Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Schwarzenegger Appointed Scandal-Ridden Quackenbush Co-Conspirator to Oversee Key Banking Oversight Agency

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kelley31jul31,0,5238243.story?coll=la-home-local

Gov.'s banking choice questioned: Panel found that the new chief of oversight agency had a role in the Quackenbush scandal

By Evan Halper/July 31, 2007

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has put a key banking oversight agency under the stewardship of an administrator who, according to a bipartisan legislative investigation, helped arrange the misuse of millions of dollars of public funds and steered government contracts to friends.

Michael A. Kelley, appointed commissioner of the Department of Financial Services by the governor in December, was a central figure in the scandal that ultimately drove former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush from office in 2000. Kelley, who was Quackenbush's top deputy, was found unanimously by a bipartisan legislative panel to have helped the former insurance commissioner divert public funds away from state coffers and into nonprofit foundations that were focused largely on promoting the commissioner's political career.

The money, a total of $12.5 million, came from legal settlements extracted from insurance companies that failed to carry out their responsibilities to consumers in the wake of the 1994 Northridge earthquake. But not a single dollar ever made it to those consumers.

The bipartisan Assembly Committee on Insurance, which unanimously concluded in 2000 that Kelley "played a prominent role" in the scandal, also accused him of awarding a $144,000 contract to a longtime personal friend who lacked experience for the job. "No one else was interviewed," the report said.

Although Kelley was never charged criminally, he was forced to resign soon after the departure of Quackenbush.

"He was deeply and directly involved in the scandalous enterprise that led to not only the commissioner's resignation, but his own," said former Assemblyman Fred Keeley, a Santa Cruz Democrat who served on the panel that investigated the scandal. "He failed to look out for the interest of consumers…. I think he has forfeited his right to serve in appointed positions where his responsibility is to do that."

Kelley defended his actions in a written statement Monday.

"Subsequent to the legislative report, the FBI, attorney general, district attorney and a grand jury conducted a through investigation and identified the individuals that had broken the law," he wrote. "I was not complicit in any criminal activities. Those who were responsible for criminal acts were found and punished by the judicial system."

Kelley's appointment, made while lawmakers were on holiday break, largely escaped notice in the Capitol until recently, when investigators for the state Senate began revisiting the facts surrounding the Quackenbush scandal in preparation for Kelley's upcoming confirmation hearing. Under state law, Kelley must be confirmed by the Senate if the administration intends to keep him in the post more than a year.

At the Department of Financial Institutions, Kelley oversees the enforcement of consumer protection laws that relate to about 700 banks, credit unions, savings associations, trust companies and other financial organizations formed by state charter. The institutions regulated by the department have assets of more than $290 billion.

A spokesman for the governor said Kelley was a good fit for the job.

"Michael Kelley has been a successful administrator and regulator for over 20 years and has been an effective watchdog for California consumers every step of the way," said Schwarzenegger press secretary Aaron McLear.

McLear said the administration had no plans to remove Kelley before the end of the year, meaning a confirmation hearing before the Senate Rules Committee is likely. Lawmakers say Kelley will be called on to defend his actions during the Quackenbush days.

"I'm sure the Rules Committee will explore this chapter of his history very, very carefully," said Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who was one of the lead questioners at the Quackenbush hearings in 2000. "The whole Quackenbush episode was one of the worst examples of misuse of funds I have ever seen."

Steinberg was among the bipartisan group of lawmakers that said Kelley colluded with Quackenbush in subverting the regulatory process, misspending state money, failing to provide redress for earthquake victims and engaging "in a cover-up in an effort to mislead the public and avoid responsibility."

The report said Kelley was largely in charge of steering the settlement money to the questionable nonprofits. One of the groups that received funds was labeled a "sham" by then-Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer. Kelley picked his longtime friend Linda Smith-Gaston to administer another of the organizations. The legislative report said Smith-Gaston, who paid herself $144,000 over 18 months, lacked skills and got the job through a process of "friends helping friends, with not even a pretense of searching for the best arrangement and best people."

Another of Kelley's longtime friends, Rhonda English, was selected by him to serve as president of a separate nonprofit established with settlement money.

When the president of one of the companies hired to do work for a foundation established by Quackenbush warned that money from the settlements was being used in an "unconscionable" manner, Kelley was assigned to investigate.

"Although now on notice there were problems worth investigating, [the Department of Insurance] took no action," the legislative report said.

As the Quackenbush scandal unfolded, Kelley engaged the help of the California Highway Patrol in seeking to root out whistle-blowers. Kelley argued that internal reports detailing Quackenbush's settlements with the insurance companies were confidential.

As Kelley's days in the insurance department neared an end, he became a beneficiary of a controversial contract obligating taxpayers to cover $1 million in legal fees for officials implicated in the scandal. Quackenbush approved the contract as one of his final acts in office, after the state Department of General Services rejected proposals for the state to cover the legal fees of Kelley and another deputy.

After the resignations of Quackenbush and then Kelley, the insurance department rescinded the contract.

Whatever Happend to Jeb Magruder?

Magruder still troubled post-Watergate
By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS AP Writer
News Fuze, 07/31/2007

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Watergate figure Jeb Magruder, as he'll always be known—not as minister, consultant or civil servant, some of his other titles—is healing.

The 72-year-old is recovering from a stroke that apparently caused his car to hit a motorcycle and a truck on a Columbus expressway.

Magruder had been banged-up before in the more than three decades since his brief prison term for his role in the break-in that brought down Richard Nixon.

Still, friends say the past few years have been particularly tough.
"Things seem like they've been a spiral down for him," said Rev. Jim Long, a Columbus pastor who credits Magruder for helping him decide to enter the ministry several years ago.

Magruder was Nixon's deputy campaign director, an aide to Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and deputy communications director at the White House. He spent seven months in prison for his role in covering up the 1972 break-in at Washington's Watergate complex.

Last week's accident came two years after he was stopped in rural Ohio and charged with drunken driving. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of reckless operation.

In 2003, police in suburban Grandview Heights arrested Magruder after finding him lying on a sidewalk and refusing to get up. Police said he appeared drunk. He pleaded no contest to a minor misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct.

About two weeks before that arrest, Magruder had claimed he heard Nixon order the Watergate break-in. Historians consider that unlikely.

Long said Watergate was a black mark that Magruder knew he could never escape, but "it also gave him visibility—maybe notoriety would be another way to put it—that allowed him to do some things."

Magruder has not commented on his recent accident, in which he was cited with failure to maintain an assured clear distance and failure to stop after an accident or collision. A message on his home phone says he is not receiving calls and messages left by The Associated Press at his office were not returned.

Magruder became a born-again Christian after Watergate. He received a master's in divinity, served at a Presbyterian church in California, then became executive minister at First Community Church in Upper Arlington, a well-off Columbus suburb.

He spent eight years at First Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Ky., then went to work for Dallas-based RSI-Ketchum, a church fundraising consulting group. It was during that time he re-embraced his role in the country's most famous political scandal.

"There was a long time where he ran from that stuff, but it finally got to the point where he accepted it and the celebrity that went with it," said Jim Keith, the company's senior vice president.

In 2003, Magruder retired to Columbus, the city where 15 years earlier, Mayor Dana Rinehart had appointed him head of a city ethics commission and charged him to lead a yearlong honesty campaign. The city was reacting to free-for-all in which people scrambled to scoop up money that spilled from the back of an armored car.

An ethics commission "headed by none other than (are you ready America?) Jeb Stuart Magruder," quipped Time magazine.

Magruder took it stride, and pointed out, "it's a characteristic in American life that there is redemption."

http://www.mercurynews.com/natbreakingnews/ci_6508972

Watergate figure cited in traffic crashes

COLUMBUS - Jeb Stuart Magruder, an aide to President Nixon who spent seven months in prison for his role in covering up the 1972 break-in at Washington's Watergate complex, has been cited in two traffic crashes and with leaving the scene of an accident, police said Thursday.

Magruder's car rear-ended a motorcycle and struck the rear of a box truck Monday on state Route 315, according to police reports. Magruder sped away after the first crash with the motorcycle, witnesses told police.

Police cited Magruder, 72, of Columbus, with two counts of failure to maintain an assured clear distance and one count of failure to stop after an accident or collision. The charges are misdemeanors.

One witness said the car was traveling above 90 mph leaving the scene of the accident with the motorcycle, according to police reports. Another witness reported seeing Magruder's Audi speeding and making erratic lane changes before the first accident.

Magruder was in serious condition at Riverside Methodist Hospital after the crashes Monday. The hospital has declined to release any details since.

Magruder could not be reached for comment. A recorded message on his home phone said he was "not receiving calls at this time."

The drivers of the other two vehicles weren't seriously hurt.

Magruder, a retired Presbyterian minister, said for the first time in 2003 that he remembered listening in on the phone as Nixon gave the go-ahead for the plan to bug the Democratic headquarters at Watergate. Some historians reacted with skepticism.

Magruder was charged with drunken driving by the State Highway Patrol in 2005 in Fayette County, about 40 miles southwest of Columbus. That charge was later reduced to reckless operation, according to court records in Washington Court House.

In 2003, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after police in the Columbus suburb of Grandview found him passed out on a sidewalk.

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070727/NEWS01/707270372

Following Ted Stevens' Northern Lights PAC

Guest Post: Following Stevens PAC Money
Wash. Post, July 31, 2007

Ethics has been the topic du jour on Capitol Hill today, with the House passing its lobbying reform measure by a landslide 411-8 vote. And the fallout continues after yesterday's FBI raid of Sen. Ted Steven's (R-Alaska) Anchorage home. Stevens and other Alaska politicians are being investigated in connection with a corruption probe. Washington Post reporter John Solomon offers us this item on Stevens's political action committee:

Lawmakers have long used political action committees to sow good will among fellow candidates. So how is Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican whose house was raided yesterday in a federal corruption probe, using his Northern Lights PAC?

Well, he doled out $95,000 to colleagues in the first half of the year, including $5,000 to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who is up for re-election and just happens to sit on the Senate Ethics Committee. That's the panel that could be called into review Stevens conduct at a later date in the controversy over his Alaska home renovations and relationship with an oil services company called VECO.

[Roberts declined to answer questions about the matter, as did the committee's top Democrat, Barbara Boxer of California, and top Republican, John Cornyn of Texas.]

Stevens also gave $5,000 to Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), another lawmaker whose ties to VECO have also attracted public scrutiny. Other recipients of the Northern Lights PAC's largesse include Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, John Sununu of New Hampshire, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. And the National Republican Senatorial Committee got a cool $15,000 as well.

Stevens apparently didn't skimp on treating his donors well, either. His fund-raising expenses listed in his latest report to the Federal Election Commission included more than $200 to an Island Smoke Shop in Key Largo, Fla., $550 in tips to the waiters, front desk and bartenders at Madrona Manor in California, more than $250 to Poker Bargains in Beverly Hills and more than $2,500 to the Pure Luxury Bus company.

To view Stevens' latest PAC report, justclick here:

-- John Solomon

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2007/07/guest_post_following_stevens_p.html

NYC's Brave New Public Spy Technology

NYC Spycam Goal: Spot Terrorists Before They Hit
By Noah Shachtman
July 12, 2007

Categories: Cops and Robbers, Homeland Security, You can run...

... Earlier this week, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a massive security plan for lower Manhattan. There’ll be 3000 or more cameras in the 1.7 square miles below Canal St., all sending live feeds back to police HQs.

... Footage in other places is used to find criminals after the act. But one of the biggest threats to lower Manhattan is a suicide bomber who’s not going to be so concerned if you can identify him the day afterwards.

So, the cool stuff being deployed in New York isn’t just the mass of cameras. It’s the software that’ll sort through images and automatically try to identify risky stuff: backpacks left unattended, guys wearing long coats on August days, cars circling the Freedom Tower. Facial recognition software is coming too. Ultimately, the cops hope that the computers will be able to identify a risk to a building and immediately dispatch officers there, equipped with electronic blueprints and info on a suspect’s every movement.

Will it work? It’ll probably be sluggish at first. Sorting video is very hard and facial recognition software, for example, has been a bust so far. There’s also huge potential for abuse. But police departments are heading this way, and New York’s rollout is definitely something to watch.

Penny Lernoux's Cry of the People: One of the Most Important Journalists of the 20th Century on the Internet

Penny Lernoux, CRY OF THE PEOPLE - The struggle for human rights in Latin America and the Catholic Church in conflict with US policy (Penguins, 1980):

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Latin_America/Cry_of_the_People.html

Excerpts:

Torture, Repression
Repression (continued)
Be a Patriot (in El Salvador) and Kill a Priest
The Doctrine of National Security -- Terror
U.S. Capitalism and The Multinationals
Villains Afoot
Clockwork Orange
The Church's Role, The Church Divided, The U.S. Connection
Quotations

Monday, July 30, 2007

British Bali Bomb Blowback (and Blair)

" ... The Bali bomb incident radically changed the Indonesian government's policies and attitudes towards Islamic inspired terrorism. Having previously denied the existence of terrorists operating on its own soil, Jakarta quickly realized that allowing the JI's activities to continue without impunity would hurt the nation's economic and foreign interests ... " - Jakarta Post, July 10, 2007


http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20070710.F05

Government admits it knew of terrorist threat to Bali

By Owen Bowcott and Michael White, John Aglionby in Bali and David Fickling in Sydney
The Guardian
October 18, 2002

Thousands of British tourists and residents living in Indonesia were urged by the foreign secretary last night to consider leaving the country unless their presence was absolutely essential.

The announcement followed a day of political recrimination over the nature of the intelligence warnings received before the explosions on Bali.

Downing Street officials who had earlier spoken of "no specific threat picked up in relation to Bali that weekend" modified it to the extent of confirming that a number of specific target areas had been identified, including six places in Indonesia, one of them Bali.

Following Australia's lead in advising its citizens to quit the predominantly Muslim state, Jack Straw warned there could be further terrorist attacks on western targets similar to the bombing of two nightclubs in Bali which killed at least 186 people last Saturday.

As many as 4,000 Britons are registered as residents with the embassy in Jakarta and thousands more are thought to be on holiday at any one time on the sprawling archipelago of islands which constitutes Indonesia.

The Foreign Office said that non-essential embassy staff and some dependents would be flown home shortly.

Mr Straw said: "As soon as we heard of the atrocity ... we recommended against all travel to Bali and all but essential travel to elsewhere in Indonesia. In the light of further information and consideration, [we are now advising] against all travel to Indonesia [and recommending] that all British citizens should consider leaving Indonesia if their presence is not essential.

"British citizens who remain should exercise extreme caution, especially in public places, including pubs, restaurants, bars, schools, places of worship, outdoor recreational venues and other locations frequented by foreigners."

Earlier, at a cabinet meeting, the prime minister told colleagues he was certain more attacks were being planned. "We can't predict when they will strike next, we can't predict where they will strike next," he said. "But we have to be honest about this that there will be further attacks."

Officials were adamant, however, that it would be impossible to "act on every bit of static around the system that you happen to pick up" and that all such information - and travel warnings - had been placed on Foreign Office and US state department websites.

Mr Blair later admitted that if the authorities acted on every "generic threat ... essentially the terrorists would close down the world".

But he also conceded that "non-specific, broad-based" information about Indonesia had referred to six places or regions, ranging Bali to the larger neighbouring islands of Sumatra and Jakarta.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,814464,00.html

THREATS AND RESPONSES: CONSPIRACY TALES
Indonesians Say They Suspect C.I.A. in Bali Blast
NYT, November 7, 2002
By JANE PERLEZ
Section A, Page 22

ABSTRACT - Many of educated elite in largely moderate Muslim country of Indonesia are blaming Central Intelligence Agency for Bali bombing that killed more that 180 people; reject United States suggestion that it was work of radical Islamic group with links to Al Qaeda; many Indonesians, especially moderate Muslim leaders, cannot accept idea that homegrown radical Islamic organization like Jemaah Islamiyah, headed by frail-loooking cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, could have had hand in terrorist act on its own soil; some Muslim leaders say it is not illogical to blame Washington for Bali violence, given history of US in Indonesia during cold war ...

JI’s links to Indonesia’s Military Intelligence

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20051014&articleId=1081

There are indications, that in addition to its alleged links to Al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah also has links to Indonesia’s military intelligence, which in turn has links to the CIA and Australian intelligence.

The links between JI and Indonesia’s Intelligence Agency (BIN) are acknowledged by the International Crisis Group (ICG):

"This link [of JI to the BIN] needs to be explored more fully: it does not necessarily mean that military intelligence was working with JI, but it does raise a question about the extent to which it knew or could have found out more about JI than it has acknowledged." (International Crisis Group, http://www.crisisweb.org/projects/showreport.cfm?reportid=845 , 2003)

The ICG, however, fails to mention that Indonesia’s intelligence apparatus has for more than 30 years been controlled by the CIA.

In the wake of the October 2002 Bali bombing, a contradictory report emanating from Indonesia’s top brass, pointed to the involvement of both the head of Indonesian intelligence General A. M. Hendropriyono as well as the CIA:

"The agency and its director, Gen. A. M. Hendropriyono, are well regarded by the United States and other governments. But there are still senior intelligence officers here who believe that the C.I.A. was behind the bombing."

In response to these statements, the Bush Administration demanded that President Megawati Sukarnoputri, publicly refute the involvement of the U.S in the attacks. No official retraction was issued. Not only did President. Megawati remained silent on this matter, she also accused the US of being:

"a superpower that forced the rest of the world to go along with it… We see how ambition to conquer other nations has led to a situation where there is no more peace unless the whole world is complying with the will of the one with the power and strength."

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration, had used the Bali attacks to prop up its fear campaign:

"President Bush said Monday that he assumes al-Qaeda was responsible for the deadly bombing in Indonesia and that he is worried about fresh attacks on the United States."

The news [regarding the Bali attack] came as US intelligence officials warned that more attacks like the Indonesian bombing can be expected in the next few months, in Europe, the Far East or the US."

Cover-up

The links of JI to the Indonesian intelligence agency were never raised in the official Indonesian government investigation --which was guided behind the scenes by Australian intelligence and the CIA.

Moreover, shortly after the bombing, Australian Prime Minister John Howard "admitted that Australian authorities were warned about possible attacks in Bali but chose not to issue a warning." Also In the wake of the bombings, the Australian government chose to work with Indonesia’s Special Forces the Kopassus, in the so-called "war on terrorism".

Australia: "Useful Wave of Indignation"

Reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the Bali attack served to trigger "a useful wave of indignation." They contributed to swaying Australian public opinion in favour of the US invasion of Iraq, while weakening the anti-war protest movement. In the wake of the Bali attack, the Australian government "officially" joined the US-led "war on terrorism." It has not only used the Bali bombings as a pretext to fully integrate the US-UK military axis, it has also adopted drastic police measures including "ethnic profiling" directed against its own citizens:

Prime Minister John Howard made the extraordinary declaration recently that he is prepared to make pre-emptive military strikes against terrorists in neighbouring Asian countries planning to attack Australia. Australian intelligence agencies also are very worried about the likelihood of an al-Qaeda attack using nuclear weapons. ...

VECO Scandal Circle Jerks: Notes on Brendan Sullivan, Ted Stevens, Tim Griffin, Fred Thompson, Jerry Prevo & Alaskan Crude

"NERVOUS? NOT UNCLE … We keep hearing Ted Stevens isn’t a target of federal investigators but Uncle Ted isn’t taking any chances. 'He has quietly hired Washington’s most powerful and expensive lawyer, Brendan Sullivan Jr., to deal with the feds,' reports the Washingtonian. Ted had no comment. ... " - Alaska Ear, The divine appendage, July 1, 2007

http://www.adn.com/news/politics/alaska_ear/story/9096742p-9012863c.html
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http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003580.php

Ted Stevens Hires Ollie North's Lawyer
By Laura McGann
July 2, 2007

Taking his lead from Oliver North, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) has hired Brendan V. Sullivan, Washington's most expensive and most powerful lawyer, The Washingtonian reports.

The move makes it look like Stevens isn't taking any chances in the ongoing federal probe into his dealings with Alaska oil services company Veco Corp.

Sullivan is used to going to bat for heavy weight defendants, including North, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, who pled guilty to a single misdeamenor at the end of a $9 million probe, and four FBI agents involved in the 1992 Ruby Ridge shootout.

Comments:

The US Government's probe on Cisneros' personal life that cost taxpayers $9m was brought to us, in part, by former Rove protegee Tim Griffin
...
Posted by:
Date: July 2, 2007 6:38 PM

Oliver North should have gone to prision for treason and obstruction of justice. Now he sits on Fox News and is held in the highest esteem by the idiot souless fools that watch Fox News.

Posted by: Sick&Tired
Date: July 2, 2007 7:15 PM

Rev. Jerry Prevo

... Ollie North is a *very* good friend of right-wing power-politico Rev. Jerry Prevo and his Anchorage Baptist Temple -- picture Alaska's very own Pat Robertson/Christian Coalition.

Ollie has made several appearances at the Temple - and so has Ted. Jerry's ties to the Alaskan Republican party go back as far and as deep as Ted's.

They're all pals in the party....

Posted by: Kuparuk
Date: July 2, 2007 8:54 PM
---------------------
ON TIM GRIFFIN'S VOTE-RIGGING

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/30/griffin-resigns/
Rove-Protege Tim Griffin Resigns As U.S. Attorney

The Arkansas Times reports that the controversial U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Tim Griffin, has resigned: The U.S. Justice Department has notified Arkansas’s congressional delegation that Interim Eastern District U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin is resigning effective Friday, June 1.

Griffin, a former protege of Karl Rove, was formerly research director of the Republican National Committee. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Griffin led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

Griffin became the poster boy for the politicization of the U.S. attorney process. Former Justice official Kyle Sampson noted that getting Griffin into office “was important to Harriet [Miers], Karl, et cetera.” The traditional 120-day term for “interim” U.S. attorneys had expired for Griffin on April 20, yet the Justice Department continued to allow him to serve.

ThinkProgress earlier spoke with Rep. John Boozman’s (R-AR) office, which said that the congressman submitted names of replacements for Griffin to the White House on March 30. So far, no word from the Justice Department on the name of the new U.S. attorney.

In the meantime, assistant U.S. attorney Jane Duke will take over. The Justice Department had previously passed her over to install Griffin, using sexual discrimination as an excuse because Duke had been on maternity leave at the time.

UPDATE: Today the Wall Street Journal reported that Griffin was in “discussions” about working for the possible presidential campaign of Fred Thompson. But the Arkansas Times reports that it’s still unclear whether he will join a campaign or go into the private sector.
--------------------
Political scandals thick as trees in Alaska
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 29, 2007
By Joel Connelly

Threats and bluster are standard operating procedures for Alaska's seniority-laden Washington, D.C., delegation, and Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, was in full cry earlier this month.

"There is always another day when those who bite will be killed, too, and I am very good at that," Young said. No kiddin'. He once waved an 18-inch-long oosik, the penis bone of a walrus, at the first woman to direct the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Young, the political architect of Alaska's "bridges to nowhere," was mad at a bid by Republican New Jersey Rep. Scott Garrett to cut one of his pet programs.

Not only did he go after Garrett, but Alaska's congressman went on to note that his opponent comes "from a state that doesn't have the greatest reputation in the world."

A few days later, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Young is under FBI investigation for his ties to VECO, the oil-field-services supplier whose president has pleaded guilty to paying off Alaska state legislators.

"Is two-thirds of the New Jersey congressional delegation currently being investigated by the FBI? Did New Jersey pols and lobbyists organize a Corrupt Bastards Club in the state capital? And get hats made?" the Alaska Ear column of the Anchorage Daily News asked.

Alaska has lately moved out in front of the Garden State when it comes to politicians for sale, for rent and ready to exchange favors.

The past year has seen a curtain pulled back on the crony capitalist insiders' network that has long run the 49th State, treating the "Great Land" as a grand treasure trove.

As usual, there's a key insider: In the 1970s, it was Jess Carr, the Teamsters Union leader whose local ran Alaska Pipeline construction with fists and featherbedding.

The go-to guy of recent times was VECO boss Bill Allen. VECO was the prime contractor in cleaning up Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez spill. VECO took in about $800 million of $2.5 billion spent by Exxon.

Allen got around, and got around the law.

By bugging VECO's suite at Juneau's Baranof Hotel, the FBI recorded vote-buying that resulted in Allen and deputy Rick Smith pleading guilty to extortion and bribery, plus corruption charges against one legislator and two former colleagues.

Between 2002 and 2006, VECO paid $243,000 in consulting fees to the firm of state Senate President Ben Stevens, son of Alaska's U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. What work the Stevens dauphin actually did is unclear. He has not -- yet -- been indicted.

Allen threw an annual fundraiser called "The Pig Roast" for Young each August. Young chaired the House Transportation Committee until Democrats won control of Congress.

Young received $157,000 from VECO employees and its political committee over the past decade. He amended campaign-finance filings this year to report $38,000 in payments to Allen for "fundraising costs."

And there is 83-year-old Ted Stevens, Alaska's senator for life. The FBI is investigating a 2000 project that more than doubled the size of his home in Girdwood, a ski town near Anchorage.

One contractor who worked on the house said he was told to send bills to VECO. He has said that someone in Allen's office examined the billing, then sent them to Stevens.

The Los Angeles Times did a 2004 study of "Uncle Ted's" personal finances. Stevens has become a millionaire by investing in partnerships with influential contractors. The same partners profited handsomely from spending items that Stevens put into the federal budget.

The Anchorage Daily News has regularly disclosed lucrative lobbying by former aides to Young and Stevens. An ex-Young staffer owns land near the terminus of a controversial proposed bridge. The family of former Gov. Frank Murkowski owns land on Gravina Island, destination of a planned bridge from Ketchikan.

Stevens, too, is given to threats. He vowed revenge on Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., after she blocked his backdoor bid to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

In a final "predators' ball" of Alaska's elite, Stevens, Young and Allen headlined a fundraiser for Cantwell's GOP challenger Mike McGavick. McGavick ended up refunding $14,700 from VECO executives when news of the FBI inquiry became public.

A new north wind is blowing.

It blew away Murkowski in last year's Republican primary. The winner -- now governor -- was Sarah Palin, who blew the whistle on ethical misconduct while chairing the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich is being recruited by Democrats to run against Young. Young is also under scrutiny for favors done for Florida businessmen who were big campaign donors.

The state's junior Sen. Lisa Murkowski -- appointed by her father when he was governor -- dodged a bullet last week. Murkowski and her husband announced they were selling back a choice Kenai River lot to a friend and real estate developer.

The resale came after a D.C. watchdog group filed a complaint against Sen. Murkowski, charging she paid far below market value and that the land deal amounted to an illegal gift.

"While Verne and I intended to make this our family home, and we paid a fair price for this land, no property is worth compromising the trust of the Alaska people," she said.

It's enough to bring tears to your eyes -- if you happen to be a crocodile.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/325567_joel30.html




FBI Raids Alaska State Offices In Probe of Oil-Field Firm VECO

JIM CARLTON and STEVE LEVINE
Wall Street Journal
2sep2006

The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided six Alaska state legislative offices, carrying away boxes of documents in what appears to be a probe into whether VECO Corp., an oil-field-services contractor with close political ties, engaged in influence peddling.

On Thursday and continuing on Friday, FBI agents launched a series of raids in Juneau and other cities, according to Alaskan legislative officials, pouring into offices that include those of State Senate President Ben Stevens, son of longtime U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. The agents sought documents and other records showing ties between the legislators and VECO and its executives, including Bill Allen, the company's chairman, the officials said.

VECO and its employees are major political-campaign contributors in Alaska, giving mostly to Republicans. In 2000, Mr. Allen was co-chairman of President Bush's Alaska state campaign.

FBI officials declined to comment on the raids. A Justice Department official said "law enforcement actions" had taken place in Alaska this week, but declined to comment further.

John Harris, speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, said his understanding is that the raids were tied to an FBI probe into whether VECO used its financial influence to try to secure votes on legislation related to a proposed natural-gas pipeline from the Alaskan North Slope.

As part of the push to ship to market all the natural gas that is now stranded at Prudhoe Bay and other big oil fields, VECO and other companies in the industry have pushed for construction of a pipeline to the lower 48 states. The Alaska legislature is considering one bill to help do that, but lawmakers have been squabbling over how much the state should have to pay for construction and other issues.

Last month, Alaska legislators passed a controversial measure that changed the way oil and gas is taxed in the state. Critics of the industry-backed bill say the new system taxes oil and gas based more on industry profits, rather than mainly on production, risking the potential for companies to reclassify some profits as expenses and thus evade taxes. However, supporters of the measure say the state stands to collect more money under the new tax plan.

Three of the legislators whose offices were raided had voted in favor of the tax-change bill, which was championed by Gov. Frank Murkowski, a former U.S. senator who lost his bid for re-election in a Republican primary after a series of unpopular moves. Besides the younger Mr. Stevens, the other legislators whose offices were raided included those of state Sen. John Cowdery and state Reps. Vic Kohring, Pete Kott and Bruce Weyhrauch. All are Republicans. State Sen. Donald Olson is the only Democrat whose offices were caught up in the raids.

Mr. Kohring issued a statement confirming that his offices in the state capital of Juneau and his district in suburban Anchorage were raided, and that FBI agents interviewed him as part of an investigation into VECO. "I was told I am not a target of the investigation," Mr. Kohring said in the statement, adding the FBI asked him not to say more.

A spokesman for Mr. Olson said he will cooperate with the investigation. Calls left for the other four legislators weren't returned. Officials for VECO -- an Anchorage-based oil-field-services company that maintains and repairs crude oil pipelines, refineries and other oil-field facilities -- didn't return calls for comment.

The FBI investigation is the latest cloud over the Alaskan oil industry. Corrosion problems at the giant Prudhoe Bay field have prompted investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation and state agencies into the practices of British oil giant BP PLC, which operates the facility. Corrosion led to a spill of about 200,000 gallons of crude from one pipeline at Prudhoe Bay last March, and BP officials ordered much of the field closed last month after discovering the corrosion problems were more widespread.

The VECO case unfolded as a surprise to workers in Alaska's capitol building, who stood by as agents in sweatshirts and T-shirts swept into the building shortly before noon Thursday, spending hours rifling through legislators' offices. Some legislative aides who saw the agents say that at first they thought they were workers, because they were inside offices, like that of Mr. Stevens, which were closed while the legislature is out of session.

By nightfall, the agents left the building carrying boxes of documents, including binders, appointment books and other materials, two legislative aides said. The agents acted under search warrants that listed "Items to be seized," said one aide who obtained a copy of a warrant. Among the items listed in the warrant, the aide said, was: "Anything having to do with any and all documents concerning, reflecting or relating to any or all of the following entities," including VECO, Mr. Allen, several other VECO officials, two Republican pollsters in Alaska and the Petroleum Club in Anchorage, which has been used to host a number of GOP fund-raisers. The warrant called for a search of all written or electronic documents, said the aide.

http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2006/VECO-AK-FBI-Raid2sep06.htm

Revealed: MI5's Role in Torture Flight Hell

By David Rose
The Observer, July 29, 2007
MI5 Headquarters in London

British source tells of betrayal to CIA - "I was stripped and hauled to US base"

An Iraqi who was a key source of intelligence for MI5 has given the first ever full insider's account of being seized by the CIA and bundled on to an illegal 'torture flight' under the programme known as extraordinary rendition. In a remarkable interview for The Observer, British resident Bisher al-Rawi has told how he was betrayed by the security service despite having helped keep track of Abu Qatada, the Muslim cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden's 'ambassador in Europe'. He was abducted and stripped naked by US agents, clad in nappies, a tracksuit and shackles, blindfolded and forced to wear ear mufflers, then strapped to a stretcher on board a plane bound for a CIA 'black site' jail near Kabul in Afghanistan.

He was taken on to the jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba before being released last March and returned to Britain after four years' detention without charge.

'All the way through that flight I was on the verge of screaming,' al-Rawi said. 'At last we landed, I thought, thank God it's over. But it wasn't - it was just a refuelling stop in Cairo. There were hours still to go ... My back was so painful, the handcuffs were so tight. All the time they kept me on my back. Once, I managed to wriggle a tiny bit, just shifted my weight to one side. Then I felt someone hit my hand. Even this was forbidden.'

He was thrown into the CIA's 'Dark Prison,' deprived of all light 24 hours a day in temperatures so low that ice formed on his food and water. He was taken to Guantanamo in March 2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement in terrorism by a tribunal.

A report by Parliament's intelligence and security committee last week disclosed that, although the Americans warned MI5 it planned to render al-Rawi in advance, in breach of international law, the British did not intervene on the grounds he did not have a UK passport. The government claimed he was the responsibility of Iraq, which he fled as a teenager when his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime.

The report confirmed that al-Rawi, 39, was only held after MI5 sent the CIA a telegram, stating he was an 'Islamic extremist' who had a timer for an improvised bomb in his luggage. In reality, before al-Rawi left London, police confirmed the device was a battery charger from Argos.

The committee accepted MI5's claim, given in secret testimony, that it had not wanted the Americans to arrest him, in November 2002, concluding the incident had damaged US-UK relations.

But al-Rawi alleged that the CIA told him they had been given the contents of his own MI5 file - information he had given his handlers freely when he was working as their source. He said an MI5 lawyer had given him 'cast iron' assurances that anything he told them would be treated in the strictest confidence and, if he ever got into trouble, MI5 would do everything in its power to help him.

When al-Rawi was in Guantanamo, he asked the American authorities to find his former MI5 handlers so they would corroborate his story but, because he did not know their surnames, MI5 said it could not assist.

The committee report cited MI5 testimony claiming that when al-Rawi was transported in December 2002, it could not have known how harsh his treatment might be. Yet eight months earlier, Amnesty International had published a lengthy report on US detention in Afghanistan, quoting several ex-prisoners who described conditions very similar to those experienced by al-Rawi.

He had conveyed messages between the preacher Abu Qatada and MI5 when Qatada was supposedly in hiding in 2002. At MI5's behest, he came close to arranging a meeting between the two sides.

Al-Rawi has now spoken out in an effort to help his friend Jamil el-Banna, who remains in Guantanamo. A Jordan-ian who also lived in London for years, where his wife and five children are British citizens, he too has been cleared by the Americans. However, he has been unable to leave Guantanamo because Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, says she is reviewing his right of residence on national security grounds.

Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East in London, where el-Banna lives, said his case revealed 'decrepitude at the heart of the government'. The government had 'no regard for the welfare of his children'.

His lawyers have filed a statement from al-Rawi as part of a judicial review case. In the action, they accuse MI5 of having a 'causative role' in both men's ordeals, stating it was 'complicit' in the illegal rendition and guilty of an 'abuse of power'.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2137144,00.html

Ritual Abuse: False Memory Proponents Dealt a Blow by New Study

" ... With practice, people can learn to suppress emotional memories ... "

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) has propogated the belief that memory repression is a big fat red herring. Never mind that repressed memory is the foundation of all psychotherapies, that it is reasonably common among stressed war veterans and other sufferers of PTSD ... false memory theory only applies to abused children, of course - and in a courtroom setting where big-big legal fees are collected for testifying that memories cannot possibly be repressed when they involve abuse, and must therefore be "false."

Sure-sure. So now a study comes along that demonstrates memories can be repressed by a simple act of concentration. The FMSF is wrestling with this one, but will invent some new fast-talk to pass off as legitimate psychiatry.

Meanwhile, sufferers of repressed memory of abuse, particularly the ritual variety, are persecuted by a legal system that has been heavily influenced by the child brutalization advocates of the FMSF.

- Alex Constantine

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/psychiatryNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001156&cid=BreakingNews
July 12, 2007

Practice Forgetting and Memories Fade

Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

This study suggests that, with practice, we can learn to forget emotion-laden images, in a process that appears to be under conscious control.

BOULDER, Colo., July 12 - With practice, people can learn to suppress emotional memories, researchers here found.

Their study may have clinical implications for those suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome or obsessive-compulsive disorder, Brendan Depue, a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, and colleagues reported in the July 13 issue of Science.

And it may also re-ignite the debate over so-called repressed memories, a topic that has been highly controversial in recent years.

The process of suppressing a memory has two stages and is under the control of the prefrontal regions of the brain, the researchers noted.

To test the degree to which people could suppress specific memories, the researchers first trained 16 participants to associate 40 neutral images of human faces with more emotion-laden pictures, such as a car crash or a wounded soldier.

After they memorized the pairs of images, the volunteers were placed in magnetic resonance imaging scanners.

Then they were shown 32 of the faces 12 times each in a pseudo-random order. For some pictures they were told to think about the associated disturbing image, for others, they were told not to think about it. The remaining eight pairs of faces and images were used as a baseline.

The use of the cue image only ensured that the subjects had to mentally manipulate their memory of the other image, Depue and colleagues said.
In the testing phase of the experiment, they were shown all 40 cue images and asked to give a short description of the associated image.

Analysis found that on average the volunteers were able to recall 62.5% of the pairs in the baseline group, compared with 71.1% of those they were asked to think about and 53.2% of those they were told not to think about.
Recall was significantly different for the "think" and not-think" groups (at P=0.0006), the researchers found. That was because, compared to the baseline, there was a trend toward better recall in the "think" group and significant reduction of recall (at P=0.02) in the "not-think" group.

The functional MRI scanning showed that two regions of the prefrontal cortex are involved one after the other in suppressing memories, the researchers said.

First, the right inferior frontal gyrus suppresses regions that support the sensory components of the memory, including the visual cortex and the thalamus.

Next, the right medial frontal gyrus suppresses regions, including the hippocampus and amygdala, that support emotional components of the memory.

The results are consistent with "the operation of an active process of suppression" of memory, the researchers said.

"By essentially shutting down specific portions of the brain, [volunteers] were able to stop the retrieval process of particular memories," Depue said.

"We think we now have a grasp of the neural mechanisms at work," Depue said, adding that he and his colleagues "hope the new findings and future research will lead to new therapeutic and pharmacological approaches to treating a variety of emotional disorders."

Not everyone sees the upside to the study.

Commenting on the results, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D., of the University California at Irvine, fears that the research will be misused as support for the idea that people can "banish horrific brutalization into the unconscious," a notion she has challenged for years.

"This will be used as a supposed piece of proof that [memory] repression has been discovered in the brain," she said. "This is not evidence for that but people will try to pretend that it is."

Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., executive director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia, noted that the images used in the experiment, while disturbing, were not personally traumatic to the volunteers, so "the results are not at all surprising to me."

But memories of real trauma can be "intrusive and worrisome" and difficult to avoid thinking about, she said.

Depue agreed that personal trauma may be a different kettle of fish. "A person could need thousands of repetitions of training to suppress such memories," he said. "We just don't know yet."

The study was supported by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The authors made no declaration with respect to potential conflicts.

Primary source: Science
Source reference: Depue BE et al. "Prefrontal Regions Orchestrate Suppression of Emotional Memories via a Two-Phase Process." Science 2007;317:215-19.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/psychiatryNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001156&cid=BreakingNews

"Counterinsurgency" in the Philippines: Enforced Disappearances an Act of Terror

http://pinoypress.net/2007/07/30/enforced-disappearances-an-act-of-terror/
By Roland G.Simbulan
July 30, 2007
MANILA — Extrajudicial killings and enforced (or involuntary) disappearances have been rampant occurrences during the Marcos dictatorship and, during the Aquino, Ramos and Estrada administrations, there were also documented reports of their occurrences by human rights groups. These killings and disappearances of political activists and advocates have been known to be perpetrated with impunity by members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the Philippine National Police or PNP (formerly Philippine Constabulary) and paramilitary/vigilante groups armed and trained by the AFP/PNP. For even today, Kuratong Balelengs or the summary execution of criminal suspects (such as thieves, snatchers, drug pushers, etc.) are a common practice among stone-cold killers who also happen to be our law enforcers.

But no administration can match the frequency and methodical manner in which extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances have occurred during the six years of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. But because there was sustained impunity, with the perpetrators not only still unpunished, but even promoted or even commended, they occur again and again with their own dirty rules. This time, they are part of what is referred to as the “Salvador Option” (with reference to the death squads of El Salvador in the 70s & 80s ) hatched by CIA operatives and their local cabal in military and civilian agencies involved in counterinsurgency.

What goes on into the mind of these perpetrators, probably professional killers or assassins?

The prolonged counterinsurgency war brings out the very worst aspect of human behavior, where the basic level of primordial instincts to survive are experienced. The human savage that lives inside all men, a remnant of the animal instinct, simplifies existence to just killing to survive and dying. Defeat insurgent terror with state terror. Everything else becomes insignificant. The professional warriors try to ignore the objectives and politics of the conflict, as they are totally consumed by getting the job done in special warfare against erstwhile suspected political cadre. It does not matter if this conflict is rooted and fueled by mass poverty, social injustice and abuses.

The intensive military training gives them a continual bonding process and they tend to protect each other, as if their lives depended on it. They have an unreasonable animosity toward those who raise issues of violations of human rights of their targets, while no one raises a howl or public outcry when their own ranks are decimated or killed by rebel insurgents in ambushes or sparrow operations. Thus, they hold a deep professional dislike for what they consider to be communist propagandists who are operating legally in the political arena and whom they assess to be operating as intelligence assets of their armed protagonists. These are the objects and targets of their U.S.-inspired “war on terror” activities. What they do in their own minds, strikes terror and panic for the enemy. Those armed as well as those operating legally, unarmed and though protected by the constitution, must be rooted out and destroyed, for they are part of the political and intelligency infrastructure of the insurgency. The enemy’s political infrastructure is for them, the snake’s head, the more dangerous prey in the war of attrition. You cut off the snake’s head in order to kill the body.

Their training in low intensity conflict warfare or special warfare reminds them that they must first engage in a surveillance of their target, track and record the subject’s daily routine until a pattern emerges that can be relied upon: where the subjects go, what they do when they arrive, how long they stay, whom they see and so on. Once these are established, they will firmly fix the target in their intelligence net, in place for what will come next — kidnapping, capture or termination — depending on the specific mission. This is why this type of work is always off limits to all but a few in the organization. In the United States, during the Vietnam War, as well as during the Clinton and Senior and Junior Bush administrations, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was authorized to form specialized hunter-killer teams to abduct and terminate quality targets –both military and civilian — of the United States’ perceived enemies, after patiently and meticulously keeping them in the antennae of the intelligence community as targets.

In my study of counterinsurgency and counter-terrorist tactics, the real operators may be a few trusted operatives, but surely, they have the guidance of their superiors and CIA handlers, usually with specialty in intelligence and operations work, or clandestine operations. But assassination of civilians is not formally taught in intelligence schools. But in special operations training, they are taught the highly specialized art of “abduction of human targets”, an issue no one still on active duty in the “special ops” game will discuss. Their basic military courses taught them to fight enemy warriors, armed combatants who are ready to die in the battlefield — not snuff out the lives of civilian mass leaders of social movements: lawyers, priests and pastors, teachers, student leaders, labor union presidents and unarmed peasant organizers.

Capture or termination is the goal of what they have collected in their target folders, but temination is an option that requires total commitment on the part of those carrying out the mission, hunting and eliminating the enemy like animals.

Snatch, or kidnap and terminate the terrorists’ political infrastructure is their mission. They carry out their missions with no remorse or regret for anyway, their “terrorist” enemy gains control over their areas of responsibility by any means possible, including terror and murder. But make their lives hell on earth. Keep the pressure on and let your enemies know their lives are in danger every day, every minute, everywhere they go or hide.

But the strategy has fatally flawed assumptions. Physically attacking or conducting death squad operations against those who have opted to work openly for reforms in a parliamentary struggle will only push more to join the ranks of those who continue to fight with guns and bullets. For is it not better to exchange ideas and words, than exchange bullets, grenade explosions and mortar shells?

If the death squad or “Salvador Solution” is practiced, in a counterinsurgency war with no definite battlefields, it should be at the state’s peril. But let us not give the state another legal weapon to victimize more advocates and communities like the so-called Human Security Act (HSA) of 2007. In reality, the HSA is an ACT OF TERROR. It is, quite frankly, a terror act: to legalize the on-going state terrorism against legal social movements, people’s organizations, advocates, critics of the government in the media, and NGOs.

This is a terrible time in our country, and we must cleanse the nation of the brutal and destructive actions by its own security forces and law enforcement agencies. For can they, invoking our protection and “human security”, play god in their dirty war and violate the very Constitution and Bill of Rights which they have sworn to uphold and protect?

It is said that war brings out the very worst in men and women. The Central Intelligence Agency’s dirty tricks, like its involvement in assassinations of foreign political leaders, and military coups –which it had for so long consistently denied under oath– was only fully exposed because a few good men of conscience from the agency like former CIA field operatives Philip Agee and Ralph Mc Gehee decided that they have had enough. My point is, can this conflict not also bring out the very best in human beings, who by their conscience would finally say, “NO MORE” and reveal to us the perpetrators and masterminds of these murders of political activists, advocates for the poor, and human rights defenders?

My specific recommendations to this National Consultative Summit on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances are the following:

1. Strengthening of measures to protect witnesses as well as “whistleblowers” from government security units who may come out as state witnesses, thru legislation and improvements in Court Rules.

2. There should be more pro-active sanctions against military or police units who are not able to solve political murders or extrajudicial killings or enforced disappearances in their areas of responsibility / jurisdiction. Security forces which continue to demonize party-list organizations, people’s organizations, social movements and NGOs as “enemies of the state” should be disciplined.

3. Disbandment of the counterinsurgency plan Bantay Laya II, and the resumption of peace talks with the National Democratic Front (NDF) towards lasting peace based on substantive economic, political and social reforms, long-term poverty-alleviation programs and social justice measures.

4. Immediate passage of proposed legislation like the INVOLUNTARY DISAPPEARANCE ACT and the HUMAN RIGHTS COMPENSATION ACT.

(The author is a professor of development studies and public management at the University of the Philippines. He submitted this paper at the National Consultative Summit on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances, sponsored by the Supreme Court of the Philippines, Manila Hotel, July 16-17, 2007)

Conservatives Lynch Rep. Keith Ellison for Comparing Bush to Hitler

Village Voice
by Harkavy
July 30, 2007
Already under attack by religious conservatives and censors in the United States, Muslim congressman Keith Ellison apparently survived a trip this weekend to Iraq without his own faith's religious conservatives and censors issuing a death fatwa against him.

The Minneapolis progressive Democrat got into trouble with conservatives and religious extremists over here on July 8 when he threw in a Nazi reference as he ripped the Bush regime for using 9/11 as an excuse for war.

Where were they when it was revealed three years ago that fellow black man Secretary of State Colin Powell — in the same context, thinking the same thing — had branded dual-disloyalist Doug Feith's Pentagon pre-war agitprop operation a "Gestapo office"?

Ellison is the first U.S. congressman known to be a Muslim, but he's no terrorist in thrall to the conservative mullahs of his own religion. They're more likely to condemn him to death for his support of gay rights and other progressive issues than embrace him.

Religious conservatives and censors in the U.S. claimed that Ellison compared George W. Bush with Hitler — he didn't. All it shows is how much religious conservatives have in common with one another, no matter which religion they claim to speak for. All of them regularly condemn one another and kill in the name of their faiths.

The latest of several ridiculous freakouts by conservatives over Ellison stemmed from something else that conservative Muslim mullahs would stone him for: his speech to a bunch of humanistic atheists. Reporter Mike Kaszuba of the StarTribune wrote it like this:

On comparing Sept. 11 to the burning of the Reichstag building in Nazi Germany: "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that.

After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

Ellison, a lawyer who landed a spot on the House Judiciary Committee even though he's only a freshman, also had this to say: [On impeaching Dick Cheney]: "[It is] beneath his dignity in order for him to answer any questions from the citizens of the United States. That is the very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and dictatorship."

On calling the war in Iraq an "occupation": "It's not controversial to call it an occupation — it is an occupation."

Ellison

On commuting the prison sentence of Cheney aide Lewis Libby: "If Libby gets pardoned, then he should not have the cover of the Fifth Amendment. He's going to have to come clean and tell the truth. Now, he could get Gonzales-itis [referring to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales], you know, with 71 lapses of memory within a two-hour period."

The ADL's Abe Foxman came unglued over the Reichstag reference, blasting Ellison for using a reference to Hitler and the Nazis.

Well, let's go to page 292 of Bob Woodward's 2004 book, Plan of Attack, in which he described meetings just before Powell's February 2003 U.N. speech:

Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and [Paul] Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Saddam and 9/11. It was a separate little government that was out there — Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith and Feith's "Gestapo office," as Powell privately called it.

He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq.

Powell had used a Nazi reference to Feith, a fanatical Jewish conservative who desperately wanted a war with Israel enemy Iraq. But Powell didn't catch hell for it. Earlier this year, Michigan senator Carl Levin (who's Jewish) blasted Feith for having spread disinformation in the run-up to the war:

Levin, who has long questioned Feith's prewar intelligence operation, was harshly critical. "Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war," Levin said.
In other words, the Cheney-Bush regime used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, just as Hitler had used the Reichstag fire 70 years earlier (February 27, 1933) as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, a key moment in the Nazification of Germany. If you doubt that the Reichstag fire could be compared with the 9/11 attacks, just imagine an arsonist's burning down Congress and the political power that a regime like Cheney's would seize as a result.

For now, extremists are just trying to burn down a congressman.

http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/2007/07/burning_down_a.php

The Rumsfeld Lawsuit Dismissal: A License to Commit War Crimes?

Rumsfeld Skates
Public Forum Letter
07/19/2007

A recent article reports the dismissal of a lawsuit brought against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of nine former prisoners who had been abused and tortured in American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dismissal was based on a district court judge's opinion that "Rumsfeld cannot be held responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job."

This is a most interesting position since the Nazis, whom we prosecuted at Nuremburg, were charged and sentenced for deeds committed in connection with their government jobs. A district court judge had no problem allowing Americans to sue the government of Sudan for the USS Cole incident and the government of Iran for financing the Khobar Tower bombing. Even if they both were guilty, their deeds would have been committed in connection with their government jobs.

The U.S. searched for and captured Saddam Hussein and issued a deck of cards for his officials for deeds committed in connection with their government jobs.

Yet, Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, et. al., are guilty of some the most heinous criminal acts in recorded history and they are going to walk because they are Americans? What kind of justice is that?

Reginald E. Smith Jr.
West Valley City
http://www.sltrib.com/Opinion/ci_6417797

Sunday, July 29, 2007

$100-Million in Damages for Men Framed by FBI in Mafia Case

" ... FBI knew the men were innocent but did not inform state prosecutors at the time. ... "

The Guardian
By Ewen MacAskill
July 26, 2007

A federal judge today ordered the US government to pay more than $100m (£50m) in compensation to a group of men jailed for decades after being framed by a mafia hitman with the complicity of the FBI.

The FBI knew the men were innocent but did not inform state prosecutors at the time.

The men, two of whom died in prison, were set up by a Mob hitman, Joseph "The Animal" Barboza. A former boxer from east Boston, Barboza worked for the Patriarcas, a New England underworld family. He turned FBI informant while in jail for murder and was shot dead by the mafia in San Francisco in 1976.

The government argued that the FBI, which knew the wrong men were being accused, had no obligation to share its information.

The district judge, Nancy Gertner, said: "It took 30 years to uncover this injustice, and the government's position is, in a word, absurd. No lost liberty is dispensable. We have fought wars over this principle. We are still fighting these wars."

Peter Limone, Joseph Salvati and the families of the two who died in prison, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco. had sued the federal government for malicious prosecution.

Mr Salvati and Mr Limone were exonerated in 2001, after FBI memos surfaced, showing the men had been framed by Barboza. The memos were made public during a justice department investigation into the FBI's relationship with the mafia in the 1960s.

Mr Salvati, aged 75, said: "Do I want the money? Yes, I want my children, my grandchildren to have things I didn't have, but nothing can compensate for what they've done."

The lawyers for the men said that Boston FBI agents knew Barboza lied when he named them as the killer of Edward Deegan in 1965. They said that the FBI was protecting one of its informants, Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi. The lawyers said the FBI treated the four as "acceptable collateral damage."

Victor Garo, one of the lawyers for the men, said: "It was more important for the FBI to protect their informants than to protect innocent people who had families."

The FBI failed to disclose that agents listening in on an illegal bug had overheard Barboza and Flemmi seeking Patriarca's permission to kill Deegan several days before he was killed in an alley.

Bridget Lipscomb, a government lawyer, in the closing arguments, said: "The FBI did not initiate this prosecution, and there is no duty of the FBI to submit to state or local governments any of its internal files."

She said the FBI had shared some information about Mr Deegan's death with local police.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2135755,00.html

CIA Mind Control Operative Whitley Streiber

http://dreamsend.wordpress.com/tag/nazis-from-outer-space/

Dream’s End - Whitley Strieber and the Paradigm of Doom Part 4: Whitley Goes to Mars, March 4th, 2007 at 11:29 pm (Whitley Strieber, Nazis from Outer Space, Uncategorized)


While researching this final post on Strieber, I ran across a much lesser known book by Whitley Strieber that stopped me cold. The book is called Billy, published in 1991, and the photograph on the cover should set your own alarm bells off as well. Listen to this summary written by one of the reader-reviewers who posted at Amazon (errors in original):

Whitley Strieber’s “Billy” is a very dark serial killer novel, centering around a child abduction. The boy in question is Billy Neary, a normal 11 year old suburban kid who is targeted by Barton Royal, a truelly creepy psycopath in a clown suit. At the end there is an incedent in the “black room”, a torture chamber that Royal has taken other children and killed them, that you must read to believe. If you ever need a reminder of how sick this world can be, just pick up this book. Barton Royal is indeed a sick individual, reminecent of Freddy Kruger, Norman Bates, John Wayne Gacy, and just any local urban legend. The cause of his insainity is clear, though never explained. It has a lot to do with his needing to be the “perfect father”. Billy is pretty well drawn out as well. He is smart, and scared, and it is written believably. Be warned, though; this book is not for the weak at heart (or stomach).

Here’s what Strieber had to say about where the character of “Billy” came from.

Billy came in the book because I love kids. It is natural that I’d want to write a character who I thought was pretty cool.

And here is a plot spoiler from Wikipedia about what happens to the cool kid he loves:

Billy’s father beat the police to find Billy, just before Barton tortures and kills him.

And you thought this little saga couldn’t get any more fucked up.

Whitley Strieber and the Paradigm of Doom Part 3

February 18th, 2007 at 1:20 am (Mind Control/MKULTRA, Whitley Strieber, Nazis from Outer Space, Uncategorized)

But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies; when I tell them, I myself believe them. I don’t lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others, so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life. (Communion, p. 139)

Strieber wasn’t talking about the alien stories there. To him, those ARE the stories he’s trying to avoid remembering. Despite their terrifying nature and internal contradictions, these stories have some quality for Strieber that raises them above the many acknowledged “screen memories” he has uncovered. Whatever that powerful quality is, we don’t share it as outsiders, so though my analysis may seem completely wrong to Strieber, it is becoming quite clear that it is the easiest way to explain the facts as he, himself, has presented them.

I’m going to conclude my look at Communion by picking out some of the stories told by Strieber that certainly do NOT support the alien hypothesis. In fact, some of these memories seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with aliens. It is the appearance of these details which convince me Strieber is not hoaxing us, or at the very least, that he’s just a lot cleverer than I am.

And I will also try to start examing some of the magicians’ secrets. Whoever these magicians may be who are using Strieber for their twisted games. I invite all of you to do the same by approaching it as I do when watching stage magic. When you watch one of those big illusions where someone disappears from a box, or levitates mysteriously, you apply the logic of Sherlock Holmes:

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (From the Sign of Four)

Until we run out of steam, we are going to put aliens on our “impossible list.” Just for now. It may be that too many factors will remain unexplained and in that case, we may have to invite the aliens back to the table. Although from Strieber’s experience, it’s not like they need an invitation.

I’m going to start with one experience Strieber describes that sounds more like something out of “The Control of Candy Jones” than Communion. For those not in the know, Candy Jones was a pinup girl who in the seventies (and, we must acknowledge, through the hypnosis of her husband, Long John Nebel, a sort of “Art Bell” of his day) began to recall a number of missions she had carried out for the CIA via her “alter” personality named Arlene. While their HAD been articles about this sort of thing, such as this article by famous hypnosis expert George Eastabrooks (either the smokingest of guns or disinformation designed to worry the Soviets which was definitely one of the several agendas being pursued in the creation of the UFO myth), the full extent of MKULTRA would not become known until congressional hearings a few years later. (Led by Nelson Rockefeller…oh, now I feel better…)

As far as Strieber recalls, he’s had only one such “Candy Jones” style event. It was in 1968 and for no reason whatsoever he left London where he was studying film and headed to the continent. Along the way, he met a young woman with whom he traveled. His memory of the entire trip is still quite hazy but it lasted about six weeks. As he put it, “If I do not think about (these memories) they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don’t make sense.” I guess if you wanted to define “screen memory” that would be as good a way as any.

The trip happened after a disturbing incident:

Then, in July (of 1968), there was another incident. I cannot recall what happened with any clarity. It was simply too confusing, too jumbled. I was at a friend’s flat in the King’s Road, Chelsea. For years I have described it as a “raid” from which I escaped by “crossing the roofs.” What I actually remember is a period of complete perceptual chaos, followed by the confusing sensation of looking down into the chimney pots of the buildings. Then there was blackness. (Communion, p. 134)

He used to tell the story of staying in Florence for six weeks but upon a return trip he realized he had little memory of the place. He recalls leaving the woman in Rome and heading to Strasbourg for no apparent reason, where he saw the cathedral and then rushed off to France and then Spain. He stayed for many days on the Ramblas in Barcelona, frightened and trying to stay among people during the day and with lights on and doors locked at night. He also recalls this:

I remember something about being on a noisy, smelly airplane with someone who called himself a coach, and something about taking a course at an ancient university (again, still not the “secret school” of the book by that name). I also recall seeing little adobe huts and expressing surprise to somebody that their houses were so simple. (Communion, p. 135)

In wondering what else was going on in the world at that time, I came across this incident: in July of 1968, the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palesting hijacked an Israeli passenger plane in Rome, Italy and diverted it to Algiers. Many of the Israelis on board were held hostage for five weeks as a bargaining chip for the release of some Palestinian prisoners. link

Whether this hijacking and Strieber’s missing time and apparent plane flight to Africa are related is purely speculation…but it’s the KIND of speculation we need to be making before assuming that aliens fly smelly airplanes in addition to their saucers and triangles.

There’s another story, the one he refers to in the quote at the top of this post, that again shows some rather elaborate screen memories at work.

A dozen times I have told a story of being menace by an old college acquaintance, whose terrifying appearances and phone calls had driven us from our Seventy-sixt Street walk-up to Cos Cob, then from there to the East Seventy-fifth Street high-rise, and finally to the Village. A part of this myth is the kindly detective who hypnotized me and enabled me to identify this individual by listening to his voice on a tape. Then we put a stop to his game by simply phoning him back after one of his vicious calls. But it didn’t happen; none of it happened. (Communion, p.139)

It’s not clear to me whether his wife also shared in this screen memory or not. Here’s another memory, this time from 1977 that, apparently, his wife has conscious recall of. Or maybe not.

One evening in April 1977, something so bizarre happened that I still cannot understand why we didn’t make more of it. With both of us sitting together in our living room, somebody suddenly started speaking through the stereo, which had just finished playing a record. We were astonished, naturally, when the voice held a brief conversation with us.

The voice was entirely clear, not like the sort of garbled message sometimes picked up from a passing taxi’s radio or a ham operator. Never before had it happened and it didn’t happen again. I do not remember the conversation, except the last words: “I know something else about you.” That was the end. (Communion p. 136)

Damn it, this stuff is starting to creep me out again. But I want to keep going a bit. First off, I hope you are starting to get the picture. If someone can be hypnotized and a suggestion planted that they will resume a trance state upon hearing certain words AND you have the house rigged to broadcast sound, then you can pretty much get away with whatever you want. And while I can’t prove that this is what was happening to Strieber, he provides so many details which suggest this could very well be the case, that it’s really strange to me that few others have reached the same conclusion. And many of these details are completely at odds with his “alien” hypothesis. Nowhere in Communion does he explore how these very earthly mind games relate to the alien abductions.

There many other little details like that. The mention of implants, for example, a common theme in abduction accounts, reminds us not only of Joseph DelGado and his implant experiments mentioned in the previous post, but also Jolyon West, who will figure more prominently in our look at Secret School.

A pet project of West’s in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. He proposed to establish a “securely fenced” center at a remote, abandoned Nike missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains, in keeping with earlier plans by the CIA to set up “mind-control” stations off the beaten path, where experimentation could be carried out free from such concerns as human rights. Ironically, West embarked on a PR campaign to promote himself as a champion of “human rights” — an effort that would be comical if not for the bottom line in terms of human suffering. West’s plans for such centers were the subject of hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, whose members were alarmed at reports that West planned to test radical forms of behavior modification — mind-bending drugs, electric shock, implantation of electrodes in the brain and forcible castration with the drug cyproterone acetate. Critics charged that his violence centers would target blacks and Mexican-Americans in its studies. link (By the way, the first link that I came to about this well established fact happend to be from a Scientology magazine. We will have a LOT more to say about Scientology in the future. So I kept the link just for irony. )

I’m going to end with fog. Fog seems to be a recurring sight with some abductees. Maybe it’s just to set the mood. Strieber recalls the night of his New York abduction being very foggy. Here’s another incident he recalls, and again note the very earthly components of this experience. It took place in 1984, but the description emerged from a 1986 hypnosis session:

I was driving back to the house from the grocery store when I suddenly saw a fogbank. It was a clear fall day, the air dry. I got curious about the fogbank and drove off the highway onto a dirt road to try and get a better look at it. The next thing I recall, I was in the fog in my car and two people in dark blue uniforms were leaning in the windows. Then I was back on the highway, returning home.

(Here now is the rest of the story straight from the hypnosis session transcript.)

I went right past the turnoff. I went right past the grocery store and I keep going. I don’t know…I want to take the car for a little run…

I keep thinking I see something above the car. I’m a little nervous. I turn off the radio. I roll down the window then roll it up again. I dont’ know why I missed the turnoff, and I’m going to turn around and go back. But I don’t….Looking out the window of the car. A white truck goes past. I — it’s like the white truck isn’t right. There’s a — I don’t know what is going on here. Now I want to go home. I feel terribly sick to my stomach. Awful feeling. I don’t want to tell you what’s happening to me….

I was driving my car, all of a sudden there was this white pickup coming toward me. Funny white pickup with a black windshield.

(Strieber then describes a bit more typical abduction scenario with “little people” around and the thin, “female” alien. As the alien starts touching his chest in a not unpleasant way, he sort of “comes to” back in the car. As usual, the experience with these “benign” beings has left him scared out of his mind. The hypnotherapist asks him about the two people in uniform he had recall of before any hypnotic regressions.)

I’m just sitting in my care alone.

(Hypnotist: Anyone tell you to go back?)

Yeah. He says to me, “Get out of here.” Then this lady on the other side says, “We don’t want you here.” I say, “Who are you?” She looks at me with a real mean look on her face. She’s a — real mean.

(When asked what they were wearing.) I mostly looked at the one over on this side (passenger side). I thought that was a woman. You know, I just can’t tell what’s going on here. I don’t know what the hell happened. Because the next thing I knonw, I’m on the road again. I’m going back home. (Communion, 145 - 152)

Then the woman morphs in his memory once again, back to the thin, female alien, which he AGAIN describes in horror as if he’s remembering seeing her for the first time. She touches him with some kind of device and lots of abstract shapes appear in his mind…a typical sort of hallucinatory experience. Strieber settles on the idea that this is the same being he has been seeing since he was twelve and becomes quite distressed. The hypnosis session is ended.

Again, Strieber decides, one assumes, that the pickup truck memory was the screen and the alien memories were the real ones. It seems far more probable to me that the exact reverse is true.

But I mention this experience not because of the truck, but because of the fog. There was another, quite famous incident that happened five years previous to Strieber’s fog-trance but this time in France. It is described by Jacques Vallee in his book, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception.

Three young people, living on the margins of society, were preparing to sell a supply of jeans and sweaters they had (likely these folks were part of the “underground economy” so to speak). They packed up the car at about 4 a.m. and one of them, Franck Fontaine, pointed out a large glowing sphere in the sky. His two companions, Jean-Pierre Prevost and Salomon N’Diaye El Mama, went back into the apartment, N’Diaye to get a camera and Prevost to get the last of the clothes.

Prevost saw out the window that Fontaine had stopped the car which was annoying because it had to be pushed to be started. He went out and N’Diaye joined him in the parking lot. Prevost was a little freaked because he’d seen the car engulfed in a weird sphere of fog. They both went out to the car which was still surrounded by a sphere of fog. There were some other little spheres of some sort (it’s not really clear from Vallee’s description if this meant spheres of fog or light) moving around, which got absorbed into the fog which was then absorbed into a large cyliner which took off.

Fontaine was nowhere to be found.

The two reported the incident to the police, evidence for Vallee that it was not a hoax pulled off by the trio themselves as they were on the edges of society and avoiding police attention would have been far more typical. They didn’t even have a valid driver’s license among them.

There was a manhunt, but Fontaine avoided detection. Seven days later, he resurfaced at the apartment. He was really pissed. Why did everyone go back to bed…they had to get the shipment of clothes delivered.

He didn’t even know he’d been missing for a week.

I can’t get into all of the details here. However, a couple of other points are relevant before we get to Vallee’s theory on this case. For one, Prevost reported, while under hypnosis by some dubious UFO investigators, that he’d been contacted by a blonde humanoid alien named Haurrio. Haurrio told him that he needed to start a group of believers and spread the word: humans are destroying the world and soon it will come to an end. True believers who spread the word, however, will be spared and used to create a new civilization. This should be a familiar message to readers of this blog. Naturally, the world did not, in fact, end, despite the earnest expectations of a bunch of French true believers standing in a cabbage patch on the appointed day. Fittingly, Vallee titles the section in which he discusses this, “When Prophecy Fails” after the book mentioned in this post.

So, there is that paradigm again…aliens telling us the world is coming to an end. Another feature of interest is the admittedly vague memories Fontaine had of his missing time.

He felt prepared for what was coming, he said, as soon as he woke up from his deep sleep in the car. Next he was lying on a flat surface, on top of a machine located in some sort of laboratory. This surface was comfortable, and he was not physically restrained. Along the walls were tall cabinets with blinking lights and dials, above which were signs he could not read. He fell asleep again and does not know how long he was unconscious, but he is sure to have been alternately awake and asleep numerous times. (emphasis in the original) He was always in the same room, except that small, luminous spheres, the size of a tennis ball, often floated in the air above him. Voices spoke to him, pleasant voices, which seemd to come from these spheres. They discussed the future survival of humanity and gave him the date of the official contact between them and the earth. (Revelations, pp. 150 - 151)

Prevost’s managed to create a little UFO cult but it sort of fell apart after the world failed to end, though he did pull a small second wave of followers together. Vallee reports that soon after the release of the French version of his book Messengers of Deception, in the introduction to which he warned of the potential events such as the one above had for exploitation in psychological experiments, Jean-Pierre Prevost confessed that the whole thing was a hoax.

A lot of questions went unanswered, however. For one thing, Prevost claimed to have hidden Fontaine in his own apartment during his “missing time” and yet police had searched his apartment thoroughly. When this was pointed out to Prevost by an associate of Vallee, Francis Leuhan, Jean-Pierre asked Leuhan if he’d read Messengers of Deception. “You ought to read the introduction…there are some very interesting things in there…” (Revelations, p. 159)

Vallee also reports that another investigator claims to have spoken to one of the first police officers to arrive on the scene who confirmed that the car was, in fact, surrounded by a thick fog “we found impressive.” No such fog is mentioned in any official police reports, however. (Revelations, p. 159)

But finally, we have one of those “government insider” reports. Admittedly, we are right to treat such reports with caution. We have learned from the Bennewitz affair. But usually, those disinformation specialists who put out such reports CONFIRM the secret coverup of the “truth” about alien intervention in human affairs. In this case, the official said that the entire affair had been an experiment.

The official claims the operation was an “Exercise in General Synthesis,” though he doesn’t explain what that means. He says that one cabinet level official with high tech credentials planned the whole thing carefully and only fifteen or so people knew anything about it. Said this official:

The operation was structured around military, scientific, and political goals. It was purely national and had no impact beyond our borders.

We put (Fontaine) to sleep and he was kept under an altered state of high suggestibility.

Somewhat ominously (and perhaps disinformationally) the official added:

But if this operation had been completed, the next phase would have been far worse. (Revelations, pp. 162 - 163)

Vallee believes that the three young people who were involved in this incident were not intentionally behind the hoax, despite the confession of Prevost. He found, for example, that one witness to the affair had seen TWO people in the car after Prevost and N’Diaye returned to the apartment. That same witness, when asked later if he’d witnessed anything on the day Franck Fontaine returned, refused to answer…not wanting trouble with “those people.” It’s unclear whom he meant. In addition, Vallee reports (though his source is unclear) that after the abduction, Fontaine was seen keeping regular 11 p.m. meetings with a mysterious man in an expensive business suit who drove a BMW.

Whatever the truth of the government insider version of events, it certainly matches what Fontaine remembers from his missing week. It also matches what we know about MKULTRA experiments. Ewan Cameron would have been proud.

Vallee found that at the location of the car there was a convenient nearby underpass that could be used for a hasty getaway. He figures that the dense fog may have been manufactured in order to hide the movement of the team of commandos tasked with grabbing Fontaine. Perhaps, he suggests, there was even some drug introduced into the fog to knock out Fontaine or make his two friends a bit more suggestible themselves.

And that’s an intriguing suggestion, since fog seems to be involved in some of Strieber’s experiences. And you know, if someone did create a fog of debilitating or hallucinogenic gas to manufacture such an experience, they’d probably need gas masks themselves when going about their work. That’s a picture of a gas mask at the top of this post.

Kinda creepy looking, isn’t it?

Whitley Strieber and the Paradigm of Doom, Part 2

February 11th, 2007 at 11:57 pm (Mind Control/MKULTRA, Whitley Strieber, Nazis from Outer Space)
************Trigger Warning: The material in this section is rather graphic and should be approached with caution by abuse survivors. **********************
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Ultimately, there are two reasons I decided Whitley Strieber was not intentionally fabricating the stories in his Communion series. First off, it seemed to me that if your intention is to promote a message that we should lovingly accept the aliens as spiritual guides he would have put at least a few incidents in the book that were not so profoundly terrifying and disturbing. It was one of the most bizarre elements of both Communion and Secret School for me that after each terrifying experience he would find some way to interpret the events as spiritually uplifting.

Secondly, many of the incidents in the book don’t seem like “alien abductions” at all. In fact, there are NO alien abductions in Secret School, which discusses childhood interaction with these beings, though via a special helmet (you’ll learn what I think that helmet really was sometime in the next few posts) he is given visions of other planets and of the past and future of earth. Also, the aliens he does interact with, guised, rather bizarrely, as nuns, don’t seem to be the same aliens in Communion in appearance or origin. They are linked, significantly, to the planet Mars. But we will examine Secret School in the next part.

In this part, I want to hunt through Communion and pull out incidents that do not seem to fit the alien paradigm, even as defined by Strieber himself (or maybe I should say “implied” by Strieber as much of the time he tries not to commit to the alien explanation). Tellingly, he never attempts to explain many of these incidents in terms of the “alien abduction” hypothesis. He simply notes them as other strange events from his past.

I’ve been rereading these incidents and I have to say it they are deeply disturbing. Here is one such recollection that features an alien but seems frighteningly human otherwise.

Whitley was 12 years old and returning from a visit with his family to relatives in Madison, Wisconsin. They took a train, and Strieber remembers getting violently ill. Consciously, he had remembered the train trip, and the vomiting and a “confused memory of my father crouched at the back of an upper berth in our drawing room, his eyes bulging, his lips twisted back from his teeth.”

The hypnosis revealed more, and whether these images were actual memories or not, there is no way to tell. He recalls having had a bladder forced down his throat, forcing him to ingest something. He says that this is not the only time he’s had this happen, and we’ll see the second one a bit later. He says the pattern seems to be that he is fed something, he vomits, and then he is fed something else along with drops to keep him from throwing up.

Under hypnosis he recalled this odd shift into another place in which many soldiers were sleeping on some sort of medical tables. The soldiers were all in fatigues, and “sprawled as if totally comatose.” Young Strieber will see the “female” being who seemed to be in charge during his New York abduction. (Her appearance was similar to the stereotype grays in some ways but her skin was brown and leathery. He said she reminded him of the goddess Ishtar.) Young Strieber asked the being why the soldiers were there, and the being responded that they had picked them up because “they were alone” and that they would look them over and return them. Then he asked, “What’s the point of that?” and the being responded and she “sounded like a stuck record. ‘The point of that is — The point of that is –’ Then she stopped as if surprised that she had been caught off guard, and said simply, ‘Well,’ her voice melodious with amusement. “

At some point he remembered, “I was in a little chair, sitting before a featureless gray surface.” This is what happened next:

Something terrifically difficult happened while I was sitting in that chair. After hypnosis I recalled seeing a landscape with a great hooked object floating in the air, which on closer inspection proved to be a triangle. Then there followed a glut of symbolic material, so intense that even as I write I can feel how it hurt my whole braind and body to take it all in. I don’t remember what this was__triangles, rushing pyramids, animals leaping through the air.” (Communion, p. 119)

To me, this sounds as if he’s been given some sort of hallucinogen. Some hallucinogens will induce vomiting, and visions of geometric shapes, followed by iconic images of animals and religious symbols are commonly reported.

As we’ll see from Strieber’s own words, he acknowledges memories of abuse at the hands of some Air Force officials. I think his viewpoint is that the abuse led to a sort of breakdown characteristic of shamanic experiences and that because of this he was able to be contacted by these beings.

Many of the details of his story match those of shamanic journeys. However, it should also be pointed out that MKULTRA scientists were VERY aware of shamanic experiences and sought out the plants which induced the altered states such shamans entered. In addition, the details of the things the ALIENS do to him and the details of typical abuse scenarios are so similar that I don’t know how you can separate them out from each other.

For example, in the hypnotically enhanced memory of the New York abduction, he recalled the insertion of the rectal device this way:

‘She’s sittin’ right in front of me the whole time, just lookin’ at me. They’re moving around back there.’ (I could sense them, but I was looking at her. She drew something up from below.) ‘ Jesus, is that your penis?’ I thought it was a woman. (Makes deep grunting sound.) That goes right in me. (Another grunt.) Punching it in me, punching it in me. I’m gonna throw up on them….” (Communion, p. 76)

Later, she asks him if he can “be harder” meaning more fully erect. And it is well known that such sexual encounters are a common feature of these abduction experiences.

His memory of his father on the train that was the most emotional.

(I then saw my father for the first time. He was standing up, apparently quite conscious.) “Daddy!” I’m scared now. They’ve — “Daddy! Don’t be so scared, Daddy! Dad, don’t be so scared! (…) Daddy, it’s all right!”

He says, “Whitty, it’s not all right! It’s not all right!” (Communion, p. 80)

Strieber is forthright about memories of abuse by humans which on at least one occasion occurred at Randolph Air Force base, one of the three such bases in close proximity to Strieber’s childhood home. You can read his account here.

Some of the abuse took place in other places and seemed to involve other students at his Catholic school, which puts us in even more uncomfortable (but sadly, somewhat more familiar) territory. He recounts a few such memories, but then adds:

My memories of what happened to me at Randolph are so horrific that I can scarcely credit them. I will not repeat the details here, because I cannot tell the degree to which they have been dramatized via the process described above. However, there are a few of those spontaneous, sudden glimpses that seem undistorted. (The process he calls “dramatization” is often called “confabulation”, filling in confusing real memories with subconscious “best” guesses as to what was going on and then treating those guesses as memories.)

Needless to say, while we have no right to know about these memories, we hope that Strieber is somehow actively attempting to deal with them and to sort out how they fit into the spectrum of experiences he’s undergone. Or maybe he’s better off just leaving them alone at this point.

Also on that web page he describes having been placed as a young boy in what is clearly a sensory deprivation chamber which induces panic and hallucinations:

Among my worst memories, one that has come back to me again and again and again over the course of my life, is of waking up and finding that I am in a coffin. A box. I wake up when I try to move, and my head bounces against the top of the thing. I cannot get out. I’m trapped. The silence is absolute. The air is heavy. Soon, my breathing is agonizing. I’m in torment. But it doesn’t end. It keeps on and on and on. I remain for what seems like hours at the edge of suffocation. I scream, I see demons staring at me, I see angels, I see my grandfather Strieber there, then I see a long horizon, the sun either rising or setting.

This is a significant detail, as here we have a memory of abuse at the hands of military officials of some kind which specifically induces hallucinations. Compare that to the situation at the hands of the aliens on the “train” in which what seem to be classical hallucinations are also induced via some drug, perhaps in combination with whatever the “gray box” is that he was sitting in front of.

What a horrific tale this is becoming, despite Strieber’s exhortations to see the process as one of guided spiritual awakening. We see evidence of likely sexual abuse at the hands of military and perhaps adults from his Catholic school and we see invasive procedures very much resembling sexual abuse at the hands of aliens. We see the aliens inducing hallucinations, and we also see evidence of hallucinations induced by his Randolph AFB abusers. Somehow, Strieber is able to see the treatment by the aliens as benign while acknowledging the treatment by human abusers as malicious. It’s a tricky balancing act and frankly I’m not very happy about making that balancing act more difficult for him. But this is happening to other people and the truth needs to be explored.

And while we will look more closely at Secret School in the next post, we see another parallel set of experiences. Secret School discusses a series of experiences Strieber underwent as a child, some of which occurred at a physical location in a nearby natural area called Olmos Basin. But he recalls in Communion ANOTHER sort of school that does not seem to be part of what the experiences he recounts in Secret School. He feels that these experiences were conducted by the aliens, but I think these may be memories of some of the early psychological conditioning Strieber (and I think a host of high I.Q children) underwent in the fifties.

(I have many recollections) of sitting in the middle of a round room and being asked by a surrounding audience of furious interlocutors questions so hard they shatter my soul (.) Trying to cope with these memories as a child, I wove anguished fantasies around the figures, who became my childhood friends in some round, gray basement, drawing out the secret structures of mind like surgeons with forceps extracting sparking neurons from my brain. I remember that they would say words, and each word they said would go through me like a hurricane, evoking every memory, thought, and feeling associated with it. This would go on for hours and hours until I begged them to stop, and I would be offered the relief of a brief rest at their feet, my soul confessing itself in the stern softness of their love. (Communion, p. 119)

The description above is reminiscent of very well known and reliable cult “brainwashing” techniques. Long sessions with confusing material presented too quickly to be assimilated. Even if you’ve just known someone who went through EST in the seventies, you’ll recognize this pattern.

And though it is unclear exactly who the “interlocutors” are, he asks if this is a “memory of the visitors at work?”

No, Whitley. It’s not.

I’m going to have to stop here. Despite the fact that I am relatively certain I have never undergone such treatment, I’m finding this material difficult to handle at the moment. One commitment I made to myself before starting this was to continue to check in with my own state of mind frequently and with help as needed, as I’m certain it can lead the unwary into paranoia and delusions of their own.

I will likely be unable to put up the next part until next weekend, as I get very little free time during the week. I’ll keep checking in on the comments frequently.

Nazis from Outer Space Part 6: Whitley Strieber and the Paradigm of Doom
February 10th, 2007 at 6:02 pm (Whitley Strieber, Nazis from Outer Space)

In 1954 nine-year-old Whitley Strieber entered an “Unknown Country” where missing time, ghostly apparitions and visitors claiming to be from outer space are the norm. Many of these childhood memories remained veiled behind a wall of amnesia until much later, though snippets of his bizarre early life experiences stayed within conscious memory.

Those memories, and particularly his later “abduction experiences” made famous in his book Communion, would solidify and popularize an emerging mythos: The aliens are here. They are gray. They need to manipulate our genetic material. They are scary as hell but we should love them. The world as we know it is about to end.

Originally, I started writing an article about how Strieber was one of the disinformation artists tasked with spreading the “meme” of the little gray men. But as I looked closer, it became very clear that something else was going on. For example, there were many Nazi scientists relocated via Project Paperclip to air force bases in San Antonio, a fact I learned from Strieber’s own website. And that Strieber claimed to have some memories of more earthly, MKULTRA style abuse at one of these airforce bases I also learned on his site.

But one thing Strieber has not written about is that during the years of his “secret school” experiences as a child, one of the central scientists in MKULTRA was stationed at Lackland Airforce Base just ten miles or so from the location of Strieber’s childhood home and the “Olmos Basin” area of San Antonio that figured prominently in his experiences. As we saw in the last post, this mind control guru was named was Louis Jolyon West, and he just so happened to have an abiding interest in all of the sorts of things Strieber had experienced there. Or, at least, in the ability to INDUCE such experiences.

The one aspect of Strieber’s writings that led me away from considering him to be a disinformation artist helping to spread the myth is that, despite the message he believes the aliens have for us, which combines the now familiar messages offered by other “space brothers” with Strieber’s own Catholic and Gurdjieffian (if that’s even a word) spiritual beliefs, the incidents themselves don’t support this message. In fact, the incidents he undergoes don’t even support the alien abduction hypothesis. Sure, there are grays, but there are all sorts of other beings, and plenty of humans involved as well. How about, for example, his vision of a blue crystal, several hundred feet tall, hovering over his upstate New York cabin. I am drawn to such details as this because, if his goal were simply to fabricate a story of alien abduction, so many of these details just seem bizarrely out of place. Why include them unless he believes them to be true? It’s possible that Strieber is just THAT sophisticated and can see “smart guys” like me coming from a mile away. Maybe the hints at MKULTRA abuse as a child he has offered on his website (we’ll get to that in a bit) are simply to add a protective layer of plausibility in case the original alien stories break down under scrutiny. It’s possible. I’m not nearly as clever as I think I am, but I’m at least clever enough to know that there are other people out there smarter and more sophisticated than I.

But I don’t think that this is the case here. As a narrative, whether to fool us into believing in alien abductions or simply to tell a good story, Strieber’s writing is just a mess. It is illogical with far too many loose ends (despite his attempts to make sense of the experiences via his own belief systems). Yet we know Strieber can write a coherent scary story as he did before Communion with Wolfen and The Hunger (the movie version starring, I might add, the “Man Who Fell to Earth” himself, David Bowie).

So let’s have a look at some of Strieber’s story.

One thing that struck me throughout Communion and the book about his childhood experiences called Secret School is that despite Strieber’s having come to “love” his abductors, these alien beings were scary as hell. They have, from his description, no redeeming values whatsoever. They invaded his body and his mind, showed him scary visions designed to test his fear response and implant the idea that the world is about to end (though, as always, HOW the end is coming is constantly changing…with several different versions of apocalypse offered in Communion alone), and generally treated him like a lab rat. And it is the fact that he has come to love them that was my first clue. Why write about aliens who are so incredibly scary when you’re trying to convince us they are benign? It sounded to me like the famed “Stockholm Syndrome”, the alleged psychological mechanism which got Patty Hearst to embrace her captors in the “Symbionese Liberation Army”. All experts on Hearst, including the experts who testified at her trial, accept that Hearst was a mind control victim. The only question was whether there was any government connection. And since these same experts were also MKULTRA scientists…well, that’s another story that will have to wait.

The first encounter Strieber relates in Communion is one that was recorded in his journal contemporaneous with the event and was not a memory recovered via hypnosis. And it’s an odd one. After hearing some noises in the house and yet inexplicably settling back into bed without investigating, he saw a figure in his bedroom. It was small enough to be a child but that’s the only way it resembles the classic grays.

It had a smooth, rounded hat on, with an odd, sharp rim that jutted out easily four inches on the side I could see. Below this was a vague area. I could not see the face, or perhaps I would not see it….I saw two dark holes for eyes and a black downturning line of a mouth that later became an O.

From shoulder to midriff was the visible third of a square plate etched with concentric circles. This plate stretched from just below the chin to the waist area. At the time I thought it looked like some sort of breastplate, or even an armored vest. Beneath it was a rectangular appliance of the same type, which covered the lower waist to just above the knees. (Communion, pp. 12 - 13)

From there begins a somewhat more classical abduction experience. After blacking out he found himself naked, frozen as if in “mid-leap” and being moved out of the room. He doesn’t suggest that he was floating. “It could easily be that I was being carried.”

He found himself in the woods. To his left:

…was a small individual whom I could see only out of the corner of my eye. This person was wearing a gray-tan body suit and sitting on the ground with knees drawn up and hands clasped around them. There were two dark eyeholes and a round mouth hole. I had the impression of a face mask. (Communion, p. 15)

The beings will take on a more fully alien appearance later in the story, but at this point, he saw someone in a “body suit” and wearing a “facemask.”

Our thesis here is that Strieber is the victim of a mind control experiment of some kind, likely one that began in his childhood. We’ll examine his childhood experiences in the next post.

But even here, Strieber gives us a variety of hints that this experience has mind control elements involved. For example, when the first being approached him in the bedroom, he stayed in bed and took no action. As he says, “…perhaps my mind was already under some sort of control.” (Communion, p. 13.) And later, while sitting in the woods,

“I felt that I was under the exact and detailed control of whomever had me. I could not move my head, or my hands, or any part of my body save for my eyes. Despite this, I was not tied.”

Strieber then felt himself being rapidly drawn into a ship or room of some kind hovering above the woods. While terror is a natural reaction to such an event, I thought his specific description of terror was important:

The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate. This was not a theoretical or even a mental experience, but something profoundly physical.

“Whitley” ceased to exist. What was left was a body in a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death. I do not think that my ordinary humanity survived the transition to this little room. I died, and a wild animal appeared in my place. (Communion, p. 16)

He realizes that much of what happened in that room has been lost to amnesia.

This might be terror amnesia, or drugs, or hypnosis, or even a doses of all three. There is one drug, tetradotoxin, which could approximate such a state. In small doses it causes external anesthesia. Larger doses bring about the “out of body” sensation occasionally reported by victims of visitor abduction. Greater quantities can cause the appearance of death - even the brain ceases detectable function.

This rare drug is the core of the zombie poison of Haiti, and little is known about why it works. It is also the notorious “fugu” poison of Japan, found in the tissues of a blowfish, which is an esteemed if deadly aphrodisiac. (Communion, p. 17)

His suggestion of tetradotoxin is interesting but likely erroneous. The out of body experiences, “dissolution of the self” and (assuming these experiences did not literally happen) hallucinations, seem more characteristic of ketamine, which was of interest to MKULTRA researchers (and fed regularly, as we’ll see sometime later, to Ira Einhorn, a seminal figure in the development of “New Age” thought until the mummified remains of his girlfriend turned up in a trunk locked in his closet. ) LSD is also a possibility, and certainly a drug of interest for our Dr. West, stationed nearby Strieber when he was a child.

Scopolamine also comes to mind. Researched by MKULTRA scientists (specifically under project CHATTER which searched for “truth drugs” for interrogation) the drug creates hallucinations, paralysis and dissociation and also results in amnesia when combined with morphine.

I also think of this reference to a lesser known drug from Colin West’s book, Bluebird, which quotes from an untitled an undated document from the MKULTRA files:

For instance, Metrozal, which has been very useful in shock therapy, is no longer popular because, for one thing it produces feelings of overwhelming terror and doom prior to the convulsion.

But terror, anxiety, worry would be valuable for many purposes from our point of view. (from Bluebird, p. 39)

Yeah, there are people who really think like that, and though it’s hard to accept, is it any harder to accept than the idea of aliens farming humans for eggs and sperm?

Strieber can’t get a good visual lock on the beings, as they always seem blurred when he attempted to look directly at them. A “tiny, squat person” approached with a box, within which is a thin needle which the being “proposed to insert” into his brain.

The idea of alien implants did not originate with Strieber so if he’s fabricating this story, or delusional, he could be incorporating previous such accounts. Still, it is important to note that from the fifties, scientists such as Jose Delgado were implanting electronic devices in animals and in people, as we saw in the previous post. While Delgado publicly said that ethical considerations and limits to technology would limit the ability to control humans via such implants, the level of control he gained over animals in his experiments is chilling. He could “steer” cats in whatever direction he wanted, or instantly switch them from docile to hostile with the push of a button. And this was in the fifties.

Interestingly, one of Strieber’s most recent newsletters contained a link to an article about very earthly implants in humans. I don’t know about the reliability of the article, but it does show that Strieber, once again, has some level of awareness that such things are certainly being done by humans. Here is a quote from Delgado as mentioned in the article linked in Strieber’s newsletter:

“Autonomic and somatic functions, individual and social behaviors, emotional and mental reactions may be evoked, maintained, modified, or inhibited, both in animals and in man, by electrical stimulation of specific cerebral structures. Physical control of many brain functions is a demonstrated fact. … It is even possible to follow intentions, the development of thoughts, and visual experiences,” wrote Dr. José Delgado in the book Physical Control of the Mind in 1969. At that time Dr. Delgado was a Professor of Physiology at Yale University, where he developed techniques for electronically and chemically influencing the brain. He has published more than two hundred scientific works and is a well-known authority in neurology and behaviorism.

In the preface to the book, it is written that Dr. Delgado, “… shows how, by electrical stimulation of specific cerebral structures, movements can be induced by radio command, hostility may appear or disappear, social hierarchy can be modified, sexual behavior may be changed, and memory, emotions and the thinking process may be influenced by remote control.”

In footnote 5 of that article, the author quotes John Lilly as cited in Martin Cannon’s The Controllers.

“Dr. Antoine Remond, using our techniques in Paris, has demonstrated that this method of stimulation of the brain can be applied to the human without the help of the neurosurgeon; he is doing it in his office in Paris without neurosurgical supervision. This means that anybody with the proper apparatus can carry this out on a person covertly, with no external signs that electrodes have been used on that person. I feel that if this technique got into the hands of a secret agency, they would have total control over a human being and be able to change his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving little evidence of what they had done.” — John C. Lilly, M.D., 1953: The Scientist, John C. Lilly, M.D., Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1988, page 91. In The Controllers, Martin Cannon, Aptos, CA: Davis Books, 1990, pages 13-14. [6]

This quote is significant not just for what it says, but also because Strieber is the one who linked to it. How seriously he has considered the idea that most if not all of his experiences were due to MKULTRA style manipulation is not known. At the moment, your humble author does not have much “juice” and so inquiries about such matters tend to go unanswered. However, I have been in contact with a friend of Strieber’s who confirmed one element of Communion for me and has relayed word back to me from Strieber that until he knows more about who I am he doesn’t want to engage in direct dialogue. That’s unfortunate, but it is probably the best course of action for Strieber when people like me contact him out of the blue. I expect that comments will be forthcoming as I have a feeling this article is going to be more widely linked than the previous ones.

Strieber was then injected with the implant which resulted in a “bang and a flash”. He says he noted that there were four types of “beings” on the ship. There was the robot type that was in his bedroom, some small dark gray or blue beings with more human features and two sizes of grays, one of whom he experienced as a female and was drawn to rather inexplicably.

And then, the anal probe. It has become almost a cultural standing joke but given that sexual abuse is one surefire way to induce dissociation (especially in children and obviously this experience occurs well into Strieber’s adulthood), this description is chilling.

…two of the stocky ones (whom he had just “sensed” were part of what he called a “good army”), drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow and triangular in structure. The inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.

Only when the thing was withdrawn did I see that it was a mechanical device. The individual holding it pointed to the wire cage on the tip and seemed to warn me about something. But what? I never found out. (Communion, p. 21)

It is characteristic of such tales that aliens advanced enough to travel from distant stars to earth have medical technology that is so incredibly primitive and needlessly painful. Even a full colonoscopy is not as traumatic as this technique experienced by Strieber. I think the description of the experience as “rape” is an apt one, though once again, one is struck by his determination to see the aliens as “good.” It is doubtful that advanced aliens would need such crude techniques to acquire the specimens they seek.

Finally, Strieber awoke with only a memory of having watched a barn owl outside his window. He notes that he has learned that such “screen memories” of animals are common among abductees.

In the following days, his physical condition deteriorated. The next day he suffered from extreme fatigue and chills as if from a fever. This is of interest because at high doses, scopolamine can produce fever. Strieber’s psychological condition deteriorated as well, as he became irritable and short-tempered and paranoid, worrying about “toxins” in his food. (Of course, given the likelihood that he had been drugged, such a fear would be “rational paranoia”.) Here are some other side effects of scopolamine that seem relevant to his experience:

In rare cases, unusual reactions to ordinary doses of scopolamine have occurred including confusion, agitation, rambling speech, hallucinations, paranoid behaviors, and delusions.

In fact, at one point Strieber reports a conversation with a neighbor in which he complained to the neighbor about seeing snowmobile lights in the woods. He had seen no such thing and knew it even as he said the words. The conversation bothered him because “it seemed so nonvolitional, almost as if I had been talking against my will.” (Communion, p. 23).

Here he describes his mental state in the days after the event:

I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal (in psychology these feelings are known as depersonalization and derealization and are sorts of dissociative states which can also be induced by various drugs.) … In the ensuing days, I experienced more bouts of fatigue. I would be working and suddenly would get cold and start to shake. The I would feel so exhausted that I could not go on, and crawl into bed quivering and miserable, sure that I was coming down with the flu. I took my temperature during one of these experiences and found that it was 96.6 at the outset and 98.8 at the height of the “fever.” Afterward, it dropped to 97.0 (scopolamine also has fever reducing effects though evidently only if there is already an elevated temperature.)

Nights I would sleep, but wake up in the morning feeling as if I had been tossing and turning the whole time. I ceased to dream, and sometimes had difficulty closing my eyes. I felt watched, and kept hearing noises in the night….

My disposition got worse. I became mercurial, frantic with excitement about some idea one moment, in despair the next. I was suspicious of friends and family, often openly hostile. I came to hate telephone calls. I could not concentrate even on light television programs….I could no longer follow my own thining, let alone that of the authors who interested me. (Communion, p. 26)

It would be a fair criticism of my thesis to say that many of these symptoms could come about simply as the result of the trauma he experienced due to the “abduction.” That’s true to an extent, but Occam’s razor says we should consider earthly explanations first.

Strieber also mentions that in January of 1986 there was a UFO sighting in the area. It’s unclear exatly what area he meant, as his cabin is in upstate New York, and Middletown, in which the article about the sighting appeared, is much further south toward NYC. One of the habits Strieber has which inclines one to believe his story is a hoax is to mention a fact which confirms his story as if he were unaware of it before his abduction experience. In this case, beginning in 1982, there was a massive wave of UFO sightings in the Hudson valley area, of which the event Streiber read about in the January 3, 1986, issue of Middletown, New York, Record article would be but one example. There were so many sightings that a book was written about it, Night Seige. We’ll come back to the Hudson Valley sightings later as it seems very likely to me that this was one of the areas selected for “field testing” the reaction of people to UFO’s by staging fake UFO waves. These field tests have likely been going on since the fifties. This project was discovered in papers found by Jacques Vallee while looking in the files of J. Allen Hynek. Hynek confirmed the story and was (or pretended to be) angry that it was true. Hynek, however, was co-author of Night Seige not having read the book yet, I don’t know if he mentioned this government project. But whether this UFO wave was real or an elaborate hoax, it seems unlikely that Strieber could have been completely unaware of it.

Here’s what Strieber says about it:

The headline (in the ) called the appearance a hoax, but according to the story, local people who had witnessed the event doubted that. ONe man, however, claimed that he had seen the things fly over a brightly lit local lprison, and in the light he saw planes. A follow-up story on January 12 expanded on the hoax hypothesis.

My wife showed me the article and told me, “You said this would happen. You were talking about this last week.” I did not remember the conversation…” (Communion, p. 27).

He later goes on to discuss the Hudson Valley wave which he discovered upon “further research.” The book Night Seige was released at about the same time as Strieber’s book, so it’s not surprising that the book itself is not mentioned, though he did find a New York Times article which discussed Phillip Imbrogno, who would co-author the book with Hynek. While I am not assuming that Strieber is a hoaxer, this tendency to give a “gee whiz, look what I found out” about information that could be construed to have inspired the details of his stories and which was readily available before his own alleged incidents is a troubling one. In fact, just after the experience described above, Strieber sat down to read a UFO book featuring the details of a similar encounter, a book which had been given to him months previously and had been sitting in his cabin all along. So, while I think hoax is not the answer here, I mention in the spirit of objectivity, and it can’t be ruled out.

We conclude this section by noting that the next step for Strieber, after these memories began to emerge, was to contact Budd Hopkins, the famed UFO abductee researcher (and hypnotist) to help him sort out these memories. Hopkins reassured him that these memories were being experienced by others as well. Eventually, Strieber would seek out an objective third party, psychiatrist Donald Klein, to overcome the amnesiac barrier via hypnosis, though Hopkins would be present at these session. In addition, there are further sessions with Budd Hopkins alone. Given my opinion of Hopkins, this is troubling. However, recordings of the two sessions with Klein and evidently one session with Hopkins are available in audio on his site.

In 1986, Whitley Strieber conducted two hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donald Klein. These sessions have recently been provided for our subscribers to listen to. Now, we offer one of the “lost” session that Whitley did with Budd Hopkins in April of 1986, some time after his last session with Dr. Klein.

This hypnosis session reveals Whitley at his most vulnerable, when he was desperately struggling with what had happened to him, and, above all, trying to understand the messages that his contact experiences were bringing him.

Listen to Whitley in a deeply private moment, struggling with information that, to this day, he has never revealed.

He talks about a trip through Europe in the summer of 1968, and a meeting with a young woman that, as they traveled from Florence to Rome, became stranger and stranger.

Finally, when they are in the crypt beneath the Vatican, he begins to speak of something “so secret” that is happening there.

Listen to this powerful and provocative tape, but be warned, it is as frank as it is mysterious.

I thought I was a subscriber but I am unable to access the subscriber portion of the site. It may that I am merely subscribed to the newsletter. Currently, new subscriptions are not being taken as they update their system, but as soon as I can I will listen to these audio recordings to sort out how much of his recalled material came through his work with Klein (who diagnosed Strieber with temporal lobe epilepsy, a not particularly satisfying hypothesis, though we will see that states very similar to TLE can be induced electronically, which may provide some further clues) and how much throught Hopkins. Given that his sessions with Hopkins take him into the Vatican vault (?) I wonder whether we are moving more into traditional conspiracy lore and away from whatever “real” experiences Strieber has had.

That said, Strieber’s “journey” through Europe and a variety of other details of his story which point much more directly to Langley than a planet orbiting Sirius, will be the subject of part two of this investigation. In part three, we will examine Strieber’s alleged childhood experiences. Assuming that these incidents, which occurred much earlier but were not recalled fully until after Communion, are not simply fabrications, delusions or implanted memories during his hypnosis sessions, they may very well be key to understanding Whitley and his desire to make all of us believe that the end is near for Planet Earth.

MKULTRA: Not Just for Paranoids Anymore

February 4th, 2007 at 9:17 am (Mind Control/MKULTRA, Nazis from Outer Space)

In all of these cases, these subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H (hypnotic) controlled state via the telephone, via some very subtle signal that cannot be detected by other persons in the room and without the other individual being able to note the change. It has been shown clearly that physically individuals can be induced into H by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signals or word and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes and that they can be conditioned to a point where they can believe a change in identity on their part even on the polygraph. –Project ARTICHOKE Document from 1953

In order to appreciate the posts which follow, you’ll need a little background on MK-Ultra, the CIA’s longrunning program researching techniques of mind control. Most of the documents for MK-Ultra and related programs, like Artichoke, ended up in the shredder, though a few boxes survived.

But I suppose I need to warn everyone ahead of time: when you get into discussions of mind control, especially when researching via internet, you get a lot of unverifiable information such as claims by alleged victims of these programs or alleged “insider” information. The problem is that much of what such victims claim is well within the realm of possibility, even if we confine ourselves to the programs for which we have surviving government documents. There is almost nothing in the accounts of people claiming to have been used by MKULTRA style programs which are not verified at least as an area of interest of these mind control programs. Deliberately created multiple personalities, voices in the head, harassment by electro-magnetic devices, induced hallucinations, “missing time” and even brain implants. ALL of these are documented as having at least been attempted in these CIA programs. So a few comments before I continue, especially directed toward those who think they might be victims of such programs.

Nazis from Outer Space: An interlude
January 13th, 2007 at 7:06 pm (Nazis from Outer Space)

I was prompted by a comment from Daniel in the previous post to write a response that got quite lengthy, and I realized that my response also helps clarify where I’m headed with this material about the manipulation of the UFO/contact movement by intelligence agencies. Daniel discusses certain videos and ideas about the role of the Rockefellers, for example. I thought I’d post my reponse here, instead, as it may help clarify where I’m going, particularly given some of the sorts of theories out there which revolve around people like the Rockefellers. I am not shy about finding them to be a part of the picture, but I do want to try to make some distinctions that are relevant to all my posts and not just this current series.

I find that often reading “conspiracy theories” about the Rockefellers and other global elites gives me a “yes but…” reaction. I think that such information, when spun by those who want to maintain faith in our capitalistic system, go too far in pinning the blame for what ails us on “secret groups,” even when those groups being blamed are not…well…Jews.

SOME of what they Rockefeller style elites are up to comes out of shared assumptions about what is “good” for the world and there isn’t always a conspiratorial element to it. One topic I hope to get to is how foundations like that of the Rockefellers manipulate the left in this country. One way they accomplish this goal is to promote groups that may, in fact, seek valuable reform, but don’t cross the line into challenging some basic structural elements of our capitalist system. Elite foundations will sometimes even fund more radical groups, but with the explicit goal of “reigning in” the most unacceptable parts of the group’s agenda.

Ironically, this is exactly where our “neocons” came from. Most of them emerged from the “Congress for Cultural Freedom”. This was a (now-acknowledged) CIA front that put out all kinds of publications. There was a great deal of leeway in what they could publish, and it was often very “liberal”in orientation. CIA did use it to put out some of their own overt propaganda, but often the goal was just to develop an anti-Soviet, anti-socialist left. As long as they stayed within that perspective, they could say whatever they wanted.

Nazis from Outer Space: Part 5
January 11th, 2007 at 8:04 pm (Nazis from Outer Space, Uncategorized)

I continue to be amazed at two things as I pursue my research into this very strange underworld we are exploring.

1. It’s really easy to find information that confirms the very close link between “UFOlogy”, the contactee movement and the military/intelligence complex.

2. If you change one basic assumption, all of the facts begin to fit together in a much more coherent way.

The assumption, which is at the heart of “mainstream” UFOlogy, if there is such a thing, is that when intelligence agencies have played games regarding UFOs it was in an effort to cover up the truth of the matter. I’d like you to try approaching all of this information with me from a different assumption, which is that the intelligence agencies have gotten involved with UFOlogy and the contactee movement in a deliberate effort to propagate certain beliefs as well as to hone techniques for controlling people, organizations and even social movements. We’ll find this assumption to be very helpful as we look more in depth in future posts at Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller and the Nine. For now, though, let’s take a much easier case to unravel: NICAP.

Nazis from Outer Space: Part 4
January 7th, 2007 at 8:05 pm (Nazis from Outer Space, Uncategorized)

1952. As I continue my research (and surprisingly, much of this information is easily found and has been compiled by other researchers, though not always with the same interpretation), I find that1952 (and also ‘53 but I need a literary device here) figures very prominently. This was the year that Kenneth Arnold, who had been pivotal in launching the saucer craze, published his book on UFO’s with Ray Palmer.We’ve already seen some of the intelligence connections involved with his investigation of the Maury Island incident.

Here are a few other storylines of note that get their start around this time. We’ll see many of these players over and over again in our examination of the fascist and intelligence underpinnings of the UFO and “contactee” movements.

It was that year fascist George Adamski had his most famous UFO sighting and contact with the “Venusians”. Indeed, there was a whole network of these occult fascists, including the most famous, William Pelley, founder of the U.S. Nazi group the “Silver Shirts”, who moved their occultism into the space age via “contactees” and channelers.

It was the year that Andrija Puharich, known to have worked for the Army and almost certainly with the CIA, made his first contact with “the Nine”, a group of discarnate entities whos impact on the UFO movement as well as, surprisingly, on our society as a whole simply cannot be underestimated. It is through the Nine that, for reasons we’ll speculate on a bit later, the CIA and various elements of the military/industrial complex had the most success in pushing what amounts to a new religion in the U.S. and much of the West. There is a massive amount of material available on this topic and I’m trying to get a handle on it. One book I have already and recommend is The Stargate Conpsiracy, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. Ultimately, they de-emphasize what I think is the most important purpose of all these intel games, but it’s an excellent place to start and you don’t have to buy into their more occult theories to find the book very helpful.


Nazis from Outer Space: Part 3
January 4th, 2007 at 7:09 pm (Nazis from Outer Space, Uncategorized)

What better way to resume our examination of UFO and related phenomena as exercises in social control than with the Invasion from Mars itself. In 1938, as is now very well known, Orson Wells and his “Mercury Radio Theatre” broadcast a live action retelling of the H.G. Wells novel, War of the Worlds.

I was surprised recently to see in an article by Daniel Hopsicker the assertion that the radio broadcast was not an innocent mistake, but was actually part of a study funded by the Rockefellers specifically to measure the reaction of the public to such an announcement.

Nothing I’ve seen so far proves that the Rockefellers funded the actual broadcast, but what is easily demonstrated is that the year before the broadcast, the Rockefeller foundation funded the Radio Research Project at Princeton University and that within a week after the broadcast, the Project had pollsters out talking to people who had been in the radio audience. Here is a Time Magazine article from 1940 that makes that quite clear.

Contrary to the Hopsicker article, the resulting report was not secret but was published in a book, whose cover you see to the left and is now available in a reprinted edition.

The study concluded that the people susceptible to the “panic” were those who had less critical reasoning ability linked, concludes the studies author Hadley Cantril (misspelled in the Hopsicker piece), to education levels and also to level of religiosity, with the more religious being more inclined to believe the story uncriticially. So even if the actual broadcast were not funded by Rockefeller, the fact that this study was funded by him should still be of great interest.

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Nazis from Outer Space: Part 2
January 4th, 2007 at 2:33 pm (Nazis from Outer Space, Uncategorized)
In the last post, we found some strange connections between one of the earliest alleged UFO encounters and the U.S. intelligence community, even finding some unexpected connections to the shadowy underworld that at least New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison believed was involved in the Kennedy Assassination. None of this is too incredibly hard to believe if you start to step back and see the political agenda operating behind the scenes.

But I’d like to confess that, while the streams we’ll keep exploring are clearly apparent, the underlying motivations are not always as clear. Specifically, we’ll see a few different things going on simultaneously. One, is a very, very clear involvement of elements of the U.S. intelligence community, as well as other aspects of the military/industrial complex, in the world of UFO’s and “contactees” (people who claim to be in contact either physically or via “channeling” with entities in space.) You’ll find that it is really no challenge at all to trace many of these connections. They seem to have several motives which often overlap. There is a lot of involvement, for example, by people directly connected to intelligence “mind control” programs like MK-ULTRA (if this is all new to you…yes, MK-ULTRA and the like are quite real, easily proven via government documents and the like but we’ll explore this later). There are also, I think, other programs designed at social manipulation at the small group level, i.e. cult-like movements.

Secondly, we’ll see the promotion of a certain ideology that is somewhat continuous with Nazi “religion”, though the Nazis themselves incorporated it from earlier occult figures. You’ll see that this ideology is not only popping up in the UFO arena, but is a fairly major component of much of current “New Age” thought. We’ve already looked at this ideology a bit in my post on Richard Heinberg and on the “fetishism of Apocalypse”. The basics of this ideology have to do with racial theory which suggests that certain races are more advanced (in our area of concern, this superiority has to do with descent from or genetic manipulation by the “space brothers.”), that a major catastrophe in the past led to their downfall (think Atlantis) and that we are headed for a “New Age” in which this race or some other race (or select group of elites) assume their role as spiritual overlords of the planet. Further, this New Age is likely to be ushered in by another Atlantis-like catastrophe.

Update: The Deaths of Duncan & Blake were Badly Mishandled by LA Times/Who has Constructed an ARG Around Theresa Duncan's "Suicide?"



Two articles here. The first addresses the awful writing on the death of Theresa Duncan by the LA Times' Chris Lee. The Times is insidious in its reality-defining strategies, and this is but the latest example of the newpaper's manipulation of its readership.

ARG deception game concepts are explained below. (9/11 activists may note a similarity between an ARG and infiltration/manipulation of grassroots investigation by intelligence cut-outs and cults.) Someone has an interest in misdirecting bloggers researching facts related to her death - to conceal the circumstances?

The woefully misleading, incomplete Times' story by Chris Lee is a step in the wider context of ARG strategies.

- Alex Constantine

http://johnstodderinexile.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/the-apparent-double-suicide/

“…the Apparent Double Suicide…” UPDATED
July 25th, 2007

A rank odor rises from the LA Times’ belated coverage of blogger/filmmaker Theresa Duncan’s death and the subsequent disappearance of her boyfriend, the artist Jeremy Blake. After rehashing what everyone else said days ago — the deaths were “confounding,” the art world is in shock — writer Chris Lee gropes in the dark for explanations that are clearly beyond the facts in his notebook, and in doing so, inflicts needless damage to their reputations.

If someone knows why two talented, popular people with the world on a string would kill themselves, they can choose to tell that story. When it comes to prominent people — and there’s no question Duncan and Blake courted attention — the trade-off between violating the privacy of the deceased and offering a coherent narrative to explain a senseless act tends to favor telling the story. But only if you have a story to tell. Lee doesn’t. He has a hodge-podge of disquieting details that add up to a big, contradictory blob of nothing that perhaps tells us more about Lee than his subjects.

According to Lee, Duncan and Blake believed they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists, “according to several friends and art world peers.”

Actually, Lee didn’t need to go to unnamed sources for this news. Duncan herself wrote about the alleged harassment incidents at length on her blog, Wit of the Staircase. On LA Observed last night, Kevin Roderick pointed to this May 2007 entry, which is exhaustive. In it, Duncan draws a series of links between an old girlfriend of Blake’s, the old girlfriend’s wealthy adoptive father and his connections to the CIA and conservative think-tanks, the Church of Scientology, an FBI file about her own past work as a labor organizer, and some incidents of social-climbing bed-hopping in the art world. Duncan painted the ex-girlfriend as possible perpetrator of the harassment, but also possible unknowing victim of her adoptive father and the shady underworld of which he supposedly is a part.

In a comment to her own post, Duncan claimed that the harassment — “including a dead cat, grafitti on and near our property” — started when Blake worked with the indie singer Beck on an album cover. It is, frankly, hard to tell how much of what Duncan wrote is relevant to the harassment. Reading it over a few times, it strikes me that Duncan put all this out there in violation of Occam’s Razor (“the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.”) It could simply have been that the ex-girlfriend carried a torch, and went overboard. Assuming the adoptive father is connected to high-level espionage and secret business, why would he want to risk exposure by having his operatives harass a couple of artists?

But, oddly, the Times’ reporter focuses on the aspect of this story that seems the least subject to challenge. He questions whether the harassment took place at all. He strongly implies it was a fantasy. His proof? Christine Nichols, an art world colleague of Duncan and Blake’s “did not see any evidence of that.” Did Ms. Nichols live with them? What was the extent of her involvement in their lives that would lead Lee to conclude that if Nichols didn’t see something, it probably didn’t happen?

(This story went through at least one editor, right? Neither Lee nor that editor saw the logical fallacy in using Nichols’ comments to prove a negative? Neither Lee nor that editor thought to call LAPD, which Duncan cited specifically in her blog? This is the kind of thing that enrages readers of the LA Times and makes us indifferent to its future, irrational as that might be.)

Then Lee reaches out to the rock star Beck who, through his manager, describes the professional relationship between Blake and himself as “very cordial.” Beck, I was stunned to find out, is a member of the Church of Scientology. The Beck Sea Change album on which Blake worked was acclaimed, and the graphics drew positive notices. Why would an uneventful and successful project that benefited a famous Scientology member lead to harassment by the Church of Scientology? Duncan never explains, nor does the Times.

But the Times does add, with an air of authority, an irrelevant comment from the NYPD that the Scientology angle is not being pursued. Why would it be pursued? These are “apparent suicides.” Despite Lee’s best efforts, he fails to draw any connection between the deaths and the harassment — which he cues us to doubt even took place.

Here’s what I think Lee wants to say, but can’t: Duncan and Blake’s paranoia about Scientology was a symptom that one or both of them were losing their grip on reality and going insane, and at the end of that road was suicide. That’s the clear impression he leaves with his floating chunks of data and oddly disconnected quotes. The second half of the story is all about how well their lives were going, and how attractive they both were to “the brainy, moneyed people who occupy the intersection of art and technology.” Lee betrays more than a little envy of both of them. Stuck with a story for which he has few worthwhile facts but a bellyful of jealousy, he tells the world in so many words that both of them were crazy.

This is a hit piece, disguised by the language of compassion. The Times’ speculative implications are completely meritless. The fact is, we don’t know their mental state, and because the police say they aren’t looking into the Scientology/harassment angle, we can assume they didn’t see evidence to justify a connection. Keep in mind the police have seen both suicide notes.

For all the artifacts and writings both artists left behind, we really don’t know them. We don’t know what transpired between them. We don’t know what mental or physical conditions they were dealing with. We don’t know about stresses in their lives. We hardly know anything. And based on the quotes from friends, their friends hardly knew anything either.
----------
This is Not a Game: The Mysterious Death of Theresa Duncan
July 26th, 2007 at 6:36 pm (Uncategorized)

Theresa Duncan, artist, writer, perfume critic and video game pioneer is dead. The police aren’t making it official yet, but the papers are calling it suicide. Her longtime partner and collaborator, Jeremy Blake, is alleged to have stripped off his clothes and taken a one-way swim into the ocean. A body was recently discovered that fits his description.

(I first learned about all of this via Jeff Wells’ Rigorous Intuition blog and I have included links to all his posts on the subject at the bottom of this post.)These people were real. But almost everything else about this case seems false. When I initially went to Duncan’s website, my first thought was that the whole thing seemed very much like one of those alternate reality games or “ARGs” which you often encounter on the internet. These are stories which are not written out in one central narrative but consist of an introductory website and a series of clues. It is up to the readers to piece together the larger story. The more immersive ones will bring in other media…players might receive emails or phone calls, or be given phone numbers to call which actually work. Real websites not affiliated with the game might be referenced…videos produced…fake photographs created.

Duncan’s site looks very much like a “rabbit hole”, the term for the entry way into an ARG. Here’s another ARG term: puppet master. That’s the person or group running the game. What follows is what is likely to be a long series of investigative pieces into who the puppet masters are in this case. It will bring together some of the themes we’ve already introduced on this site.

In this first few posts, I’d like to explain a little about why I think there is some sort of structure behind Duncan’s website and numerous websites which connect to it which is designed to lead the reader onto some kind of trail. If you aren’t familiar with ARGs, and I was not that familiar with them until just recently as I researched them in another context, this will seem a bit nonlinear at first. What I have to offer is not proof, but simply an analysis that is highly suggestive that something “ARG-like”, for lack of a better term, is going on here. But I am feeling more and more certain that I am correct about this. In fact, already some ARG-like clues have been put forward in other places. Links to websites containing nothing but mysterious pictures, seemingly pointless lists, and cryptic text. These don’t prove anything, of course. But they are exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in an ARG. The difference here is that the “characters” are very real and two of them, apparently, are dead.

We will also see that the dead lovers have connections in various ways to the very community of people who create ARGs in the first place: internet innovators, “new media” theorists, occultists, chaos worshipping Discordians, and perhaps even a few intelligence agents along the way. This is the culture Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake already were a part of.

The research that is already underway is far too unwieldy to contain on this blog, so I’m not exactly sure how to proceed. I don’t want to be disrespectful to the dead couple and I cannot at this time figure out how to reconcile the ARG nature of this material with the very real deaths of these two artists. There are others researching this material with whom I am working though they prefer to stay anonymous.

What I am going to do with these first posts is give a brief summary of some of the factors that have led me to conclude that this ARG really exists, for whatever purpose. But let me give you a little more background on ARGs, particularly one ARG, so that you can see what I’m talking about a little more clearly.

One of the more famous ARGs that was never completely owned up to as an ARG was called “Ong’s Hat.” It centered around rumors of certain documents about a device that allowed people to go back in time. It sounds silly, I guess, but it roped a lot of people in. Here is one summary of the structure of an ARG written by a veteran of Ong’s Hat

Create a interactive medium that immerses the public in an addictive, tantalizing story but keep the content restricted to certain personality types. Reveal concepts and ideas that generally represent your beliefs.

Along the way, feed this portion of the public information which may or may not be true about the story. (Filtration of the idiots)

Those that breach the truths and untruths may pass to the next level of information. Introduce more directed and personal information. Once again reveal accurate and inaccurate information. (Further idiot filtration)
As this select group narrows, inject information that more specifically reveals their personal belief systems, ideals, goals.

If the users ideals, beliefs and goals have been properly modified by the process or the user already fits the mold, those persons are then accepted into the “fold”.

Notice, if you will, how those same words might be used to describe a sophisticated disinformation campaign. Indeed, with Ong’s Hat, there were many who thought the whole thing was real. Probably still some who do. And this sort of trickery has been going on since way before the internet began. Two non-web-based ARGs which come to mind are the alleged communications from aliens from the planet UMMO which eventually ran to thousands of documents, and all of the material around the Priory of Sion that ultimately found its way into a blockbuster book and movie. It doesn’t even matter that BOTH of these have not only been proven to be primarily based on hoaxes, and that the hoaxers themselves have admitted as such; people still believe. I’ll bet if you think really hard, you can come up with some other examples. I know I can.

Unfortunately, one of those examples turns out to be the whole area of MKULTRA and mind control. Not that MKULTRA didn’t exist…but at least one ARG drew heavily on the MKULTRA material and, I would argue, did much to obscure whatever truth lies in those dark and murky waters. The ARG was called “El Centro.” And here (this is a pdf link) is what the creator himself, Joseph Matheyny, said about it:

One (goal of El Centro) was to set up a multi-leveled puzzle scenario that
would serve as a ‘survival of fittest’ course so that we could find candidates that had the unique qualities that we desired
in a PM.

I’d like to suggest there was another goal. And that was to fuck with people’s minds. Here’s an excerpt from the El Centro material:

Him: “Ok. Ever heard of Mind Control Programming?”

Me: “MKULTRA, Monarch, etc.?”

Him:”To name but a few, but yes, exactly. Ever wonder how many of those Mind Controlled morons there are running amuck out there?”

Me: “Not exactly..”

Him: “I’ll tell you how many. A lot. A whole fucking lot. That’s how many. A bloody majority.”

Me: “How does that tie in..?”

Him: “I’ll tell you how but you won’t want to hear it. There are varying layers of programming. I’ve managed to hack a few of those over the last several years. Of specific interest to me was the OMEGA layer. This is the failsafe layer, the self-destruct button if you will. Recently I’ve learned how to trigger it.”

Me: “I see…”

Him: “Do you? I’ve grown tired of trying to figure out a way to deprogram large groups of people. There’s too many of them out there and more are created every day. It’s like being in a ground war with the Republic of China. You deprogram one and they throw 20 or 30 more at you. They wear you down through attrition. So I’ve come up with a more elegant solution. I’ve discovered a method to trigger the OMEGA response en masse. They’ll off themselves. Every single agent, sleeper or active, that comes into contact with El Centro will have their OMEGA response triggered. Oh sure, we’ll see a period of mass extinction that will be unprecedented, but..”

El Centro is off line but is archived here. However, I don’t know how long those archives last.

And this brings us back to Theresa Duncan and her blog, for as you’ll easily see if you look around, aside from perfume reviews and Kate Moss updates, she began to write about various Mind Control/MKULTRA/Project Monarch topics AND she also claimed she was being stalked by forces related to those. And then, I suppose we are to infer, her “OMEGA” programming kicked in. As we’ll see, her life in intersects in a variety of ways with guys like Matheny who are behind some of the more well known ARGs. I’m not saying that some evil ARG writers killed Duncan, only that something ARG-like has been constructed around her. Whether she was witting to that, or was being somehow led to do it, I don’t know.

I’m going to end this section here. Take the time, if this story interests you, to get the background at RI. And then have a look at the comments. Some of the commenters are part of the game and have begun to leave a little trail of clues. But be careful, as I have no idea where all this is leading so I’m not even going to point out just yet which comments I believe are deliberately planted. You’ll have to come to your own conclusions about that but I’d suggest looking for the links lead….because some of them lead to some pretty weird shit.

And I want to reiterate…I am the one who is “outing” the ARG nature of this game but I have nothing to do with it. In fact, I think the people behind it, especially given the two deaths that are somehow related, are malicious in intent, whatever that intent actually is. But my goal is very simple. I would like to expose these motherfuckers. I hope you’ll join me.

Links to the background from Rigorous Intuition:

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/07/after-ambulances-go.html

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/07/imitation-of-life.html

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/07/thursday-july-26.html

Next up…hopefully later today, I will outline some of the telltale signs that Theresa’s Blog was being used as an ARG “rabbit hole”. I’d ask those of you who are wondering if I’m making a huge leap here to bear with me. The case becomes very convincing, though it will be particularly convincing if you familiarize yourself with the nature, structure and some of the major “authors” of recent ARGS. But it’s going to take a little time to develop this idea. Please don’t call the paddy wagon on me just yet.

Oh, one other warning. Once this article gets “on the radar” we will have new people leaving comments here. PLEASE remember that you don’t know anything about who other commenters are. Already I’ve had some games played in my comments section (not related to this post…but similar kinds of folks). So be careful. I don’t want anyone to be paranoid, but the folks who do this stuff are really good at building trust and manipulating.
http://dreamsend.wordpress.com/2007/07/26/this-is-not-a-game-the-mysterious-death-of-theresa-duncan/

AFRIKA BAMBAATAA'S PETITION: "TAKE BACK HIP-HOP CULTURE"

Hip-Hop gets the blame, but the violence and sexism in the music is perpetuated by the corporate entertainment complex. Afrika Bambaataa of Universal Zulu Nation demands a restoral of balance ...

http://www.thuglifearmy.com/news/?id=3773

I would like you to read this letter from Afrika Bambataa, one of our fathers of Hip Hop Culture as an introduction to a campaign myself along with others in the Hip Hop Communities nationally have just began and working strong at.

We here in Atlanta are kicking off this “Bring Back the Balance” campaign with a petition. As you read, you will understand…Please pass it along to as many people as possible. Thank you Hiphoppa, see you around the way! Peace - Angie “Hiphop Angel” Griffin: Angel of Love Events/Temple of Hiphop

TAKE BACK HIP HOP CULTURE by Afrika Bambataa

BROTHER AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
THE AMEN RA OF UNIVERSAL HIP HOP CULTURE
UNIVERSAL ZULU NATION

TIME TO FIGHT ALL RADIO STATION WHO CLAIM HIP HOP BUT DO NOT PLAY HIP HIP IN A BALANCE. PLAY OLD SCHOOL WITH NEW SCHOOL; TO KEEP A BALANCE WITH TRUE SCHOOL. TIME TO FIGHT ALL THESE DAMN STATIONS WHO ARE JUST PLAYING ONE STYLE OF RAP AND TO FIGHT THESE BS TV VIDEO SHOWS THAT ONLY PLAY RAP VIDEOS OF DISRESPECT TO WOMAN OR JUST SHOW NEGATIVE VIDEOS AND NOT PLAY ALL VIDEOS IN A BALANCE FROM PAST TO THE PRESENT. BRING THE SPIRIT OF MAAT TO HIP HOP RADIO AND TV SHOWS. CONSCIOUSNESS AND FUN IN HIP HOP

THE FIGHT FOR 2006 IS ON TO SAVE HIP HOP CULTURE, TIME TO RAISE THE ARMY OF PEOPLE WHO WILL PUT THE POWER OF THE SUPREME FORCE ON THESE SATANIST B*STARDS, WHO ARE TRYING TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF THE HIP HOP WORLD NATION. ALL WHO STAND ON THE SIDE OF THE SUPREME FORCE, WHO IS CALLED BY MANY NAMES, STOP BEING SCARED, STAND UP AND RAISE YOUR VOICE AND THEN GET TO WORK TO EXPOSE THESE DAMN RECORD LABELS, RADIO STATIONS, TV HIP HOP SHOWS OR WHATEVER SHOWS THAT SHOWS US IN A BS VISION OF JUST BEING PIMPS, PLAYAS, GANGSTERS AND HOES, STRAIGHT UP NIGGERS, WIGGERS, OR ANY OTHER DEROGATORY WORDS THAT THEY USE AND WE USE TO CALL OURSELVES.

WE ARE ASKING ALL BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF ALL SO CALLED RACES (THE HUMAN RACE) ALL OVER THE WORLD,TO JOIN BROTHER AFRIKA BAMBAATAA AND THE UNIVERSAL ZULU NATION, BROTHER DAVEY D, TOOLS OF WAR,THE R.E.A.C.H. ORGANIZATION, SISTER ROSA CLEMENTE, KEVIN POWELL, SISTER APRIL SILVER, ERNIE PANICCIOLI, CRAZY LEGS, FABEL, TONY TONE, ADISA, NTELEK MARTHA DIAZ, CHUCK D, PROFESSOR X, KRS ONE AND THE TEMPLE OF HIP HOP, THE UNIVERSAL FEDERATION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF HIP HOP CULTURE AND MANY MORE GRASS ROOTS ORGANIZATIONS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD TO BRING THE POWER OF GODS AND GODDESSES, THE SUPREME FORCE ON ALL THESE JIVE A*S SO CALLED HIP HOP RADIO STATION TO CHANGE UP OR BACK TO HELL YOU GO . IT IS TIME TO CAUSE A WORLD MOVEMENT. STOP BEING SCARED AND CALL ON THE SPIRITS OF THE ANCESTORS, THE LORD OF ALL THE WORLDS AND GET TO WORK. RAISE CONSCIOUSNESS BACK IN HIP HOP CULTURE. WE ARE NOT SAYING TO STOP PLAYING WHAT YOUR ARE PLAYING ON THE AIR OR SHOWING ON THE TV BUT TO HAVE BALANCE AND PLAY IT ALL, OLD SCHOOL TO NEW SCHOOL TO BE TRUE SCHOOL.

WE NEED THE ARMY OF GODS AND GODDESSES TO LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SPEAK BUT TO LIFT EVERY ARM AND SWING MEANING PUT FIRE TO THESE DEMONS ON THESE STATIONS WHO WILL BRING THE CULTURE OF HIP HOP OVER TO THE DEVIL. IF YOUR ARE WITH SAVING HIP HOP CULTURE THEN FIGHT LIKE GODS OF HEAVEN AND SEND THEM DEMONS BACK TO HELL. IN THE SPIRIT OF THE MILLION MORE MARCH, MILLION MAN MARCH, MILLION WOMAN MARCH, MILLION YOUTH MARCH, THE UNIVERSAL ZULU NATION, THE ROCK STEADY CREW, ALL THE B-BOYS AND GIRLS, TRUE HIP HOP CULTURE HEADS THROUGHOUT PLANET EARTH JOIN AN ORGANIZATION OR GET WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE ABOUT MOVEMENT TO TAKE OUR CULTURE BACK AND SAVE OUR YOUTH ALL OVER THE WORLD AND TO SAVE YOUR MIND AND YOUR SOUL..

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE

*Angie “Hiphop Angel” Griffin; Angel of Love Events/Temple of Hip Hop - 770.9129505

Find the petition here and please sign it - http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/BBBATL

CIA Contractors are Running the Agency

PRIVATE SPIES
Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire
Wash. Post
By R.J. Hillhouse
July 8, 2007; Page B05

Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced.

The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror" have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today.

Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed - and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show.

Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I'm told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover identities and control the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide case officers and watch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers who control clandestine operations worldwide. As the Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism -- Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan -- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA parlance.

Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS have been outsourced to private industry. These branches are still managed by U.S. government employees ("blue badgers") who are accountable to the agency's chain of command. But beneath them, insiders say, is a supervisory structure that's controlled entirely by contractors; in some cases, green badgers are managing green badgers from other corporations.

Sensing problems -- and possibly fearing congressional action -- the CIA recently conducted a hasty review of all of its job classifications to determine which perform "essential government functions" that should not be outsourced. But it's highly doubtful that such a short-term exercise can comprehensively identify the proper "blue/green" mix, especially because contractors' work statements have long been carefully formulated to blur the distinction between approvable and debatable functions.

Although the contracting system is Byzantine, there's no question that the private sector delivers high-quality professional intelligence services.

Outsourcing has provided solutions to personnel-management problems that have always plagued the CIA's operations side. Rather than tying agents up in the kind of office politics that government employees have to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing permits them to focus on what they do best, which boosts morale and performance. Privatization also immediately increased the number of trained, experienced agents in the field after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even though wide-scale outsourcing may not immediately endanger national security, it's worrisome. The contractors in charge of espionage are still chiefly CIA alumni who have absorbed its public service values. But as the center of gravity shifts from the public sector to the private, more than one independent intelligence firm has developed plans to "raise" succeeding generations of officers within its own training systems. These corporate-grown agents will be inculcated with corporate values and ethics, not those of public service.

And the current piecemeal system has introduced some vulnerabilities. Historically, the system offered members of the intelligence community the kind of stability that ensured that they would keep its secrets. That dynamic is now being eroded. Contracts come and go. So do workforces. The spies of the past came of age professionally in a strong extended family, but the spies of the future will be more like children raised in multiple foster homes -- at risk.

Today, when Booz Allen Hamilton loses a contract to SAIC, people rush from one to the other in a game of musical chairs, with not enough chairs for all the workers who possess both the highest security clearances and expertise in the art of espionage. Some inevitably lose out. Any good counterintelligence officer knows what can happen next. Down-on-their-luck spies begin to do what spies do best: spy. Other companies offer them jobs in exchange for industry secrets. Foreign governments approach them. And some day, terrorists will clue in to this potential workforce.

The director of national intelligence has put our security at risk by classifying the study on outsourcing and keeping the truth about this inadequately planned and managed system out of the light. Much of what has been outsourced makes sense, but much of the structure doesn't, not for the longer term. It's time for the public and Congress to demand the study's release. More important, it's past time for the industry -- an industry conceived of and run by some of the best and brightest the CIA has ever produced -- to come up with the kind of innovative solutions it's legendary for, before the damage goes too deep.

rjh@thespywhobilledme.com

R.J. Hillhouse writes the national security blog the Spy Who Billed Me and is the author of the espionage thriller "Outsourced."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR2007070601993.html

Brazil TAM Airline Crash (Updated)

" ... Security video released by the air force showed TAM Flight 3054 speeding down the tarmac more than four times as fast as other planes landing around the same time ... [T]he thrust reverser, used by jets to slow down just after touching down, had been deactivated earlier in accordance with proper maintenance procedures. ... "

Proper? The AP quotes Brazilian aviation consultant Elias Gedeon: "it is possible that the thrust reverser could have played a role" in the crash.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane_crash;_ylt=Athk02mGuStaIQPXe6h4umsZO7gF

Roberto da Mota Girardi, a professor of aerodynamics at the Aeronautics Technological Institute, stated that the failure of a reverse thruster is a certain risk. "This is dangerous," Girardi told reporters, "especially in a short tarmac as the one in Congonhas." A plane with an inoperative reverse thruster would need a longer runway to stop. "I'm not familiar with the Airbus's operation manual or the details of TAM's maintenance system, but it seems odd that they would allow a period of ten days to evaluate the problem."
http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/8477/1/http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/8477/1/

Officials are blaming the maintenance manual - because it doesn't specifically state that a plane with a malfunctioning or disabled reverse thruster should be grounded. Brazzil Magazine reports: " ... TAM's president, Marco Antonio Bologna, and the airline's vice president Ruy Amparo, confirmed that the reverse thruster wasn't working and had been turned off. According to them, however, this didn't represent any danger to the plane, since the jet's manual in these cases only recommend that the failed equipment be checked in ten days, but DOESN'T TELL to stop flying the aircraft. ... "
http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/8477/1/

The maintenance manual destroyed the airbus?

Flight professionals will permit an airplane to fly in any condition so long as the manual doesn't suggest grounding? Some aviation experts are echoing the airline's statement that the thruster was only "complementary," and not essential to the braking system - if so how to explain a PREVIOUS disaster at the airport was determined to be CAUSED by a faulty thruster - how is it possible if it is only "complementary," and not necessary is some situations to slow the jet? Brazzil reports: " ... In 1996, a reverse thruster failure was pointed as the reason for another crash in the SAME AIRPORT. At that time, a Fokker-100 also belonging to TAM crashed over a residential area, a few seconds after takeoff. killing 99 people."
http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/8477/1/

That was also a TAM ... and nothing was learned from the experience?

And there is this about-face. The news of thruster failure contradicts a previous statement: " ... TAM's chief executive, Marco Antonio Bologna, had said on Wednesday the aircraft was in PERFECT CONDITION. ... "
http://africa.reuters.com/world/news/usnN20326669.html

The TAM CEO "misspoke." And the airline was not forthcoming with news of the decoupled thruster - an investigation by Globo TV found the malfunction, and it was acknowledged by the airline a few hours later. Official statements made after the crash have proven to be completely false and misleading.

If it had been left to TAM officials, the mechanical problem might not have been made public knowledge, and the cause would still be (as it was deemed following the initial reports) "pilot error."

However, one investigation - concucted by the Brazlian Air Force - has found that the speed of the plane on the Tarmac may have been partially due to error. The newsweekly Veja published a report last week claiming that the plane's data recorder showed one of the jet's throttles was in the accelerate position instead of idle while touching down at Congonhas airport. This report was met with widespread skepticism, however, particularly among the families, who suspect that the story was concocted to ease criticism of da Silva's government.

The protests following the TAM crash have drawn thousands. Many marchers say that they doubt the latest accident report, AP reports, "because it would remove pressure from President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's administration, which came under withering criticism after the crash for failing to invest in airport infrastructure over the past five years amid a commercial travel boom. 'It's the best thing for Lula that could have happened,' said Gabriela Paulino, referring to the president by his nickname.

Mr. Paulino, a lawyer who did not know anyone on the TAM Airbus 320 but carried a single yellow rose for the victims added:'“Now they're going to blame the pilot because he's dead.'”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070729.wbrazilcrash0729/BNStory/International/home

The investigation is highly secretive and tightly-controlled. The AP report: "Brazil's air force said in a statement that investigators have not disclosed any information about the plane's data recorder to outside sources." But somehow the report on the engaged thruster was leaked to the press. Times of India on July 29: "The Brazilian air force, which oversees civil aviation and accident investigations, said in a statement that no conclusion had been reached and that it had not leaked any information to the press."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Rest_of_World/Brazil_plane_crash_blamed_on_pilot_error_Report/articleshow/2241563.cms
(faulty link, but the story is posted at the TI site)

- Alex Constantine
-------------------
Opposition Leader Julio Redecker Among the Dead
http://cbs5.com/topstories/topstories_story_200092017.html

Jul 19, 2007 6:44 am US/Pacific
Government Criticized After Brazil Crash

" ... The accident is certain to have political ramifications, however, if only because the dead included Rep. Julio Redecker, 51, a leader of the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party and vocal critic of Silva's handling of the aviation crisis. ... "

[Redecker was to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the day of the accident.]

Pelosi Calls for Moment of Silence to Remember Passengers on Brazilian Plane Crash

07/18/2007

Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed her condolences and requested a moment of silence on the House floor this afternoon in remembrance of the passengers on the plane crash in Sao Paulo, Brazil last night. Representative Julio Redecker, the Brazilian House Minority Leader and a passenger on the plane, was scheduled to meet with the Speaker today. Below are her remarks:

"Last evening, the airport at Sao Paulo, Brazil was the scene of a terrible tragedy that took the lives of as many as 200. Among those lost was Representative Julio Redecker, the Brazilian House Minority Leader.

"As fate would have it, I was scheduled to meet this afternoon with Mr. Redecker and the President of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, Arlindo Chinaglia. Moments ago, I spoke with Mr. Chinaglia and Brazil’s Ambassador to the United States, Antonio Patriota. Mr. Chinaglia, said that he lost a colleague last night, he lost a friend.

http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/speeches?id=0062

I Fight in the Nacional Congress [translation]
18/07/2007 12:03

"The death of the representative Júlio Redecker one of vitimas of the Flight of TAM that blew up in São Paulo, changed the routine of the house of representatives in this Wednesday.

"If nothing folloied Redecker of the president of the house Arlindo Chinaglia had happened, would be from today on in official visit Washington, capital of the United States, where a series of meetings with North American parliamentarians was marked. Today, for example, they would be congregated with the speaker of the house of the Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and with the president of the Commission of Foreign affairs, Tom Lantos. ... "
press.jrc.it/NewsExplorer/clusteredition/ en/20070719,bbc-d0680f089a685731372cfb855ef7409f.html

[Redecker was investigating Waldir Pires, the Brazilian defense minsiter, who had responsibility for air traffic safety. Pires was fired after the TAM crash.]

Joe Sharkey: Brazil

" ... Brazil has many problems and the people are upset about them. Most Brazilians want Mr. Pires away from his job and the oposition support grows stronger. Aviation is in crisis and one of the opposition deputies working on Air Traffic Investigations against Mr. Pires, Julio Redecker (PSDB-RS), was killed on that accident. ... "

http://sharkeyonbrazil.blogspot.com/2007/07/editorial.html
---------------
Banco Santander - 2 Local Men Killed In Brazil Crash
Both Were Employees Of Banco Santander
July 19, 2007

MIAMI -- Two South Florida men were among the nearly 200 killed in the airplane crash in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Local 10 has learned.

The senior vice president of marketing and strategy for Banco Santander on Brickell Avenue confirmed Wednesday that two of their employees were on the airplane that crashed Tuesday. Pedro Abreau and Ricardo Tazoe, shown at right, were killed in the fiery crash. ...
---------
Banco Santander and Chavez

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2097

" ... Away from Chávez, his mouth and his oil, the Caracas financial community has been making serious money.… Venezuelan banks’ results that are the envy of the banking world, with returns on equity (RoE) of 33 percent the norm and 40 percent-plus RoE posted by pack leaders. International concerns are welcome to the party, too: Spain’s Banco Santander, which enjoys 15 percent of total market share, is a shining example. ... "
--------------
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/07/20/brazil.crash.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- One of the two thrust reversers on an airliner that crashed in a fireball was turned off when the plane landed, the jet's owner said Thursday.

Officials were trying to determine why the plane with 186 aboard raced down a runway instead of slowing down. The airline insisted late Thursday that the thrust reverser, used by jets to slow down just after touching down, had been deactivated earlier in accordance with proper maintenance procedures. ...

Brazil's Globo TV reported earlier Thursday that an unidentified problem in the Airbus-320's right thrust reverser emerged four days before the crash and was under investigation by authorities.

TAM, the airline, told Globo TV that Airbus maintenance rules approved by Brazilian aviation officials say the type of problem found must be inspected within 10 days and that the planes can fly in the interim.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was expected to finally address Brazil's deadliest air tragedy in a televised speech to the nation Friday evening.

His government has come under fire for failing to deal with the nation's air travel safety problems. His only comment since the plane exploded Tuesday night was a brief statement of condolences issued hours later.

The opposition Social Democratic Party complained in a statement that Silva "hasn't appeared publicly to express his sorrow, or to give solidarity to the families of the victims and explain what measures are being taken" to prevent similar accidents.

The TAM Linhas Aereas SA jet had 186 people aboard and at least three people died on the ground after it slammed into a building owned by the airline, causing explosions and a fire that was still smoldering two days later.

By late Thursday, 188 bodies had been retrieved, but forensic examiners had identified only 25. ...

Meanwhile, authorities struggled to determine why the TAM jet raced down the runway after landing instead of slowing down just before it was blown apart in a series of explosions.

Security video released by the air force showed TAM Flight 3054 speeding down the tarmac more than four times as fast as other planes landing around the same time. That raised the possibility of pilot or mechanical error instead of a slick and short runway widely cited as a likely cause.

Brig. Jose Carlos Pereira, president of the national airport authority Infraero, said authorities must wait for an analysis of the black box to explain why the jet was going so fast.

"For some reason, the plane did not slow down," he said. "Something happened and the pilot, for some reason, accelerated the plane."

Aviation officials insist Congonhas' 6,362-foot runway is not too short for safe operations, but pilots have long complained about slippery conditions during rainy weather and say the length allows small margin for error.

On Thursday, another TAM plane had to pull out of a landing after coming in at an unsafe angle, circled around and landed safely on its second attempt -- a fairly routine event at Congonhas.

A day before the crash, two planes skidded off the runway. On March 22, a Boeing 737-400 overshot the runway in a heavy rain, stopping just short of a steep drop....
------------------
Brazil jet thrust reverser 'off' - The video footage shows the final moments of the flight
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6907704.stm

A thrust reverser on the plane which crashed in Brazil, killing some 200 people, had been deactivated during maintenance checks, the airline says.

The reversers can be used to help jets slow down on landing but Tam Airlines insisted the deactivation was in accordance with proper procedures.

The Tam Airlines' Airbus 320 overshot the runway at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport, hit buildings and exploded.

There has been intense speculation but no confirmation on the crash's cause.

But the crash has brought mounting calls for Congonhas airport to close.

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, who has been criticised by opponents for his low profile since the crash, will address the nation on Friday and is expected to announce new measures on air safety.

'Higher speed'

Tam Airlines said the right thrust reverser was "deactivated" at the time of the accident "in conditions stipulated by the maintenance of the manufacturer Airbus and approved by [Brazil's] National Civil Aviation Agency".

Tam Airlines' comments came after Brazil's Globo TV said a problem with the right thrust reverser had emerged four days before the crash.

Tam said Airbus's own manual says an inspection can be done up to 10 days after it is first detected and that the plane can continue to operate in the meantime.

Globo TV also reported that the same plane had problems landing at Congonhas the day before the crash.

The channel said the plane only managed to stop at the limit of the runway. The pilot told air traffic controllers it was very slippery but did not mention any other problems, the report said.

The crash occurred in wet conditions on a recently resurfaced runway that has been criticised as being too short.

New video footage shows some of the final moments of the Tam Airlines flight from the southern city of Porto Alegre, and another similar plane that had arrived earlier.

It appears to show the Tam plane travelling along one section of the runway at higher than normal speed.

It shows the first aircraft apparently taking 11 seconds to travel along the visible section, while the plane that crashed covers the same distance in three.

The Airbus 320 jet appears to continue speeding along the runway without slowing, before disappearing out of view. The flash of an explosion can be seen a short time later.

According to Globo TV, the Brazilian air force, which oversees the country's air traffic control system, believes the footage shows the plane was travelling at excessive speed.

As the plane careered towards the busy road nearby, one theory is that the pilot tried to take off again. The aircraft crossed the road and ploughed into a Tam Airlines building.

"That he jumped over the avenue was an indication he tried to take off. If he didn't [try to take off] he would have gone nose down at the end of the runway," Brig Jorge Kersul Filho, director of the Air Force's Centre for Investigation and Prevention of Air Accidents, said.

Some 180 bodies have been recovered from the burnt wreckage, says fire chief Nilton Miranda, adding another 20 bodies are expected to be found.

Most of the passengers and crew on board the flight were Brazilian.

Data mining by NSA spurred confrontation on U.S. spying

International Herald Tribune
By Scott Shane and David Johnston
Sunday, July 29, 2007

WASHINGTON: A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former government officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching in the databases, known as data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases, compiled by American companies and stored in the United States, contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans. Though the databases do not include the content of the calls and messages, their examination by the government can raise privacy issues.

The data mining by the NSA has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the recent clash between Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The clash in 2004 culminated in a showdown in the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, unsuccessfully tried to get the ailing Ashcroft to sign a reauthorization for the NSA program.

Gonzales insisted in testimony before the Senate earlier this month that the 2004 dispute had not involved the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which he defined as the interception of phone calls and e-mail messages in and out of the United States involving people associated with Al Qaeda. He said the fight involved "other intelligence activities."

Because the dispute chiefly involved the use of databases by the NSA, rather than eavesdropping, Gonzales's defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers earlier this month and in previous testimony, while legalistic, were technically correct.

But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have been briefed on the program, called the testimony deceptive.

"I've had the opportunity to review the classified matters at issue here, and I believe that his testimony was misleading at best," said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, joining three other Democrats in calling Thursday for a perjury investigation of Gonzales. "This has gone on long enough. It is time for a special counsel to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought."

The senators' comments, along with those of other members of Congress briefed on the program, suggested that they considered the eavesdropping and data mining so closely tied that they were part of a single program. Both activities, which ordinarily require warrants, were started without court approval as the Bush administration intensified counterterrorism efforts soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but they would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.

Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President George W. Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials. An agency spokesman declined to comment on the data mining issue but referred a reporter to a statement issued earlier that Gonzales had testified truthfully.

The Justice Department announced in January that eavesdropping without warrants under the Terrorist Surveillance Program had been halted, and that a special intelligence court was again overseeing the wiretapping. The NSA, the nation's largest intelligence agency, generally eavesdrops on communications in foreign countries. Since passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, any eavesdropping to gather intelligence on U.S. soil has required a warrant from the special court.

In addition, court approval is required for the NSA to search the databases of telephone calls or e-mail records, usually assembled by phone and Internet companies and including phone numbers or e-mail addresses, as well as the dates, times and duration of calls and messages. Sometimes called "metadata," such databases do not include the words spoken in telephone calls or written in e-mail messages.

Bush has asserted that both his constitutional powers as commander in chief and the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks gave him legal justification for skirting the warrant requirement. Critics have called the surveillance illegal because it does not comply with the FISA law.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/29/news/intel.php

Decades after a plant closes, Ford's waste remains

" ... There were some who wanted to be vocal, but if you fought back against the state, local government and a major company like Ford, what was going to happen to you?" ... "

International Herald Tribune
By Ron Stodghill
Sunday, July 29, 2007

Abandoned mine in Ringwood, New Jersey, that Ford had used to dump parts and paint sludge. (Sylwia Kapuscinski/NYT)

NEW YORK: In the summer of 2005, around the time that residents of Upper Ringwood, New Jersey, began to wonder whether the skin rashes, nosebleeds and bronchitis that plagued their community were more than bad luck, Ford Motor and the Environmental Protection Agency made a request: The automaker and the regulator wanted access to the yards around two families' homes to remove waste that had been dumped in the area.

Ford boasts in its ads that "It's Easy Being Green," but residents feared that the request suggested something not so easy at all.

From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, Ford operated an assembly plant in northern New Jersey, in nearby Mahwah, that cranked out millions of passenger cars. Ford closed the plant in 1980, after dumping what the EPA describes as thousands of tons of paint sludge and other waste in Upper Ringwood, a community of about 350 working-class residents near the Ramapo Mountains.

A few years later, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Upper Ringwood for priority cleanup under its Superfund program.

Ford, deemed responsible for the pollution, spent the next five years assessing and removing sludge from a 500-acre, or 200-hectare, site that included 50 homes.

Satisfied with Ford's cleanup, the EPA dropped Upper Ringwood as a Superfund site in 1994, having determined, according to a public notice, that "no further cleanup by responsible parties is appropriate" and that "the current risk posed by the site is within an acceptable range."

Yet recently, based on Ford's and the EPA's own recent follow-up studies of the soil and groundwater in Upper Ringwood, those conclusions unraveled and became fodder in what environmental experts say is now among the messiest industrial cleanup efforts in Superfund's 27-year history.

Since the EPA relisted Upper Ringwood last year as a Superfund site, cleanup experts in the area have not only removed several thousand tons of waste that crews had previously overlooked, but workers have also identified substantial amounts of potentially hazardous paint sludge in the yards of at least two private homes, according to federal regulators and Ford.

Last year, residents sued Ford in a New Jersey state court for property damage and personal injuries, citing the improper disposal of waste from the Mahwah plant.

The lawsuit claims that Ford's hazardous paint sludge and other contaminated material, while dumped decades ago, still contaminate the soil, air and groundwater in their community; that Ford failed to tell more than 600 residents how dangerous the waste was; and that Ford has yet to properly clean it up.

To make their case, residents have enlisted several high-profile legal experts and consultants, including the environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr., the toxicologist James Dahlgren, who became known after the "Erin Brockovich" movie, and the law firm of the late civil rights lawyer Johnnie Cochran.

The lawyers contend in the suit that contaminated waste that Ford left behind has contributed to illnesses among residents like the diabetes that caused Paul Eugene VanDunk to have his leg amputated and the cancer that killed his daughter.

"This community was here long before Ford had anything to do with Upper Ringwood," said Andrew Carboy, a lead lawyer for the residents. "Ford's involvement here ended almost 40 years ago, but the community is still dealing with the health consequences of Ford's dumping."

Ford counters that its history of dumping in Upper Ringwood, which occurred for four years, was legal and authorized by town supervisors. It says it was just one of several companies that deposited waste in the area during the years that its Mahwah plant operated and that its dumping activities and recent cleanup efforts have not endangered the health of residents.

"Bronchitis could be caused by a number of things that have nothing to do with toxins," said Alan Kraus, a lawyer representing Ford, during a recent court appearance. According to records of the proceedings, Kraus said he needed a medical history from each of the plaintiffs before turning over any records concerning the automaker's waste disposal activities.

"To be honest, I'm not a doctor, but I don't know whether bronchitis can be caused by toxins," he said in court.

Citing the litigation, Ford executives declined to be interviewed, but said in a statement that "the company is working diligently to address remaining issues related to its past disposal activities."

Ford also noted that "the borough of Ringwood used the site as a general dump before, during and after the four-year period that Ford-related waste materials were disposed at the site" and that recent surveys of the property "recorded the presence of non-Ford related miscellaneous wastes and debris on approximately half of all locations included in the survey."

Ford contractors and EPA officials also say that residents here have been wary about granting access to their homes to remove potentially dangerous, brick-size shards of sludge.

"We understand that the residents in Ringwood do not trust the agency or Ford too much," said Patricia Carr, an EPA spokeswoman. "But how can they voice concern about the health effects of the waste there for all these years and then not allow us access into their homes?"

Residents see things quite differently.

"Tell me what they can do to satisfy us for the lives that have been lost already?" asks Wayne Mann, a local activist and community leader. "How do you justify what they've done?"

The rustic community, an hour's drive from New York City, is home to the Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation, a tribe with roots in the area reaching back before the Revolutionary War.

The tribe maintains many traditions and has been slow to integrate; residents hunt deer and turkey and fish local streams for food. They also grow vegetables on small plots in their yards, and are not politically active - which played a part in Ford's and the EPA's inefficiency in cleaning the area, residents say.

Environmental advocates say that the significance of the fight between Ford and residents transcends Ford's activities, plaintiffs' lawyers' claims of "environmental racism," or so-called greenwashing efforts of companies with dubious environmental records to improve their images. They say it sheds light on the inherent limitations of the Superfund program, which has relied heavily on the scientific research and the purse strings of corporate polluters to clean up sites - limitations that have only been compounded by severe cuts recently in the EPA's budget.

The plaintiffs' lawyers also contend that Ford's waste has contaminated a local reservoir that provides drinking water for 2.5 million people in the surrounding area. Ford denies that.

"This site is the poster child of corporate bad behavior and the inability of the EPA to really make corporate polluters do proper cleanup of sites," said Robert Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association, an environmental advocacy group in New Jersey.

Ford's waste, Spiegel said, "is polluting the drinking water for millions of people, yet it's still unclear whether the EPA will ever force Ford into really cleaning it up."

Roger DeGroat, 58, leaves the above-ground swimming pool outside his Upper Ringwood home empty because he's afraid he might be filling it with contaminated water. He points at a purple rash on his arms to illustrate other fears. "I don't know what these blotches are," he says. "It scares me because my doctor doesn't know what's wrong with me, either. I get dizzy for no apparent reason; my eyes itch.

"My children have nosebleeds so bad in their sleep that they wake up stuck to the bed, like they've been hit in the head or something," he adds.

DeGroat, like many other residents here, says he believes that hazardous waste contributed to his family's illnesses as well as elevated rates of leukemia, cancer, diabetes and asthma in other residents.

A line of trucks barrels past DeGroat's house and disappears behind gates securing the work site where a business hired by Ford is cleaning Upper Ringwood. In recent months, workers have been removing sludge and investigating the possible presence of such hazardous substances as lead, arsenic, chromium, ethylbenzene and PCBs in local soil, according to the EPA.

Residents say that the cleanup makes their close-knit community feel like an occupied military zone, with the constant rumble of tank-size tractors drowning out the banter from children playing tag and hopscotch.

Despite the noise and the threat of illnesses, DeGroat says that he, like most of the American Indians who live here, can't imagine relocating. Tribe members have maintained largely isolated lives (because, they say, of racial taunting and stereotyping from people outside their community) and are groomed to be suspicious of most outsiders.

After Ford built its Mahwah plant in 1955 and bought 800 nearby acres to build homes for its workers, it became among the largest employers in the area. In 1967, Ford hired a contractor to dispose of waste from the Mahwah plant. Court filings say that Ford's agreement with the contractor "called for disposal of cardboard and other packing materials from the plant, scrap car parts, paint sludge and scrap and dented drums containing obsoleted hardened production sealing and insulating stock of noninflammable nature." Ford says that state and local officials approved the dumping that occurred from 1967 to 1971.

Residents say that regardless of who approved the dumping, their lives were changed. "The way we were living is not how people live in the real world," said Mann, who is also a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Ford. "There was trash everywhere. There were drums and chemicals all around, and trucks coming and dumping anywhere and everywhere. The Dumpsters would get so high that they would mysteriously burn for weeks."

Starting in the late 1960s, Ford says it began divesting large portions of the dump site in Upper Ringwood. It donated 300 acres of land to the town government, which, it claims, allowed other companies to continue dumping on the site between 1972 and 1976 (at which point state regulators shut it down).

Joseph Maraziti, a lawyer representing the town government, said that after Ford left the area, the Upper Ringwood site was used for only household waste, not potentially toxic industrial waste. "As of this moment, there has been no identification of any hazardous material connected with that site other than Ford's," he said.

Ford closed its Mahwah plant in 1980. Two years later, New Jersey regulators discovered substantial levels of arsenic in local water samples and gave their findings to the EPA, which added Upper Ringwood to a national priorities list under its Superfund program. Ford's cleanup crews arrived in Ringwood in 1983, but the company acknowledges that the process from the start was prolonged by extensive research and bureaucratic red tape.

"With the site sprawling over more than 500 acres, the EPA had to make decisions regarding how best to investigate, characterize and then address the disposal of hazardous substances on the site," the company said in a statement.

Part of the problem, too, Ford and EPA officials say, was a steep learning curve in the remediation of Superfund sites, or as the 1980 law is called, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. Superfund was a response to public outcries in the 1970s over the discovery that about 22,000 tons of toxic waste had been dumped in the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York.

"There was no model out there and no mentors in cleaning up sites," said Carr, the EPA spokeswoman. "The law was detailed and prescriptive, but nobody had any experience in how to do this."

Among the most costly initial mistakes, Carr says, was the agency's failure to involve residents in the cleanup. "In the early days, we didn't have a lot of interaction with the residents in Ringwood and from that have learned to reach out earlier in the process," she said.

Ford says it does not accept full responsibility for the lack of dialogue with the community. In its statement, the company says that "in the 1980s and early 1990s, neither the borough of Ringwood nor the residents expressed significant interest in the process to Ford."

Residents don't dispute that they were hesitant to speak out early on, but say they were silent because of fears of retribution. "When the berries and the fruit and the frogs started disappearing, I looked the other way," Mann said."Who is going to cry out when you are only renting and can be thrown out? There were some who wanted to be vocal, but if you fought back against the state, local government and a major company like Ford, what was going to happen to you?"

Ford said in a statement that even its best efforts to alleviate those fears during the more recent cleanup often proved ineffective. It said it helped the EPA set up a toll-free number early in the reinvestigation process that residents could use to anonymously report information regarding the location of paint sludge on the site. "The toll-free number was never used," the company said.

But as Alan Steinberg, a regional EPA administrator, says: "Regardless of who was at fault for what, I find the situation to be heartbreaking. It's obvious that some mistakes were made, that the site was cleaned up too quickly. We are in the process of correcting that mistake by supervising a very intensive cleanup effort by Ford."

Some environmental experts and analysts say the biggest problem in cleaning Upper Ringwood, as well as the nation's more than 1,000 other Superfund sites, stems from the depleted resources of the Superfund itself. Superfund's budget was built on an excise tax on crude oil and chemicals used for manufacturing. The tax lapsed in 1995, and the trust fund has shrunk from $1.5 billion in 1994 to insolvency today - leaving the EPA struggling to find other sources of money to identify and assess the nation's future cleanup needs, according to several recent studies. The EPA says that Superfund's shrinking resources don't undermine its ability to monitor corporate polluters and that companies themselves can adequately manage and police cleanups on their own.

The price tag for all of this remains large: according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report, it will cost $20 billion to remediate the 142 largest Superfund sites.

Superfund has proved to be effective in spurring corporate polluters to pay for their own cleanups, analysts say. Rather than face fines of as much as three times the actual cost of a cleanup if the EPA undertook the effort on its own, most major corporate polluters have opted to clean the sites themselves. But that, in turn, has left the EPA dependent on corporate polluters to oversee and clean up problem sites.

"Funding of cleanups is a really central issue now that the tax fund has been depleted," said Katherine Probst, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic research group in Washington. "And there are issues about money, and issues about the future of the program, and questions about what you can expect to get in a cleanup these days."

For its part, Ford says its efforts to clean the area through the years have been nothing less than rigorous and that the company's voluntary decision to study the area's ground and streams for pollutants after closing its plant reflects its overall commitment to making the area safe for residents.

The company says it is doing additional cleanup work at known landfill areas, including at two abandoned mine sites.

More specifically, the company said in a statement that contractors had removed several tons of paint sludge deposits from Upper Ringwood sites and that samples of soil, surface water, sediment and groundwater had shown that the sludge has not migrated into soils or water supplies.

But residents say other warning signs still concern them, despite assurances from Ford and the EPA. Earlier this year, for example, New Jersey health authorities warned residents not to hunt squirrels (a longtime staple of the local diet) after discovering a squirrel that was contaminated with lead.

Vivian Milligan, 55, said that the notification unnerved her and that she had not gotten satisfactory answers about why she had two miscarriages, an ulcer, and has high blood pressure. Or why her husband has had four of his toes amputated. Or why three of her cousins have each had a leg amputated.

"I really feel that there's a connection between the contamination and all the health problems around here," she says. "There's just too many sick people for one little area."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/29/business/pollute.php

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Disreputable Psychotic Vincent "Lone Gunman" Bugliosi Misrepresents Bullet Evidence in JFK's Murder

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Essay_-_Is_Vincent_Bugliosi_Right_that_Neutron_Activation_Analysis_Proves_Oswalds_Guilt



Is Vincent Bugliosi Right that Neutron Activation Analysis Proves Oswald's Guilt? - by Gary L. Aguilar

INTRODUCTION

In his book, Reclaiming History, author Vincent Bugliosi highlights the dubious, if long-held, claim that bullet evidence in the Kennedy case scientifically establishes Oswald's guilt to a high degree of certainty. The proof, he says, consists of two related elements that show that only two bullets from Oswald's rifle struck anyone in JFK's motorcade on November 22nd.

Commission Exhibit 399, the so-called "magic bullet," allegedly found on a stretcher in Parkland Memorial Hospital on the afternoon of 22 Nov 1963. But new evidence has raised doubts that this Mannlicher Carcano bullet is the same bullet that was originally found and turned over to the U.S. Secret Service. See The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?

First, both the nearly whole bullet that was recovered on a stretcher at the hospital where JFK and Governor John Connally were treated, as well as both of the other large bullet fragments recovered from JFK's limousine (consisting of the copper jacket and the lead core of a single bullet) were shown to have been fired from Oswald's Mannlicher Carcano, to the exclusion of all other rifles in the world. Second, a sophisticated analytical test, neutron activation analysis (NAA), proves that all the smaller, recovered bullet fragments were separated from the larger specimens. Thus, only two bullets struck, both from Oswald's weapon.

As inescapable as the logic behind the theory may seem, and Bugliosi does an admirable job of making it seem inescapable, two recent reports in the technical/scientific literature have shot holes through it. The second debunking was published six months after Bugliosi claims to have stopped his inquiry and so he can't be faulted for not addressing it. But Bugliosi was fully aware of the first article, which, by itself, posed fatal problems which he glossed over. The manner in which Bugliosi dealt with this important evidence tells us much about his general approach to the subject of the Kennedy assassination. And to understand that, some background is in order.

BACKGROUND

That the larger pieces came from bullets shot through Oswald's rifle seems clear by the still-visible rifling marks. But in the wake of the new studies what is now not clear is that NAA can prove that all the small fragments are related to either one or the other of the two identifiable, large fragments.

First elaborated before the House Select Committee on Assassination's (HSCA) reinvestigation of Kennedy's murder in 1977, NAA is a sophisticated technique that purports to identify bullets by measuring the miniscule levels of "impurities" that are commonly present in bullet lead. Typically the quantities of antimony (Sb), silver (Ag) and copper (Cu) are assayed, but other trace components could be used just as well. The HSCA called upon Vincent Guinn, the University of California-Irvine, NAA expert. He put JFK's bullet evidence to the test and, against all expectations, reported a match in antimony levels that seemed to inextricably tie Oswald to the crime.

But as Guinn explained it, NAA only proved useful in the Kennedy case because of a feature that was unique to the Mannlicher Carcano bullets used in Oswald's rifle.

In stark contrast with the lead used in non-MCC bullets, which, bullet-to-bullet, had near identical levels of measurable Sb, the lead in Oswald's bullets had varying amounts. In the fragments recovered in the JFK case, Guinn found the telltale sign of Oswald's ammo: varying quanta of Sb. But Guinn said that there was a key additional feature that helped him reach his conclusions. With Oswald's ammo the levels of trace elements found in fragments taken from a given bullet remained constant, but were different from the levels found in other bullets. Thus, by NAA, fragments from one bullet would be traceable to the bullet of origin and could be distinguished from all others, even those picked out of a single box of twenty cartridges.

BUGLIOSI'S TREATMENT OF NAA

Bugliosi offered a remarkably clear explanation of Guinn's thesis:

"When subjected to NAA by Dr. Guinn, all five of the specimens produced a profile highly characteristic of the Western Cartridge Company's Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition. Even more interesting, the results fell into two distinct groups. Of the five samples, two had a concentration of antimony of about 800 parts per million, and three had a concentration of antimony of around 600 parts per million. This could mean only one thing: all five specimens had come from just two bullets. 'There is no evidence for three bullets, four bullets, or anything more than two, but there is clear evidence there are two,' Guinn told the HSCA.

"Guinn concluded that the large fragment found in the limousine, the smaller fragments found on the rug of the limousine, and the fragments recovered from Kennedy's brain were all from one bullet.

"His most important conclusion by far, however, scientifically defeating the notion that the bullet found on [Governor John] Connally's stretcher had been planted, was that the elemental composition and concentration of trace elements of the three bullet fragments removed from Governor Connally's wrist matched those of a second bullet, the stretcher bullet. The stretcher bullet, then, had to be the one that struck Connally … ."

In further support of Guinn's conclusions, Bugliosi cited two related papers published by the longstanding Warren Commission supporters, Ken Rahn, Ph.D. and Larry Sturdivan. The authors endorsed Guinn's statistical analysis as well as Guinn's conclusion that, as Bugliosi put it, "unlike other manufactured bullets, which he (Guinn) found to have a homogeneous elemental composition even when they came from the same batch or source, Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company (CE 399 and the bullet fragments in the Kennedy case) (sic) had different elemental compositions (particularly in antimony content) from bullet to bullet within the same box (normally consisting of twenty rounds) (sic) of ammunition. (1 HSCA 494–495)."

RANDICH AND GRANT

CE 842, small metal fragments taken from the wrist of Governor Connally.

But almost immediately, there were doubts about the statistical analysis. Then, something unexpected happened. Two scientists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who were avowedly agnostic on the conspiracy question, Erik Randich, Ph.D. and Pat Grant, Ph.D., published a paper in the Journal of Forensic Science calling both Guinn's original report and the two papers by Rahn and Sturdivan into serious question.

One of Randich and Grant's objections was that, although Guinn worked in good faith, he didn't understand elemental bullet metallurgy, which was Randich's area of expertise. (Nor, they made clear, did Rahn or Sturdivan.) Guinn was wrong that Mannlicher Carcano bullets were unique because the trace levels of component Sb varied. The levels of antimony in MCC bullets do vary, they said. But so do Sb levels in many bullets that, like MCC shells, are jacketed. It is the non-jacketed bullets that have consistent levels of trace components. And the levels are controlled for a very good reason.

For while with jacketed bullets it is the jacket that provides the hardness and not the lead inside the jacket, in non-jacketed bullets the hardness of a bullet is determined by how much antimony is mixed into the lead. To strictly control bullet hardness, an important quality control issue, manufacturers strictly control the quanta of antimony used in the lead of non-jacketed ammo. But with jacketed bullets, Sb levels vary because no effort is expended to control antimony as it has no bearing on the bullet's hardness.

As it happens, the non-MCC bullets Guinn used in his comparison tests were non-jacketed, and so, bullet to bullet, had homogenous Sb levels. Imagining that his test samples were typical of the universe of all non-MCC shells, Guinn drew the wrong conclusions. The varying Sb levels he found in JFK's fragments did not prove they had come from MCC shells; they could have come from many kinds of jacketed rounds.

Randich and Grant also disproved another, key Guinn contention: that there is little variation in Sb levels within a single bullet. Using exquisite micrographs showing MCC bullets cut in cross section, Randich and Grant demonstrated that MCC bullet lead exhibits a "crystalline" type structure, with Sb tending to "microsegregate" around crystals of lead. The crystals are large enough that a sample taken from one portion of a bullet might easily have an Sb level one or two orders of magnitude higher or lower than one taken from another portion of the same bullet. Guinn found Sb matches within the MCC bullets he tested because he measured bits taken from only a very small portion of his test bullets, which said nothing about what he would have found had he sampled an entirely different area of the bullet. Thus, fragments with similar antimony levels could have come from one bullet, or more than one, and those with different antimony levels could have come from but a single bullet.

Finally, Randich and Grant analyzed the statistical model Guinn presented to the HSCA. They determined that the number of samples he had evaluated and the number of tests he performed were inadequate to draw the sweeping statistical conclusions Guinn, Rahn and Sturdivan had drawn.

A NEW STUDY

In May 2007, a second paper appeared reporting on a chemical, forensic and statistical analysis of bullets derived from the same batch as those supposedly used by Oswald. The authors, Cliff Spiegelman, professor of statistics at Texas A&M and an expert in bullet lead analysis, William A. Tobin, the FBI's former Chief Forensic Metallurgist, William D. James, research chemist with the Texas A&M Center for Chemical Characterization and Analysis, and Stuart Wexler, brought considerable expertise to their study. As with Randich and Grant, they also concluded that, "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed." They reported that, "many bullets within a box of Mannlicher-Carcano bullets have similar composition." Thus, it was not true, as Guinn had said, that such matches are extraordinarily rare.

To his credit, Bugliosi acknowledged the Randich and Grant paper in his book. Unfortunately, however, he dismissed their conclusions on the flimsy basis of a personal letter (which he reproduced in an endnote) by the 40+ year Warren Commission supporter, Larry Sturdivan. Repeating Guinn's mistaken interpretation, Sturdivan answered Randich and Grant by saying, "If one looks at the NAA data obtained by Vincent Guinn for the HSCA, it falls into two groups that are immediately obvious …." Randich and Grant had effectively demonstrated that, metallurgically and statistically, it is simply not the case that there are only two groups, a conclusion that has since been confirmed by the work of Spiegelman et al.

CONCLUSION

Thus, the NAA pillar Bugliosi touts as undergirding Oswald's guilt no longer stands. This is an embarrassing development that Bugliosi could easily have avoided. In dealing with so important an area of evidence, Bugliosi had a duty to leave no stone unturned. Instead, for reasons that seem obvious, he deferred to the opinion of the pro-Warren Commission partisan, Larry Sturdivan. Had he approached this subject the way a scholar of any merit would have, he would have checked Sturdivan's assertions with either Randich or Grant, two men who have better credentials than Sturdivan does but lack the latter's biases on the conspiracy question. But he never did. I called Randich and Grant and both said Bugliosi had never contacted them.

Jim Morrison’s Death May Be Reinvestigated

Rolling Stone
7/10/07

If you’re one of the many people who think Doors leader Jim Morrison’s 1971 demise was suspicious, you might be right. A story in the U.K.’s The Mail on Sunday suggests Morrison’s death may be reinvestigated.

According to his death certificate, Morrison, who was famously found dead in the bathtub of his Paris apartment at the age of 27, died from natural causes. But according to The End – Jim Morrison, a new book by Sam Bernett, a French-born former New York Times journalist, club manager and friend of Morrison, the rocker died of a massive heroin overdose in the bathroom of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus club in Paris’ Left Bank and was then moved to the tub as part of an astonishing cover-up meant to deflect blame from the posse of drug dealers Morrison patronized.

(Details on what Bernett says actually happened to Morrison, after the jump)

Bernett claims that in the early hours of July 3, 1971, Morrison showed up looking to buy heroin for his then-girlfriend Pamela Courson. After scoring and splitting for the bathroom, he failed to reappear. “About half an hour later, a cloakroom attendant came up to me and told me someone was locked in one of the cubicles and wasn’t coming out. I got a bouncer to smash the door down,” Bernett recalls. He says he found Morrison’s body slumped over the toilet. “We were certain he’d been snorting heroin because there was foam coming out of his lips as well as blood,” Bernett says. “He was scared of needles so never injected drugs.” Bernett brought in a customer who worked as a medic, who proclaimed Morrison dead.

At this point, Bernett says, Morrison’s dealers appeared, insisted the singer was still alive (though passed out) and carried the rocker out of the club, saying they would take care of him. Shortly thereafter, Bernett claims someone representing the club’s owner called, warning him not to tell anyone what happened.

Bernett says then-24-year-old singer/scenester Marianne Faithfull was also in the bar that night and was similarly sworn to secrecy. “Marianne never mentioned Jim again,” Bernett says. “She won’t talk about what happened in the club to this day.”

So why talk now? “I want to get rid of my heavy load,” Bernett says. “At least everything is now out there to be discussed. I’ve said what I have to say.” Will Bernett’s claims inspire French authorities to reopen the investigation? The twenty-year statute of limitations for criminal cases is up, but action could still be taken in civil court. A spokesman for France’s Police National told The Mail, “The new evidence will have to be considered.”

-- Elizabeth Goodman

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/07/10/jim-morrisons-death-may-be-reinvestigated/

UK: Navy Commander Spared Jail for Child Porn - He was Leading a "Globally-Important" Mission in Middle East

" ... Gilmour was leading a globally-important military operation in the Middle East at the time he was exposing himself and downloading child pornography. ... "

Gilmour's explanation: "NAVY PERV WALKS FREE," Daily Record, 28 July 2007 - " ... Gilmour blamed the offences on the stress of serving in Iraq and being far from his family. ... "
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/news/tm_headline=navy-perv-walks-free&method=full&objectid=19533922&siteid=66633-name_page.html

Daily Mail/July 27, 2007

A former Royal Navy commander has been given a two-year supervision order after flashing at young girls and downloading pictures of child pornography.

Craig Gilmour, 39, who was formerly captain of the fishery patrol vessel HMS Tyne, drove up to young girls and exposed himself to them in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

His victims included a 17-year-old girl on October 5 2005, an 11-year-old girl on July 3 last year, a 12-year-old girl on October 25 last year and a 10-year-old girl on September 29 last year.

The father-of-three, who resigned from the Navy after the allegations were made, admitted four charges of indecent exposure as well as 19 charges of making indecent images and a further charge of possessing 359 indecent images of underage girls at earlier hearings.

Gilmour was cleared by a jury at Portsmouth Crown Court last month of inciting the 10-year-old to perform a sex act on him.

Judge Gareth Cowling today gave Gilmour a community penalty order. He said there would be a two-year period of supervision attached to the order as well as a requirement to attend the Edinburgh sex offenders' programme for two years.

Gilmour was also told he will be registered on the sex offenders' register for five years.

He warned Gilmour: "If you do not do what is required of you, you will have to be brought back to court and if necessary (the court will) revoke that sentence and re-sentence you."

Mr Cowling added: "You are a man full of remorse. Whilst it is difficult of course for anybody else to understand why you or indeed anybody else commits this type of offence, I suspect you yourself have difficulty in understanding how you came to commit these offences."

He added: "The protection of the orders I make are far greater, far longer lasting than any short-term custodial sentence."

He told Gilmour his "abhorrent behaviour" was aggravated by the young age of his victims.

Gilmour was leading a globally-important military operation in the Middle East at the time he was exposing himself and downloading child pornography.

Between 2005 and last year, Gilmour was the Navy's chief of staff for Task Force 58, a multi-national coalition force which conducted maritime security operations in the North Arabian Gulf.

Serving as right-hand man to Task Force Commander Commodore Bruce Williams, Gilmour was responsible for the day-to-day running of the operational set-up as part of Operation Telic, to protect Iraq's oilfields as well as legitimate maritime traffic in the region.

In a letter to the court, Commodore Williams described Gilmour as an "ambitious" and "capable" officer with a "highly developed sense of duty" who had a role with considerable responsibility for the Task Force.

But the pressure of his role in the Gulf caused Gilmour, who has since been receiving psychiatric treatment, to suffer a breakdown.

His high responsibility work kept him out of the country for 11 months during a 14-month period and he worked in Portsmouth 300 miles away from his family in Newcastle.

Gilmour, whose wife is seeking a divorce and refuses to let him see their children, is now living with relatives in Edinburgh.

He said during the trial: "When I got back from the Gulf, I was aware I was a very absent father to my children.

"I was under a great deal of pressure to make sure when I was back I would be the best father I could be and I was aware I wasn't coming up to that mark.

"I was annoyed at myself and disappointed. It is quite clear that the absence I was having from my family, I was filling in an unhealthy way."

The trial last month heard how Gilmour pulled over in his blue Jaguar car, opened the passenger window and asked his 10-year-old victim for directions as she walked along Wordsworth Road, Paulsgrove.

In a videoed interview with police the victim said she felt "quite shaky and nervous" after he lifted his shorts to reveal his penis.

The 19 counts of making indecent images of children relate to photos downloaded on to his computer at his family home in Turbinia Gardens, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The 359 indecent images found on his computer at his base, Whale Island, Portsmouth, were of naked girls aged between 10 and 14 but did not involve any sexual activity.

In a separate court case earlier this year, Gilmour was fined £600 at Portsmouth Magistrates' Court after pleading guilty to inappropriate behaviour by using "vile" words towards two 13-year-old girls.

In similar circumstances to those described in his trial for indecent exposure, the court heard that Gilmour pulled his car over close to the two teenage girls in Portchester. He asked them directions before making lewd comments to them on October 23 last year.

District Judge Philip Gillibrand fined Gilmour £600 and ordered him to pay £55 prosecution costs. He told Gilmour it was a "vile offence which cannot be tolerated".

Defending counsel Rosina Cottage said today that Gilmour has considered suicide during the ongoing court cases.

She said he was "well liked, well respected, relied upon" and added: "His career would have gone from strength to strength.

"He has been forced to resign so that career is now behind him. His wife seeks a divorce. She has recently indicated she will not speak to him. He has not seen his children since last year. She has refused to allow him contact."

She said that his behaviour has had "huge and far reaching consequences beyond anything he would have contemplated at the time."

Original Title: "Ex-Navy commander spared jail for downloading child porn and flashing at young girls"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=471275&in_page_id=1770

Friday, July 27, 2007

Theresa Duncan & Jeremy Blake Coverage

Also see:
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/07/ghosts-in-wind-part-four-dick-cheney.html
Tragedy: Theresa Duncan, gone; Jeremy Blake still missing
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/07/tragedy-theresa.html

UPDATES:
via Modern Art Notes
July 26, 2007

Body found may be Blake's

The LA Times reports that a body found near Sea Girt, NJ may be Jeremy Blake. The Asbury Park Press' Nick Clunn reports it too.

via Modern Art Notes, 7/25/07:

Jeremy Blake is from Washington, DC. He took his first art classes at the Corcoran. And the Corc has a major Blake exhibition scheduled for October. So: Why hasn't the Post said one word about his apparent suicide?

via Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2007:

The apparent double suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan
By Chris Lee

via Modern Art Notes, 7/23/07:

Corcoran: Jeremy Blake show will go forward

Expect this fall's Jeremy Blake show, Wild Choir: Cinematic Portraits of Jeremy Blake, to continue more or less as planned at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art. That's the word from the museum and from the show's curator, Jonathan Binstock (who recently left the Corc for Citi but who is moving forward with the show). This will be Binstock's second Blake show: He curated "Jeremy Blake: Digital Projections" at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Blake is missing off the coast of New York City.

The show is scheduled to open on Oct. 22. Blake was to have been an artist-in-residence at the Corcoran this fall. (The museum says that Blake, who grew up in Washington, took his first art classes at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.)

It is not clear how the show will differ from the original concept: The presentation of three of Blake's 'cinematic portraits' and many of his chromogenic prints. It is possible, even likely, that Blake did not complete one of the works scheduled for the show, a 'portrait' of Malcolm McLaren titled Glitterbest. (Two other 'portraits, Reading Ossie Clark, sequence at left, and Sodium Fox are complete.) People involved with the show stressed to me that it is too early to know what happens next in regards to their expected future communications with the Blake family and so on.

I'm told that Blake finished work on the show's catalogue several weeks ago. It includes a Q&A between Blake and Binstock, an essay by Glenn O'Brien, a poem by David Berman, and many images from Blake's Glitterbest project. The Corc's releases ends by saying: "Further details of this project are pending."
:::::::::::::::::::::::
from Saturday:

Theresa Duncan has committed suicide. Last we at newsgrist heard from her it was April... I'm late to the story, so I will be as thorough as possible; there are a handful of blog links below (updates to come); The NYTimes is the first major daily to break the story (today); she's been dead for ten days. She had a fascination for Jean Seberg, her tragic doppelganger (Seberg's is the B&W image above). In any case, Theresa was unique.

Worse still: (via LATimes, July 21):

Artist Jeremy Blake is missing, according to New York City investigators, and he apparently drowned himself Tuesday night, said Lance Kinz, co-owner of the Manhattan art gallery that represents Blake. Police said a man "tentatively identified" as Blake was seen stripping to his shorts and disappearing into the surf at Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y., where no body had been found by Friday. Kinz said Blake's friends are convinced it was him because his wallet and clothes were found in the sand. Blake's apparent suicide comes a week after he found his longtime girlfriend, writer-filmmaker Theresa Duncan, dead on the bed in their Manhattan apartment, where she had left a suicide note.

Here's a characteristically dark, poetic quote from Theresa from a recent interview on LAist:

Q: If you were to make a perfume that embodied the essence of Los Angeles, what would it smell like?

A: My cologne is called Santa Ana after the powerful winds that bring desert heat and faraway smell into the city. It smells like: Celluloid and sand, coyote fur and car exhaust, contrail cloud and chlorine, bitter orange and stage blood and one bushel of ghostly, shivery night-blooming jasmine flowers like blown kisses from the phantoms of the ten thousand screen beauties who still haunt our hills every full moon because they think it's a stage light.

UPDATE 7/23/07: Some links to articles by Theresa, as well as to two animations she produced with Jeremy:

via Findarticles: articles in Slate, Art Forum, etc.

Theresa Duncan's blog: The Wit of the Staircase
The History of Glamour

by Theresa Duncan, Jeremy Blake and Karen Kilimnick, 1998, USA
An animated mockumentary about an art scene similar to Andy Warhol's Factory

* FORMAT: DVD
* PRICE: $10.00 Purchase

via NYTimes review, July 16, 1999 :

Theresa Duncan's animated video ''The History of Glamour'' is a gentle, very funny pseudo-documentary of the fashion world that tells the story of Charlie Valentine, a girl from Antler, Ohio, who moves to New York City and becomes a supermodel and eventually a Madonna-like pop star. The film imagines a chic little society where Chanel No. 5 is served as a cocktail in restaurants with names like De Rigueur. One of the narrators (played by Mary Louise Wilson doing her best Diana Vreeland impersonation) is a fashion maven named Grace Greenberg who runs the definitive fashion rag Ooh La La Magazine.

via YouTube:

Closet Cases - "The Dred Case"
Closet Cases: "Slice of Bread"
.............................................................................

An image from “Sodium Fox,” a 2005 video work by Mr. Blake. Courtesy of Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, New York

via NYTimes:

Two Artists, One Suicide, the Other Missing
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: July 21, 2007

In a case that is reverberating in the art world, the New York Police Department said yesterday that a video-game designer and budding filmmaker committed suicide last week and that her companion, a rising art star, has been missing since Tuesday.

The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.

Found with the clothes was a note that made reference to Ms. Duncan, the police said.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police department, said that Mr. Blake was last seen taking off his clothes and then walking into the water at Beach 102nd Street on Tuesday. Police scuba teams have searched the waters off the beach since then, Mr. Browne added, but have not found a body.

Lance Kinz, a director of the Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery, which represented Mr. Blake, said that Mr. Blake and Ms. Duncan had been together for 12 years and were very close. The two collaborated, along with another artist, Karen Kilimnik, on “The History of Glamour,” a 1999 animated film that spoofed the fashion world. The short movie, which Ms. Duncan wrote and directed, was called “gentle” and “very funny” by Stephen Holden of The New York Times in 2001.

Mr. Kinz said that Mr. Blake told him he had discovered Ms. Duncan’s body after she committed suicide. He said he had spoken with Mr. Blake after her death and that, while devastated and grieving, “he seemed to be very much in control and to be coping with it.”

Mr. Blake, whose work has been shown at three Whitney biennials and at a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, is scheduled to have an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in late October, partly in collaboration with Malcolm McLaren, the musician and designer.

Mr. Kinz said it is unclear whether that show, or another coming up at his gallery, in Chelsea, would open. “There’s some hope that maybe that wasn’t Jeremy going into the water,” he said, “but it’s presumed that he’s gone.”
Ms. Duncan, who was raised in Detroit, became a prominent video-game designer in the late 1990s, making sophisticated story-based CD-ROM games for young girls — an underserved population in a business largely aimed at adolescent boys. She and Mr. Blake had moved to Los Angeles but recently returned to New York, Mr. Kinz said, where she was working on writing and movie projects.

She also maintained a blog called “The Wit of the Staircase,” where she wrote energetically and at length on topics ranging from books to politics to Kate Moss. Her last entry, dated July 10, the day she died, includes a blurry photograph of a woman putting on a mask and quotes the novelist Reynolds Price: “A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens — second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”

She listed her interests at the site, theresalduncan.typepad.com, as “film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume, book collecting, philately, card and coin tricks, futurism, Napoleon Bonaparte, the history of electricity.”

Mr. Blake, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and several other prominent institutions, began to make a name for himself in the late 1990s with dissolving photographic projections used to create the equivalent of geometric abstract paintings. He called his work “time-based painting.”

The 2005 exhibition in San Francisco was based around the San Jose mansion of Sarah Winchester, the widowed heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, who built a mazelike house with 160 rooms to confuse or ward off the ghosts of shooting victims she believed would haunt her.

In addition to work for galleries, Mr. Blake also created sequences of abstract art for the 2002 movie “Punch-Drunk Love,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who had seen Mr. Blake’s work in an earlier show in San Francisco while working on the film.

Roberta Smith, writing in The Times about a 2005 exhibition by Mr. Blake in New York, said that his work had “given the stream-of-consciousness narrative, so long a part of modern literature, a time-based visual equivalent” and that he was moving past predecessors like Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston and Raymond Pettibon into new artistic territory.
..............
Funeral Service;
Ron Rosenbaum:
The Death of Theresa Duncan: News and Clues
Living Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog
Filmmaker Theresa Duncan Reported Dead
LA Witness
Theresa Duncan was 40….A Talent Removed
NYPost
ART-TO-ART GRIEF: HUNT FOR BEAU IN '2ND SUICIDE'
NY Daily News
Artist lost in surf likely killed self
Perfume of Life Forums
Theresa Duncan, Blogged On Perfume, Life, Arts, Dead in NYC last week
MediaBistrot: Fishbowl LA
Update: Theresa Duncan's Death Confirmed
Artfagcity:
Artist Jeremy Blake Missing
Modern Art Notes:
Jeremy Blake: Missing
LAObserved
Possible news on Theresa Duncan
Theresa Duncan, filmmaker was 40
Spout Blog
Theresa Duncan Dead, Jeremy Blake Missing?

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

TY Virginia McCullough
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/

By Mark Baard
23rd June 2007

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another. Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.

Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.

SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.

Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.

The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.

Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland.

The Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM-J9) in April began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces over "Noble Resolve 07", a homeland defense experiment.

In August, the agencies will shift their crises scenarios from the East Coast to the Pacific theatre.

JFCOM-J9 completed another test of SEAS last year. Called Urban Resolve, the experiment projected warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015, eight years from now.

JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.

Military and intel officials can introduce fictitious agents into the simulations (such as a spike in unemployment, for example) to gauge their destabilising effects on a population.

Officials can also "inject an earthquake or a tsunami and observe their impacts (on a society)", Chaturvedi added.

Jim Blank, modelling and simulation division chief at JFCOM-J9, declined to discuss the specific routines military commanders are running in the Iraq and Afghanistan computer models. He did say SEAS might help officers determine where to position snipers in a city square, or to envision scenarios that might emerge from widespread civil unrest.

SEAS helps commanders consider the multitude of variables and outcomes possible in urban warfare, said Blank.

"Future wars will be asymetric in nature. They will be more non-kinetic, with the center of gravity being a population."

The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.

The other SEAS models are far less detailed, encompassing only a few thousand nodes altogether, Blank said.

Feeding a whole-Earth simulation will be a colossal challenge.

"(SWS) is a hungry beast," Blank said. "A lot of data will be required to make this thing even credible."

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.

Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name.

Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.

And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.

"There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS," Chaturvedi said.

SEAS bases its AI "thinking" on the theories of cognitive psychologists and the work of Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioural economics.

Chaturvedi, as do many AR developers, also cites the work of positive psychology guru Martin Seligman (known, too, for his concept of "learned hopelessness") as an influence on SEAS human behaviour models. The Simulex website says, if a bit vaguely, SEAS similarly incorporates predictive models based upon production, marketing, finance and other fields.

But SWS may never be smart enough to anticipate every possibility, or predict how people will react under stress, said Philip Lieberman, professor of cognitive and linguistic studies at Brown University.

"Experts make 'correct' decisions under time pressure and extreme stress that are not necessarily optimum but work," said Lieberman, who nevertheless said the simulations might be useful for anticipating some scenarios.

JFCOM's Blank agreed that SWS, which is using computers and code to do cultural anthropology, does not include any "hard science at this point".
"Ultimately," said Blank, "the guy to make decision is the commander."

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

Ghosts in the Wind (Part Four): Dick Cheney, 9/11, CIA Mind Control & the "Suicide" of Art Blogger Theresa Duncan

By Alex Constantine
Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan believed that Scientologists were stalking them. In fact, they had no way of knowing who was interfering in their lives. The newspapers reported this much of the story. They neglected to mention that she also suspected " ... a prominent Republican donor connected to the Heritage Foundation. ... "

The CIA's mind control perps often lead the subject to believe that someone else is responsible for the harassment, stalking and invasive interference in their lives and minds. It wasn't necessarily Scientology. The Theresa Duncan case remains open, and there are obvious leads in the death of the famed art blogger:

" ... On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'. On July 5, she wrote: So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades... "

Lest I be accused of avoiding the subject, AC was obviously an influence on her political views - she writes about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA & cults, mind control history and other of my pet topics. Ever feel way over your head, grappling with a man-eating Leviathon? It may have claimed Theresa - and this is a source of massive sadness to me. Sometimes, the grief that comes with the research is also way over my head. This is one of those instances.

We list at sea and it can claim us at any moment. Theresa did not go gently into that good night. May she NEVER rest in peace. Some things are more important than life itself.

- AC
-----------
The apparent double suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan
Friends cite strange behavior in the final days of a golden couple in the art world.

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-blake25jul25,0,5067221.story?coll=cl-art-features
Los Angeles Times
By Chris Lee
July 25, 2007

It's been just eight days since rising art star Jeremy Blake was seen wandering into the ocean off New York's Rockaway Beach -- presumably to his death -- a week after he discovered that his blogger-filmmaker girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, had taken her life in their East Village apartment.

But the apparent double suicide of this glamorous, intellectual couple has confounded and disturbed the art world in New York, London and Los Angeles, where they lived together for several years. Many were shocked by the turn of events while others noted that the couple had acted strangely in their final months together.

According to several friends and art world peers, the two believed they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists, an abiding fear that soured old friendships and made some of their respective working relationships difficult.

Christine Nichols, a colleague and friend of Blake's since 1998, produced two art exhibitions, two books and a record in conjunction with the artist through the New York art gallery she co-founded, Works on Paper Inc. Nichols dates the couple's rising sense of "paranoia" to around 2004, two years after Blake created an album cover for alternative-rock star Beck, who is a practicing Scientologist.

"They thought Scientologists were really harassing them," Nichols said. "They would say, 'They are following us, harassing our landlord.' I did not see any evidence of that.

"But it got to be something that was huge to them -- a 'You're either with us or against us' thing where if you didn't believe them, you weren't on their side. The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives. A lot of us couldn't understand that acting out."

Two other art world sources corroborated Nichols' characterization but declined to speak on the record out of concern that Blake may still be alive.

Beck was unavailable for comment, but his manager, through a publicist, let it be known that things were "extremely cordial" between the singer and the artist the last time they talked three years ago.A spokesman said the New York Police Department was not investigating any involvement by the Church of Scientology. Karin Pouw, a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology, denied the allegations, saying, "Never heard of these people. This is completely untrue. ... "
---------------
http://yournewreality.blogspot.com/2007/07/suicide-of-arts-blogger-from-new-york.html

Weapons Of Mass Information
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

'Suicide' Of Controversial Arts Blogger Theresa Duncan
"Vital Part Of The Story Missing"

Blogger Theresa Duncan interviews Frank Morales six weeks before her death: "On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'.

On July 5, she wrote :

"So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades, as if all the Cold War missile paranoia was just a smoke screen for all the body snatchers the Pentagon was beginning to hatch."

UPDATE : Ron Rosenbaum claims that, contrary to the New York Times story excerpted below, his checking the facts of Theresa Duncan's death with the New York City Police Department and the City Medical Examiner’s Office reveals that her death has "not yet been officially ruled a suicide" :

To my knowledge no evidence has come to light suggesting murder or accidental death. But the authorities aren’t commenting, awaiting, for one thing, toxicology reports on Duncan they say may not be available for at least two weeks.

A verdict “on the cause and manner of her death” is still “pending investigation” is all a spokesman for the Medical Examiner said she was authorized to say.

Meanwhile the body of Theresa Duncan’s boyfriend, Jeremy Blake—who reportedly committed suicide in the waters off Rockaway Beach because he was “despondent” over Theresa’s death—has still not been found.

But in the meantime, 'Anonymous' commenters are filling up blog sites with claims that both Theresa and partner Jeremy Blake were mentally ill and "deeply troubled", which we examine in more detail below. Interesting then that the many 'Anonymous' comments we've read so far, from a close look at the writing styles and syntax, seem to have been written by the same one or two people.

From the New York Times :

In a case that is reverberating in the art world, the New York Police Department said yesterday that a video-game designer and budding filmmaker committed suicide last week and that her companion, a rising art star, has been missing since Tuesday.

The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.

Found with the clothes was a note that made reference to Ms. Duncan, the police said.

Theresa Duncan also ran an arts and literary blog we visited occasionally called 'Wit Of The Staircase'.

In a post on her blog the day she died, July 10, Theresa quoted novelist Reynolds Price :

"Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

The night before she killed herself, she headed a short post 'Goodnight, Children, We're In The Arms Of The Great Lover'. The Great Lover being sleep.

On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'.

On July 5, she wrote :

So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades, as if all the Cold War missile paranoia was just a smoke screen for all the body snatchers the Pentagon was beginning to hatch.

Mind control and psychological warfare are the primary weapons that led to our current Monarch Moment. Cults like Scientology and mind control-manufactured Monarch girlies and Operation Mockingbird are the fungus among us that has been eating away at the foundations of democracy for decades....

And then linked to this video, a strange and troubling documentary on the history of American intelligence and military run mind control experimentation:

The NYT story claimed her partner Jeremy Blake found her body :

Mr. Kinz said that Mr. Blake told him he had discovered Ms. Duncan’s body after she committed suicide. He said he had spoken with Mr. Blake after her death and that, while devastated and grieving, “he seemed to be very much in control and to be coping with it.”

News of her death spread fast amongst her friends, and in the New York art circles. Her blog averaged 800-900 visits a day while she alive. There was an increase of a few hundred extra visitors a day in the week after she died, perhaps friends and family members who had never visited her blog much before, but went there in search of learning something about why she did what she did.

On the day this story about her death appeared in the New York Times, the visits to her site shot up to more than 10,000 :

There are a growing number of blogs, FaceBook and MySpace pages belonging to people who've died. Often families and friends don't take down the pages, leaving them online as a personal memorial, with farewell messages from loved ones filling the comments. I've been told there are at least 200 or so MySpace pages from Americans, Brits and Iraqis who've died in the Iraq War still online. Permanent portraits of the lives and minds of the dead. As permanent as the internet remains anyway.

Sometimes you find the personal blogs and web sites of the dead are just as the creator left them the day they died. There is nothing on Theresa's site, at the moment, to say she died, or how she died. There is just the blog she created and filled with images and quotes from books and poetry that meant something to her, that she wanted to share with the world.

Many artists dream of some kind of immortality. Her blog renders her immortal in at least one sense : you can learn something of her life, her interests, her passions and her sadness from moving through the few months of archives.

It would be a shame indeed if her site, 'The Wit Of The Staircase' was taken down now she's gone. It is filled with sometimes beautiful, sometimes stark paintings, photography and artwork, and enough interesting and thought-provoking quotes and excerpts of novelists and poets to point any visitor towards searching out and reading something new they might never have come across had Theresa not created and filled this site.

UPDATE : Marshall Sponder, of Art In NYC, isn't convinced the full story of Theresa Duncan's death, and the disappearance of Jeremy Blake, has been told :

"there's some vital part of the story that's missing here..."

Theresa Duncan claimed back in May on her blog that she and Blake were being harassed, threatened, smeared and stalked by Scientologists, and a prominent Republican donor connected to the Heritage Foundation:
Much of the harassment of me and Mr. Wit was also conducted by the Church Of Scientology in L. A., who Cownie also no doubt also "does business with." U.S. Intelligence "black ops" and "psy ops" have long relied on (or just outright invented) religious cults (including the Manson Family--Charles Manson received 150 hours of in-prison Scientology "auditing"), biker gangs, and the like in Federal Counterintelligence prorgrams in order to disrupt the counterculture since the 1960s. Read more about the CIA and cults here and couch jumping, Katie kidnapping mind controlled movie star Tom Crusie's meeting with Scooter Libby and State Department head Richard Armitage here.

While this ongoing illegal harassment of Wit using Federal employees (or their "cut-out" counterparts) and Federal funding (your Homeland Security tax dollars at work!) is meant to deprive us of work and our livelihoods and even sanity, the harassment also has a curious sexual focus on Wit that mirrors this J. Edgar Hoover campaign against Black Panther organizer and actress Jean Seberg.

On June 1, Theresa engaged in something of a slanging match in the comments of Charm School, after the blog posted on her then recent interview with Episcopal priest Frank Morales. In the comments, she sounded like she had important information she wanted to share with as many people as possible. Charm School described the interview as an "elevated" discourse on:

Gov't conspiracies, dissent in art, Scientology, Christianity as subversion and Jesus as Insurrectionist, some meaning of Time, Lennon, P.K. Dick, Disney, St. Paul, the truth about 911, how the artist must take risks...

Charm School pays tribute to Theresa here, and points out that the New York Times, the New York Post and other media stories that reported on her death: are whitewashed of any mention of the harassment Wit claims she and her longtime lover suffered.

Theresa seemed to identify with the actress Jean Seberg, of whom she wrote:

The declassified "Cointelpro" FBI document requesting permission to smear the actress and Black Panther activist Jean Seberg. J. Edgar Hoover sent letters to the Los Angeles press claiming that Seberg's pregnancy was the result of an affair with a Black Panther. Seberg, who was married to playwright Romain Gary, subsequently miscarried due to the stress of the scandal. She and Gary buried their child in a glass coffin to prove that the dead child was Gary's, and to show the public that they had been lied to. Seberg suffered mental health problems for years afterward, and eventually succeeded in commiting suicide after many attempts. Seberg was gorgeous, one of kind. She can be seen in "Breathless" "Bonjour Tristesse" and Otto Preminger's "Joan of Arc.

The method of suicide Theresa Duncan allegedly chose was pills and alcohol, but an official verdict on the cause of death has not yet been made public, contrary to the "It's over" style of reporting in the New York Times, which claimed a police source had confirmed suicide.

UPDATE : The interview Theresa Duncan conducted with Father Frank Morales in late May also includes her partner Jeremy Blake commenting on how the punk music scene had changed in New York since the 9/11 attacks.

Very interesting.

The general tone of the interview, while discussing government and military programs against the American people, certainly doesn't sound like a person who was either suicidal or mentally ill.

Theresa sounds like somebody who was soaking up new information and sharing her knowledge and thirsting for more. She also supplies some of the best insights into Philip K Dick's infamous 'epiphany' that you'll read online.

One further note, many of the documents and government and military programs Frank Morales discusses in this interview are declassified and available online. So it's best not to dismiss the entire conversation as wacko conspiracy talk. If you pay attention, and follow up with some critical Googling, you might learn some very interesting things.

UPDATE : The smearing of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Duncan by 'Anonymous' commenters has well and truly begun.

Libby Trial Judge 'Perplexed' by Bush

Libby trial judge 'perplexed' by Bush
July 13, 2007
http://www.imedinews.ge/en/news_read/51383

WASHINGTON, July 12 (UPI) — The judge who sentenced Lewis Libby to 30 months said Thursday he is perplexed by U.S. President George W. Bush's description of the sentence as excessive.

Judge Reggie Walton made his comments in an order that Libby report as soon as possible to a probation officer, The Los Angeles Times reported. Bush last week commuted the sentence given Libby, who resigned as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney when he was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

Bush appointed Walton to the U.S. District Court partly because of his reputation for upholding the law and giving tough sentences. In his order, Walton pointed out that the 30-month sentence was within the federal guidelines and not the maximum he could have imposed.

In light of these considerations ... it is fair to say that the court is somewhat perplexed as to how its sentence could accurately be characterized as 'excessive,' Walton wrote.

Neo-Nazis Mail Racist Fliers Addressing Granville Case

Stanley B. Chambers Jr.
Jul 27, 2007
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/651160.html


HENDERSON - Letty Brown doesn't think the letter in her mailbox, the one that began "My dear white friends and comrades," was meant for her.

She's black. An attached flier used the N-word four times.

"In all my years, I've never seen anything like this on paper," she said Thursday. "I can't say I was angry. Sadness that this is still existing and you can just put a stamp on something like this and send it out."

What arrived in her mailbox Thursday, and in hundreds of others here recently, represents a growing conflict between a Virginia neo-Nazi group and the state NAACP, centered on a white man accused of chasing a black couple with a handgun while yelling racial slurs in June.

Granville County District Attorney Sam Currin, concerned either group may disrupt court proceedings, said he plans to move the case to Halifax County. "We're playing this by ear," he said.

Currin's address, along with those of the accusing couple and two NAACP members, was listed in the letter.

Bill White, co-founder of the American National Socialist Workers' Party, the group that sent the letters, said he and several others will be in court Aug. 8, the next time Anthony Dale Finch will face a judge, to "quietly and peacefully" observe.

"If the NAACP holds a rally or a press conference, we will be there to show our opposition," White wrote in an e-mail message.

The state NAACP, which has contacted the State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI regarding the letters, also may be in Oxford that day to "promote love and justice no matter what happens," said Curtis Gatewood of Durham, state NAACP second vice president.

The accusations

Finch, 45, is accused of following James Maye and Dionne Hensley in his pickup truck while screaming racial epithets and pointing a gun at them June 8.

The couple encountered Finch after they placed a flier in a mailbox on U.S. 158 near Greenway Auto Salvage in Henderson, according to Oxford police. The couple, after noticing Finch was pursuing them, drove to the Oxford Police Department's parking lot, where Finch was arrested at gunpoint. Police said they found evidence of Finch's association with the Ku Klux Klan, including pictures and tattoos. He is accused of pointing a gun for ethnic intimidation, among other charges.

Gatewood has publicly supported the couple, holding news conferences and rallies. His address is among those listed on the flier.

"We're only seeking justice, and to have to contend with this level of hatred, to me, it shows that we are right," he said.

The letters were sent on the neo-Nazi group's letterhead to more than 1,400 homes to target the town's white households. They blame nonwhites for whites becoming poorer, and they urge support for Finch. The mailing is part of an action plan, one White wouldn't elaborate on.

"We aim to legally and peacefully wage a 'war of ideas' against the culturally destructive influence of the Jewish establishment and their pet Negroes in the NAACP," White said.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who monitors hate groups, says White's group specializes in racial provocation.

White sparked a riot after leading a march, with followers in full Nazi regalia, through a black neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, in 2005 while part of another group, Potok said. He did the same thing in Orlando, Fla., last year. "If this group comes to town, they have the potential to set off violence," he said.

Finch's account

Finch said he does not want either group involved.

What happened June 8 was about protecting his family, not race, he said. Maye and Hensley threatened Finch's stepson, who helped get Maye fired from an auto salvage job because of poor work performance, Finch said. The couple was placing a flier defaming the business inside its mailbox when Finch arrived at a store across the street.

After he was told the couple had made threats against his stepson, Finch, a retired Henderson police officer of 23 years, followed the couple to obtain their vehicle information and file a warrant, he said. He never pointed a gun at the couple, he said, and the picture of a man wearing a pointy hood and robe found in his vehicle was taken at a Halloween party.

"If I wanted to hurt these people, I had six miles to do it," he said. "Why would I chase these people into a police department parking lot and circle it twice if I didn't want them to get identified?"

Finch and his wife have received threats since the incident and are shunned by others. It's as if he has been convicted before trial, he said.

The NAACP has made life difficult, he said. "Some days I don't even go out of the house," he said.

Maye and Hensley could not be reached for comment.

Henderson Police Chief Keith Sidwell said he hasn't heard of any threats of violence in town. While officers are looking into the letters, First Amendment rights prevent them from doing much.

"Any time one receives rhetoric like that, certainly we hope they understand that it is meant to inflame," he said. "We're fortunate in the fact that our citizens realize that's exactly what it is and nothing more."

BELATED Guardian Report: How Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitler’s Rise to Power

Congressional documents stemming from investigations of BOTH SIDES of GW Bush's family have been available to reporters for 50 years, but the military-industrial press, of course, has suppressed the information. The Guardian let itself off the hook: "RUMOURS of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades ... " Rumours? Idle gossip? Books brimming with exhaustive research support revealing Prescott Bush's financial ties to Nazi Germany were published in the '40s and onward. A "rumour" is any politically-sensitive information the Guardian chooses to suppress, but half a century too late ...

" ... Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president ... "

That's the corporate press ... status quo editorial opinion called for the suppression of information - ah, "rumours" - on the deplorable conditions at the VA for a couple of years before deciding to let the world in on it.

And this story arrived decades too late. The Guardian should be lambasted, grilled in a public court, not feted, for taking its precious time to reveal the Nazi connections to the fascist Bush clan. - AC

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

Continued:
http://dzarkhan.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/how-bushs-grandfather-helped-hitlers-rise-to-power/

FBI Allowed Innocent Men to go to Prison in Mafia Frame-Up

Compensation for men FBI let be framed
Guardian


Ewen MacAskill in Washington
July 27, 2007
The Guardian

A federal judge yesterday ordered the US government to pay more than $100m (£50m) in compensation to men jailed for decades after being framed by a Mafia hitman with the complicity of the FBI. The FBI knew the men were innocent but did not inform state prosecutors at the time.

The men, two of whom died in prison, were set up by a Mob hitman, Joseph "The Animal" Barboza. A former boxer from East Boston, Barboza worked for the Patriarcas, a New England Mafia family. He turned FBI informant while in jail for murder and was shot dead by the Mafia in San Francisco in 1976.

The government argued that the FBI, which knew the wrong men were being accused, had no obligation to share its information.

The district judge, Nancy Gertner, said: "It took 30 years to uncover this injustice, and the government's position is, in a word, absurd. No lost liberty is dispensable. We have fought wars over this principle. We are still fighting these wars."

Peter Limone, Joseph Salvati and the families of the two who died in prison, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco, had sued the federal government for malicious prosecution. Mr Salvati and Mr Limone were exonerated in 2001 after FBI memos surfaced showing the men had been framed. The lawyers for the men said Boston FBI agents knew Barboza lied when he named them as the killer of Edward Deegan in 1965. They said the FBI was protecting one of its informants.

The lawyers said the FBI treated the four as "acceptable collateral damage".

Victor Garo, one of the lawyers for the men, said: "It was more important for the FBI to protect their informants than to protect innocent people who had families."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2135853,00.html

Darfur: CIA accused of weapons smuggling

http://www.afrol.com/articles/26241


afrol News, 27 July - Sudan is now blaming the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), accusing the body of fuelling conflicts in troubled southern region of Darfur. Sudanese Interior Minister, Zubair Bashir Taha, spilled the beans by accusing CIA for smuggling weapons into the region.

Speaking to a crowd of youth organisations in the capital Khartoum, Mr Taha said the CIA wants to disrupt the demographics of Darfur.

He further accused the United States of being responsible for prolonging the war and the death of thousands of people in both Darfur and Iraq.

The crisis in Darfur started in 2003 after an ethnic minority showed their anger against mistreatment in the hands of the Khartoum government. The government then decided to form the Janjaweed militia accused of killing the minority ethnic members.

It is estimated that more than 200,000 lives have been lost as a result of the Darfur crisis.

Mr Taha’s accusations came barely a week after the US Special Envoy to Darfur, Andrew Natsios, sounded against the migration of Arab ethnic groups from the neighbouring countries for resettlement in West Darfur and other lands traditionally belonging to local African tribes.

It was also alleged that Sudan has been secretly working with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq as evidenced by the cooperation between the US and the Sudanese regime.

But most people believe that the relations between the two countries goes beyond Iraq - Sudan has helped the US track down the turmoil in Somalia. Besides, Sudanese intelligence service is said to have helped the US to attack the Islamic Courts Unions positions in Somalia as well as locate al-Qaeda suspects hiding there.

By staff writers

P-2 Grandmaster Licio Gelli on Video Describes his Prison Break

See:
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/07/thursday-july-26.html


Licio Gelli
http://proutnewsnetwork.org/NWO/files/gelli.html

Head of a 2400 member secret Masonic Lodge, P2, a neo-fascist organization, in Italy that catered to only the elite, Gelli had high connections in the Vatican, even though he was not a Catholic. P2's membership is totally secret and not even available to its Mother Lodge in England. Gelli was responsible for providing Argentina with the Exocet missile. He was a double agent for the CIA and the KGB. He assisted many former Nazi high officials in their escape from Europe to Central America. He had close ties with the Italian Mafia. Gelli was a close associate of Benito Mussolini. He was also closely affiliated with Roberto Calvi, head of the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank. Calvi was murdered. Gelli's secret lodge consisted of extremely important people, including armed forces commanders, secret service chiefs, head of Italy's financial police, 30 generals, eight admirals, newspaper editors, television and top business executives and key bankers - including Calvi. Licio Gelli and others in P2 were behind the assassination of Pope John Paul 1.

The central figure in Europe and South America that linked the CIA, Masonic Lodge, Vatican, ex-Nazis and several South American governments, the Italian government and several international banks was Licio Gelli. He, with Klaus Barbie and Heinrich Rupp, met with Ronald R. Rewald in Uruguay to arrange for the Argentine purchase of the French-made Exocet missile, used in the Falkland Island attack to kill british soldiers.

Who is Gelli and why was he so important?

To understand Gelli, one must understand the complex post war years of Europe. The biggest threat to Europe in pre-war times was Communism - it was the great fear of Communism that gave birth to the Fascists and the Nazis. Though both sides were dreaded, the Fascists represented right-wing government, while the Communist represent left-wing government. It was the right-wing that the United States and the Catholic Church desired over Communism - because Communism would destroy the capitalistic system. This is why the CIA and the Vatican had go through with Operation Paperclip. The Nazis had massive amounts of Soviet intelligence, had infilitrated Communist partisans, and were in no way going to be given up to the Soviet Union.

Gelli worked both sides. He helped to found the Red Brigade, spied on Communist partisans and worked for the Nazis at the same time, a double agent. He helped establish the Rat Line, which assisted the flight of high ranking Nazi officials from Europe to South America, with passports supplied by the Vatican and with the full acknowledgment and blessing of the United States intelligence community. While on one hand, the U.S. participated in the war crime tribunals of key Nazi officials and maintained an alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, secretly, the U.S. was preparing for the cold war and needed the help of Nazis in the eventual struggle the U.S. would have with the Soviet Union. Gelli's agreement with U.S. intelligence to spy on the Communists after the war was instrumental in saving his life. He was responsible for the murder and torture of hundreds of Yugoslavian partisans.

The Vatican provided support to Nazis and Fascists because the Communists were the real threat to the Church's survival. The Italian Communists would have taxed the Church's vast holdings and the Church has had a dismal experience with Communist governments throughout the world - where religious freedom was stamped out.

Gelli was well connected with the Vatican from the days of the Rat Line and he worked for American intelligence, as well. Gelli formed the P-2 Masonic Lodge-which did not follow the direction of any Grand Lodge-and it was supplied with a sum of $10 million a month by the CIA. Its membership was a Who's Who in the intelligence, military and Italian community. So prominent was Gelli's influence, that he was even a guest of honor at the 1981 inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.

Gelli used blackmail in order to gain prominent members of his P-2 lodge, its membership is estimated at 2400 members, including 300 of the most powerful men in the Western World.. He was a close friend of Pope Paul VI, Juan Peron of Argentina, Libyan Dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, and many high officials in the Italian and American governments - he is also reported to have had some financial dealings with the George Bush for President campaign.

Gelli and his P-2 lodge had staggering connections to banking, intelligence and diplomatic passports. The CIA poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Italy in the form of secret subsidies for political parties, labor unions and communications businesses. At the same time the Agency continued its relationship with far- right and violent elements as a back-up should a coup be needed to oust a possible Communist government. This covert financing was exposed by the Prime Minister of Italy in a speech to Parliament. He indicates that more than 600 people in Italy still remain on the payroll of the CIA. Licio Gelli was an ardent Nazi and a perfect asset of the CIA. As part of Reinhard Gehlen's intelligence team, he had excellent contacts. Licio was the go between for the CIA and the Vatican through his P2 Lodge.

Project Paperclip was stopped in 1957, when West Germany protested to the U.S. that these efforts had stripped it of "scientific skills." There was no comment about supporting Nazis. Paperclip may have ended in 1957, but as you can see from Licio Gelli and his international dealings with the CIA in Italy/P2, and Heinrich Rupp with his involvement in October Surprise, the ramifications of Paperclip are world-wide. The Nazis became employed CIA agents, engaging in clandestine work with the likes of George Bush, the CIA, Henry Kissenger, and the Masonic P2 lodge. This is but one of the results of Operation Paperclip. Another umbrella project that was spawned from Paperclip was MK-ULTRA.

A secret laboratory was established and funded by CIA director, Allen Dulles in Montreal, Canada at McGill University in the Allen Memorial Institute headed by psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. For the next several years Dr. Ewen Cameron waged his private war in Canada. What is ironic about Dr. Cameron is that he served as a member of the Nuremberg tribunal who heard the cases against the Nazi doctors.

When it was at its height in drug experiments, operation MK-ULTRA was formed. This was the brainchild of Richard Helms who later came to be a CIA director. It was designed to defeat the "enemy" in its brain-washing techniques. MK-ULTRA had another arm involved in Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) known as MK-DELTA. The "doctors" who participated in these experiments used some of the same techniques as the Nazi "doctors". Techniques used by Dr. Cameron and previous Nazi scientists include electro shock, sleep deprivation, memory implantation, memory erasure, sensory modification, psychoactive drug experiments, and many more cruel practices.

Project Paperclip brought us MK-ULTRA. Paperclip ultimately brought in key players involved in the Assassination of Pope 1, October Surprise (sabotage of Carter's peace talks), and a great many other things still classified to this day. The results of Project Paperclip were devastating, and very far reaching. I guess that is what you would expect from collaborating with Nazis.

This research shows that the OSS/CIA that was formed in the National Security Act, the same agency that employed hundreds of Nazis, has been in alliance with the Vatican through various Agency connections such as Licio Gelli. The CIA/Vatican alliance that Assassinated Pope John Paul 1, JFK, and hundreds of dictators of 3rd world countries is the Illuminati.

The Bavarian Illuminati has been around for centuries in one way or another. It's presence in the 20th century is the direct result of the Nazis. The Nazi connections to the occult and the Bavarian Thule Society were parallel to the American members of 33rd degree Freemasonry. When the Operation Paperclip was successfully executed, the Nazi element of the Bavarian Thule society was fused with the American members of Freemasonry to create the Illuminati.

Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, October Surprise, and George Bush are all facets of the Illuminati, a group whose ideals are rooted in the occult, and dedicated to world domination.

Soon after the American Revolution, John Robinson, a professor of rural philosophy at Edinburgh University in Scotland and member of a Freemason lodge, said that he was asked to join the Illuminati. After studying the group, he concluded that the purposes of the Illuminati were not compatible with his beliefs.

In 1798, he published a book called "Proofs Of A Conspiracy," which states:

"An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing governments.... The leaders would rule the World with uncontrollable power, while all the rest would be employed as tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors."

The CIA and the Vatican have rooted out all the religious establishments in the world. The CIA has overthrown and set up dictators under their control all over the world. The CIA and the Vatican have full filled the purpose of the Illuminati. The CIA and the Vatican _are_ the Illuminati.

Dossier compiled by Agent Orange

Provocateur Ward Churchill Fired for Plagiarism & Other Academic Ethical Lapses

Ward Churchill is an Indian activist promoted in his prime by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. Many fellow Indians believe him to be a CIA/FBI plant in the movement. Churchill turned around and sued the University as soon as the dismissal was announced, but the provost's office has a solid case and it's doubtful that Churchill will be reinstated, IMHO. - AC

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/25/wnazi125.xml
Telegraph
By Matthew Moore and agencies
26/07/2007

Ward Churchill: Some People Push Back - On the Justice of Roosting Chickens - A controversial American academic who likened Sept 11 victims to a leading Nazi has been sacked by his university.

After the hearing Ward Churchill insisted that he was 'going nowhere'
Ward Churchill had described those who died in the World Trade Centre attack as "a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire", and as such a valid terrorist target.

He went on to call the victims "little Eichmanns", in reference to Adolf Eichmann, the SS leader who organised the Nazi concentration camps. He was hanged for crimes against humanity in 1962.

Mr Churchill's essay, Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, and his subsequent book, provoked a storm of protest across the US, and led to an investigation of alleged research misconduct.

He was fired yesterday after the University of Colorado's governing board found him guilty of plagiarism, falsification and other academic misconduct.

The charges did not relate to his controversial works on Sept 11, but the investigation only began after their publication and the subsequent national outrage.

Mr Churchill was found guilty of the allegations on an 8-1 vote.

"The decision was really pretty basic," said Hank Brown, the university president.

"The individual did not express regret, did not apologise, did not indicate a willingness to refrain from this type of falsification in the future."

Mr Churchill's lawyer David Lane said that his client was being punished for his Sept 11 writings, and that the board's decision violated his right to free speech.

"It sends a message out to the academic community generally that if you stick your neck out and make politically inflammatory comments, you will be dragged through the mud for two years and you will ultimately have your tenure terminated," Mr Lane said.

Mr Churchill, who had previously vowed to sue if the board found against him, told reporters that he was "going nowhere".

He has defended his essay, saying that he did not intend the "little Eichmann" comparison to apply to children, blue-collar workers and passers-by who died in the World Trade Centre Attack.

The charges on which he was dismissed included misrepresenting the effects of federal laws on American Indians, fabricating evidence that the Army deliberately spread smallpox to Mandan Indians in 1837, and claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/25/wnazi125.xml

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Privatizing the Leviathan Immigration State







Related - "Dyncorp at the Border?":
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/07/dyncorp-at-border.html
Monthly Review
by Robert Koulish
July 20, 2007

The post-911 immigration regime originates in 2003 when immigration control shifted from the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished March 2003, and its functions were transferred into the newly created DHS, in a merger of some 180,000 employees from 22 different agencies.

The DHS has a mission to "unite much of the federal government's effort to secure the homeland, with the primary goal being an America that is stronger, safer and more secure."1 It seeks to "prevent terrorist attacks within the United States; reduce America's vulnerability to terrorism; and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur.2 Paul Wolfowitz positioned the "home front" as the first defense against terrorism.3 "Since last September (2001), the home front has become a battlefront every bit as real as any we've known before."

Following these shouts, in 2005, the new Border Patrol mission prioritized preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States, while also reaffirming the agency's traditional mission of preventing the entry of illegal aliens, smugglers, narcotics, and other contraband.

The immigration function of post-911 efforts to combat terrorism directed executive measures at non-citizens. Immediately following 911, President Bush issued the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 2, "Combating Terrorism through Immigration Policies," which began the process of locking immigration and security together bureaucratically. Subsequent measures included cooperation between federal and state enforcement of immigration laws; cooperation between federal immigration enforcement and the military along the border; the privatization of military and law enforcement functions; a substantial increase in the numbers of aliens who are detained for long periods of time and those who are deported from the United States for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism; the use of secret immigration hearings closed to families, press, and public; secret movement of detained non-citizens to new venues without giving notice to attorneys; and use of ethnic and racial profiling.

The decision to include immigration within the securitization arsenal was no accident. Deepa Fernandes suggests that the first major step linking immigration to the war on terror occurred with the creation of DHS which would include the Border Patrol, and the Agriculture Department's Animal and Health Inspection Service fell within the purview of the new Bureau of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) under DHS. Also within DHS are the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).4

The Bush immigration control strategy created symbolic capital by using Executive Order 13260 (March 21, 2002) to establish an advisory council which would be reconstituted by statute in the Department of Homeland Security and called the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC).

The HSAC has several subcommittees. The Secure Borders and Open Doors Advisory Committee (SBODAC) focuses attention on border control. Its mission is "to maintain security while increasing the welcoming nature of those who visit our country." Its private character made clear that "notice of meetings need not be published in the federal register, nor must the meeting itself be open to the public." Its surreptitious hubris showed little concern over potential conflict of interest. For example, a great deal of HSIN funds has gone to Sybase, Inc., whose president, John Chen, is also co-chair of SBODAC. Sybase also has close financial connections to the Republic Party, and is financially controlled by Marvin Bush, the president's brother, whose company Winston Partners owns more than $3.5 million shares of Sybase. In short, catching aliens has become financially lucrative for big business, former administration officials, and even members of the president's family.

Right-wing academics and think tanks have provided the intellectual capital for the development of DHS strategy. Specifically, conservative academics, think tanks, and technology corporations serve on SBODAC as well as on the Academe and Policy Research Senior Advisory Committee (APRSAC), all of which comprise as "the brain of homeland security strategy."5

As one might expect, the policies resulting from SBODAC meetings along the HSAC process, for example including US-VISIT, are replete with references to privatization and militarization -- enforcement, detention, inspections and services -- placing immigrants in the hands of private contractors, mercenaries, and prison guards.6

The Customs and Border Protection's Expedited Removal Program has contracted with Kellogg, Brown, and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to oversee the expansion of the federal government's capacity to detain immigrants. This $385 million KBR contract would set up temporary processing, detention, and deportation facilities. Indeed, the KBR deal is part of an extraordinary mad rush to build new private detention sites. Private prison companies are competing for an immigrant "super jail" facility (2,800 beds) in Laredo Texas.7 and in December 2005, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) announced a contract with ICE to hold up to 600 immigrant detainees in Tyler, Texas.8

Privatizing immigrant detention is nothing new. During the early 1980s, the federal government began experimenting with incarcerating people for profit, using immigrant detention as battering ram. According to some, the private prison industry was born in 1980 during a fundraiser in Nashville Tennessee for then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. The Chairman of the Tennessee Republican party and the Corrections Commissioner of Virginia and his counterpart in Tennessee together set up what became known as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In 1984, CCA, the private-incarceration leader, cut its first deal with the federal government to operate Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers in Houston and Laredo, Texas. When asked how to sell his product -- prisoners -- Tom Beasley, a CCA co-founder said, "You just sell it like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers."9 Indeed CCA was backed financially by the Massey Burch Investment Group, which funded Kentucky Fried Chicken. Since then, private incarceration has become a boom industry as well as a lightning rod for credible human-rights abuse litigation.

What is new is the expansiveness of privatization after 911 and its use in establishing a social control apparatus which is ostensibly for non-citizens but is applicable to citizens. According to Fernandes, "In the aftermath of 911, the private prison industry has once again experienced a boom as national security has been involved to sweep up and jail an unprecedented number of immigrants. Immigrants are currently the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the U.S. today."10 The nexus is clear between immigrant detention policies and the new boom market in private detention. In the months following February 2006 when President Bush proposed increasing spending on immigrant detention, stock for CCA climbed 27%.11 Of 911, the chairman of the Cornell Companies (one of the top four private prison companies) said,

It can only be good, with the focus on people that are illegal and also of Middle Eastern descent . . . there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals of Middle Eastern descent. That's half our entire prison population. . . The federal business is the best business for us . . . and the events of September 11 (are) increasing that level of business.

As an outcome, the private prison industry is increasingly in a position to direct immigration detention policy. The question remains whether private immigrant detention is a good thing for public law. Private detention facilities are one-stop shops for immigrant processing. The DHS contracts are to train and supply security guards and screeners and to build, manage, and maintain detention facilities. Security guards and screeners make decisions related to political asylum and other forms of relief from deportation, arrest, recommendations on relief from detention, and hold quite a lot of everyday power over the conditions of confinement within the detention facility. Guards have control over access to phones, lawyers, visitors, food, restrooms, and medical care. Given the logic of private prisons, for example, which is to keep its beds full and immigrants locked up, privatization threatens the legal integrity of immigrant processing, which until recently has been premised upon the idea that non-citizens should not be incarcerated.

When private companies have control over the custodial functions of government, they assume quasi-judicial responsibilities that affect the legal status and wellbeing of immigrant detainees, raising important questions. According to Ira Robins,

To what extent for example, should a private corporation use force -- perhaps serious or deadly force -- against a prisoner? It is difficult enough to control violence in the present public-correctional system. It will be much more difficult to assure that violence is administered only to the extent required by circumstances when the state relinquishes direct responsibility. Another important concern is whether a private employee should be entitled to make recommendations to parole boards, or to bring charges against a prisoner for an institutional violation, possibly resulting in the forfeiture of good crime credits towards release. By dispersing accountability, the possibility for vindictiveness increases. An employee who is now in charge of reviewing disciplinary cases at a privately run INS facility in Houston told a New York Times reporter last year: "I am the Supreme Court.12

Private guards wear badges, uniforms, carry guns, and drive cars with sirens; they make arrests, and, as far as the individual targeted by them is concerned, represent the coercive force of the state. They wield as much power as any state actor but this fact is not recognized in law.

According to Burdeau v McDowell, "(the fourth amendment) . . . was intended as a restraint upon the activities of sovereign authority, and was not intended to be a limitation upon other than governmental agencies."13 Since the Burdeau decision, the Court has never held that private searches implicate a fourth amendment interest, unless the private actor is regarded as having acted as an "instrument" or agent of the state.

Further, private contractors are not considered state actors for purposes of Bivens or 42 U.S.C. 1983 "under color of law" liability.1415 According to the Court, there exists no basis for filing a federal civil rights lawsuit under 42 USC 1983 against an individual who is not a "state actor." For example, according to the Court in National Collegiate Athletic Association v Tarkanian, the only proper defendants in a Section 1983 claim represent the state in some capacity, whether they act in accordance with their authority or misuse it.16

Tarkanian raises serious questions about accountability and liability issues related to conditions of confinement within private facilities. The Office of Inspector General Report in 2003 reported on serious infractions against private immigrant detention facilities, including routine abuse of basic prisoner rights, denial of attorney access, mental and physical abuse, denial of health and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack of showers and toilets. Inmates in public facilities have channels for redressing grievances though the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and litigation, but similarly aggrieved counterparts in private facilities are additionally impaired by the lack of such redress.

Another problem with privatizing detention is the secretiveness of the process. Screeners and guards make decisions with virtually no oversight. Interviews and hearings are closed to the public and family. Further, non-citizens are secretly shuffled from one detention facility to another around the country, without giving notice to family or counsel. This shell game has been documented and has non-citizens ending up in facilities long distances from legal counsel and family.

The Patriot Act gives the Attorney General broad authority to detain immigrants who endanger national security. Title IV of the Patriot Act introduced several amendments tightening the Immigration and Nationality Act. Section 412 of the Act authorizes the Attorney General to certify and detain non-citizens if he has "reasonable grounds to believe" that they are engaging, or have engaged, in a terrorist activity or otherwise endanger national security. The Act allows for detention for a period of seven days, after which the Attorney General must commence deportation proceedings, bring criminal charges, or release the detainees.

Even severer provisions originating in the executive branch make use of exceptional powers over internment. Department of Justice regulations issued on September 20, 2001 extend detention powers of immigration authorities17 and illustrate dangers associated with privatizing screening and detention. The regulations allow immigration authorities to detain non-citizens suspected of being in violation of an immigration law without charge for up to forty-eight hours and for an "additional reasonable period of time" in the event of an "emergency or other extraordinary circumstance." The regulations fail to define the terms "reasonable period of time," "emergency," and "extraordinary circumstance."18 "No link with alleged terrorism need be made."19 As Daniel Moeckli adeptly summarizes:

The immigration authorities may even indefinitely detain individuals who are not charged with any crime or immigration law violation and against whom no deportation proceedings have been initiated. The detainees do not have to be informed of the reasons for their detention and are not guaranteed a right to contest it.20

There is nothing discrete about such legislation and regulations. They are part of a larger effort to enhance executive powers and diminish judicial review of immigration.

Even more extreme are militarization plans to create contingency plans that could detain and deport large numbers of immigrants "at the command of the president." The plan contains echoes of Japanese internment camps during WWII, as well as contingency internment plans for Middle-Eastern non-citizens established during the 1980s. On October 17, 2006, President Bush signed into law the John Warner Defense Authorization Act. It allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."

In a manner reminiscent of government raids preceding Japanese internment during WWII and other notorious raids against immigrant communities during times of national insecurity, the Warner Act would facilitate militarized police round-ups and detention of protesters, so-called "illegal aliens," "potential terrorists," and other "undesirables" for detention in facilities already contracted for and under construction by Halliburton. In January 2006, the DHS awarded a $385 million contingency contract to KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton, to establish temporary Detention and Removal Operation (DRO) facilities. Under the cover of a trumped-up "immigration emergency" and the frenzied militarization of the southern border, detention camps are being constructed right under our noses, camps designed for anyone who resists the foreign and domestic agenda of the Bush administration.

Indeed privatization has extended well beyond incarceration, exacerbating concerns about accountability and the rule of law throughout immigration processes. Current proposals for guest worker programs, for example, are replete with privatization references. Rep. Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, has proposed deploying private "Ellis Island Centers" in foreign countries for the purpose of recruiting and managing guest workers. Such immigration control mechanisms share proprietary interests with some of the Iraq war's more notorious privateers.

After more than a decade of border militarization with "Operation Gatekeeper" and "Operation Hold the Line," the deployment of the National Guard and plans for 700 miles of fencing, the federal government in May 2006 solicited bids from military contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Ericsson, and Northrop Grumman, for a multibillion-dollar contract to build a "virtual fence" of unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites, motion-detection video equipment, and databases to store information of the identity of millions of non-citizens along the border.

Once again, such militarization is not new. What is new is the depth and expansiveness of the current practice. During the 1970s and 80s, the militarization of the border made do with Vietnam era technology. During the Reagan era, the INS introduced high tech air support, OH-6 spotter-observation helicopters from the US Army, night-vision and infrared scopes, and low-light television surveillance systems. Within short order during this time, the Border Patrol introduced SWAT teams, military trained and armed BP officers who ride in armored personnel carriers, shoot M-16s, and keep grenade launchers handy.21

President George H.W. Bush intensified border militarization. Emphasis on drug enforcement at the border resulted in the purchase and deployment of more helicopters and additional electronic surveillance equipment. Among other things, Bush established the relationship between INS and the military. This complicates the border control situation. While Border Patrol agents are trained to use minimum force and to protect the constitutional rights of the accused, the military ethic presumes guilt and responds to situations with overwhelming force.22 According to Anthony Romero, ACLU Executive Director, ". . . federal law enforcement officers are the best equipped and trained to deal with these kinds of civilian law enforcement needs. . . . Soldiers are trained to kill the enemy, and they lack the training to conduct proper law enforcement."23 The military has helped with such construction projects as operation blockade and resulting in construction of a seven-mile corrugated-steel fence between San Diego and Tijuana.

In recent years, the military role in border security has evolved. Joint Task Force North, a military unit affiliated with U.S. Northern Command, has lent services to the BP, and state governors in Arizona and Texas have dispatched National Guard Units from their states to the border. In all, as of summer 2006, about 6,000 National Guard Troops are assuming surveillance and infrastructure duties from the Border Patrol. According to DHS spokesperson Jarrod Agen, the National Guard is being assimilated into the border protection apparatus and may assume surveillance responsibilities and intelligence gathering for the Border Patrol.24

In addition to the National Guard, in 2002, the Department of Defense agreed to deploy its initial 1,600 federal soldiers as deputized Border Patrol and Customs Service agents at our borders, bringing state-of-the-art military technology coming via Iraq. Indeed, the Boeing deal and deployment of the National Guard brings the war on terror home. On September 20, 2006, Boeing, a major aerospace, defense, and aircraft contracting firm, was awarded a three year $2.5 billion contract with the DHS to create a virtual fence along the US-Mexico border. Described by a Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) subcontractor as a combination of law enforcement and surveillance systems,25 this new SBInet project will include up to 1,800 radar towers along the border, motion detectors, and cameras which can spot people from 14 kilometers away; the system can transmit images to border agents. In addition, it will include plans to develop infrastructure and logistical support to be able to "remove all removable aliens." Boeing also plans to use unmanned aerial vehicles that could be launched from the backs of Border Patrol trucks.

Boeing plans to delegate some of its workload and authority to subcontractors including Unisys and a division of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., Perot Systems, Lucent, and others. According to Unisys vice president of homeland security, Brian Seagrave, Unisys will be in charge of the SBInet systems engineering and infrastructure, configuring and installing several key software, including the "common operating picture," which Seagrave describes as SBInet's brain.26 Unisys' experience in this field includes police departments systems and a range of surveillance and detection contracts.

The virtual fence gets its cache from its ability to track non-citizens long after they pass through the border. It becomes a metaphor for the entire border industrial complex. It works in several different ways, each of which helps describe how the border industrial complex functions both overtly and surreptitiously.

After 911, the government hastened its efforts to track the entries and exit of non-citizens from particular countries. The "National Security Entry-Exit Registration System" (NSEERS) program was introduced in 2002 requiring non-citizen men age sixteen and over from twenty-five predominantly Muslim countries to register with the government. NSEERS legitimated the use of profiling by national origins, ethnicity, and religion as a tool of immigration control. A total of 290,526 people registered, including almost 86,000 men already living within the US. Any of them found to be out of status were subject to immediate deportation. Of the total, 13,799 were placed in deportation proceedings, and 2,870 were detained. The NSEERS program netted no terror-related convictions, but instilled a great deal of fear in immigrant communities around the country.

The origins of efforts to track entries and exists actually can be found in Section 110 of the US Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996, which mandated the INS to develop an automated entry-exist control system that would "collect a record of every alien departing the United States and match records of departure with the record of the alien's arrival in the United States."27 Originally, the motivation for this provision was to track visa overstays.28

After 911, the use of security technology was subsumed under the rationale for the war on terror, exemplified by the NSEERS program. The Patriot Act included entry-exit provisions as did the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. Provisions accounted for the introduction of biometric technology and a combination of facial recognition and electronic fingerprint scanning. Coming as part of the post-911 response, the Enhanced Border Security Bill passed Congress with no opposing votes.

By January 2004, the NSEERS Program morphed into the US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT). US-VISIT requires all foreigners entering the US on short-term visas to be fingerprinted and photographed and submit biographical information. The official purpose of US-VISIT is to "enhance national security" and "ensure the integrity of the immigration system." Data collection begins in consular offices with the collection of finger scans and digital photographs, which are taken again upon arrival in the U.S. for verification purposes. According to the Heritage Foundation,

When completed, it will record visitors through the use of fingerprint scanners and digital photos and will integrate existing databases to push good information across agencies. In this way, it will pick out people who are security risks, while cutting costs. . . .29

The Smart Border reach extends beyond the border. According Washington Technology, "the system will create a virtual border that operates beyond U.S. boundaries to help DHS assess the security risks of all US-bound travelers and try to prevent potential threats from reaching the country's borders."30 Data is then stored in government databases (the Homeland Security Information Network -- see below for more information about HSIN) in agencies throughout the federal, state, and local governments. As of May 2005, about twenty five million individuals have submitted data, 590 of whom have been denied admission for crimes and immigration violations. According to DHA, there is no evidence that US-VISIT has caught a wanted terrorist.31

The US-VISIT program is also experimenting with RFID (radio frequency identification), miniscule microchips (half the size of a grain of sand). The RFID tag can be read silently and invisibly by radio waves from up to a foot or more away, even through clothing. It can also link to medical records and serve as a payment device when associated with a credit card. RFIDS provide additional capacity for tracking non-citizens already in this country. They are being embedded in I-94 entry documents, passports, and border-crossing cards, which non-citizens are urged to carry with them at all times. The future use of RFIDS as an immigration control mechanisms was not lost of former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge who became head of Savi Technologies, an RFID design and manufacturing company.32

It is important to note that RFIDS and other forms of technology-based monitoring systems are easily transferable from US-VISIT to other immigration programs, for example, proposed guest worker programs. The RFID watchdog group, "Spychips.com," reported May 18, 2006 that the Board Chairman of VeriChip Scott Silverman

bandied about the idea of chipping foreigners on national television Tuesday, emboldened by the Bush Administration call to know "who is in our country and why they are here." He told Fox & Friends that the VeriChip could be used to register guest workers, verify their identities as they cross the border, and "be used for enforcement purposes at the employer level." He added, 'We have talked to many people in Washington about using it. . . .

The transferability of data from program to program is facilitated by post 911 databases that combine data from criminal and terrorist investigations at the federal, state, and local level and that is accessible in the private sector. Regrettably, data from US VISIT and from border-crossing card entries are entered into the same databases. Further, the portability of technology is facilitated by post-911 business alliances that comprise important parts of the immigration control policy-making and administration team. Consider the cost of the US-VISIT Program, projected at over $10 billion. Accenture Ltd. was awarded the U.S. VISIT prime contract on May 28, 2004 and has entered into subcontracts with Raytheon, a runner up on the virtual fence contract, SRA Intl., and the Titan Corporation.33 Together this corporate team calls itself the "Smart Border Alliance."34 Accenture is an offshore company headquartered in Bermuda, which allows it to avoid paying US corporate income tax. Republican strategist and Bush donor Charles Black lobbied on Accenture's behalf to gain the US-VISIT contract.35 The contract gave Accenture so much discretion with which to shape the program that the nonpartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense likened it to a "blank check."36

Further, the Anteon Corp. (now owned by General Dynamics), which led an alliance that lost the US-VISIT contract, was instead awarded the contract to provide secure identification and border-control card technology for the Homeland Security Department's Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, with optical card scanners and technology to read almost 20 million border-crossing cards and permanent residency cards.37 In August 2004, Anteon received a $74 million surveillance-training contract for the DHS' Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.38 According to Anteon president and CEO Joseph Kampf, "our focus on position in the marketplace with the DOD, intelligence community and DHS has really paid off."39 Indeed over 90% of Aneteon's business comes from government contracts in these three areas, with border-crossing identification a growth area. According to Kampf,

We think border crossing security will continue to grow over the next two years, perhaps becoming one of the fastest paced markets in the federal government. . . . The whole concept of validating who people are as they travel and cross land, sea and air will, I think, would be an explosive marketplace. It will be one in which we have a significant footprint.40

Finally, the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) was designed via contract by Man-Tech International. It is worth noting that Congressman Richard Renzi (R-AR), one of House's most vocal advocates for increased funding for the DHS, is the son of the ManTech executive vice-president Eugene Renzi.41 ManTech was charged with developing an information-sharing system which is called the US public and private partnership (US P3), which links public-sector agencies and private sector to "significantly strengthen the flow of real-time threat information to state, local, and private sector partners, and provides a platform for communities through the classified SECRET level to state offices." For example, data can to be shared with as many as 600 federal, state and local agencies, including police departments, fire and emergency responders, governors' offices, and agencies within DHS.42 In all, HSIN has 40,000 users, 90% of whom are from the private sector and any of whom may add information that subsequently remains there for five years.43 As Fernandes suggested, HSIN "catches immigrants in the name of protecting against foreign terrorist threats."44 And once their names are on the list, they remain on the list regardless of the reason for putting them there. In short, catching aliens is a lucrative business made all the more so by exploiting already blurred distinctions between immigration and national security.

Regrettably, few people in America are aware of Accenture, Anteon, and Man-tech, let alone the power they wield to develop and implement immigration control policy. Given the power such companies hold over individual immigrants, one would think that immigration authorities would care to see that only well trained professionals had access to HSIN and could input data, which is not the case. One of the perks of privatizing is that the masters of this virtual domain are less accountable for mistakes and outright abuse. They would also be less likely to have the training required to avoid such undesirable outcomes.

Add Blackwater Inc. and DynCorp, private security firms that have run mercenaries in Iraq and New Orleans and are negotiating a contract to train U.S. Border Patrol officers, and you get a virtual fence that has private contractors, guns for hire, the National Guard, and Border Patrol welcoming newcomers at ports of entry. Few are well trained, fewer are accountable to the constitution, and some are not liable for the misuse of coercive force.

The relevance of smart border technology should not be overlooked. Ellis Island Centers and guest worker provisions all require SBInet technologies, not so much to keep guest workers outside the country but to keep them in. Although NSEERS and US VISIT exempted foreigners from countries that didn't require visas to enter the US, guest-worker and border-crossing provisions provide similar controls for Mexican non-citizens, using a combination of biometrics, facial recognition, and RFIDs, and with data being entered in increasingly integrated databases.

Thus suspected undocumented immigrants and suspected terrorists can end up in the same database, subject to the same investigation, pursuit, and conditions of arrest and confinement. As the lines are blurred between national security and immigration, technologies designed ostensibly for the war on terror are being used interchangeably to pursue visa overstays and unauthorized entries. The billions of dollars spent on homeland security since 911 have not made us safer but have dramatically amplified technologies of social control.



1 Deepa Fernandes, Targeted: National Security and the Business of Immigration (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2006).

2 John Parachini and Lynn Davis, Homeland Security: A Compendium of Public and Private Organizations' Policy Recommendations, RAND White Paper Series (2003).

3 See Barry Buzan, Ole Weaver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Lynne Rienner Press 1998).

4 Fernandes, op. cit.

5 Fernandes, op. cit.

6 Parachini and Davis, op cit.; Rey Koslowski, "Immigration Reforms and Border Security Technologies," Social Science Research Council, 31 July 2006.

7 Suzanne Gamboa, "TX: Advocates Decry Detention 'Gold Rush,'" Associated Press, 3 February 2006.

8 Ibid.

9 Fernandes, op. cit. Buzan, Weaver, and Wilde, op. cit.

10 Fernandes, op. cit.

11 Tom Turpel, "New Detention & Deportation Laws Workshop Explores Ideas About Immigration Reform," Sprawl Magazine, 17 November 2006.

12 Ira Robbins, "Privatization of Corrections: Defining the Issues," 40 Vanderbilt L. Rev. 813 (1987).

13 Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 S. Ct. 464 (1921).

14 Section 1983 is the dominant Act by which inmates or victims of mistreatment seek legal redress for a wide variety of constitutional violations.

15 Richardson v. McKnight, S. Ct. (1997).

16 National Collegiate Athletic Ass'n vs. Tarkanian, 488 S. Ct. 179 (1988).

17 Daniel Moeckli, "The Selective 'War on Terror': Executive Detention of Foreign Nationals and the Principle of Non-Discrimination," 31 Brooklyn J. of Int'l L. Starting Page (2006).

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Raj Dhanesekaran, "When Rotten Apples Return: How the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 Can Deter Domestic Law Enforcement Authorities from Using Military Interrogation Techniques on Civilians," 31 Conn. Pub. Int. L. J. 237 (2006).

22 Ibid.

23 Patrick Yoest, "DHS Does About-Face In Backing Use of National Guard to Seal Border," CQ.com, 15 May 2006.

24 Ibid.

25 Patrick Wachter, "DHS Awards Massive Border Security Contract to Boeing," DataMonitor Computerwire, 22 September 2006.

26 Ibid.

27 Koslowski, op. cit.

28 Koslowski, op. cit.

29 Daniel J. Mitchell, "Protectionist Politics and Border Security," The Heritage Foundation, 19 August 2004.

30 Rosanne Gerin, "Accenture Taps Subcontractors on U.S. Visit," Washington Technology, 3 September 2004.

31 Fernandes, op. cit.

32 Fernandes, op. cit.

33 Fernandes, op. cit.

34 Fernandes, op. cit.

35 Sarah Posner, "Security for Sale," American Prospect Online, 18 December 2005.

36 Ibid.

37 As an example of portability, it is important to note that when Mexicans receive a border-crossing card, their data is accessible by US VISIT.

38 Cynthia Webb, "Anteon's Mid-1990s Planning Hits Paydirt," Washington Technology, 9 May 2005.

39 Nick Wakeman, "Want It Big? Start Acting Like It," Washington Technology, 10 May 2004.

40 Ibid.

41 UPI, "Inquiry Focuses on US Rep. Rick Renzi," Washington Times, 26 October 2006.

42 Lara Jakes Jordan, "Homeland Security Information Network Criticized," Washington Post, 10 May 2005: A6.

43 Fernandes, op. cit.

44 Fernandes, op. cit.

Robert Koulish is a political scientist and France Merrick Professor of Service-Learning at Goucher College. He has written extensively about immigration and human rights at the Mexican border and Hungarian Roma and minority rights and presently is writing about the corporatization of the public sphere.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/koulish200707.html

Bush Strategist Karl Rove and White House Political Advisor Scott Jennings Served with Subpoenas

Bush aides in US firings subpoena
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6918456.stm

Rove

Two senior advisers to President George W Bush have been summoned to testify at a US Senate committee investigating the sacking of eight federal prosecutors.

Top strategist Karl Rove and White House deputy political director Scott Jennings have been subpoenaed by Democrat senators.

The senators have so far failed to make any senior presidential aides testify.

Mr Bush has invoked his legal privilege to stop officials from being forced to give evidence in public on the issue.

The Democrats have also announced they will seek a perjury investigation to be carried out into Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in connection with the same case.

The White House has not yet commented on the latest developments.

Rejected demands

The row over last year's firing of the prosecutors has been rumbling for several months.

Members of Congress, which has been controlled by the Democrats since the beginning of the year following mid-term elections, have been pitted against senior figures in the Bush administration.

On Wednesday, the House judiciary committee voted to file a contempt charge against two aides, former legal counsel Harriet Miers and White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten.

Mr Gonzales, the nation's top law-enforcement officer and an old friend of Mr Bush, has faced repeated calls to resign over the affair.

Opponents say he fired the eight attorneys for political reasons and later lied about the reason for their dismissal.

Mr Gonzales, who retains Mr Bush's support, says he did nothing wrong. He points out that US attorneys serve at the will of the president, who can dismiss them at any time.

He has testified before committees in both houses of Congress, but senators now say he lied under oath.

Meanwhile, Democrats claim that Mr Rove will be able to shed light on the dismissals.

They say he knew of discussions about firing the attorneys nearly two years before the axe fell on them.

The president has previously offered to let Mr Rove and other aides speak privately to some members of Congress, but he has firmly rejected the demand for public testimony under oath.

Protec's WTC Collapse Report - Dave Emory vs. Rosie O'Donnell

" ... Oh....also.....your Brent Blanchard [Protec] 'expert' has been described in the media (not by the 9/11 Truth seekers) as: 'A spokesman' who often lacks substance but speaks with much 'bluster,' and this paper appears to fit that pattern. ... " - Rosie O'Donnell


By Alex Constantine

In his June 20 broadcast over WFMU-FM, basso conspiracy theorist Dave Emory took aim at the 9/11 Truth Movement, which he frequently derides, and backed up his assertions that a controlled demolition did not take place with a report prepared by Protec, a government contractor specializing in demolitions. Protec, of course, is not an independent investigator. The company receives generous federal funding and has a concrete vested interest in supporting the 9/11 Commission's findings ... with a seven-page report (not exactly exhaustive), one that relies largely on opinion, appeals to authority, facile misrepresentations of fact and other signally non-scientific approaches to the issue ... A contradictory report could result in loss of government contracts, of course, so its conclusions are disposable solely on conflict-of-interest grounds.

It is riddled with misrepresentations of fact, some outrageous. For instance, Protec maintains, in support of its position that the air assaults ultimately resulted in the collapse of the towers, "three steel buildings collapsed due to fire (and violent external forces) on one day .... The fact is, MANY steel structures have collapsed due to fire. ... " Not so (see entry #4 below), according to FEMA - which couldn't cite a single instance of a steel building collapsing due to fire damage - but the casual reader is unlikely to know this and the report attempts to - MUST - get away with the blatant falsehood ... otherwise, of course, the entire Protec premise - that Al Qaeda destroyed the WTC - falls to pieces like a burning skyscraper.

Unattributable statements: Protec maintains that the truth movement is mistaken in asseritons made concerning removal of WTC debris (see #1 below). The report merely cites "those who handled the debris." No names. Those who handled much of the debris in the end would be Mafia-controlled junk yards (see archive), contracted by Rudy Giuliani to cart off the evidence before it could be examined. Protec doesn't mention its source - the Mafia? - and hiding sources is another non-scientific weakness of the report. There is no way to confirm or deny Protec's statement because its source, in this and too many other instances, is concealed for no apparent reason.

Now, Dave Emory, the conspiracy theorist, has a history of responding to criticisms by dragging an "expert" onto his radio program to silence the hounds with an appeal to "authority." He doesn't particularly care if his guest is a shill or even telling the truth. His main concern appears to be that he be perceived as correct, after all, on top of the argument. Emory stifles - censors - serious responses and thus appears to have won the argument. This is a pathetic performance that he has repeated a number of times in the past, often with embarrassing results (for him - see "Dave Emory and Daniel Hopsicker are Handled" in my archive for much more).

Contents:

1) Dave Emory highly recommends Protec's 9/11 WTC collapse report and refers callers to the Protec ImplosionWorld web site.

2) The State Department highly recommends Protec's 9/11 WTC collapse report and refers callers to the Protec ImplosionWorld web site.

3.) Rosie O'Donnell's excellent critique of the Protec report.

4.) Lies in the Protec report.
--------------
1.) Dave Emory: Update on September 11 and Related Matters (Control This)
http://novus.liber.us/2007/06/20/dave-emory-update-on-september-11-and-related-matters-control-this/

In this broadcast, Mr. Emory reads a paper written by industry professionals expert in the field of controlled demolition. Evaluating principal assertions of the advocates of the “controlled demolition” theory about the collapse of World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 on 9/11/2001, they reject them on empirical scientific grounds. As noted in the introduction to the paper, this is the first evaluation of the controlled demolition theory by those experienced and skilled with this highly specialized function. Crafted by Brent Blanchard, Senior Editor for Implosionworld.com and Director of Field Operations at Protec Documentation Services, Inc., the document negates the various aspects of the “controlled demolition” disinformation that has (to an extent) served to eclipse the very real, sinister and operational forces that launched the attacks. The company [Protec] that employs Blanchard and his associates is “one of the world’s most knowledgeable, independent authorities on explosive demolition, having performed engineering studies, structure analysis, vibration/air overpressure monitoring and photographic services on well over 1,000 structure blasting events in more than 30 countries. These include the current world record-holders for largest, tallest and most buildings demolished with explosives. Protec regularly documents the work of more than 20 explosives contractors who perform structure blasting as a primary source of revenue (including extensive experience with every American company) as well as dozens more who blast structures in a part-time capacity.”

http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2007/06/ftr-599-update-on-september-11-and.html

As noted in the introduction to the paper, this is the first evaluation of the controlled demolition theory by those experienced and skilled with this highly specialized function. Crafted by Brent Blanchard, Senior Editor for Implosionworld.com and Director of Field Operations at Protec Documentation Services, Inc., the document negates the various aspects of the “controlled demolition” disinformation that has (to an extent) served to eclipse the very real, sinister and operational forces that launched the attacks. The company [Protec] that employs Blanchard and his associates is “one of the world’s most knowledgeable, independent authorities on explosive demolition, having performed engineering studies, structure analysis, vibration/air overpressure monitoring and photographic services on well over 1,000 structure blasting events in more than 30 countries. These include the current world record-holders for largest, tallest and most buildings demolished with explosives. Protec regularly documents the work of more than 20 explosives contractors who perform structure blasting as a primary source of revenue (including extensive experience with every American company) as well as dozens more who blast structures in a part-time capacity.” Listeners are emphatically encouraged to supplement their examination of this document by studying the additional material available here. The Blanchard document is available here in PDF form.

Program Highlights Include Detailed Analysis of the Following:

“ASSERTION #1: ‘The towers’ collapse looked exactly like explosive demolitions.’ PROTEC COMMENT: No, they didn’t. It’s the ‘where;’

ASSERTION #2: ‘But they fell straight down into their own footprint.’ PROTEC COMMENT: They did not. They followed the path of least resistance, and there was a lot of resistance;

ASSERTION #3: ‘But explosive charges (aka plumes, squibs, etc.) can clearly be seen shooting from several floors just prior to collapse.’ PROTEC COMMENT: No, air and debris can be seen pushing violently outward, which is a natural and predictable effect of rapid structural collapse;

ASSERTION #4: ‘Several credible eyewitnesses are adamant that they heard explosions in or near the towers.’ PROTEC COMMENT: Maybe they did hear loud noises that sounded to them like explosions, but such statements do nothing to refute scientific evidence that explosives were not used;

ASSERTION #5: ‘An explosive other than conventional dynamite or RDX was used . . . a non-detonating compound such as thermite (aka thermate), which gets very hot upon initiation and can basically ‘melt’ steel. This can be proven by photographs of molten steel taken at Ground Zero, the temperature and duration of underground fires, and comments made by rescue workers. PROTEC COMMENT: We have come across no evidence to support this claim;

ASSERTION #6: ‘Debris removed from Ground Zero—particularly the large steel columns from towers #1 and #2—were quickly shipped overseas to prevent independent examination or scrutiny.’ PROTEC COMMENT: Not according to those who handled the steel;

ASSERTION #7: ‘WTC 7 was intentionally ‘pulled down’ with explosives. No airplane hit it, and the building owner himself was quoted as saying he made a decision to ‘pull it’.’ PROTEC COMMENT: This scenario is extremely unlikely for many reasons;

ASSERTION #8: ‘A steel-framed building has never collapsed due to fire, yet three steel buildings collapsed on one day . . . therefore explosives must have been responsible.’ PROTEC COMMENT: No, actually it means three steel buildings collapsed due to fire (and violent external forces) on one day;

ASSERTION #9: ‘Anyone denying that explosives were used is intentionally ignoring or dismissing evidence that doesn’t suit their conclusion.’ PROTEC COMMENT: Please . . . if anyone knows of specific physical evidence relating to explosives being used in any manner on the Ground Zero site, bring it to our attention ... ”
-----------------
THE STATE DEPARTMENT ALSO LIKES PROTEC

2.) http://skeptosis.blogspot.com/2007/02/fire-vs-steel-facts.html

Fire vs. Steel - The Facts
http://skeptosis.blogspot.com/2007/02/fire-vs-steel-facts.html

More recently, the folks at Protec Documentation Services (and/or Implosionworld.com) released a paper late last year, designed to rebut various claims regarding the collapses of the buildings at the WTC complex. And they must be doing something right, because even the US STATE DEPARTMENT refers skeptical visitors to the ImplosionWorld website...
----------------
3.) http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3144/rosie-odonnell-wtc-7-demolished-911

Rosie O'Donnell: WTC 7 Demolished on 9/11

I've read the paper written by Brent Blanchard. Great fiction. Blanchard works for Protec who was a hired Ground Zero contractor and is a recipient of other contracts from government entities that have a HUGE interest in maintaining the "official" story....Protec and their employees are hardly disinterested or unbiased parties.
I'm not going to waste much time or effort (again, look it up yourself) on this, but here's some key points on the paper....Blanchard:

- Provides NO evidence to support most of his assertions

- Repeatedly invokes a privileged body of evidence and completely ignores the vast body of public evidence.

- Excludes possibilities out of hand, cherry-picking a few issues to address.

- Relies on flat denials, such as his assertion that there is no evidence of explosives use.

- Promotes common misconceptions, such as that the demolition must proceed from the ground up.

- Mentions only I-beam columns when discussing what caused the Twin Towers to fall, seemingly unaware that all of the tower's perimenter columns and all but the top stories of their core columns were box columns, not I-beam columns.

- States that the three buildings did not fall into their own footprint, but that they followed the path of least resistance when they in fact did fall into their own footprint and of course, followed the path of MOST resistance.

- Uses incorrect information when discussing the seismic data and their recordings differ greatly from other documented seismic data collected that day. He also gives false information from other seismic recordings to attempt to make them support Protec's data.

- Claims Protec hasn't "come across any evidence to support" claims of the presence of molten steel when there are Satellite images showing temperatures well above the melting point of aluminum ON THE SURFACE of the rubble pile FIVE DAYS AFTER the attack, not mention, the many, many eye witness accounts and photograph documentation of molten steel being present.

- States that the steel debris was properly examined which is directly contradicted by actual testimony given by the Committee on Science in the U.S. House of Representatives.

- States there was no evidence of explosive residue on the steel collected when the steel was never examined for this and the vast majority was recycled before the completion of FEMA's investigation whose final Report called for "further research investigation and analysis".

- States: "The fact is, many steel structures have collapsed due to fire", the ACTUAL fact is that no one has produced even a SINGLE example outside of 9/11 of a steel-framed high-rise building (even one of faulty construction or damaged) that has collapsed due to fires or even as a combination of structural damage and fires.

- Concludes by stating he's disproven EVERY theory when in fact he completely failed to articulate, let alone answer, even ONE single compelling argument by ignoring the six physical features that were present which are unique to controlled demolition.

- Completely dismisses the factual evidence, while highlighting the most absurd arguments, all of which have been disproven by many others much more knowledgeable and credible who don't contract with the government.

Oh....also.....your Brent Blanchard "expert" has been described in the media (not by the 9/11 Truth seekers) as: "A spokesman who often lacks substance but speaks with much "bluster", and this paper appears to fit that pattern."
-----------------
4.) mailto: isee@isee.org

http://skeptosis.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2006-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=7

subject: re: Protec Documentation Services

Sirs -

I am writing with a comment about an organization which claims membership in your organization, Protec Documentation Services of Rancocas, NJ.

Protec recently released a paper, 'WTC COLLAPSE STUDY', on its sister-site 'implosionworld.com'.

Having read the paper, and having compared the statements therein with the US Government's official positions on the issues addressed, I have reason to believe that Protec has failed to comply with at least two of the ISEE Fundamental Principles and Fundamental Canons listed on your website's Code of Ethics page.

ISEE Fundamental Principle #1:

ISEE Members uphold and advance the integrity, honor and dignity of the engineering profession by using their knowledge and skill for the enhancement of humankind.

I am not an expert in explosives, structural, or fire protection engineering, but I am definitely a member of 'humankind'.

After comparing Protec's statements regarding the WTC collapses with the statements of experts contracted by FEMA and NIST, I feel that rather than 'enhancing' anything, Protec has instead misrepresented and obfuscated the facts.

--Example 1--

a refutation of the assertion "they [the WTC Towers] fell straight down into their own footprint"

"PROTEC COMMENT: They did not. They followed the path of least resistance, and there was a lot of resistance."

This statement is at odds with NIST NCSTAR1, page 196:
"The structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass at and above the impact zone. ...the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass"

ISEE Fundamental Canon #3: ISEE Members shall issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.

Clearly, Protec's release of this paper constitutes the issuance of a public statement, and a portion of the paper seems at best misleading, if not outright untruthful.

--Example 2--
a refutation of the assertion "A steel-framed building has never collapsed due to fire..."

"PROTEC COMMENT: ...The fact is, many steel structures have collapsed due to fire."

This statement is at odds with FEMA Report 403, Chapter 5, page 1:
"Prior to September 11, 2001, there was little, if any, record of fire-induced collapse of large fire-protected steel buildings."

--Example 3--

an excerpt from a page on the implosionworld website:

"DID THE WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERS ACTUALLY 'IMPLODE'?

No. They collapsed in an uncontrolled fashion, causing extensive damage to surrounding structures, roadways and utilities."

This statement is disingenuous, as it purposefully does not address the collapse of WTC7, which is described in FEMA 403, Chapter 5 as an 'implosion' on three separate occasions.

Page 30: "...this would explain why the building imploded..."
Page 31: "...the facade was pulled downward, suggesting an internal failure and implosion."
Page 31: "Loss of strength due to the transfer trusses could explain why the building imploded..."

I trust that the above examples are sufficient to demonstrate that Protec Documentation Services is in a state of non-compliance with the above-referenced ethical standards of ISEE, and that being the case I urge you to reconsider Protec's membership in your organization.

My sole motivation in this regard is to ensure that the public record of September 11, 2001 remains untainted by mis-characterization of the events that occurred on that day, especially by self-proclaimed experts in the field of explosive demolition.

Thank you for your time, and I will look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

[name]
[address]
[phone#]

Former concentration camp inmates warn against downplaying fascism

2007-07-15 | Author : DPA

Weimar, Germany - Former inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp in the east of Germany warned Sunday against downplaying the dangers of fascism. Attempts to honour the victims of Nazi crimes were being overshadowed by the global spread of wars, nationalism and racism, said the president of the international Buchenwald committee, Bertrand Herz.
He was speaking at a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the construction of the largest concentration camp in Hitler's Germany, where 56,000 people lost their lives.

"In 1945, we never dreamed that today in Germany there would again be right-wing forces that would be allowed to demonstrate in our cities," Ottomar Rothmann said.

Democratically guaranteed constitutional rights should not be seen as a licence for rallies by fascist groups, Rothmann said, who spent two years in Buchenwald as a political prisoner.

Rothmann urged German politicians to do all they can "to ban the neo-Nazi NPD," a reference to the extreme right wing political party that is represented in two regional parliaments in eastern Germany.

A potential ban has been supported by several political leaders, including Berlin's social-democratic mayor, Klaus Wowereit, but legal hurdles remain.
The last attempt to ban the NPD was dismissed by Germany's constitutional court in 2003.

Sopme 250,000 people from 36 countries were incarcerated in Buchenwald until it was liberated by the US Army on April 11, 1945.

Located near the cultural city of Weimar, the camp is now a memorial site visited by around 600,000 people annually.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/82980.html#

No Bail in DoD Child-Porn Arrest

OrlandoSentinel.com
July 25, 2007

Orlando - A civilian Department of Defense police officer, indicted by a federal grand jury in Orlando on charges of possessing child pornography, was ordered held without bail Monday.

Mark Vandercar, 44, of Orlando was charged with possessing 130 images of young girls on his work computer and disks found in his car, along with a chat log in which he claimed to have sex with a 2-year-old, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Hawkins charged. Vandercar, a father of four who works at a Navy facility in Orlando, was ruled by U.S. Magistrate Karla Spaulding to be a danger to children and ordered jailed until trial.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orange/orl-mcfbriefs25_1107jul25,0,2906821.story

Tailored Genes

Legal Affairs
November|December 2003



Reviewed:

Limited Options By John C. Coffee Jr.
Tailored Genes By Edward J. Larson
Pay Direct By Boris Bittker

Eugenics was the darling of scientists and lawmakers of the early 20th century. Should we be concerned that it's catching on in the 21st?

By Edward J. Larson

A CENTURY AGO, ENERGIZED BY THE DISCOVERY of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, many social and biological scientists thought that we could improve humanity through simple scientific techniques of selective breeding. Eugenics, as their plan came to be known, captured the enthusiasm of the American elite and profoundly influenced progressive public policy. It changed the way Americans treated one another, splitting (or re-splitting) us along lines of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. "[T]he eugenicists . . . are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit," declared the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Like Sanger, most American eugenicists came from British or Northern European stock, and it was their "race" that they sought to enhance.

The term "eugenics" was coined by Charles Darwin's first cousin, the wealthy English polymath Francis Galton. He proposed that, with respect to human evolutionary development, "what Nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly"—through natural selection—"man may do providently, quickly and kindly"—through controlled breeding. Galton advocated programs to encourage reproduction by the fit (whom he roughly defined as people pretty much like himself) and to discourage reproduction by the unfit (habitual criminals and those who suffered from hereditary forms of mental illness and retardation).

In the United States, the cause was picked up by a number of biologists, most notably Charles Davenport, who ran the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Another important advocate was social scientist H. H. Goddard, the director of research at the prestigious Vineland School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, who introduced a version of the Binet-Simon I.Q. test to the United States as a way to identify the mentally unfit. Davenport, Goddard, and others were soon filling the scientific literature with their versions of the call for more children from the right people ("positive eugenics," in Galton's terms) and fewer from the wrong people ("negative eugenics").

Edwin Black, an investigative journalist who gained notice in 2001 with a book on IBM's role in the Holocaust, treads over this ground in his latest offering, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race . He presents the leading lights of American progressivism—the Carnegie Institution (which created Davenport's institute in 1904), the Rockefeller Foundation, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Margaret Sanger, and Woodrow Wilson, among others—promoting eugenics through the establishment of U.S. government programs that, he claims, led to the Nazi death camps. In Black's view, prominent American scientists, including many geneticists associated with the respected American Breeders Association (which is now known as the American Genetic Association), aided and abetted the cause. These homegrown eugenicists worked closely with like-minded eugenicists in other countries.

But Black exaggerates the importance of these ties. "American eugenicists saw mankind as a biological cesspool," he charges. "After purifying America from within, and preventing defective strains from reaching U.S. shores, they planned to eliminate undesirables from the rest of the planet." The best evidence that Black offers for a U.S.-inspired worldwide program of eugenic elimination is the moral and financial support given by American eugenicists to efforts in Germany, which the Nazi regime later exploited in ways that the Americans did not anticipate.

War Against the Weak is heavy on accusation and light on historical context. This is unfortunate because eugenics is one of the hottest topics in history today. Beginning with a trickle two decades ago, books and articles on various aspects of the American and international eugenics movements now flood the academic literature. Much of this work is highly nuanced and well documented, yet Black largely ignores it. He has gathered many documents—letters by leading eugenicists, publications of eugenics associations, and records of institutions for the mentally retarded—that historians had already found and interpreted. Black marshals these documents into a powerful indictment against eugenics, but like any indictment it is one-sided and sometimes misleading. "Point eight of the Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population specified euthanasia as a possibility to be considered," Black notes in a typical passage. But he does not add that such a plan was never seriously considered in the United States.

The American movement had many faults, the most striking its rush to embrace the new science of genetics to explain all manner of human behavior. But it did not lead inexorably to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In many ways, it represented a logical (if extreme) outgrowth of early-20th-century science and Progressive Era politics. Darwinian biology explained how humans evolved from other life forms, and Mendelian genetics showed how defective traits were inherited. Scientists captivated by these powerful new tools tried to push their application further. And the Progressives, reformers who characteristically sought to solve social problems through more efficient government, sought eugenic solutions to the problems of crime, mental illness, retardation, and antisocial behavior. But that was about the extent of eugenics in America.

Some radical eugenicists in the United States did dream of breeding a master race through eugenics, but they won few followers and sometimes fell laughably short. For example, Florida state senators in 1935 amended eugenic sterilization legislation to limit the procedure "to persons over the age of seventy years" and to require that the "operation may only be performed on a moonlight night . . . by a clairvoyant." Humiliated proponents withdrew the bill. Black does not tell us this story, which is related in newspaper accounts at the time. Perhaps his "gotcha" approach will help to awaken Americans to this dark chapter in our history, but it also obscures more nuanced questions about the role of science in shaping social policy, the importance of truly informed consent in medical decision making, and the value of the freedom for everyone to have children.

AFTER UNDENIABLY INFLUENCING AMERICAN PUBLIC POLICY during the early decades of the 20th century, eugenics virtually vanished from our collective memory following World War II as nurture replaced nature as the accepted explanation for human behavior. Readers will look in vain through standard histories of the United States written during the mid-20th century to find references to eugenics. As late as 1978, Doone and Greer Williams's authoritative biography of Dr. Clarence Gamble, Every Child a Wanted Child, portrays Gamble, an heir to the Proctor and Gamble company fortune, as a benign birth control advocate, though his goal was to prevent reproduction by the unfit. The book never uses the term "eugenics" at all. That's like presenting Vladimir Lenin as an opponent of the czar without mentioning his communism: It can be done, but it's lousy history.

Other biographers ignored the vocal support given to eugenics by figures like Sanger, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alexander Graham Bell, who were eager to convert the public to their way of thinking. Nurture had so displaced nature in the social sciences and Nazi abuses had so damned eugenics that America and honorable Americans could not be associated with such practices. Besides, why confuse the forward-looking aspects of Sanger's feminism and Roosevelt's progressivism with the retrograde thinking about eugenics that still clung to them?

Late-20th-century scientific developments changed this, however. In 1969, the Caltech molecular biologist Robert Sinsheimer proclaimed, "A new eugenics has arisen, based upon the dramatic increase in our understanding of the biochemistry of heredity and our comprehension of the craft and means of evolution." Meanwhile, the Harvard zoologist E. O. Wilson's pioneering work in sociobiology breathed new life into the nature side of the nature/nurture divide. Our genes determine our culture, he asserted. Although these men opposed compulsory programs of negative eugenics, fears arose that such programs might be revived.

To sound the alarm, scholars began to publicize America's own experimentation with eugenics. Mark Haller's Eugenics and Donald Pickens's Eugenics and the Progressives in the 1960s paved the way for Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man and Daniel Kevles's In the Name of Eugenics in the 1980s. By the 1990s, historian Philip Pauly could write of a "eugenics industry" within the history of science, contributing his own work, naturally, to the explosion of scholarship in the field. With an eye toward averting a revival of compulsory negative eugenics, all of these authors explored why progressive and well-meaning Americans once supported eugenics. The mounting sense of concern led the National Institutes of Health in 1989 to earmark 5 percent of the government funds spent on the human genome project to study the ethics of its uses. Black's book will likely solidify the broad-based consensus that extends from liberal pro-choice partisans to conservative pro-life advocates that compulsory negative eugenics is intolerable in the United States.

SUPPORT FOR EUGENICS WAS ONCE EQUALLY BROAD: By 1935, every state had built institutions for segregating "feebleminded" individuals and 35 states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, though most were little utilized. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were segregated in our country primarily for mental disabilities, and more than 60,000 were sterilized without their consent, including over 20,000 in California alone, where Stanford University president David Jordan, the plant breeder Luther Burbank, and The Los Angeles Times led the crusade. Most sterilizations involved the mentally ill or retarded, but some programs included criminals, epileptics, and homosexuals. Perhaps the best chapter in Black's book shows how the eugenicists co-opted advocates for the blind and persuaded them that the blind should not reproduce. Eugenics reinforced racism as well, and lent new urgency to old laws against interracial marriage. And it leached into U.S. immigration policy with the support of President Calvin Coolidge, who signed the 1924 act that imposed country-of-origin restrictions on immigrants. Those restrictions favored British and Northern Europeans over those from other places. Black goes over this history in detail, with a nose for the sensational. He entitles one chapter "The United States of Sterilization." But he never explains why eugenics was wrong. Holmes didn't think it was when he wrote the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Virginia's sterilization statute.

Such laws are easy to condemn now, but it wasn't so easy then, though populists, civil libertarians, and Roman Catholics had principled objections to such actions and spoke out regularly against them. During the heyday of eugenics, efforts were also made to educate the public about eugenic breeding, not so that people would support compulsory laws for others, but so that they would adopt such practices themselves. These efforts included public lectures, popular books and articles, educational movies, traveling exhibits, and classroom instruction. The most popular high school biology textbook of the 1920s contained advice to students on the importance of choosing mentally and physically fit spouses. And a 1916 feature film even encouraged people to marry eugenically and kill their defective offspring. No less a civil libertarian than Clarence Darrow (who opposed compulsory sterilization laws) endorsed the actions depicted in this film, as did that most famous of Americans with disabilities, Helen Keller.

By 1950, many eugenicists concluded that voluntary approaches could have a far greater effect on improving "the race" than compulsory ones, at least in the United States, though some of these experts launched ambitious plans for coercive population control in the developing world. My own research into California eugenics suggests that some state institutions facilitated a voluntary approach by opening free sterilization clinics. Under the influence of eugenic-minded physicians and genetic counselors, though, how voluntary are parents' decisions to sterilize their children? Even after explicitly race- and class-based eugenics fell from favor, some old eugenics laws were used into the 1970s to sterilize welfare recipients and others deemed by those in power to be unfit mothers. The determining question was no longer "Will she spread her genetic defect to her children?" but "Will she make a desirable mother?" It took federal lawsuits and legislation to put an end to such practices.

How different are potential uses of new reproductive techniques giving parents greater control over the genetic makeup of their children? Non-eugenic factors may serve to ease the acceptance of new reproductive practices that actually rely on genetic considerations. Large segments of the population may agree that drug addicts or abusive parents should not bear children, for example, and genes may be found that predict such behavior. But eugenicists have blurred issues of genetic and social fitness from the beginning—and will surely blur such issues in the future.

"After Hitler, eugenics did not disappear," Black recognizes. "What had thrived loudly as eugenics for decades quietly took postwar refuge under the labels human genetics and genetic counseling." Now, voluntary eugenics is enjoying a revival or at least a rehabilitation of sorts. Many of us support the informed use of human gene testing and technology to prevent genetic disability and, more tentatively, to enhance genetic ability. Black captures America's most famous geneticist James Watson musing, "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that." Watson goes on to say: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." Black implies that we should condemn Watson's impulses, but which parent among us wouldn't want a smart, good-looking child if offered the choice? Black concludes his book with the Pollyannaish hope that "no matter how far or how fast the science develops, nothing should be done anywhere by anyone to exclude, infringe, repress or harm an individual based on his or her genetic makeup." He adds, "Only then can humankind be assured that there will be no new war against the weak." If he really believes this is possible, he should reread his own book.

Edward J. Larson is a professor of law and history at the University of Georgia. His book about the Scopes Trial, Summer for the Gods, won a Pulitzer Prize for History.

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2003/review_larson_novdec03.msp

Pan's Labyrinth ... Lessons not learnt: secrets, lies and the danger of silence

The Age - By Andrew McKay
July 24, 2007

Pan's Labyrinth - WATCHING the film Pan's Labyrinth on DVD at the weekend, I remembered Spain more than 40 years ago. I remembered a small village called Campello where there was a central square faced by a church. Amelio, a local, took me by the arm, and showed me ragged pockmarks in the church wall.

"So we remember," he said. And, foolishly in retrospect, I asked what? And he said: "The war, when father killed son, and son killed cousin." The war he referred to was, of course, the Spanish Civil War, and in 1961 it was still not over although they had stopped shooting in 1939. On the inside of a cave in a nearby mountain someone had recently whitewashed "THE WAR'S NOT ENDED".

Sometimes when memories come back to disturb they thrust you into a new awareness. The awareness brought by Pan's Labyrinth was that of thinking hard about trying to define the moment at which things that should be known by everyone are declared by a few to be unknowable.

Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944 when the Allies were stamping out fascism across Europe but when, in Spain, fascism was at its most vicious because there the outbreak of WWII was not a beginning but a convenient continuation of Francisco Franco's crushing repression of republican and other counter-forces.

The Spanish, for all their charm, hospitality and warmth, have a steak of cruelty and this perhaps explains why their war was so fearful and sometimes condemned to a deep mental dungeon.

In Pan's Labyrinth there is a shocking scene where an officer in Franco's army orders two peasants summarily murdered because he chooses not to believe they have been out at night shooting rabbits. (He is given proof of their story too late but dismisses it with a shrug.)

In a bar by the beach in Campello, not long after I arrived at the beginning of summer, two young peasants appeared. Both were already drunk, but harmlessly. They had been to the market and bought two live rabbits for the pot. Several drinks later they were killing the rabbits, very slowly and with pleasure. Years after I left Campello I learned its worst secret. That between it and Alicante, up in the hills, there was a prison camp established by Franco's Falangists some time after the start of the Civil War in 1936. Thousands of men, women and children were incarcerated there.

They were still there in 1961, more than 20 years after the war ended.

This was awful. But more terrible was the silence. Nobody talked about the camp. It's not as if its existence was unknown. You cannot disguise a camp holding thousands of people for two decades in a densely populated area.

Or you can if you are able first to tell the population they must not talk about it. Then impose this order for so long that it becomes accepted. Then because it is accepted for so long it is no longer thought about. So as I watched Pan's Labyrinth I thought about Campello and Amelio. And I thought about Mohamed Haneef and I thought about what we are not allowed to know.

We are, it seems, being forced to become complicit in a selective secrecy.

We cannot know if that is harmless or very dangerous because the not knowing involves our inability to even think forensically about it — to look at it this way and that, argue, demand proof.

In Spain in 1961 Amelio's revelation came only after I had known him for nearly six months. The scars on the church wall were a secret in plain sight, the graffiti in the cave was there only for those who knew to look.

Andrew McKay is a Melbourne writer. His latest book is Shadows of War.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/lessons-not-learnt-secrets-lies-and-the-danger-of-silence/2007/07/23/1185043027894.html

Born-Again Corporate Fascism

By Chris Herz - July 20, 2007

The forces of born-again corporate fascism are as USAmerican as apple pie!

VHeadline.com's Washington D.C. based commentarist Chris Herz writes: From our British mother-country we inherited the notion that what was really required of any constitutional governance was a carefully crafted system capable of "muddling" through contingencies unforeseen by its 18th century framers.

This system was as good as any: It survived revolution, civil war and even two world wars. But it has long been foundered in the crisis of Empire.

What you on the outside see here in Sodom-on-Potomac is the successor state to the late, great republic.

Our national myths died in the fire-fights and body counts of Vietnam ... and in the assassination of the best of our leaders. Our transformation into the 'Corporate States of America' was completed by the death squads of Central America.

It is marked by Special Forces, bravely fighting world-wide for dictatorship and repression.

It is marked by aptly-named Predator drones. Some fly the skies of Greater Arabia, others walk the halls of Congress and the White House.

All controlled from behind the scenes by sinister and evil people.

No matter how rich and powerful, our oligarchical rulers labor daily in the immense task of creating one lie; one new "truthiness" to re-enforce the collapse of yesterday's political mantra. Their immense brittle fabric of irreality so painstakingly crafted by the weird churches, the army and the major media corporations covers our land like a shroud covers a decaying corpse.

A massive Department of Homeland Security is not of much use to a State which has lost the mystic chords which bind the patriot of today to those of past times who worked for our homeland in such unselfish ways. The corporate oligarchs at the summit of this class-ridden society cannot even understand altruism, and ridicule even the very notion.

Their law is enforced in this homeland by enormous armies of militarized police. Or abroad by a police-like military: Ever the loyal tools of state terror, their fruits those of full-spectrum disorder.

Watching as is my VHeadline duty, the splintering crash of the Bush regime and the feckless attempts of its Democratic Party ladies' auxiliary to salvage something for the Empire from the ruins is a painful duty, yet an exhilarating one.

I must say across the havoc of war that we owe an inestimable debt to the true patriots of our contemporary world: Especially to the Iraqi people who are determined that no foreigner may rule their country and strip it of its one great resource.

Bravely they have refused to bow to the forces of a born-again corporate fascism, as American as apple pie. They have taken up such simple arms as are available to them and are showing the whole world the dark hollowness in the heart of the Empire. Their struggle is not only winning them a free country, but it is also destabilizing the whole project for a new American Empire, even in its own homelands.

The agony that the resistance has inflicted on the neo-fascists here is a cause for somber celebration.

We learn from the latest Internet reports that the major resistance organizations have united to form a unified political structure to seek international recognition for the national resistance and to prepare for the inevitable day when the Empire is driven from their country, when the heart-breaking work of healing a decimated nation can commence.

I for one wish them the very best of success.

To them, I invite our friends in Venezuela to extend every sympathy and every possible humanitarian and political assistance, for of military aid those who have humbled Mr. Bush's empire have no need.

Indeed, the example of the Iraqis' fortitude and courage in the face of the worst the US military and "intelligence" agencies can do, may be for the Bolivarian Republic the very best repayment for your sympathy and assistance. In this common battle against the empire Iraq has paid the bitter price of a million dead.

Were it not for their willingness to endure this horror the Empire would certainly have moved on to a new war with Iran, and then perhaps to the invasion of Venezuela.

And then perhaps may we all hope to live to see right here in Washington some new life breathed into our ancient constitution?

Perhaps it will yet be possible for the USA to shake off its corporate nightmare and disgraceful militarism: To once again be a good neighbor in a world community.

Chris Herz
chris@vheadline.com
Washington D.C.

http://www.vheadline.com/herz
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=74891

Ex-Bulgarian president in Taipei for launch of 'Fascism'

" ... banned in Bulgaria ... "

July 26, 2007
By Nina Huang
Special to the China Post
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/2007/07/26/116060/Ex-Bulgarian-president.htm

Former Bulgarian President Zhelyu Mitev Zhelev launched the Chinese edition of his controversial book, "Fascism," in Taipei yesterday.

Praised as a "fighter of communism," Zhelev humbly insisted that his book was "not a heroic autobiography" but merely an analysis from his own perspective.

The book, first published in 1982, is a comparative analysis of three of the most influential political figures in the 20th century: Francisco Franco of Spain, Benito Mussolini of Italy, and Adolf Hitler of Germany.

Because of his criticism of the political systems, the book led to much controversy. "Fascism," which was originally titled, "The Totalitarian State," was later banned in Bulgaria.

The ban also led to Zhelev's dismissal and ejection from several cultural organizations.

Despite Bulgaria's censorship and disapproval, the book continued to be printed outside of the country in mass amounts.

The former president was praised for his intellectual findings and post-communist precedents by Wu Yu-shan, guest speaker and director of the Institute of Political Science at the Academia Sinica.

Wu also lauded Zhelev in deserving the "utmost respect as a fighter of communism."

The launch was hosted by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD).

The TFD is the first democracy assistance organization to be established in Asia. The purpose of the TFD is to unite the people of Taiwan to promote democracy and further the research of democratization in the global democratic network.

When asked about Taiwan, Zhelev believes that it should become a member of the United Nations, and be recognized by other countries because "Taiwan deserves a rightful position in the international community."

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Why NutraSweet Causes Obesity - Clearing Up the Misconceptions

By Alex Constantine

There is wide-spread confusion over the established fact that aspartame, or NutraSweet, causes obesity. The American Beverage Assn. is in the pocket of NutraSweet Co., and is prone to false and irresponsible statements concerning the product's deleterious effects on health ...




American Beverage Ass. makes an Ass. out of themselves; again!

Julia Havey
July 24, 2007

"Just when you thought denial couldn't get any better; this just in from the American Beverage Ass. (the same people who swear that high fructose laced soft drinks aren't at all to blame for Obesity!):

"Susan Feely, president of the American Beverage Association, said the notion that diet drinks are associated with bulging waistlines defies common sense. 'How can something with zero calories that’s 99 percent water with a little flavoring in it ... cause weight gain?' she said."
http://www.commonvoice.com/article.asp?colid=7414

Common sense does explain it - once the facts are known.

The consumer hasn't been informed of the facts, and the vacuum left - by media censorship on a level that amounts to criminal collaboration - is filled by misconceptions: Ms. Havey, the author of the article, speculates: "maybe it has to do with the messed up caloric logic that us overweight folks have! We think that the mere fact that we are drinking a 'zero calorie' drink enables us to wash a cookie down with it, or a Big Mac (I know, McDonald's isn't to blame for Obesity either!.......right!) or pizza! I think we 'can' have something more caloric since we are 'saving' calories on the soda!"

This may be true, too, but the simplest explanation - supported by several independent controlled studies - is in the chemical/rDNA composition of NutraSweet. The drug breaks down in the body to methanol, and further degrades to formalehyde.

The human body is not made to absorb formaldehyde and has no idea what to do with it. So the body stores the noxious toxin in fat cells ... and in time the fat is saturated with formaldehyde ...

So the brain signals for more simple carbohydates - to create enough fat to store the noxious chemical - with a craving for potato chips, donuts, cupcakes and other fattening foods. The poor dieter doesn't understand why the pounds keep piling on, and drinks more diet soda to compensate. The cravings for carbohydrates only become more intense; the formaldehyde accretes in the fat cells until the body bloats and disease settles in.

For more information, see "NutraFear and NutraLoathing in Augusta, Georigia," by Alex Constantine, in You are Being Lied To, published by Dininformation.com. (The story is probably still posted on the web somewhere, though I haven't searched for it.)

Mercs: DynCorp (Now a Division of CSC) & Other Contractors in Afghanistan/The Civilian Slaughter, Military-Corporate Fraternalism

Afghan Rifts; Guns For Hire
ZNet | Afghanistan
by Conn Hallinan
July 19, 2007

The rising tide of Afghan civilian deaths has opened a rift between the U.S. and NATO's 37,000-member International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). According to NATO officials, the U.S.'s increasing use of air power has badly damaged support for the war in both Afghanistan and Europe.

Daan Everts, the senior NATO civilian in Afghanistan, says the U.S. has created 'a fallout that is negative because the collateral damage and particularly the civilian casualties are seen as unduly high, certainly by the Afghan people. This is of concern to us.'

German Defense Minister Franz Joseph Jung said, 'We have to do everything to avoid that civilians are affected. We are in talks with our American friends about this.'

The issue has split German Chancellor Angela Merkel's 'Grand Coalition.' While Merkel's Christian Democrats generally support the war, their coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), is suddenly feeling pressure on its portside from the newly formed united Left Party. SDP leaders have come out against renewing the current mandate to deploy German troops in Afghanistan, a vote that will come sometime this fall.

The rising tide of Afghan civilian deaths-over 1,800 killed in 2007-has helped fuel a push for United Nations participation to end the conflict. Leading the drive is British Secretary of Defense, Des Browne.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Browne said the solutions to narcotics, security, and establishing the rule of law are political, not military. 'An overarching campaign plan is required to develop all of these disparate strands together. It has to be a strategic plan, not just a military plan...and there is no organization better placed than the UN to take that role.'

Browne said that if the international community cannot find a political solution, 'then I say to you that we have no moral right to ask our young people to expose themselves to that danger.'

In the meantime, in spite of opposition by the Kabul government, senior U.S. military officers and European nations, the Bush Administration is forging ahead with a plan to use massive aerial spraying of the herbicide glycophate to destroy Afghanistan's opium crop.

More than 90 percent of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan, and the drug trade generates about one third of the country's gross domestic product. Projections are that this year the crop will be larger than in 2006 The Germans are so opposed to the spraying that they say they will reconsider their participation in the NATO operation if it goes forward. Many military leaders are unhappy as well. Gen. Dan K. McNeil, NATO's commander in Afghanistan, says his forces are not equipped or trained to deal with drugs. 'Eradication done improperly is counter-intuitive to running the counter-insurgency because it will alienate people and you may have more insurgent people appearing than you had before.' Many Afghans agree. According to Mirwais Yasini, a member of the Afghani parliament's Committee on Counter-Narcotics, 'Aerial eradication will maximize the antagonism against the government.'

DynCorp, a private mercenary company that has done extensive spraying of coca plants in Columbia, has been contracted to do the job. Using DynCorp is hardly a coincidence. The new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, William Wood, oversaw the company's aerial spraying campaign in Colombia

'The U.S. is hell-bent on eradication,' Harvard University Professor Robert Rotberg, an expert on conflict resolution at the Kennedy School of Government, told the Financial Times. 'They claim it worked in Columbia and so it will work in Afghanistan. It is not clear to anyone it worked in Columbia.'

Actually, it is quite clear. Coca acreage in Columbia increased 9 percent in 2006, following a 26 percent increase in 2005. Coca acreage is the same today as it was when the spraying campaign began in 2001.

Have gun, will travel?

Widespread use of mercenaries in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Latin America by the Bush Administration has drawn the attention of the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, according to upsidedownworld.com.

'We have observed that in some cases the employees of private military and security companies enjoy an immunity which can easily become impunity,' says Jose Luis Gomez del Pardo, chair of the UN Working Group, 'implying that some states may contract these companies in order to avoid direct legal responsibilities.'

The Working Group found that mercenaries were recruited from throughout Latin America and then flown to Ecuador to train at the huge U.S. base at Manta. Others were trained in Honduras at a former training camp used during the Reagan Administration's war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

According to the Working Group, mercenaries working for a subsidiary of an Illinois-based company, Your Solutions Inc., suffered 'irregularities in contracts, harsh working conditions, wages partially paid or unpaid, ill-treatment and isolation and lack of basic necessities such as medical treatment and sanitation.' A major reason for using private security companies is that they are not subject to Congressional oversight.

Jeffrey Shipper, who worked at Manta for DynCorp, told the Los Angeles Times that a major reason for using Latin American mercenaries was that, 'The State Department is very interested in saving money on security now. Because they're driving the prices down, we're seeking Third World people to fill the positions.'

While most American and British mercenaries earn up to $10,000 a month, Latin Americans get $1,000. Last summer, dozens of former Colombian soldiers went on strike in Baghdad because Blackwater USA, a major security firm, promised them $4,000 a month, but paid them only $1,000.

According to the Financial Times, there are hundreds of Mercenaries from Colombia, Ecuador and Chile working in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Hilla. Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Study estimates that there are 50,000 mercenaries working in Iraq, making them the second largest armed contingent after the U.S. Cheap wages are only one of the ways that the security companies increase their profit margin. Because the firms are private they don't have to operate with safeguards. Blackwater's flight BW61 out of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is a case in point. The plane- flying during the day in clear weather-was carrying mortar shells and soldiers when it hit a mountain peak last November, killing everyone on board. The pilots had been in Afghanistan less than two weeks.

'This was infinitely worse than any armed forces flight would have been. It [a military flight] would have had triple redundancy, with checklists,' the lawyer for the families of the passengers told the New York Times. Even though the plane was unpressurized and flying at 14,000 feet, neither of the pilots was wearing an oxygen mask.

The Americans are not the only ones recruiting mercenaries. Over 1,000 Fijians work in Iraq for the British company Global Risk Strategies. According to Jone Dakuvula, the director of Citizens Constitutional Forum, a non-governmental public education organization, many Fijians who have gone to Iraq have never been paid, but can't come home because their passports have been impounded.

Dakuvula says that high unemployment in rural areas is the main impetus for signing up to go to Iraq. According to Dakuvula, many Fijians come home wounded and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress to find there are no medical or psychological resources.

Iraq is now a major source of foreign exchange for the Pacific nation. Personal remittances have climbed from $50 million in 1999 to over $300 million in 2005, or seven percent of Fiji's GDP.

Whether it is Brits or Yanks hiring the mercenaries makes little difference. Getting other people to die for you is cheap and politically safe. The body bags and the maimed return to places most Americans and British will never see or think about.

DynCorp at the Border?

Hired Guns at the Border? The Contracting Has Begun
Mid-Vally Town Crier
By Nick Braune
July 23, 2007

http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1040

The July 8th front page of McAllen's paper, The Monitor, had an article, 'Border Patrol May See Surge,' discussing a proposed increase (surge) in numbers of Border Patrol agents. This momentarily caught my attention for two reasons.

First, the U.S. has not done well with surges lately: 'The Surge' in Iraq has produced nothing but a resented brutal lockdown of Baghdad and its suburbs. And secondly, I always suspect there are too many Border Patrol agents already.

But the article kept my attention. I take it that a private contracting company, DynCorp International of Virginia, is sending out press releases (basically advertising itself) hoping to be hired by Homeland Security in this border region. It is offering 'to train and deploy 1,000 private agents to the U.S.-Mexican border within 13 months, offering a quick surge of law enforcement officers to a region struggling to clamp down on illegal immigration.'

Note that the company thinks we don't know that the 100,000 private contractors in Iraq, with at least half of them doing policing and fighting functions, have a horrible reputation. (See the documentary 'Iraq for Hire.')

DynCorp, it seems from The Monitor, is touting its mercenary