Defense Staff, Lord Inge, who heads an expanded board that also includes former U.S. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane.

The company was named "Small Consultancy Firm of the Year" in the British International Expertise Awards on Nov. 24, just days before the trophy video story broke in the British press.

The video had been available for some months at www.AegisIraq.co.uk, an unofficial Web site whose existence was originally only known to employees of Aegis and other contractors.

The site’s contents include a purported message from Lt. Col. Spicer that warns,

"[W]hilst I am not concerned about this site as yet, if it develops into something other than a light-hearted pressure valve I will take a much greater interest.

"Remember that your job and those of your colleagues indirectly relies on the maintenance of our contract. Refrain from posting anything which is detrimental to the company since this could result in the loss or curtailment of our contract with resultant loss for everybody."

Lt. Col. Spicer’s fears appear to have been borne out as the site developed. Posts on its message board included claims of poor weapons handling by Aegis staff, along with allegations of widespread drink and drug abuse, and critical commentary on the trophy video.

One post states, "Respectively, that footage is the most damning footage of trigger happy body count hunters that I have witnessed, it has done nothing but show the company and the lads it employs in a bad light, and if I was looking to employ a company that would certainly ensure that Aegis didn't get the contract."

The message board was pulled from the site after its address emerged in the press, but not before it had come to the attention of longtime critics of Aegis.

As Antiwar.com reported last year, the company’s contract with the Pentagon has encountered strong opposition on Capitol Hill because of Lt. Col. Spicer’s record in Northern Ireland, where two soldiers under his command were convicted of murdering an unarmed 18-year-old, Peter McBride.

Irish human rights group the Pat Finucane Center (PFC) also raised Spicer’s record with his previous firm Sandline, which breached a UN arms embargo in Sierra Leone and embarked on a failed intervention in Papua New Guinea that led to a military coup.

As a result of lobbying by the PFC and the Irish National Caucus, U.S. Senators Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Christopher Dodd, and Charles Schumer demanded an investigation of the contract in August last year.

"In light of the recent revelations of abuses of detainees in Iraq, it is important that U.S. actions, whether by military personnel or contractors, have respect for the law," the five senators wrote in a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "It is troubling that the government would award a contract to an individual with a history of supporting excessive use of force against a civilian population."

The lobbying campaign has since continued. PFC staff returned from their most recent trip to Washington last month, only days before emergence of the alleged Aegis video.

"A number of members of Congress expressed concern and indeed shock at the circumstances surrounding the contract," PFC spokesman Paul O’Connor said this week. "The latest allegations will certainly increase the fears that this contract has been awarded to the wrong person and the wrong firm."

"We have contacted the U.S. consul-general in Belfast today, and directed his attention to the allegations, and to the message board on the unofficial website, where there are allegations of high rates of drug and alcohol abuse by mercenaries on contract to the U.S. government."

Although Aegis holds one of the largest private military contracts in Iraq, there are signs that the company is becoming isolated within the sector. It has reportedly been rebuffed in an attempt to join industry group the International Peace Operations Association.

The latest controversy looks set to further damage Aegis’ ability to win allies at a time when it is facing the prospect of regulation in its home market.

The British Foreign Office is due to produce a white paper on private military companies early next year. The footage of security guards blasting civilians on the highways of Iraq may now provide the backdrop to that debate.

Call me Al

2005-12-02T02:01:00.000-08:00

The War on al-Jazeera by Jeremy Scahill

Nothing puts the lie to the Bush administration's absurd claim that it invaded Iraq to spread democracy throughout the Middle East more decisively than its ceaseless attacks on al-Jazeera, the institution that has done more than any other to break the stranglehold over information previously held by authoritarian forces, whether monarchs, military strongmen, occupiers, or ayatollahs. The United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001, shelled the Basra hotel where al-Jazeera journalists were the only guests in April 2003, killed Iraq correspondent Tareq Ayoub a few days later in Baghdad, and imprisoned several al-Jazeera reporters (including at Guantánamo), some of whom say they were tortured. In addition to the military attacks, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government banned the network from reporting in Iraq.

Then in late November came a startling development: Britain's Daily Mirror reported that during an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, George W. Bush floated the idea of bombing al-Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. This allegation was based on leaked "Top Secret" minutes of the Bush-Blair summit. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has activated the Official Secrets Act, threatening any publication that publishes any portion of the memo (he has already brought charges against a former Cabinet staffer and a former parliamentary aide). So while we don't yet know the contents of the memo, we do know that at the time of Bush's meeting with Blair, the administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against al-Jazeera. The meeting took place on April 16, at the peak of the first U.S. siege of Fallujah, and al-Jazeera was one of the few news outlets broadcasting from inside the city. Its exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to the BBC.

The Fallujah offensive, one of the bloodiest assaults of the U.S. occupation, was a turning point. In two weeks that April, 30 Marines were killed as local guerrillas resisted U.S. attempts to capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died, many of them women and children. Al-Jazeera broadcast from inside the besieged city, beaming images to the world. On live TV, the network gave graphic documentary evidence disproving U.S. denials that it was killing civilians. It was a public relations disaster, and the United States responded by attacking the messenger.

Just a few days before Bush allegedly proposed bombing the network, al-Jazeera's correspondent in Fallujah, Ahmed Mansour, reported live on the air, "Last night we were targeted by some tanks, twice … but we escaped. The U.S. wants us out of Fallujah, but we will stay." On April 9, Washington demanded that al-Jazeera leave the city as a condition for a cease-fire. The network refused. Mansour wrote that the next day,

"American fighter jets fired around our new location, and they bombed the house where we had spent the night before, causing the death of the house owner Mr. Hussein Samir. Due to the serious threats we had to stop broadcasting for few days because every time we tried to broadcast, the fighter jets spotted us, [and] we became under their fire."

On April 11, senior military spokesperson Mark Kimmitt declared, "The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies." On April 15, Donald Rumsfeld echoed those remarks in distinctly undiplomatic terms, calling al-Jazeera's reporting "vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable. … It's disgraceful what that station is doing." It was the very next day, according to the Daily Mirror, that Bush told Blair of his plan. "He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere," a source told the Mirror. "There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do – and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."

Al-Jazeera's real transgression during the "war on terror" is a simple one: being there. While critical of the Bush administration and U.S. policy, it is not anti-American – it is independent. In fact, it has angered almost every Arab government at one point or another and has been kicked out of or sanctioned by many Arab countries. It holds the rare distinction of being shut down by both Saddam and the new U.S.-backed government. It was the first Arab station to broadcast interviews with Israeli officials. It is hardly the al-Qaeda mouthpiece the administration has wanted us to believe it is. The real threat al-Jazeera poses is in its unembedded journalism – precisely what is needed now to uncover the truth about the Bush-Blair meeting.

Conservative British MP Boris Johnson, who is by trade a journalist and is editor of The Spectator magazine, has offered to publish the memo if it is leaked to him. It should be published, and if any journal is prosecuted for doing so, it should be backed up by media organizations everywhere. The war against al-Jazeera and other unembedded journalists has been conducted with far too little outcry from the powerful media organizations of the world. It shouldn't take another bombing for this to be a story.

Reprinted courtesy of The Nation.

The Great Dictator

2005-12-02T01:52:00.000-08:00

The NYT gives an overview of the multi-headed, diverse groups making up the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, suggesting that their very lack of a command structure is one of the secrets of their strength. LINK

http://www.juancole.com/

The US military said that suicide bombings fell to their lowest level in seven months in November and pointed to this statistic as a sign of progress in the war.

But November saw 87 US troops killed, among the highest death tolls for a 30-day period since the war began, and one wonders about the rate of severely wounded. Moreover, in one two-week period in November, bombers (suiciders or not) killed hundreds of Iraqis, spreading insecurity, fear and anger.

It raises the question of whether the guerrillas are depending more heavily on roadside bombs and remotely detonated bombs rather than on kamikazes. Whatever the case, the mere decline in the latter seems to have little or nothing to do with the level of security in the country, which is generally poor, and, indeed, among the worst of any country in the world.

The Ukraine has begun the pull-out of its almost 1,000 troops from Iraq, with its security duties taken over by the Iraqi 3rd Infantry Brigade. The rest of the Ukrainians will be out by the end of 2005. It seems likely that the US will be virtually alone in Iraq as a foreign military power by mid-2006.

The case of Muriel Degauque, the poor Belgian Catholic girl who became a kamikaze in Iraq, has sent a chill through Europe. ( snip ) '... the jihadis have become politicized and so kill themselves and others on the battlefield.

posted by Juan@informed comment

How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq by Tom Engelhardt

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=8199

If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator. George W. Bush

Terrorist Shoplifters frighten FBI

2005-12-02T00:02:00.000-08:00

FBI: Thieves Stealing Drugs May Be Terrorists, Part Of Gang
Stolen Merchandise Sent To Wholesalers Who Then Resell Product To Retailers

POSTED: 10:24 am CST December 1, 2005
UPDATED: 10:41 am CST December 1, 2005

HOUSTON -- Thieves who shoplift from Houston-area grocery and drug stores have become more organized, and officials with the FBI believe some of them could be part of dangerous gangs or terrorist organizations, KPRC Local 2 reported Wednesday.

Surveillance cameras at a Houston-area Kroger store caught several thieves unloading shelves full of over-the-counter drugs.

Officials believe the thieves are part of groups like the MS-13 gang, who sell the stolen merchandise to fencing operations for a third of the retail price. The fencing operations then sell the good to wholesalers, who turn around and sell the products back to retail stores.

"They operate in teams. Normally they communicate with cell phones. It is a major nationwide criminal organization," Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Johnnie Jezierski told KPRC Local 2.

Authorities believe there are more than 1,000 shoplifters who hit stores in Houston each day, and that most of them are illegal immigrants from El Salvador and Honduras.

"Property crime is treated less seriously than violent crimes or crimes against people. And as a result, if caught, they will serve minor jail time," Jezierski said.

In one case, detectives told KPRC Local 2 that thieves walked out of a store with more than $6,000 in over-the-counter drugs.

Similar organized crimes rings in the past have targeted baby formula, cigarettes and clothing.

Ballarat born

2005-12-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

Buningyong raised...but without a motorbike at the moment; Damn!

A weekend of radical Eureka activities will culminate in Sedition Sunday! this Sunday. Diggers Camp starts Friday night in Eureka Park.

SEDITON SUNDAY! THIS...
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As we witness the passage of the rights and liberty-destroying anti-terror and IR legislation throught the parliament it is more important than ever that we draw on the lessons of the past and resist the onslaught of tyranny.

This coming weekend there will be a whole weekend of radical Eureka activities celebrating past resistance and encouraging new campaigns to emerge. If you would like to learn more or refresh your memory about the significance of the seminal events that transpired at Eureka (and that have been suppressed by the ruling class) see:
http://www.takver.com/history/eureka.htm
and
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/

Come for the day or come and camp over on Friday and Satuday nights (Dec 2nd and 3rd) at the Diggers Camp in Eureka Park in Ballarat (the site of the Eureka centre). Just off the main road coming into Ballarat.

Come and plot around the campfire. With a couple of dawn events happening, you will be right there and on time! Bring a tent. There are free gas BBQs available and facilities.

On the Saturday there will be a range of 'Reclaim the Radical Spirit of Eureka' activities and on Sunday there will be Sedition Sunday!

Ballarat is not that far out of town and it will be well-worth the effort to celebrate and feel the Eureka Spirit! This is a perfect opportunity to enjoy the company of and network with other likeminded activists and organise future actions.

It is time to honour the memory of the diggers who took a defiant stand for democracy and justice by fighting for our rights and liberties to-day.

More details below:

Eureka Sunday, Sedition Sunday
The 151st anniversary of the Eureka rebellion will be celebrated in Ballarat with the introduction of a new crowd participation event at the Eureka Memorial, Eureka Park, Ballarat, Victoria
from 11 am on Eureka Sunday 4 December 2005
Called Sedition Sunday! it aims to make the diggers' defence of rights and liberties in 1854 relevant to the times and the Howard government assault on civil liberties and the right to collective bargaining.

Billed as a speak out, Sedition Sunday! will be an opportunity for soap box oratory, song, comedy and the public airing of seditious sentiments.

The program will include a SENSATIONAL SEDITION COMPETITION and participants are being encouraged to be creative in their dissent and to wear a costume, bring a placard, make a speech, sing a song, to be passionate, funny and free!

The event is being produced by People for Civil Liberties and Graeme Dunstan of Peacebus.com. Graeme Dunstan is known to Ballarat people as the initiating lantern maker of the Eureka Dawn Lantern Walk.

"The diggers swore an oath to stand truly together and fight to defend rights and liberties," said Mr Dunstan. "At Sedition Sunday! we will be commemorating their courage in the face of the tyranny of Imperial Britain. We will gather in the Eureka Spirit and draw on their courage to denounce Government lies and to resist State terrorism in these times."

"Like the diggers before, the men and women who come to this event will be choosing to be visible and defiant in the face of government tyranny," he said. "And where better to do it than on the very ground of the diggers' defiance. May the blood sacrifice of Eureka never be forgot!"

Further information
Graeme Dunstan 0407 951 688
Marcus Neofitou 03 5348 3679

Celebrate and Reclaim Eureka
Sedition Sunday! is just one event of a program of artful commemoration events being coodinated by the City of Ballarat Eureka Centre. See the full Eureka Week 2005 program at http://www.eurekaballarat.com

Peacebus.com recommends the following particpatory events as the pick of the Eureka151 program

Saturday 3 December

from 4 am a Dawn Commemoration presented by Dr Joe Toscano as part of his Reclaim the Radical Spirit of the Eureka Rebellion beside the old stone memorial at the south end of Eureka Park. See http://www.anarchistmedia.org

10 am March to the Bakery Hill led by Dr Joe to affirm the EurekaOath,

10.30 am Presentation of Eureka Australia Day Medals by Dr Joe at Bakery Hill.

11.30 am Story telling walk to Old Ballarat Cemetery to pay graveside respect to those who died in the Eureka battle.

2 pm Diggers March, a story telling walk led by Professor John Moloney, author of Eureka!, the definitive history. It assembles at Bakery Hill and follows the route the diggers took when they marched to occupy the Eureka Lead and build the stockade.
Sunday 4 December

3.30 am Eureka Dawn Lantern Walk, assembles at Mining Exchange in Lydhardt St and follows soldiers route to Stockade arriving about 5.30 am.

6 am Eureka Prayer and Dawn Oration at the Eureka Memorial. Fr McInerny will lead the prayer and this year leading barrister, Brian Walters of Liberty Victoria, will be the orator. Followed by a sausage sauce and bread breakfast, gold coin donation.
11am Sedition Sunday A speak-out against the anti-terror and IR laws. A Sensational Sedition Competition. Networking and planning future events. Rebellion!

Camp over in Ballarat Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd

If you are coming from out of town, come and camp over night in the Diggers Camp at Eureka Park on Friday and Saturday 3 December. Plot around the campfire. Bring a tent. There are free gas BBQs and facilities.

The glorification of Gallipoli is militaristic bullshit. Let's reclaim Eureka as the people's celebration of real freedom and indepence!

Downloadable Sedition Sunday Flyer
Go here for a downloadable Sedition Sunday! pdf flyer (400Kb) @ http://www.peacebus.com/Eureka/051112SeditionFlyer.pdf

Rain here today an hours drive away. Wetter season so far this year than the last few

Hanging protests sweep nation

2005-12-01T21:37:00.000-08:00

Hanging protests sweep nation - December 2, 2005 - 3:18PM
A portrait of Nguyen Tuong Van was placed among yellow gerberas in Sydney today.

The body of executed Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van has been taken away from Singapore's Changi Prison a little over four hours after he was hanged.

A white van from a local undertaker firm, Direct Funeral Services, drove out of the prison gates with Nguyen's body.

It was accompanied by another car carrying Australian High Commission officials.

The 25-year-old's life and death were marked with vigils, tears and a groundswell of protest in Australian cities and neighbouring countries today.

He was hanged at 6am local time (9am AEDT), after the Singapore government ruled out any last-minute reprieve.

"The sentence was carried out this morning at Changi Prison," Singapore's Home Affairs Ministry said in an emailed statement.

The Melbourne church where Nguyen went to school tolled its bell 25 times - once for every year of his life.

Nguyen's body will arrive back in Australia on Sunday accompanied by his mother, brother and lawyer.

His funeral will be held at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne next week.

Reporters and news crews have been asked by the Nguyens to stay away from a Catholic church service later today in Singapore.

In Singapore and in cities across Australia, there were protest vigils to mark the first execution of an Australian since Michael McAuliffe in Malaysia in 1993.

In Singapore, 45 minutes before his execution, Nguyen's brother Khoa arrived alone in a taxi in the pre-dawn gloom to be close to where his twin was to die.

In another taxi behind him, close friends of the Melbourne man, Kelly Ng and Bronwyn Lew, arrived with Van's lawyer Julian McMahon.

Khoa and a number of Nguyen's friends had gone to the prison to be at the wall of the jail at the execution, the closest they could get to him.

But Mr McMahon said prison authorities had allowed them into a room inside the jail because of the throng of cameras and reporters outside.

Kim Nguyen was in a prayer service supported by friends as her son spent his final moments alive, said Mr McMahon.

"She's OK, she's with people she loves," he said. "She's come from a prayer service ... which went for half an hour before and after 6am Singapore time (when Nguyen was hanged) and everyone who was there ... loved it immensely."

Kim Nguyen and Khoa were yesterday allowed limited contact with Nguyen during their last visit, after officials ruled out a final embrace.

They were told they would be able only to hold hands with Nguyen, but it today emerged Kim Nguyen was also able to touch her son's face and hair.

"There was a grille and they were able to hold each others hands. Kim was able at least for some time to touch his face," McMahon said outside Changi Prison this morning.

"She told me she was able to talk to him and touch his hair.

"That was a great comfort to her.

"She is obviously incredibly upset, but she is more prepared than she has been at any time previously."

Singapore's refusal to let mother and doomed son hug was condemned today as "clinical" by Prime Minister John Howard.

Nguyen's lawyers said the 25-year-old would have likely carried rosary beads, and walked without shackles from his cell to stand on the trapdoor of the gallows before his hanging.

McMahon said prison authorities would hold a coronial inquest. A death certificate would be issued and the body would be identified by Australian High Commission staff.

"The body will taken and prepared for burial in Australia," said McMahon.

As the time for execution came and went, there were emotional scenes outside the prison.

A small group of Singapore activists gathered, holding photos of Nguyen and chanting Indian incantations.

Human rights lawyer M. Ravi said: "What do we get out of this? What do we get out of this murder?"

He was accompanied by the distraught family of Shanmugam Murugesu, the Singapore drug trafficker who was hanged last May and who had become a friend of Nguyen.

Shanmugam's mother, Letchumi, wailed: "Who is going to help me?"

Earlier, in a cafe nearby, other Singaporean opponents of the death penalty also held a protest vigil.

The newly-formed Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Committee said in a statement they "utterly deplore and condemn" the hanging of Nguyen, as an "inhumane and barbaric punishment disproportionate to his crime".

Members of the group, including artists and professionals, gathered at a 24-hour sidewalk cafe near Changi Prison, lighting a candle atop an outdoor table on which pictures of Nguyen and messages of sympathy were displayed.

Supporters of Nguyen gathered outside Singapore High Commission in Canberra, carrying banners reading "Singapore, how could you?", "Thou shalt not kill", and "The bell tolls and we are all diminished".

Tears flowed at a prayer vigil for the Melbourne salesman at St Ignatius Church in Richmond, where Nguyen and his twin brother Khoa went to kindergarten and primary school in the 1980s.

The St Ignatius bell began ringing at 9am and hundreds of people in the packed church began wailing and sobbing.

Two young women, friends of Nguyen, wept in each other's arms as the the 25 bell chimes - one for each year of his life - echoed through the church.

Their male friends wiped away their own tears.

Outside the church, one of the group, Hoang Vo, 21, from Murrumbeena in Melbourne's south-east, said he felt very sad thinking about his friend, whom he had known for about five years.

"I'm just very sad, that it had to come to this, very sad," Mr Vo said.
"I couldn't sleep because no-one can really wake up in the morning to face that. It's just too much."

Brenda Kovacevic, 47, of Eltham, was one of about 500 people who attended who did not know Nguyen or his family, but felt connected to his plight.

"As a mother and a daughter and a sister and a friend and a human being I just feel like I can't believe that something like this can still occur in such a modern age, that we can't come up with some better solutions to these sort of problems," Ms Kovacevic said.

Also taking part in the service was former Iraqi hostage Douglas Wood.

In Melbourne's legal precinct, hundreds of lawyers observed a minute's silence and announced they were establishing a trust to help defend Australians who face execution in other countries, including, potentially, the Bali Nine.

In Sydney, silence descended on the heart of the city as several hundred people gathered in Martin Place.

Men and women, their heads bowed, sobbed and hugged each other as a gong was struck 25 times.

Many in the crowd placed yellow gerberas under a framed picture of Nguyen and paused to sign a petition condemning the Singapore government, which had systematically rejected all appeals to spare Nguyen's life.

In Canberra, dozens of people held a silent vigil outside the Singapore High Commission, including Amnesty International supporters and Australian Greens senators.

Greens leader Bob Brown said it was a distressing time in which the worst side of humanity was on display.

"It reduces all of us as human beings," he said.

A handful of protesters also stood outside the Singapore High Commission in Wellington, where New Zealand Green MP Keith Locke said the execution was "shameful and barbaric".

Nguyen's body will be returned to Melbourne at the weekend ahead of his funeral next week.

State terror demands hostages

2005-12-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

Australia's prison population increases

Australia's prison population has increased during the past year, with the Northern Territory recording the highest imprisonment rates in the country.

On average, 24,226 people were in prison per day in the three months to October, up from 23,490 in the same quarter last year.

The national average daily imprisonment rate is 155 prisoners per 100,000 adults.

Aborigines continue to make up a disproportionately high percentage of the prison population - and the rate is growing.

The national rate of imprisonment for indigenous people has increased seven per cent in the past year, to 2,027 prisoners per 100,000 indigenous adults.

That's 13 times higher than the rate for non-indigenous Australians.

The Northern Territory still has by far the highest rates of imprisonment in the country, at 550 prisoners per 100,000 adults, followed by Western Australia (223) and Queensland (177).

The Northern Territory and Tasmania recorded the largest increases in imprisonment rates over the past year, each up eight per cent.

The ACT has the lowest imprisonment rate at 76 prisoners per 100,000 adults, and recorded a decrease of four per cent in the 12 months to the September quarter.

Victoria and Queensland also recorded a drop in their imprisonment rates.

Victoria has the second-lowest rate of adults in prison, at 94 per 100,000 people, while South Australia's rate is 128 per 100,000 adults, Tasmania's is 144, and NSW's is 170.

Of those in full-time custody, 79 per cent have been sentenced, while 21 per cent are still awaiting the outcome of a trial.

The ACT and South Australia have the highest rate of unsentenced prisoners, at 34 per cent each.

NSW and WA have the highest rates of imprisonment for indigenous adults, coming in at 3,421 and 2,176 per 100,000 indigenous adults, respectively.

