tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-96846422024-03-18T19:50:17.339-07:00Alex Constantine's Anti-Fascist Research Bin"Advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." - PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 60Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comBlogger1857125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-36966183919103355062010-01-25T11:10:00.001-08:002010-02-15T22:08:20.359-08:00Moving On - Introducing The AC Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia<center><a href="http://www.theworldismycountry.org"><img src="http://www.theworldismycountry.org/NewSiteAd.jpg" border="0" /></a></center>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-14614738309390656342010-01-25T09:46:00.000-08:002010-01-25T09:52:22.010-08:00Oliver Stone says Adolf Hitler was 'Enabled by Western Bankers'<em>By Michael Casey</em> (CP)<br />Google News | 1-25-10<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4LJCT0rbtN7xA3RCCzZ0nBIecN5x3uMhd_saG3zegnqeRxbWm8XIugL99g7vrFQdFvsw4kIZLgkDcy1I6_hxH6gmGlCpDnFKKX5SRIUeKhrXPWqgc-9qNsMlxbZRgo1WKW44_/s1600-h/forth33.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 301px; height: 361px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4LJCT0rbtN7xA3RCCzZ0nBIecN5x3uMhd_saG3zegnqeRxbWm8XIugL99g7vrFQdFvsw4kIZLgkDcy1I6_hxH6gmGlCpDnFKKX5SRIUeKhrXPWqgc-9qNsMlxbZRgo1WKW44_/s400/forth33.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5430736571811625458" /></a>BANGKOK, Thailand — Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and a monster but rose to power thanks to big business leaders and other supporters who appreciated his vow to destroy communism and control workers, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone said Monday.<br /><br />Stone, who is working on a 10-part documentary on the 20th century titled "The Secret History of the United States," said the German dictator was "enabled by Western bankers" and managed to "seduce" Germany's military industrial complex.<br /><br />"Hitler is a monster. There is no question. I have no empathy for Hitler at all. He was a crazy psychopath," Stone told reporters in the Thai capital. "But like Frankenstein was a monster, there was a Dr. Frankenstein. He is product of his era."<br /><br />Stone was in Bangkok to give a lecture to high school students on the role of film in peace-building as part of a visit organized by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation.<br /><br />He said the aim of his documentary, which two historians are helping him with, was to offer a fuller understanding of the 20th century and how some of those lessons may be relevant to President Barack Obama in 2010.<br /><br />"What has America become? How can we in America not learn from Germany in the 1930s," the Oscar-winning director asked.<br /><br />Earlier in the day, Stone told about 300 students that his 1991 movie "JFK," was his most controversial to date and that the United States remains in denial over the possibility that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald could have assassinated John F. Kennedy.<br /><br />Stone said exploring alternative theories over the JFK assassination remains too sensitive for those in the media or academia who "would be endangering their careers and their position."<br /><br />"To this day, many key Americans in power are in total denial about this story," Stone said. "They don't even want to know about the possibility that he was killed by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. It is a national fairy tale."<br /><br />"JFK" ridicules the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone and suggests a massive conspiracy.<br /><br />Stone's film centred on a theory by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that a CIA-led mutiny killed the president and the plotters walked away unscathed. Garrison's theories went to court in 1967, but Clay Shaw, the alleged "evil genius" behind the assassination, was acquitted.<br /><br />Stone said Monday he thought it was "a good thing" to revisit the JFK assassination. But he came under fire from the historians and film reviewers who contended Stone had fudged facts, invented characters and elevated speculation to truth to support his burning belief that the killing was a high-level government conspiracy.<br /><br />"It's an amazing story and I did it," Stone said. "I thought I would be respected for it, and I was lambasted in the establishment press. I was called a myth-maker, a propagandist. I didn't see it coming. I thought the Kennedy murder was safe."<br /><br />Stone is famous for several other movies, including the Vietnam War films "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Platoon," which won four Oscars, including best picture and best director.<br /><br />http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jaefUfWXwMYP_e7BOeoYwU-aV9rgAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-30585521690282934292010-01-24T21:05:00.000-08:002010-01-24T21:09:54.220-08:00Did Yeats Accept a Prize of Nazi Gold?<strong>Excerpt: <em>WB Yeats and the Glittering Prizes</em></strong><br />Irish Times | January 25, 2010<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilcOBrDNDVjQ1FAVXuFGsZC-VJDSsIZYYplVWHxPJ7CiI_Fg60i0VZmHXyDLjNAiS6HFPnL1hFy056PCGqOt1pJAKgk20gM0f8w94mcvyHp3vWAiRXyJbQIzPcCHckPrjaUOZR/s1600-h/1224263035335_1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilcOBrDNDVjQ1FAVXuFGsZC-VJDSsIZYYplVWHxPJ7CiI_Fg60i0VZmHXyDLjNAiS6HFPnL1hFy056PCGqOt1pJAKgk20gM0f8w94mcvyHp3vWAiRXyJbQIzPcCHckPrjaUOZR/s320/1224263035335_1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5430539610722401042" /></a>ON JANUARY 1ST this year, Yeats finally went out of copyright, 144 years after his birth. It was a long, carefully managed career, before and after death. A notable high point was the poet winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, generally taken as an acknowledgement of Irish independence, writes <strong>WJ MCCORMACK</strong> <br /><br />As early as 1909, Yeats thought he was in with a chance, but the winner turned out to be the Swedish novelist, Selma Lagerlöf. Scandinavians featured prominently among the prize’s early recipients, starting with the Norwegian poet, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, in 1903, and including his compatriot, Knut Hamsun, in 1920.<br /><br />In addition to the fame the prize brought with it, Yeats also appreciated the Nobel money. According to legend, he interrupted the telephone call notifying him of the honour with the blunt question: “How much?”<br /><br />If it remained the greatest prize he garnered, the Nobel was not the last. On February 16th 1934, after Hitler had already come to power in Germany, The Irish Times announced that Yeats had been awarded the Goethe-Plakette by the city of Frankfurt-am-Main, together with Hermann Stehr, a “blood-and-soil” novelist. Later in the year, the Nazi-supporting Knut Hamsun was awarded a Goethe-Preis, both prizes originating in liberal civic initiatives in 1927 (the Preis) and 1932 (the Plakette).<br /><br />Preis winners included poet Stefan George (1927) and theologian Albert Schweitzer (1928), who was thereby enabled to build a house in his Alsatian home village. Another beneficiary was Sigmund Freud (1930), whose papers establish the honorarium at 10,000 marks (George also received 10,000 marks, though he failed to turn up for the ceremony).<br /><br />While several “regime changes”, national and local, occurred between 1927 and 1934, it is worth noting that, pleased to be honoured in August 1934, Hamsun refused the cash, believing that the new Nazi regime deserved it more than he did. He is said by Mark Deavin to have refused precisely the same sum Freud and George had been given, suggesting a constant amount down the years with regard to the Goethe-Preis.<br /><br />The Plakette was a lesser thing, instituted mainly to reward administrators and supporters of events commemorating the centenary of Goethe’s death. I have not located any record of payments made to Plakette or Preis recipients. On the one hand, the Nazis were tight with money; on the other, Yeats was scarcely in the same league as Dr Paquet, secretary of the Preis committee. Is it improper to ask on what verifiable documentation we might conclude that Yeats was not a beneficiary of commensurate Nazi (“souls for”) gold, in keeping with the theme of The Countess Cathleen , staged in February 1934 by SS Untersturmbahnführer Bethge? The question bears upon Yeats’s second manoeuvre on the dangerous intersection between flattery and brutality.<br /><br />The critic and pacifist, Carl von Ossietzky (who championed James Joyce’s work), had been thrown into a concentration camp, where he was most barbarously treated. A rescue campaign was supported by Karl Barth, Augustus John, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf and others. One proposal was to have the prisoner awarded a Nobel Prize, thus obliging the regime to release him for the award ceremonies. Peace prizes were in Norway’s gift, not Sweden’s. Hamsun denounced Ossietzky in the press on November 22nd 1935, and no award was announced at that time, despite a campaign that had been active since January 1934.<br /><br />Yeats became embroiled in the Ossietzky affair early in 1936, when English novelist Ethel Mannin and German dramatist Ernst Toller approached him in London. Their efforts were clumsy, and the official campaign did not consider Yeats worth approaching, despite its reliance on glittering laureates. Yeats told Mannin in April: “If the Nobel Society did what you want, it would seem to the majority of the German people that the society hated their government for its politics, not because it was inhuman . . .”<br /><br />Advancing this specious argument for inactivity, he cannot have forgotten the praise heaped on him by the German press in June 1935 for his 70th birthday, nor what he called his “Frankfurt honour”. The Nobel committee finally overcame its misgivings and, in 1936, gave the prisoner his peace prize, retrospectively. He was not allowed to travel, and died two years later, aged 50.<br /><br />Apart from an insinuating passivity, what or who got Yeats into these distasteful relations with the Third Reich? His biographer and sometime political secretary, Joseph Hone, was strongly drawn towards fascism. Active in Dublin for much of the 1930s, the wily German agent, Helmut Clissmann, befriended associates of Yeats’s, including the MacBrides (Maud and Sean) and the Stuarts (Iseult and Francis). Clissmann claimed to have studied for a doctorate in Irish Studies at Frankfurt University but seems to have spent more time arranging holiday trips to the Reich for pupils at the Dublin High School, Omagh Academy, and no doubt other Irish schools. The German minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, received Yeats on several occasions, presenting him with suitable propaganda.<br /><br />In August 1938, Yeats publicly approved the Nuremberg Laws. So much is undeniable fact, though the motive is less clear (a childish love of giving offence?). Or had he taken the Führer’s shilling four years earlier?<br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><strong><em>WB Yeats and the Glittering Prizes</em>, by WJ McCormack, will be published by UCD Press in March</strong><br /><br />http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0125/1224263035335.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-83260575389236290762010-01-22T11:36:00.000-08:002010-01-22T12:19:56.865-08:00Oracle Software and the CIA<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC6sh_YiqIpGpYHrHmRydNLoI0N7huf-LghBdoeWUFRcGsgdnVBdIJ6g2W9fbyGjD99c10wEX5-ZriZoZB5dQ90kxJ6B0dgKs6Q8HKr7Y7yGxnS8k84yiC5UYQerEpvb3KSIrF/s1600-h/images826259_Larry-Ellison.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC6sh_YiqIpGpYHrHmRydNLoI0N7huf-LghBdoeWUFRcGsgdnVBdIJ6g2W9fbyGjD99c10wEX5-ZriZoZB5dQ90kxJ6B0dgKs6Q8HKr7Y7yGxnS8k84yiC5UYQerEpvb3KSIrF/s320/images826259_Larry-Ellison.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5429650911687199570" /></a><strong>Oracle's Connection to the CIA</strong><br /><br />Most Oracle professionals are surprised to learn that the name "Oracle" originates from the name of a CIA project. This article in Forbes Magazine notes that Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison worked on a CIA project with the code-name "Oracle":<br /><br />"He [Larry Ellison] dropped out of the University of Chicago in the 1960s, headed to Berkeley, Calif. and by the mid-1970s began working on a database project. Code name: Oracle. Client: the Central Intelligence Agency.<br /><br />In 1977, Ellison founded the company with Robert Miner and Edward Oates, naming it after the CIA job."<br /><br />http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_oracle_origin.htm<br /><br /><strong>HOW TO TELL ORACLE CORP. FOUNDER LARRY ELLISON FROM GOD</strong> <br /><br /><strong>Oracle's coziness with government goes back to its founding / Firm's growth sustained as niche established with federal state agencies </strong><br />SFGATE.com | May 20, 2002<br /> <br />... Company co-founders Larry Ellison Robert Miner and Ed Oates worked on Project Oracle at a consulting firm before striking out on their own. <br /><br />A quarter century later <strong>close to a quarter of the company's revenue -- $2. 5 billion a year -- still comes from selling software to federal state and local agencies</strong>. <br /><br /><strong>"Oracle wouldn't exist if it weren't for government contracts,"</strong> said Mike Wilson, author of the book <em>The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison</em>. <br /><br />Oracle has 1000 sales and consulting workers focused exclusively on government work. And in the wake of Sept. 11 Oracle is counting on the heightened interest in staving off terrorism to boost its government ties even more. <br /><br />Oracle has been actively pitching software to local governments to create detailed digital maps that could be used to respond to attacks. In March the company formed a partnership to focus on airport security. Ellison even offered to give the federal government software to help create a national ID to thwart terrorists. <br /><br />In a background paper Oracle boasts that it is "very active in homeland security." <br /><br />Banc of America Securities analyst Bob Austrian believes the entire high-tech industry could profit from the increased security spending. But he suspects Oracle could do better than most because <strong>it already has an unusually large share of government contracts and is in a particularly relevant niche</strong>. <br /><br />"The majority of interest surrounds tracking individuals and information which by its nature is a database-intensive application" he said. <br /><br />So perhaps it's fitting that Oracle is making headlines because of concerns over the recent $95 million government contract. <br /><br />Among the allegations are that Oracle persuaded California officials to buy more software than needed misrepresent the costs savings and rush through a no-bid award without considering alternatives. It didn't help that Oracle handed a $25000 check to Gov. Gray Davis' technology adviser just two weeks after the deal was signed. <br /> <br />http://articles.sfgate.com/2002-05-20/news/17546036_1_larry-ellison-robert-miner-homeland-security-government-contracts<br /><br /><strong>ORACLE NEWS ARCHIVE</strong><br /><br />An excellent database of news stories about Oracle, hosted by Newsrunner, is <a href="http://www.newsrunner.com/videos/oracle-corp/1/1?ref=%2Fentity%2Fscience-and-technology%2Foracle-corp%2F3000004383%2F0%2F0%3Fsummaryon%3D1%26sg%3Dall">here</a>.Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-71348710251598818352010-01-20T12:24:00.000-08:002010-01-20T13:53:47.908-08:00Secrets of Josef Mengele For Sale<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2ZchSoU3cirnwNeAhKHGY_Dr7htgJqcqpwKEYyHyIUhLzB976prcOTRP4EYAqDaXGXAr92s0ljETBMJyfkaw3jpFGGwixKJOS37L_92li4SbaVbSFyx-gYJUhpu6-x52T87ET/s1600-h/mengele2.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2ZchSoU3cirnwNeAhKHGY_Dr7htgJqcqpwKEYyHyIUhLzB976prcOTRP4EYAqDaXGXAr92s0ljETBMJyfkaw3jpFGGwixKJOS37L_92li4SbaVbSFyx-gYJUhpu6-x52T87ET/s320/mengele2.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5428921384394596498" /></a><em>By Paul Bedard</em><br />US News | January 19, 2010<br /><br />Few names make one cringe in horror like that of Josef Mengele, the Nazi concentration camp "doctor" who performed gruesome human experiments—especially on twin children—before dodging Allied troops and fleeing to South America in 1945. Yet despite some people's obsession with the medical monster and all that's been written about him, little of Mengele's own work has ever been seen. "Mengele," says Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Autographs, an auctioneer of historical goods, "is very, very rare."<br /><br />Until now. Panagopulos is featuring two Mengele writings in his next auction. The sale on January 20 and 21 is expected to bring Nazi collectors out of the woodwork to cough up $100,000 for the never-before-seen artifacts.<br /><br />One is a letter he wrote from Auschwitz to his estranged wife proclaiming his love and plans for "our imaginary reunion." The other is a 180-page "diary" devoted to Mengele's theories on eugenics and population control and his rambling views on women, politics, and the church. Consider: "The real problem," writes Mengele, "is to define when human life is worth living and when it has to be eradicated." The diary is written within the covers of a composition book titled Illustrated Zoology.<br /><br />Who'd buy these? Surprisingly, Panagopulos says that it's very often Jewish collectors, who use the items to teach history or donate them to museums. The Connecticut auctioneer wouldn't identify the owner of the artifacts, which were seized in Brazil years after Mengele died in 1979.<br /><br />Perhaps more intriguing is why anybody would sell the secrets of Dr. Death. Says Panagopulos: "As horrendous as he was, Mengele is a historic figure, as are Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Anything uncovered that can offer us an insight into their thinking helps complete the historical record and perhaps helps prevent similar crimes in the future." <br /><br />http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2010/01/19/secrets-of-nazis-josef-mengele-for-sale.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-36080273642467514322010-01-18T12:58:00.000-08:002010-01-18T13:00:34.256-08:00Motives of Convicted Ex-CIA Agent still a MysteryThe Jakarta Post | 01/18/2010<br /><br />While police are preparing to deport former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Bob Marshall, who was arrested in January 2008 in Bogor, his motives for entering Indonesia remain a mystery.<br /><br />The Indonesian police said last week that Marshall, 61, was wanted by the US spy organization for a number of violations and being a renegade agent for a number of years.<br /><br />However, observers here have alleged that Marshall’s arrest has highlighted intensive CIA operations in Indonesia.<br /><br />“It’s no secret that many CIA agents operate here. Of course, they have their own mission as Indonesia is an important country for the US,” intelligence expert from the Indonesian Institute of Science, Ikrar Nusa Bhakti said here Sunday.<br /><br />The police have refused to reveal why the US citizen entered the country, saying only that it had received a request to arrest Marshall from the US government for his alleged involvement in illegal arms trade in several countries, including in his home country.<br /><br />National Police chief of detectives Comr. Gen. Ito Sumardi said Friday the deportation of Bob Marshall was being processed by the National Central Bureau Interpol Indonesia upon request from the US.<br /><br />Bogor immigration officials arrested Marshall in January 2008 as he was applying for a passport. <br /><br />Marshall told the officials that he was an Indonesian citizen, but as he could not speak Indonesian, the officials were suspicious, and subsequently found his document to be fake.<br /><br />He was charged for illegal entry and staying in the country without proper documentation.<br /><br />The US national was charged under the 1992 Immigration Law for staying in the country illegally and not holding a valid passport, which carries a combined punishment of six years in jail.<br /><br />Ito said that Marshall had entered Indonesia through Batam in December 2007, along with seven illegal migrants by boat from Johor in Malaysia, and held 40 passports. <br /><br />The Bogor District Court subsequently gave him a two-year jail term.<br /><br />Marshall has reportedly been a US fugitive since 1974. <br /><br />Until 2004, US officials said that he had committed various crimes, including fraud, theft and illegal use of weapons.<br /><br />In 1978 he managed to flee a prison in the US after being arrested a year earlier.<br /><br />In 1984, the London police were searching for him over the illegal use of guns and ammunition. He returned to the US in 1992, but was again wanted for faking passports and checks. <br /><br />From then on, Marshall traveled to a number of countries to avoid arrests using different passports before entering Indonesia in December 2007.<br /><br />The Bogor Immigration Office said that he arrived in Batam in Riau Islands from Johor, Malaysia together with seven others illegal immigrants after evading the Indonesian police’s patrol.<br /><br />The CIA’s presence in Indonesia’s politics has long been speculated about, stirred recently by the publication of Tim Weiner’s book The Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, which claims Indonesia’s former vice president Adam Malik was a US spy.<br /><br />The Pulitzer-winning book also alleged that Adam received US$10,000 from the CIA to overthrow former president Sukarno. <br /><br />Weiner, a New York Times journalist, quoted former CIA agent Clyde McAvoy in his book as saying, “Adam Malik was a CIA agent in 1964”. <br /><br />The book, recently published in Indonesian, said Adam used the money to spearhead a movement aimed at cleansing communists following their abortive coup attempt on Sept. 30, 1965.<br /><br />Many people here immediately blasted the book as a foreign conspiracy to destabilize Indonesia. The Attorney General’s Office is looking at having the book banned.<br /><br />http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/01/18/motives-convicted-excia-agent-still-a-mystery.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-22723367321187322182010-01-17T18:24:00.000-08:002010-01-17T18:27:05.037-08:00A Stolen Painting, the Murder of Martin Luther King, the FBI .... and Steven Spielberg<br /><em>" ... IT’S SOMEWHAT IRONIC that a Rockwell has been caught up in such a maelstrom of controversy and conspiracy. The American illustrator is best known for his nostalgic scenes of simpler times ... "<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiuuADG6Xunh5pzHQv9_Y0QY4c9n38HP2p38G9x5bcXQH2liREI2mA02-F5wGgfVFT217D0kc6ElDmCwQQVSBADKzCNqAwYAx8WgsZUhCRXr_f0zONhPoTUWrDV9DbXjUZ1os5ew/s1600-h/steven-spielberg-lrg.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiuuADG6Xunh5pzHQv9_Y0QY4c9n38HP2p38G9x5bcXQH2liREI2mA02-F5wGgfVFT217D0kc6ElDmCwQQVSBADKzCNqAwYAx8WgsZUhCRXr_f0zONhPoTUWrDV9DbXjUZ1os5ew/s400/steven-spielberg-lrg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5115480011503772834" /></a>" ... after two suspects connected to the art theft ring were murdered 1978 and another refused to testify, prosecutors dropped the case ... "</em><br /><br />By Richard Salit<br />www.projo.com<br /><br /><strong>Norman Rockwell’s stolen 1967 painting, Russian Schoolroom, now valued at $700,000, is the subject of a legal dispute in U.S. District Court in Nevada.</strong><br /><br />NEWPORT — It has all the makings of a Hollywood film: a powerful movie mogul and his society art dealer inadvertently get tangled up in an art heist, an FBI investigation, a political assassination and a courtroom drama.<br /><br />Unfortunately for Judy Goffman Cutler, it’s a true story. The FBI recently discovered that in 1989 the Newport art dealer profited from the sale of a Norman Rockwell painting that had been stolen from a gallery in Missouri 16 years earlier. The buyer? Steven Spielberg. Yes, that one.<br /><br />So why has it taken so long for the FBI to crack the case and how come no one was ever arrested for the theft?<br /><br />One explanation given is that the suspected art thief enjoyed federal protection because he had vital information about a major U.S. assassination — the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.<br /><br />Instead of appearing on the big screen, this drama is being played out on location — in U.S. District Court in Nevada. Jack Solomon, whose gallery lost Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom to thieves nearly 35 years ago when it was worth $25,000, is suing Spielberg for the return of the painting, now valued at $700,000. Russian Schoolroom is in Los Angeles, where the Academy Award-winning director and producer lives.<br /><br />Goffman Cutler, meanwhile, is also fighting for the painting. She says that after the FBI announced it was stolen, she offered to extricate Spielberg from the controversy by giving him another Rockwell in exchange for Russian Schoolroom. She is also suing Solomon for $25 million for sullying her reputation and jeopardizing her business relationship with Spielberg. Solomon told the media she should have known the painting was stolen when she sold it to Spielberg.<br /><br />“The clear implication of the statement made to the press was that Goffman Cutler was trafficking in stolen art and should have known she was doing so,” her lawsuit reads.<br /><br />ON A RECENT DAY, the gates to a white, chateau-style mansion in Newport slowly swing open. Behind the wrought-iron fencing is Vernon Court, a Beaux Arts adaptation of a French estate, which occupies a full block of Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s famed Gilded Age promenade. The sprawling grounds feature a pool, manicured tiered gardens, and a park created by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City’s Central Park.<br /><br />This is the home of the National Museum of American Illustration, which Goffman Cutler and her husband, Laurence, founded in 2000 to honor what they call the “Golden Age of Illustration,” art specifically created for reproduction.<br /><br />The swiveling gates open onto a short gravel driveway, which leads to the museum entrance, framed by tall white columns and a second-story veranda. Through the doorway is the Great Marble Hall, where Laurence Cutler greets a visitor and guides him past one of Rockwell’s most famous World War II works, Miss Liberty, portraying a star-spangled American woman wielding an array of tools in service of her country.<br /><br />In the library, Cutler takes a seat and reflects on the worldwide publicity the case has generated — from newspapers and magazines that cover Clayton, Mo., where the painting was stolen in 1973, across the Atlantic to England, where both Spielberg and Rockwell are well known. Over the last several months, as a result of the tantalizing details surrounding Russian Schoolroom, it’s been all too common for the Cutlers to receive interview requests from the media. Fielding reporters’ questions comes naturally for the talkative Cutler, the museum’s chairman, and it’s a role that falls to him in between his frequent business trips across the U.S. and abroad.<br /><br />“Friends have asked about it, art dealers have asked about it, and people in the art world have asked about it. We got lots of e-mail about it from all over the world,” he says. “It got a tremendous amount of attention because you have Spielberg, who is the most famous guy in movies, and you have Norman Rockwell, whose name is synonymous with apple pie and ice cream and baseball. And you have the word ‘theft.’ ”<br /><br />IT’S SOMEWHAT IRONIC that a Rockwell has been caught up in such a maelstrom of controversy and conspiracy. The American illustrator is best known for his nostalgic scenes of simpler times, hundreds of which appeared on the folksy covers of the Saturday Evening Post.<br /><br />Russian Schoolroom, painted in 1967, just six years before its theft, was inspired by Rockwell’s visit to the Soviet Union in the 1960s. It depicts students seated at their desks, looking in the direction of a bust of Lenin, except for one student gazing out a window.<br /><br />Judy Goffman Cutler had an eye for Rockwell and the works of other accomplished American illustrators, such as N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in fine arts, she began collecting the works of American illustrators, which weren’t greatly valued at the time. Soon she had so many works that friends would say her home looked like a museum, her husband says. In 1966, she opened the American Illustrators Gallery in New York City.<br /><br />“She turned around one day and realized she made that end of the market,” Laurence Cutler says. “She became the art dealer to the stars and celebrities.… She built collections for Malcolm Forbes, George Lucas and Ross Perot and many museums.”<br /><br />The Newport museum she would later establish with her husband lists Lucas, comedian/actress Whoopi Goldberg, TV celebrity Matt Lauer and editorial cartoonist Paul Szep among its board of directors, as well as the developer of the Carnegie Abbey Club in Portsmouth, Peter de Savary, and the man who has taken over and expanded the development of the town’s western shore, Brian O’Neill.<br /><br />Spielberg began avidly collecting Rockwells as his movies, including E.T., Back to the Future and the Indiana Jones series, became box office blockbusters, making him a rich man. He also contributed to a new home for the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.<br /><br />Spielberg met the Cutlers through his passion for Rockwell. They enjoyed not only a business relationship, but a friendship, too, Laurence Cutler says. He recalls traveling to California in the early 1990s to see Spielberg and Whoopi Goldberg, the director’s Pacific Palisades neighbor and another collector of American illustration. Cutler and Goffman, whose first marriages had ended, were continuing on to Las Vegas, and Cutler told Spielberg he was considering marrying Goffman there. Spielberg didn’t think it romantic enough.<br /><br />“I had wanted to do a quick wedding and he talked me out of it,” says Laurence Cutler.<br /><br />Years later, after marrying, the Cutlers moved to Newport and opened their nonprofit illustration museum. Then, 18 years after selling Spielberg Russian Schoolroom, an agency not known for its artistic appreciation contacted Goffman Cutler: It was the FBI.<br /><br />EARLY ON THE morning of June 25, 1973, a man broke through the glass front door of Arts International Gallery, in Clayton, Mo., part of the greater St. Louis area, according to a police report. A witness saw the thief emerge with a painting seconds later and jump into a car.<br /><br />When gallery staff arrived, they quickly realized what was missing: Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom, an original, 16-by-37-inch oil-on-canvas. With the crime unsolved, Solomon, the gallery’s owner, collected $25,000 in insurance, according to court records.<br /><br />In 1988, the painting surfaced at an auction in New Orleans. But there was no mention of its checkered past. Goffman bid $70,400 and took Russian Schoolroom back to her American Illustrators Gallery, in New York City. A year later, after advertising the painting for sale for $200,000, she sold it to Spielberg.<br /><br />It wasn’t until 2004 that agents with the FBI’s Art Crime Team (ACT) learned from a tipster about the 1988 auction and the sale of the painting a year later. The agency posted a description and photograph of the painting on its Web site. Spielberg’s staff saw it and alerted him that the FBI considered his painting stolen and missing.<br /><br />“Mr. Spielberg’s staff immediately used art market channels to bring the painting’s current location to the FBI’s attention,” the FBI announced in a news release earlier this year that would spark the international media coverage. “Mr. Spielberg purchased the painting in 1989 from a legitimate dealer and did not become aware it was stolen until last week.”<br /><br />WHAT HAPPENED 34 years ago, however, was apparently a great deal more complicated than a simple smash-and-grab.<br /><br />The break-in at Arts International joined a rash of similar crimes. A thief or thieves were targeting art owners in the St. Louis area. The thieves snatched silver statues of Charles Lindbergh from the St. Louis Museum of History and returned to strike Arts International again, stealing seven Rockwell lithographs.<br /><br />The case led the police to focus on “a known police character … who had a reputation for stealing and fencing valuable art and antiques,” according to the FBI. A search warrant executed in 1976 at the St. Louis home of suspect Russell Byers recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in art and other valuables, including the seven Rockwell lithographs, according to police reports. But missing from the loot was Russian Schoolroom.<br /><br />The police brought charges against Byers. But after two suspects connected to the art theft ring were murdered 1978 and another refused to testify, prosecutors dropped the case, according to the St. Louis Riverfront Times. And curiously, around the same time, Byers had become remarkably useful to powerful federal officials, the alternative newsweekly reported.<br /><br />The reason? He had been offered $50,000 to kill King, the civil-rights leader.<br /><br />Byers’ tale intrigued officials in Washington, even 10 years after King’s assassination in 1968. But Byers wouldn’t talk for fear of incriminating himself. So in 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations granted him immunity. In exchange, Byers testified about a meeting he attended that was arranged by a hotel owner who stashed stolen goods for Byers.<br /><br />Byers’ accomplice introduced him to a lawyer and business associate, John Sutherland, who belonged to the American Independent Party of segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace and who was a leader of the White Citizens Council of St. Louis.<br /><br />“The three men met in a study that Byers described as decorated with Confederate flags and Civil War memorabilia… ,” reads a report of the House committee, according to the Riverfront Times. “Sutherland was wearing what appeared to Byers to be a Confederate colonel’s hat. After some social conversation, Byers asked Sutherland what he would have to do for the $50,000. Sutherland said he would have to kill, or arrange to have killed, Dr. Martin Luther King. Sutherland told him he belonged to a secret southern organization that had plenty of money.<br /><br />Byers testified that he declined the offer from the two men. But, according to a New York Times article from 1978, the committee found enough circumstantial evidence to believe that the same bounty offered to Byers in St. Louis could possibly have motivated James Earl Ray, who was a prisoner in a nearby Missouri penitentiary (and whose brother, John Ray, led local efforts to elect Wallace president).<br /><br />Ray escaped from the prison a year before King’s death and confessed to killing the minister. Despite recanting later, Ray was convicted at trial.<br /><br />Ten years later, in 1988, a tip about the stolen Rockwell surfaced as the painting was being auctioned off in New Orleans. But an FBI investigation into the matter was stymied when agents were told that the original theft report was missing, according to the Riverfront Times. It wasn’t until last year that the FBI, treating the theft as a cold case, was able to get a copy of the report from the Clayton, Mo., police. Soon the investigation would lead federal agents to Hollywood.<br /><br />JACK SOLOMON, who owned the now-defunct Arts International gallery and was Rockwell’s dealer until the artist’s death in 1978, wants Russian Schoolroom back. He is suing Spielberg in U.S. District Court in Nevada for the return of the painting and unspecified damages. The FBI, which was initially named in the lawsuit, has been dropped from the case.<br /><br />Solomon is none too pleased with Goffman Cutler. He doesn’t believe she adequately researched whether Russian Schoolroom might have been stolen, especially since the FBI had reported it to the for-profit Art Loss Register, which maintains a database of purloined artwork.<br /><br />“She should have known better,” he told the Riverfront Times. “She could have checked that — there’s been a record of this ever since the day it was stolen.”<br /><br />He also told the newsweekly about his desire to reacquire the painting.<br /><br />“I’m sure in two calls I could turn it over for X million dollars before the sun goes down,” he said.<br /><br />Goffman Cutler, who has sold more than 300 Rockwells, defends her handling of the painting. Before acquiring it, according to her lawsuit, she contacted the Norman Rockwell museum, which had just completed a definitive catalog of the artist’s work. The catalog identified Russian Schoolroom’s location as “whereabouts unknown,” unlike other works listed as “stolen.”<br /><br />She also sold the painting in a highly public manner, according to court papers. She put it in a traveling exhibition, showed it in New York City and featured it in a magazine advertisement. She even sent a notice to a parent gallery of Arts International, in New York, announcing that Russian Schoolroom was for sale.<br /><br />Her lawsuit cites Solomon’s published remarks, noting that “the clear implication of the statement made to the press was that Goffman was trafficking in stolen art.”<br /><br />“We are really angry about Solomon, who was sitting on his thumbs for 33 odd years,” says Laurence Cutler.<br /><br />Goffman Cutler is also suing the Art Loss Register. The business, her lawyer contends, illegally sought to coerce her into settling with Solomon, by threatening to tarnish her reputation and have her investigated by the FBI. Goffman Cutler is seeking damages of $5 million in profits from business she says she stood to do with Spielberg in the future, $10 million for damage to her reputation and $10 million for defamation.<br /><br />Goffman Cutler wants the court to affirm that her New York City business, The American Illustrators Gallery, has legally acquired the painting from Spielberg.<br /><br />“We have exchanged one of our paintings, not from our museum collection, a painting of comparable or higher value, approximately the same size, painted in the same year, and both were published in Look magazine. He is very happy with that. And we are very happy to take him out of this circus,” says Laurence Cutler. Since the FBI “doesn’t want [Russian Schoolroom] to cross state lines, Steven is holding it.”<br /><br />If Goffman Cutler’s private gallery succeeds in acquiring Russian Schoolroom, it will probably be loaned to the National Museum of American Illustration, in Newport, says Laurence Cutler. The painting would travel to China for a temporary exposition at the Shanghai Art Museum, he says, and then it would probably find a home at the Bellevue Avenue museum.<br /><br />“There is now interest in seeing this painting ‘in the flesh’ so to speak, the world over,” he says.<br /><br />rsalit@projo.com<br /><br />http://www.projo.com/news/content/STOLEN_ROCKWELL_09-23-07_BR6G7AB.2afd52a.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-43953667141307948052010-01-16T12:26:00.000-08:002010-01-16T12:33:41.715-08:00Auschwitz Sign Theft Suspect Named<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZWrynL23aazDEthQmacnGd1OPEH19b-MJUkwDttK50ZbK_HuFvyVlP18fuXNV98sdTOm2rQSdI6gInwHgAcl2-sOzJ8ByS9m0X7pJfz4tz1tN-RZKIe8CCOvn5WnYXMYp0tG/s1600-h/121_auschwitz2_wideweb__430x291.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 253px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZWrynL23aazDEthQmacnGd1OPEH19b-MJUkwDttK50ZbK_HuFvyVlP18fuXNV98sdTOm2rQSdI6gInwHgAcl2-sOzJ8ByS9m0X7pJfz4tz1tN-RZKIe8CCOvn5WnYXMYp0tG/s320/121_auschwitz2_wideweb__430x291.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427438550169906290" /></a>KRAKOW, Poland, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Polish authorities say they have issued an arrest warrant for a man they describe as a Swedish neo-Nazi on charges he stole the sign above the Auschwitz gate.<br /><br />"We have already issued the arrest warrant for the Swedish suspect to be brought to police headquarters in Krakow," Boguslawa Marcinkowska of the Prosecutor's Office in Krakow said Friday.<br /><br />Five Poles arrested Dec. 21 -- three days after they allegedly stole the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from the World War II German Nazi death camp -- said they were paid to steal the sign by a former neo-Nazi in Sweden, Poland Radio reported. <br /><br />He intended to sell it "for millions" to a collector, allegedly living in Great Britain, Poland Radio said.<br /><br />Swedish press reports identified the suspect named in the warrant as alleged former neo-Nazi Anders Hogstrom.<br /><br />"My role was to go get the sign in Poland," he told a Swedish daily newspaper Expressen. "I was the middleman and was supposed to take care of the sale."<br /><br />Hogstrom, described as a former leader of a 160-member strong neo-Nazi group based in southeast Sweden, told the newspaper the money from the theft would be used to launch a campaign against parliament and Swedish politicians.<br /><br />The sign was found in northern Poland, cut into three pieces.<br /><br />http://www.upi.com/Top_News/International/2010/01/15/Auschwitz-sign-theft-suspect-named/UPI-87991263604491/Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-4159750537148428582010-01-15T10:39:00.000-08:002010-01-15T10:49:51.879-08:00ACLU Wants to Know the Legal Basis for CIA Drone Strikes/Was There Actually an Airstrike in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVq26qRSJdfd7WkodmF5YAmzjpFnODDC7pi7-JcyzJARQzz2UD7IQMPxCAJKZXvF4d3hQmNvTwEJBv6lPGfIjK10DGFpA7SP-P4oUZavxGZnIdJ6py47JKaJob911tB9ysqOP-/s1600-h/080508-f-3188g-004.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVq26qRSJdfd7WkodmF5YAmzjpFnODDC7pi7-JcyzJARQzz2UD7IQMPxCAJKZXvF4d3hQmNvTwEJBv6lPGfIjK10DGFpA7SP-P4oUZavxGZnIdJ6py47JKaJob911tB9ysqOP-/s320/080508-f-3188g-004.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427040713831308594" /></a><em>By Spencer Ackerman </em><br />Washington Independent | 1/13/10<br /><br />It’s a question that rarely gets asked: from where does the Obama administration locate the legal authority to launch missiles from the CIA’s unmanned drones into Pakistani (and, this week, Afghan) territory? The ACLU wants to know.<br /><br />The civil liberties group today filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Departments of State, Justice and Defense for documentation establishing the legal basis for the drone strikes. Drone strikes in Pakistan have risen substantially during the first year of the Obama administration.<br /><br />Additionally, the civil liberties group wants to see the government’s estimates for how many civilians the drone program is responsible for killing. A recent New America Foundation report arguing that most drone critics overstate overstate civilian casualties still found that one in every three Pakistanis killed by the drones is a civilian, not a combatant.<br /><br />From a just-released ACLU statement:<br /><br /><blockquote>“The American public has a right to know whether the drone program is consistent with international law, and that all efforts are made to minimize the loss of innocent lives,” said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project. “The Obama administration has reportedly expanded the drone program, but it has not explained publicly what the legal basis for the program is, what limitations it recognizes on the use of drones outside active theaters of war and what the civilian casualty toll has been thus far. We’re hopeful that the request we’ve filed today will encourage the Obama administration to disclose information about the basis, scope and implementation of the program.”</blockquote><br />http://washingtonindependent.com/73876/aclu-wants-to-know-the-legal-basis-for-cia-drone-strikes<br /><br /><strong>Was There Actually an Airstrike in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province?</strong><br /><em>By Spencer Ackerman</em> <br />Washington Independent | 12/29/09 <br /><br />That’s the subject of an increasingly heated charge from the Afghan government after a Dec. 27 raid in the eastern province of Kunar left nine men dead. The International Security Assistance Force, NATO’s command in Afghanistan, said the men were part of an insurgent network planting improvised explosive devices.<br /><br /><strong>Representatives of the Afghan government say they were civilians</strong>. And the governor of the province says they were killed in an airstrike. Only one thing: <strong>there may not have been any airstrike</strong>.<br /><br />There’s an investigation open into the Kunar incident ordered by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But an ISAF official who would only speak on background while the investigation proceeds said unequivocally that there was “no airstrike.” ... <br /><br /><a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/72353/was-there-actually-an-airstrike-in-afghanistans-kunar-province">CONTINUED</a>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-12783054101104838942010-01-14T04:13:00.000-08:002010-01-14T04:30:16.917-08:00Fox News: Let’s Put on a ShowBy: <a href="http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/author/cocktailhag">cocktailhag</a> seminal.firedoglake.com | January 13, 2010<br /> <br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc5CnItjBbpu32xRnFx-KjfZOaZcHAWjLIpzyb5iJKmb6c65t-3XPZdrA9s8m53RUY20Q7eZbwwtw94I3bPN4_TKOhaW48dUOmPxK37QsBY6RFLGI9g4eeyRQahEGC2zTnQGQA/s1600-h/brockman.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 317px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc5CnItjBbpu32xRnFx-KjfZOaZcHAWjLIpzyb5iJKmb6c65t-3XPZdrA9s8m53RUY20Q7eZbwwtw94I3bPN4_TKOhaW48dUOmPxK37QsBY6RFLGI9g4eeyRQahEGC2zTnQGQA/s320/brockman.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426569536764065682" /></a>Not long after Nixon’s “last press conference” upon losing the California governorship in 1962, that memorably disturbing rant which prompted an amused President Kennedy to prematurely say that if he hadn’t done anything else for America, at least he’d “saved it from Richard Nixon,” Nixon fortuitously met up with one Roger Ailes. The rest, as they say, is history. Ailes saw divisions growing in America, over race, culture, and youthful rebellion, that could potentially be exploited to make even a viscerally unlikeable phony like Nixon electable, if played right. He knew intuitively that a lot of Americans were dumb, hateful, and racist, especially in the South, and the time was right to sell them a bill of goods that could make even the elitists of the Republican party look desirable, if that inchoate resentment could be harnessed in the proper way.<br /><br />Nixon was understandably mistrustful of television after the catastrophic 1960 debates with Kennedy, but the former “Mike Douglas Show” producer was able to convince him that TV could be his friend, especially if the reality was drained out of it. Thus, 30 years before Bush’s fake town hall participants were handed their fake questions, with Ailes’ help Nixon was able to artificially manufacture the warmth and spontaneity he congenitally lacked through staged “discussions” with carefully chosen “citizens,” which began his improbable path to victory in 1968. And we all know how that turned out.<br /><br />Although it’s impossible to determine what Ailes’ real ideology is (besides making money) he decided, somewhat audaciously at the time, that news didn’t have to be, well, news, but merely had to play it on TV, and he honed his skills at this dubious endeavor for Republicans ever after, culminating in his creation of a whole news network dedicated to deception through newscasts when he joined Rupert Murdoch to conjure up FOX News.<br /><br />Like Nixon, Murdoch was a shabby opportunist who was widely disliked in his field, for good reason, and like Nixon, he was convinced that the problem was with everyone else, not him. Unlike Nixon, he was also insanely wealthy, and whatever he lacked in ethics and decency he was prepared to paper over with loads of cash from the empire he’d built on his inheritance. Sleazy politicians come and go, but sleazy global media empires are forever, and Murdoch was more than willing to spend big to re-educate the world to his way of thinking for the long term. Thus, the architect of Nixon’s Southern Strategy was handed a golden opportunity to take his deceitful and misanthropic show on the road.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjao8gQvROE7lwHs2CpmjF38qZDuzGe-J3uD_UgDGVwKYaxkJgC9H1TTHEjsUouiUgaGY2eyJSKJ_sXJgRkBC9111r-g-7pYY3UmaTGV46BOe4T-Wg47ZAfSNeES3dg6wmu5nFl/s1600-h/BeckCrying_1f6ab.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 241px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjao8gQvROE7lwHs2CpmjF38qZDuzGe-J3uD_UgDGVwKYaxkJgC9H1TTHEjsUouiUgaGY2eyJSKJ_sXJgRkBC9111r-g-7pYY3UmaTGV46BOe4T-Wg47ZAfSNeES3dg6wmu5nFl/s320/BeckCrying_1f6ab.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426571736630262866" /></a>Of course, Murdoch had no intention of aping the despised liberal media by doing any enterprise reporting, setting up expensive bureaus, or hiring actual journalists; that would potentially have let inconvenient reality seep in and worse, waste money. As Ailes knew from his long experience wooing the stupid and resentful, all that was required was the trappings of a newsroom populated by convincing-looking talking heads to fool this bunch. Better yet, such grave inadequacies could actually be a selling point to a target audience that was as fond of objective reality as the Wicked Witch of the West was fond of a bucket of water. ”Fair and Balanced” would become code for “don’t confuse me with the facts,” and pure hype and nonsense dreamed up for political effect would actually be preferable to the dreary old facts produced by the hard work of journalism.<br /><br />After a few hundred million dollars was expended handing out content for free and attempting to bring down the hated Democratic President, FOX finally got everything it wanted in its dream candidate, George W. Bush, and that’s when things started going down hill, even as ratings and profits soared. The audience demanded more, even after Bush’s insane policies had trashed the economy and brought about a string of crushing and deserved defeats for the Republicans… and Murdoch and Ailes were determined to keep feeding the beast, which had grown like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” with similar appetites. The hideous reality that FOX had helped to create kept rearing its ugly head, and keeping the audience distracted was getting more and more difficult. First the reliably flaccid but obviously correct Colmes had to be tossed off Hannity’s show; then the demented and disturbing Glenn Beck was brought in from CNN, which was busily washing its hands of the Bush era, to, among other things, boil (fake, natch…) frogs on the air and draw misspelled but seemingly heartfelt graffiti on his chalk board about Hitler, Stalin, and whatever else came to mind.<br /><br />Finally, the carefully crafted artifice of even being a “news” organization had to be dropped altogether; fake videos, blatant political organizing, and hilarious staging of news footage was routinely caught on tape, and the crowds, rather than leaving the theater in disgust, wanted more. Enter Sarah Palin.<br /><br />Now, the monkey cage that FOX has become is on display for all the world to see, and just like the party it relentlessly fetishizes, looks more and more cuckoo to the outside world as it flings its poo and unashamedly touches itself in unseemly places. Members of the Murdoch family have been moved even to risk their fat dividend checks from the notoriously vindictive Rupert by publicly declaring their embarrassment, and then Ailes rocks the boat by giving a rather impertinently self-aggrandizing interview to the hated New York Times about his genius.<br /><br />Murdoch, having created this monster, has reached the unhappy moment that ABC once did with “Happy Days” after Fonzie famously jumped the shark. What next?<br /><br />http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/23853Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-39402165580927335572010-01-13T18:40:00.000-08:002010-01-13T18:51:55.859-08:00Eugene, Oregon's Pacifica Forum/Nazi Bund<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_F9Kf-foUpKS6guQyV5YsYL8YYmTu0kpHMp4FDBeXd0U3iboZL6pZwhi0llu50IbIjbWzVMutXgFniKtF1WHsMnv08OCWGPY403QRVybAV1Crlu_SgXS6_O3iZ9FKaiV8cODP/s1600-h/pacificaforum.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 201px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_F9Kf-foUpKS6guQyV5YsYL8YYmTu0kpHMp4FDBeXd0U3iboZL6pZwhi0llu50IbIjbWzVMutXgFniKtF1WHsMnv08OCWGPY403QRVybAV1Crlu_SgXS6_O3iZ9FKaiV8cODP/s320/pacificaforum.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426421899629995074" /></a><strong>University to Address Pacifica Controversy</strong><br /><strong><em>Students plan demonstration to coincide <br />with Forum meeting at 3 p.m. today in the EMU</em></strong><br /><br /><em>By CJ Ciaramella</em><br />January 8, 2010 | Oregon Daily Emerald<br /><br />University administrators are rethinking the school’s policy on providing meeting space after another controversial event at the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group that some have criticized for being racist and bigoted.<br /><br />At the Pacifica Forum’s Dec. 11 meeting on campus, speaker Jimmy Marr gave a presentation, titled “The National Socialist Movement: An Inside View of America’s Far-Right.” According to several accounts, Marr and other audience members in the room gave Nazi salutes.<br /><br />Another Pacifica Forum meeting, titled “Everything You Wanted to Know about Pacifica Forum but were Afraid to Ask,” is scheduled today at 3 p.m. in the EMU Walnut Room. Some students are planning a counter-demonstration to protest the group’s alleged anti-Semitism.<br /><br />Michael Williams, a member of Eugene’s Anti-Hate Task Force who has monitored the forum since 2003, said Marr “expressed serious concern that white DNA is not being safeguarded from pollution by other groups.”<br /><br />The Pacifica Forum was founded in 1994 by Orval Etter, a retired University professor. Under a policy that gives former professors access to University space, the Forum enjoys free meeting space on campus.<br /><br />The Forum was originally formed to discuss issues of pacifism and non-violence, but over the years several critics have come to think of the group as home to a few self-proclaimed white separatists who have held sway over much of its programming. It is now listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.<br /><br />In recent years, the Forum has hosted several prominent Holocaust deniers, such as David Irving and Mark Weber, which sparked rounds of protest from community and campus Jewish groups.<br /><br />Members of the Forum have neither confirmed nor denied that they are anti-Semites, but in April 2007, Etter told the Emerald that he had not bothered to confirm nor refute the accusations because criticism “gets us attention” and gives meetings “livelier spirit.”<br /><br />In 2008, at the urging of Oregon Hillel, then-University President Dave Frohnmayer addressed the issue in a letter, calling forum members’ actions “gutter bigotry.” He went on to write:<br /><br />“Groups such as this that use University facilities from time to time do not speak for the University of Oregon. Nor does the appearance of any invited speaker or the use of our facilities imply the institution’s endorsement, support, or even its moral indifference to the content of a message.”<br /><br />University Vice President of Institutional Equity and Diversity Charles Martinez echoed Frohnmayer’s sentiments in a letter to the Eugene Weekly shortly after the Dec. 11 meeting.<br /><br />“We are addressing our policies about how best to proceed with our mission and values while safeguarding the campus community and the values of free speech,” Martinez wrote. “While I strongly believe that the UO must defend the free exchange of ideas and promote intellectual inquiry, we have a greater responsibility to turn ideas into the discovery of knowledge in a manner that is inclusive and welcoming to all our students and the <br />communities we serve.”<br /><br />In a phone interview, Martinez said that University President Richard Lariviere will be meeting later this month with members of the Anti-Hate Task Force to talk about the Forum’s content.<br /><br />Martinez said the University values free speech and has no litmus test for groups seeking University space, but he questioned the Forum’s motives.<br /><br />“Higher education really should be a place where there is this broad exchange of ideas,” he said. “On the other hand, is this what the Pacifica Forum does, and is this what happens at the meetings? My concern is that there is hate-mongering disguised as academic inquiry. If there is, we do as an institution and community have a responsibility to respond to it.”’<br /><br />However, Pacifica Forum regular Billy Rojas, who spoke at the Forum’s Dec. 4 meeting about “Coal Strip Mining: America’s Worst Environmental Problem,” sharply disagreed with critics’ charges against the group.<br /><br />“Today’s PF is not the same Forum as 2007 or 2006 or 2005 or any previous years, no matter what Michael Williams may say,” Rojas wrote in an e-mail. “Yet Williams persistently cites incidents from the pre-2008 past, which are mostly irrelevant for 2008-09, as if they have major importance. Actually, at the recommendation of the group’s founder, University emeritus professor Orval Etter, Pacifica set out on a new course starting on Aug. 1 of 2008, with focus on free speech and education.” <br /><br />Williams, however, said hateful content at the meetings is rarely, if ever, countered and has in fact grown more frequent over the last few years.<br /><br />“The Pacifica Forum’s topics have broadened to include bigotry against Latinos, blacks, Muslims, homosexuals,” Williams said. “You name a group that is a typical target of far right-wing hate, and the forum has had a program on it. And while there may be dissidents among some of the regulars, the programs continue.”<br /><br />cciaramella@dailyemerald.com<br /><br />http://www.dailyemerald.com/university-to-address-pacifica-controversy-1.1007224Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-463312743610045202010-01-12T22:13:00.000-08:002010-01-13T07:27:37.314-08:00Attack on Hampshire College Highlights NY Times Book Review’s Rightward Shift<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUTHW9e7ehJ6VBMnOHd3fcecr5QcJOwvHX3UpIQWQkE9KnoO8jTE2wQ3GWekkJlQ8hLzfn8Zw4QdGvIF36AzwRbirb0KkTQYMlS4-Ct-N8_M0-zoW9QRbENfrCoJyZgGc1dnEO/s1600-h/120_restrict_height_500.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 266px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUTHW9e7ehJ6VBMnOHd3fcecr5QcJOwvHX3UpIQWQkE9KnoO8jTE2wQ3GWekkJlQ8hLzfn8Zw4QdGvIF36AzwRbirb0KkTQYMlS4-Ct-N8_M0-zoW9QRbENfrCoJyZgGc1dnEO/s320/120_restrict_height_500.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426106932020557026" /></a><em>by Randy Shaw</em><br />www.beyondchron.org | Jan. 07‚ 2010 <br /><br />As newspaper book review sections shrink or disappear, editors must make tough choices. In the case of the <em>Sunday New York Times Book Review</em>, this has meant <strong>promoting books with conservative messages while largely ignoring those with progressive political themes</strong>. A particularly egregious example occurred on January 3, when the <em>Times</em> ran a laudatory review of an over-the-top attack on Hampshire College. Hampshire is an “alternative” liberal arts school whose notable alumni includes filmmaker Ken Burns, National Yiddish Book Center founder Aaron Lansky, and Stoneyfield Farm Yogurt founder and CEO Gary Hirshberg.<br /><br />Although the reviewer described the book’s author as a member of a “despised fringe group” at Hampshire — which should have raised flags about his credibility — the review highlighted the book’s depiction of Hampshire as “a laboratory of self-mythologizing.” The reviewer also condescendingly refers to Hampshire students as among the “East Coast hippie majority” — despite the book’s setting in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The only reason to review such an obscure memoir is to denigrate a liberal institution, which has become all too typical in the <em>New York Times Book Review</em> section.<br /><br />Anyone paying close attention to the Sunday <em>New York Times</em> would notice a trend away from reviews of contemporary political books, particularly those that offer progressive perspectives on current politics and/or social movements. The <em>Times</em> has developed a particular attraction to celebrity bios, while offering lengthy front-page reviews of books about such conservative icons as Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley. ...<br /><br /><strong>The Truth About Hampshire College</strong><br /><br />Why would the <em>Times</em> use its scarce <em>Book Review</em> space to promote a memoir about an author’s random small college experience in the late 80’s and early 90’s? Because <strong><em>Times</em>’ editors clearly see Hampshire College as one of those 60’s era institutions that refuses to change with the times, and must be prodded to do so by the <em>Times</em>’ promoting books that mock such throwbacks</strong>. ...<br /><br /><em>Randy Shaw is the author of</em> Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Attack_on_Hampshire_College_Highlights_i_NY_Times_Book_Review_s_i_Rightward_Shift_7683.html">FULL STORY</a><br /><br />http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Attack_on_Hampshire_College_Highlights_i_NY_Times_Book_Review_s_i_Rightward_Shift_7683.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-44285715091128666512010-01-11T13:05:00.000-08:002010-01-11T13:06:03.440-08:00The Fate of Blacks in Nazi Germany<strong>During the Third Reich, Germany had a small black community, yet relatively little is known about their life in the Nazi era. Deutsche Welle takes a look at survival strategies under Hitler's oppressive regime. </strong><br /><br />Deutsche Welle | 10.01.2010 <br /> <br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiieq3DWSUPBtQux9ouEXg8mq8WhYFdxt3-rja-dbVSkqxt8pqUllXE5mOKN3PDFNhfgi_MHGnPvZINbQGTq9OpbDLLdSfV7Ijv63CjpN7JkSD-s8lqOI4itkLn7s5cXKOYGO0k/s1600-h/black-assimilation-nazi-style-small.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 319px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiieq3DWSUPBtQux9ouEXg8mq8WhYFdxt3-rja-dbVSkqxt8pqUllXE5mOKN3PDFNhfgi_MHGnPvZINbQGTq9OpbDLLdSfV7Ijv63CjpN7JkSD-s8lqOI4itkLn7s5cXKOYGO0k/s320/black-assimilation-nazi-style-small.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5425503695483931458" /></a>Between 20,000 - 25,000 blacks lived in Nazi Germany under Hitler's rule. When asked about blacks in the Third Reich, Germans are most likely to talk about the Afrika Schau. In his book, "Hitler's Black Victims," American University researcher, Dr. Clarence Lusane writes that the Africa Schau was a traveling show that began in 1936. The show's owners were Juliette Tipner, whose mother was from Liberia and her white husband, Adolph Hillerkus. The aim of their spectacle was to showcase African culture in Germany. <br /><br />In 1940, the Afrika Schau was taken over by the SS and Joseph Goebbels who "were hoping that it would become useful not only for propaganda and ideological purposes but also as a way to gather all the blacks in the country under one tent," writes Lusane. For blacks who joined the Afrika Schau, it became a means of survival in Nazi Germany. <br /><br />Duke University historian, Dr. Tina Campt, whose research deals with the African Diaspora in Germany said that "it was possible that blacks who were involved in it used it for purposes that were not the intention of those who organized it. So if the Afrika Schau dehumanized people, there were ways that blacks involved in it could use it as an opportunity to make money, as a site to connect to other black people," she told Deutsche Welle. <br /><br />However, the show was unsuccessful and was shut down in 1941. Also, it could not gather all the blacks in the country under one tent possibly because it only accepted dark-skinned blacks who appealed to the stereotype of what was considered African. <br /><br /><strong>The fate of the "Rhineland Bastards" </strong><br /><br />Most of the light-skinned blacks living in Germany during the Third Reich were of mixed blood, and a good number of them were the children of French-African occupation soldiers and German women in the Rhineland. The existence of these children is and remains common knowledge because they were mentioned in Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"). In Nazi Germany, the derogatory term, Rheinlandbastard (Rhineland Bastard), was used to describe them. <br /><br />Deutsche Welle spoke to leading German historian Prof. Reiner Pommerin to find out what happened to these children. "I published a book in the 70s, which told the reader about the sterilization of mixed blood children. These were children who had been fathered by occupation forces - mostly French occupation forces," he said. His book, "Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde. Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit 1918 - 1937" ("Sterilization of the Rhineland Bastards: the fate of a colored German minority 1918 - 1937") publicized the sterilization of the Black minority in Nazi Germany.<br /><br />Prior to the publication of the book in 1979, this information was unknown to the public. The sterilization of biracial children was carried out secretly because it went against 1938 Nazi laws and procedures. The exact numbers remain unknown, but it is estimated that 400 children of mixed blood were sterilized - most without their knowledge, Pommerin said. <br /><br />Today, the fate of the "Rhineland Bastards" still remains largely unknown. The lack of public knowledge regarding their fate may have to do with the "lack of public interest in minorities," said Pommerin. Campt attributes it to the secrecy behind the sterilization program and the nature of the Afrika Schau. "It has to do with the status of the Afrika Schau as a spectacle. So that was set up as a visual spectacle that was supposed to get people to notice something as a display. In that way, it was really publicized in order to get people to think about," she said. <br /><br /><strong>Recognition of the black experience in Nazi Germany </strong><br /><br />According to Campt, the major difference between the experience of blacks and that of other groups in the Third Reich is the lack of a systematic Nazi extermination plan. Moreover, because of the small number of blacks living in Germany, few people are ready to recognize that there was even a population whose experience can be discussed. <br /><br />Furthermore, there is little or no support in Germany for researchers working in this area. Unlike in the United States where research on minorities is well-funded due to the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, "black German scholars who have been doing this work for years don't necessarily get the recognition on the basis of qualifications, on the basis of whether or not they are working within a certain kind of academic scholarly structure for the study of minority cultures," Campt said. <br /><br />All the same, it should be noted that even though the publication of Pommerin's book on the sterilization of the "Rhineland Bastards" did not generate much public interest at the time, it received some attention from a German politician. The member of the Social Democratic Party asked if he could obtain the names of the victims, so that they could be compensated.<br /><br />Pommerin told <em>Deutsche Welle</em> that "(the politician) wanted to hand over 3,000 German marks ($2,190). I knew where they were living, but I didn't want to bother these people because I could tell that this was more a political interest. And I could see the TV cameras standing in front of the house in the village and money is handed over. And all of a sudden the sensation is great in the village - here is someone who had been sterilized." <br /><br /><em>Author: Chiponda Chimbelu<br />Editor: Rob Mudge</em><br /><br />http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5065360,00.html<br /><br /><strong><em>Also see:</em> <a href="http://brotherpeacemaker.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/black-assimilation-nazi-style/">"Black Assimilation Nazi Style"</a></strong>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-34884612703411288722010-01-10T10:52:00.000-08:002010-01-13T19:17:59.347-08:00Oliver Stone Suggests Hitler is 'Easy Scapegoat'<blockquote><em>" ... The director ... said his intention was to broaden minds, delving into <strong>the funding of the Nazi party and how American corporations were involved in it</strong>. ... "</em></blockquote><strong>Oliver Stone, the controversial film director, is facing another backlash after suggesting that Hitler was made an "easy scapegoat" by history. </strong><br /> <br /><em>By Nick Allen in Los Angeles </em><br />Telegraph | 10 Jan 2010<br /><br />Stone ... has made a new documentary series which he says will place historical figures including Hitler and Stalin "in context".<br /><br />The director claimed many people in America did not understand the connection between the First World War and the Second World War and said his intention was to broaden minds, <strong>delving into the funding of the Nazi party and how American corporations were involved in it</strong>.<br /><br />Stone said he did not want to make an "easy" history programme and talked about trying to understand people he despises. His series will aim to uncover little reported facts that shaped the modern United States.<br /><br />Professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the series, said the programme would not portray Hitler in a more positive light, but would describe him as a historical phenomenon rather than "somebody who appeared out of nowhere". <br /><br />Stone has courted controversy before, most notably in his film JFK which suggested a high level conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. He has also polarised opinion with controversial films about President George W Bush, and Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader.<br /><br />Stone said his latest series would show history from an internationalist, rather than an American, point of view. That included a "complete other story" about how Stalin had fought against the German war machine more than anyone.<br /><br />The director said he fully <strong>expected to face a backlash from conservative pundits</strong>.<br /><br />He said: "Obviously, <strong>Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history </strong>and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of <strong>ignorant attacks</strong>." Stone, 63, who won Oscars for directing <em>Platoon</em> and <em>Born on the Fourth of July</em>, also won a Purple Heart for his own military service in Vietnam.<br /><br />http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6962475/Oliver-Stone-suggests-Hitler-is-easy-scapegoat.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-59605376307423920242010-01-01T09:35:00.000-08:002010-01-07T13:29:46.172-08:00Reformatted Mirror of AC's Blacklist (In Progress) for ResearchersThe mirror of <em>AC's Blacklist</em> is organized by topic for researchers and writers, and it has a more efficient search engine, among other developments in the blender. Every post from the <em>Blacklist</em> is mirrored at the new one and categorized - <strong><a href="http://www.theworldismycountry.org/">ALEX CONSTANTINE'S BLACKLIST (MIRROR)</strong>: </a><a href="http://www.theworldismycountry.org/">http://www.theworldismycountry.org/</a>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-80428426674707296642009-12-31T16:37:00.000-08:002010-01-07T18:43:21.232-08:00Mufti Usmani Holds Blackwater Responsible for Ashura Bomb Blast<strong><em>Also see:</em> <a href="http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/12/american-sponsorship-of-global.html">"American Sponsorship of Global Terrorism,"</a> and <a href="http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/12/usaid-officer-arrested-qwith-terrorists.html">"USAID Officer Arrested with Terrorists in Islamabad,"</a> also <a href="http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/11/islamabad-americans-dressed-as-afghans.html">"DynCorp Sub-Contractor Inter-Risk was Behind the Oct. 10th Suicide Bombing of Pakistan's Army HQ,"</a> and <a href="http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/12/extraditing-headley-will-expose-cia.html">"Extraditing Headley will Expose CIA,"</a> among many others I've posted on American engagement in terrorism. Also related: "<a href="http://pakistankakhudahafiz.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/usts-united-states-of-terror-sinister-motives-against-pakistan/">UST’s (United States of Terror) Sinister Motives Against Pakistan"</a></strong> - AC<br /> <br /><em>By Shamim Bano</em><br />The International News | December 31, 2009<br /> <br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilnxy-wL4K6ufJwHVYlZBXtfsrORXQwRr36L7BMJwhp_lmoNugorVFFscsOWI9fXAIlFz2dpani40Qf-snVQq8EdjELEbc90ZUtD69vHP5QpC14oepeFruoC7lnK0NrYWuaQ4b/s1600-h/Peshawar-blast.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 216px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilnxy-wL4K6ufJwHVYlZBXtfsrORXQwRr36L7BMJwhp_lmoNugorVFFscsOWI9fXAIlFz2dpani40Qf-snVQq8EdjELEbc90ZUtD69vHP5QpC14oepeFruoC7lnK0NrYWuaQ4b/s400/Peshawar-blast.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421565821445282706" /></a>"Karachi - Contrary to the claim and media reports about Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan <a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20091230-shiite-ashura-karachi-celebration-pakistani-taliban-responsibility-bombing">taking responsibility</a> [for] the Ashura bomb blast, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Rafi_Usmani"><strong>Mufti Mohammed Rafi Usmani</a> held US agency Blackwater responsible for the gory incident that claimed more than 40 lives</strong>." <br /><br />The Mufti's observation about the source of the blast is borne out by other stories in the world press. Compare the "Taliban claim of responsibility," as reported worldwide, with this from today's <em><a href="http://www.islamidavet.com/english/tag/blackwater-behind-peshawar-blast/">Islami Davet</a></em>: "<strong>Hakimullah Mehsud, head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, said Blackwater and some Pakistani agencies were involved in the bomb explosion at a crowded market in Peshawar</strong>." The <em>International News</em> story continues:<br /><br /><blockquote>Addressing a news conference along with Muhammed Taqi, Mufti Muhammed Naeem, Maulana Tanver-ul-Haq and others on Wednesday, Mufti Usmani said that Blackwater was involved in the killing of innocent people in the Muharram procession. <br /><br />He said that soon after the blast, shops in the city’s economic hub were set ablaze which proved that the attack was “pre-planned and organized”. <br /><br />Mufti Usmani said that the incident was a conspiracy against Islam and the government totally failed to control the situation, as it was the responsibility of the government to provide security to the citizens and to protect the property. He said that the terrorism act was not committed by any Muslim and instead it was the act of Blackwater that had hired locals to unleash terror in the city.<br /><br />He alleged that Blackwater was hiring youths in Peshawar to carry out attacks and suicide bombings. <br /><br />Mufti Usmai said that no person could carry weapons or other destructive items with him on occasions of religious processions and the incident was an attack on the country’s sovereignty. <br /><br />“By the grace of God we achieved the country, but we do not take care of it. It is not only weaknesses of successive governments but also of the people who are the least bothered about taking care of their country,” he said. <br /><br />The government, he said, must stop taking dictation from the US and form its own policies. Mufti Usmani demanded that immediate measures should be taken to compensate the affected traders of Boulton Market, Light House and other affected areas.<br /><br />He also demanded conducting an independent inquiry into the incident and exposing those involved in the heinous crime. <br /><br />Meanwhile, the Sunni Ittehad Council condemned the attack on the Ashura procession. <br /><br />Addressing a press conference, Sahibzada Fazal Karim said that the attack on the procession was a conspiracy to destabilise the country.<br /><br />He demanded of the government to constitute a commission headed by the Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court to probe the matter and to ascertain the losses incurred by the traders within 15 days. He also demanded of the government to announce compensation for the affected traders so that they could restart their businesses again. <br /><br />He also supported the strike call given by the Sunni Rahber Council for Friday. <br /><br />Meanwhile, the Sunni Tehreek (ST) in a separate press conference also endorsed the Friday strike call and announced to hold a protest rally in the city on Saturday. ST leader Shakil Qadri said that protest rallies would also be held in other parts of the country.<br /><br />http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=216088</blockquote><br /><em>- Alex Constantine</em><a href="http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/12/usaid-officer-arrested-qwith-terrorists.html"></a><br /><br />-------------<strong>UPDATE</strong>-------------<br /><strong>Mystery Surrounds Contractors' Role at CIA Base</strong><br /><em><strong>Paresi and Wise, Killed by CIA Suicide Bomber, Worked For Company Once Known as Blackwater</strong></em><br /><em>By MATTHEW COLE, NICK SCHIFRIN and RHONDA SCHWARTZ</em><br />ABC News | Jan. 6, 2010<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjLtFeke1C3QWaWpWtVRCHSNVng6CDgMYLZcoNOczwSloNZIMeUPtKnFhU7EsyRb3IzL-eJQoavnZNLaKoOeUlPDdpUPwAa1D1aLWMokXBMabj9TltFtc1ll2hT3rda2wNzviC/s1600-h/untitled.bmp"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjLtFeke1C3QWaWpWtVRCHSNVng6CDgMYLZcoNOczwSloNZIMeUPtKnFhU7EsyRb3IzL-eJQoavnZNLaKoOeUlPDdpUPwAa1D1aLWMokXBMabj9TltFtc1ll2hT3rda2wNzviC/s400/untitled.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5424191549228185074" /></a>Two of the seven CIA personnel killed in last week's suicide bombing in Afghanistan worked as contractors for the company formerly known as Blackwater, but <strong>what role Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise played at the CIA's forward base in Khost remains unknown</strong>. The base collected intelligence used in the CIA's drone attacks across the border in Pakistan, but <strong>CIA director Leon Panetta has said that the former Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, is no longer involved in the drone program</strong>. <br /><br />Spokesman for both the CIA and Xe/Blackwater declined to comment whether Paresi and Wise were employed through Xe, but two private intelligence sources and one current government official familiar with CIA operations at the Afghanistan base confirmed to ABCNEws.com that the two were there as Xe employees. A source familiar with Xe's contracts said that <strong>their role was not to provide security for the base, but provided no further details</strong>. <br /><br /><strong>Paresi and Wise were both former elite military commandos</strong>, and were killed when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a meeting inside the CIA base near the Pakistan border. Wise was a 35-year-old former Navy SEAL from Virginia Beach, Va. A statement from the family of the 46-year-old Dane Paresi described him as having recently retired from 27 years in the Army, many in <strong>Special Operations</strong>. He was from Portland, Ore. <br /><br />http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mystery-surrounds-contractors-role-cia-base/story?id=9486136Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-29416928432670727102009-12-31T12:29:00.000-08:002009-12-31T12:38:37.571-08:00ADL: Pius XII did not Save Jews in WWII<strong>" ... the ADL concluded that the claim amounted to an 'apparent campaign of misinformation' and urged Pope Benedict XVI to reject its conclusions. ... " </strong><br /><br /><blockquote><em>By JERUSALEM POST STAFF</em> | Dec 31, 2009</blockquote>The Anti-Defamation League took the Catholic Church to task this week, disputing "historical evidence" cited by Church officials as proof that WWII-era Pope Pius XII had worked to save Jews from the Holocaust. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH2h8GCDJsMpVIUEhr4Ti-Eujr8ZJPC1L7QT8YTgPmjqvP0RRZT10dkQJr1JqWPdTbQjIAKPnMn3cZg5X6MSyV5LicnXweWnFO-88C6WRlDjXSLIqvgphPzbHfkznCR2Q0vF-i/s1600-h/Satellite.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 248px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH2h8GCDJsMpVIUEhr4Ti-Eujr8ZJPC1L7QT8YTgPmjqvP0RRZT10dkQJr1JqWPdTbQjIAKPnMn3cZg5X6MSyV5LicnXweWnFO-88C6WRlDjXSLIqvgphPzbHfkznCR2Q0vF-i/s320/Satellite.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421501560826511442" /></a><em>Pope Pius XII, wearing the ring of St. Peter, raises his right hand in a papal blessing at the Vatican, 1945.</em><br /><br />The evidence in question was presented at a conference in Rome in September 2009 and apparently cleared Pius XII of accusations that he was silent in the face of the atrocities taking place in wartime Europe. The conference was held by the Pave the Way Foundation, a group that works to bridge religious divisions. <br /><br />On December 19, Pope Benedict declared Pius "Venerable," a stage on the road to full canonization and sainthood. The move was met with criticism from Jewish groups that believe Pius deserves censure for his "neutrality policy" and acquiescence during the war, even while European states passed anti-Jewish laws and began mass deportations of Jews to concentration camps in the east. <br /><br />The Vatican has claimed that Pius worked to save Jews throughout the war but was forced to do so behind the scenes because he was surrounded by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. <br /><br />According to the ADL, the evidence, which included wartime documents from an Italian internment camp for Jews in Campagna, did not demonstrate "Pope Pius XII's efforts to help Jews in the face of Nazism," as claimed by Pave the Way founder Gary Krupp. <br /><br />After examining the evidence with a handful of expert historians, the ADL concluded that <strong>the claim amounted to an "apparent campaign of misinformation" and urged Pope Benedict XVI to reject its conclusions</strong>. <br /><br />"To use the Campagna files to suggest that Pope Pius XII was active in attempting to rescue Jews is to demand something that [the] historical record cannot sustain," according to historian Paul O'Shea, author of <em>A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli, Politics and the Jews of Europe 1917-1943</em>, who participated in the study. <br /><br />"Our examination serves as a salutary reminder of the distinction between alleged claim and verifiable fact," said Debórah Dwork, a Holocaust scholar at Clark University in Massachusetts. <br /><br />ADL national director Abraham Foxman said the "historical evidence" presented to Pope Benedict [by the Pave the Way conference] makes it all the more crucial for the Vatican to open its Holocaust-era archives to independent scholars and historians now. <br /><br />"We reject the claim that the world and aging Holocaust survivors must wait another six years until all 16 million documents from Pope Pius' papacy are catalogued by the Vatican. <br /><br />"We note that Pope John Paul II opened a cache of Holocaust records from Pope Pius XI before the records of his entire papacy were catalogued. We request that Pope Benedict take the same courageous decision and order the relevant Holocaust-era materials be opened now." <br /><br />http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261364552728&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFullAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-9470647914535336602009-12-30T22:28:00.000-08:002009-12-30T23:07:54.361-08:00Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists PART 6: INTERLUDE - LEGAL PLUNDERERS & PARIAHS<em>By Alex Constantine</em><br /><br /><blockquote><em>"The first prisoner [at Guantinimo] formally charged with committing war<br />crimes was 34 year-old Yemeni Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's<br />driver.... His military-appointed attorney Navy Lieutenant Commander Charlie<br />Swift questioned the suitability of four members of the panel judging him,<br />contending they had PERSONAL CONNECTIONS WITH THE 9/11 ATTACKS and the<br />subsequent war on terror' and as such, would be prone to partiality...."</em><br />- News wires, August 29, 2004<br /><br /><em>"Any terrorist offence is the result of an intelligence failure..."</em><br />- Indian Intelligence Official</blockquote><br />Two months after the horror show in Manhattan, a federal grand jury issued subpoenas for the records of the Holy Land Foundation. The same day, federal agents froze the assets of InfoCom Corp., an Internet provider in Richardson, Texas. Both companies relocated to Richardson and opened on opposite sides of the street at the same time. InfoCom had been raided five days before the WTC meltdown.<br /><br />When a platoon of 80 federal officers pulled the plug, 500 websites crashed.1<br /><br />Agents of the FBI, Secret Service, INS, IRS and multiple branches of law enforcement pored over the company's files and copied every hard disk on the premises for four days.<br /><br />The charity and the Net provider were symbiotic. Ghassan Elashi, marketing vice president of InfoCom, was chairman of the Holy Land Foundation, a faith-based terrorist front, the government charged, represented by the law firm of <strong>Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld</strong>. After the raid on the foundation, the <em>Boston Herald</em> hit on the fact that the charity was represented by "a powerful Washington, D.C. law firm" appended to the Bush White House, one that had "earned hefty fees representing controversial Saudi billionaires as well as a Texas-based Islamic charity fingered last week as a terrorist front." Akin, Gump has handled the knotty legal affairs of three wealthy Saudi businessmen (<strong>Khalid bin Mahfouz, Salah Idris and Mohammed Hussein Al-Amoudi</strong>) who are key suspects in the financing of Al Qaeda's war.<br /><br />Partners at Akin, Gump include <strong>James C. Langdon</strong>, a close friend of G.W. Bush, and <strong>George R. Salem</strong>, chairman of the Republican party's Arab outreach program in the 2000 campaign; also <strong>Barnett A. "Sandy" Kress</strong>, a former Dallas School Board president, appointed by Bush to a post as an unpaid consultant on education policy to the White House.<br /><br />This firm, the <em>Herald</em> reported, keeps "an office in Riyadh and is a registered foreign agent of the Saudis. It was paid $77,328 in lobbying fees by the Saudis during the first six months of 2000, public records show."1<br /><br />In 1999, Saudi authorites placed bin Mahfouz under house arrest after the discovery that his bank, <strong>National Commercial</strong>, "funneled millions to charities believed to be serving as bin Laden fronts. One of his business partners, Al-Amoudi, was represented by Akin Gump." After the press reported in 1999 that the Feds were also investigating Al-Amoudi's <strong>Capitol Trust Bank</strong>, Akin Gump quickly issued a press release on behalf of their client denying any connections to terrorism. <strong>The denial crumbled, though, when it was reported that a year before, Akin Gump had co-sponsored "an investment conference in Ethiopia with Al-Amoudi."</strong>2<br /><br />Attorneys are paper mercenaries in the ditches in a strategy-of-tensions war engineered for profit and the advancement of "conservative" geopolitical aims. <br /><br />When the victims and survivors of 911 filed a trillion-dollar lawsuit against the Saudi ruling family, the kingdom assembled an immense legal team to deflect the accusations.<br /><br /><em>Newsweek's </em>web site reports: "Their opening defense salvo in what promises to be a bruising legal battle was fired last week when a trio of lawyers from <strong>Baker Botts</strong>, a pricey and prestigious Houston-based legal firm, filed a motion on behalf of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi defense minister." <br /><br />The defense fell back on a claim of diplomatic immunity and motioned to dismiss. But in documenting their motion, the Baker-Botts team "presented highly detailed new evidence of the Saudi government's role in funneling millions of dollars to a web of Islamic charities that are widely suspected by U.S. officials of covertly financing the operations of Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups."<br /><br />The Sultan's right honorable and learned legal defense attorneys were paid millions of dollars in retainers. They brought along piles of affidavits and cancelled checks, admitting in a brief that His Highness had contributed over $2 million to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Saudi charity raided by federal agents, and disbursed a total of $52,000 in grants to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, yet another organization on the FBI's charitable-front blacklist.3<br /><br />Former <strong>Secretary of State James Baker</strong> is a senior partner at the Sultan's legal firm. <strong>Robert Jordan</strong>, one of President Bush's personal attorneys, is U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.<br /><br />Some legal firms retained by the Saudis in the 911 families' suit:<br /><br /><strong>• Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering/Prince Mohammed al Faisal<br />• Kellog, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans/Prince Turki al Faisal<br />• Jones, Day/the Binladin Group<br />• Ropes & Grey/Khaled bin Mahfouz<br />• White & Case/the Al-Rajhi Banking Group<br />• King & Spalding/the Arab Bank and Youssef Nada<br />• Fulbright & Jaworski/Nimir Petroleum.</strong>4<br /><br />Meanwhile, in Guantanamo, the Defense Department's prosecutorial kangaroos oversaw a tribunal that has drawn fire from human rights activists since the word "detainee" was first breathed by Donald Rumsfeld. On June 12, 2004, <em>New York Times Magazine</em> ran a feature on Naval Lt. Commander Charles Swift, a defense attorney appointed by the Defense Department to represent the accused at the Cuban tribunal.<br /><br />Swift and his legal team submitted a provocative friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court, the <em>Times</em>' Jonathan Mahler reported, "in which, among other things, they compared their commander in chief, President Bush, to the villain of the American Revolution, King George III."<br /><br />In April, Swift took it the next step - he filed a suit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush in a Seattle federal courtroom, arguing that the tribunal for his client - still not charged or given a trial date - violates the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, federal law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.4<br /><br />"An optimist by nature," Mahler noted, "Swift was inclined to believe that the post-9/11 military-tribunal process would be fair. But over the course of the spring last year, as the Defense Department continued to define the workings of the military tribunals, his hopefulness began to fade." Swift was told that hearsay was permissable in court. He could only file appeals to the four-member review panel selected by Rumsfeld.<br /><br />"What is more, the Defense Department (in effect, the prosecution) was not only defining the crimes worthy of trial by military tribunal but also doing so only after hundreds of suspects were already in custody and had been repeatedly interrogated.<br /><br />"It was like a Monty Python movie," Swift said. "The government had this wonderful suit of armor, a lance and a sword. And I had been given a sharp stick..."5<br />-----------------<br /><strong>NOTES</strong><br /><br />1) Maggie Mulvihill, "White House Connection - "Saudi Agents Close to Bush," Boston Herald, December 12, 2001. On September 7, 2004, UK's Register reported that the FBI "suspected that the Holy Land Foundation was being used to filter money through to Middle East terrorists and so shut it down." The proprietors were arrested "on 18 December 2002 on charges of dealing illegally with Mousa abu Marzook and illegally exporting computer equipment and technology to Libya and Syria."<br />http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/09/iraq_domain_owner_convicted/<br /><br />2) See, The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2001.<br /><br />3) Anon., "A Legal Counterattack," http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3067906/<br /><br />4) Ibid.<br /><br />5) The Guantanimobile Project, Newswatch web page, "Military Lawyer Files Suit Against Tribunal System," August 29, 2004<br />http://guantanamobile.org/blog/archives/cat_guantanamo_in_the_courts.htmlAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-47931800826173285162009-12-30T16:26:00.000-08:002010-01-04T16:40:04.393-08:00CBS News: Was the Afghan Bomb Attack on the CIA an Inside Job?<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2m85mQ144mo&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2m85mQ144mo&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><strong><br />Possibility Arises that Someone Working with U.S. Forces was on the Side of the Terrorists</strong><br /><br />B<strong>y David Martin</strong><br />CBS News | Dec. 30, 2009 <br /> <br /><strong>Eight [<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8435502.stm">Seven CIA</a>] U.S. Civilians Killed in Afghan Bombing </strong><br /><br />(CBS) It all happened at a well-fortified combat outpost in Eastern Afghanistan. Somehow a suicide bomber was able to bring his explosives on the base, walk up to a group of American civilians and blow himself up. It will take an investigation to determine how he did it. <br /><br />But the outpost is located in the middle of a notorious stronghold for Afghan insurgents near the border with Pakistan, reports CBS News correspondent David Martin. <br /><br />Afghan soldiers and civilians are present at almost every American outpost since one of the chief principals of the U.S. strategy is to partner with the Afghans. According to Christine Fair of Georgetown University, some of them may actually be working for the Taliban. <br /><br />"They have really become a vehicle of infiltration for the Taliban," Fair said. "This is most certainly a vulnerability in our strategy going forward in trying to hand over security to the Afghans if we don't really have a way of figuring out who we can trust." <br /><br />Combat outposts located deep in enemy controlled territory come under frequent attack - although usually from the outside, not the inside. <br /><br />Last October , eight U.S. soldiers were killed when insurgents very nearly overran an outpost, and CBS News has been told four officers received warning letters for not having done a better job preparing their defenses. <br /><br />A year ago last July, nine soldiers were killed when their outpost was almost overrun. That battle is still under investigation. In both cases, the bases were saved by the arrival of the Apache helicopters with drove the attackers back. <br /><br />Eight American dead makes for a very grim end to what has been the worst year ever for the United States in Afghanistan. <br /><br />http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/30/eveningnews/main6039349.shtml<em></em><br /><br />---------<strong>EXPLANATION</strong>----------<br /><br /><strong>CIA bomber was a 'Jordanian informant', US media say </strong><br />BBC | Jan. 4, 2001<br /><br />The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan was a <strong>Jordanian informant</strong>, US media reports say.<br /><br />He is said to have been <strong>a doctor recruited by Jordan's intelligence service to infiltrate al-Qaeda</strong>. He is believed to have been working undercover in eastern Afghanistan for weeks before detonating a bomb at Forward Operating Base Chapman. <br /><br />The attack was the worst against US intelligence officials since the US embassy in Beirut was bombed in 1983. <br /><br /><strong>Changing sides</strong><br /><br />The <em>Washington Post</em> quotes two former US government officials as saying that the alleged bomber lured the CIA officers into a meeting with a promise of new information on al-Qaeda's top leadership. <br /><br />The reports have named him as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old al-Qaeda sympathiser from Zarqa, Jordan, arrested by Jordanian intelligence over a year ago. Jordanian intelligence believed they had brought him over to their side and sent him to Afghanistan to infiltrate al-Qaeda, US network NBC says. His specific mission was thought to be tracking down al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. <br /><br />According to Western intelligence officials quoted in the reports, Humam al-Balawi called his handlers last week to arrange a meeting at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, where he said he would relay urgent information about Zawahiri. Once inside the base, the reports say, he blew himself up killing seven CIA employees and his handler, whom Jordanian media have named as Ali bin Zeid. <br /><br />Questions were raised after the bomb was detonated in the base's gym last week about how the attacker could have managed to pass through security. The <em>Washington Post</em> says he was picked up in a car outside the base and driven in without being thoroughly searched. <br /><br /><strong>'Double agent'</strong><br /><br />A US official, who is a former CIA employee, said such people were often not required to go through full security checks, in order to help gain their trust. <br /><br />"When you're trying to build a rapport and literally ask them to risk [their lives] for you, you've got a lot to do to build their trust," he told the Associated Press news agency. <br /><br /><strong>A Taliban spokesman quoted on al-Jazeera's website said Humam al-Balawi was a double agent who had misled Jordanian and US intelligence services for a year. </strong><br />Forward Operating Base Chapman, a former Soviet military base, is used not only by the CIA but also by provincial reconstruction teams, which include both soldiers and civilians. <br /><br />The airfield is reportedly used for US drone attacks on suspected militants in neighbouring Pakistan. <br /><br />http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8440535.stmAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-40494707496653491132009-12-30T13:39:00.001-08:002009-12-31T13:00:49.306-08:00Good German Tea-Party Turns SourRupert Murdoch's progammed "patriots" live in a world that doesn't exist. No wonder they're so thin-skinned - liberals keep burning down their most precious fascistic programmed delusions ...
<br />
<br /><object style="height: 344px; width: 425px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Q7XH8lfGMc"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Q7XH8lfGMc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></object>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-43782809801392270832009-12-29T15:07:00.000-08:002010-02-02T08:43:28.813-08:00UnderpantsGate: Big Oil, the CIA and the Attempted Bombing of Flight 253 as Justification for Military Operations in Yemen & Nigeria (w/Updates)Also see: "American Sponsorship of Global Terrorism," and "USAID Officer Arrested with Terrorists in Islamabad," also "DynCorp Sub-Contractor Inter-Risk was Behind the Oct. 10th Suicide Bombing of Pakistan's Army HQ," and "Extraditing Headley will Expose CIA"<br /><br />By Alex Constantine<br /><br />It's All, Once Again, About Big Oil ...<br /><br />Mutallab's exploding unmentionables<br /><br />"Why Was Umar AbdulMutallab in Houston in August 2008? Whom Did He Visit There? What Did He Plan?"<br /><br />The press reports that he was attending a seminar, but it has also been established that he and his family were in contact with a Houston publisher (of a newspaper that gave us a curiously "Kenyan-Born" Barack Obama, an error in reporting that did wonders for the Birther movement):<br /><br />Flight 253 Terrorist Suspect on Magazine's Radar<br /><br />HOUSTON - A Houston-area magazine publisher has met and been following members of a suspected terrorist's family for years.<br /><br />Chido Nwangwu publishes USAfricaOnline.com, one of the most widely-visited internet publications devoted to Nigerian-American relations.<br /><br />Nwangwu has been following Forouk Abdul Mutalab's family for years before the 23-year-old man left Nigeria for college in the United Kingdom. The suspected terrorist's father, Alhaji Umuru Mutallab, is considered one of the most powerful men in Nigeria ...<br /><br />http://www.myfoxhouston.com/dpp/news/international/091228-umar-farouk-abdulmutallab-houston<br /><br />Dr. Gary Maxey<br /><br />Publisher Chido Nwangwu hails from the West Africa Theological Seminary, founded and chiefly directed by Dr. Gary Maxey, an American evangelical missionary who has dual homes in Atlanta, GA and Lagos, Nigeria.<br /><br />BIG OIL AND FRIENDS OF THE WEST AFRICA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY: Robert Dyer, ExxonMobil; James Bates, Vice President, ChevronTexaco Canada; Dr. Edward Beaver, Preacher, Realtor, Businessman; Dr. Bill Brown, Businessman, WATS Adjunct Faculty, Salisbury, North Carolina ...<br />http://www.watsonline.org/friend.html<br /><br />Recall that Dutchman Jasper Schuringa, who apprehended the bomber, the star of the Flight 253 "action movie" - all of it reportedly on tape - is the son of a Shell Oil executive. Shell, Chevron and Nigerian terrorists are warring: "Nigeria, whose population of about 140 million people makes it Africa’s most populous country, is almost evenly split between the mainly Muslim north and a largely Christian south. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, said Dec. 19 it attacked a pipeline in the southern oil region used by Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Chevron Corp." - Bloomberg, Dec. 26, 2009<br /><br />ABOUT THAT VIDEO TAPE<br /><br />Passenger films Northwest Flight 253 bomb attempt<br />January 5, 2010, Las Vegas Democrat Examiner, David Phillips<br /><br />Patricia "Scotty" Keepman tells 620WTMJ's "Wisconsin's Morning News." that she and her family were seated about 20 rows behind Abdulmutallab in a center aisle, and that she saw a man who videotaped the entire flight. Patricia Keepman went on to say "He sat up and videotaped the entire thing, very calmly. We do know that the FBI is looking for him intensely. Since then, we've heard nothing about it."<br /><br />There has only been one picture released to the media taken on flight 253 - it’s an exclusive on CNN showing uniformed officers removing the Christmas Day bomber from the plane. ...<br /><br />[T]he American public won’t be seeing that video anytime soon, if at all, and it seems that the Federal government doesn‘t want to mention it. But what is also even more interesting, is that CNN and other main stream media outlets have yet to follow up with any questions about the man standing with a camcorder filming the bomber on flight 253. ...<br />http://www.examiner.com/x-21777-Las-Vegas-Democrat-Examiner~y2010m1d5-Passenger-films-Northwest-Flight-253-bomb-attempt<br /><br />"'The War of Terror' is about Protecting the Free Flow of Oil"<br /><br />"Some, like author and researcher F. William Engdahl, insist that the ‘war on terror' is, and always has been, more about protecting the free flow of oil than stemming the tide of terrorism. "The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world's oil flows ... [using] claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen," writes Engdahl. "In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world's largest."<br /><br />"Impending US military actions in Yemen - strategically located on an important trading route linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea - are directly linked to US oil interests in Nigeria," wrote Ken Boyte in January at AllVoices.com. He goes on to cite a feasibility study produced by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975 that identified Yemen as "a target for invasion."<br /><br />http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1829/1/<br /><br />Africom's Priorities & a Nigerian War Game to "Secure the Oil"<br /><br />In addition to U.S. military officers and intelligence officers,<br />"Unified Quest 2008" brought together participants from the State Department and other U.S. government agencies, academics, journalists, and foreign military officers (including military representatives from several NATO countries, Australia, and Israel), along with the private military contractors who helped run the war games: the Rand Corporation and Booz-Allen. ...<br /><br />One participant, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stanovich, drew up a plan that called for the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops within 60 days....<br /><br />Among scenarios examined during the game were the possibility of direct American military intervention involving some 20,000 U.S. troops in order to "secure the oil," ...<br /><br />[W]hen General Ward appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, he cited America's growing dependence on African oil as a priority issue for Africom and went on to proclaim that combating terrorism would be "Africom's number one theater-wide goal." He barely mentioned development, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping or conflict resolution. ...<br /><br />http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14783<br /><br />The Nigerian Bomber & AFRICOM<br /><br />" ... the serious furore created by Abdulmulltallab’s action will further justify the Obama administration’s commitment to AFRICOM’s escalation of the military role of the command in fighting the alleged global war on terrorism (GWOT). ... "<br /><br />http://www.anarkismo.net/article/15430<br /><br />---<br />PROVOCATIONS<br /><br />DECEMBER 19, 2009 BBC REPORT: "Nigeria rebels attack oil pipeline"<br /><br />And that wasn't the end of it: "Nigeria rebels vow more attacks after 'warning strike' on oil pipeline"<br /><br />We've all been hit by shock waves from the attacks, but Big Oil most of all:<br /><br />Nigerian Rebels Drive Up Oil Prices<br />Shell Facility Hit, Crimping Output<br />Washington Post | June 30, 2009<br /><br />WHAT DO WE KNOW OF THESE REBELS? - BBC: "Little is known about the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta but it has shown that it is capable of destablising Nigeria's oil industry."<br /><br />On Big Oil in Yemen, see: "The Yemen Hidden Agenda: Behind the Al-Qaeda Scenarios, A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint"<br /><br /><br />" ... In addition to its geopolitical position as a major global oil transit chokepoint, Yemen is reported to hold some of the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves. ... "<br /><br />http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16786<br /><br /><br />BRUTAL "PARTNERS" IN YEMEN<br /><br />from: Scapegoats and scaremongers<br />Alan Maass unravels the deceptions and hidden motives in the government and media response to the plot to set off a bomb on a plane bound for Detroit.<br /><br />... The government of Yemen is notoriously corrupt and brutal. It is one of the few countries in the world with a record of executions to rival the U.S., and one where the CIA rendition program sent detainees to be tortured by an allied regime. Yemeni military forces have been happy to collaborate with U.S. "war on terror" operations, especially when this furthers the government's ongoing campaigns against opposition groups in the north and secessionists in the south.<br /><br />But Obama says he's "made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government, training and equipping their security forces, sharing intelligence and working with them." ...<br />http://socialistworker.org/2010/01/05/scapegoats-and-scaremongers<br /><br />THE PATH TO DETROIT<br /><br />But how on earth were Big Oil and its Saudi partners going to convince the war-weary American public to finance yet another foreign invasion? Pipeline security doesn't wring a driblet of sympathy from the recessionary taxpayer. The answer was too obvious - a covert operation ...<br /><br />CIA/Saudi Foreshadowings<br /><br />George W. Bush Let Terrorists Behind Christmas Bombing Out Of Gitmo<br /><br />Air America: "Brian Ross of ABC News reports that two of the four men behind the plot to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day were actually prisoners of the United States and that, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, were released into a Saudi art rehabilitation program. ..."<br />http://airamerica.com/politics/12-28-2009/bush-let-christmas-bombing-planners-out-gitmo/<br /><br />Saudi King, CIA chief meet amid Yemen fighting<br />www.presstv | 16 Nov 2009<br /><br />Saudi Arabia's King Abdallah receives the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as both countries become more involved in the deadly war in Yemen.<br /><br />The meeting between King Abdallah Bin Abd Al-Aziz Al Saud and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta took place in Riyadh on Sunday, the Saudi Press Agency reported. Apparently, King Abdallah also held another meeting on the same day with the Head of Russian Federal Commission of Military and Technical Cooperation Michael Dimitriv.<br /><br />The report, however, did not include any specific details about the topics that were discussed during the two meetings, simply announcing that there was an exchange of greetings between the king and US President Barack Obama through the CIA director.<br /><br />The meeting between the Saudi leader and the CIA chief came just days after both the US and Saudi Arabia decided to get more involved in the bloody conflict in northern Yemen ...<br /><br />http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=111411§ionid=351020205<br /><br />So Panetta travelled all the way to Riyadh for "an exchange of greetings between the king and US President Barack Obama?" King Abdallah couldn't dial a telephone? Perhaps, for the sake of argument, they talked about something else, something very sensitive ... like how to persuade the American people to support further covert and overt military adventures in Yemen. We had already established a CIA presence there ...<br /><br />CIA present in Yemen since 2008: Report<br /><br />INTELLIGENCE "FAILURES"<br /><br />The CIA Deliberately Misspells Terrorists' Names and Bypasses TSA to Let Terrorists Fly<br /><br />" ... Veteran investigative reporters Susan and Joseph Trento, who first obtained and exposed the flaws in the no-fly list in 2006, have completed a new investigation of the CIA’s role in airline security. It reveals that the CIA is bypassing other government agencies and following terrorists on airplanes without telling TSA or the airlines involved. It shows how terrorists and nuclear proliferators have been allowed to fly because the CIA has refused to add their correct names or aliases to the no-fly list. ... "<br />http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2010/01/cia-deliberately-terrorists-names-and.html<br /><br />" ... the CIA failed to circulate a report it had about bombing suspect ... "<br />http://www.examiner.com/x-22397-Providence-Business-News-Examiner~y2009m12d29-Breaking-Flight-253-Terror-Plot-CIA-failed-to-circulate-report-about-bombing-suspect<br /><br />" ... Yesterday it was claimed MI5 knew three years ago of his "multiple communications" with extremists in Britain while at University College London. ...<br />http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/01/04/jet-bomber-s-visa-con-115875-21940595/<br /><br />" ... Abdulmutallib was also on a terror watch list, although that fact, and the fact that he had been known to anti-terror officials for several years, did not prevent him from boarding Flight 253 ... "<br />http://frontpagemag.com/2009/12/28/flight-253-and-counterterror%E2%80%99s-epic-fail-by-robert-spencer/<br /><br />" ... The CIA said it worked with embassy officials to make sure that Abdulmutallab's name made it into the government's database of suspected terrorists and noted his potential extremist connections in Yemen. The CIA also said it forwarded that information to the National Counterterrorism Center. ... it is unlikely Abdulmutallab would have been flagged because the Customs and Border Patrol officers do not routinely screen all passengers against the names of individuals on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, known as TIDE, which was the only place that Abdulmutallab was listed. ... "<br />http://www.sphere.com/nation<br /><br />"Israeli Intelligence" Ties to AQ Extremists in Yemen?<br /><br />The BBC reports that Al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen -led by the commandos released by Bush - are really Israeli agents though they have organized attacks against US targets:<br /><br />Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the security forces have arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli intelligence. Mr Saleh did not say what evidence had been found to show the group's links with Israel, a regional enemy of Yemen. The arrests were connected with an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa last month which killed at least 18 people, official sources were quoted saying.<br /><br />"A terrorist cell was arrested and will be referred to the judicial authorities for its links with the Israeli intelligence services," Mr Saleh told a gathering at al-Mukalla University in Hadramawt province. "Details of the trial will be announced later. You will hear about what goes on in the proceedings," he added.<br /><br />The 17 September attack was the second to target the US embassy since April. Militants detonated car bombs before firing rockets at the heavily fortified building.<br /><br />Mr Saleh did not identify the suspects, but official sources were quoted saying it was same cell - led by a militant called Abu al-Ghaith al-Yamani - whose arrest was announced a week after the attack.<br />http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9951<br /><br /><br /><br />VIDEO UPDATE, 1-5-10: OFFICIAL STATEMENTS REVERSED:<br /><br />The Political Rebirth of Attorney Kurt Haskell: "Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans."<br />http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_kurt_hask.html<br /><br />Passenger's account of Flight 253 suspect disputed<br />Flier says man who tried to get on flight may be from Sudan<br />Paul Egan | The Detroit News<br />January 05. 2010<br /><br />" .... A passenger on the Christmas Day flight that was targeted in a terrorist attack says the man a fellow passenger saw attempting to board the flight without a passport may have been a Sudanese refugee, not the accused bomber. BEAU TAYLOR of Jackson, an international development consultant who was aboard the flight from Amsterdam, said he saw a young man being accompanied on the airplane by a flight attendant. ... "<br /><br />Beau Taylor & USAID, an agency on intimate terms with the CIA ... and, some say, Hizb-ut-Tahrir terrorists: "International Development, USAID contracting, Managerial and Strategy Consulting, Negotiations, Hiring, Recruiting, Management, Russian Language, International Relationship Development, Cross-Cultural Management, Marketing, Finance, USAID." Mr. Taylor is "currently charged with operational oversight of a $20,000,000 project to stabilize communities in Baquba, Iraq. This is part of the larger CSP project, a $300,000,000 development project to support USAID efforts in Iraq."<br />http://www.linkedin.com/pub/beau-taylor/1/3b4/799\<br /><br />REWARDING IRAQI INSURGENTS - ACCORDING TO A USAID STATEMENT, RE CSP (Community Stabilization Program), the program that employed Beau Taylor, has in fact been discontinued: "... a 2008 audit [found] evidence of fraud, phantom workers, and money being diverted to insurgents through trash collection contracts. ... " - USAID funding Iraqi insurgents?<br /><br />THE SECOND MAN - AN OFFICIAL RETRACTION<br /><br />"Federal officials for several days denied accounts by Haskell and his wife, Lori, also an attorney, that they had seen a second man from their flight led away in handcuffs at Detroit Metro after a dog reacted to something inside the man's bag.<br /><br />"But late Friday, Ron Smith, the chief U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer for Detroit, confirmed that the incident did happen and apologized for not correcting the information earlier. He said the man from Flight 253, who was handcuffed, later was released without charges. ... "<br />http://www.detnews.com/article/20100105/METRO/1050370/1409/METRO/Passenger-s-account-of-Flight-253-suspect-disputed<br /><br />CAUGHT IN THE ACT: WHY THE OFFICIAL DENIAL WAS RETRACTED<br /><br />" ... Government officials initially denied that anyone other than Mutallab was detained; but, after other witnesses came forward to corroborate the Haskells, they had to admit that someone else was detained. ... "<br />http://www.theendrun.com/2010/another-buried-christmas-day-arrest-uncovered/<br /><br />JOE LIEBERMAN'S SOLUTION<br />TO THE EXPLOSIVE UNDERPANTS PROBLEM<br /><br />"On Sunday, the neocon Joe Lieberman said the U.S. needs to bomb Yemen and pronto. A script on Yemen and al-Qaeda is now being uniformly followed by the corporate media ... "<br />http://www.infowars.com/man-videotaped-underwear-bomber-on-flight-253/<br /><br />The Flaming Diarhhea Psyop<br /><br />Abdulmutallab had been given erroneous directions for detonating the bomb, and it's fairly certain that the intention was to scare, not kill - after all, there were "actors" planted on the plane. AP reports: " ... The Dutch government said the plan to blow up the Detroit-bound aircraft was professional but called its execution 'amateurish.' ... [Interior Minister Guusje] Ter Horst said Abdulmutallab apparently assembled the explosive device, including 80 grams of PETN, in the aircraft toilet, then planned to detonate it with a syringe of chemicals. She said the explosives appeared to have been professionally prepared and had been given to Abdulmutallab, but did not elaborate.<br /><br />"If you want to detonate it, you have to do that another way than he did. That is why we talk about amateurism," she said."<br /><br />Everything was "professional" about the PETN bomb ... but the bomber had no idea how to ignite it. This only adds up if he was a psyop patsy.<br /><br />THE THIRD TERRORIST SUSPECT ARREST WAS A NIGERIAN PETROLEUM ENGINEER:<br /><br /><br />"Authorities said the passenger was a 36-year old Nigerian petroleum engineer who became unhappy when he was ordered to his seat one hour before landing, as required under new in-flight rules following the attempted Christmas day bombing of the same flight by another Nigerian citizen. The passenger supervises 90 employees at the multinational petroleum company he works for in Yemen. ... "<br /><br />http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/food-poisoning-blamed-northwest-flight-253-bomb-scare/story?id=9430057<br /><br /><br />The Hero & Shell Oil Co.<br /><br />" ... Jasper was born in Curacao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean though his family often moved, globetrotting for his father’s job with the Shell Oil firm. ... "<br /><br />Dutch Hero Becomes National Pride<br />By Peter Valk and Jasper Fakkert<br />Epoch Times Staff | Dec 27, 2009<br /><br />Netherlands—Dutchman Jasper Schuringa who reportedly prevented the terror suspect from blowing up the Northwest Airline jet with 289 passengers on board, is being cheered in the Netherlands as a new national hero. The 32-year-old film director’s act of bravery has made the down-to-earth Dutch proud as peacocks.<br /><br />“We are extremely proud of him but also really shocked because in one second it could have ended up very differently,” Jasper’s parents were reported as saying by Dutch media.<br /><br />Headlines in the Netherlands largest newspaper 'De Telegraaf', read "Dutch Jasper Overmasters Terrorist” and “Decoration for Hero Jasper Schuringa.” Other news articles in the Netherlands also focus on how “Dutch Jasper” is praised in American media.<br /><br />Dutch Minister Wouter Bos spoke with Jasper over the phone and expressed his appreciation on behalf of the Dutch government.<br /><br />Jasper himself seems rather sober about his part: “I just jumped. I didn’t think. I went over there and tried to save the plane,” he said in an interview with CNN.<br /><br />Jasper was born in Curacao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean though his family often moved, globetrotting for his father’s job with the Shell Oil firm. ...<br /><br />Besides Curacao, Jasper and his family lived in Oman, the Netherlands and Gabon, where they had to flee with help of the French foreign legion when the civil war broke out there. After secondary school he graduated from a film academy in Miami. Currently, he runs a video company called “Go With The Flow Productions." ...<br /><br />http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/27065/<br /><br />Abdulmutallab SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED his Seat<br /><br />" ... Jasper, a video director and producer was sitting across the aisle from the bomber and when he heard a pop as did all the other passengers; he went into action seeing the smoke and fire. ... [R]eports are now suggesting that Abdulmutallab had requested his particular seat, there needs to be an evaluation of such request. ... "<br /><br />http://www.examiner.com/x-7462-Atlanta-Faith--Family-Examiner~y2009m12d28-Hero-of-Flight-253-to-Detroit-Flying-Dutchman-Jasper-Schuringa-subdues-terrorist<br /><br />Jasper Schuringa & the National Counter-Terrorism Center<br /><br />" ... The Curacao-born Jasper Schuringa attended film school in Miami and he also lived in Oman. After accusations in the media that he was publicizing himself over the Muttalab incident, Schuringa largely receded from public view. Schuringa was en route to Costa Rica via Detroit to visit his sister. The National Counter-terrorism office in The Hague is being mum about any connections it had with Schuringa, according to the Dutch paper Parool.<br /><br />http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5424.shtml<br /><br />Payday<br /><br />The Shady Mainstream Media Payday of Flight 253 Hero Jasper Schuringa<br />Gawker.com<br /><br />Jasper Schuringa probably didn't think twice before dismantling Northwest Airlines Flight 253's would-be bomber. But before telling his story, he wanted money, and he got it. ... Yesterday Mediaite and TV Newser reported on Schurnga's two wares he's got for sale: the first, a blurry picture of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The second is himself, for interviews. CNN got to him first. They also got an interview. ...<br /><br />All the media organizations found Schuringa's company website, which had his cell phone number on it. By the time he finally got to Miami, his final destination, CNN and The New York Post had gotten to him.<br /><br />Once the Post and CNN got through to Jasper, he handed over all negotiations to his friend who lives in Miami who he came to the U.S. to visit. His name is Shai Ben-Ami. He's an Israeli guy who's in the restaurant business, as a Google search would turn up. ...<br /><br />Schurnga sold the "TV Rights" of the first of his two photos to CNN for $10K.<br /><br />The "print rights" went to the Post for $5K.<br /><br />Later, Schuringa was paid upwards of $3K by ABC News for a second photo, which Schuringa tried to sell to other local news outlets for $5K, unsuccessfully. ...<br /><br />"He was quite upfront about it," we're told. "He made it clear that Jasper was only talking to news organizations that paid."<br /><br />http://gawker.com/5434950/the-shady-mainstream-media-payday-of-flight-253-hero-jasper-schuringa'<br /><br />Abdulmutallab’s Lawyer is Public Defender Who Forged Documents in Detroit Terror Cell Trial - December 28, 2009 - Re Umar Abdulmutallab’s lawyer, Miriam Siefer, by conservative reporter Debbie Schlussel, the source of these allegations:<br /><br />During the Detroit terror cell case, she represented Karim Koubriti, an Islamic terrorist in a cell, which plotted to blow up the U.S. Air Force Base in Turkey, where U.S. AWACS and Israeli F-16s are based and from where they took off. They also plotted to blow up hotels and casinos in Las Vegas and planned to detonate in Disneyland.<br /><br />During the course of her “representation” of terrorist Koubriti, Siefer and her fellow public defender, Richard Helfrick a/k/a Rick Helfrick (who will probably also assist her in representing Abdulmutallab), stole the stationery of the then-Chief Judge of the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Lawrence Zatkoff, forged Zatkoff’s name, and sent it to another attorney in the case, accusing him of faking invoices (which wasn’t true). That makes at least several federal crimes that I can think of–theft, forgery, impersonating a federal official, mail fraud, etc. but they got away with it. ...<br />http://www.debbieschlussel.com/14360/abdulmutallabs-public-defender-is-dirty-trickster-who-forged-documents/<br /><br />Mutallab's Blue-Chip Father<br /><br />The Nigerian Bomber's Father & Big Oil: SaharaReporters - " ... Dr. Muttallab, who is currently the chairman of First Islamic bank, JBI, in Nigeria, sits on the board of that bank with Dr. Rilwan Lukman, the Minister of Petroleum resources. ... "<br /><br />----------<br />The terror suspect who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane is the son of a Nigerian banker who alerted U.S. authorities to his "extreme religious views" months ago, it was reported Saturday.<br /><br />The father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a former minister and chairman of First Bank in Nigeria, is shocked that his son was even was allowed to fly to the U.S., family members told the Nigerian newspaper This Day.<br /><br />The dad was meeting with security officials to discuss his son, identified as Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, 23. The younger Mutallab was not on any no-fly list when he flew from Nigeria to Detroit through Amsterdam, Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) told the Daily News. ...<br /><br />http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/12/26/2009-12-26_father_of_umar_farouk_abdul_mutallab_nigerian_terror_suspect_in_flight_253_attac.html#ixzz0b8LDuSQV<br /><br />Nigerian Terror Suspect: This Apple Fell Too Far From the Tree<br />USAfricaonline, Commentary, Chido Nwangwu, Posted: Dec 28, 2009<br /><br />... The older Mutallab, a conservative Muslim, was born in 1939 in the north central state of Katsina (home of the current, ailing President Umaru Ya'Adua). A USAfricaonline.com count found that Umaru Mutallab was chairman of more than 36 blue chip companies inside Nigeria and overseas. ...<br /><br />A highly respected conservative man whose friends cut across states, religion and gender, Mutallab is soft spoken and very intelligent and industrious.<br /><br />Having reported and followed key aspects of Umaru Mutallab and Nigeria's military and civilian elite, I know that the older Mutallab benefited from his deft positioning across an immense network of family, geo-ethnic and professional layers of interests.<br /><br />Consequently, the man has had a near permanent presence on Nigeria's economic landscape as a government official, banking investor, facilitator or shareholder - working the levers of power- all through civilian and military governments in Nigeria for more than 35 years.<br /><br />Alhaji Mutallab is one of Nigeria's most respected technocrats and administrators, having also served as a Federal Minister of Economic Development & Reconstruction. He is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants (FCCA), Institute of the International Bankers Association (FIBA, USA), the Institute of Bankers and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (FCA).<br /><br />Mutallab was appointed director of First Bank on March 8, 1996 and became chairman of the Board on March 18, 1999. In mid December, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab - after his massively rewarding decade at the helm of the First Bank Plc - fully retired as Chairman. He was succeeded by Oba Otudeko, a billionaire chairman of the Honeywell Group of Companies and immediate past President of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE).<br /><br />Mutallab has been in strategic board positions of the banking sector for decades as CEO and/or Chairman of various financial institutions including United Bank for Africa (UBA). <br /><br />“The man is amiable and always at the forefront of any economic revival committees and boards of government, the alleged link of his son to the alleged terrorism plot left many of his friends and associates devastated,” notes Obinwa Nnaji, USAfricaonline.com bureau chief in Lagos. “Other Nigerians still argue at their homes, various places and across USAfrica multimedia blogs that they still do not believe it to be a stock in trade of Nigerians to be found planting bombs in aircraft.” ...<br /><br />[O]ne of the areas where the older Mutallab's skills and services did not yield much if any significant value for Nigerians was his tenure as chairman of the troubled and woeful former National Electric Power Authority (NEPA).<br /><br />http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=eb6dc82396fc6c958fae289fe7cbc3d3<br /><br />Goldman Sachs, the Bomber's Father and VISION 2O20<br /><br />‘Aggressive implementation of Vision 2020 commences January 2010’<br />Daily Trust | 29 November 2009<br /><br />By January 2010, about four weeks from now, Nigerians will start feeling the impacts of the Vision 20:2020, the Chairman of the Business Support Group of the Vision, Alhaji Umuru Mutallab, CON, said in this interview.<br /><br />Vision 20:2020 sought to accelerate the pace of the country’s growth & development and make it among the world’s twentieth economies by the year 2020. Mutallab said for the Vision to succeed, the civil service must be carried along. He spoke on many other issues.<br /><br />It started during the tenure of former President Olusegun Obasanjo following the projections of Goldman Sachs which realises that countries like Brazil, Rusia, India and China have achieved phenomenal growth and said further that there are other sets of countries which if they put their acts together by the year 2025 would be among the top 20 economy of the world. Nigeria was among these countries ...<br /><br />http://www.news.dailytrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10311:aggressive-implementation-of-vision-202020-commences-january-2010&catid=26:business&Itemid=153<br />---<br />Mind Control? <br /><br />Underwear Bomber Dazed, Stared "Into Nothing"<br />Tom Leonard<br />The Daily Telegraph | December 28, 2009<br /><br />Mr Schuringa said he said he frisked the suspect and discovered his trousers were open and that he had a flaming object resembling a small, white shampoo bottle strapped to his left leg near his crotch.<br /><br />"I pulled the object from him and tried to extinguish the fire with my hands and threw it away," he told CNN. ...<br /><br />All the while, Mr Abdulmatallab seemed dazed, he said. "He was staring into nothing." When he got him into first class, Mr Schuringa pulled off his remaining clothes to check for further explosives and helped a crew member to handcuff him.<br /><br />http://au.messages.yahoo.com/news/conspiracy_theory/11121/<br />--------UPDATES-------<br /><br />Britain sends counter-terrorist forces to Yemen<br />Telegraph.co.uk - Jan 2, 2010<br />Britain has dispatched a special counter-terrorist unit to Yemen as the mountainous Arab state emerges as the new frontline in the war against al-Qaeda, ...<br /><br />Crack SAS team to hunt the terrorists<br />Mirror.co.uk - Rupert Hamer - Jan 2, 2010<br />A crack squad of SAS troopers has been flown to the Yemen to wipe out new al-Qaeda terror camps. The move follows revelations that ...<br />---<br />Operation Underpants: A "Planned Event"<br /><br />" ... The story seemed almost plausible, but the sequence of US government responses and controlled news releases about the alleged bomber over the 24-48 hours that followed proved otherwise. Just like in the cases of 9/11 and 2005 London bombings, the campaign of disinformation shows that ‘Terror in Detroit’ is another ‘planned event.’ ... " - From: "Christmas Terror in Detroit! Deception continues," by Ajit Randeniya<br /><br />http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2009/12/30/christmas-terror-in-detroit-deception-continues/<br /><br />"Covert Sponsorship of Al-Qaeda Networks Continues"<br /><br />>" ... As we have seen with Mohamed Atta, Richard Reid and Mohammad Sidique Khan, Abdulmutallab's "journey" was one undertaken by many before, often with a wink-and-a-nod by British and American security officials when it served the geostrategic ambitions of their political masters. As security researcher and analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed wrote in New Internationalist in October: 'Islamist terrorism cannot be understood without acknowledging the extent to which its networks are being used by Western military intelligence services, both to control strategic energy resources and to counter their geopolitical rivals. Even now, nearly a decade after 9/11, covert sponsorship of al-Qaeda networks continues.' ... " - From: "Weird Underpants, Strange Backstory: The Untold Tale of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's Christmas Flight," by Tom Burghardt<br /><br />http://pacificfreepress.com/news/1/5313-weird-underpants-strange-backstory-the-untold-tale-of-umar-farouk-abdulmutallabs-christmas-flight.html<br /><br />The Northwest Flight 253 intelligence failure: Negligence or conspiracy?<br />World Socialist Web Site | 31 December 2009<br /><br />... Both then and now, the government and the media expect the public to accept that all that was involved was mistakes. But why should anyone assume that the failure to act on the extensive intelligence leading to Abdulmutallab involved merely “innocent” mistakes—and not something far more sinister?<br /><br /><br />If this episode is to be examined seriously, the question must be asked: What would have happened had Northwest Flight 253 been destroyed?<br /><br />There is no question but that such a catastrophe would have had immense repercussions both internationally and within the United States. It would have seriously destabilized the Obama administration, politically strengthened the most extreme right-wing sections of the ruling class, and cleared the way for an even more massive expansion of military-intelligence operations overseas and a drastic curtailing of democratic rights at home. ...<br />http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d31.shtml<br /><br /><br /><br />Northwest Flight 253: Mounting Evidence of U.S. Complicity in Terrorism<br />by Gordon Duff <br /><br />When nothing adds up, its time we start looking at what we kow. Our recent terrorist, now dubbed "the crotch bomber" is another dupe. He could have been working for anyone, drugged, brainwashed or simply influenced, maybe by crazy Arabs, maybe by the Mossad, maybe by the CIA. We only know the game is falling apart.<br /><br />We do know a couple of things. Dad, back in Nigeria, ran the national arms industry (DICON) in partnership with Israel, in particular, the Mossad. He was in daily contact with them. They run everything in Nigeria, from arms production to counter-terrorism. Though Islamic, Muttalab was a close associate of Israel. He has been misrepresented. His "banking" is a cover. Next, what do we know about the two alleged Al Qaeda leaders Bush had released, the ones who allegedly planned this?<br /><br />According to ABC news, the Al Qaeda leaders running the insurgency in Yemen were released from Guantanamo, although two of the alleged highest ranking known terrorist there, without trial.<br /><br />Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody.<br />Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.<br /><br />Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.<br /><br /><br />New MSNBC theory: Maybe U.S. intel deliberately withheld info on Flight 253 from each other<br />posted at 9:10 pm on January 5, 2010 by Allahpundit<br /><br />"John Gibson and Ace read this as Olby’s way of hinting that dark elements within U.S. intelligence tried to hurt Obama politically by intentionally letting an attack happen. ... Either way, do note that the strong-form conspiracy theory about shadowy forces using Flight 253 to ruin Obama is indeed being circulated ... "<br /><br />http://www.glocktalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1166984<br /><br />Searching fot the "Hidden Agenda"<br /><br />" ' ... It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda.' (emphasis added)<br /><br />'I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect" the President said, "but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged.'<br /><br />The question is why? And more pertinently from a parapolitical perspective, what 'alternative agenda' is playing out here that would put the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk? ... "<br /><br />http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/burghardt3.1.1.html<br /><br />Detroit attack: US border guards knew alleged terrorist was on flight<br />Telegraph | 07 Jan 2010<br /><br />" ... 'The people in Detroit were prepared to look at him in secondary inspection,' said a an official quoted by the Times.' ... [The]database had picked up the State Department concern about this guy, that this guy may have been involved with extremist elements in Yemen ... They could have made a decision on whether to stop him from getting on the plane,' he said. ... "<br /><br />http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6944598/Detroit-attack-US-border-guards-knew-alleged-terrorist-was-on-flight.html<br /><br />CBS NEWS LEARNS CIA HAD ADVANCE INFORMATION ON DETROIT TERRORIST<br /><br />CBS News has learned that as early as August of 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed "The Nigerian," suspected of meeting with "terrorist elements" in Yemen. <br />Sources tell CBS News "The Nigerian" has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But that connection was not made when Abudulmutallab's father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria three months later, on November 19, 2009. It was then he expressed deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son's ties to extremists in Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity. ...<br />http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16769<br /><br /><br />Delta black op bomb gave neocon Christmas gifts of nudity and fear<br />www.examiner.com | January 4<br /><br />" ... Delta 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa, the young filmmaker that wrestled Mutallab to the ground and prevented his terrorist mission, "was driven to Schiphol on Christmas morning by his friend Chris Van Amersfoort. whose Facebook page lists him as a 'fan of' Dubai World’s owner 'His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum,' the Emir of Dubai. ... "<br />http://www.examiner.com/x-10438-Human-Rights-Examiner~y2010m1d4-Obamas-orders-for-security-ignored-FOX-refuses-to-release-segment-copy<br /><br /><br />---<br />Wayne Madsen Reports that Mutallab's Passport was Italian?<br /><br />Intelligence sources: Plane incident a false flag involving trinity of CIA, Mossad, and RAW<br />By Wayne Madsen<br />Online Journal Contributing Writer | Jan 4, 2010<br /><br />" ... The facts emerging are that Mutallab was not traveling on a Nigerian passport but on an Italian passport. Mutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, happens to hold the Italian Order of Merit. In addition, Mutallab’s ticket was purchased in Accra, Ghana, with $2,831 in cash and was later re-issued, on December 16, with a different itinerary at the KLM office in Lagos. ... Previously, WMR reported that the security company that cleared Mutallab in Schiphol is ICTS, a firm that is headquartered in Israel and Amstelveen, Netherlands. The firm also cleared attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid for a Miami-bound American Airlines flight from Paris in December 2001. ... "<br /><br />---<br />ORWELL FLEW IN ON FLIGHT 253<br /><br />OMNESCIENCE NOW!<br /><br />... In 2002, retired Adm. John Poindexter, an expert on information technology, devised a plan for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Total Information Awareness program.<br /><br /><br />PART OF THAT program was designed to foil "asymmetrical warfare" — airline suicide bombers, for example — with vast data-mining computers that could link widely disparate pieces of information in scattered databases. Unfortunately, Poindexter was probably not the best salesman for the program with congressional Democrats.<br />From: "Join dots and stop the terror" | Scripps Howard News Service, 1-5-10<br />http://www.thereporteronline.com/articles/2010/01/05/opinion/srv0000007247531.txt<br /><br />TORTURE AS A "MORAL OBLIGATION"<br /><br />Time For Enhanced Interrogation<br />Investors.Com | 12/30/2009<br /><br />War On Terror: The U.S. now holds a prisoner of war who has knowledge that could foil future terrorist operations. The Obama administration has a moral obligation to extract it from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. ...<br /><br />http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=516683<br /><br />THE LYING LIARS OF THE GOP<br /><br />Obama's Use Of 'Terror': Reporters Still Struggling To Use Internet To Verify Claims<br />By Jason Linkins <br />Huffpost | 01-4-10<br /><br />One of the last things I did in 2009 was to lament the awesome stupidity of a press corps that seemed unable to do even basic fact-checking, such as using available resources to test contentions like: "Did President Barack Obama stop using the word 'terror' or 'terrorism'?" Peter King told this lie, successfully, to CNN because apparently no one at CNN has access to a computer or a television or even has a teensy bit of electrical current running through the wet membranes found in their cranial cavity.<br /><br />I was able to use this thing called Google to demonstrate that King was not telling the truth when he said, "Even when the president gave his speech at West Point about the troops going to Afghanistan, he didn't use the word 'terrorism'." It's no big deal. I didn't think I deserved a medal for journalistic excellence, at the time. But I'm starting to revise that belief now that it's 2010 and Greg Sargent has a piece up at the Plum Line documenting how Jim DeMint played all sorts of journalists for fools in a similar fashion over the weekend:<br /><br />CNN let Senator Jim DeMint come on the network yesterday and claim, without any fact-checking, that Obama doesn't use the word "terror," which DeMint cited as proof of the President's lackluster approach to keeping us safe:<br /><br />DEMINT: There's no question that the president has down-played the risk of terror since he took office. He is investigating the CIA, rather than build them up.<br /><br />GLORIA BORGER: How has he -- Senator DeMint, how -- how has he down-played the risk of terror?<br /><br />DEMINT: Well, it begins with not even being willing to use the word.<br /><br />BORGER: Well, aside from the semantics, aside from that.<br /><br />Again, in about15 seconds, you can go to the White House's website, click "Briefing Room", click "Speeches and Remarks", select the first entry, which is titled, "Statement by the President on Preliminary Information from his Ongoing Consultation about the Detroit Incident" and then see the very first paragraph, which reads:<br /><br />Good morning. Yesterday I updated the American people on the immediate steps we took -- the increased screening and security of air travel -- to keep our country safe in the wake of the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day. And I announced two reviews -- a review of our terrorist watch list system and a review of our air travel screening, so we can find out what went wrong, fix it and prevent future attacks. ...<br /><br />You can also see that Obama used some form of the word "terrorism" three additional times.<br /><br />http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/04/obamas-use-of-terror-repo_n_410653.html<br />---<br />THE COVER-UP<br /><br />NOW we'll get to the bottom of this ...<br /><br />Ex-CIA official to lead inquiry into plane incident<br />By Joby Warrick<br />Washington Post | January 9, 2010<br /><br />The Obama administration's top intelligence official has appointed a retired CIA analyst to head an internal investigation of the failures that led to the Dec. 25 attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner.<br /><br />John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy CIA director, will lead a review of missteps by U.S. intelligence agencies and assess proposals for correcting weaknesses in a system that did not respond to warnings about terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.<br /><br />Blair said the review will also examine the events leading to the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood, Tex. The assessments will produce "candid, constructive guidance to improve our future performance," he said.<br /><br />McLaughlin, 67, was named deputy CIA director under George J. Tenet in 2000. McLaughlin briefly served as acting director of the spy agency after Tenet stepped down in 2004. McLaughlin retired later that year.<br /><br />http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803754.html<br /><br />And WHO is John McLaughlin?<br /><br />" ... With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. ... "<br /><br />President Obama, the CIA and the Master of the Cover-Up<br />11 December 2010<br /><br />by: Melvin A. Goodman<br /><br />The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.<br /><br />With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.<br /><br />So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."<br /><br />Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.<br /><br />Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the president's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003.<br /><br />McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.<br /><br />When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.<br /><br />McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff, Tenet and McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state about the sourcing of serious allegations dealing with Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain strategic weapons.<br /><br />The most serious allegation came from an Iraqi con man known as "Curveball," who maintained that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a key charge in the phony intelligence to justify the Iraq war. German intelligence debriefed Curveball, and German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball was unstable and that there was no validation for his claims. Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA's European Division, knew that Curveball was mentally unstable and a liar, and he urged McLaughlin to drop all references to the mobile biological labs from Powell's speech. McLaughlin ignored him, too.<br /><br />Five weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Powell and McLaughlin shared a table at the White House correspondents' dinner, where McLaughlin, an amateur magician, agreed to perform a few magic tricks during a break in the action. The CIA deputy director conjured coins out of thin air and transformed a single dollar into a $100 bill; everyone at the table laughed except for Powell, who seemed tense and out of sorts.<br /><br />According to Bob Drogin, who wrote an authoritative book on Curveball, Powell stared at McLaughlin and requested another trick. "Let's see you find the WMD in Iraq," an unsmiling Powell demanded. McLaughlin looked surprised and his broad grin faded. "We will," he replied, "they're there and we'll find them."<br /><br />In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career. In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his Deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.<br /><br />When the CIA did an internal investigation of one of the worst examples of politicization of intelligence, the case for Soviet complicity in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981, McLaughlin made sure there were no references to politicization in the final report and made every effort to hide Gates' role in preparing the Papal plot intelligence assessment. When Gates' nomination as CIA director was in trouble during the confirmation process in 1991, it was McLaughlin who stepped forward to defend his former boss from charges of politicization. ...<br /><br />http://www.truthout.org/article/president-obama-cia-and-master-cover-up<br /><br />Lee Hamilton is a leading light of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee "investigation" of Flight 253.<br /><br />Hamilton is another veteran cover-up operative, who honed his skills in the Iran contra investigation, as I reported in 2004:<br /><br />Full exposure of Iran-contra was hindered by a cover-up culture in Congress. George H.W. Bush was snared in the investigative net, so he enlisted the aid of a trusted ally in the House, Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming. Cheney was the ranking Republican in the Iran-contra probe. Robert Parry reports that Cheney "smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton," who "gave Bush a pass." The narrow, penlight focus of the investigation was the work of Cheney and Hamilton, who steered it away from "sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation." (Iran-contra's Otto Reich was tarred by the Orwellian "public diplomacy" scandal under Reagan. A Cuban exile with a sordid history of romancing repressive Latin American regimes, he followed Armitage to the State Department, was appointed to the office of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs in January 2002, under Powell.)<br /><br />"Despite surrendering to Cheney's demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report. Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side - Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible - agreed to sign the report, after extracting more concessions." Cheney and a few fellow Republicans filed "a minority report with the Committee that denied any significant wrongdoing had occurred."<br /><br />http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/05/path-to-911-parts-1-7.html<br /><br />Witness Tom Kean is well-known for his mishandling of the 9/11 investigation, among other cover-ups: " ... Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, the former chairman of the commission, were witnesses before the committee during its second hearing in a week on the events of Flight 253. ... " (Detroit News)<br /><br />Re Thomas Kean, 911 Commission Chairman, and Terrorism, Big Oil:<br /><br />In 1994, I posted an article on Iran contra connections to 9/11 that detailed some little-known facts about Kean:<br /><br />Not mentioned on Kean's official Commission biography was his role as director of Amerada Hess Corporation, which in 1998 formed joint venture Delta-Hess, with Delta Oil, in part owned by accused terrorist financier Khalid bin Mahfouz. Mahfouz inherited a controlling interest in the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, the country's largest bank, and was a director with 20% interest in BCCI, the now defunct financial conglomerate involved in money laundering, bribery, support of terrorism, arms trafficking and other crimes. Mahfouz paid $225 million to escape prosecution for his role in the BCCI scandal. Mahfouz also inherited the assets of the Saudi bin Laden group when Salem bin Laden died in a 1988 plane crash. These included an interest in Arbusto Energy, a Houston, Texas oil company founded by George W. Bush. Bin Mahfouz's interests were managed in part by James R. Bath, a close friend of Bush, who served in the Texas ANG with him. Bath's name was inexplicably redacted in Bush's Air National Guard military medical reports.<br />http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/K/Khalid-bin-Mahfuz.htm<br /><br />A previously unreported intelligence "lapse" surfaced in a hearing conducted by the US Senate Homeland Security Committee on January 20:<br /><br />US Senate begins whitewash hearings on Northwest Flight 253 bomb plot<br />By Tom Eley } 21 January 2010<br /><br />... In another bizarre lapse, the US State Department only declared Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the organization that allegedly sent Abdulmutallab onto Flight 253, to be a terrorist group on Tuesday. This is despite the fact that AQAP has operated for over a year, and was held responsible for terrorist attacks on South Korean tourists in Yemen in March 2009, high-ranking Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayif in August, and Flight 253 last month. One might also expect that the name of the organization itself would raise suspicions among anti-terrorism officials.<br /><br />The implication of this announcement, however, was that until January 19, 2010, US officials were not legally required to “implement an asset freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo” against AQAP. This only raises more questions as to what connections US agencies might have had with the attackers.<br /><br />The senators avoided dealing with these issues in Wednesday’s hearings, devoting much of their time instead to demanding further restrictions on democratic rights. ...<br /><br />http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/bomb-j21.shtml<br /><br />A Question Everybody Forgot to Ask<br /><br />Experts: Why was plane parked at Detroit terminal?<br />AP via Chicago Tribune | January 29, 2010<br /><br />ROMULUS, Mich. - The pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 took the aircraft to a gate at Detroit Metropolitan Airport without knowing about possible risks after an explosive was extinguished inside the cabin on Christmas, a newspaper reported Friday.<br /><br />Passengers were allowed to get off the plane and luggage was unloaded before the aircraft was moved to an isolated spot and searched, the Detroit Free Press said, citing records from airport police and fire agencies. ... The plane remained at a terminal gate for about two hours before it was moved to search for a bag that belonged to Abdulmutallab, the Free Press reported.<br /><br />Taking the plane to the terminal was a "violation of common sense," said Richard Bloom, director of terrorism, intelligence and security at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. "It's a violation of common standard operating procedure. It's a violation of common security rules, regulations and directives," Bloom told the newspaper.<br /><br />Asked about the decision to park at the terminal, Delta spokeswoman Susan Elliott said the airline, which acquired Northwest, relies on the "professional assessment" of law enforcers to "determine the appropriate course of action." ...<br /><br />Glen Winn, former head of security at United Airlines, said there is no national standard for handling a suspected bomb on a plane.<br /><br />"The normal procedure historically is you just don't take it to a terminal," he said.<br /><br />FULL STORY <br /><br />http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-mi-airlineattack,0,317514.storyAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-70887274865731691372009-12-29T11:49:00.000-08:002009-12-29T12:39:50.938-08:00Rupert Murdoch's Times Published Forged Iran Nuke Document<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizAk5QYwOLO0D4vIokJbWoqG_sa52vgB3hLotBasM_MXRMNPfQG9982n8zFm-RP_9xNSpbQyPHYBpog5vOO8g7vn6oUDm4nAss7Bt7Gt2lsT4rcsfD1iwwuC3-RPSIaEgwSESD/s1600-h/6a0111685b4b71970c0120a5ac72d1970b-800wi.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 114px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizAk5QYwOLO0D4vIokJbWoqG_sa52vgB3hLotBasM_MXRMNPfQG9982n8zFm-RP_9xNSpbQyPHYBpog5vOO8g7vn6oUDm4nAss7Bt7Gt2lsT4rcsfD1iwwuC3-RPSIaEgwSESD/s200/6a0111685b4b71970c0120a5ac72d1970b-800wi.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420760451983194066" /></a>Two words, "Michael Ledeen" - an Italian fascist mole in the American intelligence bund who pretends to be Jewish - probably explain it ... - AC<br /><br /><strong>U.S. Intelligence found Iran nuke document was forged</strong><br /><br /><em>By Gareth Porter</em><br />IPS | December 30, 2009 <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiONY3RrQYVrFAtqnLXfiKbwS_ljjbGprq3GNM94FQMRc8Mx53Nf8V-xftv0Tz5erK9Pv6R_q4zJ9hRjGNYv96Rbj1Q55TncSme9tshtv9126g4fhDpicapDNsBsPYNeQCwJz9X/s1600-h/110EF003-9276-414B-8DE6-4197DC010AB4_mw800_mh600.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 375px; height: 281px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiONY3RrQYVrFAtqnLXfiKbwS_ljjbGprq3GNM94FQMRc8Mx53Nf8V-xftv0Tz5erK9Pv6R_q4zJ9hRjGNYv96Rbj1Q55TncSme9tshtv9126g4fhDpicapDNsBsPYNeQCwJz9X/s400/110EF003-9276-414B-8DE6-4197DC010AB4_mw800_mh600.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420750711172912786" /></a>WASHINGTON (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the <em>Times of London</em>, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official. ... The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran. U.S. news media reporting has left the impression that U.S. intelligence analysts have not made up their mind about the document’s authenticity, although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year to assess the issue. ...<br /><br /><a href="http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=210897">CONTINUED</a>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-56270278440781380172009-12-29T11:37:00.000-08:002009-12-29T11:38:27.915-08:00Ex Gitmo Inmates Linked to Bomb(Newser) – Two former Guantanamo Bay inmates are believed to be behind the plot to blow up the Northwest flight to Detroit, according to officials and Defense Department documents. ...<br /><br /><a href="http://www.newser.com/story/77073/ex-gitmo-inmates-linked-to-bomb.html">Story</a>Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-43763604675947183532009-12-29T11:01:00.001-08:002009-12-29T11:05:10.762-08:00Anti-Semitic, Homophobic, Nazi Sympathizing GOP Candidate has History of Defamatory Attack Ads<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLRLEUt3eudZ1iJu7y_Z2ZE1B2IwB0s8Y1khwqSYNY2Shpi8JBv9gqbQdLSHsJZJC0k9A6LnKx2PkjTY7JlT2JKPmkyJ187yeEgLZTDeFYX4oQWRnxtBCPQVkCoE-SS0qZUgD6/s1600-h/AndyMartin.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 120px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLRLEUt3eudZ1iJu7y_Z2ZE1B2IwB0s8Y1khwqSYNY2Shpi8JBv9gqbQdLSHsJZJC0k9A6LnKx2PkjTY7JlT2JKPmkyJ187yeEgLZTDeFYX4oQWRnxtBCPQVkCoE-SS0qZUgD6/s400/AndyMartin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420733983201746290" /></a><strong>" ... [Andy] Martin called one federal judge a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." He also expressed sympathy to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. ... Martin was featured on a Fox News broadcast about Obama in which Martin said Obama's work as a community organizer was 'training for a radical overthrow of the government.' ... "</strong><br /><br /><strong>Rep. Mark Kirk's sexual orientation questioned in GOP opponent's ad</strong><br /><em>By Rick Pearson</em><br />Chicago Tribune | December 29, 2009<br /><br />A perennial candidate with a history of anti-Semitic rhetoric and legal disputes in federal court launched a radio ad for his Republican U.S. Senate campaign Monday that questioned the sexual orientation of the front-runner in the race.<br /><br /><strong>Andy Martin</strong>, who has been sanctioned in federal court for filing hundreds of lawsuits and was found unfit to practice law by the Illinois Supreme Court, has previously used the airwaves to attack political opponents including presidential candidates George W. Bush and Barack Obama.<br /><br />This time, Martin is going after North Shore U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, a much better-known candidate seeking the Feb. 2 Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Obama.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLH3SbKtoDojjTsBqeyTQK14Nfphjo3qFQUUPSpB4bzNdfzKTrxbceOplvV20_kelNbvX-fNHJT7ZR2BMrIi17HNWkuo-6XlavmHq0N4GhVtYqX3QXreMbaUVkfOOPrYTervoB/s1600-h/51333496.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLH3SbKtoDojjTsBqeyTQK14Nfphjo3qFQUUPSpB4bzNdfzKTrxbceOplvV20_kelNbvX-fNHJT7ZR2BMrIi17HNWkuo-6XlavmHq0N4GhVtYqX3QXreMbaUVkfOOPrYTervoB/s320/51333496.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420731066975946050" /></a><em>U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk meets with the Tribune editorial board to discuss his political positions. Kirk is seeking the Feb. 2 Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Barack Obama.</em> (Tribune photo by Nancy Stone/December 14, 2009)<br /><br />A <em>Tribune</em> poll in early December showed Kirk far ahead of the rest of his five rivals for the Feb. 2 Senate nomination, with 41 percent support. Martin had 2 percent backing while the combined support for Kirk's opponents was 13 percent. A total of 46 percent of GOP primary voters were undecided.<br /><br />In the radio ad, which aired Monday on WGN-AM and WBBM-AM, Martin attributes a "solid rumor that Kirk is a homosexual" to conservative Republican businessman Jack Roeser. Martin's ad also claims that Raymond True, the chairman of the conservative Republican Assembly of Lake County organization, says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals. The ad says Kirk should address the rumors.<br /><br />Eric Elk, the campaign manager for Kirk, said in a statement that "the ad is not true and is degrading to the political process. The people of Illinois deserve better."<br /><br />Pat Brady, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, issued a statement disavowing Martin's ad.<br /><br />"His statements today are consistent with his history of bizarre behavior and often times hate-filled speech which has no place in the Illinois Republican Party," Brady said. "Mr. Martin will no longer be recognized as a legitimate Republican candidate by the Illinois Republican Party."<br /><br />True said Monday that he "<em>never made that statement</em>" attributed to him by Martin. True said he appeared recently on a show hosted by Roeser on WIND-AM and "I made a comment not about him (Kirk) at all, but that there were some people on his (Kirk's) staff that had a special orientation."<br /><br />"I never said Mark was a homosexual and there's no evidence to that fact," True said in a telephone interview.<br /><br />On the WIND broadcast, Roeser criticized several Republicans for their support of gay rights and said of Kirk "a solid rumor is that <em>he himself is homosexual</em>," according to a podcast on Roeser's Web site.<br /><br />Roeser was not available for comment. The longtime conservative activist, who has chafed at the leadership of the state Republican Party, has backed several failed GOP candidates in bids for statewide office.<br /><br />Neither Roeser nor True has backed Martin in the GOP Senate primary.<br /><br />For decades, Martin, previously known as Anthony R. Martin-Trigona, has sought a variety of public offices as a Democrat and as a Republican.<br /><br />In Illinois, he received 34 percent of the vote in 2008 in losing a two-man race for the GOP U.S. Senate nomination to the little-known Steve Sauerberg. In 2006, he got less than 1 percent of the vote in a multi-candidate race for the Republican nomination for governor.<br /><br />In federal court filings from the 1980s related to bankruptcy proceedings against him, Martin called one federal judge a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." He also expressed sympathy to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.<br /><br />In 1999 when Martin ran for president, he aired a TV ad in New Hampshire that said GOP contender George W. Bush "had a cocaine problem" and suffered from "alcohol abuse."<br /><br />Martin gained some attention during last year's presidential contest by contending President Barack Obama was a Muslim and contesting whether Obama was born in Hawaii. <strong>Martin was featured on a Fox News broadcast about Obama in which Martin said Obama's work as a community organizer was "training for a radical overthrow of the government." </strong><em>The Washington Post</em> reported that a Fox News official later called Martin's appearance a "mistake" and said the guest had not been vetted properly.<br /><br />Martin graduated from the University of Illinois law school, but the state Supreme Court in 1973 denied him admission to the bar and noted that his Selective Service record showed he had a "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."<br /><br />The federal courts have repeatedly sanctioned him for what a U.S. district judge termed Martin's filing of "a substantial number of lawsuits of a vexatious, frivolous and scandalous nature."<br /><br />In e-mail commentaries, Martin refers to himself as an "insurgent Internet powerhouse" and a "legendary Chicago muckraker, author, Internet columnist, radio talk show host, broadcaster and media critic." He has filed unsuccessful lawsuits against the Tribune, questioned the integrity of its reporters and said he would not cooperate with the newspaper regarding his Senate candidacy.<br /><br />Martin indicated he would go after rumors about Kirk in e-mails he disseminated during the summer. Those e-mails corresponded with the announcement that Kirk and his wife of eight years, Kimberly Ann Vertolli, had agreed to a divorce. Kirk's former wife attended and endorsed Kirk at his Senate candidacy announcement in July.<br /><br />Kevin Metheny, program director at WGN-AM, said the station had no choice but to air the commercial under federal communications law and Federal Communications Commission rules for political advertising.<br /><br />Metheny said the station "is not allowed to edit or censor a candidate's political advertising, to limit it to a particular time of day, or to reject it as inappropriate." WGN-AM and the Tribune are both owned by Tribune Co.<br /><br />WBBM-AM said on its Web site that the station is required by the FCC to provide all legally qualified federal candidates with "reasonable access" and to "air political advertisements without censoring them."<br /><br />David Oxenford, an attorney specializing in broadcast law with the Washington-based firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, said stations are very limited in their ability to refuse political advertising based on content from a legally qualified federal candidate.<br /><br />"Unless an ad is legally obscene or violates a felony (statute), a station can't censor it," said Oxenford, who has represented broadcasters for more than 25 years. Oxenford said the federal requirement makes stations immune from civil lawsuits, though candidates have faced lawsuits over making allegations that are false and known to be false in their advertising.<br /><br />http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-kirk-martin-29-dec29,0,440249.storyAlex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9684642.post-63670371173755777622009-12-28T12:56:00.001-08:002009-12-29T12:33:46.428-08:00John Birch Society, a Fascist Front, Back in GOP Fold<em>by psburton</em><br />Blogger News Network | <em>December 24th, 2009</em><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2_xGoWRKax8EqStwGR7IqSLtCdwJRzoZNs2TsU-fqgDCk6blrdSyh_hnT4nFczQbylzf-9wKDaZuEDFd4iVh7DIYaKiHy-ZCxAYYy9j4ShHp6GBC_z0Kf-eh2KKy-PmTMK-Cy/s1600-h/wakeupamerica1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 186px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2_xGoWRKax8EqStwGR7IqSLtCdwJRzoZNs2TsU-fqgDCk6blrdSyh_hnT4nFczQbylzf-9wKDaZuEDFd4iVh7DIYaKiHy-ZCxAYYy9j4ShHp6GBC_z0Kf-eh2KKy-PmTMK-Cy/s400/wakeupamerica1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420392883549243602" /></a>In a display of political rehabilitation surpassing even Richard Nixon’s return to power, the John Birch society has been invited back into the big tent of the Grand old party. For those unfamiliar with the John Birch society, it was a post war conservative tea party movement on steroids. <br /><br />Birchers were so rabidly conservative, even republican President Dwight David Eisenhower was considered a willing pawn of the vast communist conspiracy, the league of women voters were commie inspired shrews and fluoridation of water, a secret plot by the Stalinist’s to bring about socialized medicine and render American men impotent.<br /><br />Civil rights according to Brother John was no less than a dastardly plan to establish a Negro soviet state in the good old US of A, which tied in logically with the fluoridation of water. The Birch society could demonstrate with pie charts and graphs way back when, that poisoning of water with fluoridation would first occur in white dominated urban areas, resulting in sex starved white women seeking comfort in the arms of colored men, who as any wise Caucasian of the age knew, were naturally over endowed, leaving white men who hadn’t been rendered limp by fluoridation feeling physically inferior. <br /><br />Brother John warned that if the Negro obtained civil rights, vast swaths of the American heartland would within a couple generations, become havens of miscegenation and Negro domination. Most historians credit the late William F. Buckley with exposing the Birch society for what they were and putting an end to their political aspirations and influence, they never went away of course, but like the K.K.K the leaders of the movement suffered a complete collapse of credibility, political fortune and intellectual influence. Because the Birchers went out of fashion prior to the advent of modern video and sound bite technology, I speculate the current Grand Poobah assumed he could simply claim the liberal media was engaged in a slander and smear campaign when the facts were reported. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3t7MaaH4q-D8lspZe6NJHuZSsHMjKm-THhumoWgOVB-xOCVns2pOIB46_z1ny-6_u8F4I6_y8-OsI4preMeieC7uaMW0MNT_tXS_l05NA0qUeR9mzn6q3-ZyhJ6jSCh9XSB2W/s1600-h/6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a71b4dde970b.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 114px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3t7MaaH4q-D8lspZe6NJHuZSsHMjKm-THhumoWgOVB-xOCVns2pOIB46_z1ny-6_u8F4I6_y8-OsI4preMeieC7uaMW0MNT_tXS_l05NA0qUeR9mzn6q3-ZyhJ6jSCh9XSB2W/s400/6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a71b4dde970b.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420435309883247586" /></a>MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported some of the facts I have passed along in this post, the society quickly threatened action, demanded a formal retraction from the network and denied it had ever been a collection of loons who were convinced Fluoridation of drinking water was a commie plot or that civil rights was a secret plan to establish a negro soviet state. Rachel happily allowed them a couple days of the news cycle to posture before she cited sources and documentation which I speculate she already had on tap when she first called them out hoping they would take the bait. <br /><br />The Birchers of this generation may have erased or shredded any damming historical files and pamphlets the society posses, but it seems some folks kept boxes of old John Birch memorabilia. The current leaders of the GOP and conservative movement could care less the society is collection of rabid racists and intellectual half wits. Republicans smell blood in the water and they need warm bodies and cold cash as polls proclaim the President and his Party seem to quickly be losing favor with a majority of the electorate that will actually take time to vote in the midterms. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbF50TzGGQP1ZQNwVtKcxYAsnSp_dfHZ5VuoWz4gwMEHBJmwhECwlkACnVNO1E7PNjy-1eQNNX0uP0RqH08HuBtCGWb5BXpkLdQNv3gvvL-OBSoDn9HdPhI9s51dcmtMhXU2RC/s1600-h/jbs_3.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbF50TzGGQP1ZQNwVtKcxYAsnSp_dfHZ5VuoWz4gwMEHBJmwhECwlkACnVNO1E7PNjy-1eQNNX0uP0RqH08HuBtCGWb5BXpkLdQNv3gvvL-OBSoDn9HdPhI9s51dcmtMhXU2RC/s400/jbs_3.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420395017580896722" /></a>I would like to say it is not so, but the disconcerting augury remains, if we held the election tomorrow, the democrats would lose between fifteen and twenty seats and should the trend continue into the spring, summer and fall, cultivating enough seats to win back control of both the house and Senate is not an unrealistic goal to pursue. Well that’s my view yours may be different.<br /><br />http://www.bloggernews.net/123347Alex Constantinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10270988000562980128noreply@blogger.com