The Truth Or The Fight

“Thats because Vidal is an intellectual with integrity. Not a useful, (bloated face alcoholic English ninny), idiot wannabe intellectual like Hitchens.”

-F.F.

Gore Vidal

Some other guy, (who really cares), jealous of Gore Vidals brain capacity

By Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed MA DPhil (Sussex)

In his February Vanity Fair hitpiece, Christopher Hitchens argues that the post-9/11 world has driven Gore Vidal ‘Loco’ – the signs, he says, were always there, but 9/11 and events thereafter ‘accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant.’

Hitchens begins his missive with Gore’s take on 9/11 itself, in which he ‘insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan.’

And then Hitchens goes on, drawing on Vidal’s October 2009interview with Johann Hari:

‘He openly says that the Bush administration was ‘probably’ in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”; that Timothy McVeigh was “a noble boy,” no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that “Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war” by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as “a failure”; the country will soon take its place “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs”; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage – broken by “the madhouse” – after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be “the Yellow Man’s burden,” and Beijing will “have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.”’

Gore Vidal has ‘descended straight to the cheap, and even to the counterfeit’, becoming a peddler of ‘crank-revisionist and denialist history’ in an ‘awful, spiteful and miserable way’. His writing and speaking witnesses ‘the utter want of any grace or generosity’, the ‘entire absence of any wit or profundity’, all replaced by ‘sarcastic, tired flippancy’ and ‘lugubrious resentment’. Even a cursory reading of Hitchens’s attack leaves a distasteful residue on the tongue – Gore Vidal is now eighty-five; has lost of the use of his legs; and lost his partner of 50 years. It is unsurprising that his irony is more cutting, his criticisms more caustic, and his tone more inflexible. Hitchens approach, however, is to relentlessly kick an old man when he’s down, rather than to engage critically and constructively with what his still sharp mind has learned.

Indeed, while denigrating Gore, Hitchens displays a chronic contempt for simple matters of fact and evidence. Let’s start with Vidal’s supposedly ‘crackpot’ scepticism of the Bush administration’s narrative of 9/11.

Obfuscating the Failures Behind 9/11

Hitchens conveniently overlooks Vidal’s axiomatic acceptance that the attacks were carried about by Islamist terrorists: ‘… our policies were such that we were going to have a lot of crazy people out there in the Arab world who were going to try to blow us up, because of crimes they feel we committed against them. Any fool could see it coming. And I’m sufficiently a fool to have seen it.’ It is only in this context that Gore describes bin Laden as ‘still not the proven mastermind.’ Hitchens thinks this is self-evidently absurd, but it would seem the FBI agree with Gore, not Hitchens: according to Sonoma State University’s Project Censored, one of the top 25 censored news stories of 2008 was that ‘He [bin Laden] has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’ Clearly, this doesn’t prove bin Laden wasn’t the mastermind, but should give us pause for thought about why the evidence isn’t so forthcoming.

On that note, it is a matter of record that the intelligence community received advanced warnings of the attacks. In Gore Vidal’s extended piece for the London Observer (currently hosted on eleven term Washington Congressman Hon. Rep. Jim McDermott’s website) he draws on my interview with former chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, David Schippers, who impeached President Bill Clinton. Schippers was approached by senior FBI agents in late July 2001 complaining that their investigations into an imminent al-Qaeda terrorist attack targeting the ‘financial district’ of ‘lower Manhattan’ were blocked from Washington. Schippers’ story was corroborated by investigative journalistGreg Palast , who reported for BBC Newsnight and the Guardian that pre-9/11 FBI investigations into the terrorist connections of Saudi royals and the bin Laden family were also blocked ‘for political reasons’. Gagged FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, whose courageous whistleblowing on US intelligence corruption was also featured in a Vanity Fair cover-story,has similarly said that the FBI had ‘real, specific’ advanced warning of the 9/11 attacks. Documents she translated clearly ‘showed that the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country and plotting to use airplanes as missiles. The documents also included information relating to their financial activities’ – contradicting Condoleezza Rice’s now notorious pretence that US intelligence knew of no ‘possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles’.

Hitchens similarly ignores that three months before 9/11, US officials warned the Taliban of a US military strike in October 2001 if they didn’t join up with the Northern Alliance. That warning came on the back of a series of negotiations involving UNOCAL from 1996 to 2000, to build a pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan. We now know, thanks to journalists like Ahmed Rashid and politicians like Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, that the US had covertly sponsored the Taliban in the (evidently vain) hope they might bring the ‘stability’ necessary for the trans-Afghan pipeline.

And according to Forbes (19 January 2005), ‘Since the US-led offensive that ousted the Taliban from power, the project has been revived and drawn strong US support’ as it would allow the Central Asian republics to export energy to Western markets ‘without relying on Russian routes’. The problem remains that the southern section of the proposed pipeline runs through territory still de facto controlled by Taliban forces. Gore never jumps to any specific conclusions around such evidence, but instead simply provokes the reader in his inimitable fashion: ‘Conspiracy? Coincidence!’

Continue Article

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

• By David Kravets

Do American students have First Amendment rights beyond the schoolyard gates?

The answer is yes and no, according to two conflicting federal appellate decisions Thursday testing student speech in the online world.

“Ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide if there ever is a time students have full-fledged First Amendment rights,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of Virginia-Based Student Press Law Center. He’s one of the attorneys in the cases the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. But that precedent, which addressed on-campus speech, is now being applied to students’ online speech four decades later.

One of the cases favoring student speech decided Thursday concerns a senior and honors student. In 2005, the Pennsylvania high school student was suspended 10 days after he created a mock MySpace profile of his principal.

The profile said the principal took drugs and kept beer at his desk. A federal judge overturned the suspension, ruling last year the fake profile was not created at school and did not create a “substantial disruption” at school.

“Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited,” U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry of Pennsylvania ruled. On appeal, the 3rd Circuit agreed, saying Thursday “the reach of school authorities is not without limits.” (.pdf)

The other case decided Thursday, by a different three-judge panel from the same circuit, went against a 14-year-old Pennsylvania junior high student. She mocked her principal with a fake MySpace profile. The 2007 profile insinuated the principal was a sex addict and pedophile.

She was suspended for 10 days. Her parents sued, citing the child’s First Amendment rights.

On appeal, the the 3rd Circuit noted that teachers complained that, among other things, the profile disrupted the classroom because students were talking about the profile rather than paying attention to class.

“We decline to say that simply because the disruption to the learning environment originates from a computer located off campus, the school should be left powerless to discipline the student,” (.pdf) the three-judge circuit panel wrote.

Dozens of similar cases scatter the federal courts. LoMonte, of the Student Press Law Center, said the only other appellate decision on the matter concerns a Connecticut high school junior punished for calling school officials “douchebags” in her blog.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year upheld her punishment of being forbidden to run for a class office. The court reheard the case last month. A decision is pending.

Photo: euthman

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/rulings-leave-us-student-speech-rights-unresolved/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

FBI director Robert Mueller

by Declan McCullagh

WASHINGTON–The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

The FBI is not alone in renewing its push for data retention. As CNET reported earlier this week, a survey of state computer crime investigators found them to be nearly unanimous in supporting the idea. Matt Dunn, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Department of Homeland Security, also expressed support for the idea during the task force meeting.

Greg Motta, the chief of the FBI’s digital evidence section, said that the bureau was trying to preserve its existing ability to conduct criminal investigations. Federal regulations in place since at least 1986 require phone companies that offer toll service to “retain for a period of 18 months” records including “the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call.”

At Thursday’s meeting (PDF) of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which was created by Congress and organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Motta stressed that the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.

“The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records…addressing, routing, signaling of the communication,” Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added “there’s going to be a balance of what industry can bear…He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data.”

Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the “retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community.”

Recording what Web sites are visited, though, is likely to draw both practical and privacy objections.

“We’re not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network,” said Drew Arena, Verizon’s vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.

And, Arena added, “if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act.”

Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.

If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant.

What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html.

While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States.

The technical challenges also may be formidable. John Seiver, an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine who represents cable providers, said one of his clients had experience with a law enforcement request that required the logging of outbound URLs.

“Eighteen million hits an hour would have to have been logged,” a staggering amount of data to sort through, Seiver said. The purpose of the FBI’s request was to identify visitors to two URLs, “to try to find out…who’s going to them.”

A Justice Department representative said the department does not have an official position on data retention.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10448060-38.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

* Second ruling of about 500 similar cases pending

* U.S. jury orders Bayer to pay $1.5 million in damages

* Company says will consider legal options

(Adds details, background)

FRANKFURT, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Germany’s Bayer (BAYGn.DE) was ordered by a jury in the United States to pay $1.5 million in damages to three farmers for losses they incurred because of contaminations of Bayer’s genetically modified rice, the second in about 500 similar cases pending.

The jury’s ruling in a St. Louis court against Bayer’s CropScience division follows a related case in December, in which Bayer was ordered to pay $2 million, the chemicals- and drugmaker said on Friday after the close of trading in Germany.

“The company will assess this ruling thoroughly and consider its options,” a Bayer spokesman in Germany said.

“Bayer CropScience is standing by its view that the company has handled its biotech rice responsibly and appropriately at all times,” he added.

A rice variety whose genetic code had been modified by a Bayer subsidiary for research purposes and which was not approved for commercial cultivation was found in the food supply chain in August 2006 after it had been tested by a U.S. university.

As a result, Japan and the European Union restricted U.S. rice from crossing their borders, leading to a plunge in rice prices, a drop in exports and extensive losses incurred by U.S. rice farmers.

“Since the amounts claimed differ considerably from case to case, the rulings so far do not allow for conclusions regarding the outcome of the remaining cases pending,” Bayer said.

The long-grain rice in question had a protein known as Liberty Link, which allows the crop to withstand applications of a certain weed killer.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration said at the time there was no public health or environmental risk associated with the rice variety. (Reporting by Ludwig Burger; Editing by Rupert Winchester)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE61421W20100205

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Big, fat, ugly, scary news here. The federal government seems to be getting ready to make the next move.”

-F.F.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 5, 2010

WRAL in North Carolina and the Associated Press are reporting that Obama has selected Missouri governor Jay Nixon to sit on his newly minted Council of Governors. On January 12, 2010,Infowars.com reported on Obama’s executive order establishing the Council or Governors.

Obama’s order states: “The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

In other words, with the stroke of a pen Obama significantly increased the ongoing effort to federalize the states and take control of the National Guard in violation of the now more or less moribund Posse Comitatus Act. Posse Comitatus was effectively annulled by the  2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act. The act provides the president with power to declare martial law under revisions to the Insurrection Act and take charge of United States National Guard troops without state governor authorization. Parts of the act were repealed in 2008.

“Actually, this EO is simply the latest in a series of events going back to the Bush and Clinton years, in which the federal government has taken steps to lay the foundation for extensive military police action within the United States,” writes Chuck Baldwin.

In march of 2009, Missouri governor Jay Nixon supported and defended the now infamous MIAC Report. “Getting information, especially public information, out of our fusion center out to local law enforcement agencies is [what] we do every day and we’re going to continue to do,” said Nixon. “Any way they take that information and can analyze what the threat levels are is important to make sure the public stays safe.”

