tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58221906391162285332024-02-19T12:19:29.233-05:00Not an ApathistThis weblog contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been authorized. Such material is provided for educational and research purposes only, and is distributed without profit, thus constituting 'fair use' as per Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law.Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.comBlogger87125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-33540505947393305732014-02-13T11:13:00.001-05:002014-02-13T15:30:19.413-05:00On Edward Snowjob's Whiteout<div dir="ltr">
As someone who is, literally, one person away from Edward <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/98290765574e073604eb806a28c6023a/tumblr_n0a1g9wE2g1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Snowden</a> on the world "friendship tree", if you catch my meaning, I believe I do, in fact, have a special insight into these matters. In other words, we both go way back with one <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/e58cc54306a9c55116bf5378f7f19879/tumblr_n0dulpKWan1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Jacob Appelbaum</a> though I don't believe Edward S. and I have ever met. I can tell you that Jacob's crowd is replete with characters that aren't what they seem.</div>
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This is where my angle on this gets really weird, even in my own opinion. This part of the story contains elements that might sound like sensationalist garbage. J.A. is a hacker from the Russian River, a place I have spent a great deal of time and a place that, at first, I had no reason to believe was, in this day and age, very Russian any longer. It's home to Bohemian Grove, a place that will send almost anyone scurrying for mental safety and solid ground if one really chooses to investigate its lore. Looking into the history of this area exposes one to a plethora of tales involving Satanism, missing children, <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/df7e06bfe2b48c5f10fade9cf1295aea/tumblr_n0lpwsDvrD1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">scientologists</a>, and other things that almost (?) seem <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/0fe48032da8da3aa5bf891226dc7085e/tumblr_n06m6tqlNL1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">designed to confuse and frighten</a>. I accidentally fell in with some of these people in the aftermath of <a href="http://thing.net/~rdom/ecd/jam.html">Jam Echelon Day</a>, which brought Echelon from internet conspiracy theory onto the set of 60 Minutes. I was <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-10-19/news/overloading-big-brother/full/">J.E.D.</a>'s primary instigator (a global effort to publicize the <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/571bdf84fd75ed90a27b340da0acf2dc/tumblr_n0qjv5H3cy1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">NSA</a>), going under the pseudonym of <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/1999/10/sdut101799.html">Robert Kemp</a>, and for my transgression I would be studied and run through a virtual Garden of Delights and, ultimately, sleep deprivation complete with attempts at imprinting, including suggestions of terror acts. This is Appelbaum's stomping ground. Here I would meet a woman who, after a year and a half, would admit to having been assigned to me. Jacob is the link between Snowden and Assange, by the way.</div>
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These are actors that are part of an international propagandists television show (and internet). A million people a year try out to be a star, with even more studying acting and theater. Bohemian Grove was started by a bunch of theater buffs in the San Francisco area over a century ago and the town in which it is situated is populated, pretty much wall to wall, by performers of medieval re-enactment festivals. What kind of jobs do YOU think actors get when it is determined that they aren't quite good enough to be in the spotlight full time? They can try out for intelligence roles in which tasks are quickly rotated, as in 'organized gang stalking' (look that up). If they're REALLY good, they may be assigned roles that involve deep cover or intense media scrutiny, or both. Scientology is the science of psychology, of manipulation, and, with that in mind, is it any wonder it's so popular among media figures? Deride and conquer!</div>
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As to the Satanic element, it's <a href="http://www.psywarrior.com/superstition.html">psychological operations</a>. When someone tries to look into these groups, they inevitably come across tales of child abduction, ritual murder, and strange proceedings around <a href="http://destabilize.blogspot.com/2006/10/real-deal-on-bohemian-grove.html">the grove</a>, like the worship of a giant owl statue called Moloch. This is there because, typically, there are a limited set of reactions in people to it (due to a lifetime of programming) and when you have a truth to hide, the less the better. When you have a small set of potential responses to expect, you can plan perception management well ahead of time and it goes like this:</div>
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Those who believe the tales are divided into two main camps - those who are solidly in the Vatican's fold and those who aren't. It may be broader and more accurate to say that the two camps are those who believe in a cosmic and earthly war between good and evil and those who don't. If you do, you land clearly on the side of taking things at face value and managing your reaction was done long ago, through societal indoctrination. If you don't believe in the devil but believe the tales about Satanic and Setian deeds, you are likely to respond with a slightly different kind of revulsion but, in both cases, the individual looks no deeper. It doesn't occur to the sensationalist that these sordid matters could possibly be a cover for something else, at once more nefarious and less fantastic.</div>
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Those who don't believe the tales are even more easily managed, as they turn a blind eye to anyone that speaks of such things. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton">James Jesus Angleton</a> once said, "Intelligence is a wilderness of mirrors."</div>
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I also consider these stories of evil incarnate, of Freemasonic devilry, to be an extension of the <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/45f8c6524d815eb58739068b8063040a/tumblr_mzynf3nDj01tqw355o1_1280.jpg">modus operandi</a> of the Vatican. In light of the seventeenth century enlightenment, <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/2d929cf69360e9a98c1f058e2524a36a/tumblr_n084vooC9t1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">something</a> had to be done to convince the world, again, that evil was real, even if the church has to be <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/08ccf061ef4f00eaa5a1ea988f8898a0/tumblr_n080mtcSkE1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">the ones</a> committing <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/ae2e2e56f2d689c7e8501ea05a58c849/tumblr_mzo0xuy8xc1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">atrocious</a> acts. <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/c79db3a13d3ca64087c3bc42a78257ed/tumblr_n0udalG1Zo1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Vatican</a> involvement in the activities of the <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/cc20643d45425970c402a20fd1c83cd5/tumblr_mzrj1aPq1Y1tqw355o1_500.jpg">Third Reich</a> comes to mind. </div>
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The op continues today. After all, Weishaupt was a Jesuit, just like <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/aefdf8ba127fd2875ef315789512919c/tumblr_mzo1phKMGY1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Guy Fawkes</a>' handlers, if not Fawkes himself.</div>
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Regarding Snowjob, more specifically, at this rate, the leaks will finally all be released when he is well into his seventies and they are entirely irrelevant. In the meantime, this "former" Booz Allen employee, a man whose documents are now in the hands of <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/03deb7aa4942394a1460a08f7c99dbb8/tumblr_n06uteMtGO1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Pierre Omidyar</a> (who has a $250,000,000 contract with the NSA), gets to <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/a3647b18c8deb56815b7843c059f6609/tumblr_mzo149Q1Ac1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">micromanage</a> the global discourse on surveillance. </div>
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The same is true with <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/4647d8308c3569a23cb9ed59980fb556/tumblr_n0cr6qQg3x1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Julian Assange</a>. Here is someone that the Obama administration is alleged to have prepared a secret indictment against but the proof of this lies in another set of pseudoleaks, the Stratfor fiasco. Any intelligence buff that has been looking into <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/ab101ea3b1813fd82ed648df13bd7807/tumblr_n0f8sjzLxx1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">these things</a> for more than a couple of years noticed that, far from being an intelligence bonanza, as it was described, it was missing even the slightest mention of <a href="http://31.media.tumblr.com/b4fe5217830541e7737544b33a90ff2b/tumblr_n06x67RKqQ1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">Mitre</a> or Booz Allen. We later found out that the whole "data dump" was <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2012/03/07/lulzsec-frontman-sabu-was-fbi.html">done under the strict oversight of the Department of Justice</a> and all it ended up doing was nabbing a handful of hackers who went by the collective name of LulzSec. Painted as a government sting intended to nail Assange and Anonymous (another <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/4042b7a0d2f89d2c12bb9870e3e88d2c/tumblr_n0bgg9VIJf1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">state protected group</a>), all it did was incriminate a small cadre of geeks. Who knows what they were or weren't up to? Was Assange fooled by these ops into believing in a set of leaks that would end up smearing his credibility? I doubt it. It seems to me that if Julian knows so little about intelligence that he wouldn't recognize the bankruptcy of a data dump that contained <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/0fc16cab2a277fe2b9457a221b15328e/tumblr_n0ku6p7pha1tqw355o1_1280.jpg">no real revelations</a> then, at the very least, he shouldn't be trusted as an informed source on these issues.</div>
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Yet another thing bears mentioning here and it is this. Before Snowden came along, a Google search for terms like Mitre and "Booz Allen" yielded pages and pages of hits and it didn't take long to find my own research implicating them in both the Echelon Security State and <a href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/11/911-its-time-for-america-to-pick-up_25.html">9/11</a>. After the arrival of Edward's whiteout, this is no longer the case. Remember, nearly all internet portals, websites, and social media platforms rely, for its base material, on what can be found at Google. What most of us call reality starts with a Google search. Rewriting history has been perfected. Orwell's Ministry of Information lives. </div>
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Can you say DIGITAL BOOK BURNING?!?</div>
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Please see Kevin Ryan's excellent piece on the risks of trusting Snowden <a href="http://digwithin.net/2014/01/01/snowden/">here</a>.</div>
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ALSO SEE THE FOLLOWING</div>
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<a href="http://beatingmychest.blogspot.com/2014/02/911-research-you-never-seen.html">911 Research You've Never Seen?</a></div>
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<a href="http://beatingmychest.blogspot.com/2014/02/2001-resurrecting-ptech-story.html">Resurrecting the Ptech Story</a></div>
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<a href="http://beatingmychest.blogspot.com/2014/02/2003-research-of-mine-on-booz-allen.html">Research on Booz Allen</a> (Recently Acquired by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/business/bin-laden-family-liquidates-holdings-with-carlyle-group.html">Carlyle Group</a>)</div>
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<a href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/10/911-revolution-in-military-affairs.html">911: A Revolution in Military Affairs</a></div>
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<a href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/10/911-and-echelon-key-players-unearthed.html">911: Key Players Unearthed</a></div>
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<a href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/10/911-and-greenberg-familia.html">911 & the Greenberg Familia</a></div>
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<a href="http://echkelon.blogspot.com/2010/07/following-zakheim-and-pentagon.html">Following Dov Zakheim & the Pentagon's Missing Trillions</a></div>
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<a href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/11/911-its-time-for-america-to-pick-up_25.html">911: It's Time to Grab the Baton!</a></div>
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<a href="http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/01/371047.shtml">Multiple Outfits Implicated in 911 Still Getting Highest Level Gov't Contracts</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLv-_w2Wtpi5POA1ZA7_0b5yHvgKxGQJ2QooufuFkI6XRttN3UneKTtehF6Xoz_17Z2gbgQlHTfAlyhzmGtdElV09YpNUd-D9dXRohH5WDqbDcOGbKkmLEGXw9-LXULByoolop2YXGWioI/s1600/IMG_20140207_122021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLv-_w2Wtpi5POA1ZA7_0b5yHvgKxGQJ2QooufuFkI6XRttN3UneKTtehF6Xoz_17Z2gbgQlHTfAlyhzmGtdElV09YpNUd-D9dXRohH5WDqbDcOGbKkmLEGXw9-LXULByoolop2YXGWioI/s400/IMG_20140207_122021.jpg" /> </a> </div>
Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-22095307230825826922014-02-11T07:11:00.001-05:002014-02-11T07:21:30.780-05:00Regarding Foerster's Elongated Skulls the Alleged Analysis<p dir="ltr">Foerster still won't tell us a single name regarding any alleged analysis of elongated skulls, neither a geneticist nor a university. He tells us, as do countless articles, that such an analysis HAS BEEN released but when asked for even a summary of the analysis (NO analysis is directly referenced by any of them), we are told by him to be patient, patient regarding the fact that the headlines are all inaccurate, and that there still isn't a single geneticist or university willing to associate themselves with an analysis we're not allowed to lay eyes on. So far from anything scientific is this whole mess that we are, essentially, being asked to make a leap of FAITH because the science, apparently, isn't there.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It makes, in the archaeological world, a laughing stock out of esoteric archaeology in general. If the analysis is not available to anyone, let alone its source, then it's simple - don't say that it is!</p>
<p dir="ltr">I tried once to bring up the archaeology that still needs to be done at Tassili n'ajjer in an archaeological forum but because one of the photos I provided was Foerster's, I drew a lot of hostility. It ended up killing my attempt at such a discussion.</p>
<p dir="ltr">As long as his proofs, like secret trials, are hidden from us and headlines keep coming that are inaccurate, Brien's material will be a continued obstacle to questioning the "official" archaeological narrative, at least among CRITICAL scientists.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9YdSPv_s2RP3eXcm0egTOT1Bw64OT4X96J1Gsy18MA9HEye7kYBeUvz98NvL5O_Ip-z-8Sd26a9JITEBDbFf0es-_N2Pv5w-XM0NS_-vHSOvGNJV2MGFp4koEHXB6G5EW9q1113BBGCGp/s1600/IMG_20140211_071948.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9YdSPv_s2RP3eXcm0egTOT1Bw64OT4X96J1Gsy18MA9HEye7kYBeUvz98NvL5O_Ip-z-8Sd26a9JITEBDbFf0es-_N2Pv5w-XM0NS_-vHSOvGNJV2MGFp4koEHXB6G5EW9q1113BBGCGp/s640/IMG_20140211_071948.jpg"> </a> </div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-5609867340560812392014-02-08T21:32:00.001-05:002014-02-08T21:32:13.390-05:002001: Resurrecting the Ptech Story<p dir="ltr">BOSTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - It is premature to draw a "terrorist" link in the probe of Ptech, a small Boston-area software firm that was searched by federal agents, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts said on Friday. </p>
<p dir="ltr">"The search was conducted in connection with an on-going financial crime investigation. Media characterizations of this as a terrorist investigation are premature," Michael Sullivan, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said in a statement.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Sullivan confirmed that federal and state investigators searched the offices of Quincy, Massachusetts-based Ptech without incident early on Friday.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The affidavit filed in support of the search warrant was under a court-ordered seal and no further information about the search warrant could be disclosed, Sullivan said.</p>
<p dir="ltr">ABC News had reported earlier on Friday that Ptech was secretly controlled by Qassin al-Kadi, one of 12 Saudi businessmen accused of funneling millions of dollars to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda militant network.</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr">In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush Administration designated al-Kadi as a terrorist entity, citing a relationship with a Saudi charity called Muwafaq Foundation, or "<b>Blessed Relief</b>" that is said by the government to transfer money from wealthy Saudi citizens to Al Qaeda. [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030709140226/http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_news&Number=348231#Post348231">Source</a>]<br>
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<p dir="ltr"><br>
<b>The Blessed Relief</b> is no stranger to the CIA or any other US government agency involved in Kosovo. This was one of the "charities" which supported the CIA's "freedom fighters."</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr">""Bin Laden’s kind offer of "humanitarian help" in 1994 has been used repeatedly ever since to fund terrorism in Albania. Many terrorists have posed as "humanitarian workers" since. <b>Secret KLA training camps, which the CIA and SAS also used, were created in Northern Albania by Iran and other countries "using Islamic educational institutions and projects for the development of rural communities as a front.</b>" </p>
<p dir="ltr">Back in 1999, "a Saudi government audit acquired by US intelligence showed that 5 of Saudi Arabia’s top business executives ordered the National Commercial Bank (NCB), the kingdom’s largest, to transfer personal funds along with $3 million diverted from a Saudi pension fund to New York and London banks. The money was diverted into the accounts of Islamic charities, including Islamic Relief and <b>Blessed Relief</b>, that serve as fronts for Bin Laden." [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030709140226/http://www.antiwar.com/orig/deliso5.html">Source</a>]<br>
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<blockquote><p dir="ltr">The company's client list reads like a who's who of the high-tech industry, including companies such as IBM, Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc., Motorola Inc., Sprint Corp. and The Mitre Corp...[<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030709140226/http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,76491,00.html">Source</a>]<br>
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<blockquote><p dir="ltr">"Booz-Allen & Hamilton, in conjunction with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, runs the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College, while <b>O'Gara Protective Services (former U.S. CIA and Secret Service agents) protects the Saudi royal family and their property and provides Saudi forces with security training.</b>" [<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030709140226/http://www.dyncorp-sucks.com/oil_tree.htm">Source</a>]<br>
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<p dir="ltr">A fellow researcher added:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr">"Maybe along the lines of INSLAW, as 'The FBI has used Ptech’s software for financial tracking and internal budgeting' sounds remarkably similar to PROMIS."<br>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6f0yG0SZO0zdkC0giQwQZc_PA89HAAkUDdAKRfJpevsfPcNdpTHjYP4E1FfKhODc2_YANt_O8OL5gmejf1-I-ukvK5yfqAeKNgsxA2WPzrQNwoiaxCH8dLSVDqdLqe0YBXTLUGCHSZM3P/s1600/IMG_20140203_104556.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6f0yG0SZO0zdkC0giQwQZc_PA89HAAkUDdAKRfJpevsfPcNdpTHjYP4E1FfKhODc2_YANt_O8OL5gmejf1-I-ukvK5yfqAeKNgsxA2WPzrQNwoiaxCH8dLSVDqdLqe0YBXTLUGCHSZM3P/s640/IMG_20140203_104556.jpg"> </a> </div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-50680199598379037962014-02-06T13:18:00.001-05:002014-02-06T13:36:42.678-05:002003: Research of Mine on Booz Allen<p dir="ltr">Edward Snowjob WORKED at Booz Allen. Here's a little I put together 11 years ago on this company, a spy contractor he has, conveniently omitted from his "leaks".</p><p dir="ltr">ORIGINAL PIECE:</p>
<p dir="ltr">A company with strong ties to the atrocity of September 11, 2001 is also implicated in the intense digital harrasment experienced in the past couple of years by anti-war activists.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Let's get right to the meat, eh?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Big Brother Alive and Well at Yahoo<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.crazyjeff.net/yahoobug.html">http://www.crazyjeff.net/yahoobug.html</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">is an excellent piece from which the following is snipped:</p>
<p dir="ltr">~<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.boozallen.com/bahng/SilverDemo?PID=Home.html&NGPgID=HOME&contType=TABLE&dispType=HTML">Booz-Allen</a> is engaged in the creation of a program called "<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=1108">Magic Lantern</a>." This program is designed to figure out people's passwords so the military can have access to *ALL* email accounts...for the purpose of fighting terrorism. Magic Lantern insidiously will install a "<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=klez%2Cbadtrans%2C%22magic+lantern%22">virus</a>" on your computer so that when you next log in to your email using a password, Magic Lantern sends a copy of the password to a Military computer, and they can then access your email. This is all stuff I got to read in the Washington Technology (a magazine devoted to celebrating the newest technological contracts awarded on Capitol Hill). It was H IGHLY recomended to me that those of us that use our email to engage in social justice work be aware of these realities and change our passwords VERY Frequently, making sure to include numbers in our passwords.~</p>
<p dir="ltr">Now, many of you may remember the enormous disruption that occurred last year in the online activist community with worms, virii, digital identity theft, email bombs, etc. and how it all targeted anti-war activists, pro-palestinian activists, and those trying to get to the bottom of 9-11. One can deduce that the authors and/or puppetmasters behind this barrage were all of the same mind and all perhaps had something to do with the advancement of the military position of Israel, the advancement of the "War on Terror" and the obscuring of any real investigation of the events of September 11, 2001.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In light of such, I consider it no accident that Booz, Allen, & Hamilton (cited above) are also heavily implicated by much of the serious research on 9-11.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Please read on.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from:<br>
Booz, Allen, and Hamilton Awareness<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Enronscam/message/297">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Enronscam/message/297</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Search&file=index&action=search&active_stories=1&stories_author=&stories_cat%5B%5D=&bool=AND&q=DARPA&startnum=1&total=26">DARPA</a>), which oversees the Total Information Awareness System (<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1458">TIA</a>), awarded 13 contracts to Booz Allen & Hamilton amounting to more than $23 million.</p>
<p dir="ltr">~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">TIA draws heavily on the private sector. Five of the eight contractors identified by the Center are involved in evaluating future contracts for the program. Grey E. Burkhart, an associate of Booz Allen Hamilton, identifies himself on his resume as “assistant project manager” of TIA system implementation. Even the phrase “Total Information Awareness” has a private pedigree—Visual Analytics, Inc., a Poolesville, Md.-based software developer and DARPA contractor, has applied for a trademark for the phrase.</p>
<p dir="ltr">~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">August 8, 2001: Booz, Allen, & Hamilton employee named head of NIMA (the National Imagery and Mapping Agency - the 'eyes of America')<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://cartome.org/new-nima.htm">http://cartome.org/new-nima.htm</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">~NIMA, the eyes of America, gets a new head one month before Operation Two Towers (9-11), one month AFTER Larry Silverstein takes over propietorship from Chase Manhattan and Citigroup.~</p>
<p dir="ltr">James R. Clapper named Director of National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet jointly announced the appointment of James R. Clapper Jr. as the new director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) on August 8, 2001. Clapper, who will become the first civilian head of the agency, succeeds Army Lt. Gen. James C. King who has headed NIMA since March 1998 and will be retiring from the Army later this year. Clapper was chosen for the position owing to his grasp of intelligence matters and his knowledge of the needs of NIMA's principal users, the combat commanders. The director has more than 37 years experience in intelligence, working at all levels and phases of the field. He retired from the Air Force in September 1995 as a lieutenant general after a four-year tour as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Since his retirement, he has served successively as executive vice president of Vredenburg, a systems acquisition services company headquartered in Reston, Va.; executive director, military intelligence for Booz, Allen & Hamilton, McLean, Va.; and recently as vice president, director of intelligence programs for SRA, International, Fairfax, Va.</p>
<p dir="ltr">~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">Back in 1999, "a Saudi government audit acquired by US intelligence showed that 5 of Saudi Arabia’s top business executives ordered the National Commercial Bank (NCB), the kingdom’s largest, to transfer personal funds along with $3 million diverted from a Saudi pension fund to New York and London banks. The money was diverted into the accounts of Islamic charities, including Islamic Relief and Blessed Relief, that serve as fronts for Bin Laden."</p>
<p dir="ltr">The company's client list reads like a who's who of the high-tech industry, including companies such as IBM, Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc., Motorola Inc., Sprint Corp. and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1619">The Mitre Corp</a>...</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Booz-Allen & Hamilton, in conjunction with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, runs the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College, while O'Gara Protective Services (former U.S. CIA and Secret Service agents) protects the Saudi royal family and their property and provides Saudi forces with security training."</p>
<p dir="ltr">~~~</p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from:<br>
Total Information Awareness Relies on Private Sector to Track Americans<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1458">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1458</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">DARPA has hired diversified defense industry giants Lockheed-Martin and Booz Allen & Hamilton for TIA and related projects. Booz Allen has won what may become the largest TIA contract, potentially worth $62 million over the next five years if DARPA exercises all the contract’s options.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Booz Allen employee Grey E. Burkhart’s resume notes that he is the “assistant program manager for the implementation of an advanced collaborative analysis system for the counterterrorism and intelligence communities,” which he identifies as “Total Information Awareness (TIA) System Implementation.” DARPA spokeswoman Walker told the Center that Burkhart is not an employee of the government.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Burkhart has had more than 25 years of experience in strategic security, intelligence, and telecommunications. Working in both the private and public sectors he was a career intelligence officer, CEO of Allied Communications Engineering, and has become a “recognized expert on in the global proliferation of information technology.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">Burkhart’s resume also notes that he was a member of Booz Allen’s Homeland Security Coordination Center and Tiger Team, for which he “conducted analysis of new legislation and executive orders and assessed their impact on current and future business.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">~~~</p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from:<br>
Mitre Corp., Warren Buffet, Global Hawk, and September 11, 2001<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1663">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1663</a><br>
~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">The NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) demonstrated its new satellite capabilities (NRO payload launched into space on September 8, 2001) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA - "the eyes of America") gained a new director one month prior to that fateful day. Considering all of this, one gets a pretty clear picture of where all those 'Star Wars' dollars went. James R. Clapper is the man named to head NIMA and he comes from Booz, Allen, & Hamilton which is a client for Blessed Relief, the charity said to be a front for Osama Bin Laden. Booz, Allen, & Hamilton also works closely with DARPA. DARPA is, of course, closely aligned with John Poindexter, head of Total Information Awareness and the guy that called the shots in Iran-Contra.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">~~~~~~~~~~</p>
<p dir="ltr">FBI Data Mining with trojans, worms and warez<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/10107">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/10107</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Total Information Awareness Relies on Private Sector to Track Americans <br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1458">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1458</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">(From last year) Total Information Oppression: Now my mailing list has been killed!<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1428">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1428 </a></p>
<p dir="ltr">From eight months ago: PLEASE HELP - DEATH THREAT<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1695">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1695</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">The NRO, September 11, UAV's, Echelon, ARPANET, the NSA, the Israeli Space Agency, NIMA, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, NASA, Ron Sega, Vince Foster, Global Hawk, TIA, Mitre Corp., Star Wars (SDI), Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia (and his satellite investments), and the NMCI.<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1622">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1622</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Also see:<br>
Agent "Souljah" Smiley's Last Stand<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1921">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1921</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">from which the following is snipped:</p>
<p dir="ltr">~snip~</p>
<p dir="ltr">Consider this: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which would later become the DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency, developed the internet. It was a DOD project before it was a public forum, which would later be turned over to the private sector for "management." DARPA it is that houses the Information Awareness Office which, in turn spawned TIA, the Total Information Awareness effort, headed by one John Poindexter, an Iran-Contra Felon that, like so many others, escaped retribution and now sits high up on the pyramid, under George W. Bush.</p>
<p dir="ltr">*</p>
<p dir="ltr">P.S. Recently, I ended a relative silence by hitting the web with a couple of pieces entitled '<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1921">Agent "Souljah" Smiley's Last Stand</a>' and '<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1924">Chemtrails, Mormonism, Halliburton, Meth, the West Nile Virus, and Zion</a>.' I posted from a relatively new addy and upon doing so, within a matter of a day of hitting Indymedia, several Yahoogroups, and Memes.org with the releases, the account received its first ever virus and worm attacks. I also got my first attempt by the dreaded <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.jsonline.com/news/wauk/jan03/112138.asp">NigeriaScam</a> to get ahold of my personal banking specifics. Pretty blatant aren't they?<br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2CHalliburton&btnG=Google+Search">Booz, Allen, & Hamilton and Haliburton (Dick Cheney's company)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2CMitre">Booz, Allen, & Hamilton and Mitre Corp. (another company with strong ties to the events of September 11, 2001)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2C%22Brown+and+Root%22">Booz, Allen, & Hamilton and Brown and Root (evil subsidiary of Halliburton)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2CTRW">Booz, Allen, and Hamilton and TRW (big NRO contractor)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2C%22Global+Hawk%22">Booz, Allen, & Hamilton and Global Hawk (the system used on September 11 to remotely smack some buildings)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2CNRO">Booz, Allen, and Hamilton and the NRO (on September 8, 2001, the NRO would run an exercise simulating the hijacking of airliners)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Booz%2CAllen%2CHamilton%2C%22Carlyle+Group%22">Booz, Allen, & Hamilton and the Carlyle Group (company houses ties between the Bushes and bin Laden)</a></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.namebase.org/main1/Booz_2Dallen-Hamilton-International.html">BOOZ-ALLEN HAMILTON INTERNATIONAL</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">~*~</p>
<p dir="ltr">P.P.S. ..a few more applicable snips..</p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from:<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/25/60minutes/main551091.shtml">All In The Family</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the defense policy board last month after it was disclosed that he had financial ties to several companies doing business with the Pentagon. </p>
<p dir="ltr">But Perle still sits on the board, along with former CIA director James Woolsey, who works for the consulting firm of Booz, Allen, Hamilton. The firm did nearly $700 million dollars in business with the Pentagon last year.</p>
<p dir="ltr">~</p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from:<br>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040815214200/http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=976">The Real Saudi Ties are U.S. Ties</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">"We’re doing a better job of sharing intelligence and collecting data, so we’re able to find, you know, able to anticipate" (President Bush) </p>
<p dir="ltr">Booz-Allen Hamilton (BAH), another global leader in strategy and technology consulting, runs the Military Staff College of Saudi Arabia. But BAH has its corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia. </p>
<p dir="ltr">On August 15th, 2002, Dale Watson, former FBIHQ, went to work for Booz. No one ever complained that it was Watson who was unwilling to connect the dots during the increased warnings on a pending attack against America in Summer, 2001, and it is clear why: Watson formerly worked for the CIA and seems to have political support from their headquarter. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Booz Allen is also supported by ex-CIA director James Woolsey, who became Vice President of BAH on July 15th, 2002. </p>
<p dir="ltr">In May 2003, Consultant News and Navy Weeks reports, that the government of Saudi Arabia, awarded Booz Allen Hamilton with a sole-source contract for naval consulting work worth $7.9 million with options that could take it to $95.3 million. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Financial interests win out over political embarrassment. Getting Booz Allen Hamiliton involved in an investigation, seems more unrealistic than ever.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk5LeITr1aKdnPjD_i-QlXuVsdXo7x1CszgJ6zBnGr6nN5KcyLW_JNZMKkZfdU1jLEBiSpIA4nRQp2zjuTOgwq757ndZEnp5f5O8Oa48tKOMxM-fyV49mbxTTONP6ZUoMca04P15STA1Fc/s1600/IMG_20140206_084352.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk5LeITr1aKdnPjD_i-QlXuVsdXo7x1CszgJ6zBnGr6nN5KcyLW_JNZMKkZfdU1jLEBiSpIA4nRQp2zjuTOgwq757ndZEnp5f5O8Oa48tKOMxM-fyV49mbxTTONP6ZUoMca04P15STA1Fc/s640/IMG_20140206_084352.jpg"> </a> </div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-18594741668002301842014-02-04T11:27:00.001-05:002014-02-04T11:27:06.102-05:00911 Research You've Never Seen?<p dir="ltr">AUTOMATIC PILOT AND 9.11 - An expert’s opinion<a href="http://www.newsmakingnews.com/911automaticpilot.htm">http://www.newsmakingnews.com/911automaticpilot.htm</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">A group of military and civilian <font color ="#0000ff"><a href="http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2845264#">US pilots</a></font>, under the chairmanship of Colonel Donn de Grand, after deliberating non-stop for 72 hours, has concluded that the flight crews of the four passenger airliners, involved in the September 11th tragedy, had no control over their aircraft. </p>
<p dir="ltr">In a detailed press communiqué the inquiry stated: “The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a superbly executed military operation carried out against the USA, requiring the utmost professional military skill in command, communications and control. It was flawless in timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as guided missiles and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their pre-selected targets.” </p>
<p dir="ltr">The report seriously questions whether or not the suspect hijackers, supposedly trained on <font color ="#0000ff"><a href="http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2845264#">Cessna</a></font> light aircraft, could have located a target dead-on 200 miles from take off point. It further throws into doubt their ability to master the intricacies of the <font color ="#0000ff"><a href="http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2845264#">instrument flight</a></font> rules (IFR) in the 45 minutes from take off to the point of impact. Colonel de Grand said that it would be impossible for novices to have taken control of the four aircraft and orchestrated such a terrible act requiring military precision of the highest order. </p>
<p dir="ltr">A member of the inquiry team, a US Air Force officer who flew over 100 sorties during the Vietnam war, told the press conference: “Those birds (commercial airliners) either had a crack fighter pilot in the left seat, or they were being maneuvered by remote control.” </p>
<p dir="ltr">In evidence given to the enquiry, Captain Kent Hill (retd.) of the US Air Force, and friend of Chic Burlingame, the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, stated that the US had on several occasions flown an unmanned aircraft, similar in size to a Boeing 737, across the Pacific from Edwards Air Force base in California to South Australia. According to Hill it had flown on a pre programmed flight path under the control of a pilot in an outside station. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Hill also quoted Bob Ayling, former British Airways boss, in an interview given to the London Economist on September 20th, 2001. Ayling admitted that it was now possible to control an aircraft in flight from either the ground or in the air. This was confirmed by expert witnesses at the inquiry who testified that airliners could be controlled by electro-magnetic pulse or radio frequency instrumentation from command and control platforms based either in the air or at ground level. </p>
<p dir="ltr">All members of the inquiry team agreed that even if guns were held to their heads none of them would fly a plane into a building. Their reaction would be to ditch the plane into a river or a field, thereby safeguarding the lives of those on the ground. </p>
<p dir="ltr">A further question raised by the inquiry was why none of the pilots concerned had alerted ground control. It stated that all pilots are trained to punch a four-digit code into the flight control’s transponder to warn ground control crews of a hijacking - but this did not happen. </p>
<p dir="ltr">During the press conference Captain Hill maintained that the four airliners must have been choreographed by an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). This system can engage several aircraft simultaneously by knocking out their on-board flight controls. He said that all the evidence points to the fact that the pilots and their crews had not taken any evasive action to resist the supposed hijackers. They had not attempted any sudden changes in flight path or nose-dive procedures - which led him to believe that they had no control over their aircraft. </p>
<p dir="ltr">THE NEWS, in an attempt to further substantiate the potential veracity of these findings, spoke to an Algarve-based <font color ="#0000ff"><a href="http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2845264#">airline pilot</a></font>, who has more than 20 years of experience in flying passenger planes, to seek his views. Captain Colin McHattie, currently flying with Cathay Pacific, agreed with the independent commission’s findings. However, he explained that while it is possible to fly a plane from the ground, the installation of the necessary equipment is a time-consuming process, and needs extensive planning. THE NEWS will publish a full interview with Captain McHattie in next week’s edition. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The FBI also came in for criticism for the various pieces of contradictory evidence it has published regarding the suspects. Questions are now being asked as to how incorrect information was given out regarding the ID cards of the suspects, and the seat numbers they supposedly occupied after boarding the flights. </p>
<p dir="ltr">None of the suspects named by the FBI appeared on any of the official passenger lists. A further point was how the FBI had managed to retrieve the passport of one of the suspects amid the molten and twisted remains of thousands of tons of steel and rubble brought about by the Twin Towers collapse. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Dr. Paul Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, and presently Senior Research Fellow at Stamford University, has lent his support to the independent inquiry findings. He also claims that Osama Bin Laden was not responsible for September 11th. The doctor has challenged President Bush to make public the so-called “irrefutable evidence” incriminating Bin Laden. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Colonel Donn de Grand said that if President Bush is lying it would not be the first time that the American people had been mislead by its government. He cited the recently published official government archives describing President Roosevelt’s duplicity in deceiving Americans about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which triggered the US entry into WWll. </p>
<p dir="ltr">He also highlighted the role of the country’s government in misleading its citizens in respect of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, and the events that brought about the Spanish American war in the late 19th, century. “Whilst considering who committed this act of war on September 11th,” he said, “albeit Russia, China, an Islamic country or NATO, we must also consider that the enemy may well be within the gates. </p>
<p dir="ltr">“Not for the first time the American public might be being mislead, by those with ulterior motives, into lending its support to a war, this time against Iraq, that has no bearing whatsoever on the interests of the people of the USA.” </p>
<p dir="ltr">So far the mainstream American news media has failed to publish or broadcast any details regarding the independent inquiry. Similarly, the White House, whilst having received a copy of the report, has remained silent on its findings. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Much more here:<a href="http://www.newsmakingnews.com/911automaticpilot.htm">http://www.newsmakingnews.com/911automaticpilot.htm</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from: </p>
<p dir="ltr">Planes of 911 Exceeded Their Software Limits<a href="http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1049">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1049</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">Two of the aircraft exceeded their software limits on 9/11. The Boeing 757 and 767 are equipped with fully autonomous flight capability, they are the only two Boeing commuter aircraft capable of fully autonomous flight. They can be programmed to take off, fly to a destination and land, completely without a pilot at the controls. They are intelligent planes, and have software limits pre set so that pilot error cannot cause passenger injury. Though they are physically capable of high g maneuvers, the software in their flight control systems prevents high g maneuvers from being performed via the cockpit controls. They are limited to approximately 1.5 g's, I repeat, one and one half g's. This is so that a pilot mistake cannot end up breaking grandma's neck. </p>
<p dir="ltr">No matter what the pilot wants, he cannot override this feature. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The plane that hit the Pentagon approached or reached its actual physical limits, military personnel have calculated that the Pe ntagon plane pulled between five and seven g's in its final turn. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The same is true for the second aircraft to impact the WTC. </p>
<p dir="ltr">There is only one way this can happen. </p>
<p dir="ltr">See <a href="http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1049">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1049</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">Once you have absorped the above information, please se what lies below. </p>
<p dir="ltr">I have comments below, and research. If you do not get this email in HTML form, with pictures, email me and I will send you a copy direct. </p>
<p dir="ltr">General L. Limnitzer in 1962: "We could blow up a drone...Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation...We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Flordia cities and even in Washington...aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area....."<a href="http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1655">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1655</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">August 8, 2001: Booz, Allen, & Hamilton employee named head of NIMA (the National Imagery and Mapping Agency - the 'eyes of America') <a href="http://cartome.org/new-nima.htm">http://cartome.org/new-nima.htm</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">From Biographies: Federal Government: Civilian and Military<a href="http://officialnoticesonline.com/bios.html">http://officialnoticesonline.com/bios.html</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">James R. Clapper named Director of National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet jointly announced the appointment of James R. Clapper Jr. as the new director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) on August 8, 2001. Clapper, who will become the first civilian head of the agency, succeeds Army Lt. Gen. James C. King who has headed NIMA since March 1998 and will be retiring from the Army later this year. Clapper was chosen for the position owing to his grasp of intelligence matters and his knowledge of the needs of NIMA's principal users, the combat commanders. The director has more than 37 years experience in intelligence, working at all levels and phases of the field. He retired from the Air Force in September 1995 as a lieutenant general after a four-year tour as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Since his retirement, he has served success ively as executive vice president of Vredenburg, a systems acquisition services company headquartered in Reston, Va.; executive director, military intelligence for Booz, Allen & Hamilton, McLean, Va.; and recently as vice president, director of intelligence programs for SRA, International, Fairfax, Va. He was a senior member of the Downing Assessment Task Force, which investigated the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996. NIMA, established in October 1996, is responsible for the collection of imagery through the use of both national and commercial assets. It advises others responsible for collecting imagery using theater and tactical reconnaissance assets. NIMA produces timely imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial information in support of the nation's military forces, policymakers, and civil customers. </p>
<p dir="ltr">From: 9-11: Mitre Corp., Warren Buffet, Global Hawk, and September 11, 2001 <br>
Posted by: souljah on Jan 16, 2003 - 06:14 PM </p>
<p dir="ltr">The NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) demonstrated its new satellite capabilities (NRO payload launched into space on September 8, 2001) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA - "the eyes of America") gained a new director one month prior to that fateful day. Considering all of this, one gets a pretty clear picture of where all those 'Star Wars' dollars went. James R. Clapper is the man named to head NIMA and he comes from Booz, Allen, & Hamilton which is a client for Blessed Relief, the charity said to be a front for Osama Bin Laden. Booz, Allen, & Hamilton also works closely with DARPA. DARPA is, of course, closely aligned with John Poindexter, head of Total Information Awareness and the guy that called the shots in Iran-Contra. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Hyperlinks considered, this piece pretty much sums up what really went down on September 11, 2001. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Mitre Corp., Warren Buffet, Global Hawk, and September 11, 2001 </p>
<p dir="ltr">Carl Hammond, 37, was a passenger on board the hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He also was a physicist for Mitre Corporation, a company that peddles Global Hawk (remote piloting) technology. The strongest case has been made that Global Hawk was employed in electronically hijacking the planes in question regarding September 11. Warren Buffet heads Mitre Corp. as well as Berkshire-Hathaway, another CIA front for the sale of remotely controlled pseudo-terrorism. </p>
<p dir="ltr">As well, Mitre Corp. has been working with Lincoln Laboratories (at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology - MIT) on many pursuits deemed necessary to the accomplishment of the human-machine interface. Recently, NASA's Ames Research Center web site reported, scientists were able to land a Boeing 757 by nerve impulses alone - by thinking about it. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Buffet's other company, Berkshire-Hathaway, makes Biz Jets, which CEO's all over the world are buying up as the latest fad. Of course, this means that Warren Buffet, consumate money launderer and second in wealth in the US only to Mr. William Gates, the very man that may have been at the heart of the play calling on September 11 (he was at least playing along), makes the machines the powerful fly in. Fear of death always works, doesn't it? </p>
<p dir="ltr">During his career, Carl Hammond worked at MIT, the institute mentioned above that is seeking total cyborg awareness. Carl Hammond ALSO worked on Global Hawk technologies, it is safe to presume, when he worked at Georgia Tech, home to DARPA's UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) program. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) demonstrated its new satellite capabilities (NRO payload launched into space on September 8, 2001) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA - "the eyes of America") gained a new director one month prior to that fateful day. Considering all of this, one gets a pretty clear picture of where all those 'Star Wars' dollars went. James R. Clapper is the man named to head NIMA and he comes from Booz, Allen, & Hamilton which is a client for Blessed Relief, the charity said to be a front for Osama Bin Laden. Booz, Allen, & Hamilton also works closely with DARPA. DARPA is, of course, closely aligned with John Poindexter, head of Total Information Awareness and the guy that called the shots in Iran-Contra. </p>
<p dir="ltr">My question is no longer, "Who pulled it off?" My question is, "Were these people killed for knowing too much or were they witness protected." </p>
<p dir="ltr">Re: suspicious deaths.. (Score: 0) <br>
by Anonymeme on Jan 16, 2003 - 11:54 PM <br>
I noticed some times ago that the company Booz had lost 3 employees in the Pentagon : Gerald Fisher, Terence Lynch, and Ernest Willcher. They had apparently to work for the government on Trailblazer 1, a system required to spy communications.. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Scott Powell and Edmond Young, members of BTG Inc, died in Pentagon too. RPI, acquired by BTG Inc in april 2001, awarded $11.2 Million Contract by Department of Justice : under the contract, RPI will support exercises to help prepare state and lo cal officials to respond to possible chemical or biological terrorist attacks... They did the job so good that BTG Inc was acquired by Titan Corp on september 20, 2001, a probable coincidence.. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Did these employees know too much ? </p>
<p dir="ltr">Anyway.. these deaths seem bizarre if we consider that the touched part of the Pentagon had just been renovated, and offices were not yet completed.. </p>
<p dir="ltr">bischar </p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from<a href="http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2002_06_09_xymphora_archive.html">http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2002_06_09_xymphora_archive.html</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">A number (it hasn't been reported exactly how many but it was called 'a small group of business leaders') of CEO's from New York, including at least one from the WTC, were attending a breakfast meeting at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska on the morning of September 11, guests of Warren Buffett (isn't he the same guy who has guaranteed that the United States will suffer a nuclear attack by terrorists?). Offutt Air Force Base is the base that Bush flew to on September 11, supposedly becau se it is the headquarters of the E-4B, the aircraft which is the "command, control and communications center to direct U.S. forces, execute emergency war orders and coordinate actions by civil authorities". He wanted to be on the scene in person, particularly as there was fear that the terrorists were in possession of the secret codes by which they could electronically impersonate Bush in giving military commands (interesting how we have heard nothing more of that story). So how much of a coincidence is it that this meeting with Warren Buffett was at the same air force base that Bush flew to (apparently Bush intended to fly directly to Offutt, but had to stop for refuelling in Louisiana)? Is it possible that Buffett's invitation to a bunch of 'important' New York City executives for a breakfast meeting at an air force base in Nebraska (just think about how weird that is!) was an attempt to save the live s of the invitees? </p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22warren+buffett%22%2C%2...">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22warren+buffett%22%2C%2...</a>. </p>
<p dir="ltr">MITRE Globetrotter in Omaha, Nebraska <br>
... United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM for short) Headquarters on Offutt Air <br>
Force Base ... Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the country (next to Bill ... <br>
<a href="http://www.mitre.org/news/gt/omaha/omahaltr.shtml">http://www.mitre.org/news/gt/omaha/omahaltr.shtml</a> - 12k - Cached - Similar pages </p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is s n i pped from <a href="http://www.mitre.org/">http://www.mitre.org/</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">MITRE is a not-for-profit national resource that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the DOD, the FAA, and the IRS, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and Northern Virginia. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from<a href="http://www.mitre.org/technology/mtp01/sensors.shtml">http://www.mitre.org/technology/mtp01/sensors.shtml</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">MITRE is supporting DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate (program agent) on the Affordable Moving Surface Target Engagement (AMSTE). The AMSTE program is developing technologies to affordably engage moving surface targets such as tanks, tactical ballistic missile transporters, and small boats from long ranges and in all weather conditions. </p>
<p dir="ltr">MITRE is experimenting with the integration of advanced Internet technologies into the ISR sensor ground station. The ISR Information Service (ISRIS) Mission Oriented Investigation and Experimentation (MOIE) will develop a prototype information portal that provides ISR sensor data and ground station service accessibility to the battlespace internets: the Intelinks, the Air Force Join t Ba ttl espace Infosphere (JBI), the Navy Network Centric Warfare, and the Army First Digital Division. In FY01, the project will demonstrate the ISRIS concept using the Global Hawk UAV platform. Global Hawk is an excellent platform for this pathfinding research since it has no established TPED support systems today, and it's multiple sensor data types Electro-Optic (EO), Infra-Red (IR), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) make it an especially rich information source. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Total Mitre Corp. Awareness<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ctrl/message/23439">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ctrl/message/23439</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">"The company was working on the developement of remote control aircraft and on Sept 6th I recieved word that some of my people may have been released from China to work on a change over of ATC Radar. I was told they had been contacted to be in a work detail in the WTC which was being renovated." <a href="http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1593&mode=thread&...">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1593&mode=thread&...</a>. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Boeing has established a new division to expand the "unmanned systems" market and speed development of pilotless combat aircraft. The immediate focus is on the USAF X-45 UCAV. Once this aircraft has been proved to a sufficient degree, the division plans to develop prototypes for gathering intelligence, area surveillance and combat reconnaissance. The X-45A is undergoing taxi testing in preparation for its first flight during the first half of next year. Initial low speed taxi testing confirmed the autonomous operation of the vehicle as well as its responsiveness to controller commands. The X-45A demonstrator system consists of an air vehicle, mission control system and a storage container. The air vehicle has a stealthy, tailless, 27-foot long airframe with a 34-foot wingspan. It can carry a variety of precision strike munitions. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.beyond2000.com/news/Nov_01/story_1302.html">http://www.beyond2000.com/news/Nov_01/story_1302.html</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-01n.html">http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-01n.html</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">Utilizing Artificial Intelligence to Achieve Dominant Battlespace Awareness/Knowledge </p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usacsl/divisions/std/branches/keg/98TermII/maai1.htm">http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usacsl/divisions/std/branches/keg/98TermII/maai1.htm</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">From which the following is snipped (from the section of the document on Key Technologies): </p>
<p dir="ltr">The Tier II-plus High Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(HAE UAV) are Global Hawk and Dark Star. These systems will provide broad-area, all weather, day-night identification of both fixed and mobile targets on land, air and sea. Precise coordinates will be developed utilizing on-board Global Positioning System(GPS). Communication relays on board will provide 200 mile radius line of sight communication, from the 45-60,000 foot altitude ranges where these UAVs operate [3]. </p>
<p dir="ltr">the following is snipped from Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle Technology </p>
<p dir="ltr">After September eleventh, UCAV technology took a big step. Although not confirmed by the Pentagon, it is reported that an RQ-1 Predator spy plane equipped with hellfire missiles flew over Afghanistan and conducted the first successful remote-controlled bombing raids in history (Bowmaster). The operators remained safely on the ground out of harms way. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Boeing, with backing from DARPA, is on the cutting edge with the development of the X-45, which is scheduled for flight test in early 2002. With an estimated range of 500 to 1,000 miles and a payload of 1,000 to 3,000 pounds, Boeing intends to increase effectiveness and survivability of manned combat aircraft by sending their UCAV in first to clear out radar, antiaircraft sights, and surface to air missile (SAM) sights. With two prototypes already complete, they are moving forward with their vision of air combat tomorrow.</p>
<p dir="ltr">the following is snipped from<a href="http://diescon2.syncorp.com/diescon/OrderGuide/Teammates/capabilities.asp?CODE=HAI">http://diescon2.syncorp.com/diescon/OrderGuide/Teammates/capabilities.asp?CODE=HAI</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">Houston Associates, Inc., located in most large Federal government engineering centers, is a leading edge engineering technologies company, that has been involved with a wide variety of DoD Information Technologies requirements for more than 15 years. HAI has provided outstanding engineering capabilities and transitional development services to a wide range of clients. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Among our Federal client base are DARPA, DISA, DIA, DSWA, USAF, US Army, several CINCs, and Federal Agencies. Each is supported with engineering capabilities from Network (MAN&WAN), ATM requirements (Red and Black systems), Mission Control Support Element Engineering Services employing leading edge Information Technologies for the UAV-Predator, UAV-Global Hawk, and other relate systems. HAI supports and is under contract to provide engineering services to the NASA Manned Space Flight Program at Marshall and Johnson Space Flight Centers. HAI is also doing network site work at Birk Test Center, Edward AFB, California. Our commercial client base included Raytheon, Sprint, Lockheed Space, an Lockheed SkunkWorks, to name a few. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Global Hawk, Artificial Intelligence, Boeing, DARPA, and September 11 <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/12427">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/12427</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">The following is snipped from<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/10954">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/10954</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">Agent Smiley, Dick I have more on the 757 order to China. The reason 757 were ordered was because China wanted 747s but the Boeing could not ramp up in time to meet the order. Since 757 would be the predominant plane used at all Chinese airports using remote and ROTHR they would become the standard in the industry along with Raytheon. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Soon after September 11, 2001, China was admitted into the World Trade Organization. They had apparently fulfilled their end of the bargain. Brzezinski's plan to include China and therefore blunt its sharpness in its ambitions globally was not going to be implemented without a little token from them. <br>
"The company was working on the developement of remote control aircraft and on Sept 6th I recieved word that some of my people may have been released from China to work on a change over of ATC Radar. I was told they had been contacted to be in a work detail in the WTC which was being renovated." </p>
<p dir="ltr">I think they were fitting it with a beacon. In a few days, a lot would be at stake for a lot of powerful interests. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Despite the U.S. spending millions to defend satellites from its own high-powered laser weapons, many of these computers in orbit still obey commands without authenticating their source. Remember, US space stations experienced disruption of their satellite communications on that day. SOMEONE had access to highly sensitive frequencies of transmission.<a href="http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1621">http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1621</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.humanunderground.com/11september/pent.html">http://www.humanunderground.com/11september/pent.html</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr">Independent Flight 77 - Pentagon Event Investigation </p>
<p dir="ltr">This is a work in progress <br>
EXPECT CHANGES AND ADDITIONS </p>
<p dir="ltr">"And these blast points, too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise." <br>
Brief Statement <br>
I hope it is understood that I mean no disrespect to the grieving loved ones of those lost on Flight 77 and at the Pentagon on S11. I respect your hardships fully. I feel that I should make a small statement here since this is getting some rather heavy traffic. I began this project in response to the Hunt the Boeing site, a French research effort into curiosities regarding the Pentagon crash site and the 'official line'. I was intrigued, but offended by the hostile tone of the presentation. I felt I had some more benign theories to answer complicated questions of my own. I began discussing them on the American Patriot Friends Network since that's where I learned of the French site. It's been non-stop since that moment. The suspicious timing of the Pentagon data release, within just hours of the developing dis cussions on APFN is rather curious. </p>
<p dir="ltr">It has occurred to me that the theory has taken a turn toward the 'extreme.' This was not intentional. I merely started out to debunk the French site, a seemingly simple task with the data available. I rejected most of the 'radical' theories out-right, but research has compelled me to look at some very disturbing circumstantial evidence. I still hold a more pro-American viewpoint and at the same time realize the extreme nature of the situation I propose requires the most extreme of measures to be taken only in an emergency as grave as war. This is wartime thinking. This is only a theory. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The Theory <br>
In a nutshell... I assume American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked by terrorists as reported. What I question is the evidence linking Flight 77 to the event at the Pentagon. Specifically, if Flight 77's transponder was off, radar and radio contact also lost, then what evidence do we have that it was in fact Flight 77 that caused the Pentagon event? </p>
<p dir="ltr">We've learned that there exists technology to control and recover a hijacked airliner, even prevent the hijacking all together. We propose that American Airlines Flight 77 was remotely recovered. It was never near the Pentagon. The terrorists were captured by a waiting hostage rescue team and the passengers are safely sequestered away as special guests of the USG, probably participating in a federal witness security program. This would explain the U.S. reluctance to elaborate on the evidence and methods to link bin Laden. The U.S. has the terrorists captured and no one will know about the remote recovery. The civilians would naturally comply; they would not want to seem unpatriotic by messing with a very important investigation while the country is at war. </p>
<p dir="ltr">In an effort to conceal the recovery, a suitable distraction needed to be created... We suggest the Pentagon was deliberately struck by an unmanned, drone aircraft to conceal the details and evidence of Flight 77's recovery, an operation of strategic deception. The "planners" targetted the Pentagon specifically to LIMIT casualties. It was a section under renovation without the full compliment of employees; they were mostly military, expected to die for their country and so they did... (Realize: specific aim points calculated for specific damage patterns routinely selected and commented on during Gulf War 2 - They are not stupid.) What is implied is that opportunities for deception will be seized if it serves a purpose. The purpose, to hide a recovered airliner with hijacking terrorists on board. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Revisions and Clarifications <br>
Due to overwhelming confusion and misinterpretation I will be removing extraneous data points and early observations from the presentation. Recent optical analysis and accounting of 5 disturbed street-light poles clearly establish a corrected trajectory. Studying the analysis more closely leaves me with the impression that the alternate impact point, which I spent so much time pointing out, could be damage resulting from the impact of the engine under the RIGHT wing. (1) (2) (3) </p>
<p dir="ltr">In response to the recent 'Fescado-Bosankoe' "evidence" I have this to say... I never had it set in stone that I was committed to a smaller aircraft, that's why I removed the F16 comparison in the first place . After Dave began promoting his math and referencing my initial observation, I put the image back up as a matter of research record (et3 and et4). My estimations were very clumsy without taking into account foreshortening of the attack object as imaged caused by the angle of approach (approx 30 deg.) and the angle of the imaging lens. I'm using an unmanned 757 as my primary drone in the equation because we can establish the automated flight control systems on board and the ease with which it would convince observers of an American Airlines Flight 77. I am open to solutions - my investigation will continue to reflect the critical thinking and emerging theories as they present themselves. </p>
<p dir="ltr">If you haven't noticed, this whole thing, (S11) opened the public debate on and demonstration of unmanned aircraft from the start of the Afghan campaign with the Predator, then Global Hawk, and now discussion of the Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicle, or some order of those words. I expect the risk of hijack will be enough to push for unmanned civil air piloting. The technology is there; the tests were completed. From NASA: "The team tested several prototype GPS Landing System concepts using NASA 557 during 226 automatic approaches and landings." From Boeing: "The precision of global positioning satellite system (GPS) navigation, automated air traffic control functions, and advanced guidance and communications features are now available as part of the new Future Air Navigation System (FANS) flight management computer. [757-200]" They can't admit to it now - for why did they not use this technology to save the day on S11? If you answer that - you will see history doesn't happen by accident. <br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_government&Number=1016889&t=-1">http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_government&Number=1016889&t=-1</a> </p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_rtuI6LvqZxbfJ3zMA-2F2g7Lj8RZDCMWyjug7pGyiPUL7KF38qxoKgAd9FOgCKMLURBtifNG5q1Ry3k-iMLNoUFChI2IwH50FRF63iSfJ8tj81ztUXOvba_ad8LLmOTjs6Nm2x1KXsK/s1600/IMG_20140129_082057.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_rtuI6LvqZxbfJ3zMA-2F2g7Lj8RZDCMWyjug7pGyiPUL7KF38qxoKgAd9FOgCKMLURBtifNG5q1Ry3k-iMLNoUFChI2IwH50FRF63iSfJ8tj81ztUXOvba_ad8LLmOTjs6Nm2x1KXsK/s640/IMG_20140129_082057.jpg"> </a> </div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-25484370204055245112014-01-21T19:57:00.001-05:002014-01-21T19:57:02.270-05:00On the Cleanup Wars<p dir="ltr"><b>UNTANGLING THE OCTOPUS</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">by Steve Mizrach</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Noriega, Iraqgate, and BCCI</b><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Before he died in an ineptly performed 'suicide,' the young journalist Danny Casolaro was working on a book that he claimed tied together many of the 'gates' and 'miniscandals' surrounding the Bush presidency. The book identified the web which tied all the scandals together as the <b>"Octopus,"</b> a mythical creature with tentacles stretching everywhere. Perhaps the birth of the Octopus lies in the 1980 Presidential election; and its growth occurred under the eight years of the Reagan presidency. Casolaro soon found that the Octopus may have consisted of a 'shadow government' apparatus that went back even further than Bush and Reagan. But what's left of his notes seem primarily to focus on events in the 80s and 90s.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">It is very possible that in 1980, Bill Casey and other members of the Reagan team may have conspired with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages: they were afraid of an<b>"October Surprise"</b> which might damage Reagan's chances of defeating Carter. Sure enough, the hostages were released right as Reagan was being inaugurated, and in 1981, the first shipment of arms to Iran began. Gunther Rossbacher, an ex-Navy pilot, and two other foreign sources, insist that on October 21st and 22nd, Bush met with Iranian delegates in Paris. The "October Surprise" may have been how Bush and other Reagan team members located the Iranian 'moderates' that played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1984, the Boland amendment forbade any more military assistance to the Contras. So, in 1985, the underground "Enterprise" - Operation Yellowfruit - began selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to furnish weapons to the Contras. George Bush claims Iran-Contra has nothing to do with him, but other administration figures' records show he was at the secret meetings - Poindexter, in particular. Amiram Nir, an Israeli terrorism expert, insists he discussed Iranian arms deals with Bush, but that can't be confirmed... he died in a mysterious plane crash in Mexico in 1988.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">It turns out the <b>Iran-Contra</b> scandal may have been part of a larger arms-for-hostages deal. The Iranians needed weapons in their war against Iraq, and the Reagan administration felt that the Iranians might have been able to convince the Shiite terrorists in Lebanon to release the American hostages held there. Reagan claimed no "quid pro quo," but then he also claimed he really didn't remember much, either. In any case, additional hostages were seized after the 'non-deal', and many may remain in captivity today, including the Lebanon CIA station head. One man who may have known a great deal about the Iran-Contra business was <b>Manuel Noriega</b>, whose name came up in the 1988 Dukakis-Bush debates. Noriega knew about the Contra drug pipeline, because he was a pusher, himself, while on the CIA payroll throughout the 1980s, and during his trial in Miami in 1989, some testimony emerged which suggested he knew something about the Central American end of the Iran-Contra affair and where some on the missing money may have 'disappeared' into.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">On the Middle Eastern end, another man who was a delighted beneficiary of American generosity throughout the 1980s was Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Agriculture Department and other agencies gave Saddam agricultural credits worth millions of dollars which he used to purchase American attack helicopters, chemical weapons for using on the Kurds, and the components of a nuclear weapons program. It is suspected that the CIA and Justice Department overlooked, or aided, the Banco Nazionale Lavoro (BNL) of Italy while it funneled billions in military aid to Iraq. This recently burgeoning scandal, <b>"Iraqgate,"</b> suggests we were playing both sides against the middle during the Iran-Iraq war. We were selling arms to both the Iranians and the Iraqis, and the CIA at various points double-crossed both sides. It is no wonder that America is so distrusted in that part of the world. In any case, there were two men that knew too much, and when Bush became president, he had to clean them up, and he would wage two "cleanup wars" to do it.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">One link between Bush, Saddam, and Iran-Contra was the corrupt Middle Eastern bank, the <b>Bank of Commerce and Credit International</b> (BCCI). BCCI, it turns out, laundered drug money, financed CIA and Mossad covert operations, and helped Bush, Saddam, and others split over $250 billion in extortion from the sale of Persian Gulf oil. (BCCI also might have had links to the corrupt drug-money-laundering-and-CIA scandals involving Australia's <b>Nugan Hand Bank</b>.) Attorney General Richard Thornburgh squashed an investigation into First American Bankshares, secretly controlled by BCCI, in October 1990; and William von Raab, former U.S. customs official, was fired by Treasury Secretary James Brady for delving too deeply into BCCI. This may have a lot to do with the links between Prescott Bush, First American director Stephens, Bahrain, and Iraq. Bush's family were oilmen, and if there is anything he stood for, it was Big Oil and its interests in the Middle East. (It might be pointed out, incidentally, that it was Norman Schwarzkopf's father who helped boot out Mossadegh in Iran when he threatened to nationalize holdings of British Petroleum.) The mess was in place, and President Bush had a lot of cleaning up to do.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>The "Cleanup Wars"</b><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">The first "cleanup war" was so-called <i>Operation Just Cause</i> in Panama. We invaded with the ostensibly 'just' cause of arresting a drug dealer and bringing him to justice here in the U.S.. The fact that he was the leader of another country, and that this is a violation of international law, didn't raise a naysayer, although insiders knew that Noriega was working for us before Bush started to see him as a threat. He may have wanted to jail Noriega because of the Iran-Contra secrets he knew. The other ostensible reason was because of Bush family holdings in Panama. It seems that Prescott's friends in the Aoki Corporation of Japan have invested more than $350 million in Panama; their holdings include the luxury resort Caesar Park and the Mariott Hotel. Bush may have been afraid of Noriega nationalizing that property. While Bush claimed to be nailing a dealer, he replaced him with two other dope pushers. Panamanian president Guillermo Endara is a director of the bank used exclusively by the Medellin cartel, and vice president Guillermo Ford is part owner of Dadeland Bank of Florida, which stands accused of laundering South American drug money. This Bush cleanup cost 26 American and 2000 Panamanian (civilian) lives, and several million dollars. It's worth seeing the film <i>The Panama Deception</i>to see some of the chilling secrets of this operation, including hidden mass graves of murdered civilians.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">The second 'cleanup war' was Operation Desert Storm, with the purposes of ostensibly 'liberating' Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. It is clear that, in fact, administration official April Glaspie succeeded in goading Hussein into invading Kuwait by saying that the U.S. would not interfere. And that the CIA and NSC provided doctored sattelite photographs making it look like Iraq was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia, when in fact Iraqi troops were nowhere near the Saudi border; further, that the CIA deliberately payed no attention to Iraqi troop buildup prior to the invasion of Kuwait. And that the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, appearing under a pseudonym, told a false story about how Iraqi soldiers were ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. Saddam Hussein had been set up, and now so were the American people, who Bush promised this was about "jobs" and dealing with America's "VietNam syndrome."<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">The Desert Storm war never accomplished any of its supposed goals. Kuwait does not have 'democracy,' only a returned monarchy hell-bent on seeking blood vengeance on Palestinian citizens. Saddam Hussein was not toppled from power; and the Kurds who were incited to rise up against him received no U.S. help when Republican Guard American-made attack helicopters mowed them down. Saddam's chemical and nuclear arsenal were never eliminated. Instead, what was destroyed was the Iraqi infrastructure, causing thousands to suffer disease, hunger, and deprivation, in addition to the thousands who died in the 'smart' bombings which nonetheless hit plenty of civilian targets; and the environment of the Persian Gulf, when eco-terrorist Saddam Hussein dumped millions of gallons of oil out of his wells and set ablaze thousands of Kuwaiti oil wells. It was a pyrrhic victory, but not for American oil companies, who profited mightily from increased oil prices... and for George Bush, who used his "VietNam syndrome therapy" as an excuse to hold hundreds of parades celebrating his 'victory' nationwide with yellow ribbons and marching soldiers.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>The Wackenhut Connection</b><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">The Wackenhut Security Corporation of Miami, Florida, has long been suspected of being a CIA front. The right-wing politics of George Wackenhut, who had ties to Belgian fascists and South American death squads, are well known. But few people realize that Wackenhut, a small company with "only a few" employees, gets some choice assignments, including guarding nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons facilities, the Alaskan Oil pipeline, and several American embassies; or that its board of directors contains several luminaries from the FBI, CIA, and Army Intelligence, including Bobby Ray Inman. Wackenhut has led a covert crusade against whistleblowers at many nuclear power plants, using wiretaps to eavesdrop on them and various 'subtle' techniques to convince them not to talk; it also spied on Chuck Hamel, a critic of the Aleyska Oil Consortium's drilling policies, by setting up a fake environmental-law firm which sought to "pump" him for his sources. Wackenhut may have even used some operatives to try and help topple President Perez of Venezuela through a (failed) military coup, largely for money (rather than politics) it was given by Blanca Ibanez, the mistress of Jaime Luinschi, the former president.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Also, a Wackenhut employee named Ernesto Bermudez was using 1500 'employees' in El Salvador for things he admitted "you wouldn't want your mother to know about" to a reporter from Spy magazine. Candian PM Pierre Trudeau refused to allow Wackenhut to purchase a weapons-propellant plant in Quebec, and it was refused a permit to open a security facility in France because President Francois Mitterand said "we had just gotten rid of the CIA." Wackenhut maintained files on over 4 million suspected 'subversives' of all types, including civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, well into the 1960s, making it the largest private holder of such information. In 1975, after a Congressional investigation into domestic intelligence operations and connections to private firms, Wackenhut turned its files over to the Anti-Communist Church League of America based in Wheaton, Illinois, which is now defunct. Florida Governor Claude Kirk claims to have worked closely with Wackenhut to "fight organized crime," although insiders maintain they were doing anything but fighting the Mob.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">But there are direct links between Wackenhut and the 'Octopus'. It appears that Michael Riconsciuto, a convicted drug dealer, claims to have met with George Wackenhut, John Amarell (of Wackenhut's Executive Board), and Dr. John Philip Nichols (a CIA operative conducting shady activities on the <b>Cabazon Indian Reservation</b> in the California desert) in Las Vegas in the early 80s to discuss the theft of Inslaw's PROMIS software; he says Wackenhut asked him "how his software work was coming along." (Supposedly, Nichols was using the Cabazon reservation as his own private munitions proving ground, testing things ranging from super-lethal Fuel-Air Explosives and chemical-biological weapons to Electromagnetic Pulse <i>[EMP]</i> generators.) Ammarell confirms the meeting, but claims it was merely about the sale of a boat! Retired general Richard Secord arranged for the Wackenhut Corp. to work with Iraqi arms dealer Ihsan Barbouti; Wackenhut operative David Ramirez claims that he and Barbouti rode in a truck carrying chemical-weapons technology from Texas to Chicago, and then rode on a plane to Iraq. Ramirez indicates that he thinks Wackenhut may have been part of a "food stamp" scheme to get agricultural credits for Iraq which were in turn used to purchase nuclear-weapons technology, making Wackenhut part of the Iraqgate affair as well.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Assisting with Barbouti's arms schemes were two partners, James Tully (who sent Bill Clinton's 'draft-dodge' letter to ABC) and Jack Brennan, who currently works as director of administrative operations in President Bush's office. Brennan and Tully had been involved in a $181 million deal to supply uniforms for the Iraqi army, arranging them to be manufactured in Ceausescu's Romania, of all places. Other partners in that deal were Watergate felon John Mitchell and Sarkis Soghnalian, a Lebanese citizen who was credited with introducing Saddam Hussein to Gerald Bull, the inventor of the so-called "supergun." Soghnalian is currently in prison for selling 103 military helicopters to Iraq; and David Ramirez says that Wackenhut considered the Turkish man to be a "valuable client." Two thousand gallons of ferrocyanide - an important chemical-warfare binary ingredient - vanished from a Boca Raton cherry flavoring factory in 1990. That plant was guarded by - guess who - Wackenhut.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Barbouti owned shares in that company, and two others: TK-7, which makes a fuel additive that could extend the range of liquid-fueled missiles such as the SCUD, and Pipeline Recovery Systems, which coats pipes to make them useable in nuclear power plants. He admits having faked his own death several times, and having helped Moammar Khadafi build his infamous chemical-weapons plant at Rabta, Libya. Further, he owns about $100 million worth of real estate and oil-drilling equipment in Texas and Oklahoma. It is widely believed that the Middle Eastern architect is either currently dead (surprise), living in Jordan, or being kept in a CIA safe house in Florida. An engineering company owned by him in Frankfurt had a $552 million contract to build airfields in Iraq. And - no surprise here - Barbouti used the corrupt BCCI bank as his middleman in many deals.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>The CenTrust Connection: the S & Ls, the Mob, and BCCI</b><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">The S & L failures of '89 were a massive blow to the banking system. Over 200 small savings and loan banks went under - just under half of those in existence - and had their assets seized by the federal 'dummy' company, the Resolution Trust Corp. Largely, this was a problem created by deregulation legislation passed by the congressional banking committees - the legislation allowed the S & Ls to make investments that were extremely risky and fiscally unsound. In fact, the failure can also be seen as the result of several years of deregulation of many industries under the Reagan administration - deregulation that was "bought" by the very industries which were supposed to be policed. But where were the regulators who were supposed to be the 'watchdogs' of the industry? Almost across the board they were 'bought off' by S & L moguls like Charles Keating, paid to look the other way while the S & Ls invested in fraudulent real estate schemes and sham projects which collapsed after a few years. But to maintain a veneer of solubility for their creditors, many S & Ls actually turned to "junk bond" king Michael Milliken, managing to "puff up" their investment profiles with airy money. There may have been even more crooked things going on, as some recent articles suggest that some of the S & L swindle may have gotten into the hands of the CIA and used to fund the Contras- most funds coming from the failed Palmer National Bank and Vision Savings Bank in Houston.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Even more daring reports, such as a recent book by investigative reporter Peter Brewton, suggest the Mafia may have been involved with some of the bank fraud - as they most certainly were with the <b>Vatican Bank</b> scandal in Italy. Author Dan Moldea notes extensive connections between the Hollywood motion picture company MCA, the defense/nuclear contractor General Electric, the corrupt Teamsters' Union, and the Mob. Strangely, former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan had connections to all of the above. The fact that there are close Republican ties to the Teamsters, despite the party's overt anti-labor stance, is very curious; but it must be examined in the light of the Teamsters' "patriotic" support of "guns and butter" and other right-wing stances, and their links to the Mafia. (It is widely suspected that Richard Nixon may have pardoned Jimmy Hoffa after making a deal with the Teamsters to give money to his 1972 presidential campaign - yet another unwritten chapter in the Watergate saga, along with the revelations that he may have tried to frame the Democrats for the assassination attempt on George Wallace.) Anthony Summers believes that J. Edgar Hoover was blackmailed by the Mob for his homosexuality, and that is why the former FBI director continued to deny the pervasiveness of "organized crime." One of Brewton's most amazing revelations is that Bush may have actively attempted to conceal the Texas oil - organized crime - S & L - CIA links during the 1988 campaign: but so did Lloyd Bentsen, who told Dukakis it would be "a losing issue for our ticket!"<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">The cost for fixing the S & L mess - for returning the depositors in the banks all their savings - will be quite high. Another cost involved in the process will be the liquidation of nearly valueless assets owned by the S & Ls - such as acres and acres of undeveloped land out in the Southwest. The properties of the failed S & Ls are being sold by RTC for businessmen for a steal; and taxpayers are being asked to pick up a large part of the tab. Some estimate that the S & L cleanup may cost each and every taxpayer as much as $1000. Each and every taxpayer, of the 200 million who pay taxes! There are economists who feel the beginning wave of the S & L collapse may have contributed to the massive stock market crash of 1987, and that its impact led to other bank failures and a real estate 'bust' contributing to the 1990 recession. Crooked S & L operators received, on the average, 2.4 years in prison for ripping off America with their white-collar crimes. But a robber who steals $200 from a convenience store gets, on average, 7.8 years. One need not be a math wizard to see something glaringly wrong with that. Why have the federal prosecutors under the Bush administration been so slow to prosecute, and so lenient with their sentences? Could it be connected to the extensive amounts of money that Bush himself got from the S & Ls during his 1988 campaign?<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Was there also a link between the failed Savings & Loans and BCCI? It turns out, yes, and the (now defunct) <b>Miami CenTrust bank</b> chairman David Paul is the key. According to a NBC special on the S & L scandal, Dexter Lehtinen, the temporary appointee to the position of federal prosecutor for south Florida, claims he was obstructed by the government from serving subpoenas on many of the big figures connected to Paul. Lehtinen was never confirmed officially for the position after serving in it for several years - some say this was because of things in his background that might lead to a confirmation fight, but others feel it was because he was digging too deeply into CenTrust's failures. Lehtinen now claims that Paul may have bribed many local and federal officials to cover up for money laundering and secret Carribean accounts to sequester 'narcodollars.' Investigators found that Paul lived a lavish lifestyle, buying gold fixtures and priceless art treasures for his office in the CenTrust building. When CenTrust was starting to face insolvency, Paul found a cash influx from an unsuspected source - BCCI financier Farouk, who tried to use CenTrust to launder money from the Banco Nazionale Lavore (BNL) in Italy. The S & L scandal is, it seems, yet another arm within the Octopus.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Bush's Teapot Dome?: the INSLAW Affair</b><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">George Bush's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had a terribly corrupt administration. There were huge numbers of indictments, resignations, scandals, and accusations of corruption and coverrup. Housing and Urban Development, under Sam "the Invisible Man" Pierce, turned a blind eye as shifty Republican financiers raked in profits off of shady deals involving public housing. Savings and Loan regulators allowed S & L's all over the country to make ridiculously unsound investments and disappear into bankruptcy. But the corruption in the Reagan administration may have been nowhere more shocking than in the Department of Justice, whose anti-pornography crusader, Edwin Meese III, was accused of improprieties regarding the transfer of a company called Wedtech.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Bush's new Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh, may have done Meese one better, bringing the Department of Injustice one step further. For it now stands accused of being a software pirate - of having stole the <b>Inslaw PROMIS</b> database program from its creators without recompensating them. That PROMIS is a program that can be used to track political dissidents, among other things, has been noted by many commentators. Because William Sessions of the FBI was investigating Justice's possible role in the Inslaw/BNL affair, Attorney General William Barr suddenly launched an investigation of Session's misuse of his phone for making personal calls and allowing his wife to be at meetings - hardly the most major of offenses among government bureaucrats! Curious infighting as the ship went down, it seems.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">According to Riconsciouto, the INSLAW affair might have been, among other things, a political payoff for the role a former political operative and Justice Department official, Earl Brian, played in the October Surprise. INSLAW was originally a nonprofit organization basically of quasi-governmental nature, which went private in the 1980s in an effort to market its software commercially. PROMIS was marketed to law enforcement agencies as an efficient tool for tracking criminal cases. However, its versatility for use in such wide-ranging areas as political intelligence and monitoring caught the eye of the Justice Department - which would require modifying the program's original design. So Brian first tried to seize INSLAW Corp. in an illegally authorized "hostile takeover," and when that failed, basically stole the PROMIS software outright. Copies of the program were thought to be distributed or sold to, among others, Israel, South Africa, some Central American regimes, and perhaps Saddam Hussein - by the Bush administration - all without consent or compensation for the program's original authors. It is believed that some regimes even today still use chilling, modified versions of the program for tracking political dissidents.<br></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Is the Octopus Still Alive?: Mena, Arkansas and a Clinton Compromise</b><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Riconsciouto claims that Clinton, like Bush, has been "compromised" by the CIA. He says that he personally flew planes carrying illegal shipments of arms to and drugs from the Contra rebels which took off from a secret airstrip near Mena, Arkansas - one which apparently existed with the full knowledge and consent of then-governor Bill Clinton. He and others think that Clinton made a basic "deal" with Bush after he won -- Bush would not criticize Clinton or bring up too much about Whitewater or Mena airstrip, and in return Clinton would not pursue indictments against Bush Administration officials. Today, as the Clinton administration battles off a series of its own political scandals, writers for the alternative media still puzzle over the "mainstream" media's total refusal to look at whatever was going at Mena, in 1992 or now. Because then-governor Clinton may have been permitting the CIA to run a small scale "black operation" right in his own state. So it's obvious that Clinton has no interest in pursuing the Octopus, the question then becomes - even if his administration isn't involved, does it still thrive in its own shadowy centres?<br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Danny Casolaro may have been killed because he got too close to the truth. The Christic Institute may have been SLAPPed out of existence because of it. Even if the Octopus isn't still operating, there are likely to be various "tentacles" of it who want to cover up the roles that they played in it. It may have branched into things that Casolaro hadn't gotten around to investigating yet. Certainly it tied together a series of sinister forces and operations. George Bush was undoubtedly a key figure, but he isn't going to be running for President again. What's more tragic is the way that he and other co-conspirators may have basically gotten off scot-free. And at this point, it's too early to tell what role Clinton and his administration may or may not be playing in keeping the creature going. Which to me is more important than any unwise land investments he and his wife may have made during the 1980s.</p>
Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-49461870509856508902011-12-30T08:23:00.002-05:002014-01-01T19:16:06.932-05:00Redirecting ReadersMy work will continue, in new ways and more slowly as I find my way to a new style of net presence, at Facebook.<div><br></div><div>http://www.facebook.com/autonomous.anonymous<br><br><br><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">PEACE!</span></span></div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-59314054962283663592011-03-20T08:23:00.002-04:002011-03-20T08:26:46.732-04:00Mitre Consultant Murdered<span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">For more in Mitre Corporation, click </span><a style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/search?q=mitre">here</a><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">.</span><br /><br /><div id="main-article-info"> <h1>John Wheeler, US military expert, found dead in US landfill</h1> <p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone">Police are investigating death of former US government official John Wheeler after his body was found at dump</p><p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone">Associated Press</p><p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone"><br /></p><div id="article-wrapper" switch="on"> <div id="article-body-blocks"> <p>The body of a military expert who served in three Republican administrations was found dumped in a landfill over the New Year's weekend, and investigators said Monday they do not know who might have killed him.</p><p>Authorities say John Wheeler III, 66, was scheduled to be on an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on 28 December. Police say it's now not clear if he ever made that trip. His body was found three days later, on New Year's Eve, as a garbage truck emptied its contents at the Cherry Island landfill. His death has been ruled a homicide.</p><p>Wheeler, who served as an Army staff officer in Vietnam, later worked in the Reagan and both Bush administrations and helped lead efforts to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington. He also was the second chairman and chief executive officer of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.</p><p>His body was discovered on 31 December as a waste management truck emptied its contents at the Wilmington-area landfill. His death has been ruled a homicide.</p><p>Police have determined that all the stops made by the garbage truck on Friday before it arrived at the landfill involved commercial disposal bins in Newark, several miles from Wheeler's home in the historic district of New Castle.</p><p>Newark, Delaware police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall said investigators had been to Wheelers' house, which was roped off with police tape after his death, but that it could not be considered a crime scene.</p><p>"We don't have a crime scene at this point in time," said Farrall, adding that investigators still do not have any leads in the case.</p><p>Farrall said initial police reports that Wheeler was last seen getting off an Amtrak train in Wilmington last Tuesday were incorrect.</p><p>"The information that we have is that he was scheduled to take a train from Washington DC, to Newark on the 28th. We don't know if that occurred," Farrall said, adding that investigators don't know how long Wheeler might have been missing before his body was found, or where and when he was last seen.</p><p>Asked why Wheeler had not been reported missing, Farrall said the family was not in town at the time.</p><p>"That's why there was some delay in notification," he explained.</p><p>A graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Wheeler went on to study at Harvard Business School and Yale Law School.</p><p>Richard Radez, a longtime friend who also graduated from West Point and Harvard Business, said he exchanged e-mails with Wheeler on Christmas. On the day after Christmas, Wheeler sent Radez an e-mail expressing concern that the nation wasn't sufficiently prepared for cyber warfare.</p><p>"This was something that had preoccupied him over the last couple of years," Radez said.</p><p>James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, wrote in an article on the magazine's website that he had known "Jack" Wheeler since the early 1980s.</p><p>Wheeler, Fallows wrote, had spent much of his life trying to address "what he called the '40 year open wound' of Vietnam-era soldiers being spurned by the society that sent them to war."</p><p>Wheeler retired from the military in 1971, and went on to serve in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also was a special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force under President George W. Bush. He recently worked as a consultant for The Mitre Corporation, a nonprofit based in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Virginia, that operates federally funded research and development centers.</p><p>"He was just not the sort of person who would wind up in a landfill," said Bayard Marin, an attorney who was representing Wheeler and his wife, Katherine Klyce, in an ongoing legal dispute with a couple wanting to build a home near the Wheelers' in the historic district.</p><p>"He was a very aggressive kind of guy, but nevertheless kind of ingratiating, and he had a good sense of humor," Marin said.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/04/usa-us-politics">The Guardian</a><br /></p> </div> </div> </div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-46393838984104315132010-11-17T08:54:00.000-05:002010-11-17T08:56:57.365-05:00Smart ranchers, real sportsmen do not curse wolves<a href="http://missoulian.com/search/?l=50&sd=desc&s=start_time&f=html&byline=Guest%20column%20by%20MARTY%20ESSEN"><span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">by MARTY ESSEN</span></span></a><span class="hide source-org vcard"><span class="org fn"><br /><br /></span></span><p>I grew up in northern Minnesota, spent summers on my grandparents' and uncles' farms, and eventually married the daughter of a Minnesota farmer. In addition, my grandfather, uncles and father-in-law were all hunters.</p> <p>Why do I share this information? In 30 years of living in Minnesota I never once heard a farmer or a hunter complain about wolves. Now that I live in Montana, such complaints from hunters and ranchers are commonplace.</p> <p>Considering that Minnesota is just 55 percent the size of Montana yet supports six times more wolves, I have to ask myself: Are Minnesota hunters more skilled than Montana hunters? Are Minnesota farmers better at taking care of their livestock than Montana ranchers?</p> <p>While emotionally I'm temped to answer the question with a resounding "yes," intellectually I know there are also good hunters and ranchers in Montana. The problem is that right now it is the lazy/poor Montana hunters and ranchers who are most vocal about the wolf.</p> <p>One reason why Minnesotans complain less than Montanans is that wolves have always been in Minnesota. Even in the 1950s, when Minnesota had a bounty on wolves, the state still supported between 400 and 700 wolves.</p> <p>Here in Montana, a significant number of hunters and ranchers are having difficulty accepting change. They feel that Montana eradicated its wolves for a reason, and they don't see reintroduction as the righting of a wrong. Of those who accept reintroduction, many still want wolf numbers artificially "managed" to lower than natural numbers - as if wolves and game animals never coexisted before humans arrived!</p> <p>While nothing I can say will convince wolf-hating hunters to reconsider their position, perhaps they'd at least agree to stop calling themselves "sportsmen" or "sportswomen." Imagine if our beloved University of Montana football team only played opponents that fielded eight players? Few fans would rejoice as our team pummeled outmanned opponents each week, and the eventual national championship would feel hollow.</p> <p>Just as there is no sportsmanship in an 11-man team slaughtering an eight-man team, there is also no sportsmanship in hunters slaughtering game animals in an artificial ecosystem with few predators. Without predators, game animals become lazy and stop behaving naturally. Photographs of prideful hunters showing off their kills mean nothing if the hunters accomplished their feat in what is essentially a giant game farm.</p> <p>A big reason I've never heard a Minnesota farmer complain about large predators is because of the tradition of bringing the cows home at night. Granted, such a tradition is more practical on Minnesota farms, which usually have less acreage than Montana ranches, but Montanans have access to numerous other nonlethal solutions, such as flagging, portable electric fences, guard dogs, and range riders. Whether it's in Minnesota or Montana, a little extra work goes a long way.</p> <p>I salute the ranchers who understand that a wide variety of wildlife is part of what makes Montana such a great and unique state. There are plenty of places where they could raise their livestock with minimal predators, but they stay here and exert the extra effort to properly take care of their animals.</p> <p>On the other hand, no one should salute ranchers who complain about their cattle falling victim to wolves on public lands. Public lands belong to everyone - including those who see wolves as an asset. Ranchers who run their cattle on public lands do so at their own risk and should not expect any predator to understand the difference between livestock and natural prey.</p> <p>Wolves are the anti-laziness animal. They make game animals, hunters, and ranchers work just a little harder. While the game animals simply move on, many of the people in the equation have an attitude of entitlement; successful hunts or carefree livestock grazing are expected, not wished for.</p> <p>That attitude of entitlement may work in the short term, but eventually all the whining will backfire. After all, hunters and ranchers combined still make up a minority of Montana's population. So if you are a hunter who believes in a true fair chase, or a rancher who is capable of outsmarting a wolf, it's time to speak up. A group that's seen as nothing but a bunch of whiners will soon lose credibility.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: <a href="http://missoulian.com/news/opinion/columnists/article_eea584ac-f0c7-11df-9b4d-001cc4c002e0.html">The Missoulian</a></span><br /></p>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-19378545448654459112010-10-16T09:03:00.001-04:002010-10-16T09:05:30.332-04:00Why Alex Jones lies about William (Bill) Cooper<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/P-AKxKUP8C4?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/P-AKxKUP8C4?fs=1&hl=en_US" width="425" height="344" allowScriptAccess="never" allowFullScreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-89087360956927300542010-10-14T22:41:00.002-04:002010-10-14T22:43:57.747-04:00New Hampshire to Cage Medical Marijuana Growing Nurse for Two YearsThe headline says medical but the video does not mention medical and I am starting to think it is not (at least legally). However, this is exactly the kind of case that would be directly dealt with, by law, if California's Prop 19 passes. Many say that making it so that people trying to obtain something less harmful than alcohol, tobac...co, sugar, and caffeine should not necessitate that a person goes to the black market where can also be found far worse things. THAT'S the gateway!!<BR><BR><object style="background-image: url(http://i4.ytimg.com/vi/GbYGgaaA8Fk/hqdefault.jpg);" height="265" width="430"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GbYGgaaA8Fk?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GbYGgaaA8Fk?fs=1&hl=en_US" allowscriptaccess="never" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="265" width="430"></embed></object>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-20747582399434865042010-09-10T14:49:00.000-04:002010-09-10T14:50:16.303-04:00Water for animals whilst Bushmen thirst<h2><span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 0.85em;">by Survival</span></h2> <div class="entry"> <p><a href="http://www.survivalinternational.org/wilderness-safaris">Wilderness Safaris</a> operates a safari lodge on <a href="http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen">Bushman territory in Botswana</a>.</p> <p>Just days ago, with <a href="http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6415">the Bushmen launching an appeal</a> against the Botswana government’s position to deny them water in their desperately dry home land, we read that <a href="http://www.wilderness-safaris.com/news/press_release_detail.jsp?id=19626">Wilderness is mercifully stepping in to relieve thirst</a> in another area it works in.</p> <div style="display: block;"><img src="http://assets.survivalinternational.org/pictures/50/BOTS-BUSH-FW-164_screen.jpg" width="450px" /></div> <p>This time, it is the animal population of Hwange, Zimbabwe who will receive the company’s blessing.</p> <p>’Water is life’, it says. So far, ‘Wilderness Safaris and Wilderness Trust have been helping out in keeping some 22 diesel pumps working throughout winter so that our wildlife will survive.’ </p> <p>They have now installed a series of windmill pumps to make the animals’ supply more environmentally friendly.</p> <div class="intheirwords" style="float: right; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); color: rgb(61, 61, 61); letter-spacing: -0.05em; font-size: 1.25em; font-weight: bold; width: 250px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <div style="float: left; width: 15px; font-size: 60px; padding-left: 5px; margin-top: 25px;"><span style="color: rgb(222, 119, 94);">‘</span></div> <div style="float: left; width: 190px; padding: 10px 10px 15px; line-height: 150%;">it is gratifying to see [the animals] slake their thirst.<small style="text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 0.65em; display: block; color: rgb(85, 85, 85); line-height: 100%; margin-top: 0.75em;">Wilderness Safaris press release</small></div> <div style="float: right; width: 20px; margin-top: 30%; font-size: 60px;"><span style="color: rgb(222, 119, 94);">’</span></div> </div> <p>All whilst the Bushmen suffer one of the longest dehydration crises on the planet.</p> <p>This also follows the firm’s insistence that ‘Wilderness Safaris is not a water utility and its business model is not robust enough [to provide water to Bushman communities in the reserve]’.</p> <p>We’ve come to expect nothing less from this self-proclaimed ‘responsible ecotourism and conservation company’.</p><p><a href="http://blog.survivalinternational.org/2010/09/10/water-for-animals-whilst-bushmen-thirst/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: Survival International</span></a><br /></p></div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-61631860587985196602010-07-15T09:24:00.002-04:002010-07-15T09:41:55.021-04:00Welfare Ranching<i><b>"Our problem results from acting like cowboys on a limitless frontier when in truth we inhabit a living spaceship with a finely balanced life-support system." - David C. Korton</b></i><br /><br /><br /><br />This was a speech given before a "crowd of five to six hundred students, ranchers, and instant rednecks (transplanted Easterners); it was reprinted verbatim, bawdy stories and all in the Montana magazine Northern Lights."(Abbey 3) Written in April of 1985 it was given at the University of Montana. Having been asked to speak at an event highlighting the issue of free speech, one cannot help but wonder if deep down inside he was saying, "Free speech? I'll give you free speech!"<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><b>Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow</b></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><b>by <a href="http://www.abbeyweb.net/">Edward Abbey</a></b></span><br /><br /><br />When I first came West in 1948, a student at the University of New Mexico, I was only twenty years old and just out of the Army. I thought, like most simple-minded Easterners, that a cowboy was a kind of mythic hero. I idolized those scrawny little red nosed hired hands in their tight jeans, funny boots and comical hats.<br /><br />Like other new arrivals in the West, I could imagine nothing more romantic than becoming a cowboy. Nothing more glorious than owning my own little genuine working cattle outfit. About the only thing better, I thought, was to be a big league baseball player. I never dreamed that I'd eventually sink to writing books for a living. Unluckily for me coming from an Appalachian hillbilly background and with a poor choice of parents-I didn't have much money. My father was a small-time logger. He ran a one-man sawmill and a sub marginal side hill farm. There wasn't any money in our family, no inheritance you could run ten thousand cattle on. I had no trust fund to back me up. No Hollywood movie deals to finance a land acquisition program I lived on what in those days was called the GI Bill, which paid about $150 a month while I went to school. I made that last as long as I could-five or six years. I couldn't afford a horse. The best I could do in 1947 and '48 was buy a third-hand Chevy sedan and roam the West, mostly the Southwest, on holidays and weekends.<br /><br />I had a roommate at the University of New Mexico. I'll call him Mac. He came from a little town in the southwest New Mexico where his father ran a feed store. Mackie was a fair bronc rider, eager to get into the cattle-growing business. And he had some money, enough to buy a little cinderblock house and about forty acres in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, near a town we called Landfill. Mackie fenced those forty acres, built a corral and kept a few horses there, including an occasional genuine bronco for fun and practice.<br /><br />I don't remember exactly how Mackie and I became friends in the first place. I was majoring in classical philosophy. He was majoring in screw-worm management. But we got to know each other through the mutual pursuit of a pair of newarly inseparable Kappa Kappa Gamma girls. I lived with him in his little cinderblock house. Helped him meet the mortgage payments. Helped him meet the girls. We were both crude, shy, ugly, obnoxious-like most college boys.<br /><br />[Interjection: "Like you!"]<br /><br />My fried Mac also owned a 1947 black Lincoln convertible, the kind with the big grille in the front, like a cowcatcher on a locomotive, chrome-plated. We used to race to classes in the morning, driving the twenty miles from his house to the campus in never more than fifteen minutes. Usually Mac was too hung over to drive, so I'd operate the car, clutching the wheel while Mac sat beside me waving his big .44, taking potshots at jackrabbits and road signs and bill boards and beer bottles. Trying to wake up in time for his ten o'clock class in brand inpection.<br /><br />I'm sorry to say that my friend Mac was a little bit gun-happy. Most of his forty acres was in tumbleweed. He fenced in about half an acre with chicken wire and stocked that little pasture with white rabbits. He used it as a target range. Not what you'd call sporting, I suppose, but we did eat the rabbits. Sometimes we even went deer hunting with handguns. Mackie with his revolver, and me with a chrome-plated Colt .45 automatic I had liberated from the US Army over in Italy. Surplus government property.<br /><br />On one of our deer-hunting expeditions, I was sitting on a log in a big clearing in the woods, thinking about Plato and Aristotle and the Kappa Kappa Gamma girls. I didn't really care whether we got a deer that day or not. It was a couple of days before opening, anyway. The whole procedure was probably illegal as hell. Mac was out in the woods somewhere looking for deer around the clearing. I was sitting on the log, thinking, when I saw a chip of bark fly away from the log all by itself, about a foot from my left hand. Then I heard the blast of Mac's revolver-that big old .44 he'd probably liberated from his father. Then I heard him laugh.<br /><br />"That's not very funny," Mackie," I said.<br /><br />"Now don't whine and complain, Ed," he said. "You want to be a real hunter like me, you gotta learn to stay awake."<br /><br />We never did get a deer with the handguns. But that's when I had my first little doubts about Mackie, and about the cowboy type in general. But I still loved him. Worshipped him, in fact. I was caught in the grip of the Western myth. Anybody said a word to me against cowboys, I'd jump down his throat with my spurs on. Especially if Mac was standing near by.<br /><br />Sometimes I'd try to ride those broncs that he brought in, trying to prove that I could be a cowboy too. Trying to prove it more to myself than to him. I'd be on this crazy, crackpot horse going up, down left, right, and inside out. Hanging on to the saddle horn with both hands. While Mac sat on the corral fence throwing beer bottles at us and laughing. Every time I got thrown of, Mac would say, "Now get right back on there, Ed. Quick, quick. Don't spoil 'im."<br /><br />It took me a long time to realize I didn't have to do that kind of work. And it took me another thirty years to realize that there's something wrong at the heart of our most popular American myth-the cowboy and his cow.<br /><br />[Jeers.]<br /><br />You may have guessed by now that I'm thinking of criticizing the livestock industry. And you are correct. I've been thinking about cows and sheep for many years. Getting more and more disgusted with the whole business. Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They've been getting a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Welfare-Ranching-Subsidized-Destruction-American/dp/1559639431/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0986191-7184905?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190578392&sr=8-1">free ride on the public lands</a> for over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out. I'm in favor or putting the public lands livestock grazers out of business.<br /><br />First of all, we don't need the public lands beef industry. Even beef loves don't need it. According to most government reports (Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service), only about 2 percent of our beef, our red meat, comes from the public lands of the eleven Western states. By those eleven I mean Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and California. Most of our beef, aside from imports, comes from the Midwest and the East, especially the Southeast-Georgia, Alabama, Florida- and from other private lands across the nation. More beef cattle are raised in the state of Georgia than in the sagebrush empire of Nevada. And for a very good reason: back East, you can support a cow on maybe half an acre. Out here, it takes anywhere from twenty-five to fifty acres. In the red-rock country of Utah, the rule of thumb is one section-a square mile-per cow.<br /><br />[Shouts from rear of hall.]<br /><br />Since such a small percentage of cows are produced on public lands in the West, eliminating that part of the industry should not raise supermarket beef privies very much. Furthermore, we'd save money in the taxes we now pay for various subsidies to these public lands cattlemen. Subsidies for things like "range improvement"-tree chinning, sagebrush clearing, mesquite poisoning, disease control, predator trapping, fencing, wells, stock ponds roads. Then there are the salaries of those who work for government agencies like the BLM and the Forest Service. You could probably also count in a big part of the overpaid professors engaged in range-management research at the Western land-grant colleges.<br /><br />Moreover, the cattle have done, and are doing, intolerable damage to our public lands-our national forests, state lands, BLM-administered lands, wildlife preserves, even some of our national parks and monuments. In Utah's Capital Reef National Park, for example, grazings is still allowed. In fact, it's recently been extended for another ten years, and Utah politicians are trying to make the arrangement permanent. They probably won't get away with it. But there we have at least one case where cattle are still tramping about in a national park, transforming soil and grass into dust and weeds.<br /><br />[Disturbance]<br /><br />Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.<br /><br />Even when the cattle are not physically present, you'll see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. if you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle. Along every flowing stream, around every seep and spring and water hole and well, you'll find acres and acres of what range-management specialists call "sacrifice areas"-another understatement. These are places denuded of forage, except for some cactus or a little tumbleweed or maybe a few mutilated trees like mesquite, juniper, or hackberry.<br /><br />I'm not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don't make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway. Anyone who goes beyond the city limits of almost any Western town can see for himself that the land is overgrazed. There are too many cows and horses and sheep out there. Of course, cattlemen would never publicly confess to overgrazing, any more than Dracula would publicly confess to a fondness for blood. Cattlemen are interested parties. Many of them will not give reliable testimony. Some have too much at stake: their Cadillacs and their airplanes, their ranch resale profits and their capital gains. (I'm talking about the corporation ranchers, the land-and-cattle companies, the investment syndicates.) Others, those ranchers who have only a small base property, flood the public lands with their cows. About 8 percent of federal land permittees have cattle that consume approximately 45 percent of the forage on the government range lands. Beef ranchers like to claim that their cows do not compete with deer. Deer are browsers, cows are grazers. That's true. But when a range is overgrazed, when the grass is gone (as it often is for seasons at a time), then cattle become browsers too, out of necessity. In the Southwest, cattle commonly feed on mesquite cliff rose, cactus, acacia or any other shrub or tree they find biodegradable. To that extent, they compete with deer. And they tend to drive out other and better wildlife. Like elk, or bighorn sheep, or pronghorn antelope.<br /><br />[Sneers, jeers, laughter.]<br /><br />How much damage have cattle done to the Western range lands? Large scale beef ranching has been going on since the 1870s. There's plenty of documentation of the effects of this massive cattle grazing on the erosion of the land, the character of the land, the character of the vegetation. Streams and rivers that used to flow on the surface all year round are now intermittent, or underground, because of overgrazing and rapid runoff.<br /><br />Our public lands have been overgrazed for a century. The BLM knows it; the Forest Service knows it. The Government Accounting Office knows it. And overgrazing means eventual ruin, just like stripmining or clear-cutting or the damming of rivers. Much of the Southwest already looks like Mexico or southern Italy or North Africa: a cowburnt wasteland. As we destroy our land, we destroy our agricultural economy and thebasis of modern society. If we keep it up, we'll gradually degrade American life to the status of life in places like Mexico or southern Italy or libya or Egypt. In 1984 the Bureau of Land Management, which was required by Congress to report on its stewardship of our rangelands-the property of all Americans, remember-confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was is "good condition," and 60 percent was in "poor condition." And it reported that only 18 percent of the range lands were improving, while 68 percent were "stable" and 14 percent were getting worse. if the BLM said that, we can safely assume that range conditions are actually much worse.<br /><br />[Shouts of "bullshit!"]<br /><br />What can we do about this situation? This is the fun part- this is the part I like. It's not easy to argue that we should do away with cattle ranching. The cowboy myth gets in the way. But I do have some solutions to overgrazing.<br /><br />[A yell: "Cowboys do it better!" Answered by another: "Ask any cow!" Coarse laughter]<br /><br />I'd begin by reducing the number of cattle on public lands. Not that range managers would go along with it, of course. In their eyes, and in the eyes of the livestock associations they work for, cutting down on the number of cattle is the worst possible solution -an impossible solution. So they propose all kinds of gimmicks. Portable fencing and perpetual movement of cattle. More cross-fencing. More wells and ponds so that more land can be exploited. These proposals are basically a maneuver by the Forest Service and the BLM to appease their critics without offending their real bosses in the beef industry. But a drastic reduction in cattle number is the only true and honest solution.<br /><br />I also suggest that we open a hunting season on range cattle. I realize that beef cattle will not make sporting prey at first. Like all domesticated animals (including most humans), beef cattle are slow, stupid, and awkward. But the breed will improve if hunted regularly. And as the number of cattle is reduced, other and far more useful, beautiful, and interesting animals will return to the range lands and will increase.<br /><br />Suppose, by some miracle of Hollywood or inheritance or good luck, I should acquire a respectable-sized working cattle outfit. What would I do with it? First I'd get rid of the stinking, filthy cattle. Every single animal. Shoot them all, and stock the place with real animals, real game, real protein: elk, buffalo, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, moose. And some purely decorative animals, like eagles. We need more eagles. And wolves we need more wolves. Mountain lions and bears. Especially, of course, grizzly bears. Down in the desert, I would stock every water tank, every water hole, every stockpond, with alligators.<br /><br />You may not that I have said little about coyotes or deer. Coyotes seem to be doing all right on their own. They're smarter than their enemies. I've never heard of a coyote as dumb as a sheepman. As for deer, especially mule deer, they, too, are survivng-maybe even thriving, as some game and fish departments claim, though nobody claims there are as many deer now as there were before the cattle industry was introduced in the West. In any case, compared to elk the deer is a second-rate game animal, nothing but a giant rodent-a rat with antlers.<br /><br />[Portions of the audience begin to leave.]<br /><br />I've suggested that the beef industry's abuse of our Western lands is based on the old mythology of the cowbo as a natural nobleman. I'd like to conclude this diatribe with a few remarks about this most cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales. In truth, the cowboy is only a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat. A herdsman who gets on a horse to do part of his work. Some ranchers are also cowboys, but most are not. There is a difference.<br /><br />There are many ranchers out there who are big time farmers of the public lands-our property. As such, they do not merit any special consideration or special privileges. There are only about 31,000 ranchers in the whole American West who use the public lands. That's less than the population of Missoula, Montana. The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stockponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West. Cowboys also are greatly overrated. Consider the nature of their work. Suppose you had to spend most of your working hours sitting on a horse, contemplating the hind end of a cow. How would that affect your imagination? Think what id does to the relatively simple mind of the average peasant boy, raised amid the bawling of calves and cows in the splatter of mud and the stink of shit.<br /><br />[Shouting. Laughter. Disturbance.]<br /><br />Do cowboys work hard? Sometimes. But most ranchers don't work very hard. They have a lot of leisure time for politics and bellyaching (which is why most state legislatures in the West are occupied and dominated by cattlemen). Any time you go into a small Western town you'll find them at the nearest drugstore, sitting around all morning drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks.<br /><br />Is a cowboy's work socially useful? No. As I've already pointed out, subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quite tomorrow, we'd never even notice. Any public school teacher does harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work, and far more valuable work than the cowboy or the rancher. The same applies to the registered nurses and nurses' aides, garbage workers, and traffic cops. Harder work, tougher work, more necessary work. We need those people in our complicated society. We do not need cowboys or ranchers. We've carried them on our backs long enough.<br /><br />[Disturbance in rear of hall.]<br /><br />"This Abbey," the cowboys and their lovers will say, "this Abbey is a wimp. A chicken-hearted sentimentalist with no feel for the hard realities of practical life." Especially critical of my attitude will be the Easterners and Midwesterners newly arrived here from their Upper West Side apartments, their rustic lodges in upper Michigan. Our nouveau Westerners with their toy ranches, their pickup trucks with the gun racks, their pointy-toed boots with the undershot heels, their gigantic hats. And of course, their pet horses. The instant rednecks.<br /><br />To those who might accuse me of wimpery and sentimentality, I'd like to say this in reply. I respect real men. I admire true manliness. But I despise arrogance and brutality and bullies. So let me close with some nice remarks about cowboys and cattle ranchers. They are a mixed lot, like the rest of us. As individuals, they range from the bad to the ordinary to the good. A rancher, after all, is only a farmer, cropping the public range lands with his four-legged lawnmowers, stashing our grass into his bank account. A cowboy is a hired hand trying to make an honest living. Nothin special. I have no quarrel with these people as fellow human. All I want to do is get their cows off our property. Let those cowboys andranchers find some harder way to make a living, like the rest of us have to do. There's no good reason why we should subsidize them forever. They've had their free ride. It's time they learned to support themselves. In the meantime, I'm going to say good-bye to all you cowboys and cowgirls. I love the legend too-but keep your sacred cows and your dead horses out of my elk pastures.<br /><br />[Sitting ovation. Gunfire in parking lot.]<br /><br />All of this information was taken from One Life at a Time, Please which was written by Edward Abbey and published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., in 1988.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/10/dispelling-cowboy-myth-interview-with.html">Dispelling the Cowboy Myth: an Interview with George Wuerthner</a><br /><br /><a href="http://beatingmychest.blogspot.com/2010/05/sacred-buffalo-holy-cow-struggle-for.html">Sacred Buffalo, Holy Cow: The Struggle for the Western Range</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/wuerthner_we_ought_not_grow_cows_in_dry_west/C147/">We Ought Not Grow Cows In Dry West</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2006/WWPMessenger12-2007-WC.pdf">Cowboy Mentality Dominates Bison Slaughter</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cow-emissions-more-damaging-to-planet-than-cosub2sub-from-cars-427843.html">Cattle are the biggest source of global warming, producing more greenhouse gases than cars!</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.westernwatersheds.org/">Western Watersheds Project</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/">Buffalo Field Campaign</a>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-19256657716227267362010-06-15T09:54:00.002-04:002010-06-15T09:56:59.851-04:00From Earth Day to “Eco-Terrorism”Apr 22nd, 2010 by Will Potter<br /><br /><p>Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and everyone, it seems, is “going green.” With widespread oil shortages due to peak oil looming within five years, and the <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0324/Global-warming-as-peacemaker-Disputed-island-disappears-under-rising-sea.">startling effects of climate change</a> becoming shockingly clear, environmentalism is more accepted and urgently needed than ever.</p> <p>So why is the “number one domestic terrorism threat,” according to the FBI, the “eco-terrorism, animal rights movement”?<span id="more-2710"></span></p> <p>The environmental movement, like all social movements, has a wide-range of elements. There are people who leaflet and write letters. And there are underground groups, like the Earth Liberation Front, which have vandalized SUVs, burned ski resorts, and destroyed genetically-engineered crops. Even at their most extreme, none of these tactics have injured a single human being.</p> <p>Nevertheless, they have been called “terrorism,” a label which has had extreme repercussions for those targeted. An environmental activist named Daniel McGowan was sentenced as a terrorist for his role in two ELF crimes, and for that he is now in a <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/cmu-proposal-domestic-guantanamo/2660/">secretive prison facility called a Communications Management Unit</a>, for “domestic terrorists.” The inmates and guards call it “Little Guantanamo.”</p> <p>The “eco-terrorist” label has not been confined to the ELF and acts of sabotage. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have campaigned to stretch the label as far as they can. For example:</p> <ul><p><a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/utah-bill-would-make-tim-dechristopher-eco-terrorist/1034/">Utah Bill Would Make Environmentalists Like Tim DeChristopher “Eco-Terrorists”</a></p><p><a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/animal-planet-collaborated-with-ecoterrorist/736/">“Animal Planet Collaborated with Eco-Terrorists”<br /></a></p><p><a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/mob-law-i-69-environmental-activists/1804/">Mafia Law Used Against Environmentalists for Tree Sits, Civil Disobedience, Blog Post<br /></a></p></ul> <p>So how do government agencies and industry groups rationalize this? How do they justify labeling activists who have never harmed anyone with the same term as people who have flown planes into buildings?</p> <p>A report by the Department of Homeland Security called “Eco-terrorism: Environmental and Animal Rights Militants in the United States” reveals part of the answer:</p> <blockquote><p> “All of these beliefs stand in direct contrast to the notion of individualism as promoted by Western culture..”</p></blockquote> <p>Put another way, the beliefs of a growing segment of the environmental movement go beyond urging people to switch lightbulbs or drive hybrids. Their critique challenges widespread cultural values, and questions deeply-held beliefs about whether humans have the right to exploit the natural world. Fundamentally, these activists question the unspoken dogma that human beings, and their interests, trump those of all other species.</p> <p>That is only part of the explanation, though. It is not just that activists hold these beliefs. That, alone, is not a threat. The threat is when they act on them. Effectively.</p> <p>That last word is critical. When activists take direct action to put their beliefs into practice, and in doing so threaten corporate profits, they become worthy of government reports and national security warnings.</p> <p>For instance, <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/state-department-powerpoint-corporations/560/" target="_blank">the State Department warned corporations in a PowerPoint presentation</a>:</p> <blockquote><p> “Although incidents related to terrorism are most likely to make the front page news, Animal Rights Extremism is what’s most likely to affect your day-to-day business operations…”</p></blockquote> <p>Forty years after Earth Day, the message from corporations, politicians and government agencies is clear. Shop and consume and shop some more, perhaps signing a petition or two along the way, and that is “going green.”</p> <p>But if you go further, if you start demanding substantive, systemic change and shaking the economic and political power structures behind the green-washing, that is “eco-terrorism.”</p><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/earth-day-to-eco-terrorism/2710/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreenIsTheNewRed+%28Green+Is+The+New+Red.com%29">Green is the New Red</a></span>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-86553563527883901512010-06-02T11:58:00.000-04:002010-06-02T11:59:57.206-04:00Proposal to legalize pot in Detroit headed for council voteBY BILL LAITNER<br />FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER<br /><br />A proposal to legalize small amounts of marijuana in Detroit is headed to Detroit City Council.<br /><br />The council is likely to have the issue on its June 15 agenda, a spokeswoman for Council President Pro Tem Gary Brown said today. If council members decline to approve the proposal, it automatically will appear on the November ballot, Brown’s public affairs director Stacie Clayton said.<br /><p>Leaving it up to voters is “actually what I expect will happen,” Clayton said. The subject was twice postponed by the city council’s Internal Operations Committee — last week for the visit to Detroit of first lady Michelle Obama last week and this week so that council members could attend the statewide conference of government officials on Mackinac Island, Clayton said. The committee now is planning to discuss the proposal at 10 a.m. June 9, she said.<br /></p><p>The full council’s consideration would follow Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey’s decision May 19 to certify more than 6,000 petition signatures in favor of the proposal, which would allow Detroiters who are 21 or older to possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana on private property, petition organizer Tim Beck said.<br /></p><p>“We’re thrilled” that the petitions were certified because “we could’ve had one paragraph misnumbered and they could keep us off the ballot,” Beck, 58, the owner of a health-insurance firm and a Detroit resident, said today.<br /></p>"These things have to be absolutely perfect,” said Beck, a veteran of successful drives to approve medical marijuana in five Michigan cities and ultimately statewide.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20100601/NEWS01/100601028/1320/Proposal-to-legalize-pot-headed-for-council-vote">Detroit Free Press</a></span>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-40601054209736043572010-05-31T12:16:00.003-04:002010-05-31T12:17:45.965-04:00Amerika<object width="420" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pxQLk0JEYIs&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pxQLk0JEYIs&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="420" height="355"></embed></object>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-41534748997896387792010-05-27T11:14:00.002-04:002010-05-27T11:17:34.621-04:00JOHN TRUDELL SPEAKS AT JUDI BARI MEMORIALApril 26, 1997:<br /><br />I'm pleased to be here and I'm glad that you're here and I'll attempt to be as clear as I can while I'm up here.<br /><br />It's about our D and A. Descendants and ancestors. We are the descendants and we are the ancestors. D and A, our DNA, our blood, our flesh and our bone, is made up of the metals and the minerals and the liquids of the earth. We are the earth. We truly, literally and figuratively are the earth. Any relationship we will ever have in this world to real power -- the real power, not energy systems and other artificial means of authority -- but any relationship we will ever have to real power is our relationship to the earth.<br /><br />So whatever Judi was doing and what Earth First! does, they were establishing connection with the basic reality, that we must take care of the earth. Our power comes from the earth.<br /><br />And because we are made up of the earth -- our common ground, so to speak -- we are all the descendants of tribes. Each and every one of us is a descendant of a tribe. We have genetic memories. Inside of our genetic memories, that power connection exists to our ancestral past. We are all descendants of tribes.<br /><br />But the tribes of the planet earth have encountered a technological religious mind set that removes all spiritual value and real value about life from the earth and puts it into theoretical heavens or hells. And it does it under a male image of a male dominator god.<br /><br />In our tribal ancestry each and every one of our ancestors resisted that notion, that imposition. Tribes of Europe, tribes of Africa, tribes of here. Every tribe resisted it. It started in different time frames in different parts of the planet. It's almost like a disease. A virus, a virus, a disease that lives in the human. A disease of the spirit. It's almost like a diseased spirit affects the perception of reality of the carrier of the disease, the human being.<br /><br />Power. It's very important that we understand who we are in relationship to power, because we have been tricked and lied to, almost in a way one would say, "brainwashed", into looking at authority as power. It is very important that we make this distinction because we need to have something to pass to the next generations.<br /><br />Authority is not power. Authority is authority. All authority is usually based upon aggression or implied aggression or active aggression. Authority is authority. Power is something else. Power is what we come from. It is a part of the natural order of the universe -- power.<br /><br />Authority is something that man creates. It's limitation is that it was created by man. Power has no limitations.<br /><br />Our relationship to the earth, DNA. We are different shapes and forms of the earth. We are different trees. We are no more or no less than the tree. We are different stones. We are just different shapes of the life of the earth.<br /><br />As human beings we understand in this technologic religious mind set that the authoritarian system, the industrial fascism, the industrial Reich that we live under, we understand that they can mine the other natural resources of the earth, and through refinement processes take old dinosaurs out of the ground and turn them into energy to run the machine world that we're very addicted to and partly enslaved to.<br /><br />We have to make the connection that we are just a different shape but our value is no more or no less than the rest of the natural resources of the earth, the rest of the DNA of the earth. So it's very possible that we are being mined in the same way that the dinosaurs are, out of the ground. Human being, human physical, being spirit. Human physical, being spirit. Human physical, being spirit.<br /><br />And we live under an authoritarian system, an industrial technologic mind set that has discovered and developed a way to mine, to take the being part of human, the spirit part of human and convert it into energy and then use that energy to power their system, to run their system. They are literally eating our spirits.<br /><br />Literally eating our spirits.<br /><br />Our spirit is eaten when we do not understand the distinction, the difference between authority and power. If they tell us money resembles power, then whoever has the most money has the most power.<br /><br />But that is a lie.<br /><br />Whoever has the most money has the ability to get authority. But that is not power. But if we believe that, if we believe that money is power, or that it can take us to power, then we will always understand that power is something removed from us and is not a natural part of us.<br /><br />It is just so subtle, and so blatant.<br /><br />If we believe that political systems are power, they're manipulative. That's all they are: a political system is a way of mining the spirit, in just the same way as the definition of authority: mining our spirit.<br /><br />This is where someone like Judi [Bari] becomes a threat, because she understands she has power, and she understands the reality of responsibility that goes with power. She understands that. We can't communicate with her now the way that we used to, but we can communicate with her. That's life. That's spirit.<br /><br />In the ways of the tribes and in our common ancestry, we understood the play with our ancestors. We understood the ones before us, the ones that we were the descendants of. This was our power connection to knowledge. This was our power connection to the past and our power connection to the future. So as we enter into this, whatever has to come down in the future -- I don't really have time to go into too far! --<br /><br />But the antibiotic to dealing with these people, these vampires -- and it t is, it is vampires, cannibalization -- the antibiotic to this disease is our intelligence. We were given intelligence by the creator. We have intelligence. That is the antibiotic.That is the cure. There is no existing cure to the problem other than the one we will create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can.<br /><br />To use our intelligence as intelligently as we possibly can.<br /><br />To have clarity. Because this beast that feeds and eats our spirit does it by the confusions that are in our minds.<br /><br />But we understand the pollution of the air, of the water, we understand the pollution of the environment has come from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. But you think about every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads -- that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit.<br /><br />Another word I hear used a lot -- I don't "believe" anything. I tried to believe but there was a "lie" in the middle: B, E, LIE, V, E. Again, use our intelligence very intelligently. There are certain words that we should use very, very, very carefully and I think that's one of those words, because either we know or we don't know.<br /><br />We should think -- anything in between us knowing and not knowing -- we should think.<br /><br />Thank you.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sisis.nativeweb.org/sov/trudbari.html">Settlers in Support of Indigenous Sovereignty</a>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-66104060967390904782010-05-22T10:17:00.001-04:002010-05-22T10:18:33.218-04:00The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy<h3>By <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/community/profile/10246">Noam Chomsky</a></h3><p>Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.</p> <p>On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.</p> <p>The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.</p> <p>To the editors of The <i>New York Times</i>, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”</p> <p>The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.</p> <p>Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.</p> <p>Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.</p> <p>The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.</p> <p>The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment”—the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.</p> <p>In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations—these “collectivist legal entities”—have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.</p> <p>This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”</p> <p>Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)—quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.</p> <p>A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”</p> <p>In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.</p> <p>The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who run the government.</p> <p>The voting data reveal a rather different story.</p> <p>High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested’ in the election,” <i>The Wall St. Journal</i>/NBC poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”</p> <p>So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.</p> <p>The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.</p> <p>In manufacturing, one in six is out of work—unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.</p> <p>Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare—that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.</p> <p>It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program.</p> <p>The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. <i>The Wall St. Journal</i>/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.</p> <p>These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned.</p> <p>Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option.</p> <p>Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end.</p> <p>But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers—a costly system peculiar to the U.S.</p> <p>The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5502/">In These Times</a></span><br /></p>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-83339153821908561602010-05-22T10:04:00.001-04:002010-05-22T10:06:20.343-04:00Rustbelt Rage<h3>By <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/community/profile/10246">Noam Chomsky</a></h3><p>On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.</p> <p>Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.</p> <p>His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.</p> <p>“Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on.”</p> <p>He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to try to take away Social Security, too.</p> <p>Stack decided that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he also couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and privileged; or a legal system in which “there are two `interpretations’ for every law, one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us.”</p> <p>The government leaves us with “the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering tens of thousands of people a year,” with care rationed largely by wealth, not need.</p> <p>Stack traces these ills to a social order in which “a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities—and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours.”</p> <p>Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The communist creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”</p> <p>Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close plants and destroy families and communities.</p> <p>An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power.</p> <p>Striking similarities exist in China, the world’s second largest economy, investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.</p> <p>Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China’s rustbelt—the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.</p> <p>In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their U.S. counterparts—in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now bitter fraud.</p> <p>Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units “are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation,” Lee writes.</p> <p>Lee’s work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious, often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.</p> <p>In the U.S., the Tea Party movement—and even more so the broader circles it reaches—reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party’s anti-tax extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s protest, but it is suicidal nonetheless.</p> <p>California today is a dramatic illustration. The world’s greatest public system of higher education is being dismantled.</p> <p>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. Other governors are joining in.</p> <p>Meanwhile a newly powerful states’ rights movement is demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs—a nice illustration of what Orwell called “doublethink”: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.</p> <p>California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It’s much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.</p> <p>Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the one that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can constrain the depredations of private power.</p> <p>However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial institutions—and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.</p> <p>But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear the deficit. That way, business’s cohorts in Washington may agree to cut benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).</p> <p>At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the deficit—the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system.</p> <p>It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5938/">In These Times</a></span><br /></p>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-32981727647138702452010-05-22T08:55:00.001-04:002010-05-22T08:56:50.141-04:00Sniffing Out Tea Party Corporatism<!-- TemplateEndEditable --> <p class="author_date">By <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="Author Name" -->Michael Winship<!-- TemplateEndEditable --><br /> <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="Date" -->April 30, 2010 <!-- TemplateEndEditable --></p> <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="Lead Paragraph" --> <p class="article_main_text"><strong>E</strong><strong>ditor’s Note: The Tea Party movement has generated a lot of media talk about “populism,” which gets defined as the battle between Big Government and the Common Folk, but what gets ignored is that the only feasible check on unlimited corporate power would be a democratized and energized federal government.</strong></p> <p class="article_main_text"><strong>So, by targeting government, not corporatism, the Tea Partiers serve essentially as “faux populist” front-men for corporate interests, a reality noted by longtime populist Jim Hightower and cited in this guest essay by Michael Winship:</strong> </p> <p class="article_lead_paragraph">I first became aware of Jim Hightower more than 20 years ago, during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The Democrats were nominating Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis to run for president against Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, and at the time Dukakis looked like he had a pretty good chance at the White House.</p><p class="article_main_text"> This was before a series of events did him in, including the notorious Willie Horton ad that attacked Dukakis for a Massachusetts weekend furlough prison program that allowed a convicted murderer back on the street, where he robbed and raped.</p> <p class="article_main_text"> And it was before Dukakis bobbled a harsh debate question about what he would do if his own wife Kitty was raped and murdered. And it was before he was photographed atop an Abrams tank wearing a helmet that made him look like he was starring in Snoopy III: This Time It's Personal.</p> <p class="article_main_text"> All of that misery lay ahead. The Democrats were still in giddy spirits during the convention and had a high old time poking fun at Bush, Sr. That was when the late Ann Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, famously lamented, "Poor George! He can't help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!"</p> <p class="article_main_text"> But it was the convention speech by Hightower that I especially remember. He was the Texas agriculture commissioner in those days – an important job in the Lone Star State - and described Bush as a "toothache of a man," a cruel but remarkable metaphor. </p> <p class="article_main_text"> And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was "born on third base and thought he hit a triple... He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber."</p> <p class="article_main_text"> Maybe Hightower didn't originate those lines (as Milton Berle used to say, "When you steal from me, you steal twice"), but he delivered them with a gusto akin to genuine authorship and over the years has come up with enough original material of his own to absolve him - mostly - from the sin of occasional joke-filching. </p> <p class="article_main_text"> Now others steal from him. It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I've heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution. </p> <p class="article_main_text"> And I think it was Jim who first said of George W. Bush, "If ignorance ever reaches $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to his head." (On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, "Oh good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant.")</p> <p class="article_main_text"> These days, Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries and edits "The Hightower Lowdown," an invaluable monthly newsletter. With the passing of both Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, he has became the funniest person in Texas politics - intentionally, that is. </p> <p class="article_main_text"> But it is his steadfast advocacy of progressive politics, his unyielding embrace of the old time gospel of populism, that made him an especially appropriate guest on the final edition of the PBS series, “Bill Moyers Journal.” </p> <p class="article_main_text">"Here's what populism is not," he told my colleague Bill Moyers. "It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort [was], and as most of it is still today - though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there.</p> <p class="article_main_text">“But what populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. …<br />"One big difference between real populism and... the tea party thing is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, 'Let's get rid of government.' You need to be saying, 'Let's take over government.'"</p> <p class="article_main_text"> As Hightower's fond of saying, the water won't clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek. </p> <p class="article_main_text">"I see the central issue in politics to be the rise of corporate power," he reiterated. "Overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they're the top dogs, and we're a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?"</p> <p class="article_main_text"> Of President Obama he said, "It's odd to me that we've got a president who ran from the outside and won, and now is trying to govern from the inside. You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force... </p> <p class="article_main_text">“Our heavyweight is the people themselves. They've got the fat cats, but we've got the alley cats."</p> <p class="article_main_text"> This weekend, Jim is being honored at Texas State University-San Marcos with an exhibition celebrating his life's work as a populist journalist, historian and advocate. They're calling the event "Swim Against the Current" because, as Moyers says, "That's what he does."</p> <p class="article_main_text"> In fact, "Swim Against the Current" also is the title of Hightower's most recent book, subtitled, "Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow." He comes from a long history of flow resisters, a critical, American political tradition. </p> <p class="article_main_text">"I go all the way back to Thomas Paine," he said. "I mean, that was kind of the ultimate rebellion, when the media tool was a pamphlet." The men who wrote the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence "didn't create democracy. [They] made democracy possible.</p> <p class="article_main_text">"What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.</p> <p class="article_main_text">"These are agitators. They extended democracy decade after decade. You know, sometimes we get in the midst of these fights. We think we're making no progress. But... you look back, we've made a lot of progress...</p> <p class="article_main_text">“The agitator after all is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So, we need a lot more agitation....</p> <p class="article_main_text">"We can battle back against the powers. But it's not just going to a rally and shouting. It's organizing and it's thinking. And reaching out to others. And building a real people's movement."<br /></p><p class="article_main_text"><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOURCE: </span><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/043010a.html">Consortium News</a><br /></p>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-20229580419946900082010-05-22T08:32:00.002-04:002010-05-22T08:37:22.881-04:00FOOD NOT BOMBS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF FEEDING THE HUNGRY<div class="moz-text-plain" wrap="true" quote="true" style="font-family: -moz-fixed; font-size: 13px;" lang="x-western"><pre wrap="">FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 1, 2010<br /><br />CONTACT: Food Not Bombs Keith McHenry - co-founder 575-770-3377<br /><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.foodnotbombs.net/">www.foodnotbombs.net</a><br /><br />FOOD NOT BOMBS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF FEEDING THE HUNGRY IN PROTEST TO WAR, POVERTY, AND THE EXPLOITATION OF THE EARTH<br /><br />TAOS, NEW MEXICO - Food Not Bombs is celebrating 30 years of feeding the hungry in protest to war, poverty, and the exploitation of the Earth by holding Soupstock free concerts and gatherings this May in cities around the world.<br /><br />Food Not Bombs was started by eight activist after the May 24, 1980 protest to stop Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire. Food Not Bombs collects food that can't be sold, prepares food to share with the hungry in over 1,000 communities around the world. This all volunteer movement is dedicated to nonviolent direct action and has no headquarters or leaders.<br /><br />Each group is autonomous and makes decisions using a process called consensus. The food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone with out restriction.<br /><br />Soon after Food Not Bombs started it's second group in San Francisco nine volunteers were jailed on August 15, 1988 for "making a political statement" by sharing free food. The police made over 1,000 arrests in San Francisco from 1988 to 1996. Orlando, Florida, Los Angeles, California and Las Vegas, Nevada and other cities in the United States have also made arrests but were not able to stop Food Not Bombs. Several Food Not Bombs volunteers have been stabbed to death in Russia by neo-nazis while feeding the hungry. Our New Orleans coordinator Helen Hill was shot to death after Katrina.<br /><br />Amnesty International has designated all Food Not Bombs volunteers prisoners of conscience and worked for our unconditional release when they were imprisoned in the United States, Mexico and the Philippines. Food Not Bombs also initiated many grassroots projects including Indymedia, Homes Not jails housing occupations, Bikes Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns community gardens and The Really Really Free Markets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States lists Food Not Bombs as a terrorist group even though volunteers are dedicated to nonviolence and fed the rescue workers in New York on 9/11, organized the food relief effort in New Orleans and other Gulf cities after Hurricane Katrina and feed the hungry every week in hundreds of American cities. Volunteers also fed the tent city protest during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, provided meals at a 600 day farm workers vigil in Sarajevo and cooked for Cindy Sheehan's Camp Casey outside George Bush's summer home in Crawford, Texas. Food Not Bombs fed peace camps on the West Bank in Palestine, and climate change actions in Denmark, Iceland and Tazmania. Food Not Bombs cooked for the June 12, 1982 anti nuclear protest in Central Park, New York, the 1999 Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization and at the protests against the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Three Food Not Bombs cook houses were raided by the F.B. I. and Homeland Security the day before the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis where eight volunteers were charged under the Patriot Act.<br /><br />Food Not Bombs continues to work for change and provide food to the hungry in over 1,000 communities around the world as well as at many protests including immigrant rights actions, direct actions against coal mining, logging and oil drilling, animal cruelty, corporate domination, economic exploitation and the wars in Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East.<br /><br />### SOME OF THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY EVENTS REPORTED TO DATE<br />__________________________ May 23, 2010 Boston, Massachusetts USA<br />May 23rd from 12-5pm on the Boston Common, Boston, MA 02115 Call<br />Kassie Carlson at 774-521-9902 or email <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:FNBBoston@gmail.com">FNBBoston@gmail.com</a><br />__________________________ May 22-23, 2010 at Alice Springs, Australia<br />Saturday 22nd - from 5pm Free BBQ feast, acoustic music and movies<br />@ Arid Lands Environment Centre<br /><br />Sunday 23rd - from 6pm Regular FNB serving, featuring extra super<br />spectacular free feast & live music Contact <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:tasquoll@gmail.com">tasquoll@gmail.com</a><br />__________________________ May 14-16, 2010 in Monterrey, Mexico<br /><br />The celebration starts with a tour thru points of Activism in this<br />Northern city of Mexico; followed by a day of Workshops and experiences<br />sharing, and proposals for linking and strengthening the efforts<br />of the participating chapters, closing with a Food Not Bombs table<br />and the Festival for the Active Peace.<br />Contact <a href="mailto:otrocomidanobombasmty@gmail.com">otrocomidanobombasmty@gmail.com</a><br /></pre></div>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-58441188542057267252010-05-20T13:00:00.000-04:002010-05-20T13:02:55.261-04:00I'm Canadian; I Have No Time For This Bullshitby <strong>Bob King</strong><br /><br /><a href="http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/01/04/facts-about-conservative-truthiness/">Ole Ole Olson, writing at News Junkie Post </a>concludes (with graphs!) that what folks like me have been saying all along is true; that the bullshit to the right of us is so deep that you need a diving suit and a support vessel to find any useful nugget of truth. And to the left - well, it's still a challenge, but you don't need life-support.<br /><br />Now, I'm probably too stubborn for my own good, still shouting out from time to time that I am, indeed a Conservative. An anti-authoritarian, to be sure. A minarchist to a degree. Occasionally I add that I'm a "<span class="aptureLink " id="apture_prvw1"><span style="background-position: right -1348px;" class="aptureLinkIcon"> </span><a class="aptureLink snap_noshots" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive%20Conservative%20Party%20of%20Canada">Progressive Conservative</a></span>," just to add a Canadian tinge of irony to my quixotic insistence on upholding the values of Burke, moderated by a good span of practice that has given us many ideas that seem well worth preserving. On occasion, this has been in the face of our dearest instincts and assumptions about economics and human nature.<br /><br />But to a genuine Conservative, facts are facts and the truth is the truth. When something works, it works, and if it works despite your philosophy, it's your <b><i>philosophy</i></b> that must adapt.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">It's an interesting read and the rest can be found <a href="http://www.graphictruth.com/2010/01/im-canadian-i-have-no-time-for-this.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Graphictruth+%28Graphictruth%29&referrer=swamii.com">here</a>.</span>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-5271629925309181172010-05-16T10:40:00.001-04:002010-05-16T10:43:12.306-04:00Ralph McGehee, the CIA and Deadly Deceits<p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >By Wade Frazier</span></p><p><b><a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#introduction"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Introduction</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#protection"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Statement for Ralph's Protection</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#synopsis"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >My 1999 Synopsis of <i>Deadly Deceits</i></span></a></b></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span></p><p align="center"> <b><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;" ><a name="introduction"></a>Introduction</span></b></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >In 1990, when I was getting educated in the alternative media and other areas, I obtained <i>Deadly Deceits</i>, the memoirs of an ex-CIA operative, Ralph McGehee. When I was writing my original web site in 1996, I wrote a brief synopsis of <i>Deadly Deceits</i>, in a section where I outlined the sources that influenced my worldview. I contacted Ralph before I published the pages, asking him if I could publish the <i>Deadly Deceits</i> excerpts that I quoted on my web pages. He replied that it was OK by him, so I did.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Ralph is an ex-CIA employee who publicly criticized the CIA, and only a handful ever have. McGehee is interviewed on Bill Moyers' <i>Secret Government</i> video. Ralph maintained his CIABASE archives on the Internet for years, exposing the CIA's activities using public domain sources. In running his CIABASE, Ralph was doing something that anyone could do. Still, he endured endless harassment from the CIA as they have tried silencing him. Ralph had more than my respect; he had my awe. After riding in the saddle with <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hitting">Dennis Lee</a> for years, I discovered how rare a Dennis or a Ralph McGehee was. People of conscience, living it at those levels, are one in many thousands. </span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >My web pages came down in early 1997 with no warning, something not entirely in my control. In early 1998, I discovered that some of my work survived and was being reproduced on the Internet. Not only had one person reproduced my entire 600-page web site, I also found that my synopsis of <i>Deadly Deceits</i> was reproduced in several places. I contacted Hank Roth's The Golem web site, one place my synopsis appeared, asking him where he got it. The surprising response from Hank was that he thought Ralph McGehee gave it to him. It turned out that Ralph had published my synopsis of his book across the Internet as the defining synopsis of <i>Deadly Deceits</i>, which is the summary of his career. I was deeply honored.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >When I discovered that my hurriedly written synopsis still dominated Ralph's presentation of his work on his new web site, I wrote a version of it using more care. It is below. After escalating harassment by the CIA and friends, leading to bodily injury to Ralph, his CIABASE web site went down in the spring of 2000, and will probably never reappear. </span></p><p> </p><p align="center"> <b><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;" ><a name="protection"></a>Statement for Ralph's Protection</span></b></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >In August 2001, I received the below statement from Ralph. He wanted to have me post it on my site, and wherever else it can be posted, for his protection. </span> </p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >“<span style="color:navy;">I moved to Florida in July 2000. Immediately the harassment I experienced in Herndon transferred here. A major difference is that the FBI here openly advises I am a threat to National Security -- because, I assume, I tell unclassified truths to the American people. </span></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >“<span style="color:navy;">In 1990 the CIA officially advised me in writing that I may use any information in the public domain -- making the FBI's actions against me false if not illegal as I have never and will never expose secret persons or information.</span></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >“<span style="color:navy;">Harassment here has grown to such a degree that I fear staged incidents to arrest me for something -- anything. </span></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >“<span style="color:navy;">I base my actions on what is in the best interests of the United States. This may be difficult to believe given my negative commentary, but I participated in and watched CIA operations in Vietnam and other countries nearly destroy the US/us.</span></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >“<span style="color:navy;">The CIA said I was an analyst with few peers and awarded me its Career Intelligence Medal. I use this ability and those experiences to inform about the CIA's many opportunities and deficiencies. </span></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >“<span style="color:navy;">Anyone wishing to know more may find details via a Google search under my name</span>.”</span><span style="color:navy;"> </span></p><p><span style="color:navy;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >-- Ralph McGehee</span></span> </p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Ralph has also asked me to post his letter from the CIA that informed him that his CIABASE activities were perfectly legal, and were no threat to “national security.” Here it is.</span></p><p> </p><blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p style="text-indent: -280px;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" > <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cia.jpg"><img src="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cia_small.jpg" alt="cia.jpg (76907 bytes)" border="2" height="106" width="100" /></a>Click on image to enlarge</span> </p></blockquote><blockquote> <blockquote> <p> </p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;" ><a name="synopsis"></a><b>My 1999 Synopsis of <i>Deadly Deceits</i></b></span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><i>Deadly Deceits</i> became a college textbook. After a moving introduction it starts slowly, climaxing with a series of haunting revelations. During McGehee's twenty-five year CIA career, he heartily believed in its stated mission of "fighting communism." McGehee wrote that CIA fieldworker candidates are psychologically screened before being hired, and their most treasured quality is the willingness to blindly follow orders.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Ralph W. McGehee joined the CIA in 1952, after an All-American football career at Notre Dame (where Phil Agee also studied) during their national championship years. He was raised on and believed in the American dream - "the Protestant work ethic, truth, justice, freedom." He signed on as a dedicated cold warrior and spent the next ten years stationed at home and abroad: at Langley (the CIA headquarters in Washington), Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and then Thailand. McGehee was dedicated to stopping the scourge of communism, and enthusiastically helped keep the world free of its taint.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><a name="communists"></a>During the mid-1960s, communism was sweeping Southeast Asia. McGehee's job was saving Thai villages from communist insurgency. He viewed his career as a cross between "Peace Corps and missionary work." Building upon a British method used earlier in Thailand, McGehee developed an inexpensive method of intelligence gathering that identified communists and exposed their network. The strategy was partly intimidating the villagers through terror, such as holding a gun to a baby's head to get the mother to talk, yet was benign when compared to other "counterintelligence" methods of the time, among them torture and boiling suspected communists in oil.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >The operation's goal was to make communists confess their "crimes," name their cohorts, return to the Thai government's fold and become "good peasants" again. Forgiveness was offered and given to those who talked, with escalating intimidation for those harder to crack. The Catholic Church successfully used a similar carrot-and-stick strategy during its <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#cathar">Inquisition days</a>. The Thailand strategy was effective and Machiavellian, something that McGehee crafted and believed in. It obtained a quality of intelligence the region had never seen before. It also reversed communist inroads. The Thai government's brute force response to "communist insurgency," backed by its U.S. sponsors, alienated the villagers, driving them into the communists' arms. McGehee's method was far more subtle and effective.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><a name="colby"></a>The operation's results were awarded universal praise in intelligence circles in 1967. McGehee had his career's greatest success and was euphoric. He discovered a way of exposing and defeating the communists, and his future looked bright. He was at the top of his game. In the wake of the accolades, William Colby (future <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#cia">CIA director</a>, and then the Far East division chief) visited, and McGehee briefed him:</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"I explained the procedures of the survey and then outlined my general conclusions, including my doubts about previous Agency reporting which said that the communists did not have the support of the local people and that they forced people to support them with threats and terrorism.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"'Such a picture is inaccurate,' I told Colby...'We have found that the Communists concentrate the majority, almost the entirety, of their time winning the cooperation of the peasants.'"</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >McGehee exposed the communist movement as a grass roots movement with peasant support, mainly because their goal was freeing themselves from colonial and <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#neocolonialism">neocolonial</a> oppression, enforced by the Thai ruling class and their industrialized-nation sponsors. The Communist Revolution in Southeast Asia was an exercise in freedom, although McGehee would not attain that realization for years. In 1967, McGehee was ecstatic that his method reversed communist infiltration.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Colby silently received McGehee's presentation, finally muttering, "We always seem to be losing." McGehee was astonished by Colby's response.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Soon after Colby's visit, McGehee was removed from the field, his successful program was canceled, and he found himself behind a meaningless desk at Langley. He was shocked and confused for years. He eventually realized that his intelligence work, although arguably the most effective the West had ever seen in Southeast Asia, produced an undesirable answer. Communism could not be damned as an evil if the people wanted it. If that fact became widely known, our Vietnam adventure could be seen in an unsavory light: killing millions to prevent them from choosing a government we disapproved of. The American experience in Vietnam was an attempt at <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#vietnam2">reconquering the region</a>, keeping it in the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#third">capitalistic fold</a> and keeping those people enslaved.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >McGehee still believed his indoctrination and volunteered for Saigon, something that no sane CIA employee did in 1968. McGehee was a true believer in America's good intentions, even if their tactics sometimes seemed regrettable. Defeating the communists was his great desire. </span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><a name="saigon"></a>One pivotal evening in his quarters near Saigon in December of 1968, McGehee finally figured it out.</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"I sat there in agony thinking about all that had led me to this private hell. My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good intelligence officer to help my country fight the communist scourge - what in the hell had happened? Why did we have to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why did the CIA, my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the truth?</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children - especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me."</span> </p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >McGehee will never lose the memory of the smell of burning Vietnamese flesh. McGehee thought of killing himself that night in Vietnam. He thought of various ways to kill himself to protest what was happening. In the end, however, he committed his life to telling the world what really happened in Vietnam and the true nature of America's fight against communism. McGehee embarked on the hard, lonely road of exposing what his nation was really up to.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >When his devastating tour of duty in Vietnam was finished, McGehee left:</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"I was glad to be going home. But I knew I would never be the same person again. All of my ideals of helping people, all my convictions about the processes of intelligence, all my respect for my work, all the feelings of joy in my life, all my concepts of honor, integrity, trust and love, all in fact that made me what I was, had died in Vietnam. Through its blindness and its murders, the Agency had stolen my life and my soul. Full of anger, hatred, and fear, I bitterly contemplated a dismal future."</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >The year was 1970, and McGehee had nearly twenty years of CIA service. He spent mere weeks in the United States before returning to Thailand. He sought somewhere to serve out his career's remaining years; somewhere he could stand living. Ironically, he saw the fruit of his anti-communist efforts in Thailand. The peaceful culture of Southeast Asia was destroyed by American involvement. Where McGehee had earlier witnessed pastoral scenes of Thai and Vietnamese people quietly living their lives, Southeast Asia had been turned into an armed camp, with violence, drug use and prostitution commonplace. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the Thai school that his children happily attended on an earlier tour of duty. The students were bodily searched as they entered the school's grounds. The Thai government destroyed the villages that McGehee had "helped" on his earlier tours. He helped establish the framework that destroyed those that he "helped." He became a squeaky cog in the machine and was put on probation.</span> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >McGehee soon returned to Langley, spending several years getting educated in the CIA's archives. He finally understood what communism meant to the communists, and realized that the Western view of communism was a fantasy to justify our violence against them. They were not trying to conquer the world. They sought freedom. For that crime, America <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#toll1">murdered millions of them</a>. McGehee retired after spending 25 years with the agency, accepting a career achievement medal so his future work could not be called that of a CIA employee with a failed career. He began his book's conclusion with:</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><a name="intelligence"></a>"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. [McGehee says he has never once seen a CIA official tell the truth to Congress. Instead comes a steady stream of lies. - Ed.] It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"As noted in the Church Committee's final report, the Agency's task is to develop an international anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian [which means "all men are created equal" - Ed.] political movement to the scourge of international communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist."</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><a name="secrecy"></a>McGehee called for the CIA's abolition in <i>Deadly Deceits</i>, describing it as an unsalvageable organization. In <i>Deadly Deceits'</i> appendix, McGehee reported on the gauntlet that he ran to publish the book. He did not want to lose his pension, go to jail or leave the country, so he abided by the secrecy agreement he signed when joining the CIA. The appendix begins:</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"The secrecy agreement that I signed when I joined the CIA allows the Agency to review prior to publication all writings of present and former employees to ensure that classified information relating to national security is not revealed. This provision seems logical and necessary to protect legitimate interests. However, my experiences in getting this book approved show that the CIA uses the agreement not so much to protect national security as to prevent revelations and criticisms of its immoral, illegal, and ineffective operations. To that end it uses all possible maneuvers, legal and illegal. Had I not been represented by my attorney, Mark Lynch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and had I not developed a massive catalog of information already cleared by the Agency's publication review board, this book could not have been published."</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >McGehee's dark journey in publishing <i>Deadly Deceits</i> is a damning indictment of U.S. secrecy laws and their enforcement. The CIA tried ambushing McGehee with a room full of lawyers, before they knew he hired a lawyer with the necessary security clearance to represent him. The CIA man assigned to work with McGehee made his feelings plain, telling him, "It's too bad you didn't work for the Israeli intelligence service. They know how to deal with people like you. They'd take you out and shoot you."</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >McGehee's original manuscript contained nothing that he felt was classified information, and he was careful. The CIA made 397 deletions from his original draft, after retracting hundreds of their more whimsical deletions, made before discovering that he had obtained competent counsel. The legal battle took more than two years, and the CIA went around in circles. They would permit certain passages after battling with McGehee, then they would retract that permission, then grant it again, then take it away once more, and on different grounds each time. The CIA’s effort was an incredible feat of double-talk and duplicity. At one point, Ralph was threatened with prosecution for stealing state secrets if he could not prove that every fact in his book was obtained in the public domain. The published book is riddled with censorship deletions, with text such as "[19 words deleted]" in the middle of a sentence. McGehee states:</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >"John Marks and Victor Marchetti's book <i>The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence</i>, published in 1974 (9 years before McGehee's book), was the last approved critical book written about the Agency by an ex-employee. In light of my own experiences the reason is obvious: the secrecy agreement and the way it is abused by the Agency. It is virtually impossible to write in an atmosphere where everything is secret until it is deemed otherwise....It is clear that the secrecy agreement does not halt the flow of information to our enemies, for it does not affect the CIA employee who sells information...What the CIA's secrecy agreement does quite effectively, however, is to stop critics of the Agency from explaining to the American public what the CIA is and does. It is sad to say, but the truth is that the primary purpose of the secrecy agreement is to suppress information that the American people are legitimately entitled to."</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >For all the mainstream media's rhetoric regarding the First Amendment, freedom of speech in America has had a rough ride. From the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#sedition">Sedition Act of 1798</a>, making it a crime to criticize high-ranking American officials (not dealt with by the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#justice">U.S. Supreme Court</a> until 1964, in the <i>New York Times</i> versus Sullivan decision), to pre-Civil War Southern laws making it a crime to speak or write about abolition, to the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wilson">Espionage Act</a> that made it a crime to criticize World War I, freedom of speech has often been more imagined than real in America. During my lifetime, freedom of speech has waxed and waned.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) would be unnecessary if the principle of freedom truly guided the American legal system. The FOIA was originally passed during the Civil Rights days of the 1960s. The Nixon years saw the FOIA erode. The aftermath of the Watergate scandal tipped the scales back toward freedom. The Carter years saw a new openness in government and a focus on human rights, but that is relative. Under no U.S. president have we truly had freedom of information, nor have <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#record">human rights concerns</a> <i>ever</i> prominently guided America’s foreign policy. Knowledge is power, and keeping information secret is a time-honored method of amassing and maintaining power. The United States is no exception, and there is no reason why it should be. People can wave around the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#iroquois">Constitution</a>, but America’s freedom of information is scant for a nation that calls itself democratic, and has gotten worse since the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc">World Trade Center</a> attacks. America’s military and spy establishment has the largest secrecy apparatus of any nation, by far.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >The rich and powerful run the Democratic Party, the same as in the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party sometimes has at least an <i>appearance</i> of allegiance to average Americans. The FOIA has endured many vicissitudes in my lifetime, with the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#reagan">Reagan-Bush</a> years witnessing the greatest assaults on the FOIA. The Reagan administration even tried <i>reclassifying</i> previously declassified information used in McGehee's book, to enter bizarre, Orwellian realms. <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#central">Bludgeoning Central America</a> was one of many dark acts committed during the Reagan-Bush years, and secrecy was its handmaiden, evident in the Iran-Contra scandal, among others. Although the pendulum swung marginally back to freedom's side during Bill Clinton's reign, freedom of speech in America is a farce if one offends or exposes the powerful. Today, the "anti-terrorist" legislation Clinton has championed, and his recent "Fortress America" ideas of protecting America from "terrorists," can easily be used to silence American critics of our government, by calling them "terrorists." Those fears, voiced continually in right wing circles, are not so farfetched (events since the <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc">World Trade Center attacks</a> make the above writing quite dated, as <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#bush1">Bush</a>, Ashcroft and friends seem to be trying to raise McCarthy from the grave).</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >To date, <a name="heart"></a>Ralph is one of a handful of ex-CIA employees to publicly criticize the CIA. Ralph does not agree with me, but I believe he did not attain his realizations due to his intelligence, which is considerable. He figured it out because he fervently digested his indoctrination and believed that his efforts made the world better. Because he was such a true believer, he chased experiences (such as volunteering for Saigon duty in 1968) that eventually provided him with his devastating revelations. When he realized that his efforts helped murder millions of people in Southeast Asia, his conscience assailed him. His pure heart enabled him to figure it out, not his intelligence.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >I can only wonder how often Ralph thinks back to those Southeast Asians that he "helped," abetting their horrific experiences at the United States’ bloody hands. He probably thinks about it every day. His CIABASE and other efforts have been attempts to help balance <i>his</i> scales, while helping us awaken, to help prevent further murders in greed's name. Unfortunately, it is happening in <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#continuing">Iraq</a> today, and Armageddon might be just around the corner. Ralph's weathering of the CIA's continuing harassment has been inspiring. <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#stockwell">John Stockwell</a> (another rare ex-CIA employee who spoke out, and has paid dearly for his efforts) has written, "More effectively than any other ex-CIA author, Ralph McGehee deals with the anguish of a principled man seeking a career in the CIA."</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >Ralph is the rare individual possessing the integrity to walk his arduous and heartbreaking path. Of the many thousands who have filed through the CIA's ranks during the past fifty years, Ralph is in an elite company of less than ten people who woke up and took a public stance. That list includes Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Victor Marchetti and David McMichael. There are not many more, and probably no others of their stature. They have my admiration, and even my awe. None of them think of themselves as heroes. As <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#chomsky">Noam Chomsky</a> says, their motivation is partly being able to look themselves squarely in the eye while shaving. They are responding to the insistent call of their consciences, and feel compelled to act. Ralph McGehee and those few others like him rarely see themselves as heroes, but are doing what any decent person would do. The problem is, few will do the decent thing if it might really cost them. I will always be grateful for the "heroic" efforts of McGehee, Chomsky, Agee, Stockwell, McMichael, Marchetti, <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hitting">Dennis Lee</a> and others. They helped me figure out how our system works. </span> </p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" > Wade Frazier, Seattle, March 1999 (slightly revised since original publication)</span></p><p> </p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >P.S. in 2004, <a href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/other.htm#neocolonialist">John Perkins</a> spoke out like Ralph did, but from the privatized “middle management.”</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" ><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm">SOURCE</a><br /></span> </p>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-12106365857510324012010-04-07T09:53:00.002-04:002010-04-07T09:55:12.743-04:00WTF?!?Let it not be said I operate my vehicle with blinders. If the following video is merely a mistake by Michele Obama then it is one of the BIGGEST blunders in recent political history. In 2008, she very explicity said that the President's home country is Kenya and here is the unambiguous video. I am sure the a...rguments are already in motion that this is no different from me calling Kentucky my home state even though I was born in Michigan, or calling Poland my home country though only my grandfather on my mother's side was born there. It could be merely a declaration of a particular affinity for that nation. I have no idea what is going on but whatever the truth, whether the birthers stand falsely accused or not, this is a blunder of the highest order. She should have known better.<BR><BR><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JhDx9PJjp20&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JhDx9PJjp20&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5822190639116228533.post-53494320245748171962010-04-07T09:40:00.001-04:002010-04-07T09:40:37.055-04:00Rachel Maddow: The Un-Mooring of Politics from Fact<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/o9KjQUSZXqE&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/o9KjQUSZXqE&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>Eric Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01401593953524570094noreply@blogger.com0