Men still significantly out-number women in prison populations, accounting for 93 per cent of those in full-time custody.

Nationally, 1,624 women were in custody in the September quarter, up from 1,589 on the same time last year.

Over one-third of them are incarcerated in NSW, which has 597 women in custody.

There's also been an increase in the number of Australians under non-custodial orders, up seven per cent in the past year to 54,906 in the September quarter.

That figure includes people who've received fines, community service orders, parole, bail, probation or some restriction to movement.

Clinton style welfare ' reform'

2005-12-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

A federal Liberal MP has abstained from voting on the Government's welfare-to-work package.

The bill passed through the House of Representatives yesterday but Judi Moylan, who has been an outspoken critic of the measures, left the chamber before the vote was taken.

Ms Moylan says while she agrees with the principle of greater workforce participation, there are serious problems with the planned changes.

She has told Lateline some people could be up to $91 a week worse off.

"My concern rests with the change of moving people from the current disability support pension and the parenting payment onto a Newstart allowance," she said.

"That has some very serious ramifications in terms of loss of income support."

Manufactured consent

2005-12-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

Viet War cover-up revealed - From: Agence France-Presse By Stephen Collinson in Washington December 02, 2005

Vietnam war - The end ... Evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon ( pic)

A TOP US spy agency has declassified data showing agents skewed intelligence to back claims of a communist attack on a US destroyer in 1964, an incident which led to the escalation of the Vietnam war.
The National Security Agency (NSA) today admitted defeat in a long battle to keep the explosive article, printed in 2001 in its in-house journal, secret.

Senior NSA officers had apparently feared the findings could prompt comparisons to claims the Bush administration twisted intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The article, by NSA historian Robert Hanyok, based on signals intelligence or SIGINT, concludes what historians have long suspected – there was no second attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on US destroyers on August 4, 1964.

President Lyndon B Johnson used the supposed second attack, two days after a confirmed initial strike, to argue for retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnam and to ask Congress for authority to act with a free hand in Vietnam.

It was the start of a fateful series of events which would lead to full scale war between the US and North Vietnam, which would kill 58,000 Americans, three million Vietnamese and scar both nations for decades.

Mr Hanyok's article concludes that neither Johnson nor his secretary of defence Robert McNamara were personally involved in manipulating intelligence on the incident, and believed it authentic.

The article, titled Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish, the Gulf of Tonkin mystery, concludes mid-level National Security Agency officials provided military and political leaders with "skewed" intelligence over the alleged attack.

"Two startling findings emerged from the new research. First, it is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night," the article said.

"SIGINT intelligence was presented in such a manner as to preclude responsible decision makers in the Johnson administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events on August 4, 1964.

"Instead, only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials."

Mr Hanyok uncovered a string of uncorrected translation errors and selective citation of intelligence in the communications intercepts which had never before been analysed together.

Independent historian Matthew Aid told AFP on November 2 he believed the NSA's deputy director blocked release of the internal history in August because of a possibly embarrassing parallel with the controversy over Iraq war intelligence.

"I am told that he rejected the request ... because of the sensitivity of the material for a political reason," Aid said.

Mr Hanyok's article concludes that the reason why the intelligence was "skewed" will probably never be known, but that the idea that agents were bending to administration pressure was not tenable.

The documents were issued through the National Security Archive, a public interest law firm and research institute based at George Washington University in the US capital.

Archive research fellow John Prados said Americans deserved to know the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

"The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq war makes it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in the light of new evidence," Mr Prados said.

Bomb Iran and Syria back to the stone age?

2005-12-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

The “Iraqization” Scam

Flashback: Anthony Gregory, April 20, 2004:

Just as the number of Americans who have died after Bush triumphantly stood in front of the now-famous “Mission Accomplished” banner exceeds by several times the U.S. death count of 140 before the war “ended,” the number of American fatalities after the Iraqi handover may make the current death toll seem like a drop in the bucket...

The fear is that pulling out may prove that the Iraq experiment was a failure, as the country descends into chaos and war. But even after Richard Nixon lost more than twenty thousand troops in his incremental attempts at “Vietnamization,” the United States eventually pulled out only to see South Vietnam fall to communism anyway...

As time goes on, and many more Americans continue to die in Iraq for reasons that increasingly seem unpersuasive to the public, the troops will come home. The only question that remains is how long this war, which now only survives by its own inertia, will continue to consume human lives. The United States can cut its losses now or we can maintain a war with no clear and just purpose, no victory in sight, and no realistic chance of reducing terrorism or bringing freedom to Iraq.

Funkytown

2005-12-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

How They Lied Us Into War: Closing in on a 'Funky' Forgery

Via the Left Coaster blog, this snippet from a piece in the UK's Private Eye magazine illuminates the mystery of how the Niger uranium forgeries came to be incorporated in the U.S. intelligence stream:

"When the US State Department finally gave international weapons inspectors its 'evidence' that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African State of Niger in 2003, they held back the one document even their own analysts knew was 'funky' and 'clearly a forgery'. Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency quickly discovered that all the papers were fake, but they did this by spotting errors that had slipped passed the State Department and CIA: The fact that the US government handed over the whole bundle of what became known as the 'Niger Forgeries' except the one paper they recognised as a hoax suggests they were trying to pass off documents they knew were phoney as the real thing."

The neocons are crying "McCarthyism" in response to demands that Congress investigate charges that we were lied into war. However, somebody in our government knew these documents were forgeries, and nonetheless utilized them to make the case for war. When the IAEA exposed them as fraudulent, the FBI initiated an investigation -- which soon ran up against the brick wall of this administration's unwillingness to pursue the matter. What I want to know is why is it left to Private Eye to do the job the FBI ought to be doing?

What did U.S. government officials know about the Niger forgeries, and when did they know it? When we get an answer to this question -- or if we can even get Congress and our law enforcement agencies to ask it -- we'll be a lot closer to knowing who lied us into war.

Posted by: Justin Raimondo on Dec 01, 05 Antiwar.bomb

No one's an Island

2005-12-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

No-one's an island entire to themselves
Anyone's death diminishes me because I'm involved in all humankind
So never send to know for who the bell toll's
It toll's for you

The Australian editorializes today that America is BACKWARD and BRUTAL. Tough but true.

The Arab Street

2005-12-01T20:26:00.000-08:00

The battling beasts of the new Middle East

By Rami G. Khouri - Daily Star staff . Saturday, November 26, 2005

BEIRUT: If there is such a scholarly discipline as political anthropology, one of its most fascinating case studies would be the current confrontation between the United States and Syria. It tells us much about the instinctive behavior of the United States, the Syrian leadership and the wider Arab world, and how change might happen during this era of uncertain transformation throughout the region and the world.

The telling moment in this dynamic came earlier this month when Syrian President Bashar Assad made a strong, defiant speech at Damascus University announcing that Syria would resist to the death the American-led international plan to bring it and the entire Arab world to their knees, or send it into violent chaos like next door Iraq. After three years of mixed signals to the United States on whether or not it would cooperate on issues like Iraq, the global anti-terror war, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Hizbullah, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Syria has again offered mixed signals, but this time with a dramatic flourish, more rhetorical fist-waving and loud patriotic music in the background.

Political anthropology is useful here because it tells us about how political organisms behave, not necessarily about what they feel or believe in. In behavioral terms, the Syrian president said essentially that he would continue to defy the United States and the United Nations' demands to cooperate with the investigation of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, while also cooperating with them on the key issues of concern to them. He made a ringing call for steadfastness, sacrifice and resistance to American-led plans to control this region and reconfigure its sovereignties, saying that Syria would pay the price of resistance and defiance, and would not fear or bow its head to anyone but God. At the same time, his government talks with the UN investigators on where to meet the top Syrian officials who are requested for questioning.

I find the Syrian position significant mainly because it allows us finally - 15 years after the end of the Cold War - to identify the broad lines of the main ideological forces that define the Middle East today and compete within it for the allegiance of some 300 million Arabs. I see five of them, of very unequal strength:

1)Mainstream Islamists: This is the largest single constituency in the region, comprising relatively moderate, mostly nonviolent, Islamist movements such as Hamas, Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood. They use armed violence to repel foreign (mostly Israeli) occupations, and in the past sometimes violently challenged their own regimes in Syria, Egypt, Algeria and other lands. Most of them now focus on sharing or gaining political power peacefully, through local and national elections. Their significant gains in the ongoing Egyptian parliamentary elections are an important signal that they would fare well if free and fair elections were held in Arab countries.

2)Terrorist groups: A small number of Arabs, Pakistanis, Afghans, and citizens of other lands have broken away from mainstream political Islamism and adopted terror as a vehicle for their political expression, a la Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They draw on the same mass resentment and sense of marginalization that plague most Arab citizenries and feed the mainstream, non-violent Islamist parties, but instead they use terror against Arab and foreign targets as an instrument of their political expression and aims.
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3) American-led Western hegemony: This is the ideological force in the Middle East that has been recently articulated in more distinct terms, following the end of the Cold War around 1990 and then more emphatically after the attacks of September 11, 2001. This movement aims to transform the Middle East into a series of Washington-compliant societies that are free to spend their money and run their internal affairs as they wish (e.g., family-run monarchies, tribal-run police states, security-run oligarchies, father-and-son kleptocracies) as long as they stay out of the business of terror, WMD proliferation, and pestering Israel. Democracy is optional, and a free market, globalized, free-trade economy preferred.

4) Anti-American, anti-imperial defiance: This is the oldest running ideological current in the region, dating from a century ago when various Arabs rebelled against European, Ottoman, and, to a limited extent, Zionist power in the region. Assad has now raised this banner high once again, targeting the U.S.A., and it will be important to see how many people follow his emotional and political lead. He couches his stance in pan-Arab and anti-imperial rhetoric and principles that still ring credibly to many ears in this battered region that suffers long-running Israeli, and more recent Anglo-American, military invasions and occupations.

5) Home-grown Arab democracy and the rule of law: This is the most recent and weakest ideology in the region, represented by civil society activists and others who demand more participatory, accountable Arab governance systems. This fledgling movement rears its head in important ways in many lands, by citizens who have grown weary and humiliated by their own national stagnation, autocracy, police states, corruption, mismanagement and deference to foreign dictates. They do not hold much hope for better things to come from the four other primary ideological forces swirling around them, and work instead for governance that respects the rule of law and pluralism.

In terms of political anthropology, they are like algae that starts to grow slowly, in small clusters in dark corners, but has the potential to take root and ultimately overwhelm its immediate environment.

President Assad's defiant speech catering to a market of pan-Arab, anti-imperial sensibilities, defiance and resistance will let us see how large and deep that constituency really is, if it exists any more. His position completes the five forces I mentioned above as the protagonist beasts in the political jungle of the contemporary Arab world. If I were a betting man, I would say that after the current period of some turmoil and violent change, the triumphant trend to emerge will combine the peaceful Islamists with the home-grown democrats. That's the optimistic scenario. The worst case scenario would see the American hegemon perpetually fighting the combined forces of the home-grown terrorists and the exasperated, radicalized pan-Arab nationalists, amidst an expanding global terror and anti-terror war.

Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for The Daily Star

Hot and Spicer

2005-12-01T19:38:00.000-08:00

November 30, 2005 -- Aegis Defense Services, the Pentagon contractor led by international mercenary Tim Spicer, seems to have some morale problems among its security force in Iraq. In the last six weeks, Aegis has experienced the following from its Tikrit security force alone: four resignations and three requests for transfers, all denied. The personnel problems are being blamed on pompous and arrogant managers who have been assigned to Tikrit and Forward Operating Base (FOB) Camp Speicher. WMR.

NSA TakeAway trial latest

2005-12-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2005 -- WMR will be at the US Courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland today covering the trial of former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Kenneth Ford. He is charged with illegally possessing classified material. This case is yet another example of the out-of-control NSA Security Directorate, which is being used as a virtual Stasi to harass, terminate, and, now in the case of Ford, imprison anyone who crosses its path.

The Associated Press reports on this trial are extremely biased in favor of the government so their coverage of the case should be taken with a very small grain of salt. This is how the AP reported the first day of the trial: "A former National Security Agency employee admitted to backing his pickup truck up to an unguarded exit and hauling away boxes of classified material, an FBI agent testified Tuesday." The AP would seem to have found Ford guilty.

NSA Security Directorate: Another day, another outrage

The government is charging Ford took classified material home to use on a resumé for a job in the private sector. Ford is also charged with making a false statement on a security clearance form for Lockheed Martin, a charge that almost never ends up in Federal court.

However, this case involves a jaded witness, Ford's one-time girl friend, "Tanya Tucker," an individual who has a long rap sheet, aliases, and a history of informing for the FBI, according to informed sources. Knowledgeable sources also report that Ford worked as an analyst on communications intercepts involving two major events: 911 and the lead up to the Iraq War. It is obvious that the Bush Justice Department and Pentagon has gone to great lengths to see Ford out of commission for ten years in a Federal penitentiary.

For NSA, the Ford case represents a return to past institutionalized racism at the signals intelligence agency and yet another example of an unrestrained Security Directorate working with untrustworthy FBI agents. WMR.

Cash for comment

2005-12-01T19:19:00.000-08:00

U.S. military pays Iraqis for positive news stories on war

By Jonathan S. Landay - Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Army officers have been secretly paying Iraqi journalists to produce upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about American military operations and the conduct of the war in Iraq.

U.S. officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad Press Club, an organization they said was created more than a year ago by U.S. Army officers. They are part of an extensive American military-run information campaign -- including psychological warfare experts -- intended to build popular support for U.S.-led stabilization efforts and erode support for Sunni Muslim insurgents.

Members of the Press Club are paid as much as $ 200 a month, depending on how many positive pieces they produce.

Under military rules, information operations are restricted to influencing the attitudes and behavior of foreign governments and people. One form of information operations -- psychological warfare -- can use doctored or false information to deceive or damage the enemy or to bolster support for American efforts.

Many military officials, however, said they were concerned that the payments to Iraqi journalists and other covert information operations in Iraq had become so extensive that they were corroding the effort to build democracy and undermining U.S. credibility in Iraq. They also worry that information in the Iraqi press that's been planted or paid for by the U.S. military could "blow back" to the American public.

Eight current and former military, defense and other U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington agreed to discuss the payments to Iraqi reporters and other American military information operations because they fear that the efforts are promoting practices that are unacceptable for a democracy. They requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.

"We are teaching them (Iraqi journalists) the wrong things," one military officer said.

Moreover, the defense and military officials said, the U.S. public is at risk of being influenced by the information operations because what's planted in the Iraqi media can be picked up by international news organizations and Internet bloggers.

"There is no 'local' media anymore. All media is potentially international. The Web makes it all public. We need to ... eliminate the idea that psychological operations and information operations can issue any kind of information to the media ever. Period," said a senior military official in Baghdad who has knowledge of American psychological operations in Iraq.

Finally, military and defense officials said, the more extensive the information operations, the more likely they'll be discovered, thereby undermining the credibility of the U.S. armed forces and the American government.

"It's a culture of being loose with the truth. We'd better stop it or we are going to end up like we did in Vietnam," said a senior U.S. defense official in Washington. "The problem is if you get caught, it destroys everything, and they don't realize the collateral damage potential."

Spokesmen for the American command in Iraq and for the Tampa, Fla.-based U.S. Central Command, which has overall responsibility for American military operations in the Middle East, said they had no immediate comment.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, "We're looking into this issue . . . to ascertain all of the facts."

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld hailed what he called the country's "free media," saying they were acting as "a relief valve" through which Iraqis have been engaging in democratic debate and dialogue.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. military has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print pro-American stories written by U.S. information operations troops.

A Knight Ridder investigation has found that the American military's information operations have been far more extensive.

In addition to the Army's secret payments to Iraqi newspaper, radio and television journalists for positive stories, U.S. psychological-warfare officers have been involved in writing news releases and drafting media strategies for top commanders, two defense officials said.

On at least one occasion, psychological warfare specialists have taken a group of international journalists on a tour of Iraq's border with Syria, a route used by Islamic terrorists and arms smugglers, one of the officials said.

Usually, these duties are the responsibility of military public-affairs officers.

In Iraq, public affairs staff at the American-run multinational headquarters in Baghdad have been combined with information operations experts in an organization known as the Information Operations Task Force.

The unit's public affairs officers are subservient to the information operations experts, military and defense officials said.

The result is a "fuzzing up" of what's supposed to be a strict division between public affairs, which provides factual information about U.S. military operations, and information operations, which can use propaganda and doctored or false information to influence enemy actions, perceptions and behavior.

Information operations are intended to "influence foreign adversary audiences using psychological operations capabilities," according to a Sept. 27, 2004, memo sent to top American commanders by the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers.

Myers warned that putting public affairs and information operations in the same office had "the potential to compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public."

The payments to Iraqi journalists originally were intended to nurture a fledgling domestic press corps by rewarding Iraqi journalists who put their lives and the safety of their families at risk by attending U.S. military briefings in the high security Green Zone in Baghdad, where American officials live and work.

"These guys had to take extraordinary risk to cover our stories," said a U.S. military officer in the United States who's familiar with the program.

The effort, however, "has gotten out of hand," said an American military official in Baghdad.

"The Iraqi population doesn't realize that some of the information" they receive from their news media "is bought and paid for by the United States," said the senior defense official in Washington.

A former senior defense official who served in Baghdad said the group was created for the same reason that the Bush administration initially tried "to put an American face" on every Iraqi government ministry. U.S. officials, the official said, were unprepared for the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime and were forced to construct "almost from scratch" an Iraqi government and ways to communicate with a frightened and disoriented populace.

"No one in charge had thought very much about the Iraqi media, about the fact that because it was part of Saddam's regime, it would just cease to exist after the regime fell and that there wasn't anything to take its place," the former senior defense official said.

"The State Department had done some work on that, but the Defense Department, which was running the show, hadn't paid attention to what State had done. So it came as something of a surprise to the troops who were there that they'd give a briefing and no Iraqis would come," he said.

However, a current American official and a second former U.S. official, both of whom served in Iraq, said the attempt to jump-start independent Iraqi media -- described by the current official as "priming the pump" -- quickly mushroomed into a much more ambitious and entrenched effort to influence what was being reported in the Iraqi media.

"The Iraqis learned that if they reported stuff we liked, they'd get paid, and our guys learned that if they paid the Iraqis, they'd report stuff we liked," the former senior defense official said.

While the Pentagon's media campaign in Iraq harks back to CIA efforts in Italy, Greece and elsewhere after World War II to discredit communism and promote pro-Western ideas, it also reflects a widespread belief by some Bush administration officials that the news media are merely another interest group to be spun, influenced, bullied or, if necessary, bought or rented.

"They don't represent the public any more than other people do," White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card once said, as quoted in The New Yorker magazine. "In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function."

Military entertainment complex

2005-12-01T19:12:00.000-08:00

It's tough to follow the history of Lincoln Group, a contractor that won a $100 million contract with the Special Operations Command to assist with psychological operations. The common denominator to the firm's history is Christian Bailey, listed on its Web site as executive vice president, capital markets. After graduating from Oxford University in England in the 1990s, Bailey moved to the San Francisco area around 1998, and in 1999, founded Express Action, an e-commerce company he apparently later sold. In the Nov. 15, 2002, issue of HedgeWorld Daily News, Bailey was identified as the founder and chairman of a New York-based hedge fund called Lincoln Asset Management. On March 1, 2003, the Alternative Investment News reported that Lincoln Asset Management had an initial $100 million in commitments to underwrite a leveraged buyout fund to acquire defense and intelligence companies.

In 2003, the Lincoln Alliance Corp. (a subsidiary of Lincoln Asset Management) made its debut, presenting itself primarily as a purveyor of what it called "tailored intelligence services" for "government clients faced with critical intelligence challenges," and as an Iraq business development catalyst. Its Web site listed no officers, principals or partners, but described operations as focused on an ambitious mix of political campaign intelligence and commercial real estate. With one office in Baghdad and more projected, Lincoln would act as a clearinghouse for U.S. and foreign companies doing business in Iraq, providing "the information, research and contacts necessary to develop and grow businesses" in the post-Saddam era.

During this time, Lincoln appears to have maintained a business address at 1130 17th St. NW in Washington, and shared phone and fax numbers with Omnicept, a firm located at the time at 1432 T St. NW. Omnicept described itself as an "advanced information technology and systems design firm" and "analytic and intelligence firm" comprising "experts whose experience encompasses military intelligence, education and academia, big business, money managers, political activists, law enforcement, entrepreneurs, artists, and more."

Paige Craig was listed at the same phone numbers as Omnicept's September 2003 point of contact for Internet solicitations for interns. He also represented Lincoln as vice president at the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority's Nov. 19, 2003, Industry Day in Crystal City, Va. According to phone records, the T Street address was a residence with listings for Bailey and Craig.

In late 2003 or early 2004, however, the Lincoln Alliance Corp. became Iraqex, and in a Sept. 27, 2004, Agence France Press news story, was referred to as "a U.S. firm involved in a range of activities from manufacturing construction materials to providing logistics for U.S. forces." In October 2004, it apparently added communications to its repertoire, scoring a $6 million contract from the Multi-National Corps-Iraq (formerly known as Combined Joint Task Force-7, which had operational control of all troops in Iraq) to design and execute an "aggressive advertising and public relations campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the coalition's goals and gain their support," as the contract's August 2004 request for proposal put it.

O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, an influential public relations trade publication, struck a somewhat skeptical tone in its coverage of the tender. MNC-I's contract officer refused to disclose the five other bidders. Bailey said "more information would be forthcoming" about Iraqex and its efforts. Little came, save a November 2004 brief in the trade publication, PR Week, that reported, "Iraqex has a policy of not speaking to the press regarding its work, but has hired 5W PR as its mouthpiece," and quoted 5W PR's chief as saying of Iraqex, "We have more experience working in Iraq than any other firm or organization anywhere in the world."

Oddly, at the December 2004 Destination Baghdad Expo in Iraq, Iraqex listed itself as Iraq-based, but provided only its Washington telephone and address. Then, in March 2005, it changed its name yet again, to Lincoln Group, a communications and PR firm "providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile environments." And on June 11, along with SYColeman and Science Applications International Corp., Lincoln Group got its JPSE contract.

While the group's current Web site does list noteworthy examples of successful endeavors apparently part of its MNC-I work, some find it curious that a firm set up by two thirty-something guys has come so far so fast. Also giving pause has been the company's apparent tendency to solicit staff by way of internships. And it is curious that records of Bailey's Republican affiliations have disappeared from certain Web sites since the JPSE contract was announced.

Bailey was a founder and active participant in Lead21, a fund-raising and networking operation for affluent young Republicans, some of whom have gone on to serve in the Bush administration. Click on the links to Lead21's site today and no mention of Bailey is to be found. But on a subscriber business and social networking site, there's an archived e-mail of Bailey discussing setting up a New York branch of Lead21, and his "personal network," which lists a half-dozen members of the organization's current board, including the chairman of the California Republican Party and the senior policy adviser to the Justice Department's chief information officer. "These are going to be the big supporters, the big donors to the Republican Party in five years' time," Bailey told The New York Times in an Aug. 31, 2004, video interview during a Lead21 party at the Republican convention in New York.

Neither JPSE nor Lincoln Group responded to verbal or written requests for interviews, but the Project on Government Oversight has reservations. "Any time we see leaders who cultivate political influence for a particular party suddenly receive major government contracts, it sends up red flags," says POGO spokeswoman Beth Daley.

http://www.govexec.com/features/1205-01/1205-01s1s2.htm

The supreme international crime

2005-12-01T18:53:00.000-08:00

Q/A on the Iraq War
by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
November 29, 2005

1. On Reconstruction

Anthony DiMaggio: The "humanitarian reconstruction" of Iraq
has been acknowledged to a large degree as a failure in the
corporate press. It's interesting, though, to see the
reasons given for why: the resistance is hampering
reconstruction, there wasn't perfect foresight by the Bush
administration in the reconstruction coordination planning
process, the excessive "rapid personnel shifts" of those
Americans involved in rebuilding, American money has
"necessarily" gone to "pacification" instead of rebuilding,
etc. What seems to be systematically omitted here is any
real responsibility placed on the Bush Administration for
its failure to make humanitarian reconstruction a high priority.

Chomsky: The excuses also overlook the fact that the
insurgency was created by the brutality of the invasion and
occupation -- which is, in fact, one of the most astonishing
failures in military history. The Nazis had less trouble in
occupied Europe, and the Russians held their satellites for
decades with far less difficulty. It is difficult to think
of an analog. A few months after the invasion, I met a
highly experienced senior physician with one of the leading
relief organizations, who has served in some of the worst
parts of the world. He had just returned briefly from
Baghdad, where he was trying to reestablish medical
facilities, but was unable to because of the incompetence of
the CPA. He told me he had never seen such a combination of
"arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence," referring to the
Pentagon civilians in charge. In fact, it was monumental.
They even failed to guard the WMD sites that had been under
UN supervision, so that they were systematically looted,
handing over to someone -- probably jihadis --
high-precision equipment suitable for producing missiles and
nuclear weapons, dangerous bio-toxins, etc., which had been
provided to their friend Saddam by the US, UK and others.
The ironies are almost indescribable.

Another fact overlooked, though it is finally beginning to
leak, is the immense corruption under the CPA, beside which
anything attributed to the UN pales in insignificance.
Plenty of information has been readily available, but only
tidbits were reported here.

One can go on. But the major and crucial point overlooked is
the judgment of Nuremberg, declaring that aggression is "the
supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated
evil of the whole." All of the "accumulated evil." Also
overlooked are the stern words of the US Chief Counsel
Justice Jackson: "If certain acts of violation of treaties
are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does
them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared
to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which
we would not be willing to have invoked against us . . . We
must never forget that the record on which we judge these
defendants is the record on which history will judge us
tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to
put it to our own lips as well." Until at least this is
recognized, all other discussion is merely footnotes, and
shameful ones.

Herman: The U.S. specialty is destruction, not
reconstruction, in accord with the U.S. elite's longstanding
giving of primacy to military means, and the use of force in
dealing with target states. We save them by destroying them,
and then move on to the next creative project. This is how
it works even when we succeed in bringing into power an
amenable client regime, as in Nicaragua after the ouster of
the Sandinistas or Afghanistan after the removal and
dispersal of the Taliban. There have been explicit
leadership statements to the effect that "nation-building"
is not our business -- we specialize in dismantlement, not
construction.

In Iraq, there has been a lot of construction, but not much
reconstruction. What have been constructed are massive U.S.
military bases and facilities, repairs of oil extraction
facilities, and protective walls in and around the Green
Zone, which is essentially an occupied fortress within
Baghdad. Not much has been done for Iraqi benefit. There are
two incentives for reconstruction in Iraq: one is to serve
U.S. companies, obviously mainly donor companies like
Halliburton and Bechtel, who want the business, especially
under conditions where looting is relatively easy given the
difficult conditions and fiscal confusion. There is also an
incentive to reconstruct in order to help sell the client
government to the Iraqi people. The first incentive has been
effective, with the donor companies getting lots of business
with lots of overpayment, but most of their work has been in
base, oil industry, and Green Zone construction, not
reconstruction helpful to Iraqis. The second incentive might
have had some potency except for the extreme difficulties of
working in the highly insecure environment of occupied Iraq,
plus the fact that Bush priorities and the unexpectedly high
costs of the occupation have made this form of help to the
client government too expensive; so helping the client
government has been reduced to the U.S. specialty --
pacification by violence.

2. On Civil War in Iraq

DiMaggio: A common argument made against de-escalation and
withdrawal is that Iraq would fall into civil war. Should
this argument be taken seriously by the American public?
Many have argued that the U.S. is already promoting civil
war in Iraq by training Iraqi security forces to fight other
Iraqis (the resistance). In addition, others have pointed
out that U.S. occupation is hardly going to change the
dynamics of long-standing sectarian and cultural divides
between Iraq's various groups (Shia, Kurds, Sunni); in fact
it may make them worse by exacerbating relations between
Sunni insurgents/resistance and the Shia and Kurds. Is there
any legitimacy to the argument that the U.S. should prevent
civil war?

Chomsky: Aggressors have no rights, only responsibility. One
is to provide massive reparations (not aid). Another is to
withdraw forthwith, unless there is very strong evidence
that the population wants them to stay. To say that such
evidence is lacking is a serious understatement. The most
recent poll (August 2005), undertaken by the British
Ministry of Defense and leaked to the right-wing British
press, reveals that over 80% of the population want the
US-UK forces out, that 1% think they increase security, and
that 45% approve of attacks on US-UK forces. If this means
all Iraqis, as reported, it must be that opposition to the
occupiers is far higher in Arab Iraq, where they are
actually deployed and engaged. This is not too surprising in
the light of earlier information that has been released.

Herman: The Bush war has already started a civil war as part
of the evolving occupation strategy. The character of the
occupation, with its murderous use of firepower and harsh
treatment of the populace, has steadily enlarged and
consolidated a resistance. Having failed to get a puppet
effectively installed without even nominal democratic forms,
the Bush war managers opted for a tacit alliance with the
Shiites and Kurds, who would be given nominal and possibly a
modicum of real power via an electoral process, but with
much of the legal and power arrangements of the occupation
left intact and with the United States staying on to protect
the new quasi-rulers from the Sunni-based insurgency. This
provoked and institutionalized a civil war, with the
occupation maintained as the military arm of one side. Thus
the idea that the United States should stay on to avert a
civil war is a laugher -- it produced the resistance and
then moved on to a tacit alliance with the Shiites and Kurds
to fight the Sunnis on behalf of the latter two groups while
trying to train and arm these to be able to pacify the
Sunnis on their own, which is to say in a civil war with the
foreign military's direct assistance and participation.

3. On U.S. Withdrawal

DiMaggio: Most Americans seem to be considering withdrawal
within the next year or so. Do you think there is any
serious role to be played by the U.N. or Arab League in
ensuring a power-vacuum does not replace the American
occupation, should the U.S. decide to leave? In other words,
are these two organizations necessary for promoting security
in Iraq? From what polling has revealed, the people of Iraq
seem to prefer that Iraqi security forces should take over
stabilizing and policing the country, rather than the U.S.
or some other power. Is this realistic at all? Would
bringing Arab League forces in not just subject Iraq to
outside political pressures from neighboring regimes? And
does the U.N. really have any credibility there after nearly
15 years of murderous sanctions?

Chomsky: In Western propaganda, the murderous sanctions are
called "UN sanctions," which is technically accurate, but a
cowardly evasion. It has always been perfectly obvious that
they were initiated and conducted under US initiative, with
the "spear carrier for Pax Americana" -- as Blair's Britain
is described in Britain's leading journal of international
affairs -- trailing politely behind. And the cruel and
savage character of the sanctions (as well as the illegal
oil shipments) trace right back to Washington,
overwhelmingly. By April 2003, a large majority of Americans
felt that the UN, not the US, should take responsibility for
Iraq -- approximately the position that Spanish voters
approved a year later, but in the US, democracy has
deteriorated to the point that public opinion has little
influence on policy, on a very wide range of issues. The
discussion, in any event, is idle. It is for Iraqis to make
these decisions. The invaders may have whatever uninformed
subjective judgments they like, but they are of only
marginal interest, no matter who the invaders are.

Herman: With a U.S. withdrawal there would be a strong
incentive for the three sub-national groups to come to some
kind of accommodation, without any outside assistance. The
U.S. withdrawal would cut out a major part of the rationale
for an insurgency, so accommodation would become possible.
The very assurance of a specific and near-term U.S. timed
exit would probably induce serious indigenous attempts to
produce reconciliation and end a struggle that is so costly
to all sides, but mostly to the Sunnis and Shiites.

Other Arab states did perform a useful mediation service in
Lebanon in earlier years, so their utility in this service
is not out of the question. The UN is pretty thoroughly
discredited and probably has no useful role to play here.
But the possibility of purely indigenous accommodation in
the absence of the aggressor-occupier from abroad should not
be discounted. The United States has wrecked the country and
continues to do further wrecking in its pacification
operations, so that ending its operations there would be a
gigantic plus. It is not likely that the situation would be
as bad or worse with the United States and its "coalition of
the bribed" out of Iraq, and there is an excellent chance
that it would be much better. The Iraqis surely ought to be
given that chance of freedom from an aggression-occupation
following their long years of non-freedom under Saddam Hussein.

The United States should not only get out quickly, it ought
to be compelled or shamed into paying huge sums to a free
Iraq to compensate for the enormous damage that resulted
from its commission of the "supreme crime" and murderous
occupation.

Anthony DiMaggio teaches Middle East Politics and American
Government at Illinois State University. He is the Senior
Editor of The Indy, an independent newspaper based out of
Illinois.

Howard the Hangman gloats

2005-12-01T18:40:00.000-08:00

Howard the hangman is wiping the blood away from the edge of his barely suppressed smirk over the state terrorist murder of a young boy.

People used to think 21 was the age of majority yet, through hard emperical science we now know the true age when a adolescent becomes an adult is now around 25.

That is why I refer to young Ngyuen as a ' boy'. He was certainly no adult when he committed his alleged offence.

And what is this offence anyway?

The drug war by any measure is a class war. The rich and powerful are just carrying out their traditional war on the poor by other means.

Their gulag prisons are stuffed to the gills with poor and working class ' drug related' offenders. The middle and upper class can continue on their merry way, snorting coke, dropping eccies and even shooting up weekend smack hits with no fear.

They know very few of them will wind up in Howard the hangman's gulag's.

The first prohibition made publicans criminals! They could be extorted, kidnapped , tortured and murdered. This crazy prohibition was only declared a complete failure after it created the largest Mafia and most corrupt police in the world.

So little has changed that people ,who could be your local chemist, can now be preyed on by corrupt police and their criminal friends. Another huge Mafia created - more corruption right through society. More war on the poor. More state terror at home. Police invade poor peoples living rooms while the rich snort and shoot with impunity in public.

More and more police and law enforcement people who can see where things are going are coming out against this second failed prohibition. Howard the hangman won't even pretend to listen to them. He has as his advisors the ultra rich, the shock jocks, the bought and paid for Military/entertainment complex ( some just exposed in Iraq ) and a ' Major' in some crackpot ' army'.

Howard the hangman is gloating today over the state terrorist murder of a young Aussie boy and toddles off to a cricket match. he has plenty more hangings coming up that he has arranged and jury rigged through his stooge, Mick Killer Keelty, in Bali.

Howard the hangman is a serial killer and gang boss. He unleashed SAS stormtroopers to murder and maim in SW Asia BEFORE the illegal ultimatum even went into effect. Howard the Mafioso coward is a killer by remote control in league with the mass murderers of Indonesia and Singapore and Malaysia and China and Amerikkka.

Howard the hangman never saw a police state he didn't like. That's why he gets on so well with all the premiers.

Howard the hangman knows very well how to cry crocodile tears and send dog whistle messages at the same time. His cheap second hand Bob Hawke act is now wearing very thin. If it wasn't for so much of the moronic inferno media being so corrupt and skewed so far to the lunar right he would never have even gained power in the first place.

Australia is not a democracy. It is a governor generalate and don't you forget it. A stacked deck and rigged pokie machine. Now it is also rapidly mutating into a Chinese style hell hole. The worst of communism and the worst of capitalism. The only way to stop this sort of malign 'centrist' totalitarianism is the EU way.

An ' Impi' Zulu horns tactic whereby the left and right ' horns' impaled the proposed EU superstate and stopped it dead.

Fuck with bull and you get the horn.

The German, US, UK, Israel and AU 'center' fascist blobs will all learn this lesson soon...real soon.

A reckoning is also rapidly approaching all the members of the ' Coalition of the willing' executioners of 100,000 innocents in SW Asia. Bush, Blair, Berlusconi and the hangman Howard could all end up in the dock at the Hague for their illegal aggressive invasion, mass murders and war crimes.

If there is to be justice then state terrorists will be held accountable. One way or another they will be held accountable. State torture and terror is the worst crime and while certainly not deserving formal capital punishment new netcentric means of predicting the permanent retirement from politics of all state terrorists is now coming on stream.

There is no future for the hangmen and there is no future for Howard in a world out for justice.

renderAIR

2005-12-01T17:35:00.000-08:00

Twist to terror suspects row as logs show 80 CIA planes visited UK

Stephen Grey and Luke Harding in Berlin
Thursday December 1, 2005 The Guardian
The transatlantic row over the secret transfer of terror suspects by the Bush administration took a new twist yesterday when it emerged that more than 300 flights operated by the CIA had landed at European airports.
According to flight logs seen by the Guardian, Britain was second only to Germany as a transit hub for the CIA, which stands accused of operating a covert network of interrogation centres in eastern Europe. Several European governments have launched urgent investigations into whether clandestine CIA flights were used in the aftermath of September 11 to transfer Islamist prisoners to third countries where they could be interrogated beyond the reach of international law.

The allegations have provoked a furore in Europe. On Tuesday the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, acting on behalf of the EU, asked the US to clarify whether planes containing terror suspects - known as "rendition" flights - had stopped off in Europe. He also raised the allegations made by Human Rights Watch earlier this month about covert interrogation centres.
The US has so far refused to confirm or deny the reports. But on Tuesday the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, told Germany's new foreign minister, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, the administration would respond. Ms Rice is likely to come under further pressure when she visits Europe next week. The Guardian's survey of flight logs taken from 26 CIA planes reveals a far higher level of activity than previously known. The CIA visited Germany 96 times. Britain was second with more than 80 flights by CIA-owned planes, although when charter flights are added the figure rises to more than 200. France was visited just twice and neutral Austria not at all, according to the logs, which also reveal regular trips to eastern Europe, including 15 visits to the Czech capital Prague.

Only one visit is recorded to the Szymany airbase in north-east Poland, which has been identified as the alleged site of a secret CIA jail. Poland and Romania have denied hosting CIA prisons.

While the logs show unprecedented CIA activity, they do not show which planes were involved in prisoner transfers. In October and December 2003 a CIA Boeing flew from RAF Northolt to Tripoli while the CIA and MI6 were negotiating with Libya over its weapons of mass destruction programme. In January 2004 the same Boeing was allegedly involved in shipping suspects to a US prison in Afghanistan.

The European Council has appointed a special investigator and is examining possible human rights violations by member countries. The European Union has launched an inquiry and the Austrian government has asked the US to explain a US C-130 Hercules that flew into its airspace. The flight logs were obtained from Federal Aviation Administration data and sources in the aviation industry.

Everone on the Today show's wearing black

2005-12-01T11:01:00.000-08:00

Everyone on the Today show this morning is wearing black to mark the hanging this morning of Van Ngyuen, a young Australian boy about to be brutally hung by the fascist police state of Singap...sorry, sorry. They were wearing black last year to mark the resignation of their popular news room boss. Sorry. They are wearing white , floral and normal business suits this morning. Dec 2 2005.

Everyone know's Australians hate, hate, HATE chemis...drug dealers. And everone in the RSL just LOVEs a good hanging!

Also our Dear Leader recently sent nine young Australian's off to a firing squad so we really can't complain now can we.

' hang em all, hang em all, the long and the short and the tall'

Conservation and appropriate technology...

2005-12-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

...trump nuclear anyday.

Review of Sustainable Technologies for Renewable Energy, Eliminating Waste, Recycling and for Real economic Progress. Many Links to sustainable technology, Recycling, organic gardening-farming, renewable energy, Permaculture and disaster relief web sites.

Traduza Traduisez Vertaa Übersetzen Sie
http://babelfish.altavista.com

ELECTRIC BICYCLES & ELECTRIC VEHICLES
Freedom from the Oil Pirates and Economic Vampires
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http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/11/1784013.php
solar boats, solar bicycles, making BioDiesel
convert your vehicle to an electric vehicle
convert your diesel vehicle to BioDiesel
training, classes and books

PEAK OIL AND PERMACULTURE
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http://burma.indymedia.org/en/2005/10/282.shtml

USA plans brutal Attack on Defenseless Orphans.
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http://japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/2486/index.php

USA SNEAK ATTACK on Organic Food
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http://ru.indymedia.org/newswire/display/14007/index.php http://www.organicconsumers.org/sos.cfm

SOLAR HEATED HOMES & SPAS ~ saving Money & energy Intelligently
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http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/11/99829.php
heating homes with solar hot water
passive solar homes, geothermal homes
heating greenhouses with solar hot water
heating buildings and homes with vegetable biodiesel
solar heating of swimming pools and hot tubs
strawbale homes, earth homes, dome homes
emergency shelters, solar tubes
water battery, flywheel battery
cohousing networks, ecovillage networks
communities for disabled people
training for developing countries
training, classes, books and journals

RENEWABLE ENERGY
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http://jakarta.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=470
solar energy, wind energy, micro-hydro
ocean energy, tidal energy, river energy
renewable energy for remote villages
solar refrigerators
solar air conditioning
solar water heaters
solar water pumps
ram water pumps
wind water pumps
energy conservation
hydrogen fuel cells
hydrogen appliances
car share
specialized training for women
training, classes, books and journals

FREE JOURNAL ABOUT SOLAR ENERGY, Sustainable Technologies
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http://www.homepower.com

SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY FAIRS AND EVENTS
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http://www.homepower.com/events/index.cfm

TOURS OF SOLAR HOMES AND SOLAR BUILDINGS
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and links to local chapter NGO's and their events
http://www.ases.org

INTERNATIONAL SOLAR ENERGY EVENTS
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http://www.ises.org

SOLAR WALLS
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http://www.solarwall.com

ORGANIC TECHNOLOGY FOR GARDENERS & FARMERS
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http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2005/08/8610.php

ORGANIC FARMING WILL FEED THE WORLD
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http://www.twimc.org/newswire/display/644/index.php

ECO RECYCLE ~ saving Money & energy ~ nullify global starvation
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http://india.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/211088.shtml
worm composting, EM composting
compost tea, worm tea
kitchen worm composters
garden roofs, green parking lots
winter farming and gardening
drought farming, permaculture
stormwater abatement
organic gardening, biodynamic gardening
community gardens, allotments
eliminate hunger, gardening therapy
community supported agriculture
recycling used cooking oil
purifying indoor air with plants
rainwater collection systems
fog water collection systems
solar water desalination
gray water recycling
waste water recycling
solar water purification
recycling heat from waste water
composting toilets
newsletters, training, classes, books and journals

BOOKS about:
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http://www.acresusa.com
organic farming and gardening
eco farming, biodynamic gardening
greenhouses, metro farms
permaculture, composting
monthly journal

SOLAR MEDICAL EQUIPMENT & solar Hospitals:
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http://www.sunutility.com/html_pg/healthcare.html

SOLAR REFRIGERATORS for vaccines and medicines:
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http://www.sunfrost.com

BUILD INTO THE FUTURE
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Indestructible and energy efficient buildings and homes
Hurricane proof, Tornado proof, Earthquake proof & Tidal Wave proof
http://www.monolithicdome.com

WHY BE STUPID?
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http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2005/11/930568.php

Please email this web page to your friends and to people who are concerned about our future and our Grandchildren’s future. Thank you.

www.permacultureinternational.org

FROM Melbourne IMC

I've had some thoughts for Au sustainable energy along the lines of Solar ponds, Distilling greenhouses, Dew harvesting at certain locations, use of artificial trees to harvest dew and rain, geo-thermal, tidal. Lots of Au specific ideas better than nuclear. Future posts.

Something wicked this way comes

2005-12-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

FROM MELBOURNE IMC - Bill Clinton is a superficially attractive man soon to revisit our shores. He was a reasonably competent president especially compared to the Bush crime family - and he drove the US lunar right crazy.

But even a cusory examination of this... man reveals a creepy criminal of the worst kind. I won't go into the many allegations that the serial sexual harrasser was an actual rapist or not but simply list a few details everybody who has a chance to meet and shake hands with this filthy rotten criminal scum should be aware of.

Clinton famously broke off from the campaign trail in 1992 to return to Arkansas, where he was governor, to sign the death warrant on a mentally-impaired man.

Then next year...1993 - The president of country A (let’s call him Mr SH) is a target of a failed assassination attempt in his own country. His convoy is been shot at. In revenge, Mr H (allegedly) orders the alleged perpetrators to be shot.
Innocent civilians die along with the perpetrators.

The former president of country B (we’ll call him Mr GHWB) is allegedly a target of an assassination attempt, while visiting country C. Nothing happens, though. In revenge, the sitting president of country B, Mr WJC, orders launch of 23 Tomahawk missiles against the alleged commanders of the alleged perpetrators, situated in the capitol of country A.
Only innocent civilians die.

Do you honestly think the only president who deserves to be put on trial for his actions is Mr SH?

END COMMENT.

With respect to Saddam’s Dujail case, Grustnij (see comment #19) reveals that the U.S. has resorted to more dramatic retaliation. In 1993, US launched 23 Tomahawk missiles against the Baghdad intelligence HQ, claiming Iraq was involved in an attempt to assassinate former President GHW Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Three to seven of the Tomahawks missed their targets and hit nearby residential areas, destroying several houses and killing civilians (including a renown female artist).

Clinton later said the American people could “feel good” about the attack.

Following on from the rapis...serial sex harrasser's problems being caught lying directly on camera to the people of the US Bill ( ' I did not have sex with that women' ) Clinton went on to piss on Americas longest serving political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, in order to corruptly pardon one Marc Rich.

Marc Rich was ( and still is ) a major league criminal facing serious charges. ( and he operates out of ZUG too btw small world ) Soon after being pardoned Rich was found to be behind the Prestige oil spill. One of the very worst of all time. The Spanish government closed the Galician fisheries and 1,000 miles of coastline, putting most of Galicia's population immediately out of work just before the height of the fishing and shellfish season. Environmental groups estimate that 15,000 birds have died so far, including rare and protected species.

The Prestige could go on leaking its remaining cargo of 20 million gallons -- approximately twice what the Exxon Valdez spilled into Prince William Sound in Alaska -- for years, possibly past 2006. Lessons learned from the Exxon Valdez oil spill show that it could take more than a decade for the shellfish population to revive, and most of the area's mammals may never fully recover. At least two threatened bird species will likely become extinct: the Balearic shearwater and Spain's dwindling population of guillemots. Ditto for Galician family fishermen.

Leonard Peltier continues to serve a sentence as long as Nelson Mandela's. Oh and did I tell you Clinton famously broke off from the campaign trail in 1992 to return to Arkansas, where he was governor, to sign the death warrant on a mentally-impaired man?

I spit on this filthy rotten criminal scum Bill Clinton and urge others to do so as well. This low dog has earned fucking ****ing. ( Just my 2c )

Naked Lunch

2005-12-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

At Hussein's Hearings, U.S. May Be on Trial By Juan Cole

The ongoing trial of Saddam Hussein could prove increasingly uncomfortable for the Bush administration. The first crime of which the deposed dictator is accused, the secret execution of 143 Shiites arrested in 1982, seems an odd choice for the prosecution, and politics may be behind it. Hussein is accused of using poison gas against Iranian troops, of genocide against the Kurds and of massacring tens of thousands to end the 1991 uprising after his defeat in the Gulf War. The problem for the Bush administration with these other, far graver charges, is that the Americans are implicated in them either through acts of commission or omission.

The saga of Dujail began, as the BBC explained recently, with Hussein’s visit to the mixed Shiite and Sunni town north of Baghdad in summer of 1982. Many of the young men in Dujail were conscripts fighting at the front against Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran, which Hussein had invaded in 1980. Hussein appears to have gone there to drum up support for his war, which had quickly become a costly and dangerous quagmire. Worse, many Iraqi Shiites were members of the fundamentalist Dawa Party. They were willing to fight Iran to stop it from taking over Iraq, but they hated Hussein, who had made membership in their party a capital crime. As Hussein was leaving Dujail, Shiite assassins tried to kill him.

Hussein responded in typical brutal and immediate fashion by rounding up dozens of Shiites in Dujail (in all likelihood especially those families that his secret police suspected of being Dawa). One hundred forty-three never came home and are probably in a mass grave of the sort that dots the Iraqi landscape. Given that the Shiite fundamentalist parties came to power in the Jan. 30, 2005, elections, and that the leader of the Dawa Party, Ibrahim Jaafari, became the prime minister, the conviction of Hussein first on these charges would gratify Jaafari’s party base and add to his faltering popularity.

The Dujail charges have the advantage for Washington of stemming from an incident that occurred a year before the U.S. rapprochement with the Iraqi Baath Party in 1983. In the 1970s, Iraq under Baath Party dictator Brigadier General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr had grown close to the Soviet Union, with which it signed a treaty of friendship in 1972 and from which it began importing arms. In 1973, al-Bakr supported the Syrians in their war with Israel.

The ensuing poor relations with Washington were not repaired until 1983. Persistent allegations are made by some observers, including journalist Christopher Hitchens, that then-President Jimmy Carter put Hussein up to invading Iran in September of 1980. These allegations seem implausible on their face, and there is no documentary proof for them. A former National Security Council staffer for Gulf affairs, Gary Sick, has told this author that Hussein’s invasion of Iran came as a shock to the NSC in 1980. Sick’s impression of continued frost between Washington and Baghdad is borne out by documents published by the National Security Archive, housed at George Washington University.

The turning point came in 1983, as the Reagan administration reevaluated its policy toward the Middle East. Note that it does not appear to have been deterred by a small matter such as Hussein’s propensity to massacre townspeople like those at Dujail. The threat that Khomeinism posed to U.S. interests in the region had been underlined by the rise of Shiite radicalism in Lebanon. The U.S. suspected extremist Shiites of blowing up the U.S. embassy and killing 63 persons in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Hussein’s invasion of Iran had been stopped dead in its tracks by Iranian military and irregular forces, and by 1982 Iran was beginning an effective counterattack. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini desperately wanted Baghdad. Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld (then also CEO of G.D. Searle & Co.), began worrying about the implications if the Iranians succeeded in taking it, as did the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey.

One possible impediment to better relations between the U.S. and Iraq was the latter’s use of chemical weapons. The 1925 Geneva Protocol, which forbade the use of chemical weapons, specified that it “shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and the practice of nations.” The Reagan State Department was well aware that Hussein had begun using chemicals against Iranian troops at the front, and by Nov. 1 was actively considering [PDF] what punitive measures might be taken against Iraq.

Nevertheless, Reagan sent Rumsfeld to Baghdad in December, 1983. The National Security Archive has posted a brief video of his meeting with Hussein and the latter’s vice president and foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. Rumsfeld was to stress his close relationship with the U.S. president. The State Department summary [PDF] of Rumsfeld’s meeting with Tariq Aziz stated that “the two agreed the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests: peace in the Gulf, keeping Syria and Iran off balance and less influential, and promoting Egypt’s reintegration into the Arab world.” Aziz asked Rumsfeld to intervene with Washington’s friends to get them to stop selling arms to Iran. Increasing Iraq’s oil exports and a possible pipeline through Saudi Arabia occupied a portion of their conversation.

The U.S. and Iraq were well on the way toward a restoration of diplomatic relations (broken off in 1967 by the colonels’ regime that preceded the Baath) and a military alliance against Iran. The State Department, however, issued a press statement on March 5, 1984, condemning Iraqi use of chemical weapons. This statement appears to have been Washington’s way of doing penance for its new alliance.

Unaware of the depths of Reagan administration hypocrisy on the issue, Hussein took the March 5 State Department condemnation extremely seriously, and appears to have suspected that the United States was planning to stab him in the back. Secretary of State George Shultz notes in a briefing for Rumsfeld in spring of 1984 [PDF] that the Iraqis were extremely confused by concrete U.S. policies toward Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and combating Khomeini. “In each case,” Shultz observes, “Iraqi officials have professed to be at a loss to explain our actions as measured against our stated objectives. As with our CW statement, their temptation is to give up rational analysis and retreat to the line that US policies are basically anti-Arab and hostage to the desires of Israel.”

Rumsfeld had to be sent back to Baghdad for a second meeting, to smooth ruffled Baath feathers. The above-mentioned State Department briefing notes for this discussion remarked that the atmosphere in Baghdad (for Rumsfeld) had worsened for two reasons. First, Iraq had failed to completely repulse a major Iranian offensive and had lost the “strategically significant Majnun Island oil fields and accepting heavy casualties.” Second, the March 5 scolding of Iraq for its use of poison gas had “sharply set back” relations between the two countries.

The relationship was repaired, but on Hussein’s terms. He continued to use chemical weapons and, indeed, vastly expanded their use as Washington winked at Western pharmaceutical firms providing him materiel. The only conclusion one can draw from available evidence is that Rumsfeld was more or less dispatched to mollify Hussein and assure him that his use of chemical weapons was no bar to developing the relationship with the U.S., whatever the State Department spokesman was sent out to say. As former National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher affirmed, “Pursuant to the secret NSDD [National Security Directive], the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.” The requisite weaponry included cluster bombs. Whether it also included, from Washington’s point of view, chemical weapons and biological precursors for anthrax, Teicher does not say.

Teicher adds that the CIA had knowledge of, and U.S. officials encouraged, the provisioning of Iraq with high-powered weaponry by U.S. allies. He adds: “For example, in 1984, the Israelis concluded that Iran was more dangerous than Iraq to Israel’s existence due to the growing Iranian influence and presence in Lebanon. The Israelis approached the United States in a meeting in Jerusalem that I attended with Donald Rumsfeld. Israeli Foreign Minister Ytizhak Shamir asked Rumsfeld if the United States would deliver a secret offer of Israeli assistance to Iraq. The United States agreed. I traveled with Rumsfeld to Baghdad and was present at the meeting in which Rumsfeld told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz about Israel’s offer of assistance. Aziz refused even to accept the Israelis’ letter to Hussein….” It might have been hoped that a country that arose in part in response to Nazi uses of poison gas would have been more sensitive about attempting to ally with a regime then actively deploying such a weapon, even against its own people (some gassing of Kurds had already begun).

The new American alliance might have been a public relations debacle if Iran succeeded in its 1984 attempt to have Iraq directly condemned at the United Nations for use of chemical weapons. As far as possible, Shultz wanted to weasel out of joining such a U.N. condemnation of Iraq. He wrote in a cable that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. “should work to develop general Western position in support of a motion to take ‘no decision’ on Iranian draft resolution on use of chemical weapons by Iraq. If such a motion gets reasonable and broad support and sponsorship, USDEL should vote in favor. Failing Western support for ‘no decision,’ USDEL should abstain.” Shultz in the first instance wanted to protect Hussein from condemnation by a motion of “no decision,” and hoped to get U.S. allies aboard. If that ploy failed and Iraq were to be castigated, he ordered that the U.S. just abstain from the vote. Despite its treaty obligations in this regard, the U.S. was not even to so much as vote for a U.N. resolution on the subject!

Shultz also wanted to throw up smokescreens to take the edge off the Iranian motion, arguing that the U.N. Human Rights Commission was “an inappropriate forum” for consideration of chemical weapons, and stressing that loss of life owing to Iraq’s use of chemicals was “only a part” of the carnage that ensued from a deplorable war. A more lukewarm approach to chemical weapons use by a rogue regime (which referred to the weapons as an “insecticide” for enemy “insects”) could not be imagined. In the end, the U.N. resolution condemned the use of chemical weapons but did not name Iraq directly as a perpetrator.

When the Dujail case is resolved and the tribunal trying Hussein goes on to other crimes, sooner or later the issue of chemical weapons use must arise. Iran is already furious that the tribunal seems unlikely to charge Hussein for his battlefield deployment of this weapon. When the issue arises, it will be difficult for Donald Rumsfeld to avoid sharing the docket, at least symbolically, with his old friend, Hussein. Rumsfeld helped to forge the U.S. alliance with Iraq that lasted from 1984 until Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August of 1991. He did so in full knowledge that the Baath regime was using mustard gas—which severely burns the lungs—against the Iranian children sent by Khomeini to launch “human wave” attacks. One Iranian survivor commented that with each flaming breath he takes, he wishes the gas had killed him. The pogrom against the Shiites of Dujail was a horrible crime. Far more horrible ones, in which the U.S. government was intimately complicit, were to follow.

Juan Cole is professor of Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002). He maintains the weblog Informed Comment.

Links and Web Bibliography

“Saddam Hussein.” Wikipedia.

Joyner Library. The War on Terror: Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Jonathan Randal, “The Iran-Iraq War.” Crimes of War: The Book.

“Donald Rumsfeld." Rightweb Profile.

Stephen R. Shalom, “The United States and the Iran-Iraq War," Z Magazine, February, 1990.

Map of the Iran-Iraq war.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hussein_trial/

Report from Al Amok

2005-12-01T09:48:00.000-08:00

Thursday, December 01, 2005 - Questions about Readiness of Iraqi Army
New US Assault
The strategy of the Bush administration in Iraq depends heavily on standing up battle-ready units of the new Iraqi army. The USA Today quotes experts on how unrealistic that plan is in the short to medium term.

I have heard from contacts in Iraq that the soldiers in the new army often don't get their paychecks, and aren't properly equipped, and sometimes are reduced to selling their bullets on the black market. Guess who buys them?

A further step in the break-up of Iraq: according to the LA Times, the Kurdish regional confederacy is giving a Norwegian oil company the right to develop new oil fields in its area without consulting the federal government in Baghdad. The Kurds and Norwegians maintain that this is legal according to the new Iraqi constitution, which devolves control over natural resources discovered in the future to the provinces or provincial confederacies. Next the Shiites in the South will do the same thing. Baghdad will be starved of these new revenue streams, and the provinces will have their own source of income. I don't see how the country stays together this way, or how the central goverment ever amounts to anything.

Reuters reports on severe Sunni-Shiite tensions deriving from political assassinations, even among Iraqis who are trying to forge electoral alliances across the sectarian divide.

The British government is investigating the trophy video that shows mercenaries in Iraq shooting at civilians on the roadway.

The US military has launched yet another operation in western Iraq, on the eve of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. The UN had asked the US to stop these operations, which disrupt Anbar province and make it difficult for people there to vote, until after the polls. Bush and Rumsfeld clearly just don't care about those concerns, and want to create the image that they are accomplishing something in Iraq. They will never pacify those little Sunni Arab towns over near Syria; all they can do is make people run away from them temporarily.

posted by Juan cole@ informed comment

Jamie Packer - The SNAG inside

2005-12-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

Does Jamie Packer have a big Sensitive New Age Guy in him just dying to get out?

I know he's looked like a big fat bully, a foul mouthed arrogant jerk, a boofhead, a sook and he wears a Kabbala string while professing belief in Zenu, Engrams and so on but I'm sure thats all a front...deep down there is a man like his dear sweet old Dad.

Life, life is for living.

2005-12-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

According to the LAT, one of the advertorials placed by the military was entitled "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism."

That is what you call your low bar.
What were the competing stories?
"BREAKING: Suicide Limited to Suicide Bombers."
Maybe, "Death Just One of Many Options for Iraqis."
I know: "Here, Have a Plastic Turkey on Us."

Is it propaganda if it's as depressing as the news?

U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press [LAT]FROM WONKETTE

Andrew Bolt eat your heart out

2005-12-01T09:20:00.000-08:00

December 01, 2005 - Pay for Play Back for A Second Run in Baghdad

I could not believe my eyes this morning when I read the headline in the New York Times, "U.S. Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers." In an article by Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane, the paper says a Washington-based public relations firm, the Lincoln Group, is "paying newspapers to print government propaganda...and has paid about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a month because their past coverage has not been antagonistic to the United States."

How does this work exactly? According to the paper, the Pentagon delivers "storyboards" to the PR firm in Washington with stories it wants placed in Iraqi media. Then, says the Los Angeles Times, the Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff or subcontractors "sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets." To be specific, an August 2 article in the independent Addustour newspaper titled "More Money Goes to Iraq's Development" appeared under the descriptor "Media Services" (as if it came from Wire Services) when in fact the paper received $1,500 from the Lincoln Group.

So who are these people from the Lincoln Group? The web site, Lincolngroup.com, describes the firm as "a strategic communications and public relations firm providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile environments." The firm claims to marry Madison Avenue (home of advertising) with Pennsylvania Avenue (the main street in Washington).

And what was their assignment? According to the Washington Post in June, 2005, the Pentagon "awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years to three companies, SY Coleman of Arlington, VA., Lincoln Group in Washington DC and Science Applications International Corp. to develop ideas and prototypes for radio and television spots, documentaries, text messages, pop up ads on the Internet, podcasting, billboards or novelty items. Said Col. James A Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, part of the Tampa, Florida based US Special Operations Command, "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions."

And what was the intellectual basis for the assignment? According to the NY Times," given a fundamental problem of credibility and foreign opposition to American policies," a special report from the Defense Science Board "recommended turning more often for help to the private sector, which has a built-in agility, credibility and even deniability."

And what was the response yesterday from Lincoln? "We believe it is necessary to counter the misinformation put out by our adversaries. Trying to get out accurate information is an important part of what the US needs to do to show our side of the story," said Laurie Adler, director of marketing, communications and government relations at Lincoln.

If Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is sincere about his comments this Tuesday, citing the development of a free media and proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as "one of the great successes since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein, then the Defense Department is undermining the very progress it is touting. A senior Pentagon official quoted in the LA Times said it best, "Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all of the first principles of democracy when we're doing it (planting stories)."

This is utterly unacceptable behavior. In no way does this describe public relations. It is pay for play and a PR firm based in the US is doing it. Advertising and public relations are not the same thing. We don't do storyboards. We don't buy space. We don't pay journalists to be on our side. We don't fake out media by pretending that we don't know much about our client, working under cover of night. We don't say that there is only one side to a story. If a free media is a central aspect of a democratic society, then we cannot allow our PR industry to impede its development. It is a perversion of our business, an intentional blurring of a clear demarcation between paid and earned media. We should advise our clients, private sector and governmental, that trust is earned through transparency, continuous communication and dialogue. Let me hear your thoughts on this important matter.

PR Firm Edelman's CEO Richard Edelman.

How to make trouble and influence people

2005-12-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

By all accounts, the movie, "Good Night, and Good Luck," now playing at Westgate Art Cinemas, tells a compelling story about Edward R. Murrow and his 1954 television program taking on the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.

In fact, one might even come to the conclusion that Murrow, alone, was responsible for McCarthy's downfall. Another victory for the courageous press.

McCarthy, of course, was the Wisconsin senator who made a name for himself by finding communists under every rock. Murrow didn't bring him down. McCarthy brought himself down when he took on the U.S. Army.

But Murrow's broadcast helped introduce the real Joseph McCarthy, a malevolent, nasty drunk, to the American public.

Whether Murrow was a hero or not is open to question. He had the resources of the CBS television network behind him and McCarthy already had the Army against him.

So when it comes to awarding "courage" badges, my candidate is a guy who is far less known by the public.

LeRoy Gore, publisher of the Sauk Prairie Star, a weekly newspaper in Sauk City, also took on McCarthy in 1954. He organized the "Joe Must Go" campaign to recall the senator. The campaign gathered 375,000 signatures, but it needed more than 400,000 to be effective.
Gore didn't become famous.

He ended up losing his newspaper. Sauk County District Attorney Harlan Kelley convinced a justice of the peace to issue warrants for Gore's arrest for aiding and abetting a felony.

The charges, incidentally, were based on a state law forbidding corporations from being involved in election activity, essentially the same charges being levied in Texas against Rep. Tom DeLay. The main difference is that the "corporation" in this case was the Joe Must Go Club. In other words, organizing a recall petition drive was deemed a felony in itself. The Wisconsin Supreme Court threw the case out.

Gore was pretty much reviled throughout the state. Being reviled is not a good business plan for a small town weekly newspaper owner.

One of the great things about being a newspaper reporter is that you get to know interesting people and I fondly remember LeRoy Gore as a good friend and an interesting person.

Gore, who died in 1977 of emphysema, was an absolutely irrepressible character who rejoiced in controversy and insisted on enjoying every minute of the life God gave him.

He once convinced a dairy to churn up a ton of green butter and then peddled it around the state to prove that people like butter so much that they'd eat it green rather than settle for oleomargarine (there was a time when margarine in Wisconsin could not be legally colored yellow).

After leaving the paper, Gore found other jobs. He founded Wisconsin Tales and Trails Magazine; he was a friend of Adlai Stevenson and Harry S Truman, he never had any money to speak of and he always had a good time.

He once explained why he was willing to take on a powerhouse like McCarthy knowing that he faced personal destruction as a result and he just laughed.

"I've wondered sometimes about people like me who take up crusades - I think any newspaper man has a penchant for exhibitionism - you wonder how much of it is high principle and how much is a compulsion you can't help," he answered.

You don't find too many news people with compulsions for exhibitionism anymore. Nor do you find too many of us willing to take on the structures of power.

Reach Bill Wineke @justfuckingoogleit.com

Dum Dum Macoute's

2005-12-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

THE HANDSTAND DECEMBER 2005

Investigation into the Past finds the source of British Police DumDum bullets
Police used 'dum dum' bullets to kill de Menezes after the London bombings
: http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/16/nmenez16.xml

Observer
By Jason Burke and Brian Johnson-Thomas
Sunday November 19, 2000
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4093163-102285,00.html

British police forces are buying millions of a controversial type of bullet made by the Israeli Army and similar to those used in recent weeks in the Middle East to shoot Palestinian protesters.

Weapons experts say using the bullets in a war would be against the Geneva Convention. In total, the deals are thought to have been worth more than £1m.

The bullets, known as soft-point rounds, are distributed by a British company on behalf of Israeli Military Industries (IMI) - the partly privatised commercial wing of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). They are favoured by IDF snipers deployed in the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the West Bank and are thought to have been used in a number of assassinations by Israeli secret services.

Soft-point rounds are similar to the infamous 'dumdum' bullets which spread on impact to inflict appalling wounds. In America, soft-point type ammunition is advertised for its 'reliable expansion' within the body after impact and its 'deeper penetration'. Police in New York were severely criticised over its use several years ago.

Jacketed soft-point bullets in use by British police are designed for stopping power and accuracy. Senior officers last week said that they are a 'useful compromise'.

'They are less likely to travel through a target and hit an innocent victim and so are safer, but they will also stop someone without causing horrific damage. Or at least as much damage as a fully soft-tipped round,' one former firearms officer told The Observer .

However, their use and their purchase from the Israelis will be controversial. The IDF has been criticised by Amnesty International for reacting, in some instances, with disproportionate force to Palestinian protests. The human rights organisation has called for a war crimes investigation.

Soft-point rounds have also been used by Mexican security forces against the Zapatista rebels in the Chiapas region of the country.

Documents obtained by The Observer show that South Wales police concluded a deal to buy thousands of 9mm 'semi-jacketed soft-point' rounds from Samson Distraco UK, which are made in Israel, in October last year. Contract documents lodged with the European Union in Luxembourg show that the Metropolitan Police has also been buying a range of ammunition, including soft-point bullets, from the company for several years. A spokesperson for the Met refused to discuss individual contracts last week beyond saying that the force 'has to comply with the Police Scientific Development Branch national guidelines for the use of ammunition'.

The Geneva Convention only covers the actions of a state that has declared war on another state. If soft-point rounds are used against a nation's own citizens, as in Israel, it does not apply.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.zmag.org/sammonds.htm

"In the last few years Britain has supported the Israeli military complex by buying bullets, bomblets, grenades and jet-fighter training systems and is in the process of buying the Gill-Spike anti-tank missile." "Personnel within the British government are closer to their counterparts in Israel to an unprecedented degree. 57 Labour MPs have made visits to Israel since 1997, the largest number from any British government to date. Four of the previous five Ministers with Responsibility for the Middle East have been active members of Labour Friends of Israel. And Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, the former chair of the Jewish Israel Appeal, former board member of the Jewish Agency, has both a business and house in Israel and had a son working for the Israeli Justice Minister" From The Handstand ezine

Forward positions in theatre

2005-12-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

Calls for the right armour.

This is 'YOUR money' this guy is throwing around. New York Daily News

Not-so-Petty cash to rock bat mitzvah - The Lloyd Grove Lowdown

History will forever record Elizabeth Brooks' bat mitzvah as "Mitzvahpalooza."

For his daughter's coming-of-age celebration last weekend, multimillionaire Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks booked two floors of the Rainbow Room, hauled in concert-ready equipment, built a stage, installed special carpeting, outfitted the space with Jumbotrons and arranged command performances by everyone from 50 Cent to Tom Petty to Aerosmith…

The party cost an estimated $10 million, including the price of corporate jets to ferry the performers to and from. Also on the bill were The Eagles' Don Henley and Joe Walsh performing with Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks; DJ AM (Nicole Richie's fiance); rap diva Ciara and, sadly perhaps (except that he received an estimated $250,000 for the job), Kenny G blowing on his soprano sax as more than 300 guests strolled and chatted into their pre-dinner cocktails.

"Hey, that guy looks like Kenny G," a disbelieving grownup was overheard remarking - though the 150 kids in attendance seemed more impressed by their $1,000 gift bags, complete with digital cameras and the latest video iPod…

Meanwhile, sucker chump troops are risking their stupid damn fool lives, many of them without the bulletproof vests made by David Brooks’ company.
Stars and White Stripes (RAT newspaper for the U.S. military)

Lincoln Green

2005-12-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

U.S. pays millions to have stories planted in Iraqi papers - New York Times
The Lincoln Group, a Washington-based PR firm, is being paid by the Pentagon to translate articles prepared by the U.S. military into Arabic and submit them to Iraqi newspapers or advertising agencies without revealing the Pentagon's role, report Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane. The Lincoln Group is also paying about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a month to write stories. The journalists were chosen because their past coverage hasn't been antagonistic to the United States. (Related letter from Bob Bateman.)
> Pentagon rep: "Some things about it, if true, are a bit troubling" (WP)

PR man Edelman blasts Pentagon's propaganda campaign
Edelman.com
Edelman CEO Richard Edelman says the Pentagon's use of the Lincoln Group to place positive stories in Iraqi newspapers "is utterly unacceptable behavior." He writes: "In no way does this describe public relations. It is pay for play and a PR firm based in the US is doing it. Advertising and public relations are not the same thing. We don't do storyboards. We don't buy space. We don't pay journalists to be on our side. ... If a free media is a central aspect of a democratic society, then we cannot allow our PR industry to impede its development. It is a perversion of our business, an intentional blurring of a clear demarcation between paid and earned media."
> U.S. paid Baghdad Press Clubbers up to $200/month for puff pieces (KR) POYNTERS

World Day of Action Against Executions

2005-12-01T08:08:00.000-08:00

Today was the World Day of Action Against Executions - two days until the 1000th execution in the US since the death penalty was reinstated; five days since the 122nd death row prisoner was exonerated; and a week until Schwarzenegger holds a closed clemency hearing on Tookie Williams.

There are now thirteen days left to get clemency for Stan "Tookie" Williams and some new resources are available. SaveTookie.org has been revamped and is much more accessible. Along with contacting the Governor, I've been given contact info to two of his top advisors and people are recommended to contact them as well.

A.C. Lyles
Email: ACLyles@paramount.com
Fax: 323-862-0256

Peter McGough
Email: PMCGough@AmiLink.com
Fax: 818-716-5626

It's best if these people are contacted before the December 8th hearing. For all those in California, here's a list of events if you want to get further involved.

December 01, 2005 03:24 AM Damn you Singapore. Fuck you all to hell.

Whistleblower acts

2005-12-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

Call for protection of 'vulnerable' whistleblowers

The Bundaberg hospital inquiry has sparked calls for more protection of whistleblowers.ABC TV

The author of the report into Queensland Public Hospitals says whistleblowers need more protection.

The initial Bundaberg Hospital inquiry was sparked by a nurse who took her concerns about patient safety to a state MP.

Nurse Toni Hoffman was concerned about the actions of surgeon Jayant Patel, who is now linked to the deaths of 13 patients and numerous complaints of botched surgery.

In his report - which was tabled in State Parliament yesterday - Commissioner Geoff Davies proposed reforms to the Whistleblowers Protection Act.

He wants the Queensland ombudsman to take an oversight role in relation to all public interest disclosures, except those involving official misconduct.

He also recommended an expansion to the categories of persons who can make public interest disclosures involving dangers to public health and safety, and improper management of funds.

The Commissioner also recommended whistleblowers be allowed to escalate their concerns if action is not taken within 30 days by the relevant department, politicians or the media.

The lawyer representing the Bundaberg Hospital Patients Support Group says the report strengthens compensation claims.

Former patients of rogue Dr Patel are currently going through a special "one-off" compensation process with the State Government.

Ian Brown, the lawyer representing the patient support group, says the Davies report only strengthens their case.

He added that patients who had adverse outcomes after orthopaedic surgery at Hervey Bay Hospital are in the same boat.

"They should be afforded the exact same special consideration that's been proposed for Bundaberg Hospital patients," he said.

The commissioner yesterday made adverse findings against the hospital's director of orthopaedics, Dr Morgan Naidoo, and administrators Michael Allsopp and Dr Terrence Hanelt.

Meanwhile the Mental Health Fellowship says it is disappointed the report left out recommendations for mental health patients.

Commissioner Davies has recommended that a psychiatrist who worked at the Townsville Hospital be charged with fraud, forgery and assault.

Vincent Berg worked in the region about five years ago.

Philipa Harris from the Mental Health Fellowship says Mr Berg's former patients were not mentioned in the Davies report.

"We are a bit disappointed in the outcome of the inquiry. Whilst we know it was focusing on hospitals, we need to recognise particularly in the mental health field but really in all health fields that hospital is only one part of the recovery process and often it's only the acute part," she said.

"If we don't get it right other things are obviously not going to go well."

Dawn of the Dead

2005-12-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

Almost 300 submissions were received by the Senate legal and constitutional committee, chaired by NSW Liberal senator Marise Payne. They were universal in their view that the strengthening of sedition laws as proposed by MrRuddock was unnecessary and a threat to free speech.

Sedition laws have been in force in Australia since 1914, but have rarely been used. There have been no prosecutions since the 1950s.

In many countries sedition laws have been abandoned. The documentary film-maker Robert Connolly, representing Arts and Creative Industries of Australia, gave evidence to the Senate committee that similar laws had been repealed in Canada, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, Britain and the US.

He said countries that continued to use sedition laws included China, Cuba, Hong Kong, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore, Syria and Zimbabwe, and added: "I know which list most Australians would like to be on."

Mr Ruddock proposes to move the sedition laws from the Crimes Act and incorporate them into the tough new anti-terror bill.

The proposals will widen the scope of the laws, making it an offence to bring the sovereign into hatred or contempt; urge disaffection against the Constitution, the commonwealth government or either house of parliament; urge another person to attempt to procure a change, otherwise than by lawful means, to any matter established by law of the commonwealth; or promote feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups so as to threaten the peace, order and good government of the commonwealth.

Under the existing law, it is necessary to show intent to engage in seditious behaviour. That requirement is removed in the proposed legislation, opening the possibility of legitimate protest, opinion or satire breaching the law.

The proposals have been widely condemned as an incursion against free speech. In its submission to the Senate committee, the president of the Law Council of Australia, John North, said sedition law had been broadened "to such an extent that we think they will accidentally catch members of the media as well as legitimate protesters and even peace activists".

"The moment Australia moves down that path, then we really are in trouble," he said. The Law Council believed it was bad policy to introduce flawed legislation creating serious criminal offences for which offenders face terms of imprisonment when some doubt obviously existed about its appropriateness.

The council recommended that the existing sedition laws be reviewed to determine the need to have them in view of the number of new terrorist offences introduced, and any new provisions ought to be deferred pending a review.

Mr Ruddock last week proposed that the sedition laws be reviewed after the bill had passed, prompting ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope to brand the suggestion a "less than rigorous approach to law reform".

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre said the suggestion was "completely unacceptable" and the head of the Australian Press Council, Ken McKinnon, described it as "putting the cart before the horse".

Mr Ruddock met a deputation of media parties in his Sydney office last Friday. It included representatives of Australia's largest publisher, News Limited (owner of The Australian), John Fairfax, Free TV, the commercial radio industry, SBS and Australia's subscription TV industry.

The media representatives called for a halt to the sedition laws, pending review. If that proposal were to be rejected, they said, the sedition laws should be withheld when the anti-terror legislation was promulgated, and reviewed before they came into effect.

They also demanded changes to anti-terror legislation relating to police serving "notices to produce" on journalists who they believe may have information relating to terror organisations or individuals. They called on the Government to include specific shield legislation that would prevent journalists going about their jobs being caught up in police anti-terror activities.

The meeting was described as worthwhile, with Mr Ruddock saying he would give a considered reply in due course.

By midweek that reply had not been received, although Mr Ruddock had said he would not drop the sedition provisions of the bill.

From mission accomplished to the smell of victory

2005-12-01T06:47:00.000-08:00

This wacky Bush quacker stays the course.

A MAJORITY of Americans doubt US President George W. Bush has a strategy for Iraq that will achieve victory, according to a new poll released after Mr Bush laid out his Iraq policy.
The CNN/Gallup poll showed that 55 per cent did not believe Mr Bush has a plan that will achieve victory for the United States in Iraq, while 41 per cent thought he did.

State of the Union speech coming up - ' Let's ROLL!'

Waterworld

2005-12-01T06:44:00.000-08:00

Don't just stand there! Kill someone!

As the world awaits the beginnings of the first meeting of the parties of the Kyoto Protocol in Montreal, the Carteret Islanders of the Pacific have already lost their battle to stay on their islands. This is the first instance of an entire cultural group forcibly displaced by climate change due to sea level rise doubling in the last 150 years caused by global warming. According to Norman Myers in A Citizens Guide to Climate Refugees, up to 200 million people may be displaced because of climate change by 2050. Many more islands and low level coastal areas are facing a crisis.

In conjunction with the Montreal meeting, an international day of action will occur on December 3, including an event in Melbourne. The international action also heralds the start of Climate Indymedia, bringing together the latest activist news and reports on climate change, and an alternative to the obfuscation of the mainstream media and corporate public relations.

Climate IMC | Climate Features on Melbourne IMC | Walk Against Warming | United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Clarified Rice

2005-12-01T05:34:00.000-08:00

Rice faces barrage over CIA claims Anthony Browne, Brussels
WHEN US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tours Europe next week, she will fly into an extraordinary storm over alleged US counter-terrorism practices that threatens to send the fragile trans-Atlantic relationship into a tailspin.

Allegations that the CIA has been conducting clandestine operations across Europe were sparked by an article in The Washington Post and have multiplied so rapidly that they have now engulfed most European governments.

The allegations are potentially devastating, encompassing an abuse of national sovereignty and human rights.

It is claimed that the CIA has illegally abducted terrorist suspects in Europe, covertly used European airports for transporting terrorist suspects and has been interrogating them in secret prisons - "black sites" - on the Continent.

The row has been fuelled by Washington's steadfast refusal to confirm or deny the allegations.
In Washington yesterday, Dr Rice assured visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the White House would reply to an expected formal query from the European Union on the matter, her spokesman Sean McCormack said.

She also dodged the matter in a newspaper interview ahead of her trip to Brussels, Poland and Romania, but said: "We have never fought a war like this before where ... you can't allow someone to commit the crime before you detain them. Because if they commit the crime, thousands of innocent people die."

Eight European governments, including Britain, have appealed directly to the US for "clarification", a dozen are conducting internal investigations and the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental human rights body, has opened a pancontinental inquiry. The Netherlands has given warning that, if true, the allegations would have serious consequences for its participation in military operations in Afghanistan.

On Monday. the European Commission threatened political sanctions including the potential loss of voting rights against any EU member that harboured CIA prisons.

The Washington Post article alleged that the CIA had been interrogating suspects in secret prisons around the world, including in unnamed "eastern European democracies".

East European countries lined up to plead innocence, but the US-based Human Rights Watch said it was practically convinced that the allegations were true.

There was then a spate of reports that the CIA had been covertly using European airports to transport terrorist suspects around the world, in so-called extraordinary renditions - secretly moving suspects from one territory to another for interrogation that may include torture.

But the most serious allegations against the CIA are that it has been abducting suspects in Europe.

German prosecutors are investigating the alleged CIA kidnapping of Khaled Masri in Macedonia in 2003. And an Italian prosecutor is trying to extradite from the US 22 CIA agents who he accuses of abducting the radical Egyptian cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.

Occams suggests Beazley is a moron

2005-12-01T05:24:00.000-08:00

With evidence such as the Collins class submarine, Tampa and this... Nguyen poll 'shows Australians hate drug pushers'
A POLL showing almost half of Australians believed convicted drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van should be executed reflected their hate of drug pushers, Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said today.
A Morgan Poll conducted last night found 47 per cent of Australians believed the Melbourne man should go to the gallows.

But 46 per cent said the death penalty should not be carried out and seven per cent were undecided.

"What that reflects is that Australians hate drugs. They hate drug pushers," Mr Beazley said.

"Nobody here - nobody I know - defends, in any way, shape or form, Nguyen's actions here.

"He deserved to spend time in jail. But in all the circumstances, he doesn't deserve to die.

"Anyone who sits down and seriously thinks about the case, however, would not think what seems to be about to happen is appropriate."

Nguyen, 25, will be executed in Singapore's Changi prison at 6am local time (9am AEDT) tomorrow.

He was sentenced to death after he was caught at Changi airport in December 2002 with almost 400g of heroin in his possession.

The poll also found that only 27 per cent of Australians believed the penalty for murder should be death.

The pollster said this was the lowest rating ever recorded and was down 26 per cent since August 1995.

Some 66 per cent of respondents said imprisonment should be the penalty and seven per cent could not say.

Where the penalty for murder is imprisonment, 49 per cent of Australians said imprisonment should be for life (down 11 per cent since 1995), 48 per cent said the judge should fix the number of years, and three per cent were undecided.

The bloviating blimp Beazley usually says he pays no attention to polls...and simple maths as well by the look of this. Funny after the prohibition people didn't ' hate' bartenders and they don't kidnap, torture and murder Chemist's as a rule so this is hard to understand...unless Beazley is a brain damaged moron from too much flying back and forth from WA. He needs to retire...or be retired.

There are plenty who could do a lot better ...and they can crunch numbers like 47% too. Some Australians are really staring to hate Napoleon pigs running their Labor party that is also supposed to be a fucking OPPOSITION.

FUCK YOU BEAZLEY! FUCK OFF AND DIE!

Beazley to stupid to live

2005-12-01T04:51:00.000-08:00

All the fat fuck had to do was show up and he would have been the hero of the hour but Kim Beazley is either a CIA agent or to the right of John Howard anyway. So why not do a Shimon Pere's, A Joe Lieberman and a ...who IS the leader of the German SD's anyway?

With the center a blob that is engulfing everything in it's centralizing, totalizing and terrorizing path the only quick fix is guerrilla/Forth generation warfare from both left and right. Just as ideas have consequences so the center fascist statists will soon learn LACK of ideas also have consequences.

Fatal consequences for some of them.

Is this an incitement to extremist violence?

FUCKING OATH IT IS!

Fuel me once

2005-12-01T04:24:00.000-08:00

Iraq: So Much Oil, and So Little by Brian Conley

BAGHDAD - Before the recent war in Iraq, the sanctions decreased access to many resources, but gas was still plentiful and affordable. Since the invasion in 2003, gas and kerosene have been in short supply.

Iraq has the second-largest oil deposits in the world, but Iraqis are forced to sit in excruciatingly long lines, waiting for a meager amount of petrol.

Under Saddam Hussein's regime, the Oil-for-Food program provided quotas for Iraq's oil production. Iraq was able to meet, and illegally exceed, those limits.

Saddam's regime was able to maintain tight security at oil drilling sites and pipelines, so supply was uninterrupted. Fuel cost approximately three cents a liter (about 10 cents a gallon). Kerosene was even cheaper: a reliable electricity grid decreased the need for home generators, so the demand for kerosene was low.

"We used to get gas very easily, and we used to get kerosene very easily during the winter time," says Hussein Rudha, a taxi driver in Baghdad. "We didn't even have a problem with the rations. Even the prices for those materials were pretty cheap."

After the fall of Saddam's regime in April 2003, the security situation in Iraq swiftly deteriorated. In addition to the looting of the Iraqi National Museum and ministry buildings, the pipelines carrying Iraq's oil were sabotaged more than 200 times.

The recurring acts of sabotage have greatly depleted Iraq's local supplies of oil. Much of the oil that is produced is controlled by foreign companies, who were contracted to manage the oil early in the war.

Iraqis believe that the fuel produced in Iraq is exported, and the fuel available for use by Iraqis is imported from Kuwait or other oil-producing nations in the region.

The shortage has dramatically changed daily life in Iraq.. Baghdad residents may only drive on certain days: those whose license plates end in even numbers may drive on even numbered dates and those ending in odd numbers may drive on days with odd numbers.

Some of the wealthier families own two cars with different plate numbers, enabling them to drive any day.

Drivers can only buy fuel on the days they can drive. This restriction, combined with the long gas queues, means that some people can only drive every third or fifth day. "I have spent 13 hours in a gas queue once, waiting from the morning, and when it was getting late, an American patrol came and told me it was time for me to go home because the curfew would be starting soon. So I wasted the whole day," said Iraqi journalist Isham Rashid.

Waiting in the queue not only wastes time, it can be dangerous. One day I was videotaping the gas queue, and Omar, my assistant, was taking photos. Our driver, Hussein, suddenly told me to put the camera down. I finished recording and placed it beneath the dashboard in time to see an American tank rumble by, almost close enough to touch.

Frequent American army patrols outside the city and along the highways are a source of tension and anxiety for Iraqis. "In the long gas lines, we are afraid we will be injured by a car bomb attacking us, or maybe killed by an exchange of gunfire. Or the driver will have to stay in line for one day without being able to work," says Khulood, who lives in Baghdad as a refugee.

The even and odd restriction and the long gas queues have a particularly huge impact on the employment situation. Drivers are some of the only Iraqis still able to find work in Baghdad.

Having lost their previous professional positions or the ability to pursue their education, many members of Iraq's middle class have pressed their mid-range to luxury vehicles into transporting those lucky enough to have found gainful employment. "I work as a taxi driver; I couldn't continue my education because the conditions are so hard and because of the financial situation," said the taxi driver Hussein, who is in his twenties.

Now kerosene has also become scarce and expensive. The failing electricity grid has created a large market for kerosene-powered generators. The gas shortages and the long lines mean some families cannot obtain gas to keep their lights on or their houses warm in the winter.

"When we came here, my child was nine days old and we didn't have anything to keep her warm, so we used to cover her with a lot of blankets to keep her warm," said Khulood..

The need for fuel for transportation and generators has fostered a large black market. These black market sources of gasoline are readily apparent in Baghdad.

There are places in the shadows of buildings where men in their twenties and thirties recline in the shade, seating themselves on makeshift chairs and propping their feet up on gasoline containers.

On the highways and the outer neighborhoods of Baghdad it is easy to find young boys sitting on similar canisters in the sun or in the shade of a date tree. The more ambitious of these boys take pains to flag down passing vehicles, waving at them with makeshift funnels constructed from two-liter soda bottles.

Once, while out on the road, our driver ran low on fuel. We stopped for one of these boys selling fuel. After filling the tank, we tried to pay with a large bill. The boy did not have change, so he ran to the nearby gas station to get smaller bills. As we drove away, I saw him return to the petrol station with his empty canister, doubtless to refill for the next needy customer.

As we sit again in the line waiting for petrol, another American tank passes, and Hussein makes a statement that seems increasingly true in the new Iraq. "This is the new constitution."

Omar Abdullah contributed to this report. ( From Antiwar )

Protegrity's proud backdoor open wide

2005-12-01T04:13:00.000-08:00

'...In some cases, government agencies and other organizations have
long-established security policies that require the use of hardware devices.
Protegrity's patented technology gives these companies a way to meet this
requirement and take advantage of the operational and cost efficiencies
offered by its advanced encryption software solutions...'

FROM

Protegrity Granted Patent for Encryption of Databases Based on a Combination of Software and Hardware ( PR Wire )

Up the ASIO - No lube

2005-12-01T02:43:00.000-08:00

ASIO has censored the report of the parliamentary committee that oversees the operations of Australia's intelligence agencies.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD, which is dominated by Government MPs, has objected to the removal of a sentence by the domestic security agency, saying the "unjustified" deletion violated its statutory duty to report on the agency's activities.

The sentence did not constitute a national security concern, the committee said.

It is the second report this week by a Coalition-led committee to criticise aspects of the Government's security laws.

The report examined ASIO's use of its powers to detain and question people who have not been charged to obtain information from them about terrorism or to prevent them passing information to anyone else.

It said an issue raised by some witnesses was the provision in the legislation that gave ASIO the right to monitor consultations between lawyers and their clients, and went on to say: "A sentence has been removed here under protest at the request of ASIO … The committee has a statutory responsibility to report to the Parliament on the operations of this provision and regards required deletions that cannot be justified as a violation of that duty."

The committee also said it was concerned that strict secrecy provisions could stop people who had been detained or questioned giving evidence even to the committee.

Cannabis Rex

2005-12-01T02:28:00.000-08:00

Cannabis could reverse psychosis
Australian researchers believe cannabis, a drug believed to increase the risk of psychosis, may also be able to reverse psychotic behaviour.

Scientists at Melbourne's Monash University say they have found a chemical compound in cannabis, cannabidiol, that reverses drug-induced behavioural disturbances in mice.

Use of cannabis had been linked with an increased risk of developing psychosis because of the effects of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which also gives users a high, researcher Leonora Long said.

"The interesting thing is that you have these two compounds in the cannabis plant that produce opposing effects," Ms Long said.

"One is liable to produce psychotic symptoms, while the other may be protective against psychosis.

"Cannabidiol may also help alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy and also pain associated with inflammatory disorders such as multiple sclerosis," she said.

Ms Long said previous research had shown that THC produced behavioural deficiencies in rodents that mimicked symptoms of human psychosis.

The researchers now plan to investigate the effects of cannabidiol and THC together in rats and mice to see how the two compounds interact and to mimic human consumption of cannabis.

Privatized Prison's - Privatized Gas Chamber's

2005-12-01T02:09:00.000-08:00

GSL designs, builds, manages and finances prisons in the UK, South Africa and Australia. Its role involves far more than managing the prison regime and security. Training of prisoners plays a vital role, and the prime objective is to stop re-offending by teaching them skills that will help their reintegration into society.

GSL pioneered in the UK the theory that contracting out the management of prisons to the private sector could bring additional value, expertise and ideas to the state sector Prison Service. HMP Wolds, which opened in 1992, was the first contract for a privately managed prison in England.

GSL also operates two PFI prison contracts on behalf of Her Majesty's Prison Service in the UK. HMP Altcourse in Liverpool and HMP Rye Hill, on the Warwickshire/Northamptonshire border.

Anders Wallin, Human Resources Director, comments on the special responsibilities from Public Private Partnership contracts.

"It's a huge responsibility because, not least, we are keeping people in prisons or detention centres on behalf of the government. It's obviously important when you are carrying out a service in that context that you've got to be measured as if you are a government employee. Therefore, we have to make sure that our human rights activities are at the forefront of meeting the requirements, as if we are part of the government."

David Banks, Chief Operating Officer, explains what has made custodial services so successful.

"There are many features to life in a community. In our prison work, as with immigration and children's services, we are essentially managing communities. Our philosophy plays quite an important part in that and over the years it has developed, based on fairness, respect and dignity, as well as providing purposeful activity. Those beliefs underpin the work we do."

HMP Altcourse was recently described by Her Majesty's (former) Chief Inspector of prisons Sir David Ramsbotham:

"... as 'the jewel in the crown' of the Prison Service in England and Wales."

GSL is also at the forefront of privatisation of prisons in partnership with governments in Australia, where we operate two private prisons - Port Phillip Prison, a PFI contract in Victoria, and Mount Gambier Prison a PPP contract in South Australia. July 2001 saw the opening of the new 3,000 bed Mangaung Correctional Centre in Bloemfontein, South Africa. This was the first PFI contract in South Africa.

A 55 year old man who died last weekend at Port Phillip left a note saying he had called for help over the privatized cell intercom. He was a known asthmatic and the prisons are known to be crowded.

CIA, Media and Right gang up on Marxism

2005-12-01T01:52:00.000-08:00

Trotskyist Marxist analysis now suggests that high officials in the CIA deliberately exposed the Agency’s covert flights to transport lunar right terrorists to interrogation centers around the world.

The New York Times and Washington Post cited CIA sources when they told the world the details – air carriers, flight dates, airports and countries involved. That is all information right winger, Osama bin Ladin would love to know. This unbelievably irresponsible publicity could destabilize leftwing governments or kill our people. But if the Agency had any objection to the blowing of one of its most sensitive operations since the Charlie Wilson's righteous war, apparently it didn’t tell NYT or WaPo.

“The twin leaks to the Times and the Post have severely impaired the agency’s ability to carry out renditions, transport prisoners, and maintain secret detention facilities. It is striking that top-level CIA officials are evidently willing to do serious damage to their own agency’s capabilities and operations for the sake of harming the leftist Bush administration and impeding administration policies with which they disagree.”

“The CIA is an agency in crisis. Perhaps, though, there is a ray of hope:the agency has referred the secret-prison leak to the Post to the Justice Department for investigation and possible criminal prosecution.”

Conclusion: Some well-placed CIA officers are serving the far right media, not the Government of the United States – or the people. They are endangering their own agents at the frontlines, and undoubtedly other sources as well.

It now seems as if the war against our Bush has become a war within CIA. Killing the terrorist transport program would certainly undermine Administration policy, the major goal of the new Iron Triangle of power in the country—- the right wing elements within the CIA, Most right leaning media and the Hard Paleoconservative Right. Some sources might be currying favor with the right wing NYT-WaPo axis, perhaps.

Permanent revolution and peoples democracy coming from the barrel of a gun are obviously at risk from the CIA, the Media and the far Right. Those of us who believe in centralized power, central planning, deficit funding and world revolution through state terror have a duty to expose the enemies of the people.

Viva Iraq Libre Viva! Hasta La Victoria Siempre Bushista!

( Recovering Marxist Christopher Hitchens approved this post )

Understanding Bushit

2005-12-01T01:37:00.000-08:00

The village idiot cannot be understood at all ...but his small army of highly paid spin doctors can be...if you can understand this you can understand them...scientists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have coaxed six atoms into spinning together in two opposite directions at the same time, a so-called Schrödinger "cat" state that obeys the unusual laws of quantum physics. The ambitious choreography could be useful in applications such as quantum computing and cryptography, as well as ultra-sensitive measurement techniques, all of which rely on exquisite control of nature's smallest particles.

The experiment, which was unusually challenging even for scientists accustomed to crossing the boundary between the macroscopic and quantum worlds, is described in the Dec. 1 issue of Nature.* NIST scientists entangled six beryllium ions (charged atoms) so that their nuclei were collectively spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Entanglement, which Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," occurs when the quantum properties of two or more particles are correlated. The NIST work, along with a paper by Austrian scientists published in the same issue of Nature, breaks new ground for entanglement of multiple particles in the laboratory. The previous record was five entangled photons, the smallest particles of light.

"It is very difficult to control six ions precisely for a long enough time to do an experiment like this," says physicist Dietrich Leibfried, lead author of the NIST paper.

The ability to exist in two states at once is another peculiar property of quantum physics known as "superposition." The NIST ions were placed in the most extreme superposition of spin states possible with six ions. All six nuclei are spinning in one direction and the opposite direction simultaneously or what physicists call Schrödinger cat states. The name was coined in a famous 1935 essay in which German physicist Erwin Schrödinger described an extreme theoretical case of being in two states simultaneously, namely a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time.

Schrödinger's point was that cats are never observed in such states in the macroscopic "real world," so there seems to be a boundary where the strange properties of quantum mechanics--the rule book for Nature's smallest particles--give way to everyday experience. The NIST work, while a long way from full entanglement of a real cat's roughly 1026 atoms, extends the domain where Schrödinger cat states can exist to at least six atoms. The Austrian team used a different approach to entangle more ions (eight) but in a less sensitive state.

In the NIST experiment, the ions are held a few micrometers apart in an electromagnetic trap. Ultraviolet lasers are used to cool the ions to near absolute zero and manipulate them in three steps. To create and maintain the cat states, the researchers fine-tuned trap conditions to reduce unwanted heating of the ions, improved cooling methods, and automated some of the calibrations and other formerly manual processes. One run of the experiment takes about 1 millisecond; the cat states last about 50 microseconds (about 1/20 as long). The team ran the experiment successfully tens of thousands of times, including numerous runs that entangled four, five, or six ions.

Entanglement and superpositions are being exploited in laboratories around the world in the development of new technologies such as quantum computers. If they can be built, quantum computers could solve certain problems in an exponentially shorter time than conventional computers of a similar size. For example, current supercomputers would require years to break today's best encryption codes, (which are used to keep bank transactions and other important information secret) while quantum computers could quickly decipher the codes. Quantum computers also may be useful for optimizing complex systems such as airline schedules and database searching, developing "fraud-proof" digital signatures, or simulating complex biological systems for use in drug design.

Cat states, because they are superpositions of opposite overall properties that are relatively easy to verify, could be useful in a NIST-proposed design for fault-tolerant quantum computers. In addition, cat states are more sensitive to disturbance than other types of superpositions, a potentially useful feature in certain forms of quantum encryption, a new method for protecting information by making virtually all eavesdropping detectable.

The entangled cat states created by the NIST researchers also might be used to improve precision instruments, such as atomic clocks or interferometers that measure microscopic distances. Six ions entangled in a cat state are about 2½ times more sensitive to external magnetic fields than six unentangled ions, offering the possibility of better magnetic field sensors, or (for fixed external magnetic fields) better frequency sensors, which are components of atomic clocks. In addition, correlations between entangled ions could improve measurement precision, because a measurement of the spin of one of the entangled ions makes it possible to predict the spin of all remaining ions with certainty.

An animation related to the release can be seen here: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/images/NIST_CatStates_embed.html.

The statist takedown

2005-12-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

Taking out the modern state has been compared to the French and American revolutions in the past and the HAL computer shutdown in the ' future'. ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ) The top layer or layers get knocked out leaving the vast bulk of the state ticking over...and possibly dangerously regenerating.
I've put my plan forward many times to knock out the Secret Service level of the upper echelon as a way to 'send-a-message' to the powers-that-be. Such a Ddos attack may not be necessary if Google keeps growing at it's rapid emergent exponential rate. Check out this article ( Found at Dan Gilmores ) Googlephobia
Google may be the giant asteroid that is going to make the old-media dinosaurs extinct—but the publishing industry is trying to head it off.

By John Heilemann

Pat Schroeder, the former Colorado congresswoman who’s now the head of the Association of American Publishers, sits in her office on lower Fifth Avenue, reminiscing with me about the last time her industry tangled with technologists. “Back in the nineties, we had all these kids in black T-shirts who came and told us, ‘You guys are flat-earthers, you don’t know anything, we’re in tune with the future,’ ” she says. “Well, those guys crashed.” Schroeder chuckles for a second but then adopts a tone of infinite solemnity. “But now there’s a more sophisticated bunch, and they’ve come up with a business plan that crashes us.”

Schroeder is talking about Google, of course, the search-engine titan with which the publishers now find themselves embroiled in a bitter copyright lawsuit. In the decade since the Web emerged as a commercial force, such contretemps between old media and new—the music industry versus Napster, Hollywood versus Grokster—have become as routine a feature of the Internet as spam that promises penis enlargement.

Yet somehow the fact that the book business has chosen to take on Google doesn’t reek of same-old same-old. It’s startling, even mildly shocking, and more than a little revealing. For no matter how the publishers’ lawsuit ultimately unfolds, it has already provided the most vivid evidence to date of a seismic shift in the business Zeitgeist: from unalloyed Googlemania to gathering Googlephobia.

The signs are everywhere. In France, Jacques Chirac has ordered his minions to gin up a French and German search engine—on the grounds that Google is (wait for it) a tool of U.S. cultural imperialism. In Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart board members admit to keeping a wary eye on Google—whose capacity to alert shoppers to better bargains elsewhere is seen as a burgeoning threat. Even out in Silicon Valley, reproachful accusations are hurled that the once-beloved leader of the Internet resurgence has taken on a dark Microsoftian cast.

But nowhere is the sense of Googlephobia more acute than in New York, particularly in the village within a village that is the media-industrial complex. There’s Madison Avenue, in a state of panic over Google’s reinvention of advertising as a science driven by algorithms instead of an art propelled by (ahem) “creativity.” There’s the New York Times, quaking in its wingtips as Google ventures into online classifieds. There’s the cable industry wringing its hands over Google’s designs on video distribution on the Web.

And then there’s the book business. Now, it’s fair (albeit unkind) to say that publishers have earned a reputation as the most stubbornly analog of media concerns: If music and movie companies are dinosaurs in the Darwinian scheme of electronic evolution, publishers are moss-draped invertebrates still sloshing around in the primordial soup. Compared with book people, even newspaper people are a more Web-savvy species.

So it’s not surprising to find that Schroeder’s take on Google’s incursion into the realm of books is dire in extremis. “Alan Murray wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that called Google’s business model a new kind of feudalism: The peasants produce the content; Google makes the profits,” she informs me, then ladles on an extra helping of ominous foreboding. “Do we really want one corporation controlling all the content in the world?”

The proximate cause of Schroeder’s angst—and of the lawsuit filed by the AAP as well as a similar one issued by the Authors Guild—is Google’s plan, announced a year ago, to digitize and render searchable every book contained in five major libraries: Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. For books published before 1923, and therefore in the public domain, Google would provide access to the entire text. For those still covered by copyright, however, it would display only a snippet—one or two lines—around the term you’re searching for, plus basic bibliographic information and links to publishers or booksellers who might provide the full book.

What makes the plan controversial is that Google has no intention to ask for permission before scanning copyrighted books. To the AAP and the Authors Guild, this constitutes a naked case of copyright infringement. Google disagrees. It maintains that seeking permission from publishers or authors—especially when it comes to the millions of books, as much as 60 percent of the total, that are out of print but still under copyright—would be so burdensome as to make its Alexandrian project impossible. More to the point, Google claims that because it’s copying the books only to create a comprehensive index, and because it offers snippets only of copyrighted text, its plan falls under the “fair use” exception in copyright law (which allows book reviewers, for example, to quote from books without permission).
Who’s right? Impossible to say. By all accounts, the law of fair use is mind-bendingly complex: “There are parts of it that I don’t understand, and I’ve been studying it for years,” says Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford intellectual-property guru. Like virtually everyone involved in the dispute—he’s a vocal Google backer—Lessig allows that there are precedents that point in each direction. But he also acknowledges that the legal issues are in some respects peripheral, for the battle is actually being fueled by factors at once more venal and more visceral.

At the top of the list is money—something the publishers make no bones about. “I will stipulate that they built a great search engine; I use it and I love it,” Schroeder tells me. “But someone has to pay for the content so there’s something to search for. So we have to figure this out. I say to Google, ‘Let’s make a deal. You won’t make quite as much money, but I think you’ll do okay. Let’s share, boys, come on, let’s share! You don’t have to be so greedy!’ ”

“I can’t speak for the industry, but I don’t trust Google,” says Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos.

That Google is not so open about its pecuniary motivations is one of many things about the company that drives the publishers to distraction. “There’s sort of this innocent arrogance about them,” Jack Romanos, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, tells me. “One minute they’re pretending to be all idealistic, talking about how they’re only in this to expand the world’s knowledge, and the next they’re telling you that you’re going to do it their way or no way at all.” Romanos went on, “We bent over backwards in negotiations, but they showed no interest in what we had to offer. They had a holier-than-thou attitude that hasn’t done them any favors.”

Both Romanos and Schroeder argue that Google’s intransigence owes to the fact that, for the company, the dispute is about more than books. Schroeder: “Google approached our colleagues in music, movies, and broadcasting with the same deal. They said, ‘We’re going to copy all your stuff and only use a snippet.’ And our colleagues said, ‘Oh yeah? Do that and we’ll sue.’ I think Google believed those guys because they’d sued before, so Google let it go. But we hadn’t sued. We hadn’t even threatened to sue because publishers are such nice guys. Google saw us as patsies. They thought that our guys weren’t sophisticated enough to understand the issue. They assumed we’d never sue. But they were wrong—so here we are, and isn’t it fun?”

Romanos concurs. “Google thought, Hey, if we can bully the publishing industry, we can move into other forms of media.” And then he adds, with ostentatious brio, “But the publishing industry has backbone—we’re showing that right now.”

What the publishing industry is showing, actually, is that its own stance is about more than books as well. It’s about posturing and pride, ego and vanity, about the defensiveness of an industry that’s been called “flat-earthers” one too many times for its liking. If Google were to stick to its pledges about how it would employ the megadatabase of books that it’s constructing, the book business would likely benefit. But publishers don’t believe that Google can be relied on to keep its word. They fear that the company, which has made a mint off a technology, the Internet, that publishers still only vaguely comprehend, will someday abandon its putative adherence to just-the-snippets fair use and screw the publishers with their pants on.

“I can’t speak for the industry, but I don’t trust Google and Simon & Schuster doesn’t trust Google,” Romanos says. “Why would you assume that people who had taken the law into their own hands now would abide by the law in the future? If we let this get away from us, it would be a huge mistake. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in again.”

Talk like that may sound wildly paranoid—but then, as someone once observed, even paranoids have enemies. As the publishing industry and the rest of the traditional media are only now starting to grasp, Google is a company of vast and omnivorous ambitions. In the eyes of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and its CEO, Eric Schmidt, there are no limits to the segments of the economy that the computational machine they’ve built is capable of upending. As the Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie put it recently in the Times, “Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be.”

And Google is not alone. Five years after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the Internet is back—only this time, its potential for radical disruption is married to the capacity for outlandish profits. Once again, the media village senses that the wolf is at the door. But the village suspects that this time, he’s not going away, and that he’s brought some friends. The village has been wrong before. But probably not now. END

The Bubble Boy Booby who cried Wolf in SW Asia will hear from all of us soon...real soon.

R Cunningham, Potzi and the Fonz.

2005-12-01T01:02:00.000-08:00

DOMESTIC MILITARY INTELLIGENCE ON THE RISE

The military role in domestic intelligence collection appears to be
rapidly shifting in subtle and profound ways, as new missions are
assigned to little-known military organizations and most
congressional overseers are silently acquiescent or actively
supportive.

One of the public manifestations of the changing landscape is a new
Defense Department Instruction that "establishes procedures, and
assigns responsibilities ... for the conduct and administration of
DoD counterintelligence (CI) collection reporting activities."

See "DoD Counterintelligence Collection Reporting," DoD Instruction
5240.17, October 26, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/i5240_17.pdf

The Instruction was issued by Stephen A. Cambone, the Under Secretary
of Defense for Intelligence. His authorities and responsibilities
are themselves defined in the updated DoD Directive 5143.01, dated
November 23, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5143_01.pdf

The expansion of domestic military surveillance was reported in the
Washington Post on November 27, and was elaborated with new details
by William M. Arkin in his Washington Post blog. See "Domestic
Military Intelligence Is Back," November 29:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/

HEARING: FOIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The strengths and weaknesses of the Freedom of Information Act were
explored in a May hearing of the House Government Reform Committee,
the transcript of which has just been published.

The lead witness was Allen Weinstein, the Archivist of the United
States, who recalled that long before he became Archivist, he sued
the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, which is indeed an
excellent credential. Other witnesses included representatives of
the Justice Department, the Government Accountability Office, media
and public interest groups.

See "Information Policy in the 21st Century: A Review of the Freedom
of Information Act," hearing before a subcommittee of the House
Government Reform Committee, May 11:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2005/foia.html

CIA RECRUITMENT FLOURISHES

The Central Intelligence Agency is in several respects a wounded
agency. Its authority is diminished, and its credibility on
everything from weapons of mass destruction to information
classification policy is in tatters, leaving it an object of
derision.

See, for example, "CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters
All These Years," which is intended to be a satire, in The Onion,
November 30:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43014

But there are still plenty of people who are eager to work there,
more than the Agency can even consider hiring.

See "It's no secret: CIA scouting for recruits" by John Diamond, USA
Today, November 23:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-11-22-cia-recruit_x.htm

In recent years, "We had 100,000 applicants for CIA," said Rep. Randy
"Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) at an October 19 hearing of the House
Intelligence Committee. "You know how many got looked at? Thirty
thousand. Seventy thousand never even got a letter back. That's
bad."

Speaking of bad, Rep. Cunningham, who was an intelligence
subcommittee chairman, resigned in disgrace from Congress on
November 28 after admitting that he accepted millions of dollars in
bribes and evaded taxes.

The public policy consequences of such gross corruption at the
highest levels of the intelligence oversight process have barely
begun to be assessed.

Rep. Cunningham was a reliable advocate of unbending secrecy in
intelligence matters. On at least two occasions, in 1997 and 2000,
he voted against public disclosure of the aggregate intelligence
budget figure-- since that would damage national security.

Kid's killed by madness of King George

2005-12-01T00:56:00.000-08:00

http://iraq-kill-maim.org/kid-kill/kid-kill-01.htm

www.cryptome.org

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will go forward with its previously announced proposal to remove its Flight Information Publications (FLIP) and Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIFTM) from public access.

NGA is taking this action due to the increased numbers of international source providers claiming intellectual property rights of their data. Many of these sources forewarned NGA they intended to copyright their aeronautical data. NGA's public release of data produced by others violated claimed copyright, forcing NGA to discontinue the release of this data to the general public. Government agencies and authorized government contractors are not affected by this action.

"The removal of this aeronautical data from general public access will assure the continued availability of information vital to national security," commented NGA Director, Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr., USAF (Ret).

NGA officially announced its proposed intention to remove the aeronautical products from public access on Oct. 1, 2005 in the Nov. 18, 2004 Federal Register. As a result of the feedback received from organizations and individuals, NGA invited public comment on this proposed action between Dec. 17, 2004 and June 30, 2005. Numerous comments were received and addressed from private citizens and special interests groups.

As a result of input from the public comment period, NGA will phase in the removal of the affected NGA products from public access over a 22 month period.

NGA, in consultation with the Federal Aviation Agency has determined this action will not affect chart products for US airspace or Caribbean and South American charts and also Pacific, Australia, and Antarctica charts in areas considered part of the US Flight Information Region. NGA has decided not to withdraw paper map products to a scale of 1:250,000 to 1:5,000,000. These products will continue to be available to the public.

The first phase of the product withdrawal begins in January 2006 with the removal of worldwide DAFIFTM from public sale. The electronic distribution of DAFIFTM over the World Wide Web (www) and public sale of NGA FLIP outside US airspace will cease in October 2006. The remaining NGA FLIP will be removed from public access in October 2007.

The NGA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and a member of the National Intelligence Community. The Agency's mission is to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of our national security. Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., NGA has major facilities in the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, and St. Louis, Mo., areas with NGA support teams worldwide.

Stop torturing the english language

2005-11-30T22:53:00.000-08:00

STOP RUMSFELD.

RMSFELD AND PACE....Via Tim Dunlop, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reports on a recent exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The subject was torture:

When UPI's Pam Hess asked about torture by Iraqi authorities, Rumsfeld replied that "obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility" other than to voice disapproval.

But Pace had a different view. "It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it," the general said.

Rumsfeld interjected: "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."

But Pace meant what he said. "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," he said, firmly.

Don't bomb us bubble boy

2005-11-30T22:43:00.000-08:00

DON'T BOMB US....In the ever expanding blogosphere, the latest entry is a blog from several Al Jazeera staffers titled, appropriately, "Don't Bomb Us." Here are five things they would like you to know:

1.Al Jazeera was the first Arab station to ever broadcast interviews with Israeli officials.
2.Al Jazeera has never broadcast a beheading.
3.George W. Bush has recieved approximately 500 hours of airtime, while Bin Laden has received about 5 hours of airtime.
4.Over 50 million people across the world watch Al Jazeera.
5.The Al Jazeera websites are http://www.aljazeera.net (Arabic) and http://english.aljazeera.net (English). AlJazeera.com, AlJazeerah.info and all other variations have nothing to do with us.

The Dictator's club

2005-11-30T22:33:00.000-08:00

We've joined the dictators'

THE Federal Opposition said today Australia had joined the ranks of tyrannical states such as North Korea, Syria, and Cuba by strengthening its free speech laws.
Labor leader Kim Beazley said the Howard Government seemed "hell bent" on enforcing the sedition aspects of its new anti-terror laws.

The Government says the laws are to enable authorities to tackle extremists who urge violence against Australians and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock again defended the sedition plans, saying they would not act as curbs on free speech. (Full story)

Under the sedition measure in the Anti-Terrorism Bill, anyone convicted of urging a group to use force or violence against another group could be jailed for up to seven years.

"I do not know why the Government insists that we should lower ourselves to the standard of North Korea, Syria and Cuba," Mr Beazley said.

"I don't think that's necessary but they seem to be hell bent on this." Former Midnight Oil frontman and Labor MP Peter Garrett said the sedition laws meant the Government was now "at war" with Australia's satirical cartoonists and writers.

Media organisations, a government-led Senate committee, civil libertarians and other lobbyists had all called on the Government to drop the sedition provisions in the bill, concerned that future governments might use the laws to silence anti-government commentary in the media.

Some amendments were made to the laws last night and the laws are now expected to be in force in a matter of days.

A key Government MP who lobbied for changes to the laws, Senator George Brandis, said today the changes included an "absolute defence to protect freedom of political speech and freedom of reportage and commentary".

Mr Garrett said Labor doubted the cartoons would be sufficient and that "cartoonists and creative artists, writers and others shouldn't be relying on defences in anti-terror legislation for them to carry out their work." Labor, however, will attempt to separate the sedition elements of the anti-terror laws in Parliament.

"The sedition laws are about protecting politicians. The detention laws are about protecting Australians," Mr Beazley said.

"I'm all for protecting Australians, I'm not for protecting politicians, and we're talking about politicians' reputations, not their lives."

Mr Garrett said: "The defences that we think will be proposed will not be sufficient, and in any event cartoonists and creative artists, writers and others shouldn't be relying on defences in anti-terror legislation for them to carry out their work."

Small scale Nuclear energy looking better

2005-11-30T22:13:00.000-08:00

Now that we find no recent efforts by the old Saddam Hussein regime to obtain uranium in Niger and no centrifuge tubes it can be seen that the scale of certain nuclear works is hard to hide - especially in a world where optic fibre snakes out several miles every minute covering more and more of the world while more satellites are also launched to help cover the planet.
Back in the early seventies we said ' Uranium creates a police state'. Today we live in a ' Brinworld' whether we like it or not and yet that paradoxically makes the nuclear option look better. A huge STASI style police state is unnecessary where an informed, intelligent population looks out for each other.
I still see alternative energy such as tidal, solar, wind, geo and other as being more attractive yet also smaller and safer nuclear energy alternatives that would formerly need a massive police state to protect them could also be competitive if we are honest. This should become even clearer as more and more large authoritarian government's fall over and never get back up.

Rumsters brain fart

2005-11-30T22:06:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, while other Americans were watching football and eating leftover turkey, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ended the Iraqi insurgency.

It was easy, really. He said that the insurgents would, henceforth, no longer be called insurgents.

"Over the weekend, I thought to myself, 'You know, that gives them a greater legitimacy than they seem to merit'," Mr Rumsfeld said of his ban on the I-word at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday.

"It was an epiphany. These people aren't trying to promote something other than disorder, and to take over that country and turn it into a caliphate … This is a group of people who don't merit the word insurgency."

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, standing at Mr Rumsfeld's side, evidently did not get the message. Describing combat in Iraq, he paused and said: "I have to use the word insurgent because I can't think of a better word right now."

"'Enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government' - how's that?" Mr Rumsfeld said. "What the secretary said," General Pace continued, to laughter.

But Mr Rumsfeld's new description did not stick with the general. He used the word again while discussing explosive devices. Mr Rumsfeld recoiled in mock horror. "Sorry, sir," General Pace said. "I'm not trainable today."

It was not the first time the world had refused to follow Mr Rumsfeld's lead. When he tried to change the "war on terror" to the "global struggle against violent extremism", President George Bush put an end to that idea.

This time it is the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, still new to the job, who isn't marching to Mr Rumsfeld's orders.

Asked by a reporter about torture by Iraqi authorities, Mr Rumsfeld replied that "obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility" other than to voice disapproval. But General Pace had a different view. "It is the absolute responsibility of every US service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it," he said.

The Washington Post

WHAT'S IN A WORD

The definition of "insurgency", according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
1. The quality or circumstance of being rebellious. 2. An instance of rebellion; an insurgence

The brain damaged bubble booby Bush went to war and relied on advice from the serial liar and criminal conspirator, Dick Cheney and this loony tune Field Marshall Von Rumsfeld.
Together they were known as ' The Gestapo' and ' The Commissar's'.'
It will take a global insurgency to knock out this gang. The worst pack of criminal murderers since the Third Reich.

Lord Haw Haw in his cups

2005-11-30T21:30:00.000-08:00

Lord Hitchens of Baghdad may be a recovering Imperialist in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling. The main difference being Kipling could write. The Lord Haw Haw for the criminal Bush terror regime now claims to be interested in consistancy in arguing point's of view...'...It was said even then that the attack would fail, because (remember?) if you killed Osama Bin Laden, then a thousand more would rise up to take his place. This line soon mutated into, "No war on Iraq: It's a distraction from the hunt for Bin Laden." What a good thing it is that the Bush administration didn't exaggerate by much, because if it had, millions of people would now be saying that they couldn't think of any reason of their own why the Taliban should have been removed...'

At least that's what it SOUNDs like. Hitchens last few efforts for SLATE have been increasing incoherent ( Tired and emotional? )
Still - I take from the above that Hitchens has a new found interest in lucid, linear and coherent argument on serious matters.

Perhaps then Christopher can explain , and it should be easy from his priviliged ' insider' if not ' inbedded' status, the (bureaucratic or otherwise) reasons for invading SW Asia?

It started out as WMD's didn't it?

So what is it now?

Making the world safe for open bars in all Arab places? Regime change? Finding the broom of the wicked witch? Someone as wise and informed as Christopher should find this question a snap but it puzzles me...and it seems to puzzle more and more.
Everyday the reality based community grows while the friends of Lord Haw Haw hunker in the bunker.
At least he has plenty of aneasthetic's on hand from the sound of it.
Were Hitchens a real journalist...one who actually READ what he freely stole from Sy Hersh he might be running around with his hair on fire warning us about the new dangers to Iraq's neighbor's and projected massive increases in secret bombing runs.
Instead he is swilling down the free SLATE fire water like there is no tomorrow. Then again there was no yesterday for this hopeless drunk so I guess that makes sense.
The president may even be living vicariously through Hitchens...that is if he isn't sneaking a snifter or three himself ...with a pretzel chaser.
The Exxon Valdez ran aground with a drunken sot as captain didn't it?
That would sure explain a lot.
Chris's favourite cocktail?
I hear it's a ' Long Island tea' with a splash of light sweet crude...and it's called a ' Turd Blossom' I believe.

Hitchens could be SLATE's Iraq

2005-11-30T20:41:00.000-08:00

The sunk cost fallacy has to be considered with epic quagmires such as the American's in SE Asia, the Americans and Brits in SW Asia... and Christopher Hitchens raiding the drinks cabinet down at Slate ...again.
The bloviating buffoon and Lord Haw Haw of endless war sounds like a true believer in throwing good money after bad.
Take Ali Baba Ahmed.
Please!
However it must be allowed...he could be a recovering believer.
Some of us out in the reality based emperical community did not object too much to ' Plan Afghanistan'. After all that could be construed as a liberation for the vast majority...at least for a time. ( RAWA now claims things are just as bad as ever they were and certainly the supply of narcotics has dramatically picked up - not that there's anything wrong with that )
If it had only all stopped there with just another 3000 odd innocents lives snuffed out as collateral damage.
Unfortunately like some crack addict's or alcoholic's it was impossible for Hitchens new warmongering friends to stop at one.
The criminal enemies of peace might have been stopped had the (military-entertainment complex) media done what it is supposed to do. Obviously it is as dysfunctional as the so called ' intelligence' services.
And so we see clearly now the greatest bunch of outright criminals since the third Reich...and their Lord Haw Haw, Hitchens.
The ultimate example of the sunk cost fallacy Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens ripped off real journalists to create a mini ( sub Chalabi/ Che ) level myth about himself as the anti-Kissinger.
This begs the question - who's Kissinger now?
At least Mother Teresa never came out for illegal aggressive war (in the trad sense.)
It's passing strange that the ' left' warmongers who claim to be so sensitive to the oppression of women under Islam have helped create this trainwreck where the main beneficiaries are fanatics who beat women journalists to death and hang gays.
It was predicted... and they could have found out that it was predictable. That is if they were not a) stupid, or b) corrupt or c) hopeless drunks. ( or some combination of those three... in Hitchens case ' All of the above' )
In my cynical moments I sometimes think that the Axis of evil should stay in Afghanistan. This is where old empires go to die... and the Afghans are fighters!
They gave it to the British up the Khyber pass and beat the Reds black and blue.

Yes SLATE - you do appeal to my darth side sometimes.
Then I think of the depraved, nihilistic and fascisticly misanthropic policy of creating a free fire zone there ...so we won't have to fight them fair and square here.
And you have to think of the 100 thousand and climbing innocent casualties of the illegal aggressive invasion of SW Asia.
Ya Basta. Enough.
Enough warmongering lies and lies to cover up yet more lies.
Enough criminal conspiracy aided and abetted by a corrupt media.
Enough of this fascist history repeating as farce.
Hitchens to the Hague. Hang Hitchens. ( after a fair trial naturally )

Operation Bushit storm

2005-11-30T20:36:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON -- As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. . The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents, and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

While the articles are basically truthful, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles -- with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism" -- since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are vowing to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech to a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption. It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled "The Role of Press in a Democratic Society."

Underscoring the importance U.S. officials place on development of a Western-style media, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday cited the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as one of the country's great successes since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. The hundreds of newspapers, television stations and other "free media" offer a "relief valve" for the Iraqi public to debate the issues of their burgeoning democracy, Rumsfeld said.

The military's information operations campaign has sparked a backlash among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S. military's credibility both in foreign nations and with the American public.

"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it," said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

The arrangement with Lincoln Group is evidence of how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between military public affairs -- the dissemination of truthful information to the media -- and psychological and information operations, which use propaganda and sometimes misleading information to advance the objectives of a military campaign.

The Bush administration has come under criticism for distributing video and news stories in the United States without identifying the federal government as their source and for paying American journalists to promote administration policies, practices the Government Accountability Office has labeled "covert propaganda."

According to military officials familiar with the effort in Iraq, much of the effort is directed by the "Information Operations Task Force" in Baghdad, part of the multinational corps headquarters (MNC-I) commanded by Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are critical of the effort and are not authorized to speak publicly about it.

A spokesman for Vines declined to comment for this article. A Lincoln Group spokesman also declined comment.

As part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the past year, one of the military officials said that the task force also has purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and is using the outlets to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.

The official would not disclose which newspaper and radio station are under U.S. control, saying that naming the organizations would put their employees at risk of insurgent attacks.

U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda with American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon's efforts are carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably "bleeds" into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets.

"There is no longer any way to separate foreign media from domestic media. Those neat lines don't exist anymore," said one private contractor who does information operations work for the Pentagon.

Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University, said that he does not believe that planting stories in Iraqi media is wrong. But he questioned whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the insurgency.

"I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it," he said. "I just question whether it's effective."

One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first made him suspect that the U.S. military was planting stories in the Iraqi media.

"Stuff would show up in the Iraqi press and I would ask: 'Where the hell did that come from?' It was clearly not something that indigenous Iraqi press would have conceived of on their own," the official said.

Iraqi newspaper editors reacted with a mixture of shock and shrugs when told they were targets of a U.S. military psychological operation.

Some of the newspapers, such as Mutamar, a Baghdad-based daily run by associates of Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, ran the articles as news stories, indistinguishable from other news reports. Before the war, Chalabi was the Iraqi exile favored by senior Pentagon officials to lead post-Hussein Iraq.

Others, such as the independent Mada daily, ran them as "advertorials" and distinguished them from editorial content with disclaimers. Yet the disclaimers did not mention any connection to the U.S. military.

One Aug. 6 piece, published prominently on Mutamar's second page, ran as a news story with the headline "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism." Documents obtained by The Times indicated that the newspaper was paid approximately $50 to run the story, though the editor of the paper said he runs such articles for free.

Nearly $1,500 was paid to the independent Addastour newspaper to run a Aug. 2 article entitled "More Money Goes to Iraq's Development," the records indicated. The newspaper's editor, Bassem Sheikhly, said he had "no idea" where the piece came from but wrote "media services" on top of the article to distinguish it from other editorial content.

The U.S. military-written articles come in to Mutamar, the newspaper run by Chalabi's associates, via the Internet and are often unsigned, said Luay Baldawi, the paper's editor-in-chief.

"We publish anything," he said. "The paper's policy is to publish everything, especially if it praises causes we believe in. We are pro-American. Everything that supports America we will publish."

Yet other employees of the newspaper were far less supportive of their paper's connection with the U.S. military. "This is not right," said Faleh Hassan, an editor at Mutamar. "It reflects the tragic condition of journalists in Iraq. Journalism is in Iraq is in very bad shape."

Ultimately, Baldawi admitted that he, too, was disturbed by the origin of the articles and vowed to be "more careful about stuff we get by email."

Iraqi newspapers are often shoestring operations barely breaking even while paying writers and editors little more than $200 a month.

After he learned of the source of three paid advertorials that ran in Mada in July, the paper's managing editor, Abdul-Zahra Zaki, was outraged, immediately summoning a manager of the advertising department to his office.

"I'm very sad," he said. "We have to investigate."

The Iraqis who delivered the articles also reaped modest profits from the arrangements, according to sources and records.

Employees at Mada said that a low-key man arrived at the newspaper's offices in downtown Baghdad on July 30 with a large wad of U.S. dollars. He told the editors that he wanted to publish an article entitled "Terrorists Attack Sunni Volunteers" in the respected newspaper.

He paid cash and left no calling card, employees said. He did not want a receipt. The name he gave employees was the same as that of a Lincoln Group worker in the records obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Although editors at Mada said he paid $900 to place the article, records show the man told Lincoln Group that he gave more than $1,200 to the paper.

Mada is widely considered the most cerebral and professional of Iraqi newspapers, publishing investigative reports as well as poetry.

Zaki said that if his cash-strapped paper knew the these stories had been from the U.S. government, he would have "charged much, much more" to publish them.

According to several sources, the process for placing the stories begins when soldiers write "storyboards" of events in Iraq, such as a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on a suspected insurgent hide-out, or a suicide bomb that killed Iraqi civilians.

The storyboards, several of which were obtained by The Times, read more like press releases than news stories, and often contain anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials. It is unclear whether the anonymous quotes are authentic.

"Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories," said the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq.

One of the storyboards, dated Nov. 12, describes a U.S. and Iraqi offensive in Karabilah and Husaybah, towns in western Iraq.

"Both cities are stopping points for foreign fighters entering Iraq to wage their unjust war," the storyboard reads.

It continues with a quote from an anonymous U.S. military official: " 'Iraqi army soldiers and U.S. forces have begun clear-and-hold operations in the city of Karabilah near Husaybah town, close to the Syrian border,' said a military official once operations began."

Another storyboards, written on the same date, describes the capture of a insurgent bomb-maker in Baghdad."As the people and the (Iraqi Security Forces) working together, Iraq will finally drive terrorism out of Iraq for good," it concludes.

It was unclear whether those two storyboards have made their way into Iraqi newspapers.

A debate over the Pentagon's handling of information has raged since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

In 2002, the Pentagon was forced to shut down its Office of Strategic Influence, which had been created the previous year, after reports surfaced that it intended to plant false news stories in the international media.

For much of 2005, a Defense Department working group has been trying to forge a policy about the proper role of information operations in wartime. Pentagon officials say the group has yet to resolve the often-contentious debate in the building about the boundaries between military public affairs and information operations.

Lincoln Group, formerly known as Iraqex, is one of several companies hired by the U.S. military to carry out "strategic communications" in countries where large numbers of U.S. troops are based.

The company's website states that Lincoln Group relies "on our experience, quality people, flexibility, and a low profile to get the job done."

"The bottom line to our success often comes down to the fact that we live and work inside these communities. Our staff members are experts on the communities they work in and are able to immerse themselves in them unobtrusively."

Some of Lincoln Group's work in Iraq is very public, such as an animated public service campaign on Iraqi television that spotlights the innocent Iraqis killed by roadside bombs planted by insurgents.

Besides its contract with the military in Iraq, Lincoln Group earlier this year won a major contract with U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, to develop a strategic communications campaign in concert with special operations troops stationed around the globe. The contract is worth up to $100 million over five years, although U.S. military officials said they doubted the Pentagon would spend the full amount of the contract.

Mazzetti reported from Washington and Daragahi from Baghdad.

Pelosi comes across

2005-11-30T20:16:00.000-08:00

Whatever Bubble boy blubbers about has little interest for the reality based community. That community that today, welcomes, house leader Pelosi into it's ever increasing ranks. This significant move further isolates 'opposition' warmonger's such as Hilary Clinton and Joe Lieberman. There is also ever increasing pressure on large slabs of the military-entertainment complex, the so-called MSM, to join and share in reality community politics. This pressure comes from two fronts; one being ignored and the other not getting paid.
It's beyond doubt now that what was described about a hundred years ago as ' new superpower'; public opinion, has aquired a incredible force multiplier in the internet in general and blogs in particular. It's not to hard to see a total collapse in state power in the medium term with all power flowing to free floating networks. The outcomes for world peace, environmental repair and equitable distribution according to need could only improve from such intercommunal anarchy.
While the net itself is not strictly anarchic it is growing faster every second and anarchic grids and meshnets can now be easily overlain on the basic node architecture.
The future keeps happening and it is up to us to stop team Bush cold, fix global warming and fair trade. The best way to do that imho is to take out the upper echelons of the state; the biggest state first. The birth of our power should not go unoticed because we have a limited window of opportunity to fix the war , climate and trade problem's without more massive loss of life.

CIA Follies

2005-11-30T19:35:00.000-08:00

One of the 22 CIA agents wanted in Italy over the kidnapping of Egyptian imam Abu Omar from a street in Milan in February 2003 has claimed in his defence that the Italian authorities were well aware of the operation. The lawyer for Robert Seldon Lady, who headed the CIA's Milan station from 2000 to January 2004, made the claim while challenging the warrant issued for his arrest by Italian prosecutors in June this year, saying his actions had "explicit, or at least implicit authorisation from the Italian government."

However, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reports that "the CIA has lost the first legal round" in its fight to legitimise its practice of 'extraordinary renditions', which involves the capturing and deporting of foreign terror suspects without any trial to countries where they could be tortured.

Milan judge Enrico Manzi rejected the first line of defence used by Lady's lawyer, with a verdict establishing that no diplomatic immunity or state secret can authorise "the capture of suspects outside of every judiciary control" by either Italian or foreign secret services. Manzi therefore declared the rendition "an act of force" which "violates the sovereignty of Italy" and cannot be justified.

Omar was already under surveillance by Italian police when he was kidnapped, suspected of having links with terrorist groups and recruiting young people to be used as martyrs in Iraq. Milan investigating magistrates say he was first taken to the Aviano American air base in northern Italy and transferred to a military base at Ramstein in Germany, from where he was then flown to Egypt in a private plane hired by the CIA. Since then he has been held at the high security Tora prison, where, he told a friend when he was briefly released, he was tortured to the point of being left partially paralysed.

Pressure has been growing for an explanation into dozens of CIA flights through Europe thought to have picked up and delivered terror suspects to prisons in countries where they may subsequently have been tortured. An investigation has been opened in Germany into the use of the Ramstein base in the Abu Omar rendition.

Italian investigators found a photograph of Abu Omar on Lady's computer, taken on the street he was seized from 33 days before he disappeared. His wife had deleted all the files on his computer, but on rebuilding the hard drive, police are reported to have found evidence that he had run searches for the shortest route from the Milan street where Omar was kidnapped to Aviano. A list of the luxurious hotels in Milan the agents accused of being involved in the kidnapping stayed in was also found in the rubbish bin in his garage.

Evidence has also been uncovered that Lady was in Cairo during the two weeks when Omar is said to have suffered the most violent interrogation. Investigators tracked down two airplane tickets showing that he flew to Cairo from Zurich on 24 February 2003, and returned to Italy on 7 March.

In her first appeal, Lady's lawyer Daria Pesce, claimed he was innocent or "only following orders" and was occupying the role of consul at the time, giving him "diplomatic immunity" which also covered him for "special missions". However, this argument was rejected by the judge, who decreed that immunity does not cover "serious crimes like kidnapping". State secrets, he argued, protect "the security of Italian democracy" and not "actions carried out by foreign operatives".

The Italian government and intelligence service SISMI have always denied knowledge of the operation to capture Abu Omar. However, Lady's lawyer stated twice in his defence that "Lady, in his consular role as intelligence supervisor, undoubtedly enjoyed the authorisation of the US government in agreement with the political authorities of the Italian state" and this "Italian approval" was "indispensible" for a "special mission sent by the United States".

Italy's La Repubblica newspaper speculated on Wednesday that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi could soon find himself forced to make a difficult choice: "Turn the whole affair into a state secret, thereby admitting that Palazzo Chigi [the Prime Minister's office] knew, or alternatively, hand over to the Milan prosecutor's office the names of those who authorised or kept quiet about the kidnapping of Abu Omar."

While the Bush administration has publicly defended the extraordinary rendition practice, it has always denied complicity in any torture the suspect may later have suffered in the country he was sent to.
In the UK Allegations that the CIA has been using the UK as a stopping point for flights on their way to secret jails have raised a complex legal debate.

It is not in dispute that the infliction of torture - for whatever purpose - is unlawful under the UN Torture Convention of 1984, to which Britain, in common with 140 states, is a party.

The law was used as recently as last summer to underpin the prosecution of an Afghan warlord arrested in London. Article 4 of the UN Convention makes complicity in torture an offence.

In principle, then, if it can be established that the government knowingly allowed CIA " torture flights" to land in Britain or use British airspace, there must be a case to bring before the UK courts.

Professor Philippe Sands, an authority on human rights and the law, says: "I would go further and argue that international law imposes a positive obligation on the government to investigate these allegations of torture."

But lawyer Khawar Qureshi points out that the UK courts "through long established case law have refrained from adjudicating on acts of the executive which are rooted in policy and national interest consideration".

A string of British airports have allegedly been used

If Liberty goes ahead with a judicial review application, its chances of success will be in the balance.

It is becoming evident that the US administration is also anxious to find an answer to the moral and legal problems raised by the process of so-called " extraordinary rendition" - where captives are interrogated in third countries.

One reported suggestion, from Vice-president Dick Cheney, is that the CIA should be authorised to do the questioning itself in circumstances where the suspects are not US citizens and they are being held as part of counterterrorism operations abroad.

Unresolved issue

The proposal, made to senior Republican senator John McCain, who is sponsoring a law which would ban inhumane treatment and oblige all US agencies to abide by the UN Torture Convention, was rejected.

The use of evidence obtained under torture is an unresolved issue.

It is claimed that the federal prosecuting authorities decided not to charge a man, held for three years as an "enemy combatant", with planning to detonate a "dirty bomb", because the evidence against him was extracted under torture.

And the House of Lords will shortly give a landmark ruling on the same issue. Can such evidence obtained abroad be admissible in the British courts?

The Appeal Court said that it could because the UN Torture Convention has not been incorporated into UK law.

If the ruling is upheld by the law lords, the ambition of human rights groups to place legal curbs around the apparently growing use of torture will be thwarted.

Backsliding Marxist?

2005-11-30T09:12:00.000-08:00

Hitchens is still scribbling away at SLATE. This is a scandal all on it's own and one that stinks up an entire portal...glad it's Hitchens confrere's that have to live with it...much like sharing a W/house with a Turd blossom I imagine.
Best not to linger in either cesspit.
In the recent past, Hitchen's has claimed to be a ' recovering Marxist'. He's also written a grovelling brown nosing paen to ' The Old Man' Leon Trotsky in ' Atlantic'.
( Another site suffering from the old ' lie down with dog's syndrome' )
You could see an example of how much a recovering Marxist Hitchens really is today at SLATE...'...How strange that the anti-war left should have forgotten all of its Marxism and superciliously ignored the fact that oil is blood: lifeblood for Iraqis and others. Under Saddam it was wholly privatized; now it can become more like a common resource. But it will need to be protected against those who would shed it and spill it without compunction, and we might as well become used to the fact...'

It would appear Hitchens hasn't forgotten his Marxism at all!

How feeble his ' recovery'!

But then he ' recover's' again...fast as WC Fields. ( I have to wonder if Hitch ever gets whiplash quaffing all that refrigerator wine he inhales...shouldn't be surprised if he shows up with a neck brace I guess )

"...With or without a direct Anglo-American garrison, there is an overwhelming humanitarian and international and civilizational interest in defeating the Arab Khmer Rouge that threatens Mesopotamia,..'

And they called John Kerry a ' Flipper'!

Those of us not six sheets to the wind on SLATE claret might consider who created the original Khmer Rouge by massive air bombing campaigns while ' Vietnamization' was underway. Then the same crew that maintained recognition of the Khymer Rouge AFTER their terrible ( yet typically Marxist) atrocities were known.

Why the friends of Christopher Hitchens of course. You know him. The ' recovering Marxist' who's Kissinger now. Hey ferggedabout ' Blood for oil'. Blood for CLARET!

Hitchens is overtaking Stephen Schwartz and coming up fast on David Horowitz with a sideways nod to James A Donald!

' With or without Ali Baba Ahmed and his 400 Sandline thieves...'

NSA Takeout

2005-11-30T09:10:00.000-08:00

GREENBELT // A former National Security Agency employee admitted to backing his pickup truck up to an unguarded exit and hauling away boxes of classified material, an FBI agent testified yesterday.
The former NSA employee, Kenneth Ford, made the admission during a raid on his Waldorf home, FBI agent Michael Thompson testified. Thompson, the first witness called in Ford's trial, said he was "surprised" to find the classified materials in Ford's home, but said, "I don't recall Mr. Ford reacting."

Prosecutors said they raided the home after receiving a tip from Ford's girlfriend, Tanya Tucker.

Ford told the agents he was using the documents as reference material for a new job. The former NSA employee is charged with illegally possessing classified materials and making false statements while trying to obtain security clearance.

Defense attorney Spencer Hecht said in opening statements that the case was not as simple as the prosecutor said. Noting the strict security policies in place at the NSA, Hecht told jurors the case was about the "feasibility and possibility that Ford could have taken them."

The defense attorney also said he would show a link between the girlfriend and the NSA. By the end of the trial, jurors will come to the conclusion "that something here just isn't right, something here just doesn't make sense and there's a whole lot more to this story."

As the trial started in U.S. District Court yesterday, the judge warned jurors the conduct of the case would be unusual because of the classified nature of much of the evidence.

For example, jurors would not be allowed to discuss much of what they would hear even after the trial is over, said Judge Peter J. Messitte. He said they also would "hear" testimony from so-called silent witnesses who would point to significant sections of classified documents the jury would be handed, but would not talk about those sections in open court.

Ford, 34, faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison on the charges, prosecutors said.

Howard the Hangman

2005-11-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

Australian government deserts young man due to hang in Singapore
By Mike Head 30 November 2005 WSWS
A young Australian man will almost certainly be hanged in Singapore at 6 a.m. this Friday after the Australian government made it plain it was prepared to sacrifice his life to bolster its economic and strategic relations with the anti-democratic south-east Asian regime.

Despite pleas from around the world, Van Tuong Nguyen, 25, will be executed under Singapore’s mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, including those people caught working as “mules”.

Over recent weeks, tens of thousands of people, including school students and community groups, in Australia have taken part in “candles of hope” rallies, signed petitions, sent SMS messages and written letters, pleading for a halt to the execution. In Singapore, where public assemblies are forbidden and the government-controlled media has suppressed reportage and discussion, hundreds have nevertheless attended protest meetings. In one instance, authorities censored an anti-hanging art exhibit, removing all references to Nguyen.

In the face of the groundswell of support for the young man, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his key ministers have engaged in hypocritical hand wringing—claiming to oppose the execution, but not even lodging a formal diplomatic protest to Singapore. On Monday, they finally ended the pretence, declaring that there was nothing further they could do.

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer ruled out mounting a challenge in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Howard dismissed calls for a minute’s silence across Australia to mark the execution and the prime minister confirmed that he would not alter his plans to attend a cricket game in Canberra on Friday.

Even then, Howard claimed to be doing the “decent” thing by ending the “false hopes” of Nguyen’s family. “There does come a time when the most decent, honest thing I can do is to express the view that I am now, that I do not believe that the Singaporean Government will be moved to change its mind.”

An Australian citizen of Vietnamese descent, Nguyen was arrested at Singapore’s Changi Airport almost exactly three years ago, on December 12, 2002, after being found in possession of 396 grams of heroin. He admitted attempting to smuggle the narcotics between Cambodia and Australia and agreed to cooperate with the authorities, including the Australian Federal Police, in the hope of avoiding the noose.

Nguyen has been on death row since March 2004 after being convicted under Singapore’s Misuse of Drugs Act, which carries a compulsory death sentence for anyone found guilty of trafficking in more than 15 grams of heroin. Singapore’s high court rejected his appeal on October 20 and the country’s president S.R. Nathan, dismissed a clemency plea the very next day.

The young man’s case is a particularly tragic example of the way in which many poor people become drug couriers, taking huge risks for relatively small payments from narcotics syndicates. He agreed to carry the heroin in an effort to pay off debts incurred by his identical twin brother, Khoa, stemming from drug problems. The family has struggled financially since arriving in Australia from a refugee camp in Thailand, where Nguyen and his brother were born.

While claiming to sympathise with Nguyen and his distraught family, Howard spelt out Canberra’s attitude most bluntly on November 20. He described Nguyen’s plight as a “desperately sad case”, but then said it would not “contaminate our bilateral relationship with Singapore”. His comment underscored the primary calculation that has been made in corporate, political and media circles from the outset—popular support for Nguyen must not be allowed to disrupt Australia’s lucrative business, geo-political and military links with Singapore.

In an attempt to cover the government’s tracks, Downer on Monday tabled in parliament a list of 30 occasions on which Australian representatives had raised Nguyen’s case with Singaporean ministers. Two things, however, stand out about the list. First, no senior Australian minister said a word until almost a year after Nguyen was arrested, by which time he had already been charged with an offence carrying the mandatory death penalty.

A senior Singaporean defence lawyer, Subhas Anandan, said the time for Australia to intervene was back in December 2002, before Nguyen was formally charged. Anandan had represented a German woman, Julia Bohl, who was originally charged with a capital offence over drug crimes but had her sentence commuted to five years by a plea bargain.

More fundamentally, not once has the Australian government issued a formal protest in any diplomatic forum or court, either against Nguyen’s death sentence or capital punishment itself.

Over the past month, Howard has had the opportunity to raise Nguyen’s case in two international gatherings—on the floor of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum in South Korea and at the (former British) Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Malta—but decided not to do so. Instead, he held friendly talks with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the son of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister and continuing “Minister Mentor”.

At the time when Howard was meeting with Lee in South Korea, Nguyen’s mother received an official letter from Singapore, advising her of the date and time of her son’s execution.

Over the past week, Howard and Downer have rejected out of hand expert legal opinion that Australia could take the case to the ICJ. Nguyen’s lawyer, Lex Lasry, QC, received advice from barrister, Dr Christopher Ward, who practices in international law and has experience at the international court, that Australia could apply to the court to halt the hanging, with or without Singapore’s acceptance of the court’s jurisdiction.

In his written opinion, Ward stated: “Australia and Singapore are parties to each of the United Nations Narcotic Conventions. Each of those conventions contains a clause permitting recourse to the International Court of Justice.” Other international law experts, including Sydney University’s professor Don Rothwell, said the narcotic convention and other treaties signed by Singapore would allow Australia to obtain an emergency injunction to stop the execution. Rothwell cited three “death row” cases heard by the court in the past seven years, each against the United States.

But after apparently scouring the globe for a contrary opinion, Downer said he had received advice from Cambridge international law professor James Crawford that there was no basis to take the case to the court. Downer declared there were no more legal avenues left and “only a miracle” would save Nguyen’s life. Yet, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock admitted that Australia had not even formally demanded that Singapore accede to the international court’s jurisdiction.

Corporate and strategic interests

The motivations behind the Howard’s government’s callous inaction are clear. As a financial and trading hub for regional and global capital in South East Asia, Singapore is Australia’s largest trading partner in the region, with two-way exports and imports currently worth $10.6 billion annually. Singaporean investment in Australia is substantial, involving companies such as Optus, Singapore Airlines and CapitaLand, Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation, which owns hotels, and Temasek, which holds a stake in the airline Qantas. These corporate ties were cemented by a Free Trade Agreement signed between the two countries in 2003.

Canberra also places high value on its military and security links with the Singaporean regime. The two governments conduct joint military exercises and their police and intelligence agencies work intimately together as part of the “war on terrorism”. Diplomatically, Singapore maintains close relations with the region’s major powers—the US, Japan and China—and recently assisted Howard in gaining a belated invitation to the new East Asia Summit.

If Howard were in any doubt as to the stance he should take, Monday’s editorial in the Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s national daily, spelled it out. Pouring scorn on calls by broadcaster Mike Carlton and others for economic sanctions and consumer boycotts against Singapore, it said: “Are our economic relations with Singapore a mere bagatelle that we should be prepared to sacrifice on the altar of a feel-good moral gesture? Hardly. Singapore is our largest trading partner in the region, and the eighth-largest of all, with annual two-way trade of well over $10 billion. Around a quarter of a million Singaporeans visit here each year, and they are a huge market for our elite schools and universities.”

Significantly, the editorial noted that Singapore was an “authoritarian” society, but a “successful” one. Since the British granted Singapore self-government in 1959, Lee Kuan Yew’s Peoples Action Party (PAP) has made the country a virtual one-party state. The PAP has ruled through a mixture of electoral payoffs and the systematic suppression of even the most moderate political opposition. Local big business and the major powers have backed the PAP for decades as a guarantor of economic and political stability.

Its drug laws are part of the PAP’s wide-ranging draconian measures. Singapore has retained the notorious Internal Security Act (ISA), instituted by the former British colonial administration, which can be used to arrest and detain people without trial virtually indefinitely on the vague grounds of national security.

Nguyen is far from the only citizen being sacrificed on the altar of the financial and strategic interests of Australian capitalism. The Howard government has likewise wiped its hands of responsibility for the nine young people—dubbed the Bali Nine—currently facing the death penalty in Indonesia on similar heroin trafficking charges. In that case, the drive to boost ties with Jakarta saw the Australian Federal Police effectively hand the nine over to the Indonesian police. David Hicks is another victim. After more than four years in Guantánamo Bay, he remains incarcerated without trial in the interests of the government’s close ties with the Bush administration.

Howard and the death penalty

According to Amnesty International, Singapore, with a population of just over four million, is believed to have the highest per capita execution rate in the world. By best estimates—given that secrecy surrounds the official statistics—more than 420 people have been executed since 1991, the majority for drug trafficking.

But for the Howard government to offer any criticism would call into question its relations with two other death penalty regimes—the Stalinist bureaucracy in China and the Bush administration in the US.

Based on public reports available, Amnesty International estimates that at least 3,400 people were executed by Chinese authorities during 2004, although the true figures are believed to be much higher. In the same year there were 59 executions in the US, bringing the total to 944 since the use of the death penalty was resumed in 1977. More than 3,400 US prisoners remain on death row and US President George W. Bush has personally presided over 152 executions—when he was governor of Texas.

The death penalty was abolished in Australia in the 1970s. But the Howard government, which came to office in 1996, has never issued any condemnation of its use by its key trading partners.

Only two years ago, in August 2003, Howard exploited the trials of the October 2002 Bali bombers to call for a “debate” on capital punishment. While he claimed to oppose it for “pragmatic” reasons, he used the occasion to appeal to a right-wing constituency that has periodically clamoured for its return. “I respect the fact that a lot of people are in favour of the death penalty, a lot of people who are close to me are in favour of the death penalty.... They are not barbaric, they’re not insensitive, they’re not vindictive, they’re not vengeful.”

As some media commentators have observed, Howard has been playing “dog whistle” politics throughout the Nguyen affair—seemingly opposing this particular execution but carefully courting this pro-death penalty base. In all their statements, Howard and his ministers have scrupulously avoided any condemnation of capital punishment per se.

Amid the countdown to Van Nguyen’s state murder, the federal parliament is preparing to pass the Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005, which contains provisions—such as “preventative” detention without trial, house arrests and sweeping sedition laws—that would not be out of place in Singapore.

See Also:
Howard government abandons Australian citizen sentenced to death in Singapore
[26 October 2005]
The Howard government, the Australian media and the Schapelle Corby case
[9 June 2005]
Howard government leaves “Bali nine” alleged drug runners to their fate
[11 May 2005] WSWS

Yes we have no secret torture dungeon's

2005-11-30T08:36:00.000-08:00

Rice: US will respond to inquiry about CIA prisons
Boston Globe - United States
... Rice promised Germany's foreign minister yesterday that the United States would respond to a European Union inquiry into secret CIA prisons allegedly operating all around Europe and added...' please, PLEASE don't let them bust any more of our station chiefs and agents, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF BABY JESUS!'

A judge has rejected an appeal by a former CIA station chief in Milan against an arrest warrant issued for his alleged role in the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric, ruling that he was not protected by diplomatic immunity.

Italian judges have issued arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA agents, including the former station chief Robert Seldon Lady, accused of involvement in the kidnapping of cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

The judge on Monday rejected arguments by Seldon Lady's lawyer, Daria Pesce, who claimed that he was protected under international treaty and Italian law, and that evidence of his involvement in any alleged abduction was weak.

Prosecutors claimed Nasr's abduction was a serious violation of Italian sovereignty, and said it hindered Italian terrorism investigations. They reconstructed the alleged operation through cell phone traffic and other evidence, contending that Seldon Lady played a central role.

They have sought the extradition of the 22 suspects, and the Italian Justice Ministry is deciding whether to press the case with Washington.

Prosecutors claim that Nasr, believed to belong to an Islamic terror group, was abducted on a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, before being flown to Egypt, where he was reportedly tortured. He is believed to still be there.

Pesce contended that Seldon Lady's work as an intelligence officer accredited at the U.S. Consulate protected him.

But Milan Judge Enrico Manzi ruled that Seldon Lady lost immunity when he left his post in August 2004, and that in any case consular officials could be arrested for grave crimes, according to court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

He said that consular officials did enjoy protection, ``but always within the limits of international law. Within these limits, naturally, is the principle of the sovereignty of the host state that cannot allow on its territory the use of force by a foreign state that outside every control of the political and judicial authorities.''

Neither Seldon Lady, who owns a home in Italy, nor any of the other suspects has been arrested, with all of them believed to be out of the country.

Pesce said Seldon Lady was in the United States. She said she planned to appeal Manzi's decision.

Manzi noted in his ruling that there had been contacts between Seldon Lady's phone and others used by suspects believed to have carried out the kidnapping.

The judge said evidence from a raid on Seldon Lady's home, turning up among other evidence a photo of Nasr and records of Internet searches to plan the route of Nasr's transfer from Milan, ``have made the picture of evidence against him even more complete.''

Nasr's alleged abduction was purportedly part of the CIA's ``extraordinary rendition'' program, in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible ill-treatment.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government, a strong U.S. ally, has denied it had any prior knowledge of the alleged kidnapping. The United States has consistently declined comment on the case.

Don't call them insurgent's

2005-11-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

Call them winners. Don't call us, we'll call you ...Oh wait. ' We have always been at war with Oceania bin Ladin', my bad.

Curious Moves on the P2P Playing Field
TechNewsWorld - Sherman Oaks,CA,USA
... They know they can't beat P2P though -- so they're trying to enjoin it. The use of P2P technologies would solve many, if not most ...

First media center with P2P support
Register - London,England,UK
A Dutch company has launched a mediacenter under the name of Lamabox, which takes all its content from P2P networks such as Edonkey, Bittorrent, Fasttrack ...

Court Dismisses P2P Mom Appeal
MP3 Newswire - Freehold,NJ,USA
... The cartel is fighting a losing battle against the p2p file sharing networks which sprang up as a form of citizen protest against the labels, and people such ...

New P2P service uses Gmail storage
PC Pro - UK
... His new service, known as G2G Exchange combines the storage capacity of Gmail with p2p technology to create a new file-sharing service. ...

Empire of corruption

2005-11-30T07:04:00.000-08:00

The Abramoff affair: Snapshots from an empire of corruption
By Patrick Martin 29 November 2005
Many episodes in Abramoff’s relations with various congressmen have already been given considerable exposure in newspaper accounts and court filings. What follows is a summary of the most revealing:

Christian fundamentalists and Internet gambling

In what seems to have been a dress rehearsal for the Coushatta Indian shakedown, Abramoff and Tony Rudy, a senior aide to then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, induced a prominent Christian fundamentalist to intervene against a bill restricting Internet gambling, without telling him that Abramoff was working on behalf of eLottery, a Connecticut-based e-gambling company.

In the spring and summer of 2000, after the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act had passed the Senate and was moving through the House of Representatives, Abramoff was hired by eLottery to spike it. He arranged for a $25,000 payment from eLottery to a foundation which hired Rudy’s wife as a consultant, then himself hired Rudy as a lobbyist after the gambling bill was defeated.

As reported by the Washington Post October 16, Abramoff hit on the idea of inducing Christian fundamentalists to oppose the ban on e-gambling on the grounds that it did not go far enough, since the bill had loopholes to protect established horse-racing and jai alai interests. To disguise the source of funds, he had $150,000 funneled from eLottery through Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, then to a fundamentalist lobby called the Faith and Family Alliance, then to Ralph Reed’s Century Strategies company, before it reached the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Sheldon, apparently unwitting, came out publicly against the Internet gambling bill, breaking with other fundamentalist groups like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.

This money-laundering had an additionally seedy aspect: according to the Post account, the director of the Faith and Family Alliance, Robin Vanderwall, a former colleague of Reed’s at the Christian Coalition, “was later convicted of soliciting sex with minors via the Internet and is serving a seven-year term in Virginia state prison.”

Ultimately, the combined efforts of DeLay inside the House of Representatives and Sheldon’s lobbying outside tipped enough Republican votes. The ban on Internet gambling failed to get the two-thirds majority required to clear a procedural hurdle, and the effort was abandoned.

The congressman, the casino boat, and a mob hit

In the course of 2000, Congressman Robert Ney of Ohio twice placed into the Congressional Record remarks on a topic far-removed from his southeast Ohio district, an impoverished area on the border of Appalachia, once a center of coal mining. Ney denounced Gus Boulis, the owner of SunCruz Casinos, which operated a fleet of gambling boats based in south Florida (the boats went out beyond the three-mile limit to evade state gaming laws). And he praised the would-be purchaser of the company, Adam Kidan, whose partner in the business venture was Jack Abramoff.

Kidan and Abramoff had been members of the College Republicans together at Georgetown Law School. Kidan had later developed a close business relationship with Anthony “Big Tony” Moscatiello, linked in the press to the Gambino crime family. That did not stop Congressman Ney from praising Kidan lavishly and hailing the proposed sale of SunCruz by Boulis, which took place in September 2000.

Subsequently, aides to Ney and Tom DeLay were flown to Tampa, Florida on a SunCruz corporate jet to attend the 2001 Super Bowl, courtesy of Abramoff. Ney and his sons were invited but passed up the trip, although Ney went on at least three other junkets with Abramoff, including one to Scotland and another to the Northern Marianas Islands.

Shortly after the Super Bowl, Boulis, the man denounced by Ney from the safety of the House of Representatives—where he enjoyed immunity from libel action—was murdered in south Florida in a mob-style hit. Three men have been arrested and charged with the murder, including Moscatiello, who had been hired to supply “catering and security services” to SunCruz, as well as Anthony “Little Tony” Ferrari and James “Pudgy” Fiorillo.

Kidan and Abramoff awarded themselves $500,000 salaries and other perks from SunCruz, but it later emerged that they had borrowed $60 million to finance the takeover without putting down any of their own money. The two were indicted last summer for allegedly filing false documents showing they had invested $23 million in the purchase.

Michael Scanlon has now agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in the SunCruz fraud case. In his plea agreement, Scanlon admitted that he helped persuade Congressman Ney to insert comments into the Congressional Record that were “calculated to pressure the then-owner to sell on terms favorable” to Abramoff and Kidan.

A wireless contract and a school for snipers

No account of Abramoff’s operations would be complete without noting his close ties to right-wing Zionist groups in Israel. These surfaced in at least two incidents detailed in court documents related to the indictment of Michael Scanlon.

In 2002, Congressman Ney, in his capacity as chairman of the House Administration Committee, approved a license for an Israeli telecommunications company to install wireless antennas for the House of Representatives. His decision bypassed the usual bidding process and led to protests from competitors of Foxcom Wireless, the Israeli company. Foxcom subsequently paid Abramoff $280,000 for lobbying and donated $50,000 to a charity controlled by Abramoff.

The House of Representatives had earlier authorized a group of wireless companies to select a company which would install antennas for cellular phones in the Capitol and House office buildings, where service was poor. The companies were to choose the contractor and pay for the work, and they initially chose LGC Wireless of San Jose, California for the $3 million contract.

Foxcom Wireless, then an Israeli start-up, lobbied for the job. (After the job’s successful completion, Foxcom moved its offices from Jerusalem to Vienna, Va., in the Washington suburbs, and renamed itself MobileAccess Networks). Ney delayed the award of the contract, sparking a protest from LGC about the “highly politicized selection process.” In November 2002, Ney gave Foxcom the contract. He has refused to release documents about the award, on the grounds that the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to Congress.

More sinister is Abramoff’s apparent connection to efforts to train ultra-right Zionist settlers in Israel in how to kill Palestinians. The New York Times made one cryptic reference to this on November 4, in an article which noted in passing that Abramoff’s private charity, the Capital Athletic Foundation, “has come under scrutiny by Senate investigators since the foundation was used to underwrite overseas travel by members of Congress and senior government officials, as well as a Jewish day school that Mr. Abramoff had established and paramilitary training for kibbutz residents in Israel. Mr. Abramoff’s e-mail messages describe the training program as a ‘sniper school.’”

There is a grim irony in the possibility that contributions from American Indian tribes ultimately made their way to ultra-right settlers on the West Bank, many of them transplanted American Jews who boast of treating the Palestinians in the same way that white settlers in the Old West treated the Native Americans.

A front group for corporate polluters

One of the principal beneficiaries of cash from Abramoff was the Council of Republican Environmental Activists (CREA), which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from Indian tribes at Abramoff’s direction. The CREA was a peculiar target for the dollars of American Indian tribes, since its main function is to provide suitably “green” rationales for the rape of the American landscape by giant mining, timber and oil companies, frequently to the detriment of the Native American population.

Both Indian affairs and the environment are under the purview of the Department of the Interior, where the highest-ranking executive branch beneficiary of Abramoff’s attentions, J. Steven Griles, worked until recently. Griles was deputy secretary of interior, making him number two at the agency to Secretary Gale A. Norton (herself a right-wing activist who co-founded CREA with Grover Norquist). He was frequently lobbied by Abramoff on behalf of his tribal clients.

At a tense hearing November 3 before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the former legal counsel to the department, Michael G. Rossetti, sat next to Griles and directly contradicted his claim that he had never intervened in Indian casino matters during his four-year tenure. At one point, Rossetti testified, he demanded to know the reason for Griles’ intervention on a particular issue, and asked him “whose water was he carrying.”

Documents presented to the committee session included 300 pages of e-mails detailing close relations between Abramoff and Giles, including one in which Abramoff wrote that he had offered Griles a job and, “I expect he will be with us in 90-120 days. This will restrict what he can do for us in the meantime.” Griles acknowledged the job offer, which he said he had rejected and then immediately reported to the Interior Department’s ethics officer.

CREA’s current chief, Italia Federici, also testified—only after initially refusing to appear until US marshals served her with a subpoena. She admitted receiving $250,000 in contributions from Indian tribes, but denied having used her personal relationship with Griles to influence Interior Department actions on behalf of Abramoff’s clients. One e-mail released by the committee was a message from Abramoff to Federici about the Louisiana Jena tribe’s casino: “Can you make sure Steve knows about this and puts the kibosh on it? Thanks.”

See Also:
The Abramoff affair: Corruption scandal threatens Republican control of US Congress
[29 November 2005]WSWS