The United States Of Conspiracy

Where Do All These Nutters Get Their Crazy Ideas?

The New York Post is shocked, shocked, by a new poll that shows a staggering of number Americans believe that President Bush and/or his administration knew the 9/11 attacks were coming, and did nothing to stop them :

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.

Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The findings followed a 2006 poll by the same researchers, who found that 36 percent of Americans believe federal government officials "either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action" because they wanted "to go to war in the Middle East."

In that poll, 16 percent said the Twin Towers might have collapsed because of secretly planted explosives - not hijacked passenger jets flown into them.

And what hit the Pentagon? Twelve percent figured it was a US cruise missile.

Anger at the federal government and skepticism in general by younger Americans is fueling the popularity of crackpot conspiracy theories.

Crackpot conspiracy theories?

So where are all these Americans getting such crackpot conspiracy theories?

The New York Post (in 2002) !



Fantastic.

Think Progress has more on all this.

It's a remarkable thing to consider that every year, on September 11, when memorials and retrospectives fill the evening news and current affairs shows, and President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney roll out the speeches, more than 6 out of 10 Americans watching it may be thinking "They knew it was coming, and they didn't stop it."

If that is indeed true, then there is clearly a need, from the American people themselves, for a totally thorough, bipartisan investigation into the 9/11 events to be undertaken and completed.

Stephen King : Who Cares If Britney Spears Is Wearing Panties Or Not?

America's Mind Power Wasted On Worthless Celebrity Trash

America's most succcessful novelist, and self-confessed news junkie, Stephen King cuts loose on the corporate media's obsession with mindless celebrity crap. Americans are being treated like idiots, and are being robbed of their intellect, all the while the real stories are being missed, like :

"...where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear.

"And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit.

"You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife.

"And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.

"So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip.

"We're news junkies in my house."

"I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

"We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their f------ Representatives are."

"Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That's all. I mean, I don't mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, "Here's a lady who can't take care of her kids, she can't take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands." And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it's Britney, it's Lindsay.

"So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it's time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

"...Britney is now famous for being famous. Her sales have gone down with almost every album, bigger and bigger jumps, so that nobody really cares about her music anymore. They care about the tabloid headlines and whether or not she's wearing panties. I mean, is this an issue that the American public needs to turn its brainpower on?"

An American friend has a theory on what's going on in his country right now. He doesn't believe the media is dumbing down his country, he thinks it's being dumbed up. That is, the obsessions and fixations of the not so bright are being forced up the intellectual scale, to where even once 'hard news' channels and current affairs shows are now including stories about celebrity trash.

"This Country Is In Revolution"

This collection of answers, in the below video, from Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is as good an example as any of why the ten term senator is storming through the avalanche of spin and tosh falling from the mouths of the likes of Rudy Guiliani and causing such a ruckus.

The mainstream media remained faithful, for months, to the line that Ron Paul was merely an internet phenomenon and that his support base was nothing but a few hundred online activists doing a hell of a good job with spamming comment boards and 'rigging' online polls.

But Ron Paul pulled some 5000 people to a recent rally (even Hillary Clinton has trouble pulling crowds that big), and raised more than $4 million for his campaign in 24 hours. His fundraising efforts are on fire, while other, higher profile Democrat and Republican candidates are failing to raise enough for any serious advertising campaigns to get their message out.

Now it's clear that there is a growing proportion of the American people listening to, and agreeing with, what Ron Paul has to say, the serious business of discrediting him and destroying his credibility will now begin, in earnest.

In the meantime, here's the video of Ron Paul's answers during the recent CNN Republican debate. Take special note of the vile way John McCain tries to link Ron Paul to the rise of the Nazis during the 1930s. Incredible :



Kurt Nimmo explains why McCain does not know his own country's history :

McCain, citing the long ago discredited official history, declared Ron Paul to be an isolationist and World War II the fault of American isolationism, a claim so out of touch with reality as to be speculative fiction.

“Mussolini enjoyed a great deal of admiration in corporate America from the moment he came to power in a coup that was hailed stateside as ‘a fine young revolution,’” writes the historian Jacques R. Pauwels. “In the 1920s many big American corporations enjoyed sizeable investments in Germany…. By the early 1930s, an élite of about twenty of the largest American corporations had a German connection including Du Pont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gilette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, IBM, and ITT.”

Isolationist? Hardly. Corporate America was in business with Germany and Italy during the 1930s. Big business.

Murdoch Admits He Tells His Newspapers What To Print

"We Can Change The Way People Think"


By Darryl Mason

From The Orstrahyun

Okay, prepare yourselves, and try not to be too shocked by this revelation :

Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.

Mr Murdoch's comments were revealed in the minutes from evidence he gave behind closed doors on 17 September in New York, during the committee's inquiry into media ownership.

But the News Corporation chairman said he took a different approach with The Times and The Sunday Times. While he often asked what those papers were doing, he never instructed them or interfered, he said.

The minute stated: "For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a 'traditional proprietor'. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which party to back in a general election or policy on Europe

Murdoch's revelation of purposeful editorial control and influence should not be a revelation to readers of this blog.

Murdoch clearly admitted, back in June during his climate change awakening, that not only did he instruct his newspapers to push a certain reality that he favoured, but he could also muster the entire forces of his internet, newspaper, cable and TV empire to push his belief systems onto the world and change not only what they believed, but how they behaved.

Here's Rupert Murdoch explaining how this would be done on the issue of 'waking up' his hundreds of millions of readers and viewers to the 'reality' of climate change :

"We need to reach (our audience) in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

"We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

They can, and they do.

More On All This And What Effect Murdoch's Media Had On The Change Of Government In Australia At The Orstrahyun Blog

Murdoch Media Begins Whitewashing John Howard's Iraq War Crimes Legacy

42 Words Of Spin That Could Work Wonders For Bush

By Darryl Mason

The American mainstream media can learn a lesson or two in how to whitewash the war crimes of President George W. Bush from Rupert Murdoch's Australian media.

This is how Murdoch's key foreign policy commentator summed up the Iraq War Thing today in a long and glowing tribute to now former prime minister, and key Bush 'War on Terror' ally, John Howard in his national newspaper, The Australian :

Howard made the right call on the information available, and it took incredible guts to do it. There were certainly no lies involved - every responsible authority was convinced Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction - and Howard will be vindicated by history.

42 words, a couple of big statements, don't worry about the crap factor, and that's it. Don't try and argue the case. That gets messy.

Look how easy the exact same whitewashing pitch can be slathered over President Bush's Iraq War legacy :

Bush made the right call on the information available, and it took incredible guts to do it. There were certainly no lies involved - every responsible authority was convinced Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction - and Bush will be vindicated by history.

Like Bush, John Howard's lies before and during the Iraq War have been stunning and numerous, but it is essential for his media supporters and shameless hacks to keep saying "he never lied, never, never, never" as often as possible, just in case it aids people in being able to look at these war criminals without thinking of Iraqi children with their arms and legs blown off and the ragged stumps pissing blood.

The 42 words come courtesy of Murdoch's chief foreign policy commentator in Australia, Greg Sheridan, who you might remember for his fabulous and completely uncritical work in helping Dick Cheney get his message out on why the US must go to War On Iran, during his tour of Australia in February.

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NeoCon : If The Queen Of England Says Iran Must Have A People Power Revolution, There Will Be One

Michael Ledeen : I Was For Regime Change In Iran Before I Was Never For Military Action Against Iraq

By Darryl Mason

Who knew the Her Maj, Queen Of England played such a large role in the future of Iran?

Who knew Queen Elizabeth II decided whether or not countries outside her realm should suddenly become overwhelmed by the fervour of people powered revolution, backed by British secret service and the CIA, and try to overthrow their leaders?

According to Michael Ledeen, a NeoCon 'scholar', Her Majesty does decide the course of historical events like popular uprisings against fascist and/or totalitarian regimes in the Middle East. In this scenario, Iran :

"...take revolution, for example. If the Americans and the Queen of England want there to be a democratic revolution in Iran it will happen. It will succeed. And conversely, if they don't want it to happen, it can't succeed.

Which is why I think basically (the Iranian people) are waiting to hear clearly from...Her Majesty that it's time for democratic revolution."

Is Michael Ledeen eating special mushrooms, or has he revealed too much information?

Ledeen has something to say about the levels of "carnage" in Iraq and who is responsible for it. Again, probably too much information...or not enough :

"...there is carnage. There are attacks, but compared to a year ago it's 70 per cent less, 80 per cent less, 60 per cent less, I mean, big numbers. Numbers that surprise, frankly, that surprise our own military people who are the ones who have carried it out.

Let's just file that one away as a Ledeen-style Bushism.

We'll move on.

Michael Ledeen also wants it to be known that he was never for the military invasion and occupation of Iraq. For him it was always about revolution in Iran :

"I thought it was a bad idea to...attack Saddam Hussein militarily when there were so many smart political things to do. And I thought we should have started with Iran rather than starting with Iraq."

Is there one single NeoCon left now who will admit that they enthusiastically, evangelically backed the War On Iraq? Without having a thick wad of 2002 interview transcripts waved in their face, that is.

Here's an example of Ledeen expressing his opposition to the use of violence to get rid of Saddam Hussein :

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today...

And here's Ledeen expressing his concern for casualties in Iraq, and other Middle East war zones :

I think the level of casualties is secondary. I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say. But all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.

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Seeing as Michael Ledeen is a 'resident scholar' at the American Enterprise Institute ("You Want A War? We Can Make It Happen!"), we should make mention of some of the other valuable insights and breaking news he supplies during this interview :

* 90% of the streets of Baghdad are now so safe, Western journalists can go to the shops, get a haircut and do their jobs.

* Western journalists are now leaving the Iraq 'post-war zones' because there is not enough violence to write about.

* The new peace in Iraq can't last however, because Iran and Syria won't let freedom reign.

* NeonCons, like Leeden, now view Iraq as a "battle" that has been "won", but the war is not over because Iraq was just one "major battle" in a larger "regional war".

* Iranians thinks that the British Secret Service and the CIA run the world, and control historical events in Iran, and for good reason.

* President Bush is not planning to strike Iran militarily. Unless, of course, they nuke Israel, or if Israel is forced to shoot down a "nuclear tipped missile in mid-flight". Then Iran gets smashed.

* The United States will not go to war again based on an intelligence assessment, because even the intelligence community no longer believes what intelligence assessments claim to be reality.


So to summarise : a democratic revolution in Iran needs the support of Queen Elizabeth II; even American intelligence agents don't believe their own intelligence reports; the Iranians are right about the CIA and British Secret Service really running the world, or Iran at least; there will be no war on Iran unless a nuclear bomb either detonates inside Israel or is shot down on its way there and Katie Couric can walk down nine out of ten streets in Baghdad today without heavy security, go get a haircut and survive to file a 'local colour' story for CNN.

Let it never be said again, by anybody, that NeoCons like Michael Ledeen and the hermetically-sealed-against-reality inmates of the American Enterprise Institute don't have any idea what's going on in the world today.

Clearly the likes of Michael Ledeen know much more than you or I do about the true power of Queen Elizabeth II and her involvement in the fermenting of people power revolutions in the Middle East.

Now forget you ever learned this. Life is easier that way.

"...People Of Iraq, Go Home And Die"

It's not quite the way I remember President Bush's State Of The Union speech from 2003, but it turns out to have been true enough.




This is the work of British satirist Chris Morris, creator of Brass Eye and Jam.

Morris recently spent some time detailing the absurdity of author Martin Amis, who has Taken On Islamism, and grimly warned we are entering the 'Age Of Horrorism' and other new words, invented by Amis. Beware the Meccalanche :

Amis should be allowed to wonder aloud about anything. He can suggest Muslims should 'experience painful discrimination until they get tough with their children' if he likes.

Thought experiments are fine.

But if he bundles his thoughts on Islam together and iterates them one after the other as he did when I saw him, he displays not unguarded musing but the forging of an incoherent creed of hate.

It goes roughly like this: 9/11 was horrific, its driving ideology was totalitarian, the totalitarians were Muslims, all Muslims follow a book they believe to be the immutable word of God, I don't believe that, therefore all Muslims are idiots, and basically bastards. Idiot bastards moping around the Middle East in a paranoid funk just cos they lost their empire, and what a rubbish empire it was, too, by the way. Now, what is your balanced view of these primitive wife-beating idiotic bastards?

Martin Amis made funny, an accomplishment on a grand scale.

The Child Soldiers Training For War In America's Schools

The militarisation of youth in poor, black American public schools continues to supply the Bush wars with new recruits :

Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day's do's and don'ts.

One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes -- including how to shoot a gun properly -- from retired veterans.

That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.

Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.

But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society.

"To call these young people child soldiers might be technically inaccurate, but it does reveal the truth of it," said Oscar Castro, a spokesman for the National Youth and Militarism Program, an advocacy group.

Military recruiters already have the right to give presentations in public schools and to access databases with the contact information of all public school students whose parents do not remove their children from the list.

While military officials say the junior reserve programs are not used as recruiting tools, about 30 to 50 percent of cadets eventually enlist...

This is particularly troubling given that the programs are concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods, said Sheena Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Chicago branch of the American Friends Service Committee which lobbies against the programs.

"If you want to teach discipline and leadership then do it for everyone and don't make them wear (military) uniforms," Gibbs said. "Students (at regular schools) protest that they have to still share books but the military academy has laptops."

At Chicago's Marine Military Math and Science Academy, the first public Marine academy in the nation and the fifth military academy run by the city's school district, it's easy to see how signing up for service would be a logical post-graduation step.

The argument that such military training helps wayward kids learn discipline and how to behave is valid enough.

But equally valid is the argument that such military-in-schools programs are rare indeed in the more affluent white suburbs of the United States.

Rich white kids rarely go to fight America's wars.

They go to university.

Jihadville

What is it about one Moroccan city, and/or its people, that appears to be producing a growing and deadly list of ready-to-explode jihadists?

The New York Times Magazine goes into great detail, finds a few vague answers and tosses out a whole lot of theories. Still there is interesting information and insight to be found :

What, then, caused them to embrace violent jihad? In a city flooded with televised images of civilians dying in Iraq, the forces of politics and religion surely weighed on these men’s lives. For some of them, public outrage merged with personal grievance.

Yet individual experiences and ideological convictions can only explain so much. Increasingly, terrorism analysts have focused on the importance of social milieu. Some stress that terrorists are not simply loners, overcome by a militant cause. They are more likely to radicalize together with others who share the same passions and afflictions and daily routines. As the story of Jamaa Mezuak suggests, the turn to violence is seldom made alone. Terrorists don’t simply die for a cause, Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies terrorism, told me. “They die for each other.”

The question of what drives someone to terrorism has given rise to a cottage industry of theories since Sept. 11. None may fully explain what happened in Jamaa Mezuak: why some of its young men chose to become terrorists when most have not. The notion that poverty is to blame has been debunked again and again. And while religious extremism can feed militancy, many experts prefer to emphasize the anger generated by political conflicts, like the war in Iraq or the Arab-Israeli struggle.

Many may sympathize with a cause, but few ever turn to violence. Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer, holds that people prone to terrorism share a sequence of experiences, which he outlines in his forthcoming book, “Leaderless Jihad.”

They feel a sense of moral outrage that is interpreted in a specific way (the war in Iraq, for example, is interpreted as a war on Islam); that outrage resonates with the person’s own experiences (Muslims in Germany or Britain who feel marginalized might identify with the suffering of Iraqis); and finally, that outrage is channeled into action.

This process, Sageman told me, is rarely a solitary one. He and a growing number of law-enforcement officials and analysts argue that group dynamics play a key role in radicalization. While ideology may inspire terrorists, they say, it takes intimate social forces to push people to action. Friends embolden one another to act in ways they might not on their own. This might be called the peer-pressure theory of terrorism. Experts in the field refer to it as the BOG, for bunch of guys (or GOG, for group of guys). “Terrorism is really a collective decision, not an individual one,” said Sageman, who coined the theory. “It’s about kinship and friendship.”

Jihadi groups, like most social circles, tend to rely on frequent, sustained interaction, Sageman told me. People are drawn together by a common activity, like soccer, or by a common set of circumstances, like prison. Often they meet in the temporary spaces born of immigration.

In groups predisposed to violence, there is often a shared grievance around which members first rally. In the case of urban American gangs, the grievance could be police brutality. For the Hamburg cell behind 9/11, it was the war in Chechnya.

Law-enforcement agencies have begun changing their approach to counterterrorism in tandem with their heightened awareness of the role that groups play. Investigators in Europe, Canada and the United States are now conducting surveillance of suspects for longer periods of time, in part to observe the full breadth of their social networks.

The horrors and inhumanity of what has happened in Iraq is poisoning the minds of millions of young people across the planet, not just in Morocco. A miniscule number are choosing violence as their way of unleashing vengeance, or evening scores.

But the West is clearly losing the battle of the mind when young men in Morocco can look to television and see for themselves the untold destruction and death unleashed by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and feel driven to seek revenge, and all that can be done is to increase surveillance on groups of young men who may or may not be plotting terror attacks.

In the New York Times Magazine story, young Moroccan men are quoted as saying that President Bush is the "biggest terrorist in the world." They say this, apparently, because they've seen on TV what has happened to the people of Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Bush's nickname of being "The World's Greatest Terrorist" is seen at marches and rallies all over the planet.

War is Terror, and Terror is most certainly War.

Osama Bin Laden's calls to jihad would be next to worthless without the wars of President Bush to supply the imagery and horror stories that rots so many souls, and helps to poison so many minds.

The wars feed the terrorism, and the terrorism feeds the wars.

Hopefully it won't take another generation to end this circle of violence and inhumanity.

John Howard Suffers Humiliating Defeat In Australian Elections

Bush Loses Number One Iraq War Ally, NeoCon Influence Down Under Comes To An End

Ghosts Of The Iraq War Follow Prime Minister To The Polls

By Darryl Mason

Australia has a new prime minister today, and President Bush has lost his most devoted ally in the Iraq War.

Bush once called John Howard his "deputy sheriff" in the Pacific. It's not a nickname that Bush will be able to slap on Labor leader Kevin Rudd, who has experienced one of the fastest rises to power in political history.

Rudd only became leader of the Australian opposition government less than a year ago, but from day one of his leadership he had John Howard's number, promising to "mess with Howard's mind". He won early support for committing to a withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq and to pull back from the disquietingly close relationship Howard shared with Bush.

John Howard swept his Liberal Party into a fourth term in 2004, with massive support from the Australian public. In only 36 months, millions of Australians have turned their back on Howard, as the scandals, lies and controversies surrounding the Iraq War, and the 'War On Terror' continued to mount.

One of the most damaging, and shocking, of all the revelations came in late 2006, when it was revealed John Howard had ignored, literally, dozens of memos from Australian soldiers and public servants in Iraq who had repeatedly tried to warn him that the Australian authority dealing with shipments of wheat to Iraq through the late 1990s and early 2000s were paying massive bribes to Saddam Hussein. It total, more than $300 million of dirty money helped to prop up the brutal dictator, and supplied him with cash to pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, build palaces and keep his military and Republican Guard paid and in arms.

Howard lied numerous times about when he first committed Australian troops to the Iraq War, after President Bush asked him to do so. While Howard continued to claim he had made no commitment at all about sending Australian troops into the warzone, as late as only a few hours before the first bombs of the 'Shock And Awe' campaign began to level buildings, many Australian soldiers were told in August 2002 that they were going to war, and they should prepare themselves and their families.

Most of the facts about when Howard decided to fully back Bush's War On Iraq only came to light after Howard was re-elected in 2004.

The new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is committed to withdrawing all of Australia's combat forces from Iraq in 2008, around 600 troops.

While the Saddam bribes scandal and the War On Iraq did not feature heavily during election debates, or in the media coverage, it's clear Howard's close relationship with President Bush, his continued backing for the War On Iraq, and his endless refusal to admit he was partly responsible for the hell unleashed on the Iraqi people, was symptomatic in killing off his support base.

John Howard's massive and humiliating defeat in the elections yesterday brings to an end his 11 year reign as Australia's leader, and a career in politics stretching back more than three decades.

Remarkably, most Australians still know little about their new prime minister, though they are clearly impressed with the Kevin Rudd they've seen so far.

The NeoCon influence on Australian politics and society, rammed into our normally easy-going, peaceful and "fair go for all" culture by Howard and Bush's influence, is set to come to an end.

Hopefully.

Hey Rupert? What Happened To All Those Post-Saddam $20 Barrels Of Oil?

Oil Touches $100, But Will Go Beyond In 2008

By Darryl Mason

No power king on the face of the planet did more to warp reality than Rupert Murdoch in helping to create the American mindset that backed the War On Iraq in early 2003.

Using his massive media blitzkrieg marketplace control in the US, the UK and Australia (70% of all daily newspapers), Murdoch pumped the always extremely dodgy case(s) for War On Iraq with all the desperate enthusiasm of a Depression-era carnival huckster with two families to feed and a baseball bat wielding loan shark taking aim at his kneecaps.

You must remember what Rupert had to say about how good the Iraq War would (could) be for the price of oil, right?

In case you've forgotten, here's Rupert Murodch, from February 12, 2003, as quoted in the Australian Financial Review :

"The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be US$20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

Rupert won over a lot of people with that prediction. A lot of business and oil people anyway. A lot of media people, too. Particularly his media people.

They really believed that getting rid of Saddam would let them control the majority of Iraq's oil, and flow another 4 or 5 million barrels a day into world markets. Invading and occupying Iraq was also going to help free the United States from its terror-soaked death grip with the Saudis, who were, and remain, the dominant force in Middle East oil.

How dominant? More than a dozen of Saudi Arabia's countrymen allegedly carried out the 9/11 attacks, and BushCo. paid them back by, errr, bombing goat herders in Afghanistan and flying out dozens of members of the Bin Laden family from the United States under the protection of the CIA. Talk about a hardline.

But even though Murdoch could spin Wall Street, and readers of the financial media, he never really convinced most of the readers of his tabloid print and TV media, even though the pro-war message was relentless and unforgiving. That's why more than ten million people around the world marched in protest against the Iraq War in early 2003.

Murdoch's media ranted and raved and spite bile at all the protesters, even the World War 2 veterans and the little kids with their hand-drawn signs saying 'Please Don't Kill Iraqi Kids'. Murdoch's media labeled veteran and child alike a bunch of Saddam sympathisers and terrorist-enablers, sometimes on the front pages of the newspapers. Before the protests even began.

But they still marched. In cities, towns, villages, even along country roads where the only people to see them were interstate truck drivers. In the United States, in England, in Australia, the United States, Canada, across Europe, across Asia.

Even though Rupert controlled the vast majority of tabloid newspaper markets in Australia, the UK and the US, and he directed them all to, as one former Murdoch journo told me in 2004, "really get behind this now", he could never get the majority of the people in Coalition Of The Willing nations onside for the Iraq War. They didn't have to step in it to know it was bullshit from the get go.

When the Iraq War began on Mach 21, 2003, more than 70% of Australians opposed the illegal invasion and occupation. The opposition was higher in the UK, and much less in the United States.

For most people, already trying to deal with rising fuel price, the only thing the Iraq War had going for it was Rupert's claim that $20 a barrel oil would likely be the result of massacring Iraqis.

So where are we now, four and a half years on from Rupert's infamous "$20 a barrel" quote?

Oil is closing in on $100 a barrel, and the financial media is discussing how oil beyond $100 a barrel will effect economies around the world.

Venezuela is happy, Iran is very happy, Russia is happy, Canada is happy, Mexico is happy. East Timor, if oil prices stay this high, will also soon be very happy. The Saudis? They're fucking ecstatic. They'll have to start burning money logs soon just to get rid of all that cash.

If you're an excess oil producing nation (meaning you produce enough to sell on international markets) you're probably burning candles and bowing down before shrines of President Bush, Dick Cheney and the coterie of NeoCons who have done so much in the past few years to unleash so much havoc and destruction and fear and chaos across the Middle East, further destabilising the confidence of the world's oil markets.

Without Bush, Cheney and all those NeoCons and let's not forget the Iraq War enabler himself Rupert Murdoch, the 'evil' leaders of Iran, Venezuela and Russia would not be so rich and powerful.

How rich? How powerful? Well, think about this. Venezuela, Iran and Russia now owe international creditors next to nothing. They've paid off once near crippling loans to the World Bank and IMF. Collectively, they owe a few billion, less than $10 billion, tops.

And the United States? Trillions in debt. Not billions. Trillions.

Who knows? Maybe there really is something in the ultra-weird conspiracy theory that the leaders of Iran, Venezuela and Russia are secretly working in cahoots with President Bush's oil baron friends to drive up the price of the black gold. It would probably make sense around the boardroom table. Everyone gets rich.

Except for you, of course.

After all, we keep hearing about a looming War On Iran, it's always just a few weeks away, but it hasn't happened yet, has it? Flicking back through my files I see stories from 2003, saying that Bush would launch air strikes on Iran "within weeks". That's more than four years ago now.

And look at Venezuela. Chavez has never been so powerful, or so popular. His anti-American rhetoric, and his interference in how American corporations suck oil from his nation, have helped to make oil a very, very unstable commodity. Chavez, compared to the days before the CIA tried to assassinate him, is now leading one of the most oil-rich socialist nations on the planet. And thanks to all that oil wealth, Venezuela is soon to become even more socialist.

Questions.

So many unanswered questions.

What about the new Oil Shock? Isn't oil running out? What if Venezuela cuts off supplies to the US? Is the Iranian president really crazy? Does he actually believe in the 12th Iman? Is he going to sink oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and disrupt more than 1/4 of the world's oil from getting to market if Israel nukes his reactors? What if Iran bombs Israel? What if Israel bombs Syria? What if Turkey invades Northern Iraq and that oil pipeline up there goes up in flames? And what's with Putin? Could China and Russia really go to war with the US to protect their hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new business interests in Iran? What would that do to the world's oil supplies?

And up and up and up the prices go.

Where they will stop?

Nobody knows.

Well, they'll have to stop before $200 a barrel. That's the price where even the most optimistic economists say the world's economies will grind to a halt.

And nobody wants that.

Well, not yet.

"The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be US$20 a barrel for oil."

Thanks for that, Rupert. It's one of the greatest misguided, or false-positive quotes since all those quotes in the 1940s where scientists and radio station owners said "this TV thing" would never take off.

Now, the chaos in Iraq, mostly unleashed thanks to the Murdoch-backed war, is not the only reason why oil is now closing in on $100 per barrel.

But it sure isn't helping.

It's amazing to remember that President Bush, and others, particularly in Murdoch's worldwide media, pushed the line that Iraq would, within only a few short years, be pumping oil to the tune of 8 to 10 million barrels a day. That was how the reconstruction of Iraq was going to be paid for. Before the American taxpayers got shaken down for more than $600 billion. And probably another few hundred billion more.

The Council On Foreign Relations, the Vatican of nutcase war pigs and NeoCon destroyers-of-nations, also pushed the line back in 2002 that the Iraq War could only mean good things for the price of oil. They failed to tell us, however, that when they meant "good things" they weren't talking about oil at $20 a barrel.

How they all must have laughed when Rupert Murdoch said the Iraq War could see oil prices plunge from $30 or $35 a barrel (late 2002 prices), down to a measly $20. That would have showed those damned Saudis and Iranians - wink, wink.

But instead, we got oil closing in on $100 a barrel, and a tank of petrol becoming the sort of luxury expense that millions of Americans, Australians and Brits are increasingly unable to afford so they can, you know, get to work.

A few hundred years ago this pack of clowns now purposely driving up the price of oil to once unimaginable prices would have been hung in the village square and pelted with cow turds.

Now they sit back and watch their stock prices soar. And they're doing it in the US, in the UK, in Australia, in Venezuela, in Russia and across Europe. And of course, in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Welcome to the New Poverty. It's pretty much like the old poverty, but much, much worse. You'll be poor, you'll be able to only eat shit food, but you'll still have a job. However, you probably won't be able to afford the fuel to get to work.


UPDATE : To be fair to Rupert Murdoch, he did get one prediction right from the days before the War On Iraq was unleashed. And that was this prediction about President Bush if he didn't end up 'winning' the war :

"He will either go down in history as a very great president or he'll crash and burn."

Crashing and burning.

The Final Nail In John Howard's Coffin

Terror Fear Campaign Targeting Sydney Muslims Set To Finish Off Australian Government In Weekend Elections

By Darryl Mason

The husband of the Liberal Party candidate running for election in the Western Sydney seat of Lindsay this Saturday, and the husband of the retiring Liberal Party member, have now both been kicked out of prime minister John Howard's party for distributing 'fliers' claiming a vote for the opposition is a vote in support of terrorists who've killed more than 100 Australians.

The leaflet also claimed the Labor Party would build more mosques in Western Sydney and were in favour of allowing Islamic extremists into the country.

A third man, in the executive of prime minister John Howard's party, has also been expelled.

All this less than 48 hours out from an election that is widely tipped to see the downfall of the John Howard government.

Incredible.

John Howard's reaction?

He knew nothing about the leaflets, they were not authorised Liberal Party election material, he has distanced himself from the scandal, and now he expects us to believe that neither of the two Liberal Party politicians had any idea of what their husbands were up to in writing, printing and then delivering the leaflets to hundreds of homes in one of the most highly contested seats in the election.

Current Liberal Party member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, is still insisting the unauthorised campaign brochure her husband helped to write, print and distribute to homes in Western Sydney was "a joke" and that she thought it was "funny." She tried to explain away the scandal, still laughing, by claiming her husband, and the other men involved were drunk and bored.

Tonight's current affairs shows, which draw combined audiences of about 20-25% of Australia's population, are expected to go hard on this story, uncovering similar tactics used by Jackie Kelly in past elections, and interviewing the families of Australians killed in international terror attacks.

Bizarrely, John Howard tried, unsuccessfully, to spin away the storm of controversy today by claiming that a wife should never be held responsible for the actions of her husband, and attempted to relate the individuality of husbands and wives to the rise of feminism, and that such separations of responsibility for each other's actions should be celebrated, not damned.

Barely mentioned in most of the coverage so far is that the leaflets directly linked Australian Muslims to supporting international terrorists and terrorist attacks. Linkages that have been essential to John Howard's divide-and-rule strategy of giving white Australians an easy target for vilification and loathing, though it should be pointed out that only the smallest minority of Australians have ever fallen for Howard's race and religion-based baiting.

The Howard government defeat will now be even worse than the latest polls indicate, which is, to quote John Howard from earlier in the year, already set to be a defeat of near total "annihilation."

Go Here For The Full Story

Forbes : Oil To Hit $100 A Barrel As "US Dollar Collapses"

It was scary enough to read stories like this last year on alternative news and so-called conspiracy sites, now this shocking stuff is hitting the headlines of the mainstream media every day :

Oil rose close to 100 usd/bbl having hit a record high price earlier as the dollar sank to new depths against major currencies -- making commodities denominated in the greenback cheaper for those trading in other currencies.

...at an OPEC summit over the weekend, Venezuelan and Iranian officials discussed the possibility of trading oil in currencies other than the dollar because given the greenback's latest weakness members' purchasing power is eroded.

...as long as oil is priced in dollars its unlikely the cartel would raise production because such a move would possibly push oil prices down -- decreasing further the group's purchasing power.

OPEC nations are already pushing for the US Dollar to lose its long-standing role as the currency that oil prices are set in.

OPEC can raise production, but it is beginning to sound like it will only do that when the Euro becomes the currency of choice for pricing oil.

Not even a War On Iran will not slow the death of the US Dollar now.

Grim indeed.

Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails The Reality-Distraction Media Divide

Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails have teamed up with video activists The Art Of Mental Warfare to deliver a thumping music and vid call to arms.




Trent Reznor is deep into his plans to revolutionize the way his fans find, hear and experience his music. No more major label record deals (or so he says), he has already started releasing his music for free online, and will make his money from live concerts and merch.

Digital is the future of the music industry, and one Reznor has been anticipating since the release of his breakthrough album The Downward Spiral in 1994.

Reznor's last contractual release with Universal Music has hit a major roadblock. Reznor put the masters of his last album Year Zero up on a site so fans could remix the songs. Reznor wanted to take this project further, but Universal Music's lawsuits with YouTube and others over content control has canned that plan :

"Their premise is that if any fan decides to remix one of my masters with material Universal doesn't own - a 'mash-up,' a sample, whatever - and upload it to the site, they will be doing exactly what MySpace and YouTube are doing. If they were to do such a thing, everybody sues everybody and the world abruptly ends.

"I am profoundly perturbed with this stance as content owners continue to stifle all innovation in the face of the digital revolution."

No wonder Reznor wants to cut himself free of this kind of crap forever. The digital revolution is being held back by the profit-at-all-costs corporate motivations of the last century, and their endless lawsuits as they try to contain the new mediums. And the new players.

Excerpts from the manifesto of The Art Of Mental Warfare :

The power elite expend such great effort in controlling our communication and information system because they fear the American public more than any other enemy. They understand that if they lose their grip on our mass media, their lies and injustices will be exposed to the very people who can put a stop to their crimes...

The famed military strategist Carl von Clauswitz wrote in his study, On War, that the key to defeating an enemy is to identify and strike at “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.”

The mass media is the foundation of the elite power structure. Without domination of the mass media the elite power structure is a house of cards.

Once the people can get their message through elite censors, the necessary evolution will occur. And thanks to the internet the tide has begun to swing back in our favor. The internet has given us a major weapon to battle these entrenched interests.

The internet is the one method of mass communication where you can research news and information for yourself, where you can use your own critical thinking and judgment skills, where voices are not censored through elite corporate interests.

The internet has been for us what pamphlets were to our forefathers; a new form of mass communication that is not censored by elite interests.

Not yet, anyway.

American Combat Troops In Iraq Told To Watch The Sopranos

Kidnappings, racketeering, assassinations, bribery, corruption...no wonder American troops are being told to watch The Sopranos to get an insight into how criminals are running the show in some neighbourhoods of Baghdad and Mosul :

"I tell a lot of my soldiers: A good way to prepare for operations in Iraq is to watch the sixth season of 'The Sopranos,' " said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. forces in central Iraq, referring to the hit HBO series about the mob.

"You're seeing a lot of Mafioso kind of activity."

An update on what's happening in Iraq can be found at The Fourth World War blog.

What Would Benjamin Franklin And Thomas Jefferson Think Of The United States Today?

Some excerpts from a Ron Paul editorial running in a number of US newspapers follows. Paul lays out his platform and believes clearly and concisely.

Most Americans remain perplexed as to where Democrat and Republican presidential candidates truly stand on any number of issues. One of the key reasons why Ron Paul is finding an ever expanding audience of Americans willing to listen to what he has to say is that his anti-war and pro-freedom and pro-liberty platforms are so straightforward :

On the fourth day of July in 1776, a small group of men boldly told the most powerful nation on Earth they were free. They declared that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights.

One then has to wonder how Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would react to our current state of affairs.

We have lost sight of the simple premise that guided the actions of our founding fathers. That premise? The government that governs least is the government that governs best.

In our early history, it was understood that a free society embraced both civil liberties and economic liberties. But our government has significantly changed from one of limited power to one of pervasive intervention.

We must also examine our foreign policy. Our troops are spread to the four corners of the Earth and stretched too thinly, meaning we may well have difficulty defending ourselves if we are ever threatened.

The situation in Iraq reminds us that we are to go to war only after a congressional declaration of war, as required by the Constitution. A coherent foreign policy is based on the understanding that America is best served by not interfering in the internal affairs of other nations.

We should also reclaim our national sovereignty by first securing our borders. By now, many have heard about the proposed "NAFTA Superhighway." This superhighway would connect Mexico, the United States and Canada, cutting a wide swath through the middle of Texas and through Kansas City. One proposed path takes the superhighway right through Iowa. This superhighway can be built only by sacrificing family farms through eminent domain.

Any movement toward a North American Union that erases the borders between the United States, Mexico and Canada would greatly diminish the ability of Americans to influence the laws under which they live.

Our economy is another victim of intense government intervention. The gold dollar of 1900 is now nothing more than a Federal Reserve note backed only by the promises of untrustworthy politicians and central bankers. No longer is there silver or gold available to protect the value of a steadily depreciating currency. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle- and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy and put the American people ahead of special interests.

We can reclaim our heritage of freedom, but it will require commitment, work and a willingness to stand firm for our beliefs, refusing to compromise with those who would continue to push for more taxes, more spending and more government solutions.

Just as devotion to freedom and self-determination brought forth our great nation, a renewed adherence to those principles can move us to new heights.

Fox News : Taser Dissenters, "Beat Them To A Pulp"

It's good to see that Fox News continues to set the standard for open democracy and free speech in the United States.

Fox News hosts, like most of the "Shut The Hell Up You Commie!" conservative media in the US, are appalled by the idea that leading Republicans, and Democrats, can be questioned during public appearances by mere voters, and have their answers broadcast to the world on
YouTube :

During a discussion about a Code Pink member heckling Hillary Clinton at a recent event, Fox News host Brian Kilmead said that people who confront politicians are "threatening" and should be Tased or "beaten to a pulp," as the establishment media continues to sell the idea that anyone who disagrees with authority should be brutally punished.

A segment on the Fox and Friends morning show yesterday turned into an opportunity for Kilmead to share his dictatorial fetish that dissenters be dealt with in the proper manner, as footage aired of Clinton's heckler being removed from the event by security.

“They should Tase this guy,” Kilmead says. “At one point with security so high and tensions on edge, don’t you think they’re going to get at the very least Tased or beaten to a pulp by somebody? These people look threatening.”

Paul Joseph Watson has the footage, and much, much more on the shocking rise of mainstream media pushing for dissenters to be brutally punished for speaking out of turn. Or just speaking out at all. This is how fascist police states begin : by using the media to make it somewhat acceptable, through repetition, for the public to be brutally punished for daring to dissent.

While Fox News hosts are usually keen fans of violence on innocent people, particularly through warfare, this bizarre and sickening call for members of the public to have their lives placed at risk by taser-happy cops and security guards, when tasers are repeatedly killing people they're used on, probably has a lot to do with the mainstream media's horror that some 17 year old kid with a video camera can get better quotes, and more entertaining confrontations, out of presidential candidates than they can.

The protected and highly defended decades long rein of the mainstream media as makers and deliverers of news is coming to an end.

And they don't like it, not one little bit.

Churchill Loved Bambi

England's PM Winston Churchill loved to enjoy repeated, late night screenings of Bambi and Dumbo in a private cinema as he led his nation victory in World War 2.

He'd kick back in a huge chair around 11pm, after dinner, and instruct the projectionist to "Let It Roll!"

Other favourites included The Battle Of Midway, Lady Hamilton And Goodbye Mr Chips.

You can find more info about these movies at the International Movie Database.

Bambi?

Number 13 Really Is Unlucky

If you're playing the UK's National Lottery that is :

The superstitious will need no convincing but there really is good reason to steer clear of the number 13.

It is the unluckiest ball in the National Lottery, research has revealed. Since the lottery was launched in 1994, 13 has come up only 146 times, eight fewer than any other ball.

It failed to appear in 49 consecutive draws between July and December 1997. The next unluckiest balls are 6, 9 and 11.

I'm sure a math wiz could show that this reasoning is dodgy, at best. It sounds more like a promo push for and by the National Lottery than carefully parred fact.

Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, The Philippines To Form EU Style Union

Australia And New Zealand Locked Out Of New 'Asian Union' On Orders Of China

By Darryl Mason

We're rapidly moving towards a future where vast sections of the world are united in unions, for the benefits of easier trade and securing future energies supplies, primarily.

The European Union has been a reality since the 1950s, the US-Canada-Mexico will likely meld into the North American Union in the next decade (unless they have a civil war, or major uprising) and it is likely we'll soon see a 'Caspian Sea' Union of numerous 'Stans that border the Caspian Sea, or benefit from its energy resources (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, etc), along with a larger China-Russia-Iran alliance, though perhaps no official Union as such.

For now, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam are moving forward with their new Union and hope to have the deals signed and sealed by 2015. The new Asian 'community' sounds like it be partly controlled by China, with India begging to be included.

Lots of details in this story from Bloomberg :

The 10 members of the group adopted an Asean Economic Community Blueprint that also promises investors better dispute- settlement mechanisms and more transparent and consistent rules.

Member nations say integration, styled after the EU without a common currency or passport-free travel, is essential for the group as it competes with China and India for exports and investments. The Asean countries have a combined gross domestic product of over $1.03 trillion and a population of about 570 million.

story continues after...
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Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's Online Novel ED DAY - Life In Sydney After A Bird Flu Pandemic Kills Millions

The Latest From The Oil Wars : "Hey Rupert? What Happened To All Those Post-Saddam $20 Barrels Of Oil?"

Go Here To Read The Latest Stories From 'The Orstrahyun'

Go Here To Read The Latest Stories From 'Your New Reality'

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story continues...


Australia and New Zealand were locked out of the 'Asian Union' on the orders of China, apparently:

China, Japan and South Korea agreed to work with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to open up regional trade, dropping a plan to include India, Australia and New Zealand.

Leaders from the 13 nations said the so-called Asean Plus Three group ``would remain the main vehicle toward the long- term goal of building'' an Asian regional community, according to a statement released after a meeting today. The document makes no mention of the other three nations that will also attend tomorrow's East Asia Summit in Singapore.

Asean secretary general Ong Keng Yong earlier this year insisted that India, Australia and New Zealand would be included in plans to establish a free-trade zone covering all 16 nations who participate in the East Asia Summit. Today's statement recognizes China's demand that only Asean Plus Three countries should be included in the community.

"The Chinese refuse to accept the other three guys,'' Ong said in an interview today. "They have always maintained that the East Asia community is 13 countries.''

China really is starting to rule the world.


Latest Story From Your New Reality : "Hey, Rupert? What Happened To All Those Post-Saddam $20 Barrels Of Oil?

This Is What A Real Anti-War American Presidential Candidate Sounds Like

By Darryl Mason

It takes a lot of guts to run as a truly anti-war presidential candidate in the United States. After all, the war industries are now the United States biggest and most profitable industries. If BushCo. wasn't pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the war industries, the American economy would be in a hell of a lot more trouble than it is right now

Which probably goes a long way to explaining why Dr. Ron Paul is hated by Democrats and Republicans alike. And it also explains why Paul is now on his way to raising more than $7 million in only three months to continue his campaign to get the Republican nomination.

Only a few months ago, Paul was regarded by the mainstream media as a joke. They stopped laughing when Ron Paul raised more than $4 million in one day, from some 60,000 donors. Some of the mainstream media dealt with that jaw-dropping earthquake across the well-controlled American political landscape by trying to link Dr. Ron Paul with terrorists and Nazis. As expected. But that only made Dr. Ron Paul more famous, and ramped up the enthusiasm of his supporters, now growing at an astounding rate.

This is what an anti-war presidential candidate sounds like :

“I believe we can restore such cooperation with Iran through diplomacy, trade, and travel, rather than threatening a nuclear strike.”

“We need to re-open the doors to diplomacy with Iran, by removing sanctions and actually talking with them—as we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. President Reagan was “the Great Communicator,” and we need to hearken back to his policy of communication to prevent war with Iran or any other country that seeks to obtain nuclear weapons.”

“Our foreign policy seems to be focused on provoking Russia rather than seeking friendly and mutually-beneficial relations. The United States has troops stationed in a ring around Russia and regularly interferes in the internal affairs of the new states of the former Soviet Union.”

“There is no reason for a “new Cold War” with Russia, and the foreign policy I intend to pursue as president – peaceful relations, engagement, and trade – will greatly improve US/Russia relations.”

“What is most clear is that the United States needs a president who understands that to really make us safe against future terrorism, we must change our foreign policy and get control of our borders. These two cannot be separated from each other”.

“We claim to be fighting a war to protect our national security when we’ve left the back door unlocked at home. If we were truly worried about national security, we would first secure our borders, and oppose amnesty for illegal aliens.”

The more Americans hear Dr. Ron Paul saying such things, the larger his support base grows.

It's hard to imagine America's political elite, in front of the podiums and behind the curtains, and the mainstream media now almost totally controlled, through networks of companies, by America's war industries will allow Paul to even get close to winning the Republican nomination, should his support base grow so large as to make that even a rank possibility.

The first rounds in the destruction of Ron Paul's bid for the Republican presidential nomination were fired after his $4 million day, a few weeks back, but they failed to impact on his credibility or temper the growth of his supporters.

The next wave of attacks through and by the mainstream media look set to begin within days.


The Full Interview Transcript With Dr Ron Paul Is Here

Musharraf Praised By US For "Fighting Extremism" As He Plans Elections Under Martial Law

Pakistan's President Musharraf has no intention of lifting the 'emergency rule', or martial law as it's more commonly known, he has imposed upon his people since November 3, now even planning to hold supposedly 'democratic elections' without winding back his military dictatorship.

Musharraf has suspended the Constitution, wiped away the Supreme Court, jailed thousands of political opponents, including opposition leaders, shut down non-state media and threatened other media with prison sentences and massive fines for simply daring to satirise him.

US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte talks tough about Musharraf in this Washington Post story, damning Musharraf's plans to hold election while the country is locked down under emergency rule :

"Emergency rule is not compatible with free, fair and credible elections," Negroponte said at a news conference Sunday morning, referring to parliamentary elections set for early January.

"The people of Pakistan deserve an opportunity to choose their leaders free from the restrictions that exist under a state of emergency."

But Musharraf knows it's just talk. With a wave of terror attacks claiming hundreds of lives in Pakistan in recent months, and virtual full-scale war breaking out in the northwestern tribal lands, bordering Afghanistan, claiming thousands of lives of Pakistan military, police and militants in the past two years, Musharraf has a very powerful wild card to play against the United States, all but guaranteeing they will soon shut up about how they cannot tolerate his martial law.

Musharraf is now one of the top three BushCo. allies in the 'War on Terror', and he is fully aware of the power he now holds, and how much the United States is relying on him to keep militants and tribal warriors from entering the Taliban Vs NATO war in Afghanistan :

Musharraf said in an interview Friday that he would tell the United States that he was the only leader capable of "protecting and safeguarding Pakistan."

"We need to fight the terrorists and we need the emergency for a peaceful environment," he said.

His aides said he repeated those views in the meeting with Negroponte. "The war on terror needs Musharraf," one of the aides said on condition of anonymity. "Musharraf is good for America."

Which explains why Negroponte had these far more revealing words to say about Musharraf, explaining why the BushCo. objections to martial law in Pakistan is not much more than loud, but necessary, words :

Negroponte praised Musharraf's efforts in the fight against terrorism, saying that he "continues to be a strong voice against extremism."

Musharraf is ruling by military dictatorship, crushing the media, banning public rallies, shredding the Constitution, jailing political opponents, but the US sees him as a "strong voice against extremism."

One man's extremist is another man's military dictator.

Musharraf's ability to close down independent Pakistan media, broadcasting from outside of Pakistan, as detailed here, is frightening.

Banks, International Corporations, Currency Speculators, Entire Countries All Now Abandoning The 'Toxic' US Dollar

Saudi Minister Warns Of US Dollar Collapse If OPEC Prices Oil In "Alternative Currencies" Like The Euro

Months after it became blindingly obvious to even a casual observer, the dark news about the US Dollar is now shifting from the financial pages to the front pages of mainstream media across the world.

This from the UK Independent :

The decline of the dollar, symbol of US global hegemony for the best part of a century, may have become so entrenched that some experts now fear it is irreversible.

After months of huge and sustained turmoil on the money markets, lack of confidence in the world's totemic currency has become so widespread that an increasing number of international traders are transferring their wealth to stronger currencies such as the euro, which recently hit its highest level against the dollar.

"An American businessman over here who is given the choice would take anything but the dollar," David Buik of Cantor Index said yesterday. "I would want to be paid in yen, and if not yen then the euro or sterling."

Matthew Osborne, of Armstrong International, added: "The majority would say sterling. There are a few dealers in the City who may take the view that they'll take dollars now, while they're cheap, and hold on to them for 12 months.

"But the problem is so serious that there are people who in July or August might have been thinking, 'I'm paid in dollars, how annoying' for whom it's now a question of, 'Do you have a job; do you have a bonus?' "

Kenneth Froot, a Harvard university professor and former consultant to the US Federal Reserve, warned yesterday: "Part of the depreciation [of the dollar] is permanent. There is no doubt that the dollar must sink against periphery currencies to reflect their increase in competitiveness and productivity."

Professor Riordan Roett, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Bloomberg News: "There is a loss of confidence in the dollar and the US. It may only reflect the widespread dismay with the Bush administration, but it is obvious that the next administration, of either party, will have a steep uphill struggle." As well as reaching its lowest level against the euro, which has been trading at more than $1.47, the dollar has also fallen to its lowest level against the Canadian dollar since 1950, sterling since 1981, and the Swiss franc since 1995.

Its plight was made still worse by a jarring signal from China that it was switching to other currencies. Cheng Siwei, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, told a conference in Beijing: "We will favour stronger currencies over weaker ones, and will readjust accordingly."

The warning was reinforced by a Chinese central bank vice-director, Xu Jian, who said the dollar was "losing its status as the world currency".

China has stockpiled £700bn worth of foreign currency, and has only to decide to slow its accumulation of dollars to weaken the currency further.

Last month, in a humiliating turn of events, the central bank in Iraq, four years after the United States invaded, stated that it wished to diversify reserves from a reliance on dollars.

Korea's central bank has urged shipbuilders to issue invoices in the local currency and take precautions against the weakened dollar, and three of the world's big oil exporters, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, are demanding payment in euros rather than dollars. Iran insisted that Japan should make all its payments for oil in yen, rather than dollars.

Warren Buffet, who is reputedly the richest man in the world, was asked on the US network CNBC last month what he thought was the best currency in the world to own now. He answered: "Not the US dollar."

"Not the US Dollar" is becoming the catch cry of international bankers, oil traders and market vendors across the planet.


A Saudi government minister has been overheard discussing the collapse of the US Dollar if OPEC decides to price it's oil in Euros, or other "alternative" currencies :

In an embarrassing blunder at the meeting in Riyadh, ministers' microphones were not cut off during a key closed meeting, and Prince Al-Faisal was heard saying: "My feeling is that the mere mention that the Opec countries are studying the issue of the dollar is itself going to have an impact that endangers the interests of the countries.

"There will be journalists who will seize on this point and we don't want the dollar to collapse instead of doing something good for Opec."

June 1, 2007 : The Dying 'Faith Based' US Dollar

President Bush And The Death Of The American Dollar - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, South Korea All Abandon The US Dollar

When Conspiracy Theories Become Brutal, Ugly Fact

The United States Is Now Primed For A Police State Dictatorship

Conspiracy theories about the United States becoming a police state were much easier to ignore, and outright dismiss, with a cynical laugh and a roll of the eyes, before the age of BushCo. and 9/11.

Now, it's not so easy.

With the mostly permanent archives of the internet, and a growing movement of remarkably well-informed, and every questioning, young Americans with access to the greatest invention for information distribution since the invention of the printing press, the memory hole of yesterday's headlines or last year's 'quiet announcement' has all but disappeared.

A dark and extremely troubling tide of draconian laws and anti-human rights, anti-freedom legislation is now swamping the former Land Of The Free, and millions of Americans know it, and they're trying to stop it.

You can pretend it isn't happening, but it is. And most of the rest of the world knows it. They watch on from across the oceans and ask 'Why can't Americans see what is happening to them?'

The Washington Post will hold a two day shock n' horror special at yet another removal of basic rights for the American populace, and CNN might even do a special five minute report on the latest outrage from the Bush administration aimed at curtailing the freedoms of Americans under the ever widening umbrella of the 'War on Terror', but British, European, Russian, Japanese and occasionally Australian media take plenty of notice of what's going on in the US. Under Bush.

As millions of Americans now use the internet to inform themselves, and inform each other, of what is unfolding, they are finding allies all over the world through the internet to help them in their research, to check their fact, to discuss how such police state tactics crept into reality in other countries during the 20th century, to debate their information and theories, and to spread the word.

Researcher Steve Watson has compiled a detailed, heavily researched, report on how the United States is plummeting towards a police state dictatorship, and unlike the endless rumours and conspiracies of the 1990s, Watson has a wealth of documents, videos, speeches and news reports to make his case. And it's one hell of a case.

Some excerpts :

A sustained media propaganda campaign in support of the move to swing the apparatus of tyranny away from phantom Muslim terrorists and towards the American people is in full operation and may pave the way for further attacks on US soil to be blamed on dissenting Americans who speak out against the war and the rise of the domestic police state.

Over the past decade we have witnessed an extreme acceleration of the physical implementation of a framework and infrastructure ready to receive those who will not go along with a coordinated destruction of traditional American values and freedom.

With 9/11 came the first opportunity of the 21st century to radically alter the mentality of America and introduce a new order of society.

The corporate media is now preparing the psyche of the American public for a second major shift. This time the effort will be to direct the understanding of the manufactured and fraudulent "war on terror", away from "Islamofascists" and "Al Qaeda" and towards dissenting American citizens.

For years we have warned that the police state is coming, how Martial Law will become the norm, how ancient laws, rights and freedoms are being overturned and replaced with repressive mechanisms of control. We warned how the mechanisms of the police state would be turned onto the average Americans who refused to go along with it.

For years we have presented the evidence, the Army War College documents, the domestic military takeover drills, the draconian legislation, officials left right and centre calling for more centralized military control domestically.

For years people refuted the evidence, or passed it off as being intended for something else, or simply refused to believe it. Now everything we warned you about is happening.

In the wake of recent natural disasters on American soil, dangerous precedents have been set.

We have been forced to watch how in times of crisis we must submit and follow the orders of Federal Commanders, no matter whether they deny us basic human rights or not.

Now the propaganda is flowing in full force, media heads are attacking and labeling as terrorists anyone who stands up against the new order...

The labelling, by the corporate media, of non-violent dissenting Americans as "terrorists" is not something that is going to happen in the future, it's happening now, right now, on CNN, on Fox News, to name only two mainstream news channels involved.

You don't have to read the whole report by Steve Watson. But you should. You don't have to believe it, but you should inform yourself of the facts. That way the next time you laugh at someone claiming the United States is on its way to becoming a police state, you will actually know what you're talking about.

There is a lot to be learned from BushCo.'s reaction to the implementation of a hardcore military dictatorship and martial law in Pakistan.

Yes, Bush and his spokespeople said they were shocked and outraged. But they didn't do anything about it. Beyond words, and warnings through a half-smile.

A close American ally, pumped full of some $10 billion in American aid, imposes a brutal police state rule on its people and arrests thousands who voiced their opposition, and opposition politicians, while closing down the media, and most reactions from America's political and media elite was a bunch of shrugs.

"We don't like what's happening in Pakistan," they say, "but it's necessary right now."

The question is, when will it be necessary for the United States?

Cure Found For 'Tree Man'



Your eyes are not deceiving you, and the image has not been photoshopped. This Indonesian man has 'tree roots' growing out of his arms and hands. The whole story, and more photos, here, are absolutely mind-blowing. But doctors think they've found a cure for the man's rare condition.

Do rare conditions, like this 'tree man' affliction, offer explanations for ancient stories of human giants, half-man/half-beasts and multi-limbed gods?

It would appear so.

Perhaps the Gods Amongst Men were simply suffering from rare infections and medical conditions for which their societies offered no rational explanations.

Iraq : Foreign Troops Leave, Number Of Attacks Plunge

One of the most prominent current propaganda strategies for those who want to keep American, Australian and British troops in Iraq for as long as possible (or at least until the right oil laws are signed and sealed) is the one that claims that if we leave, all hell will break loose. Or more hell.

But that's not the case, so far, in Basra. After British troops packed up and left, attacks have plunged by a whopping 90% :

Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols.

A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come under attack from militants in Basra, but the overall level of violence is down 90% since the British troops left.

The repackaging of such information is now of primary importance to the NeoCons. They will continue to pump and spin the line that attacks in Iraq are dropping because of the Bush "troop surge", not because foreign troops are packing up and going home, or because some American patrol units are refusing to undertake suicidal missions along IED infested roads.

Whatever way you choose to interpret the information, the less foreign troops and Iraqis being killed, the better.

British forces are expected to return control of Basra to Iraqi officials in December. The official end of UK troops combat role in Iraq could come before Christmas.

Some 30,000 of so American troops are expected to pack up and go home before Christmas as well. At the moment, because of the crossing over old and new deployments, the United States has more than 170,000 soldiers in Iraq, the highest number since the Iraq War began.

This Is Your Planet, At Night



A spectacular view of glittering Earth at night from The European Space Agency's Rosetta comet probe.

More details and a key to which cities' lights are glowing the brightest over at Wired.

A new vid of the Earth, from a low Moon orbit, with some wonderful Carl Sagan quotes, can be viewed here.

America's Suicide Soldier Epidemic

6000 US Veterans Killed Themselves In 2005

What Happened To The 'Malboro Man'

More American veterans are dying by their own hand back home in one year, than have died in battle in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It's impossible to comprehend the horror that these men and women experienced, and witnessed, that made them unable to keep living once they were home from the war. But the story of the 'Malboro Man', James Blake Miller (see below) provides some insight into life during and after the war in Iraq for American soldiers.

A report from CBS News exposes some of the appalling statistics of the homeland carnage :

* In 2005, more than 120 American war veterans took their own lives each and every week. That is more than double the national US suicide rate. As a rough rule, for every successful suicide there are usually three or four who try and fail to kill themselves.

* More than 100,000 vets are seeking help for mental health issues.

* More than 52,000 were trying to get help for PTSD alone. And that's only the veterans who have come forward.

* Of 90,000 vets returning from Iraq, 28% had mental health problems.

* Vets are 11% of the general population, but make up 25% of the United States' homeless people.

Note : this story has been corrected after more research and a third viewing of the CBS News story made clear that it was 6000 veterans of America's wars since World War 2 who took their own lives in 2005, not 6000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. On a first viewing of the CBS News story, the introduction gives the mistaken impression that the 6000 veteran suicides figure was related to only veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Regardless, it is still a shocking number of post-war suicides, and considering the high rate of PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, it is only likely to climb higher unless more help is made available to these veterans.



The infamous 'Malboro Man', James Blake Miller(above) is just one of the hundreds of thousands of American 'War on Terror' veterans whose life has fallen apart since returning from the warzone.

Once hailed by the American media, particularly Fox News and conservative bloggers, as a true American hero, he has now been abandoned by those who used him as a recruiting tool. He suffers from PTSD, his marriage fell apart, he has battled the urge to take his own life.

The lives of the 'Malboro Man' and his photographer, Louis Sinco, who captured the iconic image image during the Battle Of Fallouja, have become intertwined once more, years later.

It's a truly remarkable story of survival, slow recovery, the horror of war and PTSD, and the bond formed by two men who were thrown together by the rough tide of American history.

Some excerpts, and quotes from Miller, from the story written by photographer Louis Sinco :

Miller told...how empty and confused he had felt when combat ended. How he had placed the barrel of an M-16 assault rifle in his mouth on the outskirts of Fallouja one day, taken a deep breath and reached for the trigger.

"What made me so special that I deserved to stay here and my buddies didn't?" Miller asked, speaking of friends who had died. "At one point, I was almost mad at them. How could my buddies leave me like that? We came together. We were supposed to leave together. I don't know how you can disconnect that feeling."

He told us about an event that haunted him. From an observation post in Fallouja, he had seen a head pop up amid the wreckage of several cars. It was a free-fire zone. He squinted into his rifle scope, saw a patch of dark curly hair and squeezed the trigger.

Later, Marines advanced on the scene and found a dead boy, 6 or 7 years old, his curly hair mottled by bits of brain and blood.

There was more, he said -- terrible things he couldn't divulge. Not now. Maybe never.

As Miller and I drove back to West Virginia, news crackled over the radio. The Democrats had routed the GOP in the midterm congressional election. Public sentiment about Iraq had soured, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the architect of the war, was resigning.

Miller had mixed feelings. "That's good news, I guess," he said. "But it should've happened a long time ago. Everybody that's dead now. I mean, what's the point?"

It was Nov. 9, 2006 -- two years after I took the famous picture of Miller and a year after he left the Marines.

Go Here To Read Part One Of Silco And Miller's Story

Go Here To Read Part Two

The 'Malboro Man' Tells His Story, In His Own Words And Music

C & L Has The Video Of The CBS News Story On America's Suicide Soldier Epidemic

A PBS Documentary On American Soldiers And PTSD

Earth Goes Up, Earth Goes Down




The above is yet more stunning high-resolution imagery from the Japanese moon mission. It is a view only witnessed by a small handful of humans who have visited our nearest neighbour.

Here's some quotes from legendary astronomer Carl Sagan talking about the "pale blue dot" we call home, words inspired by photographs of Earth taken from millions of miles away :

That's home. That's us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than (the view from space of) this tiny dot. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Amen to that.

OPEC Player : $200 For A Barrel Of Oil If Iran Is Invaded

US Military Revolt Against NeoCons Bursts Into The Headlines

NeoCons Warned By Central Command Chief To Shut The Hell Up Over Bombing Iran

The head of the United States Central Command is now using key financial media to directly warn NeoCon warpigs to drop their 'Bomb Iran Now' campaign.

The American military resistance to NeoCon plans to expand their chaos and destruction in the Middle East has now leaped out of the alternative media and into the headlines of the world's financial press :

The Pentagon is not preparing a pre-emptive attack on Iran in spite of an increase in bellicose rhetoric from Washington, according to senior officers.

Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, told the Financial Times that while dealing with Iran was a “challenge”, a strike was not “in the offing”.

The continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said.

“Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”

...his comments served as a shot across the bows of hawks who are arguing for imminent action. They also echoed the views of the senior brass that military action is currently unnecessary, and should only be considered as an absolute last resort.

Adm Fallon declined to comment specifically on whether the US rhetoric was feeding the speculation, but said that “generally, the bellicose comments are not particularly helpful”.

As we always say, read the front sections of the newspapers, by all means, but if you really want to know what's going on in the world, always take a look at the business and financial pages.

In another story in the same edition of the Financial Times, Admiral Fallon says :

“It seems to me that we don’t need more problems...It astounds me that so many pundits and others are spending so much time yakking about this topic.”

Admiral Fallon is now issuing warnings, as the head of Central Command, to the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, Murdoch media Iran War cheerleaders like Bill Kristol and washed up former NeoCon diplomats, who now populate Fox News 'chat shows', like John Bolton.

The Financial Times, more widely read by international bankers and economists than the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, has all but officially launched a 'No War On Iran' campaign in recent days, with the story on Adm. Fallon's warning to NeoCons just one recent example.

While the regularly psychotic op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal enthusiastically tries to promote the NeoCon case for War On Iran, virtually all of the rest of the world's financial media is actively opposing such military action, knowing full well what such a war will mean for the economies of China, India, the United Kingdom, Japan, north and south Asia and Australia.

story continues after...
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story continues...


While commentators and opinionists in the corporate media of the United States fall over each other to attack Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, much of the international media either ignores his utterances and vitriol, or reports his comments soberly.

Like the Financial Times, the world's wire services will today pump out Chavez's warning of oil hitting $200 a barrel if War On Iran becomes a reality, without echoing the NeoCon propaganda.

OPEC nations usually leave it Chavez to issue such warnings to the rest of the world, and particularly to the United States and Israel. It is a rare day, though it does happen occasionally, when OPEC nation leaders take Chavez to task for his oil-price related declarations and warnings. Don't expect any of them to shout down Chavez over this :

Chávez, Venezuela’s president, has warned that oil prices could reach $200 a barrel if the US invaded Iran.

Mr Chávez also suggested that Opec should become a more important player in geopolitics, and finance social development programmes for poor countries in areas such as literacy, health, education and housing.

The oil cartel should “go beyond just energy, it should have the appearance of politics – even more so given the context in which this summit will take place”, he said.

...the Venezuelan president reiterated his long-held view that oil prices would hit $100, although he believes that Opec should attempt to stabilise prices at that level “for several years”. This “should prompt developed countries to moderate their consumption”.

However, an even greater leap could be possible, he warned. “If the empire [the US] decides to invade Iran, surely oil prices could go as high as $200 a barrel.”

He offered to mediate between Washington and Tehran to ease tension, but added that “no one has asked us for help”.

The Venezuelan president also repeated a long-standing threat to cut off oil exports to the US should it decide to attack his country. Caracas is already pursuing a policy of gradually reducing its exports to the US in favour of China.

Note : Since this story was published, the Saudis have raised objections to Chavez's stance.

The United States currently takes about half of Venezuela's total oil production.

Another story from the Financial Times paints in great detail the now open dissent from key senior Pentagon and military leaders against NeoCon plans for a new war against Iran :

Of particular importance are the US military’s deep reservations about a pre-emptive attack on Iran, largely because of the uncertain consequences that would result. In addition, pragmatists have replaced hawks among Mr Bush’s closest colleagues.

“There is no doubt that an element in the government wants to strike Iran,” says retired General Joseph Hoar, a former head of Centcom, making an apparent allusion to Mr Cheney. “But the good news is that the secretary of defence and senior military are against it.”

Anthony Zinni, another former Centcom chief, says even a limited American attack could push Tehran to retaliate in a number of ways, such as firing missiles at Israel, Saudi oilfields and US bases in Iraq, mining the Straits of Hormuz and activating sleeper terrorist cells around the world. “It is not a matter of a one-strike option,” he says, voicing his worries that Iranian retaliation could pull America into a protracted conflict on the ground. “It is the classic question of ‘And then what?’”

Gen Zinni issued similar warnings before the war in Iraq and was paid little heed. But this time things are different. In particular, a number of the military’s most experienced officers echo his misgivings.

“We’re in a conflict in two countries out there right now,” Admiral Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the joint chiefs, told the New York Times last month. “We have to be incredibly thoughtful about the potential of in fact getting into a conflict with a third country in that part of the world.”

Gen Hoar casts doubt on the effectiveness of any attack, arguing that the US military may not have the “proper” weapons to destroy deeply buried sites and that Washington lacks good intelligence on Iran’s nuclear sites, including the existence of any clandestine facilities.

The US military are not going to allow their forces to go to War On Iran, regardless of what President Bush orders them to do. More and more military chiefs are voicing their opposition and stating why such a war cannot be waged, even openly admitting their forces may not be able to cope.

This is an open resistance by senior military leaders against the NeoCons. It's been building for years, but now it's hitting the headlines.

At the same time, the NeoCon 'War On Iran' cheerleaders are getting more hysterical and shrill, as they slowly realize they will never get their War On Iran. Not without an horrific attack on the United States that they can blame on the Iranians.

The NeoCons are now verbal terrorists, helping to push up the price of oil with their endless demands for air strikes on Iran and warnings of chaos to come, causing scares and uncertainty in global oil markets.

It is clear that President Bush, with the help of Secretary Of State, Condoleezza Rice, is now trying to distance himself from the very NeoCons who helped thrust him into power, and fully backed and promoted the invasion and occupation of Iraq. His "World War III" comments caused shock and outrage across the world, and you can expect to see President Bush reign in his Iran rhetoric in the weeks to come.

The threat of terror in the United States may now not just be coming from Islamists, but from the NeoCons themselves, who are sounding more psychotic with every passing day and just about ready to stop at nothing to get their War On Iran before President Bush leaves the White House in January, 2009.

Who else in the world, bar Osama Bin Laden, talks so frequently, so threateningly, of civilian bombings, including the use of car bombs, against supposed enemies instead of diplomacy?

In The US, Pro-Peace Veterans Arrested On Veterans Day

In The UK, 'WoT' Veterans Banned From Joining Remembranc Day Marches



The pro-war crowd will tell you that you only have the right to free speech because soldiers gave their lives fighting for it. But they don't really want even soldiers to exercise that right. Particularly on a day, and in a place, where the powerful messages from veterans who know the true brutality and loss of war would have the most potency :

Members of Veterans for Peace lined up in front of a podium at City Hall Plaza holding (pro-peace) placards, as color guards from Massachusetts military units and JROTC bands from across the state filed into Government Center for a ceremony, sponsored by the American Legion, to honor veterans after the parade. Some protesters wore gags, which they later said symbolized the fact that, while they were permitted to march in the parade, they were prevented from carrying signs opposing the war in Iraq.

"We were exercising our First Amendment rights," said Winston Warfield of Dorchester, a member of the group. "The First Amendment protects free speech, even when you don't agree with what's being said."

"Our free speech and civil rights are being abridged here," said Nate Goldschlag, a Vietnam-era veteran who was among those standing in front of the podium. "We are veterans, too, and we should be allowed to express our opposition to this war."

And this story from the UK is beyond appalling. If there are rules that stop wounded soldiers from taking part in ceremonies like this, you change the rules :

Serving soldiers horrifically injured in the Iraq and Afghan conflicts have been refused permission to join today's main Remembrance Day parade, prompting angry accusations that the government is 'ashamed' to have them seen in public.

Jamie Cooper, 19, the youngest Briton seriously injured in Basra, had hoped to join the march past at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. He is one of a number of young soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan the Royal British Legion had wanted to include in Britain's centrepiece remembrance ceremony.

But last week, the head of the Legion contacted Jamie's's father, Phillip, to say that government rules for participating in the parade stipulated that only veterans, not 'serving soldiers', could take part. Last year 1,500 civilians were among the 9,500 allowed by the government to participate in the official march past.

'I am absolutely outraged,' Cooper said. 'I would not have made an issue of it. But Jamie, who is thankfully recovering well from his latest major operation, said to me: "Dad, do you remember how we always used to go to Remembrance Day when I was younger? Do you think we could go this year?" He feels strongly about it, because he has lost friends on the battlefield and wants to pay tribute to them.'

It is also understood that several soldiers currently recuperating from serious injuries at Headley Court, the military rehabilitation centre near Epsom in Surrey, had wanted to attend, but were also not able to join the official parade.

Cooper said: 'It is outrageous. I know any father would say this, but I am just so, so proud of Jamie, of all he has sacrificed, and of how he has fought against all the odds to survive and get better. His government ought to be proud too - not ashamed of him.'

Jamie lost the use of one leg and suffered serious hand and stomach wounds in a mortar attack near Basra in November 2006.

His father's anger was echoed yesterday by the mother of Ben Parkinson, the 23-year-old whose horrific injuries from an Afghan landmine explosion sparked a nationwide controversy over compensation levels for seriously wounded soldiers. 'Ben, Jamie and the other young men who have been badly injured are an inspiration,' Diane Dernie said last night. 'But the government wants them hidden away, not be seen or heard from.'

She said the young service personnel should be 'celebrated' for their sacrifice and positively encouraged to be part of the ceremony. She recently took her son to visit the army museum in Chelsea to see the exhibit on operations in Afghanistan. 'People kept coming up to him in his wheelchair and touching him, smiling, and saying: "Well done, young man." These boys are an inspiration, but the current government guidelines suggest they are embarrassed by them. It's bizarre.'

Many of what we call Veterans Day, Armistice Day, ANZAC Day or Remembrance Day marches were started in the years after World War 1 as protests by wounded soldiers, demanding their governments help them to recover from their wounds, or get a new start in life. They had given their arms and legs and sanity for their governments' war, they wanted to be treated with respect and refused to be ignored any longer.

It says a lot about our days that ceremonies and marches that were started by wounded veterans are now blocking many wounded veterans of current wars from taking part.

John Bolton On Pakistan : Forget Democracy

Former US ambassador, and key NeoCon John Bolton, in this clip from CNN, explains why democracy in Pakistan needs to take a back seat for a while. Only a military dictatorship, claims Bolton, can keep Pakistan's nuclear arsenal out of the hands of "Islamists".

Yes, democracy is a fine and wonderful thing, but not for Pakistan. Not now, and probably not for a while to come, according to Bolton.

You have to understand, Bolton pleads, that Pakistan is "a complex situation."

You have to understand that NeoCons like John Bolton actively back military dictatorships that crush democracy movements, despite what they may claim on Fox News.

Bolton admits that Musharraf's military is infested with "Islamists", who have been feeding on the United States incredible $10 billion in military aid since the 9/11 attacks.

Bolton also totally dismisses concerns raised by Pakistan's former prime minister Bhutto that the Taliban is "advancing on our cities."

What is happening today in Pakistan is a prime example how the War On Islam front of the War On Terror has led to even a greater concentration of power, prestige and military dollars in the hands of Islamic extremists.

It is one of the most appalling ironies, and failures, of the WoT that revenge crazed murderers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have turned a minor, though deadly, movement of religious extremism into insurgencies and rag-tag armies capable of taking on the greatest military force in the history of the world, primarily thanks to the military aid, lost weapons and missing aid money, that has flowed like swollen rivers via the War On Terror.

But don't expect NeoCon John Bolton to ever admit that his Project For The New American Century screwed up so monumentally, and helped to make the world a far more dangerous place, for freedom and democracy. Bolton's PNAC key mission in the late 1990s was to get America's military spending back up to, and then beyond, Cold War levels. On that front, they can shout "Mission Accomplished!"


Go To 'Crooks And Liars' For The Bolton Video

Bolton Gets Misty-Eyed For The Days When United States Used To Overthrow Democratically Elected Governments

Project For The New American Century's "Mission Accomplished" - US Military Spending Soars Back To Cold War Levels

Why PNAC NeoCons Think The War On Iraq Is A Great Success Story

Inside The NSA

Five 9/11 Hijackers Were Staying In A Motel Near The Front Gates Of The World's Most Secretive Intelligence Agency The Morning Of The Attacks

This BBC News story about the formerly, officially, non-existent US National Security Agency from 2002 is getting some movement on Digg at the moment. No wonder. It's full of brain sparking information that seeped into plenty of 9/11 and spying-on-American newspaper stories in 2002 and 2003 and then fell into the memory hole.

A few info nuggets from the story.

* On the morning of September 11, 2001, five of the alleged hijackers of Flight 77 were staying at the Valencia Hotel, virtually outside the front gates of the NSA. When the alleged hijackers left the hotel to head for Washington's Dulles Airport, they would have found themselves in heavy traffic filled with NSA employees. Flight 77 was allegedly crashed into the Pentagon.

* Ironically, the NSA was set up following the 'surprise attack' on Pearl Harbour, which brought the United States into World War 2.

* The National Security Agency is housed inside Fort Meade, a few miles outside of Washington.
* The NSA's key mission is to scoop up as much of the world's electronic traffic - emails and phone calls - as possible, translate it, organize it and analyze it.

* The NSA employed more than 38,000 in 2002. That figure has increased dramatically since then, but you won't find an official head count anywhere. The NSA employs more people than the CIA and FBI, combined. Each and every employee is "sworn to a lifetime of secrecy."

* The NSA complex has shopping malls, sports grounds and its own police force.

* It also has its own television news channels, complete with newsreaders. According to the BBC News story :

On one channel you can watch live video from unmanned planes flying over Afghanistan or surf through real-time satellite photos of Pakistan troop movements on the Kashmir border.

On their secure internet, which they share with the CIA and FBI, you can read transcripts of intercepted conversations between soldiers on exercise in China, or European diplomats.

* The NSA has a dozen listening stations dotted across the planet. These stations scoop up more than tw0 million emails, faxes, cell phone calls and "diplomatic traffic" per hour. Or more than 500 million hours of communications each and every day.

Since 2002, the NSA has added a monumental amount of domestic American electronic communications traffic to that overall information haul, which is one of key reasons why the NSA now has such a higher profile. The 'outing' of the NSA began when President Bush was busted ordering the NSA to bypass the courts and to begin warantless wire tapping of American citizens.

In 2005, James Bamford wrote a controversial story for the New York Times about the NSA, which conservative media blasted for supposedly telling terrorists too much about how the NSA spies on the world's communications, and its own people. Some excerpts :

Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."

At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.

How times have changed since that BBC News 2002 story.

The National Security Agency now promotes itself actively online, mostly for its cryptology activities (code breaking). It has a Careers page, a fascinating online exhibit of code cracking equipment through two centuries and even a page for kids.

Despite not officially existing for most of its 56 year long history, the NSA has popped up in popular culture, in 1990s spy fiction, in a 1968 Star Trek episode, in recent James Bond films and even in The Simpson's Movie.

NSA Exhibit On The 1967 Attack By Israel On The USS Liberty

The Agency That Could Be Big Brother

Fox News Host Calls For Terror Car Bombings Against Civilian Targets

If you went on a national TV program and called for the use of car bombs in cities to achieve a political objective, you'd probably get a visit, about 4am, from about 20 men wearing body armour and helmets.

But if you're a host on the Fox News Channel, you can openly demand the use of terror car bombings, and get away with it :





Notice the way they had 'problems' with the feed in this interviewer? Looks like someone in control room tried to pull the plug.

This is demented.

As has been pointed out, correctly, on other blog coverage of this disgusting call for the use of terrorism against civilians, this on air crime will bring fear and heartbreak to victims of terror, and to the families of those who didn't survive terror attacks.

In the 1940s, death mongers called for the carpet bombing of foreign cities.

Today, they call for the use of car bombs.

Welcome to the 'War of Terror'.

President Bush And The Death Of The American Dollar

China Threatens To Get Out Of The US Dollar Business, With $1.4 Trillion In Reserves

Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Iran, China, Russia Get Ready To Abandon The US Dollar

From 'The Last Days Of President Bush' blog :

The American Dollar is dying. Some would say it is already dead. China is now preparing to bail out on the American Dollar to the tune of some $1.4 trillion it holds in reserves. They call it 'diversifying'. International money traders, privately, call China's move The Coffin. The US Dollar, of course, is the corpse in that coffin.

For years, numerous so-called 'conspiracy websites' have been warning that it has been President George W. Bush's mission to destroy the US Dollar as a world beating currency. Some theories go that the death of the Dollar will pave the way for the introduction of a new currency for all of North America - that is, the United States, Mexico and Canada. Make of that theory what you will.

The mainstream media, naturally, has long refused to face the fact that the US Dollar under President Bush has become a currency on life support. But some in the MSM are now starting to hint at a grand conspiracy to kill off the US Dollar, mostly by highlighting just how unconcerned President Bush is by what is happening to his nation's currency, and how he insists the current Federal Reserve strategy is working when it clearly is not.

Bush says his policy is for a "strong dollar" and that "the market" will decide the US Dollar's true value. The market is already doing this, and it's getting ugly.

Go Here To The Last Days Of President Bush For The Full Story


Currency Trading notes that China, Iran, South Korea, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia are preparing to all but dump the US Dollar "to protect their assets". CT details what such a move would mean :

Countries are growing weary of losing money on the falling dollar. Many of them want to protect their financial interests, and a number of them want to end the US oversight that comes with using the dollar. Although it’s not clear how many of these countries will actually follow through on an abandonment of the dollar, it is clear that its status as a world currency is in trouble.

Obviously, an abandonment of the dollar is bad news for the currency. Simply put, as demand lessens, its value drops. Additionally, the revenue generated from the use of the dollar will be sorely missed if it’s lost. The dollar’s status as a cheaply-produced US export is a vital part of our economy. Losing this status could rock the financial lives of both Americans and the worldwide economy.

The blowback effect on their own economies, however, may mean those countries won't ultimately choose to isolate themselves from the poisoned US Dollar. Not completely anyway. They will try to find a balance between lessening the impact of a total US Dollar collapse and getting out while they can still save some billions.


Finally, Mike Whitney takes a blowtorch to the shocking state of the US Dollar, the massacres on Wall Street and the financial tsunami that looks set to swamp the entire nation :

Foreign investors and central banks around the world have lost confidence in US markets and are headed for the exits. The dollar is sinking, the country is insolvent, and its leaders are barking mad. That's bad for business. Investors are voting with their feet. They've had enough. Capital is flowing to China and the Far East in a torrent. It's "sayonara" downtown Manhattan and"Hello" Tienanmen Square.

In Australia, our currency is now closing in on parity with the US Dollar. Australia's economy appears to be doing well, but not that good. We are a mere $1.3 trillion dollar economy, and our dollar will soon be worth the same, if not more, then the once mighty US Dollar.

The Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello, is now using the threat of a 'financial tsunami' to try and win the coming national election for his government.

The American and international financial behemoths who saw all US Dollar bloodshed coming have already used the global economy to move the bulk of their wealth well out of the blast zone. It is the small investors, the middle class Americans with a $20,000 stock portfolio, a big fat mortgage and a small business, who will pay the biggest price.

Don't believe them when the kings of commerce and the financial experts say that nobody saw this coming. They all saw it coming, and many grow even more wealthy as the US Dollar eats itself alive.

Iran Dumping American Dollar - BushCo. Imposes Sanctions On Iranian Banks

June 2007 : The Dying "Faith Based" American Dollar

From ED DAY :

The Boy In The Gardens was this eight or nine year old kid I'd found liberating a toy shop about four days after ED Day. He was alone, he was already turning feral. He'd found some mangy kitten and it clung to his shoulder while he ripped through boxes in the dark shop.

He refused to tell me his name, and didn't talk much. I tried to get him to come and stay with us, but he wanted to keep looking for his mother.

He'd come into the city from the eastern suburbs, from what I could get him to tell me, about three or four days before ED Day. So he'd been running around by himself for a good week or so before I found him. His mother had sent him into the city to find his father.

From what he said, it sounded like his mother was dying when he left her.

"She cried blood," he told me.

A couple of days before the boy died, I got him to describe his mother to me as much as he was able to. I went back to the ID Wall and pulled down about 50 pieces of photo ID that showed women who were about the right age, the right hair colour, eye colour, as his mother.

The boy was excited to look through the IDs but he couldn't find her in any of the photos.

The more he looked, the more confused and upset he became.

"I don't remember what she looks like!" he cried. "I've forgotten my mum..."


The above is an excerpt from the latest chapter of the online novel ED DAY.

If you're not already reading the serialised novel, about life in Sydney after the bird flu pandemic, you can read Chapter One here.

Japan Reaches The Moon



The Japanese probe now orbiting The Moon has sent back the first high-definition photos ever taken of the ancient, meteor-scarred surface.

High definition images, yes, but it's the same old moon we first saw in close up some 40 years ago. Still, the images are pretty spectacular.

There's also a brilliant video sweeping across the surface of The Moon that can be viewed on this page.

The Japanese mission is the biggest moon mission since the American Apollo program. It's remarkable that even now, almost four decades after man first walked on the Moon, we don't even know the truth about our nearest neighbour's evolution, or even its origin. We have a better idea of how Mars and Venus came into existence than we do of how The Moon came to form in orbit around our planet.

With China, Russia, the EU, India, Germany, Taiwan, the United States and even some South American nations now planning further Moon missions, including human and robot landings and permanent living and mining bases, humanity is likely to claim The Moon as its second home within a matter of decades.

Go Here For More Images And Info From The Japanese Mission

Asia's Space Tigers Bare Their Teeth

The Search For Helium-3, The Miracle Power Source : Why Everyone Wants To Go Back To The Moon

Who Is Hoaxing The Global Warming Skeptics?

By Darryl Mason

The news that bacteria in the ocean had been (allegedly) scientifically proven to be the primary cause of global warming, and that this revelation probably spelt the 'death of manmade global warming' came like a gift from the Gods for some global warming skeptics.

Here it was. Finally. Peer reviewed, scientific fact-rich, undeniable proof that the Al Gore approved Global Warming Threat was nothing but a hoax, a lie, a scam.

For days, the new research paper (detailed below) flew around global warming-related discussion boards (includiing that of Fox News host Sean Hannnity) and the revelation of a massive previously unnoticed anomaly that proved it was impossible for man to be responsible for global warming was branded as a heavy weapon against Al Gore cheerleaders.

But it was all a hoax. A quite basic hoax. The 'scientific study' was a total fraud, and anyone who bothered to visit the 'research site' responsible for the study's publication would have quickly realised they had almost been duped.

Not every, or even many, global warming skeptics fell for this hoax. But enough did for the scam to be used as a means of discrediting the serious skeptics.

The research paper claimed :

...bacteria in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans emitted at least 300 times more carbon dioxide than industrial activity - a finding that, if true, would overturn the widely held view of scientists that burning fossil fuels are the main cause of warming.

The research paper contained a number of charts and graphs to back up their claims. But it was the only research paper published on the home page for the 'Journal Of Geoclimatic Studies', even though it gave the very thin impression it had been publishing for years, and was an established scientific journal.

There are two key questions here.

1) Why didn't the global warming skeptics who took the report as gospel do what they accuse the 'global warming is real' crowd of repeatedly failing to do and study the supposed facts on the 'ocean bacteria' research for themselves, before excitedly forwarding the study to friends and colleagues and leaping onto discussion boards to talk up the 'ocean bacteria is responsible for global warming' claims?

2) Who is responsible for the hoax, and was the hoax released and promoted to discredit global warming skeptics?

The answers to 2) is we're not sure yet, and a definite "Yes".


story continues after...
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Life After The Bird Flu Pandemic - Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's Free Online Novel ED DAY

Go Here For The Latest Stories From 'Your New Reality'

Go Here For The Latest Stories From 'The Orstrahyun'

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story continues...


Here's the news story :

Laden with scientific jargon and published online in the previously unknown Journal of Geoclimatic Studies based in Japan, the report suggested the findings could be “the death of manmade global warming theory”.

Sceptics jumped on the report.

A British scientist e-mailed the report to 2000 colleagues before spotting it was a spoof.

Another from the US called it a “blockbuster”.

Blogger sceptic Neil Craig wrote: “This could not be more damaging to manmade global warming theory ... I somehow doubt if this is going to be on the BBC news.”

“The whole story is a hoax,” Deliang Chen, professor of Meteorology at Gothenburg University in Sweden, told Reuters.

He said two “authors” listed as from his University were unknown.

Here's the hoax report - 'Carbon Dioxide Production By Benthic Bacteria : The Death Of Manmade Global Warming Theory?'

Here's the home page for the Journal Of Geoclimatic Studies.

Note : the above two links are only available now in Google cache. The website has been pulled down. The report is still readable, though the 'too perfect' graphs are probably not viewable.

While the Journal Of Geoclimatic Research gives the impression it is an established journal, the only paper on the site is the hoax, and all the names listed of scientists and researchers pull no hits in Google searches. The researchers and scientists don't exist, though some of the universities and research facilities do.

Here's how the researchers, at the end of the paper, probably fooled so many skeptics, with plenty of humble pleading for The Truth To Come Out Before It's Too Late :

It was not our intention in researching this issue to disprove manmade global warming theory. We have received no funds, directly or indirectly, from fossil fuel companies and have no personal interest in the outcome of the debate.

We simply noticed an anomaly in the figures used by those who accept the "consensus" position on climate change and sought to investigate it. But the findings presented in this paper could not be more damaging to manmade global warming theory or to the thousands of climate scientists who have overlooked - sometimes, we fear, deliberately - the anomaly.

We have found a near-perfect match between the levels of carbon dioxide produced by benthic eubacteria and recent global temperature records. By contrast we note what must be obvious to all those who have studied the figures with an open mind: a very poor match between carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels and recent global temperature records.

Moreover we note that there is no possible mechanism by which industrial emissions could have caused the recent temperature increase, as they are two orders of magnitude too small to have exerted an effect of this size. We have no choice but to conclude that the recent increase in global temperatures, which has caused so much disquiet among policy makers, bears no relation to industrial emissions, but is in fact a natural phenomenom.

These findings place us in a difficult position. We feel an obligation to publish, both in the cause of scientific objectivity and to prevent a terrible mistake - with extremely costly implications - from being made by the world's governments.

But we recognise that in doing so, we lay our careers on the line. As we have found in seeking to broach this issue gently with colleagues, and in attempting to publish these findings in other peer-reviewed journals, the "consensus" on climate change is enforced not by fact but by fear. We have been warned, collectively and individually, that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding, but that we also jeopardise the funding of the departments for which we work.

We believe that academic intimidation of this kind contradicts the spirit of open enquiry in which scientific investigations should be conducted. We deplore the aggressive responses we encountered before our findings were published, and fear the reaction this paper might provoke. But dangerous as these findings are, we feel we have no choice but to publish.

The wording of the plea for help is quite brilliant, and picks up on the very true claims by credible scientists that defying global warming gospel will get you in trouble.

The fake plea appeals to many of the talking points of hardcore global warming skeptics : that it's a big conspiracy, that adhering to manmade global warming beliefs will destroy economies, that if you are a researcher or scientist and you dare the challenge the 'truth' about global warming you will have your funding cut off and be ostracised, simply for trying to get the truth out.

The hoax worked against some skeptics because it hit every key point that winds up so many global warming skeptics.

What this very simple, but apparently extremely successful, hoax proves is that many so-called global warming skeptics are just as gullible and unwilling to do their own research as those who take the words of Al Gore as concrete fact.

Yes, the climate in certain regions of the world is changing, weather systems are becoming chaotic, global warming is probably responsible, and it is likely mankind has something to do with it - likely, though not yet 100% confirmed - but the arguments and, no doubt, the hoaxes from both sides of the debate will continue for years to come.

There are vested interests on all sides.

UPDATE : A person claiming to be the hoaxer is interviewed :

Why did you decide to construct the fake website? Was it purely a joke or did you set out to make people taking your paper at face value look foolish?

Its purpose was to expose the credulity and scientific illiteracy of many of the people who call themselves climate sceptics. While dismissive of the work of the great majority of climate scientists, they will believe almost anything if it lends support to their position. Their approach to climate science is the opposite of scepticism.

Are you surprised at the pick up your coverage has generated?

Not really. Equally ridiculous claims - like those in the paper attached to the "Oregon Petition" or David Bellamy's dodgy glacier figures - have been widely circulated and taken up by the ‘sceptic’ community. But you can explain this until you are blue in the face. To get people to sit up and listen, you have to demonstrate it. This is what I set out to do.

It should be noted that few credible global warming skeptics were taken in by the hoax. Of course, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News' Sean Hannity were, but then they're notorious idiots and suckers for any old kind of garbage - Saddam has nukes, Saddam will nuke the UK, Europe, America, the official story of the 9/11 attacks makes perfect sense, the Iraq War has been a success, and so on.


Scientists Claim They've Found A "Cure" For Global Warming

Founder Of The Weather Channel Calls Global Warming A 'Scam'

Who Didn't See This Coming? EU Proposes 'Global Alliance' To Fight Climate Change

Claim : The Dramatic Effects Of Global Warming Can Now Be Seen Occurring

Climate Change Is Now A Reality In The Alps, Experts Say Make The Most Of It

The Ten Commandments...Of The Mafiosi

They may be the commandments of the Mafiosi, but there's plenty of governments, political parties and corporations that could do with adopting, and adhering to, many of these rules, which are claimed to have been uncovered during the recent arrest of another 'godfather' :

1.No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to
do it.

2. Never look at the wives of friends.

3. Never be seen with cops.

4. Don't go to pubs and clubs.

5. Always be available for Cosa Nostra, even if your wife's about to give birth.

6. Appointments must be respected.

7. Wives must be treated with respect.

8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.

9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.

10. People who can't be part of Cosa Nostra are anyone with a close relative in the police, with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn't hold to moral values.

I can't find it online now, but there was a great essay a few years back explaining that one of the reasons why The Godfather movies were so popular in the United States in the early 1970s was because the political culture was so monumentally corrupt that it made murdering gangsters look like honourable gentlemen by comparison.

It's hard to argue with that.

Technician Confesses : I Plugged In The Big Brother Machine

All Web Traffic Monitored By Spy Agency

The following should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody. But it will. Because such claims used to fall under the easy-to-dismiss "Oh, that's just a conspiracy".

It isn't. It never was.

The internet was invented by the American Department of Defence in 1969. The idea that your online activities and surfing has ever been free of monitoring by government or private intelligence agencies is a fantasy.

A technician who used to work at one of the United States' biggest communications companies confesses to Keith Olbermann :

Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device.

"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet."

"As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how the splitter was wired to the secret room," Klein continued. "And so I know that whatever went across those cables was copied and the entire data stream was copied..."

"We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic," Klein said. " And that's what got me upset to begin with."

"It involves millions of communications, a lot of it domestic communications that they're copying wholesale, sweeping up into that secret room."

"...I'm a little older so my thought was George Orwell's 1984 and here I am forced to connect the big brother machine," he said. "And I felt I was in a funny position, but I needed my job, so I didn't want to make a fuss a the time."

Raw Story Has The Video

Vaccine Development Or Bioweapon Trial?

AIDS "Vaccine" Clinical Trial Leads To HIV Infections In Volunteers Who've Never Had The Virus

In an appalling example of how terribly wrong clinical trials of vaccines can go, dozens of people testing a new anti-AIDS vaccine have caught the virus they were supposed to be protected against. The HIV-loaded vaccine also made people who had previously had a higher level of immunity to infection more likely to catch the virus :

Nine Australians are believed to be among thousands of people who are unaware a once-promising vaccine for AIDS has increased their infection risk, after they participated in clinical trials around the world.

The multinational trials involving more than 3,000 HIV-negative volunteers were cancelled in September after a large-scale study found the vaccine was not effective at preventing infection.

Researchers have this morning revealed far worse news - those who received the V520 vaccine are more susceptible to acquiring the AIDS virus. It is understood nine of the 18 people from Sydney involved in the study were given the HIV vaccine but do not know. The volunteers were warned to protect themselves from exposure to AIDS but were not told if they were administered the vaccine or the inactive placebo.

The information was kept secret to minimise biases in the study.

So they knew the vaccine trial had gone horribly wrong, that people who did not have HIV were developing AIDS after being given the vaccine, but they held back from telling the people whose lives were now in danger because they were afraid of "biases" creeping into their study?

Insanity.

Scientists claim they are "baffled" :

The study started 18 months ago after 20 years of research and development to get the vaccine to human trials.

Its chief researcher in Australia, Dr Tony Kelleher from the University of New South Wales, told ABC reporter Karen Barlow in May last year there was no chance for the vaccine to cause HIV infection because it carried so little of the virus.

They gave HIV to people who did not have HIV. What's there to be "baffled" about?

Researchers say....somehow things went horribly wrong with the phase-two trial.

Of the people who had the HIV vaccine, 49 became infected with the virus...

You give people who don't have HIV a vaccine with HIV in it, 49 become infected with HIV. And you're "baffled" as to how they got HIV?

"We are analysing the data to try to determine if the results are due to immune responses induced by the vaccine, differences in study populations, or some other biological phenomenon we don't yet understand, or simply due to chance....It will take some time before we understand why the vaccine did not work and why there was a trend toward more cases of infection in volunteers who received the vaccine."

Apparently the vaccine was constructed from a cold virus, which was loaded up with three "synthetically produced" HIV genes.

There's a synthetic version of the HIV virus, is there?

One of the supposed failings of the vaccine includes its ability to make people who previously had a higher immunity against catching HIV more likely to then catch the virus.

It sounds more like a bioweapon than a vaccine.

President Bush Now Free To Pull A 'Musharraf' In The United States

President Musharraf has declared martial law in Pakistan. Here's a recap from a Tuesday post of what martial law in Pakistan actually means :

* The protection of life and liberty is gone.

* No more rights of free movement.

* Detainees no longer have to be informed of the crimes they have supposedly committed, nor are they granted access to lawyers.

* There are no more protections of property rights.

* The right to assemble in public, or gather in crowds, is now gone.

* There is no longer the right to free speech.

* All citizens are no longer entitled to equal rights before the law.

* Independent media is being shut down and attacked, and there are bans on media coverage of suicide bombings and the activities of militants.

Musharraf is in control of the military and is now planning to use the massive force available to him to crush planned protests over the next week.

While President Bush claims to be opposed to the brutal crushing of democracy in Pakistan, he has stated he still supports Musharraf's fight against "terrorists and extremists". As we've pointed out here numerous times before, BushCo. used the word "extremist" a lot now, more often than they use the word "terrorist", which is strange, because the 'War On Terror' is supposed to be a war on terrorists, isn't it?

It will come as a surprise to most Americans that President George W. Bush recently made sure that if he sees the need to do so, he can pull a Musharraf, declare martial law across the US and deploy the full force of the military to stop anti-government protests, all without even consulting Congress. He has to tell Congress, but only within 14 days of declaring martial law.

Justin Finney points out the two key passages in the 2007 Defence Authorisation Act, and its rejigged Insurrection Bill, that would allow Bush to pull a Musharraf on his own people :

(Sec. 1076) Revises federal provisions allowing the President to utilize the Armed Forces in connection with interference with federal and state law to allow the President to employ the Armed Forces and National Guard in federal service to restore public order in cases of natural disaster, epidemic or other public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or domestic violence. Requires the President to notify Congress within 14 days of the exercise of such authority. Authorizes the President, when exercising such authority, to direct the Secretary to provide supplies, services, and equipment to persons affected by the situation.

Whenever the President considers it necessary to use the militia or the armed forces under this chapter, he shall, by proclamation, immediately order the insurgents or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time.

It is up to President Bush to decide what constitutes a national emergency, and he has a broad range of options available to him, from the spread of the bird flu virus amongst humans to a few days worth of violent protests in Washington or New York City.

It's worth noting that not only can Bush pull a Musharraf if the United States suffers another terrorist attack, but he can do so on the occurrence of a terrorist incident.

Whatever that means.

No doubt it's all purposely very vague in definition.

Can Kids 'Catch' Attention Deficit Disorder From Watching 'Violent' Cartoons?

It's a remarkable claim to make, that young children tuning into only an hour of so-called 'violent' cartoons a day can have their brains permanently altered, and be twice as prone to developing ADD later in life.

But that's pretty much what these researchers are claiming :

Dr Dimitri Christakis, associate professor of paediatrics at the University of Washington, said the first three years of a child's life involved critical brain development, specifically connections between neurons. Watching such programmes during this early period of brain "plasticity" meant children were being conditioned for a high level of stimulation which they were not going to get later in life.

With nearly a quarter of young children having a television in their bedroom, the latest findings will add to the debate about parents using the box as a "babysitter". This is the first time programme content has been investigated in such studies.

The research project found that popular shows such as Power Rangers, Lion King and Scooby Doo, involving fighting, hitting people, threats or other violence central to the plot, were shown to increase the signs of attention disorders.

But even "non-violent" entertainment such as Rugrats and The Flintstones carried a substantial risk of attention problems, but slighter lower.

Educational programmes such as Arthur, featuring the adventures of a well-adjusted anthropomorphic aardvark, or Barney the Dinosaur and Sesame Street had no adverse effects.

Dr Christakis, who co-authored the report, published in the journal Paediatrics, said of television: "It's not inherently good or bad. It really depends on what they watch."

Dr Christakis said shows such as Power Rangers and others without violence but which also tended to be very fast-paced may hamper children's ability to focus attention.

Barney The Dinosaur is good? Not if you're an adult in the room when kids are watching that show. Those incredibly irritating songs are known to induce violence thoughts in adult minds. Towards purple dinosaurs, that is.

'Saving Democracy' By Introducing Martial Law

In Pakistan, Publicly Mocking President Musharraf Could Get You Three Years In Jail

A senior Pakistan government minister has just given an extraordinary interview on Australian TV on how Pakistan's President Musharraf is now saving democracy through the introduction of martial law.

It was one of the most spectacular sessions of ultra-spin I've heard in a very long time. In short, Musharraf introduced a ban on public gatherings for the purposes of staging marches and protests, and so the beating and jailing of anyone who defies this new emergency law is actually an act of protecting democracy through the reducing social upheaval, according to the minister who was interviewed.

We'll come back to this when the interview transcript is up. But for now, here's a short list of what democratic and human rights have now been wiped away under Musharraf's introduction of martial law :

* The protection of life and liberty is gone.

* No more rights of free movement.

* Detainees no longer have to be informed of the crimes they have supposedly committed, nor are they granted access to lawyers.

* There are no more protections of property rights.

* The right to assemble in public, or gather in crowds, is now gone.

* There is no longer the right to free speech.

* All citizens are no longer entitled to equal rights before the law.

* Independent media is being shut down and attacked, and there are bans on media coverage of suicide bombings and the activities of militants.

And just to make sure the message is getting through to all the media, broadcasters now face a three year jail term if they dare to "ridicule" the military, President Musharraf or his government.

All these changes follow a tide of suicide bombings in Pakistan cities, including Islamabad, and the increasing levels of militant violence in the Warizistan province, bordering with Pakistan.

The United States, the UK and Australia are making a bit of noise about how "outraged" and "disgusted" they are by what Musharraf has now done, all but totally canning the likelihood that scheduled January democratic elections will go ahead, but they are unlikely to cut ties, or aid, or the billions of anti-terror funding that has flowed consistently to the Pakistan military regime for years.

Musharraf recently picked up on American NeoCon and thinktank rhetoric about Pakistan becoming the "new front line in the War On Terror".

So, Musharraf is showing that a way to fight terrorism, in the War On Terror, is to lock your country down under martial law and jail people for making public jokes about the government.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban have long mocked Musharraf for being an American puppet.

The challenge now is for the the US, Australia and the UK to utterly condemn what Musharraf has done, and cut the funding that fuels the repression and violence now being unleashed by Musharraf's military.

But will they? Or more importantly, how can they do this?

Cut funding to a key ally in the War On Terror who is now claiming to be taking an ultra-hard line against terrorists in his country?

Musharraf is now claiming that to really fight terrorism in your own country, sometimes you have to introduce martial law.

It's an horrific example of how those who are supposed to be fighting terror can use the threat of terrorists' violence against their own people. And shut down democracy and basic human rights for an entire nation.

It's an example that should spark some alarm in the citizenry of the United States, the UK and Australia. If our leaders do not truly oppose what Musharraf has done, you can presume that similar plans of martial law, and emergency rule, have already been considered as an option available to them if deadly bombs begin exploding in our cities.

Fight Terror, Suspend Democracy. This is the reality now for the people of Pakistan.

More On All This Here

Bush Becomes World's Most Prominent Al Qaeda 'Cheerleader'

President Bush has some big problems in promoting the threat posed by Al Qaeda.

He needs to say that the war against Al Qaeda is being won in Iraq to shore up the remaining support he has in the United States, and to try and stem the rapidly growing rise of anti-Bush, anti-war dissent across the United States.

But Bush also needs to widely and loudly promote the threat posed by Al Qaeda to ensure that the US Congress will continue to fund his 'War On Terror'.

So the threat of Al Qaeda is being contained, and yet, at the same time, it is comparable to the rise of Stalinism and Nazism. Or so Bush believes.

From 'The Last Days Of President Bush' blog :

President Bush believes the Democrat-controlled Congress is not taking his 'War On Terror', and the threat of terror, seriously enough.

So what to do?

What else? Invoke Hitler, of course. And Lenin, too.

History teaches that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia - and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war," Bush said.

He also compared Islamist plans to "build a totalitarian Islamic empire... stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia" to the Third Reich.

"In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews - and the world paid a terrible price."

Few intelligence, terrorism or military experts will let any media quote them saying that Al Qaeda is a worldwide force, an militant army of millions or hundreds of thousands, comparable to the Nazis or the Soviet Army under Stalin.

In pumping the threat of Al Qaeda, President Bush is becoming their best publicist, constantly putting the name 'Al Qaeda' in front of the media, rattling off their mantras and threat lists for the daily headlines and evening news.

But then, Bush has managed to convince Congress to fork over more than $US500 billion for the 'War On Terror' so far, by previously pumping the exact same propaganda and comparisons with Hitler.

Bush will get the money he wants to keep fighting his war.

Not because the majority of American Democrats don't want to fight him, but because they actively support the extension of the 'War On Terror' and another few hundred billion pouring into the coffers of the arms industries and defence contractors that will help pay for their 2008 presidential election campaigns.

When Dick Cheney said he expects the 'War On Terror' to last a generation, he wasn't kidding. That is the plan. Of course, they might run out of terrorists before then. But that's why Cheney and Bush constantly refer to 'extremists' and 'radicals' when they talk about the 'War On Terror'.

The war against extremists and radicals is quietly beginning. In Iraq, and in the homeland.

It's probably a good time to rent or buy the DVD of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and listen closely to the words from Robert DeNiro's character.

As director Terry Gilliam himself has been saying of late, we now need terrorists, or a new enemy, to keep this war going.

Go Here For More On This Story

1800s Was The Golden Age For World Changing Gadgets

A fascinating A - Z from the UK Independent of '101 Gadgets That Changed The World' turns up some very interesting info.

The Internet was invented by the US Department of Defence in the late 1960s, but it took another 20 years for the World Wide Web to come along. In 1969, there were four people using the internet. In 1988, there were 50,000 people online. By 1991, one million. By 2001, 500 million. In 2007, 1.2 billion. Now that's market growth.

The 1930s saw the invention of the Biro pen and Sellotape. The 1940s saw the creation of mobile phones, microwave ovens, hand-cranked calculators, the transistor and Velcro. The 1970s delivered up the personal computer, the Walkman, barcodes and the Atari 2600.

Very, very impressive you might think. Sure, if you compare those decades with the 1990s and the 2000s. But the 1800s absolutely massacres the 1900s and 2000s for cannot-do-without gadgets and time saving inventions.

Take a look at what people invented, or at least patented, in the six decades from 1840 to 1900 : dynamite, vulcanised rubber, fax machines, cameras, movies, the fridge, the first modern hand gun, the internal combustion engine, the kettle, lawnmowers, the lightbulb, the kind of locks on your front and back door, the machine gun, paperclips, pneumatic tyres, keyboards like the one in front of you, radio, rubber bands, safety razors, the sewing machine, contact lenses, the Swiss Army knife, syringes, the the telephone, steel-ribbed umbrellas, early vacuum cleaners, Aspirin, barbed wire, dynamite and the bicycle.

The only gadget on the list invented in the past seven years?

The iPod.

Have we really run out of things to invent?

The Wonders Of Scientific Research - Elephants On Acid And Two Headed Dogs

If it wasn't for rigorous scientific experimentation, we would be lacking in some very essential knowledge.

Did you know, for example :

That if you shoot up an elephant with a dose of LSD 3000 times stronger than that consumed by a human for 'pleasure', the elephant will probably keel over dead?

That if you graft a second head to a dog, it is unlikely to live longer than a month or so?

That if you tell a bunch of soldiers on an aircraft that the flight is crashing to the ground, they will have trouble filling out insurance forms?

That you can drink the vomit of a victim of yellow fever and probably not catch the fever yourself"

That male turkeys will attempt to mate with a dismembered female turkey, even if all that's left is a head on a stick?

More on this here

During The Cold War, CIA Feared UFO Attacks More Than Soviet Nuclear Missiles

CIA Devoted Decades To Intensive Ultra-Secret Study Of UFOs

Journalist Philip Mora has dug through hundreds of declassified reports and files from the CIA , going as far back as 1947, and uncovered some genuine gems of information. The full story is well worth a read, but here's some of the nuggets Mora has uncovered.

* For years, during the Cold War, the US government was more terrified of an alien invasion, or alien attack on the US, than they were of Soviet nuclear missiles raining down on American cities.

* The CIA decided shortly after the infamous Kenneth Arnold 'flying saucer' sighting of 1947, that they would officially deny the existence of unexplained aerial vehicles over the United States, and claim all such sightings were actually weather balloons, weather phenomenon, airplanes, satellites, flocks of birds or just plain hoaxes. The CIA, and its flow-on government agencies and spokespeople issued such explanations even when the UFO sightings could not be explained by Air Force and aviation experts. There were a number of sightings, including one of an aerial vehicle that was "self-luminous", that they dismissed as hoaxes when they knew they were genuine unexplained flying objects.

* There were endless inter-agency feuds that raged for decades about whether the American public should be told the truth about UFOs.

* The official government study of UFO phenomenon involved some of the "greatest scientific and military minds", as well as psychological warfare specialists.

* 1953, in particular, saw the CIA trying to cope with a tidal wave of UFO reports.

* Physicists and scientists working on such projects as the development of the hydrogen bomb were also involved in setting up studies of unexplained technology resulting from the CIA's intense research into UFOs. These explained technologies included "ion paths", "magnetic focusing" and "cosmological electrodynamics."

* The CIA set up a "uber-intelligence group" called ONE to study UFO sightings and related phenomenon.

* In only a few years, the CIA and air force racked up more than 300 "official sightings" for which there was no explanation.

* The UFO phenomenon was examined by American psychological warfare planners (psy-ops) to see how they could make use of the fear, confusion and paranoia attached to UFO sightings as part of their psychological warfare 'weapons'.

* In 1952, the Office of Scientific Intelligence issued a memo expressing concern about "the vulnerability of the US to air attack" from UFOs.

* In 1953, another memo from the Office of Scientific Intelligence reveals details of an intensive study of a Kodachrome movie of a UFO, which could not be explained as natural phenomenon, because, it was concluded, to be "self-luminous". The memo advised that the public be educated about the reality of UFOs to "avoid hysteria".

* The ultra-secret investigative panel ONE included the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the chief of staff for President Eisenhower.

* The ONE panel was originally designed to form "the heart of the CIA and of the national intelligence machinery."

Go Here To Read The Full Story

Where's Osama? Who Cares?

'War On Terror' Makes Rich Arms Industry Execs Even Richer

Defence Contractors Profits Soar Off 9/11 And The 'War On Terror'

No wonder President Bush doesn't give a bucket of crap about finding Osama Bin Laden. Why would he want to? Find Osama, bring him to justice, and the momentum of the 'War On Terror' just becomes all that harder to maintain. As long as Osama's 'out there', the 'War On Terror' can roll on, endlessly. But Osama will have to improve the quality of his videos, however. People are getting suspicious and are asking serious questions about whether or not someone is faking this stuff.

Here's Bush showing how much he cares about capturing Osama - History's Greatest Terrorist Mastermind, the Cold-Blooded Killer Of Thousands Of Americans, and the FBI's Most Wanted Man In The World :

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."

"I don't know where he is. I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

"Deep in my heart I know the man's on the run, if he's alive at all...I just don't spend much time on it, really, to be honest with you."

If he's alive at all? Shhhh! Don't let that idea take hold in the minds of mainstream Americans. Not to worry. One thing is guaranteed, whenever Bush needs it the most, Osama always comes through with a new video or tape recording.

In a piece titled, appropriately enough, 'Cashing In On Terror', Robert Scheer explains just how good Osama Bin Laden, and the 'War On Terror', has been for the American war industry :

What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.

Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division, but Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks. As Newsweek International put in August: “Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years while Raytheon’s had doubled.”

Bush the younger...exploited the trauma of 9/11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9/11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history.

Thanks to bin Laden and Bush’s exploitation of “war on terror” hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9/11; they should give bin Laden his cut.

The only stocks that soared spectacularly on the morning of 9/11, before the plug was pulled on Wall Street, were those of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and so on. If you were a Wall Street player and you had the slightest inkling that 9/11 was coming, you could have become a very, very rich person indeed. If you were that cold-blooded. But of course, many were.

The NeoCons who put their names to policy documents under the Project For The New American Century - including Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and a checklist of NeoCon media 'War On Terror' promoters - predicted that only a 'New Pearl Habour' would see Americans ready to spend the sort of money they currently hand over to defence contractors. They made this prediction only a few years before the 9/11 attack. Soon after, massive increases in defence spending became a profit-heavy reality.

And here's a blatant warning from five decades ago, of how and why the arms industry megacorps want, need and push for more wars, all the time. The man speaking is then retiring US President Ike Eisenhower. The speech was seen and heard by tens of millions of Americans, and hit the headlines of virtually every American newspaper the day after. Then his warning all but disappeared from the pages of American history. His warning is as prescient now as it was back then. Perhaps even more so today :




You should be praying that it's just one big conspiracy theory.

(Via Crooks and Liars)

Are American Evangelical End Timers Actually Looking Forward To A Mass Population Slaying Bird Flu Pandemic?

Short answer? It sure sounds like it :

The 1918 Spanish flu that killed 40 million people was a type of avian influenza. Health experts fear that the H5N1 strain will mutate to a form that can be transmitted human to human. Lee Jong-Wook, the late director general of the World Health Organization, stated that “It is only a matter of time before an avian-flu virus—most likely H5N1—acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza. We don’t know when this will happen. But we do know that it will happen.”

This silent spread of H5N1 avian influenza may be the start of a European epidemic. Time will tell, but we can be certain that biblical prophecies of severe pandemics in the end time will be fulfilled soon.

If this sort of madness takes root, the United States government could find itself trying to deal with millions of Americans who don't want to stop the spread of the bird flu virus, because they will believe it is a good thing, and what God wants, even when it turns pandemic and fills the streets of cities and towns with corpses, because it means the End Times are here and Jesus will soon be back for his long-overdue encore appearance.

The bird flu virus is dangerous enough without people actually wanting it to become a pandemic reality.

Madness.

Go Here For The Full Story

Confirmed : Bird Flu Virus Now Spreading From Human To Human

UK Government Pandemic Death Toll Prediction Soars To 650,000

UK Prepares 'Inflatable Tents' To Store Pandemic Dead, Plans 'Fast Track' Funerals

Mothers Can Pass Bird Flu Virus Onto Their Babies, In Utero

Afghanistan President To BushCo. - Stop Bombing My People!

The quandary for Afghanistan's President Karzai is a simple but deeply troubling one. In 2007, NATO and American airstrikes are believed to have killed more Afghan civilians than Al Qaeda and Taliban terror bombings have. More than 300 civilians, including many women and children. One of the worst air strikes took out members of four generations of one family. More and more Afghanis want to know why Taliban bombings are terrorism, but American/NATO bombings are not.

It's a question that can be asked of many war zones, throughout history. During my eighteen months of work with the Australians At War Film Archive, I transcribed at least two interviews with Bomber Command crew men from World War Two. They helped level cities in Germany during night time bombing raids that killed tens of thousands of civilians. We were terrorists, at least two of desperately sad old men said, we bombed civilians.

President Karzai is now facing incredible pressure from Afghanistan's rising new media - magazine style current affairs shows and tabloid newspapers. They run front page stories on the civilian casualties from American/NATO air strikes and the subject of why this bombing is terrorism and why this bombing isn't is now soaking up air time time on talk back radio.

Excerpts from a report on American 60 Minutes :

The 60 Minutes team found the dead buried in a cornfield. It appears there were no enemy combatants. It was four generations of one family, all killed in the air strike: an 85-year-old man, four women, and four children, ranging in age from five years to seven months. One boy survived. The night of the bombing, seven-year-old Mujib happened to be staying with his uncle, Gulam Nabi.

"Some of the bodies were missing a hand or a leg or half a head. We recognized one of them only by the clothes she was wearing," Nabi remembers.

Nabi recognized Mujib's mother among the dead, "I saw my mom, my sisters, and my brother and my grandfather were dead. And our house was destroyed," the little boy remembers.

Mujib's father was not there. He's accused of being a local Taliban leader and the U.S. has been searching for him with no luck.

The air strike came March 4th. An Army press release says it started after enemy forces fired a rocket at a U.S. base above the village. The rocket fell "causing no coalition casualties," in fact, "missing the fire base" altogether. Then U.S. pilots saw two men with AK-47 rifles leaving the scene of the rocket attack and entering a compound in the village.

The fort, which is on a hill, began raining down mortar fire on part of the village -- mortar fire that came down for about an hour. It was nighttime, and even though there were no U.S. forces in contact with the enemy on the ground, a decision was made after the mortars to call in an air strike. U.S. Air Force aircraft dropped two bombs on the neighborhood, each one weighing 2,000 pounds.

The bombs hit their intended targets. But when the smoke cleared there were no men with rifles -- just Mujib's family.

"During the Russian invasion we haven’t heard of 10 members of one family being killed by Russians in one incident. But the Americans did that," a villager remarked.

These Afghans, like many others, are deciding whether to support the U.S.-backed government. We expected anger, but we didn’t expect this.

The Afghan people understand that mistakes are made. But five years on, six years on, definitely, very clearly, they cannot comprehend as to why there is still a need for air power," Karzai explains.

Asked if he is asking the American government to roll back the air strikes, Karzai says, "Absolutely. Oh, yes, in clear words."

Karzai told 60 Minutes he delivered those words, privately, to President George W. Bush. But he decided to take the message public in this interview. "And I want to repeat that, alternatives to the use of air force. And I will speak for it again through your media," he says.

"You're demanding that?" Pelley asks.

"Absolutely," Karzai says.

More On All This Here

American Soldiers In Iraq Hide From Insurgents - Park And Quietly Wait Out Their Patrol Shifts

Does the following story partly explain why US casualties in Iraq have been dropping in the past few months?

Something very similar occurred during the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. There comes a point in most long wars where soldiers begin to question the legitimacy of what they're doing and whether or not the sacrifice of themselves, and their friends, is worth it. It's not about being a coward, it's about realizing whether or not you have become mere 'cannon fodder'.

From Dahr Jamail :

Watertown, New York : Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here say that morale among U.S. soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed "search and avoid" missions.

Phil Aliff is an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York. He served nearly one year in Iraq from August 2005 to July 2006, in the areas of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, both west of Baghdad.

"Morale was incredibly low," said Aliff, adding that he joined the military because he was raised in a poor family by a single mother and had few other prospects. "Most men in my platoon in Iraq were just in from combat tours in Afghanistan."

According to Aliff, their mission was to help the Iraqi Army "stand up" in the Abu Ghraib area of western Baghdad, but in fact his platoon was doing all the fighting without support from the Iraqis they were supposedly preparing to take control of the security situation.

"I never heard of an Iraqi unit that was able to operate on their own," said Aliff, who is now a member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). "The only reason we were replaced by an Iraqi Army unit was for publicity."

Aliff said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. "We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralised, so we decided the only way we wouldn't be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time."

"So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine," he said, adding, "All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command."

Other active duty Iraq veterans tell similar stories of disobeying orders so as not to be attacked so frequently.

"We'd go to the end of our patrol route and set up on top of a bridge and use it as an over-watch position," Eli Wright, also an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division, told IPS. "We would just sit with our binoculars and observe rather than sweep. We'd call in radio checks every hour and say we were doing sweeps."

Wright added, "It was a common tactic, a lot of people did that. We'd just hang out, listen to music, smoke cigarettes, and pretend."

The 26-year-old medic complained that his unit did not have any armoured Humvees during his time in Iraq, where he was stationed in Ramadi, capital of the volatile Al Anbar province.

"We put sandbags on the floors of our vehicles, which had canvas doors," said Wright, who was in Iraq from September 2003 until September 2004. "By the end of our tour, we were bolting any metal we could find to our Humvees. Everyone was doing this, and we didn't get armoured Humvees in country until after we left."

Geoff Millard served nine years in the New York Army National Guard, and was in Iraq from October 2004 until October 2005 working for a general at a Tactical Operation Centre.

Millard, also a member of IVAW, said that part of his duties included reporting "significant actions", or SIGACTS, which is how the U.S. military describes an attack on their forces.

Millard told IPS "search and avoid" missions continue today across Iraq.

"One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time," he explained, "He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda, and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone."

The stats that Dahr Jamail quotes on incidents of PTSD for American soldiers who've served long, or repeated, tours of duty in Iraq are shocking.

The Full Story Is Here


While the folowing story from the Washington Post carefully avoids the subject of American troops in Iraq avoiding suicidal patrol work, it does bring into focus the kinds of question that leads to soldiers making decisions about why they should avoid placing their lives on the line, when an end to the Iraq War is not in sight, and the ultimate goals of continuing the war change every few months :

Asked if the American endeavor here was worth their sacrifice -- 20 soldiers from the battalion have been killed in Baghdad -- Alarcon said no: "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."

While top U.S. commanders say the statistics of violence have registered a steep drop in Baghdad and elsewhere, the soldiers' experience in Sadiyah shows that numbers alone do not describe the sense of aborted normalcy -- the fear, the disrupted lives -- that still hangs over the city.

American soldiers estimate that since violence intensified this year, half of the families in Sadiyah have fled, leaving approximately 100,000 people. After they left, insurgents and militiamen used their abandoned homes to hold meetings and store weapons. The neighborhood deteriorated so quickly that many residents came to believe neither U.S. nor Iraqi security forces could stop it happening.

The descent of Sadiyah followed a now-familiar pattern in Baghdad. In response to suicide bombings blamed on Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Shiite militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, went from house to house killing and intimidating Sunni families. In many formerly mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad, such as al-Amil and Bayaa, Shiites have become the dominant sect, with their militias the most powerful force.

"It's just a slow, somewhat government-supported sectarian cleansing," said Maj. Eric Timmerman, the battalion's operations officer.

Many of the soldiers from the battalion are on their second tour in Iraq. Three years ago, they were based in Tikrit, the home of Saddam Hussein, a city they entered expecting to fight a determined Sunni insurgency. By the end of their tour, with much of the violence contained, many of them felt optimistic about progress in Iraq.

"I honestly thought we were making a difference in Tikrit. Then we come back to a hellhole," Marino said. "That was a playground compared to Baghdad."

The American people don't fully realize what's going on, said Staff Sgt. Richard McClary, 27, a section leader from Buffalo.

"They just know back there what the higher-ups here tell them. But the higher-ups don't go anywhere, and actually they only go to the safe places, places with a little bit of gunfire," he said. "They don't ever [expletive] see what we see on the ground."

You have to wonder how differently Republican and Democrat senators would feel about the continuance of the Iraq War if they actually spent a week or more with American units who leave the Green Zone.