The MIAC report was leaked to Alex Jones in early March by two Missouri police officers who were concerned by its content. The report went viral on the internet and was eventually covered by the corporate media.

The report “lists Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumper stickers, people who own gold, or even people who fly a U.S. flag and equates them with radical race hate groups and terrorists. This is merely the latest example in an alarming trend which confirms that law enforcement across the country is being trained that American citizens are a dangerous enemy,” Paul Joseph Watson, Kurt Nimmo and Alex Jones reported on March 13.

The report was vetted by Captain Hull at the Missouri State Highway Patrol who told Infowars.com that the MIAC Strategic Report was part of “normal operation for officers” and was used to train police officers. Lt. John Hotz also told Alex Jones the document was legitimate.

In response to the story, three former presidential candidates — Chuck Baldwin, Ron Paul, and Bob Barr — sent a letter to Missouri officials protesting the MIAC Report. Appearing on The Alex Jones Show on March 19, Baldwin said that he and his fellow letter signatories were considering legal action if the letter did not result in a repudiation of the MIAC report and its inflammatory allegations.

On March 26, in response to media coverage of the report and public outrage over the document, Missouri Highway Patrol Superintendent James Keathley engaged in damage control and pulled the MIAC report. “The head of the Missouri State Highway Patrol has shut down a controversial report linking right-wing groups with the modern militia movement,” the Associated Press reported. In response to the public fallout, Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder called on the director of the Public Safety Department to be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

Missouri Gov. Nixon backtracks on MIAC Report.

Governor Nixon also did an about face. “I was not governor when the MIAC was formed,” Nixon said. “I was not governor, I did not hire any of the people there and nobody in my administration — the director of public safety — saw this stuff before it went out,” reported Prime Buzz. “Under a previous system, MIAC would prepare and distribute these reports to law enforcement agencies without review or approval from the colonel of the Highway Patrol or the director of Public Safety,” Nixon said. “That’s simply not acceptable.”

The fact Nixon will now sit on Obama’s unconstitutional Council of Governors should be of concern. It must be remembered that Nixon enthusiastically supported MIAC before it became politically unpopular to do so. He is also an advocate of fusion centers surveilling the American people.

Mr. Nixon will soon be discussing national security and terrorist threats with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs, and most ominously the commander of NORTHCOM.

Nixon’s initial support for the MIAC Report reveals that he agrees with its conclusion that libertarians and supporters of Ron Paul are domestic terrorists. It is significant that he will be sitting on a council along with members of the Department of Homeland Security.

In April, following the release of the MIAC Report and a similar report issued the Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, a DHS document entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” surfaced. The DHS document characterized returning veterans, gun owners, and opponents of Obama and big government as domestic terrorists. It also listed those opposed to abortion or immigration as potential extremists and cited groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority as potential sources of hate crime.

In August, after a whirlwind of negative coverage, a freedom of information act request revealed that the report was not based on any reliable supporting evidence. “According to the DHS, the report was compiled based purely on around 50 internet articles, the credibility of which is severely questionable,”Steve Watson wrote at the time.

According to research conducted by Americans for Legal Immigration, the MIAC report was in essence crafted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti Defamation League.

An FOIA request filed by Americans for Limited Government attempted to find out where the Department of Homeland Security received the information for its report. “Our worst fears about what went into this memo have been confirmed. The government department that was supposed to be tasked with identifying domestic terrorist threats is apparently using news stories, kooky websites, and conjecture instead of actual hard intelligence reporting and analysis… This is a disgrace, and calls into question what it is that the so-called ‘Extremism and Radicalizaton Branch of the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division’ actually does,” wrote the organization’s president.

These questionable sources include the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti Defamation League.

http://www.infowars.com/miac-report-supporter-and-missouri-gov-nixon-to-sit-on-obamas-council-of-governors/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Story Here

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at building up the United States cyber security army and expertise, amid growing alarm over the countrys vulnerability online. The new law will create a mega-agency to represent the government in negotiations over international standards and orders the White House office of technology to convene a cyber security university-industry task force to guide the direction of future research.

http://www.infowars.com/alex-jones-talks-with-russia-today-about-u-s-plan-to-build-a-cyber-security-army/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This is what happens when you (are) and associate with the worst kind of criminals you rat fuck. No sympathy… we are laughing at your pain.”

-Fred Face  2/6/10

By: Jessica Pressler

No WAY is Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis going to be the only one to answer for the acquisition of crappy Merrill Lynch and its crappy bonuses, “a person close to Lewis’s defense team” (who may or may not be Ken Lewis himself) tells Charlie Gasparino today on the Daily Beast. NO WAY will he be a scapegoat, alone, for the people who twisted his arm to go through with the Merrill deal by telling him he would be fired if he didn’t. “If this thing goes to trial you can expect both Paulson and Bernanke to be on the witness list.” If he’s going down, he’s bringing them down, too. Bringing them down to Chinatown. Order in the court!

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/ken_lewis_already_relishing_th.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

• By Katie Drummond

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.

The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Of course, Darpa’s up against some vexing, fundamental laws of nature — not to mention bioethics — as they embark on the lab beast program. First, they might want to rethink the idea of evolution as a random series of events, says NYU biology professor David Fitch. “Evolution by selection is nota random process at all, and is actually a hugely efficient design algorithm used extensively in computation and engineering,” he e-mails Danger Room.

Even if Darpa manages to overcome the inherent intelligence of evolutionary processes, overcoming inevitable death can be tricky. Just ask all the other research teams who’ve made stabs at it, trying everything from cell starvation to hormone treatments. Gene therapy, where artificial genes are inserted into an organism to boost cell life, are the latest and greatest in life-extension science, but they’ve only been proven to extend lifespan by 20 percent in rats.

But suppose gene therapy makes major strides, and Darpa does manage to get the evolutionary science right. They’ll also have a major ethical hurdle to jump. Synthetic biology researchers are already facing the same questions, as a 2009 summary from the Synthetic Biology Project reports:

The concern that humans might be overreaching when we create organisms that never before existed can be a safety concern, but it also returns us to disagreements about what is our proper role in the natural world (a debate largely about non-physical harms or harms to well-being).

Even expert molecular geneticists don’t know what to make of the project. Either that, or they’re scared Darpa might sic a bio-bot on them. “I would love to comment, but unfortunately Darpa has installed a kill switch in me,” one unnamed expert tells Danger Room.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagon-looks-to-breed-immortal-synthetic-organisms-molecular-kill-switch-included/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“USA=China.”

-F.F.

By Ellen Nakashima

The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.

Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.

The partnership strikes at the core of one of the most sensitive issues for the government and private industry in the evolving world of cybersecurity: how to balance privacy and national security interests. On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair called the Google attacks, which the company acknowledged in January, a “wake-up call.” Cyberspace cannot be protected, he said, without a “collaborative effort that incorporates both the U.S. private sector and our international partners.”

But achieving collaboration is not easy, in part because private companies do not trust the government to keep their secrets and in part because of concerns that collaboration can lead to continuous government monitoring of private communications. Privacy advocates, concerned about a repeat of the NSA’s warrantless interception of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, say information-sharing must be limited and closely overseen.

“The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA?” said Ellen McCarthy, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an organization of current and former intelligence and national security officials that seeks ways to foster greater sharing of information between government and industry.

On Jan. 12, Google took the rare step of announcing publicly that its systems had been hacked in a series of intrusions beginning in December.

The intrusions, industry experts said, targeted Google source code — the programming language underlying Google applications — and extended to more than 30 other large tech, defense, energy, financial and media companies. The Gmail accounts of human rights activists in Europe, China and the United States were also compromised.

So significant was the attack that Google threatened to shutter its business operation in China if the government did not agree to let the firm operate an uncensored search engine there. That issue is still unresolved.

Google approached the NSA shortly after the attacks, sources said, but the deal is taking weeks to hammer out, reflecting the sensitivity of the partnership. Any agreement would mark the first time that Google has entered a formal information-sharing relationship with the NSA, sources said. In 2008, the firm stated that it had not cooperated with the NSA in its Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Sources familiar with the new initiative said the focus is not figuring out who was behind the recent cyberattacks — doing so is a nearly impossible task after the fact — but building a better defense of Google’s networks, or what its technicians call “information assurance.”

One senior defense official, while not confirming or denying any agreement the NSA might have with any firm, said: “If a company came to the table and asked for help, I would ask them . . . ‘What do you know about what transpired in your system? What deficiencies do you think they took advantage of? Tell me a little bit about what it was they did.’ ” Sources said the NSA is reaching out to other government agencies that play key roles in the U.S. effort to defend cyberspace and might be able to help in the Google investigation.

These agencies include the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Over the past decade, other Silicon Valley companies have quietly turned to the NSA for guidance in protecting their networks.

“As a general matter,” NSA spokeswoman Judi Emmel said, “as part of its information-assurance mission, NSA works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates to ensure the availability of secure tailored solutions for Department of Defense and national security systems customers.”

Despite such precedent, Matthew Aid, an expert on the NSA, said Google’s global reach makes it unique.

“When you rise to the level of Google . . . you’re looking at a company that has taken great pride in its independence,” said Aid, author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the NSA. “I’m a little uncomfortable with Google cooperating this closely with the nation’s largest intelligence agency, even if it’s strictly for defensive purposes.”

The pact would be aimed at allowing the NSA help Google understand whether it is putting in place the right defenses by evaluating vulnerabilities in hardware and software and to calibrate how sophisticated the adversary is. The agency’s expertise is based in part on its analysis of cyber-”signatures” that have been documented in previous attacks and can be used to block future intrusions.

The NSA would also be able to help the firm understand what methods are being used to penetrate its system, the sources said. Google, for its part, may share information on the types of malicious code seen in the attacks — without disclosing proprietary data about what was taken, which would concern shareholders, sources said.

Greg Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a privacy advocacy group, said companies have statutory authority to share information with the government to protect their rights and property.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/03/AR2010020304057_2.html?sid=ST2010020402509

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Khephra Maley

Many Americans were shocked by Obama’s meteoric rise to power. Although plenty of other ‘relative unknowns’ have made the jump from Congress or a governorship to the Oval Office, none of them were visible minorities or able to galvanize public sentiment nearly as well as Obama. Following 8 years of despotic rule by George Bush & Co., huge segments of the American public embraced Obama’s candidacy with wanton enthusiasm. His campaign rallies took on an imperialistic tenor, and for many confused Americans he was psychologically conflated as a political messiah – ready, willing and able to act as civilization’s great panacea. Unfortunately, much of the public was simply projecting dreams for a better future onto Obama. They saw in him a clear improvement over Bush and more integrity than Hillary Clinton, and this branding helped him handily mop the floor with John McCain. Nevertheless, branding aside, with a little critical attention Obama’s rise to power begins to seem less accidental, and takes on all the hues of a prolonged, successful grooming process. Barack Obama did not become a global sensation by accident. He had help getting where he is. That help obviously included corporate and financial interests, but it may also have included the involvement of covert intelligence agencies – perhaps most especially the CIA.

In contrast with the enthusiastic shock many felt towards Obama’s rise to success, fewer would be surprised at the suggestion that the military-industrial complex exercises undue influence in the American political system. Eisenhower warned the world before leaving office in 1961, and JFK’s condemnation of ’secret societies’ operating within the American government may have contributed to or hastened his assassination. A few decades later theIran-Contra debacle illustrated that the military-industrial complex could act with impunitywithout fear of legitimate censure. Oliver North, the scandal’s sacrificial lamb, now works as a ‘political commentator’ for Fox News and is a best-selling NYT author. If this is how we punish culprits found dabbling in treason, one might begin to wonder if Lady Justice should remove her blindfold.

In the modern era, however, the scope of the military-industrial complex’s domination has escaped all semblance of notoriety. This, like Obama’s success, did not arise by accident. Society today has been immersed in Hollywood’s mythology since birth. Most of us would be hard-pressed to remember before we first met Mickey Mouse, for example. But Mickey Mouse isn’t benign, and neither is Hollywood. Among the many useful things Mickey Mouse will teach you is that males solve problems, females need males to solve problems, and the ‘good’ guy always finishes the day happy. Few of us view life this simplistically and many would balk at the suggestion that Mickey Mouse really ‘teaches’ us anything, but we are unwise to think this conditioning has no effect on our psychosocial development.

Similarly, Hollywood has spent the last three decades churning out a remarkable slew of movies involving or centring on war, military life, crime and punishment, and intelligence agencies. More often than not, audiences transpose these romanticized characterizations onto how they think the military-industrial complex operates. In the audience’s eyes acts of dubious morality become justified – the heroes actions are always legitimated by the results they achieve. An obvious example of this perceptive tendency is the public’s enthusiasm for 2008’s The Dark Knight, in which the antihero’s actions – which include illegally surveilling civilians, wanton disregard for social accountability, perjury, vigilantism, tax evasion, and blackmail (to name but a small few) – are excused because he gets the ‘bad’ guy. Likewise, in the popular sci-fi spy drama Alias, covert intelligence agencies are portrayed as rogues while their roguish behaviour is beyond reproof. The lead character, Sydney Bristow, was a top-tier college freshman who was courted and recruited by a covert intelligence agency. She goes on to save the world a few times – occasionally while pregnant – but throughout it all the world remains ignorant of her actions. In Alias’s fictional world, the public is kept perpetually ignorant of the very real threat it is under, all manner of resources are marshalled for various sundry endeavours, and the government exists merely as a means of enabling the antihero’s success. This implicitly anti-democratic message isn’t innocuous and it isn’t simply a rhetorical device used to weave a story. It mirrors an established psychopathology: narcissism.

Narcissism, like any other human characteristic, can take on many different masks. Even still, I don’t think this narcissistic/patriarchal worldview is limited to Hollywood, serialized television, or literature. In fact, I think many within the military-industrial complex would readily sympathize. From their vantage, they’re “watching over” us and “keeping us safe [from ourselves, if need be]“. Thinking the application of this patriarchal worldview passive, in my opinion, would be a mistake. Rather, I would argue this narcissistic psychopathology infects large swaths of the military-industrial complex’s leadership, and some of these ‘defenders of the public’ are willing to go through similarly despotic means to reach their desired ends. As a result, I think it pertinent to consider whether president Obama’s success may be a byproduct of a similar agenda.

John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. – (John Pilger)

“It is almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation about Obama. The problem isn’t that people come to him with baggage. Everyone comes to everything in politics with baggage. It’s that they refuse to check it in or even declare it. Any conversation about what he does rapidly morphs into one about who he is and what he might be.” – (Common Dreams)

For an official-esque, sanitized timeline of Obama’s life, see here. It adds an explicit chronology and gives a skeletal overview, but if you dig a little deeper, things get muddy. The domain is registered to ‘Eran Sadeh’ – an Israeli who remotely registered the site. Try doing a search for “barack obama timeline” and it’ll come up first.

To get things started, we need to be very clear in demonstrating that Obama is no spring chicken:

Obama: “It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags ‘I’ve met leaders from eighty countries’–I know what those trips are like! I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then–you go.”

“You do that in eighty countries–you don’t know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa–knowing the leaders is not important–what I know is the people. . . .”

“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college–I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . . .” – (Huffington Post)

Continue Story

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Statement of Congressman Ron Paul
United States House of Representatives
Statement on House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing:
‘Yemen on the Brink: Implications for U.S. Policy’
February 3, 2010

Mr. Chairman, I am extremely concerned over current US policy toward Yemen, which I believe will backfire and leave the United States less safe and much poorer. Increasing US involvement in Yemen may be sold as a fight against terrorism, but in fact it is more about expanding US government control and influence over this strategically-placed nation at the gateway to Asia.

The current administration, according to today’s testimony of Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman, has dramatically increased foreign aid to Yemen, from $17 million in FY 2008 to $40 million in FY 2009, to $67 million for FY 2010, to, according to the president’s recent budget sent to Congress, $106 million for FY 2011. That represents an incredible six-fold increase in US aid to Yemen over just four years, at a time when the US economy continues to falter.

When I look at the US assistance plan for Yemen I see that it is primarily focused on nation-building. That is the failed idea that if the United States sends enough money to a foreign government, with which that government purchases US-manufactured weapons and hires US-based consultants and non-governmental organizations, that country will achieve a strong economy and political stability and in gratitude will become eternally friendly to the US and US interests. I have yet to see a single successful example of this strategy.

According to Assistant Secretary Feltman’s statement, “Priorities for U.S. assistance include political and fiscal reforms and meaningful attention to legitimate internal grievances; better governance through decentralization, reduced corruption and civil service reform; human rights protections; jobs-related training; economic diversification to generate employment and enhance livelihoods, and strengthened natural resource management.” How can we believe that the US government can achieve abroad what we know it cannot effectively achieve at home? We are going to spend millions of dollars to help create jobs in Yemen as we continue to shed jobs in the United States?

Yemen is a country mired in civil conflict. The Shi’ites in the north, who make up a significant percentage of the country’s total population and a majority in their region, have been fighting against what they see as the discriminatory policies of the Sunni-based government in the capitol, Sana’a, for years. Yemenis in the south, who up until 1990 were a separate country, likewise oppose the central government and threaten to escalate this opposition. Added into this mix are elements of what are called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), some of whom are left over from the US-supported fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and others have been radicalized by their exposure to Wahhabi extremism in US-allied Saudi Arabia. Still others in AQAP are veterans of the insurgency against US occupation of Iraq. We cannot forget either those Yemenis who were held for years by the United States without charges at Guantanamo Bay. How many of those were innocent of terrorist actions or intent but became radicalized under such conditions?

Saudi Arabia’s concern over the Shi’ite unrest in north Yemen has led to unsubstantiated claims of Iranian involvement in attempt to draw the US into a regional problem that has nothing to do with the United States. Saudi Arabia has struggled with unrest among its own Shi’ite population and is determined to prevent any spill-over. There are some here in the US who repeat false claims of Iranian involvement in the hope of expanding the US military presence in the area. Others in the United States irresponsibly call for a US pre-emptive war in Yemen. We should be clear on this: expanded US involvement in Yemen plays into the hands of bin Laden and his organization as has been made clear on many occasions. Luring the United States into a conflict in Yemen by falsely advertising it part of a war on terror will certainly radicalize the Yemeni population against the United States. It will weaken our over-extended military and it will further destroy our economy.

Similarly, the US-backed central government in Sana’a stands to gain by claiming its internal problems are part of a global crisis that requires US intervention. The central Yemeni government has much to gain by making its battles and its problems our battles and our problems. But that gain will come at the expense of US soldiers, US security, and the American economy. I wonder how long it will be before the US establishes a permanent base on the strategic territory of Yemen?

I hope, as we begin to debate the foreign affairs budget for next year, that we may yet change course from that of the last administration, where the failed policies of interventionism, militarism, and nation-building have left the United States in a diminished position in the world.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=585

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“What a joke. This idiots have absolutely nothing to do with our movement. Stop confusing the already confused public.”

-F.F.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 5, 2010

The Tea Party movement is now almost completely unrecognizable from what it was a few short years ago. It came to prominence in 2008 when the Libertarian Party of Illinois planned to hold an April 15, 2009 anti-tax “Boston Tea Party” in Chicago. In February 2009, the idea grew after CNBC personality Rick Santelli, speaking from the floor of the Chicago stock exchange, criticized the Obama administration’s tax and economic policies and urged Americans become Tea Party activists.

In fact, the idea  began as the Boston Tea Party in 2006. It was founded by a group of former Libertarian Party members who criticized the party for its “abdication of political responsibilities,” declaring that “Americans deserve and desperately need a pro-freedom party that forcefully advocates libertarian solutions to the issues of today.” The Boston Tea Party opposed statism at all levels. “The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.”

How things have changed.

It didn’t take long for establishment Republicans to steal the idea and claim it as their own. A few weeks after Rick Santelli made his comments, Ron Paul’s media coordinator Steve Gordon went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and complained about what he characterized as an attempt by Republicans to hijack the idea. Gordon specifically blamed former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

It didn’t take long for Republicans to embrace the idea. RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Rep. Michele Bachmann from Minnesota have suggested the Tea Party should be rolled into the Republican Borg hive.

Now there will be a national Tea Party convention in Nashville. It will be a parade of Republican statists with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin leading the charge. “I look forward to meeting many Americans who share a commitment to limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It’s not a top-down organization,” Palin wrote for USA Today, “it’s a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.”

Ground-up? Tea Party candidates for the 2010 mid-term elections “will be expected to support the Republican National Committee platform,” according to Fox News. “If a particular candidate meets the proposed Tea Party criteria he or she would be eligible for fundraising and grassroots Tea Party support.”

“Once elected to office, members would be required to join a Congressional Tea Party Caucus, attend regular meetings and be held accountable for the votes they cast. Those who stray from the Tea Party path would risk losing it’s support and a likely re-election challenge.”

In other words, business as usual. Under the rule of George W. Bush and the Republicans, “inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent, according to the libertarian Cato Institute. Eight years of a Republican president, six with a Republican-controlled Congress, resulted in bigger government, the biggest expansion of entitlements in 40 years and a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street that continues to grow,” writes Donny Ferguson of the Libertarian National Committee.

Maddow explains how the Republican subverted Tea Party movement is a blessing for statist progressives.

Bush and the Republicans also invaded two sovereign nations and killed more than a million Iraqis. Democrats by and large supported these war crimes. They also overwhelmingly supported the Republicans when they attacked the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the so-called Patriot Act being only the most egregious example).

If the co-opted Tea Party embraces the Republican National Committee platform, it will finalize its mutation from a grassroots libertarian organization into an establishment statist tool pushing a national debt for the banksters, bloated government, taxation, perpetual war, and continued attacks on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It should be obvious by now that the Republicans plan to run Sarah Palin against Obama in 2012. This will be a disaster for the Republicans because many Americans are not fooled by her sudden Tea Party plumage. Republicans are desperate to regain control of the White House and Congress and give us four or eight more years of Bush and his warmongering statist neocons. It is a shabby and absurdly transparent gimmick.

Real Tea Party activists and supporters need to reject Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, and the Republicans out of hand. They should be vocal about their rejection. Otherwise we will end up with another ideologue and teleprompter reading cigar store Indian for the ruling elite.

http://www.infowars.com/subverted-tea-party-movement-told-to-embrace-republican-platform/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

http://gunowners.org

Thursday, February 4, 2010

What a difference a day makes!

Before the January 19th election of Republican Scott Brown as United States Senator from Massachusetts, we were being told that ObamaCare would be crammed down our throats  whether we liked it or not  and that any effort to defeat this monstrosity was hopeless.

After Brown’s election in socialistic Massachusetts sent shock waves through the liberal Democratic establishment, too many pro-gunners had assumed that we had won — and that we could just stop fighting and go home.

But a football team doesn’t leave the field and go home at half time, even if it has a healthy lead.

And Nancy Pelosi hasn’t given up her efforts to socialize America’s health care system and bring your private medical matters under strict government control.  Fox Newsis reporting today that congressional leaders are working on a compromise.

Pelosi herself has said that, if the “gate” to ObamaCare is locked, she will climb over the fence — or pole-vault over the wall — or parachute to a liberal socialist victory.

Pelosi’s only viable strategy is to get a reluctant House to pass the Senate’s bribe-laden, Medicare-cutting, gun-banning bill — but do so in conjunction with a “fix-it” bill which would pass the House at the same time under quickie “reconciliation” procedures.

We still have plenty of parliamentary tricks up our sleeves to try to block this.  But the easiest way to bury ObamaCare once and for all is to get just one House member to switch his vote — from supporting ObamaCare last fall to opposing it now.

The President’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, is boasting that they are one vote away from passing it in the House.  So if we can switch one vote, we can take the “undead” ObamaCare bill and drive a stake through its heart, cut its head off at a midnight crossroads, shoot it with a silver bullet, put garlic around its neck, and bury it in a lead casket with a crucifix on the top.  And, given the damage which ObamaCare would do to America, this is hardly too much overkill.

ACTION: So, we are asking you to write your congressman again.  Tell him you want a commitment to oppose the corrupt bribe-laden Senate ObamaCare bill — and to oppose any effort to fix it up.

You can use the Gun Owners Legislative Action Centerat http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htmto send a pre-written message to your Representative.

—– Pre-written letter —–

Dear Representative:

Nancy Pelosi hasn’t given up her efforts to socialize America’s health care system and bring me and private medical matters under strict government control.  She has said that, if the gate to ObamaCare is locked, she will climb over the fence — or pole-vault over the wall — or parachute to a liberal socialist victory.

Pelosi’s only viable strategy is to get the House to pass the Senate’s bribe-laden, Medicare-cutting, gun-banning bill — but do so in conjunction with a “‘”fix-it” bill which would pass the House at the same time.

The Senate would then kill the “fix-it” bill under the arcane “Byrd rule” — but gullible House members would claim that wasn’t their fault.

It is time to bury ObamaCare once and for all. This legislation will allow the ATF to troll a health/gun database in order to take away firearms from tens of millions of Americans.  Not only that, the federal bill is jam-packed with billions of dollars of bribes paid to buy the votes of unscrupulous senators and will impose a host of new taxes on me and my family.

So please make the following commitments:

* To vote against the bribe-laden, gun banning Senate ObamaCare bill under any circumstances; and,

* To publicly declare that the corrupt monstrosity is too sleazy to be cleaned up by any fix-it bill.

If you believe the American people are angry now, wait until Nancy Pelosi shoves this down our throats.

Please take this abomination off the table now — once and for all.  And, please let me hear from you that you will not vote for ObamaCare.

Sincerely,

(your name)

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

February 4, 2010

Dear C4L Member,

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said it was time for us to try “common sense,” which apparently to him means not only promising to continue but outright championing the exact same status quo ideas that created the economic crisis and sent the national debt skyrocketing.

In contrast, Congressman Ron Paul’s recent “State of the Republic” speech argued that the same establishment thinkers who failed to predict this latest crisis are also wrong about the worst being behind us.  Their proposals will only prolong the necessary correction and deepen America’s pain.

Dr. Paul persuasively makes the case that, if we want to restore our nation’s economy and secure a brighter future for our children and grandchildren, we must adopt a mindset centered on freedom, which will result in us bringing legitimate change to the way government works.

View our video illustrating just a few of the differences between the two speeches:

As we head into this new decade, it’s up to our movement to lead the way back to prosperity and freedom.  While Barack Obama’s State of the Union address reminds us of the establishment mindset we must never stop fighting, Ron Paul’s “State of the Republic” speech issues a clarion call for us to take action and effect real change.

In Liberty,

John Tate

President

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Robert Murphy

San Jose State economics professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel tells all his students that the easiest way to understand the Federal Reserve is to think of it as a giant, legalized counterfeiter. I had always known that the Fed and other central banks were likecounterfeiters, but I still thought that the actual mechanics of open-market operations and so forth actually provided some important distinctions.

In large part because of my frequent email exchanges with Hummel, I now realize that I was being naïve. Once you understand the details of modern central banking, you are able to step back and see that it truly is a way for the government to use the printing press to pay its bills. All of the complicated process of targeting interest rates through buying Treasuries simply hides this essential point — and perhaps deliberately so.

An Old-Fashioned Monarch With a Printing Press

Before we examine Fed operations, let’s start with something simpler. Suppose there is a powerful monarch reigning over a large, industrialized country. The monarch has managed to wean his subjects off commodity money such as gold or silver, and instead they use fiat notes, rectangular slips of paper featuring the king’s portrait. The king has a printing press at his disposal, which gives him unlimited ability to create more slips of paper with which he can buy goods throughout his kingdom.

At first, one might think that our hypothetical king has infinite wealth. But upon reflection, we see that there are actually pragmatic limits on how much new money he will print up each year. It’s true that there are no legal constraints on how many notes he can create, but the more monetary inflation he sows, the greater the price inflation he will reap.

At some point, the monarch would actually make himself poorer in the long run by running the printing press too heavily in the present. For example, if he doubled the stock of money in one year, the resulting price inflation would destabilize his economy and cause much needless capital consumption. His subjects would be less willing to invest in their businesses and retirement portfolios, knowing that he might effectively confiscate their savings again through massive creation of new money. Foreign investors too would be wary of exposing themselves to his country if he made his fiat currency too volatile.

Because of these considerations, the monarch would no doubt run off new money every year from his printing press, but he wouldn’t overdo it. He would aim for a moderate level of constant price inflation, with the purchasing power of his fiat currency slowly falling over time in a predictable manner. Each year, the new influx of money into the economy would represent a transfer of wealth from all other currency holders into the king’s possession.

Now what if our monarch is really profligate? What if he wants to spend more money than the income and tribute he earns in his position as monarch, even including the amount of new money he dares to create each year with his printing press, can support? In this case, the monarch can still resort to old-fashioned borrowing. Therefore in any given year, the monarch can only spend what he collects in tribute (taxes), debt financing, and inflation.

Continue Article

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

As President Obama continues to try to sell the country on the necessity of government intervention, this Mises Institute video from April 2009 looks at what happened when a president made the rare choice to restrain government action in an economic crisis.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Why do people in the Middle East hate the United States,” people are asking, in the wake of the events of September 11.
This partial chronology of U.S. intervention in the Middle East illustrates the lengths to which the U.S. power structure has gone to gain and maintain U.S. domination of the Middle East–a region considered key to the U.S.’s standing as an imperialist world power. This is not a complete list of the invasions, bombings, assassinations, coups and other interventions by the U.S. government, its allies, or its client states, nor does it fully document the U.S.’s economic domination and exploitation of the region’s people and resources.

1918-1945:
BREAKING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST:
THE FIGHT FOR INFLUENCE & OIL

1920-28: U.S. pressures Britain, then the dominant Middle East power, into signing a “Red Line Agreement” providing that Middle Eastern oil will not be developed by any single power without the participation of the others. Standard Oil and Mobil obtain shares of the Iraq Petroleum Company.

1932-34: Oil is discovered in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and U.S. oil companies obtain concessions.

1944: U.S. State Department memo refers to Middle Eastern oil as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” During U.S.-British negotiations over the control of Middle Eastern oil, President Roosevelt sketches out a map of the Middle East and tells the British Ambassador, “Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.” On August 8, 1944, the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement is signed, splitting Middle Eastern oil between the U.S. and Britain.

Between 1948 and 1960, Western capital earns $12.8 billion in profits from the production, refining and sale of Middle Eastern oil, on fixed investments totaling $1.3 billion.

1945-1955:
REPLACING RIVALS AND WAGING WAR
ON NATIONAL LIBERATION

1946: President Harry Truman threatens to drop a “super-bomb” on the Soviet Union if it does not withdraw from Kurdestan and Azerbaijan in northern Iran.

November 1947: The U.S. helps push through a UN resolution partitioning Palestine into a Zionist state and an Arab state, giving the Zionist authorities control of 54% of the land. At that time Jewish settlers were about 1/3 of the population.

May 14, 1948: War breaks out between newly proclaimed state of Israel, and Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria, who had moved troops into Palestine to oppose the partition of Palestine. Israeli attacks force some 800,000 Palestinians–two-thirds of the population–to flee into exile in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank. Israel seizes 77 percent of historic Palestine. The U.S. quickly recognizes Israel.

March 29, 1949: CIA backs a military coup overthrowing the elected government of Syria and establishes a military dictatorship under Colonel Za’im.

1952: U.S.-led military alliance expands into the Middle East with Turkey’s admission to NATO.

1953: The CIA organizes a coup overthrowing the Mossadeq government of Iran after Mossadeq nationalizes British holdings in Iran’s huge oilfields. The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, is put on the throne, ruling as an absolute monarch for the next 25 years–torturing, killing and imprisoning his political opponents.

1955: U.S. installs powerful radar system in Turkey to spy on the Soviet Union.

1956-1958:
UPHEAVAL AND INTRIGUE IN EGYPT,
IRAQ, JORDAN, SYRIA & LEBANON

July 1956: After Egypt’s nationalist leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, receives arms from the Soviet Union, the U.S. withdraws promised funding for Aswan Dam, Egypt’s main development project. A week later Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal to fund the project. In October Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt to retake the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower threatens to use nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union intervenes on Egypt’s side; and at the same time, the U.S. asserts its regional dominance by forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6308.htm

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

http://taxfree15.com/ActionPlan.aspx

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Infowars.com

February 3, 2010

Senior US Treasury Dept. Official William Pizer, the current Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy is simultaneously a sitting council member on the Global Environment Facility (www.thegef.org), one of the largest funders of projects to “improve the global environment” (i.e. push through fraud-based carbon cap-and-trade programs).

This ‘Facility’, while not claiming to be a bank, at the same time calls it itself “An independent financial organization” (see http://www.thegef.org/interior_right.aspx?id=50#GEF%20History).

Isn’t it illegal (or at the very least unethical) for a senior member of the Treasury Department to openly sit as a member of a huge foreign bank (oops – “facility”)?

This is only one of dozens of questions that should be asked about this organization, but we as tax-paying Americans should find someone who can answer this question, because it seems to me that either:

1) We need a law passed to stop such a high official holding two such posts and potentially using their influence and position in the US Treasury to move untold millions into the coffers of what is effectively a foreign bank or . . .

2) There is a law and someone needs to file a federal lawsuit

Pizer’s name/contact info. appear on the GEF website here (just scroll down a bit):

http://www.thegef.org/interior.aspx?id=21670#PIZER

This is no small matter: I found this organization while researching information given by George Hunt on an Alex Jones Show interview last January (see http://www.infowars.com/the-inner-workings-of-a-one-world-new-age-government-alex-interviews-george-hunt/), and George Hunt claims this organzation was founded by Edmond de Rothschild and Maurice Strong (originally to be named the “World Conservation Bank”), and its purpose is to engulf all other banks.

In the interview, George played numerous audio clips proving Edmond De Rothschild, Maurice Strong, as well as former Treas. Sec. James A Baker III, and the then heads of the IMF and World Bank were involved in promoting this new bank at the Fourth World Wilderness Congress in 1987 in Colorado.

The very fact that you can’t find any information on who actually started this bank is suspicious in itself, given its size and massive UN backing: the Wikipedia entry on this organization merely parrots that which is on the “thegef.org” website, and also does not explain its origin:

The Wikipedia entry states “The Global Environment Facility was established in October 1991 as a $1 billion pilot program in the World Bank to assist in the protection of the global environment and to promote environmental sustainable development”.

Established by who?

The GEF’s verbose and acronymn-laden 2008 annual report brags of the millions of dollars ostensibly transferred from 1st world nations to poorer nations to help clean up their environment, but it offers zero details on where the money came from other than simple pie charts showing broad categories such as “government”, “NGO”, etc.:

http://www.gefweb.org/interior_right.aspx?id=26610

Everyone should contact their US senator or congressman, as well as the US Attorney General and demand an investigation into this obvious appearance of impropriety on the part of the US Treasury Department

http://www.infowars.com/sr-us-treasury-official-openly-serves-on-council-of-rothschild-founded-earth-bank/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

HERE

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Lets hope he’s wrong for a change.”

-F.F.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Time Magazine has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.

As we reported earlier this week, during a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

His proposal was almost instantly advocated by Time Magazine, who published an article by Barbara Kiviat - one of Mundie’s fellow attendees at the elitist confab. It’s sadistically ironic that Kiviat’s columns run under the moniker “The Curious Capitalist,” since the ideas expressed in her piece go further than even the free-speech hating Communist Chinese have dared venture in terms of Internet censorship.

“Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality,” writes Kiviat. “Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?”

Kiviat ludicrously compares the necessity to show identification when entering a bank vault to the apparent need for authorities to know who you are when you set up a website to take credit card payments.

“The truth of the matter is, the Internet is still in its Wild West phase. To a large extent, the law hasn’t yet shown up. Yet as more and more people move to town, that lawlessness is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. As human societies grow over time they develop more rigid standards for themselves in order to handle their increased size. There is no reason to think the Internet shouldn’t follow the same pattern,” she writes.

“The people in charge—as much as anyone can be in charge when it comes to the Internet—are thinking about it,” Kiviat barks in her conclusion, seemingly comfortable with the notion that shadowy individuals and not the Constitution itself are “in charge” of deciding who is allowed free speech.

Despite Kiviat’s mealy-mouthed authoritarianism and feigned reasonableness in advocating such a system, Mundie’s proposal is little different to a similar system already considered by officials in Communist China to force bloggers to register their identities before they could post. At the time the idea was attacked by human rights advocates as an obvious ploy “by which the government could control information” and crack down on dissent.

Indeed, the proposal was deemed too severe and the Chinese government eventually backed down. So a system considered too authoritarian and too much of a threat to freedom in Communist China is seemingly just fine and dandy in the “land of the free,” according to Kiviat and her ilk.

Unfortunately for her, Kiviat was immediately reminded about what makes the Internet such a threat to the ruling elite for whom she is a well-trained apologist – almost every comment below her article disagreed with her.

“No. A thousand times no. This benefits no one but “the people in charge,” wrote one respondent.

“Drivers’ licenses ensure a basic level of driving competency, so that 13-year-olds don’t get drunk and drive into a schoolbus. That kind of stupidity doesn’t happen on the Internet. Enough security theater! Focus on actual security. Truly awful idea, Barbara.”

“I, for one, welcome our new internet overlords. It will be a comforting time when “the law” comes along to protect people from themselves on the net, because gosh darn it, freedom is dangerous,” quips another. “Not to mention, standards only ever come about through coercive government action, and never through private parties responding to their own incentives.”

I think bloggers ought to be fingerprinted, DNA tested for abnormalities and have the information safely stored in a government vault. That way when some authoritarian ruler of pit, decides you have broken his self made tyrannic law he can prosecute you,” jokes another respondent. “For being a journalist you sure are s—-d, anonymity protects the right of free speech especially when the scary internet is most dangerous in a nation that prosecutes freedom of speech and opinion. The biggest thugs and criminals you mentioned are corrupt governments. I bet you love China’s safe internet measures huh? But there are worse than China.”

“The internet is the only thing preventing total tyranny right now, and they are trying everything they can to chill free speech. There is NO grass roots movement anywhere calling for government intervention in the internet. It is not broken. It works too well, that is a problem for tyrants,” points out another.

Shortly after Time Magazine started peddling the proposal, the New York Times soon followed suit with a blog this morning entitled Driver’s Licenses for the Internet? which merely parrots Kiviat’s talking points.

Of course there’s a very good reason for Time Magazine and the New York Times to be pushing for measures that would undoubtedly lead to a chilling effect on free speech which would in turn eviscerate the blogosphere.

Like the rest of the mainstream print dinosaurs, physical sales of Time Magazine have been plummeting, partly as a result of more people getting their news for free on the web from independent sources that don’t feed at the trough of the military-industrial complex. Ad sales for the New York Timessunk by no less than 28 per cent last year with subscriptions and street sales also falling.

“The Internet, where newspapers are generally free, has siphoned off circulation and advertising,” conceded an October 2009 NY Times article, which is precisely why establishment publications like the Old Gray Lady and Time are pushing proposals that would strangle the blogosphere and in turn eliminate their competition – while devastating free speech all in one foul swoop.

http://www.infowars.com/time-magazine-pushes-draconian-internet-licensing-plan/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Maybe there is some  connection with the NWO using propaganda in hip-hop like Jay-Z or other shitty-ass music like his wife’s chalkboard scratching. Soulless music that vomits hyperspace sized chunks of banalities are what reach the most people. Via Americas corporately run network of dildo ear hammering radio stations. I didn’t really buy the idea that hip-hop acts were courting with the NWO when I first heard about it. I pay very little attention to mainstream rap, but who knows, maybe the evil ultra-white-elite circles are using Jay-Z as a useful idiot… to reach more useful idiots.  It’s propaganda! They don’t give a shit what sucker gets behind Satan for them… as long as sneaks it’s way into many-o mush minds.”

-Fred Face 2/3/09

Acclimating the civilians to men in black uniforms?

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“It’s kinda the whole point of this manufactured economic depression. A very, very small number of people want to see a very, very large number of  innocent people in really bad shape, so you’ll neither have the time or strength to give a shit about anything but your next meal. Or even better… {{for this elite establishment}}… would be for you to just die already… you useless eaters.”

-Fred Face 2/2/10

By Daniel Tencer

70 percent of emergency food centers face threats to their survival

If there is any indicator of the toll that the Great Recession has taken on the public, it would be the statistics beginning to emerge about hunger in the US.

According to a study from the nation’s largest food bank operator, the number of Americans in need of food aid has jumped 46 percent in three years, including a 50 percent jump in the number of children needing food assistance, and a 64 percent increase in hunger in senior citizens’ homes.

The study, Hunger in America 2010, found that 37 million people, or roughly one in eight US residents, received food aid in 2009. That’s a 46 percent jump from a similar survey carried out in 2006.

“Clearly, the economic recession, resulting in dramatically increasing unemployment nationwide, has driven unprecedented, sharp increases in the need for emergency food assistance and enrollment in federal nutrition programs,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, which operates some 200 food banks across the country.

The study found a growing number of people having to make difficult choices about what to spend their dwindling dollars on, with the rising cost of health care a major contributing factor to hunger.

“More than 46 percent of clients served report having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food; 39 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food; 34 percent report having to choose between paying for medical bills and food; and 35 percent must choose between transportation and food,” the study reports.

“It is morally reprehensible that we live in the wealthiest nation in the world where one in six people are struggling to make choices between food and other basic necessities,” Escarra said in astatement.

She added that “[t]hese are choices that no one should have to make, but particularly households with children. Insufficient nutrition has adverse effects on the physical, behavioral and mental health, and academic performance of children.”

Feeding America’s study is just the latest to show an alarming trend line for hunger in the United States.

Last week, a report (PDF) from the Food Research and Action Center found that nearly one in five in the US — 18.5 percent — report having gone hungry in the past year, up from 16.3 percent at the start of 2008. Households with children were even likelier to experience hunger, with nearly a quarter reporting hunger in the past year.

Perhaps worst of all, the Feeding America study finds that 70 percent of emergency food centers are reporting “one or more problems that threaten their ability to continue operating.”

“While we have reached many more people over the past four years, the need of hungry Americans far outpaces our current level of service,” Escarra said.

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/study-unprecedented-hunger-us/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Fuck-Head liar.”

-F.F.

Head of UN climate change body ‘not at fault’ for false claim Himalaya ice caps would melt by 2035

David Adam and Fred Pearce

The embattled chief of the UN’s climate change body has hit out at his critics and refused to resign or apologise for a damaging mistake in a landmark 2007 report on global warming.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said it would be hypocritical to apologise for the false claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, because he was not personally responsible for that part of the report. “You can’t expect me to be personally responsible for every word in a 3,000 page report,” he said.

The IPCC issued a statement that expressed regret for the mistake, but Pachauri said a personal apology would be a “populist” step.

“I don’t do too many populist things, that’s why I’m so unpopular with a certain section of society,” he said.

In a robust defence of his position and of the science of climate change, Pachauri said:

• The mistake had seriously damaged the IPCC’s credibility and boosted the efforts of climate sceptics.

• It was an isolated mistake, down to human error and “totally out of character” for the panel.

• It does not undermine the “basic truth” that human activity is causing temperatures to rise.

• That he would not resign and was subject to lies about his personal income and lifestyle.

Pachauri spoke as the second day of the Guardian’s investigation into the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia reveals how climate scientists acted to keep research papers they did not like out of academic journals. One UEA scientist, Dr Keith Briffa, wrote to a colleague to ask him for help rejecting a paper from a journal which he edited. “Confidentially I now need a hard, and if required, extensive case for rejecting.” The request apparently broke the convention that the review process should be independent and anonymous. Briffa was not able to comment because of an ongoing independent review into the stolen emails.

In another email, sent in March 2003, the leading US climate scientist Prof Michael Mann suggested ostracising a journal for publishing a paper that attacked his work.

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Mann denies any attempt to “stifle legitimate sceptical views”.

The emails also reveal that one of the most influential data sets in climate science – the “hockey stick” graph of temperature over the past 1,000 years – was controversial not just with sceptics but among climate scientists themselves. “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story [in the forthcoming IPCC report], but in reality the situation is not quite so simple,” wrote Briffa in September 1999.

In his Guardian interview, Pachauri defended the IPCC’s use of so-called “grey literature” – sources outside peer-reviewed academic journals, such as reports from campaign groups, companies and student theses. The false Himalayan glacier claim came from a report by the green group WWF. He said reports of further errors in the IPCC report linked to grey literature were spurious and the result of a “factory” of people “only there to create pinpricks and get attention”.

Stories that claimed errors about losses from natural disasters and Amazon destruction were false, he said. “We looked into that [Amazon claim] and we’re totally satisfied that what’s been stated in the report is totally valid.”

The IPCC is beginning work on its next climate report, and Pachauri said it would stress to authors and reviewers the importance of checking sources. “Our procedures are very clear on the use of grey literature. Whenever an author uses grey literature they need to double check the source of information is authentic and defensible. People have been using grey literature for quite some time now. Apparently in this [Himalayan glacier] case there has been a failure because authors did not follow the procedures required.”

To exclude such reports, he said, would give an incomplete picture. “The reality is that in several parts of the world, which will be influenced by the impacts of climate change, it’s an unfortunate fact that we just don’t have peer-reviewed material available.”

Pachauri also rebutted newspapers’ claims that he lives a lavish lifestyle and wears $1,000 suits. He said: “It’s ridiculous and it’s a bunch of lies.”

His salary from the research institute that employs him is fixed in the range of 190,000 rupees (£2,600) a month, he said, while he receives only travel expenses for chairing the IPCC.

He added: “There is a tailor who stitches all my suits for 2,200 rupees (£30).”

The panel’s report at the centre of the controversy said: “The likelihood of them [the Himalayan glaciers] disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,” a statement referenced to a report by WWF, which had taken it from a magazine article. It was subsequently found to be wrong.

Questions were raised about the glacier claim in an article in the US journal Science in November, and again by the BBC on 5 December, leading to allegations that Pachauri had been told by Pallava Bagla, the Indian journalist who wrote both, that it was problematic, but failed to act.

But Pachauri said he had not become aware of the problem until January. “If he [Bagla] sent me an email and I didn’t see it, I can only say that I’m sorry that I didn’t see that email. A lot of my emails are handled by my office and I don’t get to see them personally.”

Pachauri also said he was taking steps to strengthen the staff employed by the panel. “We’re in an information society today and we have to respond adequately and professionally. We’ve been weak in that regard to be honest. The IPCC is starting to realise we’re living in a very different world to what we had in 1988.

“I think this [glacier] mistake has certainly cost us dear, there’s no question about it,” he said. “Everybody thought that what the IPCC brought out was the gold standard and nothing could go wrong. But look at the larger picture, don’t get blinded by this one mistake.

“The larger picture is solid, it’s convincing and it’s extremely important. How can we lose sight of what climate change is going to do to this planet? What it’s already doing to this planet?”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/climate-change-pachauri-un-glaciers

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Civilians ‘put at greater risk to save military lives’ in winter attack – revelations that will pile pressure on Netanyahu to set up full inquiry

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year’s Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.

The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as “means and intentions” – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers”.

The officers’ revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander’s acknowledgement – if accurate – was “a smoking gun”.

Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: “Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area… We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference.”

His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans’ group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine – enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF’s own code of ethics – that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives.

Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: “Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn’t have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us.”

Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade’s war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza – particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets – had “taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head”. Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, “here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it.”

The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report – that the Israeli military had deliberately “targeted” the civilian population – most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier “any movement must entail gunfire. No one’s supposed to be there.” He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that “if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement.”

The other soldier in the war-room explained: “This doesn’t mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That’s not something you’re going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that.”

He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. “Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote … compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted,” he said.

Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.

In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF’s ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life “must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians”. While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, “it is demanded in Israel’s military code and this has always been its tradition”.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.

That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the “acute dilemmas” posed by Hamas’s operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: “Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A ‘civilian objective’ is any objective which is not a military target.” It adds: “In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian.”

Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published.

Israel in Gaza: The soldier’s tale

This experienced soldier, who cannot be named, served in the war room of a brigade during Operation Cast Lead. Here, he recalls an incident he witnessed during last winter’s three-week offensive:

“Two [Palestinian] guys are walking down the street. They pass a mosque and you see a gathering of women and children.

“You saw them exiting the house and [they] are not walking together but one behind the other. So you begin to fantasise they are actually ducking close to the wall.

“One [man] began to run at some point, must have heard the chopper. The GSS [secret service] argued that the mere fact that he heard it implicated him, because a normal civilian would not have realised that he was now being hunted.

“Finally he was shot. He was not shot next to the mosque. It’s obvious that shots are not taken at a gathering.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/exclusive-israeli-commander-we-rewrote-the-rules-of-war-for-gaza-1887627.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

D                              A                             R                      P                         A

• By Katie Drummond

The Pentagon’s mad science agency has big plans for next year: crowdsourcing military intelligence, creating an “immune system” for Defense Department networks, and even research that might one day lead to editing a soldier’s DNA.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, just released its budget for the upcoming year. And, as you might expect from the Pentagon’s way-out science and technology division, there are some wild new projects on tap.

Military analysts are already overwhelmed by too much information. Instead of training more analysts or handing data over to computers, Darpa wants to improve how the military uses its intelligence info by turning it into an open call for contribution. The $13 million dollar project, called “Deep ISR Processing by Crowds,” looks “to harness the unique cognitive and creative abilities of large numbers of people to enhance dramatically the knowledge derived from ISR systems.”

Crowdsourcing is already used among businesses and other government agencies, to generate more innovative ideas that draw on as many sources as possible. Darpa wants that innovation to take over individual analysis and decision-making:

Novel frameworks will be developed to capture the experience base of users and systems to allow problem partitioning, quantitative confidence assessment, and validation in environments that may be partially compromised by adversaries.

When it comes to cybersecurity, Darpa’s taking inspiration from nature, with “Cyber Immune” — a defense model for the Pentagon’s computing systems that’s able to detect an attack, fight back and even heal itself automatically to prevent subsequent infiltration.

The current model for cybersecurity, dubbed “perimeter defense,” uses firewalls that hackers try to break through. Once they make it inside, they’ve got free rein, and the compromised system is vulnerable to ongoing outside attacks until the firewall is rebuilt. Instead of technicians who patch holes as they find them, Darpa wants a system with the instincts to go it alone, and that “assume[s] security cannot be absolute, yet … can still defend itself in order to maintain its (possibly degraded) capabilities, and possibly even heal itself.”

Of course, Darpa’s also living up to its mad-science rep, with ambitious plans to fast-track mastery over the human genome. Darpa’s budgeted $7.5 million in hopes of “increas[ing] by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Editing DNA could have widespread implications, but Darpa seems most interested in two: microchip implants that restore senses and movement in traumatic injury patients, and the ongoing Darpa goal of boosting troop performance in the field:

On the other end of the size scale, a primary goal is to apply microsystem techniques to soldier-protective biomedical systems. One example is an in-canal hearing protection device that will provide enhanced hearing capabilities in some settings, but be able to instantly muffle loud sounds of weapons fire. This one example will improve inter-personnel communications and at the same time drastically reduce the incidence of hearing loss in combat situations. For these examples and many more, the goal is to bring exceptionally potent technical approaches to bear on biological and biomedical applications where their capabilities will be significant force multipliers for the DoD.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/darpas-new-plans-crowdsource-intel-immunize-nets-edit-dna/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Not good. Give financial assistance if it is feasible for you, here.”

-F.F.

• By Kim Zetter

Wikileaks, the controversial whistleblower site, has temporarily shuttered its operations. It finds itself out of funds to meet its operating costs.

The site announced last December that it planned to temporarily cease operations, save for its anonymous submission tool, until it could raise money to operate.

But it has so far been unable to meet those needs. The site’s annual costs are $200,000 — $600,000 if staff is paid — but it has raised only $130,000, so far. The site will remain closed to allow administrators to raise funds.

A note on the website’s main page reads: We protect the world — but will you protect us?

“We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the U.S. detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release,” the pages reads. “You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another 10,000 hands and $1,000, a million.”

The site was launched in 2007 as an online clearinghouse for anonymous submissions of documents, images and other data. It has received awards from Amnesty International and has been praised by media groups and others for providing a forum for whistleblowers, political dissidents and others to expose corruption and suppression and foster transparency.

It’s run by the Sunshine Press, and is said to be composed of anonymous human rights activists, investigative journalists, technologists and members of the general public around the world.

The site has proven to be fertile ground for leaked documents and has regularly scooped mainstream media outlets in obtaining documents and information on hot and controversial topics. Documents posted at its site have become the focus of numerous mainstream media stories.

In 2007, the site published a 238-page U.S. military manual that detailed the day-to-day operations of the Defense Department’s Guantánamo Bay detention facility. It made public a manual for operating the CIA’s rendition flights, which involved undocumented detainees who were kidnapped in various locations and flown to countries outside the United States for interrogation and torture.

Wikileaks was also the first to publish data from Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo e-mail account after a Tennessee college student gained unauthorized access to the account two months before the 2008 presidential election.

The site has been the target of numerous legal challenges.

In 2008, a judge tried to shutter the site by ordering its U.S. host to take it offline after a Cayman Islands bank complained that the site was publishing proprietary documents.

The Julius Baer Bank, a Swiss bank with a division in the Cayman Islands, took issue with documents that were published on Wikileaks by an unidentified whistleblower, whom the bank claimed was the former vice president of its Cayman Islands operation, Rudolf Elmer. The documents purported to provide evidence that the Cayman Islands bank helps customers hide assets and wash funds.

The judge reversed his decision a week later after numerous groups stepped forward to support Wikileaks, saying the judge’s decision constituted prior restraint, a violation of the First Amendment.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/wikileaks-budget-woes

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Obama administration has announced that a further $215 million dollars will be spent on installing virtual strip search naked body scanners, meaning the devices will be in no less than half the nation’s airports by next year, but the historical record clearly shows that the scanners are a completely illegal violation of human rights.

“The $215 million proposal to acquire 500 scanners next year, combined with the 450 to be bought this year, marks the largest addition of airport-security equipment since immediately after the 9/11 attacks. There are only 40 body scanners in a total of 19 airports now,” reports USA Today.

Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg pointed out that the scanners were yet another expensive instrument of the war on terror being used against the American people.

“We’ll have another Homeland Security Department program for the war on terror used almost exclusively on Americans,” said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

As we have highlighted, the naked scanners are a boon for the military-industrial complex and people like former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who vigorously promoted their use in the aftermath of the staged underwear bombing, having a huge financial stake in seeing them rolled out nationwide.

Despite the seemingly breakneck speed at which airports are rushing to adopt the scanners, some are proving to be less enthusiastic.

Durham Tees Valley Airport in the UK has refused to commit to installing the scanners despite the British government ordering all airports to adopt them before the summer season.

The fact that the scanners are nothing less than a virtual strip search has been played down by the government and the media due to the potential for legal fights that could see the devices banned as a breach of human rights.

Despite official denials that the images produced show details of genitalia, journalists who have investigated trials of the technology have reported that details of sexual organs are “eerily visible”.

Indeed, as we have previously highlighted, when the scanners were first introduced at Australian airports in 2008 it was admitted that the X-ray backscatter devices don’t work properly unless the genitals of people going through them are visible. “It will show the private parts of people, but what we’ve decided is that we’re not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities,” said Melbourne Airport’s Office of Transport Security manager Cheryl Johnson.

Attempts to keep this under wraps by lying about the images produced are an effort to head off challenges to the legality of the devices. Historically, civil lawsuits where an individual has been strip searched by a member of the opposite sex have proven to be successful in North America.

Courts have consistently found that strip searches are only legal when performed on a person who has already been found guilty of a crime or on arrestees pending trial where a reasonable suspicion has to exist that they are carrying a weapon. Subjecting masses of people to blanket strip searches in airports reverses the very notion of innocent until proven guilty.

Barring people from flying and essentially treating them like terrorists for refusing to be humiliated by the virtual strip search is a clear breach of the basic human right of freedom of movement.

The legal foundation of the naked body scanners needs to be undermined and eroded by lawsuits before they are rolled out on the streets, as has already been proposed by major western governments.

http://www.infowars.com/obama-pledges-another-215-million-for-virtual-strip-search-scanners/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

As President Obama calls for further government intervention and control, another speech on the state of our country reminds us that the crisis will only get worse if we do not abandon the establishment’s failed way of thinking and pursue liberty.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Supreet Minhas

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned century-old restrictions on corporate spending in elections under the guise of protecting First Amendment free speech rights. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said, “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” This argument of the majority decision rests on the notions that corporations are covered by the same free speech protections as individual citizens and that campaign donations or financing are the same as speech.

Corporations, however, are inherently not the same as individuals and thus cannot have the same protections as individuals. There are a slew of laws that protect corporations and their interests in the arena for which they are by definition formed—namely the marketplace. The laws that govern corporations and the rights enjoyed by them are distinct from the laws and rights of individuals. A corporation, for example, can enter into contracts like an individual, but unlike an individual, a corporation’s members can be protected by limited liability so their personal assets are not at stake.

If a corporation, then, is a distinct legal entity governed by different laws than an individual is, corporations are not protected under the First Amendment in the same way that individuals are protected. Corporations, especially in their most powerful and wealthy incarnations, are exponentially more influential than most individuals in America. The restrictions on corporate spending in elections that were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court were meant to redress this power balance between average individuals and unduly influential businesses. Corporations already have a plethora of ways to influence politics, from political action committees to lobbyists on Capitol Hill. The framers of the Bill of Rights wanted to protect the voices of the trampled, not amplify the voices of the elite.

The other part of the Supreme Court’s premise for its decision is that the First Amendment free speech clause applies to campaign funding. While speech can be interpreted loosely as any form of expression, such an open, ambiguous definition would create a myriad of problems with all kinds of laws. An architect has a vision of a building: it is his art, his self expression, yet he cannot ignore local zoning laws that, for instance, restrict the height of his building. Should he sue the state for violation of his free speech, his right to expression? Equating money with speech also opens the door to sundry ludicrous claims by, for instance, an employer who objects to minimum wage laws since he’d like to express that his employees are only worth paying $3 an hour. There have to be restrictions on what constitutes speech to prevent a bastardization of the term and an overly liberal interpretation of the First Amendment.

A corporation already has the power to issue a statement in favor of a candidate or policy through its political action committees, and individual members of a business are welcome to contribute money as well. However, allowing a corporation to use its vast profits to directly finance the election or to remove a candidate compromises the democratic notion of a free and fair election. There are unseemly ties even now between politicians and various industries, but this new ruling would make such connections more robust and give them a veneer of legitimacy. A politician financed by a business would become completely beholden to its political agenda and not to the voters.

It’s not only the independence of politicians that’s at stake, but also the independence of our judges, who are at the very least expected to be impartial. Many states still use elections to appoint judges, which leaves them vulnerable to the influence of political spending. In a recent speech at a law school conference, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor worried about the impact of corporate campaign funding in judicial elections, saying that “judicial campaigning makes last week’s decision in Citizens United an increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary.”

Two cornerstones of our democracy—free elections and an independent judiciary—are threatened by the Supreme Court’s activist and meddling decision. The case could have been decided much more narrowly in favor of Citizens United, but instead, the majority of the justices decided to expand the case to champion the rights of big money over the interest of the American people. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (D-PA) introduced the Fair Elections Now Act last March. It would prohibit contributions from political action committees and would match individual donations, limited to $100, on a 4:1 basis so that fundraising focuses on the people. Such a system has been in place in New York City since the 1988 Campaign Finance Act. The rest of the country is long overdue to follow. Never before has the fight for public financing been more necessary.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in political science. She is a prospective law student.

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/01/31/corporations-are-not-people-and-money-not-speech

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

• By Noah Shachtman

The Defense Department just released its king-sized, $708 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Much of the proposed spending is fairly detailed — noting exactly how many helicopters the Pentagon plans to buy and how many troops it plans on playing. But about $56 billion goes simply to “classified programs,” or to projects known only by their code names, like “Chalk Eagle” and “Link Plumeria.” That’s the Pentagon’s black budget.

Cobbling together this round figure for the military’s hush-hush projects is easier than it seems. The Pentagon’s separate ledgers for operations, research and procurement all contain line items for “classified programs.” Add those to the non-sensical, all-caps programs, and you’ve got yourself an estimate for the Pentagon’s secretive efforts.

Last year, that budget grew to more than $50 billion – ”the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer. A few more billion were added for wartime operations, for a total of $54 billion. This year’total would be $2 billion higher, a 3.7 percent increase.

Not all of the Pentagon’s secret projects got a budget boost, however. Funds for the Cobra Judy missile-watching radar system were cut nearly in half, from $61 million to $36.5 million. Similar, money for the Navy’s Link Evergreen project was cut to $41 million, from $123 million.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagons-black-budget-tops-56-billion/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Debra Medina speaks to the press after the Belo Debate (Texas gubernatorial Republican primary).Video by David Barrow 01-29-2010.

Apparently, she dominated her GOP competition so badly that sitting Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Hutchinson decided not to appear in the post-debate conference.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the top Republican candidates for governor of Texas actually lost their nationally televised C-SPAN2 primary debate to a tea party upstart named Debra Medina. She was cool, calm, collected (and, of course, nuts).

Guess what? It happened again Friday night. This is getting fun.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“The Establishment is scared shitless of the power of the internet, (these idiots invented it), being the last true beacon of freedom of speech for the people around the world.”

-Fred Face 2/1/10

Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones & Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 1, 2010

Calls to introduce a licensing system to police the Internet on behalf of a powerful UN agency represent the latest salvo in a long-running battle to kill free speech on the web and bring an end to the powerful digital democracy that has devastated the carbon tax agenda of the UN by exposing the Climategate scandal.

UN International Telcommunications Union secretary general Hamadoun Toure told the World Economic Forum in Davos this past weekend that global treaties need to be enacted in the name of stopping cyber warfare.

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

“We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet,” he said.

“If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.”

Andre Kudelski, chairman of Kudelski Group, said that people should be forced to “have two computers that cannot connect and pass on viruses”. Since using the Internet requires a computer to connect to a network, it seems unclear as to how this would work without blocking off entire areas of the Internet altogether.

Globalists are invoking the threat of cyber attacks by nation states in order to accomplish their real agenda of stifling and regulating out of existence the last true outpost of free speech – the Internet. The establishment is furious at the level of influence individuals and small political groups have been able to wield by means of the world wide web, particularly over the last few years.

Climategate is a perfect example of the power of the digital democracy that authoritarian enemies of free speech want to crush. The Copenhagen global warming conference was completely devastated by the Climategate revelations which appeared just days before elitists convened to ram through their CO2 scam. As a result of bloggers feverishly pursuing the Climategate story, the entire foundation of the UN’s IPCC has been totally eviscerated and the global warming hoax is on its last legs.

The power to cripple entire branches of their control freak agenda within a matter of weeks has the globalists hopping mad, which is why their mission to eliminate real free speech on the web is accelerating.

“Don’t be surprised if it becomes reality in the near future,” writes ZD Net’s Doug Hanchard. “Every device connected to the Internet will have a permament license plate and without it, the network won’t allow you to log in.”

The graphic below illustrates how you would be blocked from using the Internet if your device had not obtained government permission to access the network.

Another method would be to make the use of fingerprint scanners that are included on a lot of new computer models mandatory. You would have to register your fingerprint at a central government data center and then scan each time you want to access the Internet. Misbehave online and your access will be denied.

“One thing is for sure,” concludes Hanchard, “A lot of money is going to be spent trying and sooner or later, everyone may have to pay with an Internet cop instant messaging you – “license and registration please”.

It seems certain that cyber security problems will be exploited or even manufactured to justify the move to Internet licensing. Authorities need to create a strong pretext to justify measures that would otherwise be rightly rejected for what they truly represent – government regulation and censorship of the web that would outstrip anything the Communist Chinese have attempted.

Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption.

In the UK, legislation slated as the “Digital Economy Bill“, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers” to block whichever sites it wishes.

Under clause 11 of the proposed legislation “technical obligation” is defined as follows:

A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

In other words, the government will have the power to force ISPs to downgrade and even block your internet access to certain websites or altogether if it wishes.

The legislation comes in the wake of amplified UK government efforts to seize more power over the internet and those who use it.

For months now unelected “Secretary of State” Lord Mandelson has overseen government efforts tochallenge the independence of the of UK’s internet infrastructure.

Mandelson also wants to impose harsh policies, via the Digital Economy Bill, that would see users’ broadband access cut off indefinitely, in addition to a fine of up to £50,000 without evidence or trial, if they download copyrighted music and films. The plan has been identified as “potentially illegal” by experts.

The legislation would impose a duty on ISPs to effectively spy on all their customers by keeping records of the websites they have visited and the material they have downloaded. ISPs who refuse to cooperate could be fined £250,000.

As Journalist and copyright law expert Cory Doctrow has noted, the bill also gives the Secretary of State the power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes, without Parliamentary oversight or debate.

This could include the authority to appoint private militias, who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files in addition to the blocking of websites.

Mandelson and his successors will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any digital transgression he deems Britons to be guilty of.

Despite being named the Digital Economy Bill, the legislation contains nothing that will actually stimulate the economy and is largely based on shifting control over the internet into government hands, allowing unaccountable bureaucrats to arbitrarily hide information from the public should they wish to do so.

Mandelson began the onslaught on the free internet in the UK after spending a luxury two weekholiday at Nat Rothschild’s Corfu mansion with multi-millionaire record company executive David Geffen.

The Digital Economy Bill is intrinsically linked to long term plans by the UK government to carry out an unprecedented extension of state powers by claiming the authority to monitor all emails, phone calls and internet activity nationwide.

Last year the government announced its intention to create a massive central database, gathering details on every text sent, e-mail sent, phone call made and website visited by everyone in the UK.

The programme, known as the “Interception Modernisation Programme”, would allow spy chiefs at GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency, the centre for Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) activities (pictured above), to effectively place a “live tap” on every electronic communication in Britain in the name of preventing terrorism.

Following outcry over the announcement, the government suggested last April that it was scaling down the plans, with then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith stating that there were “absolutely no plans for a single central store” of communications data.

However, as the “climbdown” was celebrated by civil liberties advocates and the plan was “replaced” by new lawsrequiring ISPs to store details of emails and internet telephony for just 12 months, fresh details emerged indicating the government was implementing a big brother spy system that far outstrips the original public announcement.

The London Times published leaked details of a secret mass internet surveillance project known as “Mastering the Internet” (MTI).

Costing hundreds of millions in public funds, the system is already being implemented by GCHQ with the aid of American defence giant Lockheed Martin and British IT firm Detica, which has close ties to the intelligence agencies.

A group of over 300 internet service providers and telecommunications firms has attempted to fight back over the radical plans, describing the proposals as an unwarranted invasion of people’s privacy.

Currently, any interception of a communication in Britain must be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank. Only individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigations may be subject to surveillance.

If the GCHQ’s MTI project is completed, black-box probes would be placed at critical traffic junctions with internet service providers and telephone companies, allowing eavesdroppers to instantly monitor the communications of every person in the country without the need for a warrant.

Even if you believe GCHQ’s denial that it has any plans to create a huge monitoring system, the current law under the RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) allows hundreds of government agencies access to the records of every internet provider in the country.

In publicly announced proposals to extend these powers, firms will be asked to collect and store even more vast amounts of data, including from social networking sites such as Facebook.

If the plans go ahead, every internet user will be given a unique ID code and all their data will be stored in one place. Government agencies such as the police and security services will have access to the data should they request it with respect to criminal or terrorist investigations.

This is clearly the next step in an incremental program to implement an already exposed full scale big brother spy system designed to completely obliterate privacy, a fundamental right under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Similar efforts to place restrictions on the internet are unfolding in Australia where the government isimplementing a mandatory and wide-ranging internet filter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.

Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy said the government would be the final arbiter on what sites would be blacklisted under “refused classification.”

The official justification for the filter is to block child pornography, however, as the watchdog groupElectronic Frontiers Australia has pointed out, the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires while the pornographers can relatively easily skirt around the filters.

Earlier this year, the Wikileaks website published a leaked secret list of sites slated to be blockedby Australia’s state-sponsored parental filter.

The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”

The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.

The broad attack on the free internet is not only restricted to the UK and Australia.

The European Union, Finland, Denmark, Germany and other countries in Europe have all proposed blocking or limiting access to the internet and using filters like those used in Iran, Syria, China, and other repressive regimes.

In 2008 in the U.S., The Motion Picture Association of America asked president Obama to introduce laws that would allow the federal government to effectively spy on the entire Internet, establishing a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection.

In 2009 the Cybersecurity Act was introduced, proposing to allow the federal government to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e mail communications.

The legislation, introduced by Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in April, gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president, according to a Mother Jones report.

During a hearing on the bill, Senator John Rockefeller betrayed the true intent behind the legislation when he stated, “Would it have been better if we’d have never invented the Internet,” while fearmongering about cyber attacks on the U.S. government and how the country could be shut down.

Watch the clip below.

The Obama White House has also sought a private contractor to “crawl and archive” data such as comments, tag lines, e-mail, audio and video from any place online where the White House “maintains a presence” – for a period of up to eight years.

Obama has also proposed scaling back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies.

Recent disclosures under the Freedom Of Information Act also reveal that the federal government has several contracts with social media outlets such as Youtube (Google), Facebook, Myspace and Flickr (Yahoo) that waive rules on monitoring users and permit companies to track visitors to government web sites for advertising purposes.

The U.S. military also has some $30 Billion invested in it’s own mastering the internet projects.

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2″ system. All of the above represents stepping stones toward the realisation of that agenda.

The free internet is under attack the world over, only by exposing the true intentions of our governments to restrict the flow of data can we defeat such efforts and preserve the last vestige of independent information.

http://www.infowars.com/enemies-of-free-speech-call-for-internet-licensing/

Related Article:

“UN agency calls for global cyberwarfare treaty, ‘driver’s license’ for Web users”

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

ALL 4 INVOLVED IN SENATE HOMELAND SECURITY BREAKIN CIA “N-O-C” AGENTS

CIA PROGRAM MAY HAVE TRAINED DOMESTIC “DEATH SQUADS”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Last week’s breakin at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in the New Orleans Federal Building was more than it seemed, much more.  All of the 4 arrested had been trained by the CIA and, possibly, Israel.  One arrested, Stan Dai, is listed as an Operations Officer of the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Program and  a known expert and lecturer on, not only surveillance but explosives training, assassinations and “false flag operations.”  If you wanted a plane to crash, an enemy to get sick and die or a building to blow up, Dai would be the man to know how to make it happen.  Problem is, his skills were being used as part of a criminal conspiracy inside the United States against members of our own government.

Original reports on the “break-in” were also wrong.  One of those arrested was found blocks away with a covert receiver, managing the office bugs.  The man in the car is identified as Stan  Dai, Operations Officer for the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Program:

“one of the four was arrested with a listening device in a car blocks from the senator’s offices.” The FBI’s affidavit noted that Flanagan and Basel were in the building with O’Keefe, and a federal law enforcement official confirmed to AP that Dai was the one in the car.”

What is not initially known is whether this was the first attempt or, as is much more likely, an additional incursion to plant new bugs as the ones in place were missing key conversations.  Also, it is not known how many “black ops” crews are being run by the CIA inside the United States in violation of their charter or if their operations are being limited to spying on Democratic lawmakers or if operations of a more threatening nature have been performed but remain undiscovered.

Additionally, as this was a covert op against  US government investigations of, not only terrorism and terrorism funding but major financial crimes against the United States, it is unclear who the recipient of the “product,” an intelligence industry term for “output” or information put up for “distribution” might be.  Potential buyers could be the Republican Party, Israel, Turkey, India, Russia, China, Venezuela, North Korea or financial institutions involved in massive money laundering schemes being investigated by the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security of which Senator Landireu is a member.

Learn how the Intelliegence Community Center for Academic Excellence (IC CAE) at Georgetown University and the CIA got involved in this seedy domestic “black ops” group.  In a story broken this week:

Dai’s links to the intelligence community appear to be particularly strong. He was a speaker at Georgetown University’s Central Intelligence Agency summer school program in June 2009, and is also listed as an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C. (note the parallels between the Georgetown program tied to “conservative think tanks” and the GWU program with similar ties and the same characters where we trace Dr. Hasan, Ft Hood mass murderer to)

The university’s president Patricia McGuire told The Associated Press that it promoted careers in intelligence but denied that it trains students to be spies.  (a seemingly meaningless statement considering what has happened)

The Trinity program received a “$250,000 renewable grant from the U.S. Intelligence Community” upon launching in 2004, according to its Web site. The program’s goals are stated:

The IC CAE in National Security Studies Program was established during 2005 in response to the nation’s increasing need for IC professionals who are educated and trained with the unique knowledge, skills and capabilities to carry out America’s national security objectives.

The CIA summer school packet also notes that Dai “served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program.”

Dai has been an undergraduate fellow with the Washington-based national security think tank Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (FDD), according to his College Leadership Program award biography at the Phillips Foundation — as Lindsay Beyerstein first reported.

FDD claims that it’s partly funded by the US State Department. Its Leadership Council and Board of Advisers comprise many high-profile conservative politicians and public figures — including former House speakerNewt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), former Bush official Richard Perle and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Operatives recruited in universities and managed thru conservative think tanks receive paid “vacations” to Israel and elsewhere, places where they are trained in silent killing, use of poisons, explosives and other potentially useful skills whether their career is in intelligence or politics.  As with other terrorist suspects such as those who travel to Afghanistan for their training, these domestic types are funded covertly through the US government but, as we see in New Orleans, rented out to either Israel, India or the Republican party.

This history of this program parallels one from the Nixon administration after the Vietnam War.  CIA recruiters subsidized hundreds, perhaps several thousand veterans, Marines, Special Forces and Army Rangers who served in unofficial and semi-official capacities in and out of the US.  Some serve to this day.  Today’s, if current bio’s are any indication, depend more on ideology than physical bravery or intellectual qualifications.  Perhaps the “purity” test left little room for battle hardened veterans who might choose country over party and loyalty over cash.

In a “clarification” of how Israel is involved and sees their cooperation in this domestic terror organization as part of their support of the United States as a trusted ally, we received the following story:

http://current.com/1q0244c

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“The same thing is happening w/ good Muslim people around the world. And for all good Americans citizens who are Muslim’s, gun rights/2nd amendment advocates, Libertarians, (or anyone who threatens the power structure of the of the horrendously evil & criminal white Anglo-American establishment), your next up to bat.”

-Fred Face 1/31/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Jason Leopold

A long-awaited Department of Justice watchdog report that probed whether John Yoo and his former boss Jay Bybee violated professional standards when they provided the Bush White House with legal advice on torture has cleared both men of misconduct, according to Newsweek, citing unnamed sources who have seen the document.

An earlier version of the report, prepared by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and completed in December 2008, actually concluded that Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge on the 9th Circuit, violated professional standards when they drafted an August 2002 legal opinion that authorized CIA officers to use brutal methods when interrogating suspected terrorist detainees.

But as I reported last April, those earlier conclusions were watered down after OPR received responses on the report’s conclusions from Yoo and Bybee, who both worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

Legal sources familiar with the internal debate about the draft report say OPR is in the process of “watering”- down the criticism of legal opinions by [OLC] lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002 and 2003 and by [OLC acting head Steven Bradbury], who in 2005 reinstated some of the Yoo-Bybee opinions after they had been withdrawn by Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith when he headed the OLC in 2003 and 2004.

David Margolis, the career prosecutor charged with reviewing the final version of the report, was responsible for “softening” OPR’s earlier finding of professional misconduct and instead determined that Yoo and Bybee “showed poor judgment” when they drafted an August 1, 2002 legal opinion authorizing the CIA to employ methods such as waterboarding against detainees during interrogations.

That means neither Yoo nor Bybee will not be referred to state bar associations where they could have faced disciplinary action. For Bybee, such a referral could have also led to an impeachment inquiry before Congress.

Newsweek noted that the report is still “sharply critical” of the “legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding” and other methods of torture CIA interrogators used against detainees after 9/11.

Moreover, the report, which is still under a declassification review “will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document,” Newsweek reported.

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

The OPR probe was launched in mid-2004 after a meeting in which Jack Goldsmith, then head of the OLC, got into a tense debate with White House lawyers, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. Goldsmith had withdrawn some of the Yoo-Bybee opinions because he felt they were “legally flawed” and “sloppily written.”

After the meeting, Goldsmith resigned and was subsequently replaced on an acting basis by Bradbury, who restored some of the controversial Yoo-Bybee opinions in May 2005, again granting George W. Bush broad powers to inflict painful interrogations on detainees.

As Truthout previously reported, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Congress last year that the OPR report was expected be released by end of November. In interviews over the past month, two senior aides to Democratic lawmakers said the report was being held up in lieu of the passage of a health care bill.

But Tracy Schmaler, a DOJ spokeswoman, disputed those claims.

“That is absolutely untrue,” Schmaler said. “One thing has nothing to do with another.”

Schmaler said the review “process is ongoing and we hope to have [the report] complete and released soon.”

Two DOJ officials familiar with details of the report said a delay in releasing it in the time frame Holder had promised was due, in part, to the fact that Margolis was hospitalized in December for pneumonia.

In his testimony last November, Holder said the report had not been released sooner due to “the amount of time we gave to the lawyers who represented the people who are the subject of the report an opportunity to respond. And then [OPR] had to react to those responses.”

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m62756&hd=&size=1&l=e

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

by F. William Engdahl

President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.

Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.

A relevant Texas geological project

Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players—the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.

The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.

Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called “Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons.” It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons—oil and gas.

Continue Article

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Story Here

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites