To The Victor, Goes The Corporate, Trade Secrets

Allies Used Gestapo Tactics To Loot Devastated German Industry After World War 2

They came in the night. Kicking in doors, dragging people from their beds, kidnapping and forcing them into trucks and onto planes and trains that carried them away from the hometowns and families.

That description sounds very much like the way the Gestapo rounded up Jews across Europe during World War 2, and it was. But it also accurately describes the way British soldiers and private contractors abducted German scientists and corporate executives during the wholesale looting of the war-shattered nation.

Military, commercial and scientific assets and secrets were stolen by the British, and Americans (along with the French and the Russians) leaving Germany bereft of the skills and personnel and information needed to rebuild, and delaying the day when German industry could once more compete with the best of the British.

It is another example of the dirty secret financial and corporate war that raged behind the scenes of hero-packed battlefields, navies shredding each other on the world's oceans and air battles that became the stuff of legend.

More than 60 years later, the mainstream media has barely begun to scratch the surface of the other side of the World War 2 - where American corporations got rich off Nazi gas pellets, where Australian steel manufacturers shipped the material to build navies and air fleets to enemies, even when they know war was coming, and where the kings of British industry used the infamous Bomber Command to destroy their competitors in some of the most horrific scenes of mass slaughter of civilians in the history of the world : a campaign in which the first bombs were dropped before World War 2 even officially began.

Congratulations then to the UK Guardian, which has uncovered one of these remarkable secrets of the corporate war behind World War 2.

T-Force was the name of the elite British unit that abducted "hundreds of German scientists and technicians and put them to work at government ministries and private industry". But there's much more to the story than just that. Read on for a stunning memo from the British government, lost for 61 years :

The programme was designed to loot the defeated country's intellectual assets, impeding its ability to compete while giving a boost to British business.

In a related programme, German businessmen are alleged to have been forced to travel to post-war Britain to be questioned by their commercial rivals, and were interned if they refused to reveal trade secrets.

The economic warfare programmes are detailed in batches of Foreign Office files, marked "Top Secret", many of which lay unseen at the National Archives at Kew until discovered by the Guardian.

The files detail the way in which the scramble to uncover the Nazis' military secrets during the dying days of the conflict in Europe, to assist the continuing war effort in the Far East, turned rapidly to an early cold war campaign to prevent Germany's scientific and industrial assets falling into Soviet hands. This, in turn, offered the British government an opportunity to exploit the scientific and technical know-how of the defeated nation, with scientists being regarded as a form of human booty who could help give the UK an economic and commercial edge

While it has long been known that German scientists and technicians worked in the US and Britain after the war, it has generally been assumed they were all volunteers, lured by the promise of good pay and accommodation. However, the declassified papers make clear that for more than two years after the cessation of hostilities the British authorities were subjecting them to a programme of "enforced evacuation".

One memo found at Kew, written in August 1946 by a senior civil servant working with the British military government in northern Germany, makes clear how this programme worked. "Usually an NCO arrives without notice at the house or office of the German and warns that he will be required. He does not give him any details of the reasons, nor does he present his credentials. Some time later the German is seized (often in the middle of the night) and removed under guard.

"This procedure savours very much of the Gestapo methods and, quite apart from causing great and unnecessary inconvenience to the individual and to the industry employing him, it is bound to create feelings of alarm and insecurity.

"I have not been able to get to the bottom of the matter, but there appear to be two bodies which carry out these kidnappings."

While many factories were being dismantled, as part of a post-war plan to limit Germany's industrial capacity, the investigators would look for state-of-the-art machinery to be shipped back to Britain, research papers to be taken away and patents to be appropriated. These teams would often include representatives of firms such as ICI and Courtaulds, and others from the shipbuilding, steel or aerospace industries, usually wearing British army officers' uniforms. As well as deciding which equipment and documentation to take, they also identified scientists and technicians to be removed.

Many of the detainees had indeed been involved in armaments work. The papers show that among those most sought after were men with expertise in underwater acoustics, infrared technology, electron microscopes, munitions, optical glass and aircraft engine design. Other target lists at Kew reveal a determination to trace technicians with knowledge of a "method of causing temporary blindness by ultra violet rays", the manufacture of Sarin gas, and "physiological trials of chemical warfare gases" - which had been conducted on concentration camp inmates.

In November 1946 the New Statesman reported that three members of a six-strong Bios team, which included representatives of Pears Soap, Max Factor and Yardley, had called at the home of an elderly woman whose family firm manufactured 4711 eau-de-cologne, a famous brand, and attempted to bully her into handing over the recipe. When she was taken ill the team threatened to call a prison van to take her to a prison hospital. Next day they telephoned to try again.

Scientists were not the sole targets. The papers disclose brief details about Operation Bottleneck, which aimed to extract business information.

"An English manufacturer would name his German counterpart and competitor and 'invite' him to England (whether the man comes voluntarily or not is questionable). They then discuss business and the German is gently persuaded to reveal secrets of his trade. When he refuses, he is kept in polite internment until he gets so tired of not being allowed to return to his family that he tells the Englishman what he wants to know. Thus for about £6 a day the English businessman gains the deepest secrets of Germany's economic life."

The rationale for this had been set out by Herbert Morrison, lord president of the council, who told the prime minister, Clement Attlee: "It is most important at this formative stage to start shaping the German economy in the way which will best assist our own economic plans and will run the least risk of it developing into an unnecessarily awkward competitor."

The Full Story Is Here

Don't ever kid yourself that World War 2 was all about defeating those evil Nazis and stopping the spread of fascism. And don't think Australian, British and American troops who fought that war were completely ignorant about what was going on in the boardrooms of the corporations upon whose half they unofficially were fighting.

Many of those soldiers knew, and some knew more than they could live with.

As I heard one WWII veteran state in 2003, shortly before his death, his voice cracking with rage, "Where's the John Wayne movie where he humps his platoon from Europe to Wall Street to finish off the enemy?"

Where indeed.

The soldiers got shiny medals and pretty ribbons. The bankers got country estates.

Just like the Iraq War today, World War 2 was a corporate war, first and foremost.

And on the Iraq War, here's a story that will probably tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the corporate feeding frenzy going on there right now. But don't read 'The Great Iraq Swindle' after midnight. Your screams of fury and disgust just might wake up the entire neighbourhood.

During World War 1, It Was The Done Thing



100 years, 170,000 cigarettes.

Speaking at her 100th birthday party Winnie said: "I have smoked ever since infants school and I have never thought about quitting."

Infants school? Yes, infants school. Winnie started smoking at seven years old.

Why?

"It was the done thing".

But Winnie has a secret to her long life of smoking. She only puts away five a day and never inhales.

Kerouac : The Legend Of The Scroll



Like most classic literary legends, the story of how 'Beat' writer Jack Kerouac put together his ground-breaking novel of new realism, On The Road, is better in the telling than the reality.

The fable goes that Kerouac, a dirt poor, desperate writer, itching for recognition, sat down one day in the early 1950s, fed one end of a 120 feet long roll of paper into his typewriter and wrote the entire novel, no edits, no rewrites, in a few days. He took the paper roll of One The Road, written as one long paragraph, to his publisher and Kerouac then became one of the most famous writers in American history.

But the reality of the struggle Kerouac went through to finish On The Road, and to eventually get it published, would a more familiar tale to novelists than the legend.

This story in Vanity Fair, marking the first time the original text of the 120 foot long scroll version of On The Road has been published, explains the soul-gutting struggle behind the legend of Kerouac's On The Road.

In short, Kerouac did write the novel on that scroll of paper, but his publisher told him to go away when he tried to unroll it in his office. Kerouac's novel went unpublished for six long years after he wrote the first draft, and it only made its way onto bookstores shelves after a lengthy, frustrating process of rewriting, editing and honing the tone.

The paper scroll of On The Road, now fading and yellow, sold a few years back at auction for more than $2.4 million. More money than Kerouac saw in his entire, alcohol-poisoned life time.

The scroll now tours the world, in climate-controlled display cases, tended by an expert in paper preservation and detorioration.

From the VF story :

The edited book is faster than The Scroll but sadder—the changes Jack made himself in the six years before it was published reflect his growing preoccupation with mortality, which by 1954 he tried to fend off with Buddhism. As Dr. Howard Cunnell eloquently points out in his introductory essay, "Kerouac escapes this encircling loss in the act of writing. To say what happened. To get it down before it is lost. To make mythology from your life and the lives of your friends."

Go Here To Read The Full Vanity Fair Story


The 1957 New York Times Review Of On The Road That Made A Legend Overnight

The Essentials Of Spontaneous Prose By Jack Kerouac

Kerouac On 'The Technique'

An Excerpt From On The Road

Troops Move Into Washington DC

Weird. A local Orlando, Florida, newspaper writes about troops being deployed for "federal active duty" in Washington DC like they are heading into the IED-laced streets of Iraq :

The troops will be deployed for a year.

"It's going to be all right It's OK if he helps people and everything, and it's his job. He’s got to do it. He just got to do it," Jessica Ward said, whose father is being deployed.

Jessica speaks for many when she talks about her father's deployment.

Michael Ward and company are leaving for a year, and that weighs heavy on families.

They are ordered by the president to the nation's capital, where they will operate high-tech weapons systems against any potential air threat.

Yolanda McCormack is relieved husband Charles isn't headed to Iraq, but there is always a risk.

There is? Compared to Iraq today?

Considering how bitter and distraught more and more American soldiers feel about their very long 15 months of hell-time in Iraq, scoring a gig manning "high tech weapons systems" in Washington DC sounds like a bit of a vacation.

Unless Washington DC is attacked.

But is that even close to being likely in the next year? Short of an Independence Day style extraterrestrial invasion?

Are they expecting Chinese or Russian missiles to come raining down sometime soon?

Or another plane-as-bomb attack, like on September 11, 2001?

800 Iraqi Children Held In American Military Prisons

Child 'Insurgents' Taught To Read Harry Potter In Arabic



There are now more children in US detention camps in Iraq than there are foreign insurgents.

800 children, as young as 11, are now being held as war prisoners and are in the process of being 'rehabilitated'.

Since March, the child prisoner population has increased some 800%. As part of their 'rehabilitation' they taught to read and write in English, to learn 'values' and are encouraged to read Arabic translations of Harry Potter.

So desperate and wretched is the poverty in liberated Iraq, that children can earn enough to feed and house their families for two or three months by planting just one bomb to take out American troops.

Iraqi children captured during fighting, or suspected of being involved in kidnapping and killing, are held for a year by the American military before being handed over to the Iraqi judiciary.

From LA Times :

The students, a quarter of whom are illiterate, study basic Arabic, English, math, geography and science in air-conditioned tent classrooms. Dubbed the House of Wisdom, the classrooms are surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire.

In daily civics lessons, the boys study Iraqi history and new government institutions. A team of psychiatrists will provide regular counseling. A large library will hold 4,000 volumes and already has English textbooks, computer manuals and a set of Harry Potter books translated into Arabic.

Adult detainees try to instigate the minors by wrapping notes around stones and tossing them over the wall at their sleeping quarters or by calling out to them. The message they send is that the teachers and guards are infidels who will try to convert them to Christianity, Kareem said.

Clashes between sects led to segregation of Sunni and Shiite detainees in their sleeping quarters, but they still study, play and eat together.

In December, guards at Camp Cropper put down a riot when about 240 boys ripped toilets from the floor and hurled stones and concrete, said 1st Lt. Rob Glenn, the juvenile education administrator.

Hicham Hassan, spokesman for the Red Cross and monitor for American detention facilities, said his agency has filed a formal complaint with the military regarding the denial of access to an attorney and the courts. The military holds the boys for up to a year before they are released or forwarded to the Iraqi judicial system for trial.

The entire article is well worth reading.

It's a portrait of the utter tragedy of the Iraq War, and the dark, horrific world into which so many children there have now been drawn - by the influence of insurgents, by poverty, by hatred of the occupation of their country and through simply wanting to help their families survive, even if it means earning money by killing Americans, or their own people.

But there are some hints of hope for a few hundred of this generation of war ravaged children.


The 2nd Most Deadly Terror Attack In Modern History Already Forgotten By The West

Seven Serving American Soldiers Tell The Truth About The Iraq War - The "Surge" Has Failed - Iraqi Army And Police Teaming Up To Kill Americans

Al-Sadr's Militias Move To Take Control Of Basra As Retreat By British Sparks Chaos

We Gotta Blame Somebody - The US Political War Against The Democratically Elected Prime Minister Of Iraq Continues

Bush's 'Lost Year' In Iraq : 1000 Dead American Soldiers, Tens Of Thousands Of Dead Iraqis, $100 Billion - Because Bush Knew Better Than The US Military

How Do You Like Your Freedom And Liberty? - More Than One Million Iraqis Forced From Their Homes

Robert Fisk : 9/11 'Truther'

Six Years Later, And Important Questions About 9/11 Remain Unanswered

Former NIST Science Chief Encourages Fire Investigators To Become 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, "But In A Proper Way"


Unlike most other journalists, Robert Fisk manages to get beyond the 'ravers', as he calls them in an interesting piece on 9/11 'truth' published today. He also quickly dismisses the standard argument blunter about a 9/11 conspiracy - BushCo. can't run a war, how could they have pulled off 9/11? - so as to get to the real red meat of the debate.

That meat being questions relating to the core mysteries of the collapse of three New York City skyscrapers on 9/11 that so very few journalists are even interested in daring to raise.

Why is that?

What are they afraid of? The reaction from NeoCons? From their own governments? From the public? From their colleagues? From the ranting ranks of propaganda-spouting right-wing blogs that believe everything President Bush tells them?

As one of the rescue workers told me in New York City, a few weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, "this (will be) one of the biggest stories of the century, and the media won't even bother reporting it."

The rescue worker was referring to numerous eyewitness reports, some from his friends and colleagues, about explosions coming from inside the Twin Towers before they fell, and a number cars and trucks around the base of the towers that some claimed had 'blown up' before the buildings came down.

He was right. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, the International Herald Tribune, CNN, the London Times, the BBC, have all refused point blank to launch even the most basic of investigations into the eyewitness reports of unexplained explosions and vehicle detonations, let alone the raft of other unanswered questions about what happened on 9/11.

Curiously, many of these media outlets reported the mysterious explosions around the base of WTC 1 and 2 on September 11 & 12, and then never mentioned them again, not even to correct earlier reports.

Journalists are supposed to question what governments propose to be the truth. It is their job to challenge the propaganda and myth-making of spin doctors and government-approved investigations. They are supposed to hold our governments and authorities to account.

Six years on, and many of the questions Robert Fisk raises in his column remain mostly unanswered. At least, the answers provided by a handful of investigations, some less credible than others, have not achieved a scientific consensus, or even broad peer reviewed agreement.

Why aren't more journalists prepared to investigate these questions, and the gaping inconsistencies of the 9/11 Commission Report, and the endlessly cited, allegedly thorough debunking of 9/11 conspiracies by Popular Mechanics?

As Fisk notes in this story, six years on and there is still no peer-reviewed scientific explanation for why the WTC 7 building collapsed on the afternoon of 9/11.

You don't have to believe that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were controlling the planes of 9/11 via remote control, or some other such absurd conspiracy theory, to have doubts about the official story of what happened that morning, when 2300 Americans and international workers lost their lives in the worst non-state terrorist attack in history.

Here's Fisk writing in the UK Independent :

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7.

...what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

...like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True?

The questions about Atta's prayer are new, at least we haven't seen them raised before. You may remember that the 9/11 hijackers left their parked cars stuffed full of Korans and prayer sheets and other paraphernalia that could leave no doubt in anyone's mind that those who hijacked the planes that morning were Al Qaeda-inspired, suicide-minded Islamists.

That full "our own reality" quote Fisk mentions, supposedly muttered by Karl Rove to journalist Ron Suskind follows (Suskind is doing the quoting) :

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' ..."That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."

We liked the reality-warping of that mindset so much, we used it to come up with a name for this blog.

Nothing sums up the Bush administration, their version of the Iraq War, or the so-called 'official story' of what happened on 9/11 more than that line : "we create our own reality."


On the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigation mentioned by Fisk, and referred to heavily in the supposedly credible Popular Mechanics investigation into 9/11 conspiracies, the former Chief of the Fire Science Division of NIST, Dr James Quintiere is unhappy with conclusions reached in the NIST investigations about what caused the collapsed of three skyscrapers on 9/11, and now wants the NIST reports to be peer reviewed.

Dr Quintiere voiced his concerns during a speech at the 2007 World Fire Safety Conference.

"I would really like to see someone else take a look at what they’ve done; both structurally and from a fire point of view.”

“I think the official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable,” explained Dr. Quintiere. “Let's look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of the collapse of the World Trade Towers and how that relates to the official cause and what's the significance of one cause versus another.”

Dr Quintiere said he had trouble getting clear answers to his own questions from the NIST panel of investigators, and remains unhappy with the conclusions reached, and the six year delay in their finalisation of a report on what caused the collapse of WTC 7.

Debunkers of even the most basic questions, or supposed conspiracy theories, of 9/11 love to claim that only nutters, ravers and people with no scientific credibility believe anything but the 'official story.

But now even the former chief of the Fire Science Division of the NIST is raising serious questions about the numerous, very valid points of contention regarding the scientific causes of the WTC collapses that remain mostly unanswered. Six years later.

There is about as much of an international consensus amongst scientists and experts on why three of the WTC towers collapsed from fire damage on 9/11 as there is a scientific consensus on the causes of global warming and climate change.


Former Chief of NIST's Fire Science Division Calls for Independent Review of World Trade Center Investigation

Via Crooks And Liars....California Considers Hemp Production

A proposed law would establish a five-year pilot program in four California counties and define "industrial hemp" as separate from marijuana under the state's health and safety code, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Unlike marijuana, hemp has less than 1 percent of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, rendering it ineffective for drug use. The United States is the only industrialized nation where hemp is not an established crop, the Chronicle said.

Hemp is used in soaps and lotions and can be converted into fully biodegradable plastics.

It can also be turned into one damn fine biofuel and help stop desertification.


Hemp Produces FOUR Times As Much Paper As Trees

Popular Mechanics, 1938 - Hemp : The Billion Dollar Crop

Hemp Biomass For Energy - Can Be Added To Coal To Reduce Emissions

Hemp For Victory - When The US Government Told Farmers To Grow Hemp To Help Fight The Second World War

5000 Years Of Cannabis - A Detailed Chronology

Canadian Police Admit They Sent Agent Provocateurs Armed With Rocks Into Peaceful Ranks Of Protesters

Incredible. Still can't work out why the Quebec police have come out and admitted they sent police officers, disguised as 'protesters',wearing hoods, and armed with large rocks, into a crowd of peaceful protesters but they've done officially done so.

Naturally the police claim the undercover officers were not acting as agent provocateurs - that is, sent in to spark violence so police had a reason to aggressively disperse the crowd - but that claim to innocence is next to worthless considering there is video evidence of the masked police officers armed with large rocks, ready to throw them at their own colleagues. The only reason they didn't start hurling the rocks is because protest organisers intervened, thus saving the police from being assaulted. By fellow police.

Go here for more on the build-up to this break news and the video which proves the agent provocateurs were supposed to spark violence amongst peaceful protesters.

As we asked in our previous story, how many of the violent, chaotic riots surrounding APEC and WO protests all over the world in the past six years were started by police in disguise? We'll post a selection of YouTube clips in the coming days to help make the point, but in almost every video of so called WTO and APEC protesters going nuts and kicking in the windows of Starbucks, or hurling barricades at police, the most violent of all are wearing ski-masks, or bandannas to hide their faces.

In the meantime, you can go look for yourself. YouTube has dozens of videos from the so-called 'Battle In Seatle' WTO meeting, showing masked people running amok, causing violence and damage, while police let them do their business, and protesters try to stop them.

This admission by the Quebec police should stand as a stark warning to everyone planning to march and protest during the early September APEC summit in Sydney, when 21 world leaders gather, including President Bush.

If you see anyone disguising their face, and acting aggressively, they must be singled out and isolated from the rest of the peaceful protesters. The rules of the game have now changed forever, thanks to the admission by the Quebec police.

If the use of agent provocateurs is a reality in Canada, then it is may also prove to be a reality in Sydney, considering police stated today that prisons have been cleared in anticipation of hundreds of arrests of protesters during a week of rallies and marches during the APEC summit.

Australian media must demand the truth from the state and federal police that they will not use masked agent provocateurs to stir up trouble amongst protesters who have no intention of causing violence and chaos.

Here's a major story from the Canadian media with more details of the admission from police :

The Quebec provincial police acknowledged in a statement Thursday that their agents had infiltrated protesters demonstrating during the recent North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que. but denied that they acted as “agent provocateurs” to instigate violence.

“They had the mandate to spot and identify violent demonstrators to avoid the situation from getting out of hand,” the Surete du Quebec said in a statement. “The police officers were identified by demonstrators when they refused to throw projectiles.”

Protesters have accused police of planting agents outside the Chateau Montebello to instigate violence during Monday’s demonstration.

A prominent labour official pointed Wednesday to video made available on Youtube and photographs of three burly men, dressed as “Black Bloc” anarchists, standing out in the midst an otherwise peaceful sit-in adjacent to Surete du Quebec and RCMP riot squads.

The video shows the three black-clad bandana-wearing men being singled out by union organizers and the crowd. Other protesters started pointing at them and crying “police.”

One of the three men is seen shoving and swearing at Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union of Canada, who is angrily confronting the trio, demanding they put down the rocks, remove their bandanas, and identify themselves.

After being backed into a corner against a line of provincial police officers in riot gear, they try to force themselves through the police line and are arrested while the crowd cheers.

“People have the right to peacefully protest something they don’t like,” said Coles this week, demanding answers from Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

“They think that they have the right to infiltrate us as they’ve done before. But to be packing large boulders, they were going to do something with those rocks and it wasn’t peaceful.”

Steve Joseph Watson has more :

Protest organizers confirmed that four arrests had been made in total during the summit, all of legitimate demonstrators, meaning that the arrests of the "anarchists" was a staged event purely for public and media consumption to create the myth that the police were responding to the fact that one of the anarchists was wielding a rock and attempting to break through a police line.

Watching the video, it is clearly evident that as soon as the trio are exposed as police, they try to casually drift back into police ranks before cops are forced to stage their arrests.

Firstly, why should we accept the notion that it's legitimate for police officers to engage in tactics more familiar to rogue intelligence agencies by disguising themselves as anarchists in order to spy on completely non-violent protesters who are merely exercising their right to peaceably assemble?

Secondly, if the police had to go to the lengths of staging arrests to perpetuate the myth that the "anarchists" were real protesters then why should we believe for a second that they weren't intent on causing violence, since they had armed themselves with projectiles?

We shouldn't believe it. It's clear what was supposed to happen, and it's clear who stopped the violence. Not the police, but the protesters themselves.

Claim : Undercover Cop 'Caught In The Act' Of Trying To Spark Police Violence At Peaceful Protest

Riveting, and infuriating vision.

Watch the video, and then read the story beneath :




From the (Canadian) Star :

Protesters are accusing police of using undercover agents to provoke violent confrontations at the North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Que.

Such accusations have been made before after similar demonstrations but this time the alleged "agents provocateurs" have been caught on camera.

A video, posted on YouTube, shows three young men, their faces masked by bandannas, mingling Monday with protesters in front of a line of police in riot gear. At least one of the masked men is holding a rock in his hand.

The three are confronted by protest organizer Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. Coles makes it clear the masked men are not welcome among his group of protesters, whom he describes as mainly grandparents. He urges them to leave and find their own protest location.

Coles also demands that they put down their rocks. Other protesters begin to chime in that the three are really police agents. Several try to snatch the bandanas from their faces.

Rather than leave, the three actually start edging closer to the police line, where they appear to engage in discussions. They eventually push their way past an officer, whereupon other police shove them to the ground and handcuff them.

Late Tuesday, photographs taken by another protester surfaced, showing the trio lying prone on the ground. The photos show the soles of their boots adorned by yellow triangles. A police officer kneeling beside the men has an identical yellow triangle on the sole of his boot.

Kevin Skerrett, a protester with the group Nowar-Paix, said the photos and video together present powerful evidence that the men were actually undercover police officers.

"I think the circumstantial evidence is very powerful," he said.

The three do not appear to have been arrested or charged with any offence.

Police confirm that only four protesters were arrested during the summit – two men and two women. All have been charged with obstruction and resisting arrest.

Veteran protester Jaggi Singh, who is helping to circulate the video as widely as possible, said all four of those arrested are known to organizers and are genuine protesters.

"But we see very clearly in that video three (other) men being arrested . . . How do (police) account for these three people being taken in, being arrested? Where did they go?" Singh said.

"I have no hesitation in saying they were police agents . . . and they were caught red-handed."

Singh, a member of the Montreal-based No One is Illegal, believes the agents were meant to provoke a confrontation and give the police an excuse to use some of their "toys," such as tear gas and rubber bullets.

"To a certain extent it's self-fulfilling logic. You provide police with this kind of equipment and they end up using it and one way to justify it is to plant some people that toss a rock or two."

Neither the RCMP nor the Surete du Quebec would comment on the video or even discuss generally whether they ever use the tactic of employing agents provocateurs.

"I cannot answer your question because I don't have the information," said Const. Kane Kramer, a spokesman for the RCMP at the summit.

Of course not. Why would a cop even think of admitting to such a thing?

He wouldn't.

You can understand that police would want to place undercover officers in large crowds of protesters, particularly when they fear there might be outbreaks of violence or looting.

But sticking undercovers into a crowd with the intention of causing a riot, or giving riot squads a reason to wade into the crowd with pepper spray, or batons or worse?

That's beyond disgusting.

But when you look around YouTube, at rallies and marches that turn violent, all over the world, again and again you see the hooded people, the ski-masked 'protesters', kicking in shop windows, throwing chairs and rocks, provoking police and ripping down barricades.

Are all of them undercover cops as well?

Probably not.

But it certainly makes you wonder how many of them are there because they're paid to be there, and they're paid to cause trouble, or spark violence.


UPDATE : Steve Watson details other infamous marches and rallies awash with violence where agent provocateurs were clearly involved :

In Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organisation meeting, the authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed curfews and resorted to nothing short of police state tactics in response to a small minority of hostile black bloc hooligans....the police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors...the left-wing anarchist groups are actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters.

At WTO protests in Genoa 2001 a protestor was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice by a police vehicle. The Italian Carabinere also later beat on peaceful protestors as they slept, and even tortured some, at the Diaz School. It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters, to justify their actions. Some Carabiniere officials have since come forward to say they knew of infiltration of the so called Black Bloc anarchists, that fellow officers acted as agent provocateurs.

At the Free Trade Area of Americas protests in Miami in late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident. The United Steelworkers of America calling for a congressional investigation, stating that the police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protestors. The USWA suggested that billions of dollars supposedly slated for Iraq reconstruction funds are actually being used to subsidize ‘homeland repression’ in America

Revealed : White House Manual Details How To Organize Fake Public Support For President Bush

Republican "Rally Squads" Used To Shout Down And 'Corral' Protesters, And Squash Dissenters

A strategy manual put together by the White House reveals a detailed set of guidelines on how to marginalise, discredit and isolate Americans exercising their democratic rights to dissent against President Bush, during his public appearances and fund-raising rallies.

The same White House manual also details how local organizers of Bush's public appearances should carefully screen each and every ticket holder, so not one person opposed to the president's policies, on anything, gets within eyesight of the president.

That the White House would formulate such strategies, to essentially keep anti-Bush protesters out of his eyesight and away from the media, during his public appearances, should come as no surprise to the 70% of Americans who are now opposed to their own president, and the millions who want to make him aware of their displeasure.

But what is surprising, and downright disgusting, about the revelations from the White House manual, is that it also explains how local pro-Bush organisers can create fake support for the president, and organize rally squads to round up, "drown out", any and all protesters.

In short, Bush's own White House has a systematic, and years old, program to create a fake reality : that is shows of support for President Bush, through crowds of chanters, sign wavers and cheerers, where little or none genuine non-Republican lackey support actually exists, and to keep away Americans wanting to express real, passionate opinions to their elected leader.

The revelations from the White House manual also unleash a host of troubling questions :

How often does the White House help state Republican and conservative groups to organise shows of support for the president where little local support actually exists?

How many of those "USA! USA! USA!" crowds that show up at anti-war protests, waving American flags and demanding that protesters shut the fuck up and support the troops are nothing more than hired actors, or ring-ins?

How long has the mainstream media been aware that the White House creates fake public shows and rallies of support for the president, and his War On Iraq policies, and why do they so often fill stories with images of supposedly patriotic Americans who may be nothing more than fakes?

This article from the Washington Post also reveals White House strategies on carefully screening audience members at Bush public appearances to make sure absolutely no protesters, or even silent dissenters, get within a mile of the president :

...any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be screened in case they are hiding secret signs. Any anti-Bush demonstrators who manage to get in anyway should be shouted down by "rally squads" stationed in strategic locations. And if that does not work, they should be thrown out.

....the manual outlines a specific system for those who disagree with the president to voice their views. It directs the White House advance staff to ask local police "to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route."

The manual demonstrates "that the White House has a policy of excluding and/or attempting to squelch dissenting viewpoints from presidential events," said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Miller. "Individuals should have the right to express their opinion to the president, even if it's not a favorable one."

The manual offers advance staffers and volunteers who help set up presidential events guidelines for assembling crowds. Those invited into a VIP section on or near the stage, for instance, must be " extremely supportive of the Administration," it says. While the Secret Service screens audiences only for possible threats, the manual says, volunteers should examine people before they reach security checkpoints and look out for signs. Make sure to look for "folded cloth signs," it advises.

To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to create "rally squads" of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with "favorable messages." Squads should be placed in strategic locations and "at least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems," the manual says.

"These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators," it says. "The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."

"If it is determined that the media will not see or hear (protesters) and that they pose no potential disruption to the event, they can be ignored. On the other hand, if the group is carrying signs, trying to shout down the President, or has the potential to cause some greater disruption to the event, action needs to be taken immediately to minimize the demonstrator's effect."

The manual adds in bold type: "Remember -- avoid physical contact with demonstrators! Most often, the demonstrators want a physical confrontation. Do not fall into their trap!"

Some trap.

Could Bush's public appearances be any more stage-managed? Crowds screened for dissenters, fake rallies of support, "shout down" roaming squads of anti-dissenters on the hunt for fellow Americans angry at the Iraq War, and police corrals for protesters.

The White House, and Republicans, spend an awful amount of time and money creating a fake reality for President Bush.

No wonder he believes that many Americans still support his policies. If he looks around at huge crowds at public events and fundraisers and sees nothing but cheering support, then it would have been very easy for the likes of Karl Rove to convince him that public dissent was of no great consequence and merely the opinions of a rare few, instead of the reality that is the hundreds of millions of Americans (70%) now vastly opposed to his administration.

The Last Days Of President Bush

Harper Lee Speaks

In 1961, Harper Lee published her first and only novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. Since then, she has started and abandoned a number of books, picked up a Nobel Prize, given a few private speeches, wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey's magazine, O, on why she prefers books to the internet, and generally kept a low profile. In the 45 years since To Kill A Mockingbird was published, it has sold an astounding 30 million copies.

Harper Lee has been invited to literally thousands of book festivals and ceremonial gatherings, but she has never given a public speech at any such event.

But finally Harper Lee has broken her silence.

On Monday, Lee appeared at a ceremony to honour great Alabamians (she still lives in Monroeville, Alabama) and was invited to address the crowd.

Here's her speech in full :

"Well it's better to be silent than to be a fool."

Killer robots have trundled out of the pages of science fiction and into Iraq. Armed with high-calibre machine guns, this new generation of robots will soon be killing people in at least two war zones. If they haven't started doing that already. The US has committed $200 billion to programs that will see one-third of all American combat vehicles and weapons replaced by robots, or automatons, by 2015. One of the most amazing articles you will read this month, right here. Apparently American soldiers trialling the killer robots, and IED defusing robots, are getting a bit too attached to their new metallic friends. Wonders one captain, will we see a day when humans are sent in first to clear the way for the robots? Depends how much the robots cost. If they're more expensive than paying off the family of a dead soldier, then probably yes.

They roll, they run, they crawl, they fly. They're ready to slaughter without question, or conscience. Killer robots. Coming to a war zone near you, all too soon.


Russia and China held war games together, and Russia, China and Iran issued a joint statement aimed at the United States, warning them to stay the hell out of East Asia. It didn't get much of a mention in the Western media. Too scary? If you don't know what the SCO is and why it's already more powerful and wealthy than NATO, or the UN, it's probably time to find out.


So how bad, how truly bad, are the financial problems of the United States? Well, put it this way, American lending standards and free and easy credit have been described as "unbelievable" by a top Swiss banker, and the world's central bankers are said to absolutely shitting themselves with fear over what 's going to happen. Soon. The warning is don't be fooled by the current recovery, the horror has only just begun.


Eat Your Greens To Stay Healthy And Fight Cancer, right? Well, maybe not. At least, you might be better off eating your Reds and Blues and Purples. Seems the pigmentation of the vegetables is where all the real anti-oxidation action is.


Who needs terrorism? More than 26,000 Americans were killed by drunk driving in 2005 and 2006.


An horrific and widespread drought continues to wreak havoc on China. Farmers are being told to switch from growing rice, which uses plenty of water, to potatoes. Spuds are more drought-resistant than rice. The Chinese have been farming their lands for more than 7000 years.


You can't be too careful when screening for potential terrorists at US airports. Particularly when the person being screened, for the third time, is a seven year old kid who's just had the time of his life at Disneyworld. This is less about keeping out terrorists, and more about intimidating innocent people. The bonus is that the kids and families held up for three or more hours during questioning, because their names are a close match to names on the 'no-fly' lists are usually Muslims. If you read about this sort of crap happening in North Korea, you'd think 'dictatorship'. Pathetic.


More bullshit about online "hooligans" make life unpleasant for blog readers and blog writers. There are plenty in power, and business, who would like to see blogs shut down completely, at least the ones not attached to, or controlled, by the mainstream media. Offended by nasty blog comments? Consider the choice. Deal with the arseholes, as you are forced to do in real life, or allow censors and anti-free speech activists to take away exactly what makes most blogs worth reading. They say they are pushing for tighter controls on blogs for the good of the blogstream, and all bloggers, and their readers. But they're lying. It's about censorship and control. Nothing more. The "hooligans" and "deeply offensive" crap is the cover story to ram through the measures of control and censorship.


While BushCo. and the NeoCons are still wetting their pants over Iran, Pakistan and India, along with China and Russia, are expanding their business and energy ties with Iran. UN sanctions? What UN sanctions? Iran will be pumping natural gas to India, via a pipeline the cuts through Pakistan, in the next decade, and Russia and China have quietly warned anyone who doesn't like that idea (the US) that they are mounting their own 'War on Terror'. That is, a war against any nation, or agency, who tries to sabotage the Iran to India pipeline. Not all terror is crazed fundamentalists detonating backpacks in crowded trains. There's also plenty of state-sponsored terrorism used to benefit some of the world's biggest corporations, particularly the oil and energy giants.

Pakistan, meanwhile, a supposed key ally on the US-led 'War on Terror' is now soft-peddling the Taliban. According to Pakistan's President Musharraf, not all members of the Taliban are terrorists.


An American pastor, who has been living in Israel for two decades, and recently applied for permanent residency, has instead been told to pack his bags and get the fuck out. Why? He was preaching Christianity.


Another story about an American pastor, this one spent two days 'lost' in an American airport.


If you've had enough of the endless lies and disinformation about what is happening in Iraq, particularly to American soldiers, then get reading on this article written by seven American active duty soldiers. The war isn't lost, they say, but it will be if Iraqis are not allowed to run their own country. The "surge" isn't working, and death tolls all round are on the rise. Americans are widely seen as occupiers, and the resentment is growing by the day. Iraqi police and Iraqi Army are now teaming up to kill Americans. More truth on one page than in 50 speeches by Vice President Cheney, or George W. Bush, or the efforts of some NeoCon columnist who's been given a Truman Show like tour of the Green Zone, and caught a glimpse of manufactured peace and stability in a movie-set reality Baghdad market.


Australia's 'Next Prime Minister' has found himself caught up in a scandal surrounding a drunken visit he made to a New York strip club in 2003, while on an official visit to the UN. The strip club trip was arranged by Rupert Murdoch's favourite editor, and Kevin Rudd, currently the Australian opposition government leader, claims he didn't know he was going to a strip club until he was inside. If Rudd gets too close to actually winning the coming federal election, you can expect some photos of Rudd inside the club to suddenly be discovered and splashed across the front pages of every newspaper in the country.

Politicians are controlled by the manner in which they have allowed themselves to be compromised. Rudd will now have to play Murdoch's game if he wants to be prime minister of Australia, or he will pay a very heavy price.


"A Gentle Humping Motion" - One of Australia's most famous bloggers has been fired from his mainstream media gig for imaging what Kevin Rudd got up to in that New York strip club. He wrote about Rudd trying to grope a stripper and getting rejected, cracking a fat, dry-humping a pillow back in his hotel room and then taking care of himself, in the traditional manner. The blog was online for but a few hours. It got pulled, the whole blog was yanked, and the blogger, Jack Marx, got the sack. All on his birthday.


You can call him a war pig, a terrorist, or the Worst American President In History. And George W. Bush won't react. But if you dare to call him a 'Fashion Victim', you might just get a call from the White House.


How happy are Americans with their lives, and lifestyles? Damn happy, or at least 94% of them are fairly well satisfied with how their lives are going, according to this poll. New Yorkers remain pretty hard to please.


A NeoCon agency, posing as a group concerned with American family values, believes that President Bush is restrained by all that nasty democracy. Democracy, you see, just doesn't work. This is why Bush should wipe away all that freedom and liberty and declare himself President For Life. Then get busy nuking Iran, and nuking Iraq. Once all the Iraqis are dead, says an editor of the Family Security Matters website, then Americans can flood in and make a new America in the Middle East. You'll wish this was just some stupid joke. It's not. It's awesomely, mind-numbingly real. Save American families by nuking Iranian families? Beyond demented, and of course, buried by Fox News and all the other so-called conservative media howlers who always try to hide the darkness and puerile violent extremism within their own ranks.

Also, check out the first comment that goes with this story to find out just how much fun it is to be a Muslim nurse in America right now.


The US Army is using up so much ammunition - some one billion rounds per year - during training and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that police across America are facing bullet shortages, and working out ways to cope with delivery delays of up to a year for ammunition. Warehouses once full of ammo, are now empty. The vast demand for copper and lead by China has also made bullets more expensive.

BTW, if you happen to have 25 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition lying around that you want to unload, the US Army wants to hear from you. Soonish.


Iran : Evil, dangerous, deadly, want nukes, crazy, according to the NeoCons. According to a German historian, Iran has not started a war - that is it has not attacked or launched offensive military operations - for 1000 years.


UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been told by British commanders that their troops can't achieve anything more in south-east Iraq, and it's time to pull them out. Now. Some 500 British soldiers are holed up in 'Basra Palace' and are hit by an average of 60 insurgents attacks per day. The British troops are helping to hold the 'Palace', in part, because it is a location from where the CIA is said to be keeping a close eye on Iran. In Afghanistan, since April, half of all British front line troops have been wounded and "patched up".


Ground Zero, the site where the World Trade Centre once stood, before fires caused by the 9/11 attacks allegedly collapsed three skyscrapers in seconds, is still claiming the lives of firefighters. There's going to be some troubling superstitions and fears gaining credence after two firefighters died at the site yesterday. Many NYC firefighters view Ground Zero as 'sacred ground', where hundreds of their friends and colleagues lost their lives, many of whose remains were never recovered before rebuilding work began. You can expect to hear this question raised soon by the tabloid media : Is Ground Zero Cursed?


If you want to be taken seriously as a Republican candidate for president in 2008, you better be rich. That goes for the Democrats, too. A serious run at the White House is expected to now cost candidates $200-500 million. Which probably explains why only an elite group of American millionaires and billionaires who have their sights set on the West Wing have any real chance of winning.


Villagers in some of the most flood-devastated regions of India, now have to fight off starving animals for food and shelter. The toll of victims now reaches into the millions. Since mid-July, some 850 people have been killed by landslides, drowning and waterborne diseases. Misery unimaginable.


Japan recently endured its hottest day in recorded history. The shocking heat wave killed at least 13 people. The mercury hit 40.9 Celsius. That's cricket weather in Australia.


Australian cities have five to ten years to find new sources of fresh water, or they will face shortages, or even bone dry pipes. Australia is basically a huge desert and scrub land, fringed by shrinking rainforests and pasture lands. The droughts increase and spread, the deserts grow, and the city populations climb as the ground and spring water levels are depleted.


What happens when a 13 foot long saltwater crocodile takes on a huge bull shark in remote Northern Australia? Find out here.

Naked Anti-Global Warming Activists Quicken Melting Of Glacier With Body Heat



Hundreds of naked people posed on a melting glacier in Switzerland, to highlight the fact that it's melting, and that other glaciers are melting, some of them faster than historical records would dictate to be a natural, or seasonal, occurrence. They're melting faster because of global warming claim the hundreds of naked people.

That Swiss glacier they're posing on has melted just that little bit more thanks to the body heat of the hundreds of naked people who lay down on the ice and snow for a series of photographs as part of their protest.

Switzerland has 1800 glaciers, and most of them are retreating, or melting. But some locals see an expansion of tourism opportunities in the big melt. The idea is to do boat tours to get tourists right up close to some of the more rapidly melting glaciers. Lakes beneath glaciers in Switzerland are expanding fast. Tours to watch global warming in action, right there before your eyes in the small rivers of fresh water cascading down a glacier, are expected to be very popular with foreigners.

Perhaps a world tour could be organised around this idea. Travel the globe, in boats and jets, and watch the melting glaciers, the growing deserts, the drowning polar bears, the starving penguins, the shriveling grain crops. The more popular the tours are, the more tours will need to be held, with lots more jet and boat trips, thus causing more warming all round.

The success of the Warming World Tours create even more sights to see on the next tours.

Brilliant.


Rupert Murdoch Sets Off On His Climate Change Crusade

Scientists Seek New Ways To Feed The World Amidst Global Warming

Global Warming Might Be A Hoax, But That Doesn't Mean It's Not Real

Surfing The Glaciers In Alaska - 25 Foot Tall Waves

Hot Air - The Logic Of Global Warming Jihadists

Global Warming Simplicities

A Shattered Consensus - The True State Of Global Warming

Love God? Worship The Earth - Warming Draws Evangelicals Into The Environmentalists' Fold

Wolfowitz Speaks

War On Terror Is "A Struggle For The Heart Of Islam"

No Regrets On Iraq : Needs "Some Kind Of Stability"

By Darryl Mason

In mid-2003, Invasion Of Iraq cheerleader, Paul Wolfowitz, spilled the beans when he told Vanity Fair that the 'Saddam has WMD' story was "the one issue that everyone could agree on", and was chosen for reasons of "government bureaucracy". It also happened to be the easiest way to sell Americans, and the American media, on the idea of launching the War On Iraq.

Now Wolfowitz has done it again, telling the truth, long denied by President Bush, former UK prime minister Tony Blair, and Australia's PM John Howard, about the 'War on Terror' :

"It really is a struggle for the heart of Islam..."

He should change his name to Whoops-o-witz.

So much for the WoT being a fight against terrorists, and supporters of terrorism, regardless of their religious or ideological persuasions.

Now it's about winning hearts. Specifically, winning the 'heart' of Islam.

That revelation should go down a treat with about 1.2 billion people.

Wolfowitz has emerged from his coffin in Australia and is holding forth on the Iraq War, and the 'War on Terror' and why he hasn't wrong to lie America into a savage invasion and occupation of a souvereign state who posed no threat to the United States.

Hey, he's Wolfowitz, he doesn't have to say sorry to no-one. Particularly when he has a stream of sympathetic mainstream media apologists, like this interviewer, to buff his dismal image, and reputation. And that of the NeoCons in general :

The Western press, especially the Australian press, has indulged an absurd caricature of the neo-conservatives. Wolfowitz was always concerned with human rights...There is often a sheer irrationality in the hostility directed at Wolfowitz...

He's right. It's absolutely outrageous how most Americans, and much of the rest of the world, hold Wolfowitz in absolute contempt for helping to make real the worst American foreign policy debacle in modern history, and one of the deadliest wars in decades.

Wolfowitz is concerned about human rights. His hostile critics are irrational.

The article from which these quotes are drawn, by the way, is called 'NeoCon Prophet Unbowed'.

Stop laughing, you haven't even heard what the prophet has to say yet.

So what about Iraq, Wolfowitz? Any thoughts?

"The best prospect would be some kind of stability emerging..."

Err, yeah. Brilliant plan. Stability on a level, say, equal to, I don't know, pre-invasion maybe?

"The most important thing is that it (Iraq) be able to stand on its own feet in dealing with its problems, because obviously the patience of the American people is not infinite."

The United States is getting ready to pull out of Iraq.

"But I do think the stakes are larger than just Iraq."

The NeoCons want to launch another war, this time on Iran. Or maybe Syria.

"Everyone agrees it would be good to get American troops out of Iraq but the challenge is not to leave something behind which is much worse and comes back to bite us."

Wolfowitz is talking the Russia Vs Afghanistan War of the 1980s and how the NeoCons, via the Republican Party, thought it would be a really swell idea to arm Afghans with rocket launchers and get the CIA to train them in insurgency tactics, and how to make car bombs, and how to carry out sabotage. And then invite Islamists from all over the world to come to Afghanistan and help fight those damn Russkies. To help convince the new recruits to act like suicidal maniacs, the NeoCons and the CIA resurrected hundred year old jihadist ideology and pumped them all full of it.

"...it’s now recognised we won a proxy victory against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then the country went to hell in such a way that it created the wherewithal for 9/11.

Proxy war? Yeah, righto!

Wolfowitz is full of valuable insights into what's going on in Iraq, and the broader Middle East.

"...I really do believe if things evolve the right way there are millions of Iraqis who would welcome a more moderate and stable Middle East, and would be allies in promoting it."

The vast majority of Iraqis, like the vast majority of Syrians, Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians and Saudis, like 5.8 billion other people in the world, want to live in moderate and stable countries, without war and the threat of violence and sudden death erupting in a fireball on the streets of their hometowns.

This is some kind of revelation?

No regrets from Wolfowitz about invading Iraq, however. And he's still pumping the old Saddam-free credo :

"I think the world is much better off without Saddam Hussein. Does that mean everything was done perfectly? By no means."

Since the coalition invaded Iraq, as part of the 'War on Terror', more Iraqis have died from acts of terror than all the innocent people killed by every act of terrorism throughout the entire 20th century.

But we're not dealing with uncomfortable facts. We're dealing with Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz still seems awed by the fact when given the chance to do so, Iraqis actively took part in democratic elections. Just like all those Palestinians when they elected Hamas. Oh wait, don't mention that democratic election.

Wolfowitz is also up to date on the latest NeoCon Talking Points regarding the 'War on Terror'.

Observe :

"I remember first hearing (former defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld shortly after September 11 saying this would be a long struggle and he likened it to the Cold War. I thought maybe that was overstating the problem, but it didn’t take me long to realise that if anything it was understating the problem.

"It extends far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. It extends deep into various Western societies. It really is a struggle for the heart of Islam, if you like. It’s going to affect us all.

"I really believe the people we are confronting are so inhuman and so brutal and so wrong that, as in the Cold War, we should, because of the strength of free societies, come out on top."

"We should..."

Well, that's reassuring.

Clearly, NeoCon Grand Illusion Number One is still firmly wedged in place in Wolfowitz's reality zone : The NeoCons won the Cold War.

NeoCons, like Wolfowitz, now claim the 'War on Terror' is even a bigger challenge than 'defeating' the crippled and crumbling Soviet Union in the 1980s.

So, some 30-50,000 thousand demented fundamentalists, pushing mantras of pure violence that become less popular amongst Muslims by the day, and led by a barely functioning, if not already dead, ideologue pose a bigger threat to the world than a massive Communist state armed with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons?

Expect to hear that piece of fatuous propaganda tumbling from the dribbling lips of your local NeoCon talking head soon.

NeoCons really do believe their own bullshit.

Like mushrooms, they thrive on it.

Guiliani Caught Blatantly Lying On How Much Time He Spent In The Ruins Of World Trade Centre

600 Visits? More Like 60


Rudy Guiliani (second from right) knew he had to protect his lungs from the toxic dust at Ground Zero. This is rare photo of Guiliani in a mask. He usually removed it for interviews and photographs.

UPDATE : Salon reports that Rudy Guiliani actually spent more time watching baseball games between September and December, 2001, than he did in the ruins of the World Trade Centre.


Following up our recent report on wannabe Republican president, and former New York City Mayor, Rudy Guiliani's absurd claim that he was just like all those first responders and rescue workers, who clocked up many hundreds of hours in the toxic pit of 9/11's Ground Zero, a story in the New York Times reveals just how much time Guiliani actually spent on site.

The number of visits Guiliani made to Ground Zero between September 11 and December, 2001, is one-tenth of the number of visits he's previously claimed to have made.

Considering, also, that when Guiliani did visit the smoking ruins of the World Trade Centre he spent no more than 15 to 30 minutes at a time there, only increases the suspicion that Guiliani knew exactly how toxic the air was at the site, as did clearly the staff and security detail of the luminaries and world leaders he took there for tours.

Guiliani knew he had to keep his visits to Ground Zero, and the time he was exposed to the toxic air, to an absolute minimum.

Incredibly, Guiliani, who is now trying to base an entire run at the White House on his record as a 9/11 hero, has spent more accumulative hours giving lectures and speeches about the time he spent at Ground Zero (for which he has collected millions of dollars in fees), than the total amount of hours he spent at the site itself.

Remember, Guiliani boasted last week that :

"I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them...I'm one of them."

Really. "...as often, if not more" than rescue and cleanup workers who logged 600, 700 or 800 hours on site, over three to four months.

That's a mighty claim. Guiliani tried to tamp down the explosion of controversy generated by such a ridiculous claim the next day, but he didn't retract his words.

So how many hours then was Guiliani at Ground Zero?

The New York Times claims that an "exhaustively detailed account" from Guiiani's own archives shows that between September 17 and December 16, 2001, 'America's Mayor' was at Ground Zero for a grand total of....29 hours.

29 hours, broken up through 41 separate visits. The 41 visits included inspections lasting as few as 13 minutes and also visits to areas near the wreckage pile for meetings before going on the site.

The majority of the visits, according to the New York Times were "to give tours to other officials and foreign dignitaries".

29 hours.

Here, again, is the quote from Guiliani that has infuriated New York City firemen, police and rescue workers, and the families of those who have already died from the deadly dust and fumes they inhaled in the process of clocking up hundreds of hours on the site :

“I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers...I was there working with them.

But Guiliani went further than that back in September, 2006, when he first started feeling the heat about the tens of thousands of New Yorkers and rescue workers sickened by the toxic WTC dust :

“I spent as much time here as anyone...I was here five, six times a day for four months. I kind of thought of it as living here.”

According to Guiliani, he visited the WTC site close to 600 times.

Rescue workers I spoke to near Ground Zero in early October, 2001, said Guiliani was rarely seen on site, and only in the company of numerous news crews and photographers, or with world leaders like Vladimir Putin. The only time Guiliani took off his mask (to protect against the dust and fumes), a rescue worker told me, was when he was speaking on camera. The moment the interview ended, the mask went back on.

Between September 11 and September 17, Guiliani did visit the WTC wreckage pile, most famously accompanied by President Bush on September 14, but there are no official accounts of how many visits he actually made.

Considering the dozens of hours he clocked up giving NYC local, US national and international interviews in the days immediately after 9/11, and the fact that he was supposedly co-ordinating rescue and recovery efforts from the relocated emergency centre (the original was destroyed when WTC 7 was brought down), it would be generous to say that Guiliani visited the site 15 to 20 times between September 11 and September 17, 2001.

That figure, combined with the official visit count of 41, taken from Guiliani's own meticulously kept records, makes for a grand total of some 60 visits, before Christmas 2001.

That's about 560 visits less than the total Guiliani claimed in September 2006.

A spokesman for the International Society Of Firefighters said his members are sick to death of Guiliani's grandstanding over his role in the rescue and recovery efforts following the World Trade Centre attacks and has urged the media to begin the "peeling Guiliani's 9/11 onion."

The New York Times appears to have begun that process. Let's hope the rest of the American media follows suit and holds this serial liar to account.


7 Out Of 10 WTC Rescue Workers Suffer Lung Problems

How Guilani Made Millions Off 9/11 And His Five Biggest 9/11 Lies

Guiliani Spent More Time Watching Baseball Than At The World Trade Centre Site

Sydney To Be Cut In Half By Three Metre High Security Fence

Sydneysiders are about to get a solid taste of what it's like to live in a high-tech, mini-police state when 21 world leaders converge on the harbour city for the APEC summit in September.

The security measures being rolled out to keep protesters away from champions of democracy, like President Bush, are mind-boggling. So much for free speech.

More from The Ostrahyun :

A five kilometre long, three metre high security fence will cut Sydney's CBD in half.

You will only be able to enter the lockdown zone on foot, and then only through a small number of gates, manned by some of the 4500 police and thousands more private security guards, secret service and intelligence agents already descending on the city.

You will need to queue at the gates, where your face will be scanned in a live field test of facial recognition technology and assessed by agents for suspicious body language. Police and intelligence agents have been scouring through years of anti-war protests and building up a database of faces that were captured on police and security video.

Nearly everyone who passes through the gates will be searched, have their ID checked and have their handbags and briefcases unpacked.

Once you've produced ID, your name and address will be compared to a long list of suspected 'troublemakers' that the police and intelligence agents have been compiling for months. Everyone who enters the security zone is expected to be photographed, and databased along with their ID information.

Even if you work on the other side of the fence, you can be refused entry without explanation. Should you then choose to make a scene, you may be judged to be a troublemaker and detained, without charge, for the entire length of the APEC summit. If you are charged, you can be denied bail.

There will be buses, converted into mobile prisons by the police, to hold those who the police and intelligence agents deem to be suspicious, or those they want to interrogate further, or submit to full body searches.

Inside the security zone, you will come face to face with police and soldiers carrying machine guns, and if you look to the top floors and rooftops of buildings you might catch a glimpse of the dozens of snipers expected to be in place once President Bush settles into his room at the InterContinental Hotel.

If you watch the skies you will probably see BlackHawk helicopters, surveillance balloons and even jet fighters conducting patrols of the airspace above the city.

In preparation for the APEC summit, the staff of dozens of restaurants and hotels were subjected to intense background and security checks.

Even eight year old children, who will be singing at the Opera House, as part of the Sydney Children's Choir, were subjected to security checks and assessments. The good news is none of the children were deemed to be terrorists, or security threats.

Although the security fence is claimed to be necessary to stop 'terrorists', it will have the added benefit of keeping all protesters hundreds of metres to a kilometre away from the gathering of world leaders, which include Communists, despots, dictators, champions of democracy and war makers. You can decide for yourself who is who.

The NSW police commissioner has made a point of stating that no protesters will get within shouting distance of any of the world leaders.

The NSW government claims the security measures will cost Australian taxpayers more than $170 million, but some estimates place the final costs at more than $300 million.

Go Here For The Full Story

New Book Blows CIA's 'Spooky' Cover

Six Decades Of Bungles And Debacles Revealed



Through its sixty years of history, the Central Intelligence Agency has killed a lot of people through its support of brutal governments and regimes. The death toll is somewhere between a a few hundred thousand and a few million. The Agency has overthrown democratic governments, staged coups, assassinated leaders, propped up horrific dictators, seeded dissent, smuggled drugs, destroyed millions of lives and bankrupted nations. All of which may well sound appalling to the extreme, which of course they are, but they were all mostly missions accomplished for the CIA.

But along the way, the CIA sure has fucked up plenty of times. And the costs of those fuck-ups, in resources, in careers, in lives and in rocking the balance of world powers, has been immense.

Born out of the ashes of World War 2, and the homo-erotic Yale club, Skull & Bones, the CIA has often acted as a secret, inner world government for America's most elite families and power brokers (see the Bush dynasty and Henry Kissinger), and also its most anti-democratic and anti-freedom institution. Until President Bush gave birth to the Department Of Homeland Security.

Many have said The Agency has long outlived its usefulness, and that it should have been wound up at the end of the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, it had lost is enemy in chief. But then along came Osama Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda. That the CIA helped to actually create Al Qaeda, by funding, training and arming the mujaheddin in Afghanistan's war against Russia in the 1980s, is either the ultimate of all ironies, or one of history's greatest conspiracies. Either is bad.

After it failed to stop the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, the CIA's budget ballooned by tens of billions of dollars per year. And that was only additional funding to its declared budget. The CIA's 'black budget', for all those off-the-book operations where records are burned instead of being stamped 'classified', is said to rival the GDP of some small nations.

A new book, Legacy Of Ashes : The History Of The CIA sounds like it makes a pretty solid case for the why the CIA should have been dismantled, decades ago :

...the agency routinely destroys whatever it touches...

The agency's past is filled with "fleeting successes and long-lasting failures abroad," writes author Tim Weiner, a national-security reporter at The New York Times. "The agency's triumphs have saved some blood and treasure. Its mistakes have squandered both."

Forget the latest James Patterson thriller. This is by far the scariest book of the year. By Mr. Weiner's account, the agency created after World War II to predict the next Pearl Harbor has spent six decades mishandling virtually every major world crisis. It's also managed to spy on American citizens while failing to anticipate everything from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and 9/11.

Forecasting the future, of course, is a difficult business. But predictions are most useful when they're based on information from good sources and solid analysts, and the CIA rarely had either.

Throughout the entire cold war, a grand total of three spies provided useful details about Soviet military efforts. Years later, the agency relied on fewer than a handful of agents to give it the inside story about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

The roots of the CIA's debacles lie in its early days, writes Weiner. Instead of chasing secrets, leaders preferred the dashing world of covert operations.

Eliminate a left-leaning president here, support a right-wing anticommunist leader there: It was all good. Bad men ended up in power and thousands paid the ultimate price, from Chile and Vietnam to Cuba and Indonesia.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Presidents and Congress both failed to keep the CIA under control and never answered a crucial question: How can a democracy and a secretive intelligence agency coexist?

Since the book is so hard-hitting, some readers might assume Weiner is another liberal reporter on an ideological rampage. But the agency's own historians confirm many of his post-mortems.

Federal judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative's conservative who investigated the CIA's role in the run-up to the Iraq war, said generals would be sacked if the military had made such huge mistakes.

The CIA has issued a rare public rebuttal to the new book :

"Backed by selective citations, sweeping assertions, and a fascination with the negative, Weiner overlooks, minimizes, or distorts agency achievements..."

Well, they would say that now, wouldn't they?

CIA Busted Censoring, Rewriting, Reshaping Wikipedia


The CIA Is "Skull And Bones With A Billion Dollar Budget"

FaceBook : The CIA Conspiracy - Collecting Personal Information On A Voluntary Basis

Hollywood's Overt War Against The CIA


The CIA Sabotage Manual - A Practical Guide To Paralysing The Military Industrial Complex (In Nicaragua)

Has The CIA Ever Been Good At Intelligence Gathering?

Chapter One Of 'Legacy Of Ashes'

America As The Roman Empire...In Its Last Days

Trillions In Debt, Army In Ruins, National Infrastructure Failing

A remarkable, and long overdue, all siren warning from the US comptroller general, David Walker, over the shocking state of overstretched America.

Quite rightly, the usually reserved chief investigator for Congress, whose job it is to keep an eye on everything from deficits to infrastructure, compares the United States of tomorrow to the Roman Empire in its last, ruinous days.

There's little time left, Walker warns, to stop the entire country falling apart, busting apart, at its extremely weakened seams.

From the Financial Times :

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

“I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said. “As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range and take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough..."

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks.”

Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an “unsustainable path”.

“Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure. Billions of dollars will be needed to modernise everything from highways and airports to water and sewage systems. The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis was a sobering wake-up call.”

A few examples of the dire problems Walker is talking about :

To re-equip the US Army, back to its pre-war Iraq War capability, will cost more than $200 billion. There are more than 70,000 bridges across the country that are classed as "weakened" or in need of urgent repair. The average American owes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and spends more each week than they earn, mostly on luxury goods or entertainment. The US Treasury is all but empty, but the nation owes more than $8 trillion in treasury bills. Unofficial estimates put America's unfunded liabilities at soaring towards $60 trillion - or close to twice the entire GDP of the entire world.

And that's just the beginning.


This report spells out the shocking state of America's "creaking" infrastructure :

America’s infrastructure, its roads, bridges, tunnels and water systems, is old, underfunded and badly in need of repair and replacement.

Much of America’s infrastructure was built in the first half of the 20th century, propelled by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal public works funding in the 1930s and Eisenhower's interstate highway system of the 1950s. In the 21st century, the United States faces a looming crisis over the repair and replacements costs. According to a report by Ernst & Young, the consultancy group, published in June, the US has a funding shortfall for infrastructure of $1.6 trillion (£785 billion), a sum needed merely to repair and bring the existing infrastructure back up to scratch. The funding gap and unreliable infrastructure raises questions over whether US growth could be affected.

Chris Laughton, one of the authors of the report, said: “There was significant investment in the middle of the last century, but now there’s not much built then which isn’t starting to creak. There is a funding crisis which is looming. And it’s going to hit relatively soon.”

Russia, China, Japan, the EU all know that the American economy is a paper tiger. They are now trying to work out how they can salvage what they can from the horror levels of American debt they hold, if the US Dollar becomes near worthless, and prop up what they deem to be of vital "national interest" (their own), before the whole miasma flakes apart.

Central Bankers From the United States to Australia to Europe force-fed the global stock markets more than $US370 billion in 48 hours, but it still seems that the effort has only delayed the inevitable.

American economic commenters, bar a few, refuse to even say "recession" out loud because they fear, and rightly so, that such talk may actually help pave the way to such a reality.


Bush Opposes Federal Financial Help To Tens Of Thousands Of Families Now Set To Lose Their Homes

Federal Reserve Plunges Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars Into Propping Up Stock Market- Fails To Halt Share Value Slide

Credit Fears See Continuing Fall In Value Of US Dollar Against Euro, Pound

US Will Spend $1 Trillion On Iraq War...If It Ends In 2008

Bush Loses His Brain

By the time President Bush empties the drawers of the Oval Office desk in late January, 2009, the only senior member of his original White House 2001 team left will be Vice President Dick Cheney. If he's still alive. Rumours persist in Washington that Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice will be gone by mid-2008, to save what she can of her own reputation and to secure a solid diplomatic post before the Bush White House completely disintegrates, or the president is finally impeached.

Karl Rove, one of Bush's few close friends, and his most influential adviser and toxic political strategist announced yesterday he was quitting the White House. Like a true coward, Rove has run for sanctuary in Texas, and a big fat book deal, before the full karma debt due to him was paid out.

The vast majority of media coverage today is brutal on Rove, and what he has done to American politics over the past two decades. And for good reason.

James Moore sums up Rove's foul legacy the best :

The image I see of Karl Rove as he leaves Washington is of a man carrying a gas can and a box of matches as the city burns behind him.

Andrew Sullivan delivers a mini-demolition :

The man's legacy is a conservative movement largely discredited and disunited, a president with lower consistent approval ratings than any in modern history, a generational shift to the Democrats, a resurgent al Qaeda, an endless catastrophe in Iraq, a long hard struggle in Afghanistan, a fiscal legacy that means bankrupting America within a decade, and the poisoning of American religion with politics and vice-versa. For this, he got two terms of power - which the GOP used mainly to enrich themselves, their clients and to expand government's reach and and drain on the productive sector. In the re-election, the president with a relatively strong economy, and a war in progress, managed to eke out 51 percent. Why? Because Rove preferred to divide the country and get his 51 percent, than unite it and get America's 60. In a time of grave danger and war, Rove picked party over country. Such a choice was and remains despicable.

Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war - and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency. His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president's eager approval, into the political culture and into the conservative soul.

Rove claims he is leaving now to "spend more time with my family." Nobody believes that. His son just started college. Some media already speculates that Rove is fleeing in the face of a big news story about to break.

Perhaps something to do with the release of the transcripts of his five appearances before the Fitzgerald grand jury for his treasonous involvement in revealing the name of a CIA agent fighting to the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Or something far more personal : a tabloidish expose of Rove's bisexuality.

We round up the best of the coverage of Rove's departure, and his legacy, over at The Last Days Of President Bush.

China's Super Surveillance City Previews Our Coming Reality

The Quiet Death Of Privacy, Another Casualty Of The Worldwide 'War On Terror'

Most of what is detailed in this story about super surveillance in a Chinese city you can take as given will become reality for all in the US, the UK, the EU and Australia within five years or so. At least, there will be those who will point to data from the "success" of China's new multi-functional ID chip card, in a few years time, and claim it is a necessity for all.

That American tech companies are helping China to create such super surveillance capabilities means that what happens in Shenzhen will be seen as a sort of live field test for this spy-tech, and will be used in the pitch for the adoption of such super surveillance by Western governments.

It should be noted now, however, that in all the talk below about China's unrolling of massive networks of surveillance cameras, the United Kingdom still leads the world with one surveillance camera for nearly every 14 people.

From the New York Times :

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

These sort of personal information-rich ID cards were once referred to as "life cards", meaning that details of a person's entire life would be encoded into a chip on the card. Eventually the ID chip will move from the card to the human wrist, first as a bracelet, or ring, and then actually implanted under the flesh. To not have one of your own, will be to not officially exist.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

Once again, the spectre of 'terror threats' is used as the all-purpose excuse to eventually place an entire population under life-time monitoring, and behavioural analysis and assessment :

...rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.

New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests.

Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.

How the regional Chinese government keeps track of its police paves the way for how the central government will eventually keep track of all citizens, and visitors :

Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.

When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal technique of social control has been for local government agencies to keep detailed records on every resident.

What worked in China will become the reality of all those living in the supposedly 'free' West.

That there is so little opposition to an ultra-surveillance state, as personified by the participation of hundreds of millions of people on social network sites, like MySpace and Facebook, who are easily encouraged to share the most intimate details of their lives, their thoughts, emotions and spending habits, surely would have surprised the likes of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

Both authors, along with thousands more since the 1960s, expected the general public would mount widespread resistance and dissent against ultra-surveillance. They couldn't have been more wrong.

As long as it ultra-surveillance is sold to us as being more convenient, and fun, and working to keep us safe from 'terror', we seem to all but welcome the integration of our privacy and governments into a cohesive whole.

That so many seem to take comfort from the presence of surveillance cameras in particular, citing the reassuring feeling that "someone is watching over me", seems almost more science fiction than the Big Brother dystopias of Huxley, Orwell and Philip K Dick.

When our every movement through a city, or across a country, can be tracked and logged via GPS and surveillance cameras, and through digital checkpoints (where your ID chip is auto-scanned through your wallet, or clothing), and the majority seemed to have already made peace with the reality that every phone call, e-mail and text message they send and receive is being monitored, how long then before we gladly welcome surveillance cameras into our homes? Into the private sanctum of our bedrooms and even our bathrooms?

The ultimate end game for ultra-surveillance would be constant monitoring from within our minds, a log of every thought and emotion, a record of every dream.

But we would be most likely be as happy, or non-resistant, to that invasion of privacy as well. Once we got used to it. Once we were thoroughly sold on the benefits, and all the reasons why it would be fun to get brain chip.

As long as we get the craving reassurance that we are not doing anything wrong, or thinking anything wrong, with the proof being that we are never detained, or officially questioned, we seem to harbour no mass resistance to the end of privacy.

We barely even hear the pro-surveillance state mantra, "If you've done nothing wrong, then you've got nothing to hide" anymore.

It is no longer needed. That mantra has become a cliche.

As cliched as the idea that privacy, and freedom, is the reward for not breaking the law.

There is no reward anymore.

Just a slight lessening of suspicion.

The Internet : The Shared Memory Of Our Species

After a cascade of piffle recently about the evils of the internet, and how it is destroying lives and laying waste to culture and creativity, it's refreshing to hear an author like William Gibson, who infamously popularised the term 'cyberspace' back in the early 1980s, give the greatest invention for the growth and sharing of human knowledge since the printing press some due respect :

(Gibson has) argued that the creation of the internet is a human event comparable to the invention of cities. Even make-believe is, as a result, no longer quite the simple act it used to be.

'I'm really conscious, when I'm writing now, how Google-able the world is. You can no longer make up what some street in Moscow looks like because all your readers can have a look at it if they want to. That is an odd feeling. It is a genuine way that cyberspace is, to use a word from Spook Country, everting the world. It is turning itself - and us - inside out. It's where we transact so much of who we are these days.'

'You could say, in some ways technology and entertainment culture does not look that good from outside. I mean, if you looked at the internet objectively, sometimes you would think it was just a tsunami of filth, something you would not want anywhere near your children.'

It is though, he believes, an intimately human form of culture. 'I think that one of the things that sets us most thoroughly apart is the ability to preserve our individual memory. The information of the cave paintings becomes Borges's library, Borges's library becomes a laptop computer.' The internet is the shared memory of the species.

I wonder if Gibson, an inveterate blogger, thinks it possible to have human relationships in cyberspace that are as close as in the real world?

'If they are text-based, I would say yes. I have some friendships conducted almost entirely through email that are very intimate. I think we are getting to the point that a strange kind of relationship would be one where there was no virtual element. We are at that tipping point: how can you be friends with someone who is not online? In a couple of years, we will be no more disturbed by our relationship with virtual worlds than we are by our relationship with broadcast television.'

This story also supplies a solid, and fascinating 'genesis' tale of the inspirations that led to Gibson writing his first, and most famous, novel Neuromancer back in 1982 :

One day, waiting for a bus, he saw a poster for the Apple 2c, a relatively small personal computer with a handle on it, like a briefcase. 'I stood there and remember thinking: Wow, computers can be small.'

It was also about the time of the first video arcades and Gibson would look in and see kids playing. 'I was always struck by the idea that the kids pushing the buttons wanted more than anything to be on the other side of the screen. The look on their faces suggested that.'

He started to invent a world where subcultures, particularly urban youth subcultures, might meet digital technology in a way that had not happened yet. He evolved the language for this place in part from overhearing conversations at science-fiction readings. He'd go to Seattle and 'just eavesdrop guys in a bar or whatever, guys who were maybe in working at the early days of Microsoft'.

Once he overheard two women who worked as keypunch operators at an army facility have a brief conversation about viruses on the machinery. 'I didn't ask, I just took it home and thought: this sounds good. The idea of computer viruses was generally unknown at that time, but I could see how it might work in Neuromancer.'

Scorsese On Antonioni

Allen On Bergman

For film addicts, here's two excellent tributes to two of cinema's greatest innovators, from two of modern cinema's greatest directors.

Martin Scorsese pays lyrical tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni :

Antonioni made us aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

...it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself. Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.

Woody Allen pays passionate kudos to Igmar Bergman :

Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.

Like all great film stylists, such as Fellini, Antonioni and Buñuel, for example, Bergman has had his critics. But allowing for occasional lapses all these artists’ movies have resonated deeply with millions all over the world. Indeed, the people who know film best, the ones who make them — directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors — hold Berman’s work in perhaps the greatest awe.

I've seen only a few of Bergman's films, but I've seen most of Antonioni's.

Watching Jack Nicholson stumble towards the end of his life, or someone else's, in a forgotten desert town in Antonioni's The Passenger is still one of cinema's greatest couple of hours. It's not slow, it takes its time to tell its story, and to let you find the story for yourself. In DVD stores crowded with movies that hand-feed you plot and backstory until you feel bloated, The Passenger remains a wondrous journey into the soul of a troubled man, looking for the end.

Nicholson was so proud of his work in The Passenger, and such a fan of Antonioni's, he brought the rights to the film so he could preserve it, and keep it away from those who wanted to cut it short, or clip its more dangerous moments for vanilla mainstream television audiences. It's rarely shown on television, and it can still be hard to find a copy of The Passenger, but it's well worth it. As are nearly all Antonioni's films.

If you love Woody Allen, then you will probably find plenty to like in Bergman's films.

But if you love Martin Scorsese, the director of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and The Departed, you should feel a frantic compulsion to track down each and every Antonioni film you can find, starting with The Passenger, or Zabriske Point, or L'Avventura.

Scorsese has seen more films than you've taken deep breaths, but the magic of Antonioni's cinematic power can be clearly in seen in nearly every Scorsese film, including The Aviator and The Departed.

Rudy Guilani : America's Mayor? America's Idiot


The toxic dust cloud of 9/11 : Then mayor Rudolph Guiliani knew it was poison, but didn't tell New Yorkers, or the firefighters digging through the rubble for their friends


Wannabe president Rudy Guiliani, and his supporters, and well paid media wranglers, like to portray for the former mayor of New York City as "America's Mayor", for "taking charge" when terrorists struck New York City on 9/11.

Rudy Guiliani spent many hours on the morning of 9/11, using the media as a human shield and all but pissing his pants in fear. During his first press conference, he could barely speak above a whisper.

Some hero.

Yesterday, in only a handful of quotes, Guiliani all but destroyed his chances of ever becoming US president, let alone scoring the Republican nomination. At least, he should have done :

Rudy Giuliani drew outrage and indignation from Sept. 11 first-responders yesterday by saying he spent as much time - or more - exposed to the site's dangers as workers who dug through the debris for the missing and the dead.

Speaking to reporters at a Cincinnati Reds ballgame he caught between fund-raisers, the GOP front-runner said he helped 9/11 families and defended himself against critics of how he managed the attack's aftermath.

"This is not a mayor or a governor or a President who's sitting in an ivory tower," Giuliani said. "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them."

Did he tear the fingernails from his hands as he tried to dig, without tools, through dozens of feet concrete and twisted steel wreckage, desperately trying to reach his buried friends in the ruins of the World Trade Centre?

Fuck no.

Did Guiliani work six and seven day weeks, twelve hours at a time, on the still burning pile for more than three months?

Fuck no.


Did Guiliani breathe in enough toxic fumes and dust from the smouldering wreckage to destroy his lungs in only a couple of years later?

Fuck no.

Did Guiliani wait until rescue workers had unearthed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold bars, from WTC basement vaults buried in the wreckage, before demanding they stop digging for their friends, and then send in police to try and arrest them when they refused to quit?

Oh yes, he did.


New York City firefighters, paramedics, police, Port Authority workers are already responding with disgust to Guiliani's mind-boggling claims that he is "one of them" :

His statement rang false to Queens paramedic Marvin Bethea, who said he suffered a stroke, posttraumatic stress disorder and breathing problems after responding to the attacks.

"I personally find that very, very insulting," he said.

"Standing there doing a photo-op and telling the men, 'You're doing a good job,' I don't consider that to be working," said Bethea, 47.

Ironworker Jonathan Sferazo, 52, who said he spent a month at the site and is now disabled, runs a worker advocacy group with Bethea and called Giuliani's comments "severely" out of line.

"He's not one of us. He never has been and he never will be. He never served in a capacity where he was a responder," Sferazo said.

"[Giuliani] is self-absorbed, arrogant and deluded," said International Association Of Firefighters spokesman Jeff Zack.

Nobody really knows how much money Guiliani has made out of 9/11. He has a number of business interests tied to Homeland Security money and other security related investments. Some estimates place the wealth he has accumulated off just his post-9/11 investments in the tens of millions.

But he has also been paid an astounding $100,000 a pop for just standing at a podium and telling his ever-changing story of his 'heroics' on 9/11. Guiliani has given dozens of such speeches and presentations.

One of Guiliani's infamous acts of 9/11 'heroism' was to appear in numerous photos with first responders and Ground Zero rescue workers. Guiliani was the one wearing a face mask, because he knew just how toxic the air and dust around Ground Zero was. He was told, as mayor, that he had to warn New Yorkers of just how dangerous the air was. He refused. He was told he had to make sure that all the workers at Ground Zero wore respirators. He refused.

Most of the firefighters Guiliani posed with were not wearing masks, and the dust was thick on their face and clothes. Some of these firefighters have already died from 'WTC Dust', others are still dying.

More than 70,000 New Yorkers and rescue workers are now being monitored for signs of respiratory ilnesses and blood cancer as a result of being exposed to the poison dust cloud, and choking smoke fumes, from Ground Zero.

Guiliani is not one of them.

The editors of the New Yorker have clearly had enough of Guiliani's near ceaseless whoring of 9/11 for his own personal, political and financial gain.

The New Yorker has published a devastating expose called 'Rudy Guiliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11'. It's well worth a read. Here are some highlights from the story :

Nearly six years after 9/11, Rudy Giuliani is still walking through the canyons of lower Manhattan, covered in soot, pointing north, and leading the nation out of danger's way. The Republican frontrunner is campaigning for president by evoking that visual at every campaign stop, and he apparently believes it's a picture worth thousands of nights in the White House.

Giuliani has been leading the Republican pack for seven months, and predictions that the party's evangelicals would turn on him have so far proven hollow. The religious right appears as gripped by the Giuliani story as the rest of the country.

Giuliani isn't shy about reminding audiences of those heady days. In fact he hyperventilates about them on the stump, making his credentials in the so-called war on terror the centerpiece of his campaign.

'Every effort was made by Mayor Giuliani and his staff to ensure the safety of all workers at Ground Zero.' So read a Giuliani campaign statement in June, responding to a chorus of questions about the mayor's responsibility for the respiratory plague that threatens the health of tens of thousands of workers at the World Trade Center site, apparently already having killed some.

The statement pointed a finger at then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, issuing a list of the many times that "Whitman assured New Yorkers the air was safe." Instead of also detailing the many times Giuliani echoed Whitman�for example, "the air is safe and acceptable," he said on September 28�the campaign cited several Fire Department "briefings" about "incident action plans" for the use of respirators, suggesting that the city had tried to get responders to protect themselves from the toxins at Ground Zero. The press release did not make a case that any of these "plans" had ever resulted in any real "action"; nor did it dispute the fact that as late as the end of October, only 29 percent of the workers at the site were wearing respirators.

The city had its own test results, of course, and when 17 of 87 outdoor tests showed hazardous levels of asbestos up to seven blocks away, they decided not to make the results public.

The firefighters' union pointed out that the respiratory debacle was, like the malfunctioning radios and so many other things, another symbol of the city's failure to prepare for a major terrorist event. Fire Department memos after the 1993 bombing had urged better protective gear, just as they'd screamed for better radios. The UFA's leaders pointed out that the department had "ignored many issues related to respiratory protection" for years. The union's health-and-safety officer, Phil McArdle, likened the long-term effects of working at Ground Zero to Agent Orange in Vietnam. "We've done a good job of taking care of the dead," he said, referring to the hunt for remains, "but such a terrible job of taking care of the living."

UPDATE : Guiliani has realised how damaging his absurd comments about being exactly like the 9/11 rescue workers have already proven, one day later, and has backtracked :

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he misspoke when he said he spent as much time, if not more, at ground zero exposed to the same health risks as workers combing the site after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I think I could have said it better," he told nationally syndicated radio host Mike Gallagher. "You know, what I was saying was, 'I'm there with you.'"

Guiliani's attempt at reframing his insulting comments may just increase the political and public perception damage already done :

Giuliani's explanation further angered his ground zero critics, prompting several to issue a statement demanding an apology.

"He is such a liar, because the only time he was down there was for photo ops with celebrities, with politicians, with diplomats," said deputy fire chief Jimmy Riches, who spent months digging for his firefighter son.

"On 9/11 all he did was run. He got that soot on him, and I don't think he's taken a shower since."

Good luck with scoring the Republican presidential nomination, Mr Guiliani.


Read The Full Story Here

Firefighters Urge 'Peeling Of Guiliani's 9/11 Onion' - Damning Interview On The 'Heroics' Of Mayor Rudolf Guiliani

We Were Warned, But Did Anyone Listen?


Ron Cobb's late-1960s vision of the future. Chillingly accurate.

Ron Cobb, America's greatest political cartoonist of the turbulent 1970s, now has a gallery of some of his brilliant work online here. Cobb has also worked extensively in film and television, designing sets, props and costumes for dozens of movies, including Dark Star, Alien and Total Recall. Cobb also, infamously, designed the more memorable aliens in the Star Wars cantina sequence.

Hopefully, we'll be running an interview with him here soon. And if he doesn't complain, more of his wonderful art and design work.

New York Times Brainstorms American Terror Attacks

Asks 'How Would You Attack America?'

One of the more interesting blogs, Freakonomics, has found a new online home at the New York Times, and set off a comment-packed firestorm with this post musing on what would be the best, most efficient, and the highest-impact ways that terrorists could strike inside the United States.

More than 500 comments followed the question, and there is plenty of interesting, scary, fascinating and aggravating thoughts to be absorbed, if you've got the time to soak through them all.

We know you don't have that sort of time, so we went digging for the gold.

One commenter described how she began thinking like a terrorist on a recent flight. She had visited duty free and walked on board an airliner with a sealed bag, the contents of which were not checked. Inside the bag she had a bottle of booze, a scarf or piece of material and a cigarette lighter. How easy then, she asked herself, would it be for me to create a Molotov cocktail right there on the plane? While she clearly had no intention of doing so, just coming up with this scenario reinforced in her mind how completely vulnerable she was to terrorism at almost every turn in her daily life.

Which is the conclusion most people would reach once they chewed through even half of the 500 comments on the Freakonomics blog.

You can be hit anywhere, anytime, in a hundred different ways. So why live in fear of what may never happen anyway?

Author Tom Clancy, who wrote about terrorists crashing a hijacked airliner into the White House in Debt Of Honour, a pre-9/11 novel, would be impressed by the creativity on show in the comments in response to the Freakonomics question.

Security agencies, meanwhile, are probably shuddering in horror, or quickly scribbling down the scenarios that they had never before considered.

Here's a selection of the terror attack scenarios NYTimes readers concocted :

- Releasing bags full of extremely deadly poisons or toxins on a number of crowded underground train systems across the country, on the same day, at the same time. Have gunmen waiting on the stairs of the subway platforms to cut down the screaming, running hordes.

- 20 terrorists load up on shot guns and machine guns and hit 20 different malls, same day, same time, and commence blowing people away.

- Another commenter ups the ante by suggesting the 'Mass Mall Attack' scenario could be adopted to schools, or even day care centres, to maximise the horror and terror.

- Deploy a few dozen terrorists to take low-paying, easy-to-get jobs on American farms, and then poison vegetables, cattle, fruit trucks as they leave the farms.

- Dump gallons of cyanide into the 300 mile long channel that carries fresh water into Los Angeles, resulting in, at the minimum, a closure of the channel and millions left without access to clean water.

- Spread terrorists around the country to attack to simultaneously attack rail cars carrying toxic chemicals and gases, blowing them up as they pass through towns and villages. Dittos for chemical trucks.

- Select a certain make or model of a widely sold American car, send terrorists out onto two lane highways (with no road dividers) in cars laden with gasoline. Terrorists would then plunge their fuel bomb car into the chosen cars, presumably killing dozens, but throwing every owner of the targeted car models into panic, and fearful of driving their vehicles.

- Detonate car bombs on all the major bridges and tunnels of New York City, shutting down the roads and causing economic chaos.

- ferment civil unrest via blackouts, water shortages, widespread food poisonings, dambreaks, disinformation campaigns aimed at the stock market.

- Walk through the Californian hills with flares and create dozens, or hundreds, of wildfires.

- Send terrorists into cinemas at the start of the big summer movie season with duffel bags full of explosives. Detonate. People avoid cinemas, Hollywood loses billions.

- Hide explosives inside bottles of cranberry sauce and put them on the shelves of grocery stores the afternoon before Thanksgiving.

- Bomb randomly chosen food courts in mall across America with explosives on ten minute timers. Repeat every day for a week.

- Wait for events like the New York City steam pipeline explosion, or the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and then release videos claiming responsibility while chanting "Allah Akbar".

- Fly private jets into key dams.

- Set fire to crowded seaside boardwalks at the height of summer's tourist season.

- Set off smoke bombs at major sporting events, counting on the mass panic to produce trampling deaths and injuries and give people The Fear about attending major sporting events in the future.

- Mass murder peoples' pets.

But my personal favourite is the following :

They should drive everywhere in SUV’s (one per vehicle and even better with little American flags flapping in the wind to destroy fuel efficiency) and leave doors open when the AC (or heat) is full blast. The CO2 produced will fill the atmosphere and cause the Earth to retain heat to the point that the polar ice caps and most of the major glaciers melt and flood the oceans. The result will have global impact with disastrous effects on the coasts and disrupt the natural ecosystems that provide our food.

Or perhaps this one :

I'd send out millions of IRS audit letters.

This site started collecting ideas from readers about how terrorists might next attack America in late 2004. The mind-boggling list now runs into hundreds of quick summaries. From the economically disruptive :

Terrorists might kill the head of every fortune 500 company when he went out to get his morning paper.

And the explosive :

Terrorists might plant bike path land mines

To the plain dippy :

Terrorists might pack a life-like robot panda with explosives, kill other pandas

Despite the fury and outrage provoked by the Freakonomics invitation to get terroristically creative, it's astounding how many times such lists have been compiled before online by American websites in the years since 9/11. They're everywhere.


Not surprisingly, the Freakonomics question caused dozens of commenters to vent their outrage at possibly giving terrorists new ideas on how to cause terror in the US, and some demanded the FBI launch investigations on the post.

As we said, holding such a forum is hardly a new idea online, and if someone coming up with an attack scenario online needs to be investigated, then why not investigate Tom Clancy, ten thousand other terror-novel writers and the creators of '24'?

But the Freakonomics forum also yielded the below comment, which sums up a lot of the turgid atmosphere you find on American news forums, and in letters to the editor of small town American newspapers. That's not to say the atmosphere is only online. Americans can sense what is coming, and seem, generally, remarkably well informed on the numerous ways Bush Co. has terrorised its own people by using the threat of terror to expand its control of the nation and its people, while shredding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights :

The reason attacks like this haven’t happened isn’t because the terrorists haven’t thought of them, or because our intelligence agencies have prevented them… it’s because the threat has been been falsely inflated.

Your government wants you to be afraid so it can strip you of your freedoms and control you. The news media wants you to be afraid because it will keep you glued to your TV, boosting ratings with “Breaking News” plastered across the screen every time Homeland Security announces that it has foiled a contrived “terrorist plot.”

You are being manipulated into accepting slavery.

Wake up before it’s too late.

— Posted by Sean

Terrorists Win : Americans Living In Perpetual Fear

Watch Out For Terrorists And Their Plans

Surveillance State : US Turns U2 Spy Planes On Itself

Terror Movie Plot Contest Winner : Attack The Dam, Flood Whole States

Hundreds Of Terror Attack Movie Plot Ideas

Security Firms Working On Tech To Spot Potential Terrorists In Crowds

News Laws Will Turn American Phone Systems And Internet Into Permanent Spying Architecture

Here's Comes 3-D TV

Open up some new landfills. All those mega-screen HD TVs will be toast, as far as the "must have it now!" visual addicts are concerned, when 3-D TVs start hitting the stores in five or so years :

I'm sitting in Paris and some butterflies are fluttering towards me. Loads of them, perfectly clearly. I could allow one to land on my hand or catch one of the rose petals being blown towards me - except I can't, because they're not real. They're images on a TV in high definition - and in perfect 3-D. They look life-sized and real, and I'm not wearing silly spectacles, other than the ones I wear all the time.

People have been working on convincing 3-D without the glasses for a long time and the demo is breathtaking. It's on a prototype Philips TV, which won't be available for a while; it would cost £10,000 (more than $A23,000) at the moment, but that's expected to be vastly lower when it reaches the mass market.

Orange has also emerged as an unexpected early player in the market, and I'm watching the demo in its offices. It believes 3-D TV will be key to the services it will be able to deliver to people's homes once its 100 Mbps fibre-optic internet service being trialled in Paris takes off; hence its interest. The display moves to a beer advert that looks as though you could lift it off the screen, and then there's a demo of a computer game in genuine 3-D with bullets flying at you. Four cynical journalists are silenced for once. Later Orange takes a 3-D photo of us and shows it to us on a hand-held camera, with the hint that phones will do this one day.

The technology works by throwing a different image to each eye and angling them so that one eye picks up one and the other picks up the other. There are in fact eight separate images, the technologists having added more after early users reported feelings of nausea and dizziness. "All of us have heard of 3-D for games, for example, but it's not really 3-D," says Philippe Delbary, head of 3-D services for Orange. "It's just an attempt to represent depth."

The new technology shows actual 3-D and it's impressive. But it's not totally natural; if the camera has focused on the foreground, it's not possible to focus on the background as there is no clear image there for your eye to pick up. Once you're used to that it looks perfect. But how quickly will the market embrace it?

A shortage of movies shot in the new 3-D format are likely to delay mainstream demand until well after 2010. There are only three big budget 3-D movies going into production in the next year that we know of : A Tin Tin movie each from directors Peter Jackson and Stephen Spielberg, and James Cameron's long-delayed, but eagerly anticipated Avatar.

But a decade from now, 3-D is likely to be the dominant format for just about everything you watch on TV.

Of course, there are people now developing technology that will pipe content straight into your brain, so you can watch movies and things we can't even anticipate right now, simply by closing your eyes, but that's another story.

a

No Bullets When It's 'Settlers' Throwing The Rocks

From the New York Times :

Pelted by rocks and chunks of metal, hundreds of Israeli riot police officers on Tuesday forcibly removed Jewish settlers from houses they had been occupying illegally for months in the West Bank city of Hebron.

If they had been thirteen year old Palestinian kids, throwing "rocks and chunks of metal", they would have been shot.

All Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 boundaries are considered illegal by much of the world; Israel disputes that. But there are more than 20 settler outposts created since March 2001, illegal under Israeli law, that the government has promised Washington to dismantle but has not.

Why does the United Nations, and the world, continue to tolerate the stealing of other peoples' lands and homes in this way?

Meanwhile, Israel's siege against the democratically elected government of Gaza, and its people, enters its third month, and continues to decimate the economy, imperil public health and malnourish children.


Indonesia Promises Humanitarian Aid To Palestinians Under Siege

Israel Jails Soldiers Who Refused To Evict Illegal Occupiers In Hebron

Goobye Bat Boy

The Weekly World News Turns Off Its Presses




Finally, the Washington Post runs some real news.

After three decades, the legendary Weekly World News is turning off the presses, and the Washington Post pays it due respect with a massive feature story, full of fantastic behind the scenes stories and hilariously brilliant headlines. From Planet Of Strange Things :

Weekly World News was so much fun in the 1980s and 1990s because it mixed actual stories of bizarre human behaviour with complete, brilliantly absurd fabrications. But nearly all of it was written as though it had just come off a serious news wire.

The Weekly World News, in case you've, somehow, never heard of it, was the newspaper that revealed that Elvis Presley did not die on a toilet in 1977, but actually faked his own death and ended up working behind the counter of a convenience store, quite happily.

The Weekly World News also produced such gut-busting headlines as these -

"DEAD ROCK STARS RETURN ON GHOST PLANE!"

"BLIND MAN REGAINS SIGHT AND DUMPS UGLY WIFE!"

"12 U.S. SENATORS ARE SPACE ALIENS!"

"CRAZED DIETER MISTAKES DWARF FOR CHICKEN!"

"FAMED PSYCHIC'S HEAD EXPLODES"

"HEAVEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY HUBBLE TELESCOPE"

"HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY"

The Weekly World News also invented Bat Boy, who was discovered in a cave and spent decades on the run from the Feds. WWN also came up with the story of the time traveling stock market speculator who turned a few hundred dollars into a mega-million dollar fortune before being busted by the Securities & Exchange Commission :

"We don't believe this guy's story -- he's either a lunatic or a pathological liar," says an SEC insider. "But the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck.

"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources."

The story of time traveler Andrew Carlssin was the most successful WWN jape ever, and the Reuters-like straight detail suckered in newspapers across the world, who repeated the story as true in their news pages.

Of course, many editors later claimed that they ran the Carlssin tale as a 2003 April Fool's Day story. That didn't explain, however, why so many newspapers published the story on Apri 2, or April 3 and then quickly deleted the story from their digital archives once the truth was known.

Brilliant.

BTW - The first time 'Bat Boy' appeared on the cover of the Weekly World News saw the WWN score the second highest sales for any American tabloid in history. 'Bat Boy' and the WWN also inspired one of the best Seinfeld episodes ever - when Kramer became obsessed with a "Pig Man!" he claims he saw hidden away in a New York City hospital room.


Go To 'Planet Of Strange Things' For More, And More Fantastic 'Bat Boy' Front Pages

Abandoning Britain

Thousands Of Young, Skilled Workers Exit The UK In An Unprecedented Exodus

You may have heard that tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing the horrors of war and deprivation in their homeland. But did you know that some 4000 people are leaving the UK each and every week?

The biggest foreign visa consultancy firm in the UK claims that applications from Brits to get out of the country have soared some 80% in 2007 alone. In the mid-1990s, the numbers were about 300 a week. The exodus is reaching 4000 people per week. Per week.

But, tragically for Britain's future, the majority of the exodus is not comprised of retirees. According to this story in the UK Express, the vast majority are "young professionals and skilled workers aged 20-40".

That means, of course, if the exodus continues and there are signs it will only increase, not decrease, that Britain will lose more than 200,000 members of its highly educated workforce in the next twelve months alone.

Here's why so many young people are now abandoning Britain :

...many cite their reason for wanting to quit as immigration to these shores – and the burden it is placing on their communities and local authorities. The dearth of good schools, spiralling house prices, rising crime and tax increases are also driving people away.

Obtaining a visa to live abroad can cost as little as £1,500 for the right candidates. Plumbers, electricians, construction workers and doctors are famously in demand.

Liam Clifford, a former immigration control officer, set up globalvisas.com as a one-man band 12 years ago. He now employs 60 people and is in the process of opening new offices in both South Africa and Australia. Mr Clifford said: “It’s absolutely phenomenal. People are trying to get away to wherever they can..."

According to the most recent Office of National Statistics figures, in 2005 the official number of people leaving UK shores was 352,000 – up from 249,000 in 1995.

Not surprisingly, many young Brits are heading to Australia, where there is a massive shortage of skilled workers, vastly warmer winters and shorter, more comfortable commutes, if you they don't move to the inner city suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne that is.

Mental And Market Meltdown

They call him the 'Madman Of Wall Street' and if you're wondering why, just take a look at the below video of this financial TV show host absolutely losing his shit when it appeared that US stocks could have been, for a few hours anyway, heading for a 1929 style mega-crash :




"We have Armageddon!" Very entertaining, just a little scary.

More on the 'Madman', noted ranter Jim Cramer of CNBC, from the UK Guardian :

Cramer, co-founder of the US financial website TheStreet.com, is a noted ranter and his Mad Money show on CNBC attracts a cult following.

(Cramer turned) his attention to Bear Stearns, which sparked Friday's sharp fall on Wall Street with its hastily arranged press conference, blasting the investment bank for putting its head above the parapet.

As presenter Erin Burnett looks on dumbfounded, he then rounds on the Federal Reserve, shouting: "They [the Fed] know nothing. The Fed is asleep. My people have been in this game for 25 years ... They are losing their jobs - these firms are going out business. Cut the rate. Relieve the pressure."

Afficionados of Cramer, a former hedge fund boss, say this is one of his all-time greatest rants.

Yeah, well, maybe one rant from this guy is enough for the uninitiated. It's been fun.

Russia Says Global Warming Is Good...For Russia

Exposed : Global Warming Deniers A 'Well-Oiled' Machine


Global Warming bad?

Hell no. Not if you happen to be in control of ice-and-snow riddled Russia :

Global climate change means “we’ll spend less on fur coats,” Russian President Vladimir Putin quipped in 2003.

But increasingly, Russia’s official stand on global warming seems to be: Why worry?

While global concerns about climate change conjure images of melting ice caps, submerged cities and massive droughts, some Russian experts are hailing global warming as the answer to Russia’s prayers.

As the long and dreary Russian winters become balmier, billions of dollars will be saved on heating and there will be fewer cases of depression, says Vladimir Klimenko, a professor at the Moscow Energy Institute, whose lab is funded by the state-run oil and gas company.

Surely just a coincidence? Hmmm?

Agriculture ravaged by the cold and 70 years of Soviet collectivization will blossom, and watermelons could grow in Moscow, he said.

In the land of frozen tundra and winters that drag on into June, politicians and scientists are welcoming climate change as a panacea, not a harbinger of environmental apocalypse.

“For our great northern country, I don’t today see any imminent problems for the next 100 years at least,” said Konstantin Pulikovsky, who heads of Russia’s environmental regulatory agency.

The upbeat assessment comes as Russia is bolstered by massive oil and gas wealth. It has led to calls for the Kremlin to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty mandating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which Russia approved in 2004.

Russia is not the only northern nation to consider the benefits of warming. The United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway, along with Russia, are haggling over rights to the resource-rich Arctic, which may soon be free of ice.

As we've discussed here, Russia has a few trillion (dollar) reasons why global warming could be especially good for them, as long as they can hold onto their recent claim to more than half of the rapidly melting North Pole region, where under the ice is believed to lie hidden as much as 25% of the world's remaining reserves of oil and natural gas.

So Russia sees the Big Melt as opening up new farmlands, warming its coldest cities and getting rid of all that damned ice covering up their claimed future oil and gas reserves.

Don't expect Russia to be too keen to help stop global warming when the issue takes centre stage during the APEC conference in Sydney in September, as Putin meets with President Bush and the leaders of China, Australia, Japan and 17 other nations.

Russians speculate widely and often in their media that global warming is a Western conspiracy to try and hold back the economic growth and development of rising world powers like Russia and China, and to stop their expansion into Iran and Africa, where they plan to develop new oil and gas fields and build continent crossing pipelines.


Newsweek has put the boot into global warming deniers this week with a dramatic cover story claiming there is a concerted fifth column of well-'oiled' lobbyists trying to foul the political waters over moves by governments big and small to stop climate change.

Basically, Newsweek claims, these professional global warming denialists are worse than scum :

If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. Yes, 19 million people watched the "Live Earth" concerts last month, titans of corporate America are calling for laws mandating greenhouse cuts, "green" magazines fill newsstands, and the film based on Al Gore's best-selling book, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar. But outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

The entire Newsweek piece is pretty weak, and provides little to no real proof of who is getting how much and from whom to keep up the denialism campaign.

Is it really that hard to name and shame those they accuse of perpetuating such 'evil'?

Newsbusters has freaked right out over the cover story and screams "Shame, Newsweek! Shame!"

A fairly solid rebuttal in all.


Then again, there's probably about a hundred million in China and South Asia tonight who need no more convincing that rapid climate change is a very real, destructive and home destroying reality.


Switzerland's Glaciers Retreating At 3% A Year

Bush Calls The World To History Making Global Warming Talks In September

Global Warming : The Propaganda Factory

'Sunshade' For Global Warming Could Cause Drought

Explosion In Numbers Of Stray Cats Latest 'Evil' Blamed On Global Warming

Bizarre Claim : Walking Instead Of Driving Adds To Global Warming

Walking, Instead Of Driving, Adds To Global Warming

Thinking of dumping the car and walking to the shops instead to pick up your groceries? Don't do it. Not if you want to stop climate change.

An environmentalist in the UK has calculated that the energy needed to walk to the shops means more food has to be eaten, which means more carbon produced, than if the person just drove instead. It's all to do with modern methods of food production and food imports.

Can you feel your head spinning? Good, me too :

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production.

“Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

story continues below....
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Why Alexander Downer doesn't care about terror attacks that don't cause "mass casualties"

The Orstrahyun news round up - the news you need to know

Go Here to read Darryl Mason's 'American Sniper' - an epic poem on the Battle For Fallujah

Expert advice on how to survive terror attacks - deploy psychic abilities

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story continues


This story provides a bonanza of green extremism from which global warming deniers can draw fuel to hoot and holler their propaganda.

Particularly this line :

The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses.

And this line :

The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.

The UK evironmentalist in this story wants us to turn off the TV, sit in the dark and eat a bowl of cold, raw mung beans?

It's not really living, is it?

Little wonder then that more and more people are losing their good-hearted desire to do what they can to stop the world from warming up.

The more environmentalists push such extremes, the more they will isolate themselves from the majority.

It's exactly what happened to the animal rights movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they started attacking poverty-level farmers and threatening to blow up research labs.

People need to know clear, precise and simple things they can do to make a difference. Not get lost in a hailstorm of contradictory and confusing advice on which are the best ways to reduce carbon emissions.

"Driving To Save Energy"

It'll be on a bumper sticker, and on the back of a Hummer, within days.


UPDATE : And we have our first climate change denier taking the bait. Australian 'journalist' Andrew Bolt, employee of anti-global warming advocate Rupert Murdoch, uses the "Drive Don't Walk" story to accuse people who promote walking over short car trips of being "planet wreckers". Desperate times call for increasingly idiotic statements from the likes of Bolt.

Go to 'The Orstrahyun' blog for more on this.

The Changing Climate Of Andrew Bolt


How To Survive Global Warming

Don't Put Your Carbon Footprints On The Furniture

Global Warming : The Eco-Terrorist Menace

Keith Richards Clarifies "I Snorted Me Dad" Story

"I Did Snort Me Dad, But Not With Cocaine"

Keith Richards wants to make something absolutely clear.

He did snort his father's ashes.

But he didn't mix his father's ashes with cocaine before he hoovered them up.

That, of course, would have been disrespectful :

When Keith Richards retracted claims that he had snorted his father’s ashes with a generous sprinkling of cocaine, he put the kibosh on one of the greatest Rolling Stones anecdotes.

“I said I chopped him up like cocaine, not with. I’d opened his box up and said, ‘Jesus, I’ve got to do something with dad, y’know, plant the oak tree.’

“I pulled the lid off and out comes a bit of dad on the dining room table. I’m going, ‘I can’t use the brush and dustpan for this’. So you just gotta like, put it together.

“What I found out is that ingesting your ancestors is a very respectable way of… y’know, he went down a treat.”

Richards also has a touching, and very special, story to tell about the death of his 91 year old mother :

“I sat on the end of her bed two days before she kicked the bucket,” he remembers. “I brought round a guitar and sat there and played to her. She’s gasping by now, she’s out of there, y’know. ‘Bye bye mum, see you tomorrow.’

“Next morning she wakes up and tells my secretary, who goes round to see her every day: ‘Did you hear Keith play? He was a bit out of tune.’ To the end, man. Acid.”

Keith Richards autobiography, for which he was, will be, reportedly paid $7 million, is due in 2010.

Personally, I can't wait. Richards' autobiography is probably going to be the greatest rock book ever published, and for good reason. He's been at the forefront of rock and blues for almost 50 years. He's played with the best, written some of the best rock songs of all time, and lived ten lifetimes in one.

2010 seems a long, long way away, right now.

BTW. Richards recently underwent a full medical. Doctors found his heart, liver and kidneys to be in perfect working order.

Naturally, the doctors were shocked.

Presumably, Keith Richards just laughed.

'Expert' Advice On How To Survive Terror Attacks :

Deploy Psychic Abilities

The second biggest boom industry in the United States today, after the manufacturing of bombs, guns and bullets, is the 'Terror' industry - how to fight terrorists, how to catch terrorists, how to prepare for terrorist attacks and how to survive terrorist attacks.

The US spends tens of billions of dollars a year on the 'anti-terror' related industries. It's the new Cold War, and the fear-mongering is just as dire, overblown and hysterical.

'Experts' pumping out warnings, advice and propaganda in the press and on TV haven't been this busy since the early 1980s. It's boom time in the US right now, but since 9/11, thankfully, there hasn't been any real booms when it comes to terrorism.

There has, however, been literally hundreds of "warnings" issued via the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, various think tanks, NeoCon cheerleaders and an endless parade of Middle East and terrorism 'experts'.

There could be a terror attack next week. Next month. Next year.

The next time the US is hit it will be three attacks at once. Five attacks at once. Seven attacks at once.

They'll hit the US with anthrax. With dirty bombs. With stolen Russian nukes. With Chinese nukes. With Pakistani nukes. With suitcase nukes.

The War On Terror will take years. The War On Terror will take decades. Lifetimes. Generations. A century.

If you follow all this in the American media closely, you can and should be forgiven for not taking it all too seriously, after a while. And Americans, in the majority, are burned out on terror warnings. They now fear having their homes taken away by the banks, and their children's future taken away by global warming, more than they fear a terrorist attack.

Which is why the 'experts' are probably sounding so desperate in their warnings now.

Desperate, and scared, that not only will Americans be unprepared when a terrorist attack comes, but scared that the gravy train of anti-terror funding may soon dry up.

As one prominent Republican recently stated, what America needs right now is another major terrorist attack.

The good news in the bad news, then, is this terror expert claims an "event" is not only "imminent", it could happen :

"...tomorrow, or it could happen in the next few months. Ninety days at the most."

Ninety days at the most? That's three whole months away. Do we hear sixty days? Do we hear thirty days? Going, going...

But that's old news. Everyone from President Bush to Bill O'Reilly fans knows a terror attack is "imminent."

Forget the crumbling infrastructure that leads to catastrophic and deadly bridge collapses, something might blow up...besides New York steam pipes. More terror of the collapsing infrastructure.

Attacks are coming, but how to survive them?

The Fox News 'terror expert' offers up a new option of terrorism avoidance that we've never seen mentioned before. Deploy your psychic abilities :

If your gut feeling tells you when you walk onto a bus there is something unusual or suspicious, get out and walk away. You may do it 10 times for no reason, but there will be one time that saves your life. Let your sixth sense direct you.

I see terror people.

And some more valuable advice from the expert :

Try to break your routine. If you travel during rush hour every day, try to get up a little earlier and drive to work or take the train when it’s still not full. Don’t find yourself every day in the midst of rush hour. Terrorists are not going to waste a bomb on a half-empty train.

19 terrorists wasted their lives on four half empty planes on 9/11.

Naturally, this Fox News terror expert seems to know more about the "imminent" terror attacks on the United States than the White House, the FBI, the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security is willing to disclose.

Not a terror attack. Multiple terror attacks :

What they’re going to do is hit six, seven or eight cities simultaneously to show sophistication and really hit the public. This time, which is the message of the day, it will not only be big cities. They’re going to try to hit rural America. They want to send a message to rural America: "You’re not protected. If you figured out that if you just move out of New York and move to Montana or to Pittsburgh, you’re not immune. We’re going [to] get you wherever we can and it’s easier there than in New York."

This Fox News 'terror expert' claims one minute that terrorists are not going to "waste a bomb" on a half-filled train, and a minute later he claims they are going to hit low population centres in rural America?

Al Qaeda wants to blow up your tractor.

Consider yourself warned.

60% Of Americans Don't Trust Bush Co. To Tell The Truth About Terror Threats

Republican Chairman Say What The US Needs Is More Terror Attacks

Newspaper Editor : The 'War On Terror Is An "Undeniable Fraud"

Spiderlamb



Seven legs, and it can use five to walk.

But this lamb is doomed.

Go to Planet Of Strange Things for the full story.


UPDATE : It's Bizarre Creature week over At Planet Of Strange Things :

Mangy Old Blue Fox, Or The Legendary Blood-Sucking Chupacabra?

The Invasion of The Giant Killer Pythons

'Monster' Roams The English Moors

Presenting The 'Dumbo' Octopus

Israel To Get Oil Pipeline From Iraq As "Bonus" From Americans For Iraq War Support

Kissinger May Live To See His "Vision" Of Iraq To Haifa Pipeline Become A Reality

Israel imports nearly all of its oil, from countries like Mexico, Russia and Indonesia, but as an ever energy hungry and fast growing nation, its rulers have long dreamed of re-opening the near fabled pipelines that once carried oil from Northern Iraq, through Jordan, to the port city of Haifa. That pipeline was shut down in 1948, when the newly, UN-minted Israel began invading and occupying neighbouring Arab lands.

It's insulting to the thousands of Americans, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, who've died in the Iraq War to even try and pretend the 2003 invasion and occupation was not, in part, if not wholly, to do with securing future oil supplies for the United States and its allies, in particular, the UK, Australia and Israel.

Before the March 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein was pushing OPEC countries to follow his 2000-2001 lead and sell their oil in Euros, all but stripping the underlying international financial bedrock from the American dollar's strength.

Hussein was also looking to China as a future buyer of his oil, and at a far better price than what the West was offering, taking into consideration that Iraq oil was worth about $US25-$US30 a barrel back in 2002.

Israel supported the US-led invasion of Iraq, quietly, so as to not inflame Muslim and Arab tensions any further then they already were, but didn't commit any troops to coalition combat units.

The true scale of Israel's involvement in the war, once it began, is still mostly unclear, though they offered unfaltering support at the United Nations, and helped enormously in the spreading of inflammatory propaganda and vast fear-mongering about Saddam Hussein's non-existence WMDs, and the hyped threat of international attacks.

Before the war was barely a month old, and years before a democratically elected Iraqi national government was in place, Israel's rulers were already itching to collect on some of the spoils of the war (From an April 20, 2003 report) :

Plans to build a pipeline to siphon oil from newly conquered Iraq to Israel are being discussed between Washington, Tel Aviv and potential future government figures in Baghdad.

(the pipeline's) resurrection would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke.

It would also create an endless and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia - a keystone of US foreign policy for decades and especially since 11 September 2001.

The revival of the pipeline was first discussed openly by the Israeli Minister for National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz .

The paper quotes Paritzky as saying that the pipeline would cut Israel's energy bill drastically - probably by more than 25 per cent - since the country is currently largely dependent on expensive imports from Russia.

One former senior CIA official said: 'It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration [of President George W. Bush] and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States.

'The Haifa pipeline was something that existed, was resurrected as a dream and is now a viable project - albeit with a lot of building to do.'

Sources at the State Department said that concluding a peace treaty with Israel is to be 'top of the agenda' for a new Iraqi government...

James Akins, a former US ambassador to the region and one of America's leading Arabists, said: 'There would be a fee for transit rights through Jordan, just as there would be fees for Israel from those using what would be the Haifa terminal.

'After all, this is a new world order now. This is what things look like particularly if we wipe out Syria. It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally.'

Akins was ambassador to Saudi Arabia before he was fired after a series of conflicts with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, father of the vision to pipe oil west from Iraq.

In 1975, Kissinger signed what forms the basis for the Haifa project: a Memorandum of Understanding whereby the US would guarantee Israel's oil reserves and energy supply in times of crisis.

Kissinger was also master of the American plan in the mid-Eighties - when Saddam Hussein was a key US ally - to run an oil pipeline from Iraq toAqaba in Jordan, opposite the Israeli port of Eilat.

The plan was promoted by...Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the pipeline was to be built by the Bechtel company, which the Bush administration last week awarded a multi-billion dollar contract for the reconstruction of Iraq.

A few more weeks later and the Haifa pipeline was still looking like rapidly becoming a reality. Some in Israel's ruling elite couldn't hold back and wait to see what a new Iraqi government would do about the pipeline. They started talking like they were just about to turn on the spigot.

From the UK Daily Telegraph, June 21, 2003 :

Israel's finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, predicted yesterday that the British-era oil pipeline from Iraq's northern oilfields through Jordan to the Israeli port city of Haifa would be reopened.

"It won't be long when you will see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa," Mr Netanyahu told a group of British investors in London.

"It is just a matter of time until the pipeline is reconstituted and Iraqi oil will flow to the Mediterranean."

But then the Sunni-led insurgency, comprised of many die-hard Iraqi nationalists who didn't want to see Iraqi oil flowing out of the country (and the oil-rich north split away from the rest of Iraq) hit back against the American forces, and started destroying oil industry infrastructure.

Now, four years later, and the Haifa pipeline is back on the table. Interestingly it is now being referred to, at least in this story from Haaretz, as a "bonus" from the Americans for Israel's support and backing of the War On Iraq :

The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.

The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a "bonus" the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.

The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948.

The National Infrastructure Ministry has recently conducted research indicating that construction of a 42-inch diameter pipeline betweenKirkuk and Haifa would cost about $400,000 per kilometer. The old Mosul-Haifa pipeline was only 8 inches in diameter.

Sources in Jerusalem confirmed yesterday that the Americans are looking into the possibility of laying a new pipeline via Jordan and Israel.

Iraqi oil is now being transported via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border. The transit fee collected by Turkey is an important source of revenue for the country.

In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.

Iraqi oil exports flutter between 500,000 and two million barrels a day. But with a rejuvenated oil refining and exporting industry running at full clip, many experts claim Iraq could produce 10 million or more barrels a day.


When the insurgency killed the possibility of the Haifa pipeline getting up and running sooner rather than later, Israel increased its "unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq" by teaching American forces how to fight an Islamist insurgency :

Israeli advisers are helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, US intelligence and military sources said yesterday.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has sent urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of US special forces, and according to two sources, Israeli military "consultants" have also visited Iraq.

US forces in Iraq's Sunni triangle have already begun to use tactics that echo Israeli operations in the occupied territories, sealing off centres of resistance with razor wire and razing buildings from where attacks have been launched against US troops.

"This is basically an assassination programme. That is what is being conceptualised here. This is a hunter-killer team," said a former senior US intelligence official, who added that he feared the new tactics and enhanced cooperation with Israel would only inflame a volatile situation in the Middle East.

"It is bonkers, insane. Here we are - we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world, and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."

"They are being trained by Israelis in Fort Bragg," a well-informed intelligence source in Washington said.

"Some Israelis went to Iraq as well, not to do training, but for providing consultations."

...Brigadier General Michael Vane, mentioned the cooperation with Israel in a letter to Army magazine in July about the Iraq counter-insurgency campaign.

"We recently travelled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas," wrote General Vane, deputy chief of staff at the army's training and doctrine command.

IDF interrogators are also widely rumoured to have played key roles in not only training some of the US interrogators involved in theAbu Ghraib sexual torture scandal, but of actively taking part in numerous interrogations at other detention facilities in Iraq.

It'll be interesting to see what the new military aid bribes worth tens of billions of dollars to Sunni-dominated Arab countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, will mean for the eventual construction and security of the Iraq to Haifa pipeline.

President Bush is believed to have insisted, pre-war, that one of the key conditions for the pipeline to become a reality was for Israel to finalise a peace deal, and the implementation of the two state solution, with the Palestinians.

Who Armed The Iraqi Insurgency?

The United States Did

This story confirms what has long been openly discussed for years amongst American, British and Australian soldiers who've served in Iraq, and come face to face with insurgents - that some insurgents were well-armed with American weapons, wearing American body armour and were being supplied with weapons and equipment given to the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police by the Americans.

But the arming of the insurgency and Shia death squads, and the trade of legally gained American weapons is utterly mind-boggling in its scope :

The US Government cannot account for 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, says the Government Accountability Office.

According to its July 31 report, the military “cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces”.

The weapons disappeared from records between June 2004 and September 2005, as the military struggled to rebuild the disbanded Iraqi forces from scratch amid increasing attacks from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.

Since 2004 the military “has not consistently collected supporting records confirming the dates the equipment was received, the quantities of equipment delivered, or the Iraqi units receiving the items,” the report said.

US commanders often accuse foreign powers such as Iran of supplying arms to illegal militias fighting in Iraq, but the report shows they cannot fully account for the hundreds thousands of weapons they brought in themselves.

Last month, Turkey raised concerns over reports that separatist Kurdish guerrillas launching cross-border raids from northern Iraq had received US-supplied guns supposedly destined for Iraqi security forces.

The US has spent $US19.2 billion (22.61 billion) on Iraq's security forces since the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, with $US2.8 billion ($3.3 billion) devoted to equipping them.

Four years after the 2003 US-led invasion the country is beset by several overlapping conflicts, and Iraqi security forces, particularly the police, are widely believed to be infiltrated by rival militias.

US media claims that Sunni insurgents are now joining with American troops in greater numbers to fight 'Al Qaeda'. But there exists an even more dangerous, and deadly, major source of conflict in the making.

Now the Iraqi Army and police have been utterly infiltrated by Shia militias, and those same militias have 'cleansed' hundreds of towns and Baghdad neighbourhoods of Sunnis, the US fears they will find themselves caught between future massive fighting between rival Shia militias and long-feuding family and tribal groups. Many of whom now believe they can take all of Iraq's prizes for themselves, as the US appears to be moving closer to troop withdrawals in late 2008 as they run out troops to deploy and the Republicans face destruction in presidential elections.


Tuesday In Iraq - Bombed Petrol Tanker Kills 50, Dozens More Found Dead - Five Coalition Troops Killed

Report Aerial Bombing Of Iraq Villages And Cities By US Up 500% On Same Period In 2006

Iraq Leader Struggles To Save Government As Sunni And US Support Fades

Sunnis Officially Quit Iraqi Government

Kurdish Leader Warns Of 'Civil War' Over Oil-Rich Kirkuk

US Forces To Remain In Iraq For "Years, Not Months" - War To Cost Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars More