The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.

The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.

Last night, George Esson, who was Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway when Megrahi was indicted for mass murder, confirmed he was aware of the development.

But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer's motives. He said: "Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I can't help but question their motive for raising the matter now."

Other important questions remain unanswered, such as how the officer learned of the alleged conspiracy and whether he was directly involved in the inquiry. But sources close to Megrahi's legal team believe they may have finally discovered the evidence that could demolish the case against him.

An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer approached them after Megrahi's appeal - before a bench of five Scottish judges - was dismissed in 2002.

The insider said: "He said he believed he had crucial information. A meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been planted by US agents.

"Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he'd been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified.

"He also said that at the time he became aware of the matter, no one really believed there would ever be a trial. When it did come about, he believed both accused would be acquitted. When Megrahi was convicted, he told himself he'd be cleared at appeal."

The source added: "When that also failed, he explained he felt he had to come forward.

"He has confirmed that parts of the case were fabricated and that evidence was planted. At first he requested anonymity, but has backed down and will be identified if and when the case returns to the appeal court."

The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.

The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives, and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to Libya and the East German Stasi.

At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's headquarters.

The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi - to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of scientific qualifications.

Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.

The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a wild conspiracy theo ry. It has long been rumoured the fragment was planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.

The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.

Following the trial, legal observers from around the world, including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland. Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.

A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.

"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a manufactured case, mistakes were made."

Dr Jim Swire, who has publicly expressed his belief in Megrahi's innocence, said it was quite right that all relevant information now be put to the SCCRC.

Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity, said last night: "I am aware that there have been doubts about how some of the evidence in the case came to be presented in court.

"It is in all our interests that areas of doubt are thoroughly examined."

A spokeswoman for the Crown Office said: "As this case is currently being examined by the SCCRC, it would be inappropriate to comment."

No one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland was available to comment.

Crushing Congressional Dissent: The Fall of Hilliard, Barr and McKinney

by Wayne Madsen

Historians will one day write that the 107th Congress was the last to stand up to the constitutional encroachment by the military and monarchist policies of the Bush II administration. Just as with the Roman Senate, the Congress of the United States is becoming an elite club of pathetic assenters and global elitists. Once the domain of great orators and dissenters like Cato and Cicero, the Roman Senate was eventually subsumed by the Roman Army when the Emperor took on dictatorial powers. The Roman Senate could say nothing as the Roman dictatorship annexed Macedonia, Spain, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa. By the time Emperors Tiberius and Septimius Severus took power, the Senate, which had grown to an elite club of 600, was a rubber stamp body that had no choice but to go along with the military's continued usurpation of power.

The United States Congress stands on the same precipice as its Roman ancestor. If Bush pulls another electoral coup in 2004 and we see the presidential election thrown into the House of Representatives, the future for the country appears very dim.

The August 20 defeat of two Georgia Representatives, one Democrat, the other Republican, is a bellwether event that bodes ill for this November's elections. Rep. Cynthia McKinney was successfully challenged by a Republican-turned-Democrat for her Fourth District seat. Before a cleverly contrived political operation was launched under the aegis of Georgia's other quasi-Republican, Senator Zell Miller, no one outside of Georgia had ever heard of former state judge Denise Majette, a self-described supporter of fringe lunatic GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes in 2000. Majette will join in Congress fellow Ivy Leaguer Artur Davis, who beat Alabama Democratic Representative Earl Hilliard in that state's primary because of the latter's outspoken support for a more even-handed Middle East policy. Hilliard and McKinney join a long list of politicians who were defeated after advocating an independent U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: Senators Charles Percy, James Abourezk, James Abdnor, and J. William Fulbright, and Representatives Paul Findley and Paul McCloskey. The careers of Adlai Stevenson and William Scranton were similarly ended after they supported a Middle East policy less tied to the interests of Israel. Only Michigan's veteran Representative John Dingell was able to stave off a recent assault from the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) in a match off with fellow Representative Lynn Rivers in a redrawn congressional district.

However, Dingell's National Rifle Association ally, Georgia Representative Bob Barr, was not as fortunate. Barr was also a target of Miller's political operation. An opponent of the more draconian elements in Bush's and John Ashcroft's USA-PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Department bill, Barr was a target of opportunity for the extreme right that favors turning the United States into a version of East Germany or North Korea. Moreover, Barr's chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law gave him real gavel power to block Bush and Ashcroft on critical civil liberties and privacy infringements, a power Barr has not hesitated to wield. And after supporting Steve Forbes in the 2000 GOP primary, Barr did not fit into Bush's binary and simplistic world: "If you're not with me, you're against me." Therefore, Miller, who, according to a former aide, is targeting fellow Senator Max Cleland and Georgia Governor Roy Barnes for defeat by conservative Republicans, figured out that if Barr supporters in Gwinnett County, which straddles McKinney's Fourth District and Barr's Seventh District, could be coaxed into crossing over party lines and voting for Majette, it would kill two birds with one stone. Barr would lose votes to his opponent John Linder and McKinney would get trounced by Majette in a low turnout (25 per cent) election with a high GOP crossover vote. The gambit paid off. McKinney and Barr were both defeated handily, McKinney with the help of 25,000 crossover votes. Of course, the fact that people not authorized to vote in the Fourth District may have voted anyway would fall into the category of election fraud. But after the Florida debacle, the Ashcroft Justice Department sees such electoral machinations as a way to remain in power a la any totalitarian regime parading around before the world as a democracy.

That McKinney and Barr were on the same neo-conservative hit list was exemplified on August 21 by a second-tier conservative radio talk show host in Washington, DC. Speaking on WTNT-AM, Oral Roberts University graduate, Pat Buchanan political adviser, and Tom DeLay- style Republican talk show host Michael Graham said it was great news that two "kooks" had been beaten in Georgia. He then stated he was talking about "Cynthia McKinney and her photo negative twin, Bob Barr." The statement was clearly racist in nature and a not-so-veiled reference, through a warped attempt at humor, to Barr's long rumored African-American heritage. But for the extreme right that dominates the GOP, such incendiary ethnophobic comments are the rule and not the exception.

McKinney had incurred the wrath of the White House by her question about what George W. Bush knew in advance about the September 11 terrorist attacks. But that was only the tip of the iceberg for the Republicans and their major campaign contributors. While it true that McKinney has championed the cause of Palestinian statehood and self- determination, thus inviting the enmity of major Jewish organizations in the United States, it was her long-time opposition to the trade of blood diamonds and other strategic minerals in Africa that earned her a major challenge from multinational corporations, including Barrick Gold, on whose board President Bush's father serves as an international adviser. Among its other misdeeds, Barrick has been accused of helping to cover up the 1996 burying alive by one of its subsidiaries of over 50 Tanzanian gold miners in Bulyanhulu, in the northwest part of the country. Of course, when it comes to the lives and welfare of non-white people, the Bushes have never really held any soft spot, whether they are blacks in Africa or America's inner cities, Afghan or Iraqi children, or even a troubled half-Hispanic daughter/niece/granddaughter in Florida.

McKinney long advocated a halt in the pilferage of blood diamonds out of African war zones. She cited, on numerous occasions, the result of such commerce: the hacked off limbs, hands, and ears of small children in Sierra Leone; the permanent crippling from land mines of children in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and over 2.5 million deaths from civil wars in the DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. The diamond profiteers from this mayhem and death are largely the Hasidic diamond dealers of Antwerp, Amsterdam, New York, and Tel Aviv. These dealers and their lobbyists often circled in and out of House hearing rooms and McKinney's office when issues relating to stemming the flow of ill-gotten African diamonds came up for discussion. These diamond merchants also have a powerful ally in long- time Democratic Party fundraiser and diamond cartel magnate Maurice Tempelsman.

The 108th Congress, lacking the consciousness of Cynthia McKinney and the skepticism of Bob Barr, will be a far more dangerous place. I have had the pleasure of working and knowing both of them over the years - fighting battles, in the case of McKinney, against U.S. human rights offenses in Africa and elsewhere and in the case of Barr, against rampant U.S. government surveillance of the private lives and activities of American citizens. The next Congress will be full of complacent African-American parlor servants like Majette and Davis, dangerous extreme rightists like former cockroach exterminator DeLay and former sportscaster J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, pitiful morons like Florida's former Secretary of State and chief election rigger Katherine Harris, Republican moles and sleepers like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, and Democratic spineless amoebas like Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle. They will stand ready to back Bush's military campaigns into Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Colombia, or wherever Bush's economic interests are at stake. The country stands on the brink of disaster. But we cannot count on the future Congress to save us. Lacking a spine or any guts, it will surely help to bury us.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based investigative journalist. He testified before Cynthia McKinney's hearing on the genocide in the DRC in May 2001 and has worked with Bob Barr on privacy legislation in the past. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@a...

Alexander Cockburn Taking Down Cynthia McKinney

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen0822.html

World Bank Secret Documents Consumes Argentina
Alex Jones Interviews Reporter Greg Palast

Infowars.com

Monday, March 4, 2002

(Courtesy of A Great Listener)

AJ: This is earth shattering. Can you break it down for us and tell us what the economists have done?

GP: Well, I'll tell you two things. One, I spoke to the former chief economist, Joe Stiglitz who was fired by the (World) Bank. So I, on BBC and with Guardian, basically spent some time debriefing him. It was like one of the scenes out of Mission Impossible, you know where the guy comes over from the other side and you spend hours debriefing him. So I got the insight of what was happening at the World Bank. In addition, he did not brief me but I got some other sources. He would not give me inside documents but other people handed me a giant stash of secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

AJ: So to insulate himself, somebody else did it.

GP: No, I'm telling you. He wouldn't touch it but I really did get from completely independent sources a big stack of documents.

AJ: Just like you got W199I, from the same folks we got it from.

GP: And so one of the things that is happening is that, in fact, I was supposed to be on CNN with the head of the World Bank Jim Wolfensen and he said he would not appear on CNN ever if they put me on. And so CNN did the craziest thing and pulled me off.

AJ: So now they are threatening total boycott.

GP: Yea right. So what we found was this. We found inside these documents that basically they required nations to sign secret agreements, in which they agreed to sell off their key assets, in which they agreed to take economic steps which are really devastating to the nations involved and if they didn't agree to these steps, there was an average for each nation that signed one-hundred and eleven items that they are required to sign on to. If they didn't follow those steps they would be cut-off from all international borrowing. You can't borrow any money in the international marketplace. No one can survive without borrowing, whether you are people or corporations or countries - without borrowing some money and having some credit and ...

AJ: Because of the debt inflation pit they've created.

GP: Yea, well, see one of the things that happened is that - we've got examples from, I've got inside documents recently from Argentina, the secret Argentine plan. This is signed by Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank. By the way, just so you know, they are really upset with me that I've got the documents, but they have not challenged the authenticity of the documents. First, they did. First they said those documents don't exist. I actually showed them on television. And cite some on the web, I actually have copies of some...

AJ: Greg Palast dot com?

GP: Yea, gregpalast.com. So then they backed off and said yea those documents are authentic but we are not going to discuss them with you and we are going to keep you off the air anyway. So, that's that. But what they were saying is look, you take a country like Argentina, which is, you know, in flames now. And it has had five presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed.

AJ: Isn't it six now?

GP: Yea, it's like the weekly president because they can't hold the nation together. And this happened because they started out in the end of the 80s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets. I mean, things we wouldn't think of doing in the US, like selling off their water system.

AJ: So they tax the people. They create big government and big government hands it off to the private IMF/World Bank. And when we get back, I want to get to the four-parts that you elegantly lay out here where they actually pay off the politicians billions to their Swiss bank accounts to do this transfer.

GP: That's right.

AJ: This is like one of the biggest stories ever, Sir. I'm sorry, please continue.

GP: So what's happening is - this is just one of them. And by the way, it's not just anyone who gets a piece of the action. The water system of Buenos Aires was sold off for a song to a company called Enron. A pipeline was sold off, that runs between Argentina and Chile, was sold off to a company called Enron.

AJ: And then the globalists blow out the Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation and then they just roll the theft items off.

GP: You've got it. And by the way, you know why they moved the pipeline to Enron is that they got a call from somebody named George W. Bush in 1988.

AJ: Unbelievable, Sir. Stay right there. We are talking to Greg Palast.

BREAK

AJ: We are talking to Greg Palast. He is an award-winning journalist, an American who has worked for the BBC, London Guardian, you name it, who has dropped just a massive bomb-shell on the Globalists and their criminal activity. There is no other word for it. You link through at inforwars.com, you can link to his web site - gregpalast.com, or any of the other great reports he has been putting out. He now has the secret documents. We have seen the activity of the IMF/World Bank for years. They come in, pay off politicians to transfer the water systems, the railways, the telephone companies, the nationalized oil companies, gas stations - they then hand it over to them for nothing. The Globalists pay them off individually, billions a piece in Swiss bank accounts. And the plan is total slavery for the entire population. Of course, Enron, as we told you was a dummy corporation for money laundering, drug money, you name it, from the other reporters we have had on. It's just incredibly massive and hard to believe. But it is actually happening. Greg Palast has now broken the story world-wide. He has actually interviewed the former top World Bank economist. Continuing Sir with all these points. I mean for the average person out there, in a nutshell, what is the system you are exposing?

GP: We are exposing that they are systematically tearing nations apart, whether it's Ecuador or Argentina. The problem is some of these bad ideas are drifting back into the U.S. In other words, they have run out of places to bleed. And the problem is, this is the chief economist, this is not some minor guy. By the way, a couple of months ago, after he was fired, he was given the Nobel Prize in Economics. So he is no fool. He told me, he went into countries where they were talking about privatizing and selling off these assets. And basically, they knew, they literally knew and turned the other way when it was understood that leaders of these countries and the chief ministers would salt away hundreds of millions of dollars.

AJ: But it's not even privatization. They just steal it from the people and hand it over to the IMF/World Bank.

GP: They hand it over, generally to the cronies, like Citibank was very big and grabbed half the Argentine banks. You've got British Petroleum grabbing pipelines in Ecuador. I mentioned Enron grabbing water systems all over the place. And the problem is that they are destroying these systems as well. You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. I mean it is not just a question of the theft. You can't turn on the tap. It is more than someone getting rich at the public expense.

AJ: And the IMF just got handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply now. That's been in the Chicago Tribune.

GP: Well the problem that we have is - look, the IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury. So the question becomes, what are we getting for the money that we put into there? And it looks like we are getting mayhem in several nations. Indonesia is in flames. He was telling me, the Chief Economist, Stiglitz, was telling me that he started questioning what was happening. You know, everywhere we go, every country we end up meddling in, we destroy their economy and they end up in flames. And he was saying that he questioned this and he got fired for it. But he was saying that they even kind of plan in the riots. They know that when they squeeze a country and destroy its economy, you are going to get riots in the streets. And they say, well that's the IMF riot. In other words, because you have riot, you lose. All the capital runs away from your country and that gives the opportunity for the IMF to then add more conditions.

AJ: And that makes them even more desperate. So it is really an imperial economy war to implode countries and now they are doing it here with Enron. They are getting so greedy - they are preparing it for this country.

GP: I've just been talking to, out in California just yesterday, from here in Paris, the chief investigators of Enron for the State of California. They are telling me some of the games these guys are playing. No one is watching that. It's not just the stockholders that got ripped off. They sucked millions, billions of dollars out of the public pocket in Texas and California in particular.

AJ: Where are the assets? See, everybody says there are no assets left since Enron was a dummy corporation - from the experts I've had on and they transferred all those assets to other corporations and banks.

GP: Well yea, this stuff has really gone just like a three-card Monty game. I mean remember that there is money at the bottom. You did pay California's electric bills according to the investigations, they are telling me that they were pumped up unnecessarily by 9 to 12-billion dollars. And I don't know who they are going to get it back from now.

AJ: Well they actually caught the Governor buying it for $137 per megawatt and selling it back to Enron for $1 per megawatt and doing it over and over and over again.

GP: Yea, the system has gotten completely out of control and these guys knew exactly what was happening. Well, you have to understand that some of the guys who designed the system in California for deregulation then went to work for Enron right after. In fact, here I'm in London right now and we have, the British has some responsibility here. The guy who was on the audit committee of Enron, Lord Wakeham. And this guy is a real piece of work, there isn't a conflict of interest that he hasn't been involved in.

AJ: And he is the head of NM Rothschild.

GP: There isn't anything that he doesn't have his fingers in. He's on something like fifty Boards. And one of the problems, he was supposed to be head of the audit committee watching how Enron kept the books. And in fact, they were paying him consulting fees on the side. He was in Margaret Thatcher's government and he's the one who authorized Enron to come into Britain and take over power plants here in Britain. And they owned a water system in the middle of England. This is what this guy approved and then they gave him a job on the board. And on top of being on the board, they gave him a huge consulting contract. So you know, this guy was supposed to be in charge of the audit committee to see how they were handling their accounts.

AJ: Well, he is also the head of the board to regulate the media.

GP: Yes, he is, because I have run into real problems, because he regulates me.

AJ: They are also trying to pass laws in England where you've got an 800-year old well, or in some cases a 2000-year old well that the Romans built that's on your property and they say we are putting a meter on it. You can't have your own water.

GP: Yea, and that's Lord Wakeham. I mean this is the guy from Enron. He is a real piece of work. He can't be touched here because like I say he actually regulates the media. So if you complain, he's got his hand on your pen.

AJ: Burrow into NM Rothschild, you'll find it all there. Go through these four points. I mean you've got the documents. The IMF/World Bank implosion, four points, how they bring down a country and destroy the resources of the people.

GP: Right. First you open up the capital markets. That is, you sell off your local banks to foreign banks. Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills - we can't even imagine selling off water companies in the United States of America. But imagine if a private company like Enron owned your water. So then the prices go through the roof. Then open up your borders to trade - complete free marketeering. And Stiglitz who was the chief economist, remember he was running this system, he was their numbers man and he was saying it was like the opium wars. He said this isn't free trade; this is coercion trade. This is war. They are taking apart economies through this.

AJ: Well look, China has a 40% tariff on us, we have a 2% on them. That's not free and fair trade. It's to force all industry to a country that the globalists fully control.

GP: Well, you know Walmart - I did a story, in fact, if you read my book. Let me just mention that I've got a book out, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" about how, unfortunately, America has been put up for sale. "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is coming out this week. But I have a story in there about how Walmart has 700 plants in China. There is almost nothing in a Walmart store that comes from the United States of America, despite all the eagles on the wall.

AJ: Exactly, like 1984, then they have big flags saying "Buy American" and there's hardly anything --- it's Orwellian double-think.

GP: What's even worst is they will hire a factory and right next to it will be the sister factory which is inside a prison. You can imagine the conditions of these workers producing this lovely stuff for Walmart. It's really....

AJ: And if an elitist needs a liver, they just call.

GP: (Laughs) I know, it's grim. In fact, I talked to a guy, Harry Wu, is his name and, in fact, he broke into, he's been in Chinese prison for 19 years. No one believed his horrible stories. He actually broke back into prison, took a camera with him and took pictures of the conditions and said this is the conditions of factories where Walmart is getting its stuff made at, it's all....

AJ: I was threatened to be thrown off TV here in Austin when I aired video of little girls 4-years old chained down, skinnier than Jews in concentration camps, to die. And I was threatened, if you ever air that again, you will be arrested.

GP: Well you know, it is horrifying stuff that, unfortunately, I have been handed and Stiglitz, was very courageous for him to come out and make these statements. Like I said, he didn't provide me the documents. The documents really sealed it because it said this is what really happened. They really do say sign on the dotted line agreeing to 111 conditions for each nation. And the public has no say; they don't know what the hell is happening to them. All they know....

AJ: Go back into privatization. Go through these four points. That's the key. It sends billions to politicians to hand everything over.

GP: Yea, he called it briberization, which is you sell off the water company and that's worth, over ten years, let's say that that's worth about 5 billion bucks, ten percent of that is 500 million, you can figure out how it works. I actually spoke to a Senator from Argentina two weeks ago. I got him on camera. He said that after he got a call from George W. Bush in 1988 saying give the gas pipeline in Argentina to Enron, that's our current president. He said that what he found was really creepy was that Enron was going to pay one-fifth of the world's price for their gas and he said how can you make such an offer? And he was told, not by George W. but by a partner in the deal, well if we only pay one-fifth that leaves quit a little bit for you to go in your Swiss bank account. And that's how it's done.

AJ: This is the ....

GP: I've got the film. This guy is very conservative. He knows the Bush family very well. And he was public works administrator in Argentina and he said, yea, I got this call. I asked him, I said, from George W. Bush. He said, yea, November 1988, the guy called him up and said give a pipeline to Enron. Now this is the same George W. Bush who said he didn't get to know Ken Lay until 1994. So, you know.....

AJ: So now they are having these white-wash hearings. You know I was at Enron yesterday in Houston because I'm now here in Austin. We were like 30-feet from the door, right on the sidewalk and I have it on video - goons came up and said you can't videotape. I said go ahead and have me arrested. I mean I'm talking on the sidewalk, Greg.

GP: Well, you know, I was there in May, telling people in Britain you've never heard of Enron, but ... And these are the guys who have figured out how to (garbled) this government. In fact, we saw some interesting documents, a month before Bush took office, Bill Clinton, I think to get even with Bush's big donor, cut Enron out of the California power market. He put a cap on the prices they could charge. They couldn't charge more than one-hundred times the normal price for electricity. That upset Enron. So Ken Lay personally wrote a note to Dick Cheney saying get rid of Clinton's cap on prices. Within 48 hours of George W. Bush taking office, his energy department reversed the clamps on Enron. OK, how much is that worth for those guys. You know that has got to be worth, that paid off in a week all the donations.

AJ: Listen at the bombs you are dropping. You are interviewing these ministers, former head of IMF/World Bank economist - all of this, you've got the documents, paying people's Swiss Bank accounts, all this happening. Then you've got Part 2, what do they do after they start imploding?

GP: Well, then they tell you to start cutting your budgets. A fifth of the population of Argentina is unemployed, and they said cut the unemployment benefits drastically, take away pension funds, cut the education budgets, I mean horrible things. Now if you cut the economy in the middle of a recession that was created by these guys, you are really going to absolutely demolish this nation. After we were attacked on September 11, Bush ran out and said we got to spend $50 to $100 billion dollars to save our economy. We don't start cutting the budget, you start trying to save this economy. But they tell these countries you've got to cut, and cut, and cut. And why, according to the inside documents, it's so you can make payments to foreign banks - the foreign banks are collecting 21% to 70% interest. This is loan-sharking. If fact, it was so bad that they required Argentina to get rid of the laws against loan-sharking. because any bank would be a loan-shark under Argentine law.

AJ: But Greg, you said it yourself and the documents show it. They first implode the economy to create that atmosphere. They institute the entire climate that does this.

GP: Yea, and then they say, well gee, we can't lend you any money except at these loan-shark rates. We don't allow people to charge 75% interest in the United States. That's loan-sharking.

AJ: Part 3 and Part 4. What do they do after they do that?

GP: Like I said, you open up the borders for trade, that's the new opium wars. And once you have destroyed an economy that can't produce anything, one of the terrible things is that they are forcing nations to pay horrendous amounts for things like drugs - legal drugs. And by the way, that's how you end up with an illegal drug trade, what's there left to survive on except sell us smack and crack and that's how...

AJ: And the same CIA national security dictatorship has been caught shipping that in.

GP: You know, we are just helping our allies.

AJ: This is just amazing. And so, drive the whole world down, blow out their economies and then buy the rest of it up for pennies on the dollar. What's Part 4 of the IMF/World Bank Plan?

GP: Well, in Part 4, you end up again with the taking apart of the government. And by the way, the real Part 4 is the coup d'etat. That's what they are not telling you. And I'm just finding that out in Venezuela. I just got a call from the President of Venezuela.

AJ: And they install their own corporate government.

GP: What they said was here you've got an elected president of the government and the IMF has announced, listen to this, that they would support a transition government if the president were removed. They are not saying that they are going to get involved in politics - they would just support a transition government. What that effectively is is saying we will pay for the coup d'etat, if the military overthrows the current president, because the current president of Venezuela has said no to the IMF. He told those guys to go packing. They brought their teams in and said you have to do this and that. And he said, I don't have to do nothing. He said what I'm going to do is, I'm going to double the taxes on oil corporations because we have a whole lot of oil in Venezuela. And I'm going to double the taxes on oil corporations and then I will have all the money I need for social programs and the government - and we will be a very rich nation. Well, as soon as they did that, they started fomenting trouble with the military and I'm telling you watch this space: the President of Venezuela will be out of office in three months or shot dead. They are not going to allow him to raise taxes on the oil companies.

AJ: Greg Palast, here is the problem. You said it when you first came out of the gates. They are getting hungry, they are doing it to the United States now. Enron, from all the evidence that I've seen was a front, another shill, they would steal assets and then transfer it to other older global companies, then they blew that out and stole the pension funds. Now they are telling us that terrorism is coming any day. It's going to happen if you don't give your rights up. Bush did not involve Congress and the others who are supposed to be in the accession if there is a nuclear attack in the secret government, Washington Post -"Congress Not Advised of Shadow Government." We have the Speaker of the House not being told. This looks like coup d'etat here. I'm going to come right out with it. We had better spread the word on this now or these greedy creatures are going to go all the way.

GP: I'm very sad about one thing. I report this story in the main stream press of Britian. I'm on the BBC despite Lord Wakeham. I know he doesn't like me there. I'm in the BBC, I'm in the main daily paper, which is the equivalent of the New York Times or whatever, and we do get the information out. And I'm just very sorry that we have to have an alternative press, an alternative radio network and everything else to get out the information that makes any sense. I mean this information should be available to every American. I mean, after all, it's our government.

###

At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's London Observer columns and view his reports for BBC Television's Newsnight.

http://www.infowars.com

MEDIUM RARE

By Jim Rarey

April 23, 2002

HOMELAND HEALTH – AN UNHEALTHY ALLIANCE?

First it was Homeland Defense with a director appointed by the President to pull all of the government agencies together to protect the country against terrorism. Other than issuing occasional warnings of impending terrorist acts based on unknown sources, little has been done in the public view. For that matter, even the Congress is in the dark as the President refuses to let Homeland Defense Director Ridge talk to them

Now comes a new "cooperative" effort to provide protection against "bio-terrorism." But this one is quite different from Homeland Defense. It is a merging of government and the "private sector." Announced quietly without fanfare (the reader will soon understand why) the first notice was the appearance of new website on the Internet appropriately named Homeland Health.com. The website explains that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has joined with the pharmaceutical industry to develop defenses against biological threats.

Aside from the involvement of for profit companies in the effort, another major difference from Homeland Defense is that the man in charge is not a part of the government.

The nominal head of the industry’s effort comes through its trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). However, PhRMA’s president Alan F. Holmer announced that Dr.Michael Friedman would be the association’s Chief Medical Officer for Biomedical Preparedness and lead the initiative.

Friedman will interface with a number of government agencies including HHS, The Dept. of Defense, the FDA, NIH, and the CDC and, oh yes Homeland Security. Holmer did not say whether or not Friedman would be making use of the association’s lone consultant (as listed on its webpage) Arthur Anderson, LLP.

Friedman himself is a thirty-year veteran of government service in public health. He was a leader in the FDA and at one time its acting commissioner. Friedman was the FDA official that gave the Department of Defense the go ahead to use the anthrax vaccine in the Gulf war although the FDA had not found it to be safe or effective against inhalation anthrax.

But Friedman is no longer in government. He currently is a senior vice president of the pharmaceutical giant Pharmacia Corporation from which he will be drawing his paycheck (and bonuses and stock options?) Many, including this writer, would predict that the recommendations and agenda of Pharmacia might carry more weight with Friedman than those from the others. So what is Pharmacia and who runs it?

In April 2000 three well-known companies were combined to form the Pharmacia Corporation of today. Pharmacia and Upjohn Laboratories who had earlier combined acquired Montsano (chemical) Company. The combined companies have a pipeline of new drugs, a $2 billion Research and Development budget and leading sales force in the U.S. market. Additionally, with the acquisition of Montsano’s agriculture division, about 90% of the world’s genetically engineered foods will contain a Pharmacia (Montsano) gene.

The current Chairman of the Board and CEO of Pharmacia is a Pakistani named Fred Hassan. Hassan was President of Pharmacia-Upjohn at the time of the merger with Montsano and moved into his current position after Montsano’s CEO had served an interim 18 month period as head of the combined companies.

There are a couple of well-known names on the Pharmacia Board of Directors and one whose name has only recently come into the public consciousness.

William Ruckelshaus is a Harvard trained lawyer who came out of the Justice Department to become the first administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. He served another three-year term as EPA administrator during the Reagan administration. Ruckelshaus is currently a principal in the Madrona Investment Group

Michael (Mickey) Kantor is a close confidante of Bill Clinton and served in his administration first as the United States Trade Representative (USTR). Kantor took over as Commerce Secretary following the controversial death of Ron Brown. Kantor was one of the point men involved in blunting some of the Clinton personal scandals including the Kathleen Willey affair.

Dr. Philip Leder, although a virtual unknown outside of medical circles, has impressive credentials. He is Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He was a contemporary of Dr. Don C. Wiley at Harvard. Wiley, who had made a breakthrough in genetic research, died in a mysterious plunge from a bridge in Memphis, Tennessee that was ruled an accidental death. Wiley also was funded as an investigator by HHMI.

Perhaps the most controversial member of Pharmacia’s board is Frank Carlucci. Carlucci is Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Carlyle Group, which describes itself as a "merchant bank." However its portfolio ranks it as one of the major defense contractors in the country.

The Carlyle Board of Directors reads like a class reunion of former cabinet members from past Republican administrations. However, Carlucci himself seemed equally at home under Democrat and Republican presidents during his checkered career in public service.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Carlucci was a foreign service officer ostensibly in the State Department although some alleged that was cover for his CIA activities. Indeed he served as Deputy Director of the CIA in the Carter administration. He served in foreign posts in the Congo and Brazil when Communist or pro-Communist governments were overthrown as well as ambassador to Portugal when that government fell.

Carlucci held several sub-cabinet level positions in the Nixon Administration. As Deputy Secretary of Defense under Caspar Weinberger in the Reagan administration he was responsible for development and procurement of new weapons. In that post he formed a number of associations that would prove to reap rewards for the Carlyle Group. He later was elevated to Secretary of Defense where he worked closely with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe. Crowe would become the "front man" in the takeover by the el Hibre family of the State of Michigan laboratory producing the only anthrax vaccine approved by the FDA.

Although Pharmacia will likely be first among equals in influencing PhRMA’s involvement in bioterrorism, there are plenty of other big shooters (don’t take that literally) in the association. Virtually all of the American and foreign pharmaceutical giants are members along with some smaller companies and subsidiaries of the giants.

Numbered among the sixty six members is Bayer, the German firm that returned to profitability through the surge in sales of its antibiotic Cipro following the mailed anthrax incidents last year.

Surprisingly, none of the companies involved in direct manufacture of anthrax and smallpox vaccines to be sold to the U.S. Government is a member of PhRMA. Currently Bioport in Michigan produces the only FDA approved anthrax vaccine. Acambis, supported by Baxter investments will be the supplier of a new smallpox vaccine. The FDA is said to have promised quick approval of Acambis’ vaccine shortcutting the normal approval cycle.

However, under the radar of the PhRMA umbrella there is a web of interlocking agreements, partnerships and alliances among members, for profit non-members, and tax-exempt foundations involved in bioweapon research and production. Ostensibly searching for defenses against biological attacks, the threats must be produced to measure the effectiveness of vaccines and antibiotics.

A common thread in the fabric of this web is the presence of two giant foundations; Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Billions of dollars have been funneled through these institutes to universities, private companies and individual researchers in the bio-genetic field of scientific effort. The money comes from government grants, contracts with various government agencies and from their own huge endowments. Both have extensive ties to the CIA and other government agencies involved in classified operations.

In a three part series (Anthrax, GOCO’s and Designer Germs) this writer detailed Battelle’s management, or co-management of four super-secret government installations, one of which (Dugway, Utah) stockpiles and has produced weaponized anthrax.

Researcher’s Leonard Horowitz and Patricia Doyle have catalogued the extensive involvement and control by HHMI of research on the human genome. At least six microbiologists in that field with ties to HHMI have been murdered or died mysterious deaths (five since 9/11/01).

One of the undercurrents in the development of the ability to change genes is the documented effort by scientists in several countries (including the U.S.) to turn the science into production of deadly designer diseases that attack only specific segments of the population.

According to an undercover FBI informant, American scientist Larry Ford (who had ties to the CIA) designed an agent for the South African bioweapon program that would affect only blacks. Ford later was considered a suspect in the attempted murder of his business partner and himself died from a shotgun blast that was ruled suicide.

One of the concerns of researchers, including this writer, is that such bioweapons may have been perfected and the spate of some fourteen or fifteen scientists’ deaths is merely a cleanup operation eliminating those who know too much or are potential whistle blowers.

A second concern is with the vaccines and other "defensive" agents being hastily contrived. Could any of them actually contain dangerous designer genes? As states adopt the model Emergency health legislation, combined with the 1996 interstate emergency assistance compact, procedures will be in place to compel vaccinations under threat of detention in a different state.

These (unconstitutional) "emergency" procedures only require the declaration of any emergency by states’ governors. In the case of a health emergency, only a perceived threat is necessary, not an actual outbreak. And who will announce the existence of a "threat?" Odds are it will be Homeland Health.

Permission is granted to reproduce this article in its entirety.

The author is a free lance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. He is a former newspaper editor and investigative reporter, a retired customs administrator and accountant, and a student of history and the U.S. Constitution.

If you would like to receive Medium Rare articles directly, please contact us at jimrarey@comcast.net .

Although not necessary, we would appreciate an indication of the city and/or state or country (If outside the USA) in which you are located to give us an idea as to where our articles are being received.

MEDIUM RARE

By Jim Rarey

June 30, 2002

MORE ANTHRAX SPIN FROM FBI AND NYT

A June 23rd article in the New York Times by reporters David Johnston and William J. Broad quotes (unidentified) investigators as saying the anthrax mailed to the office of Senator Leahy was no more than two years old. That determination was said to have been made using the radio carbon dating process.

William Broad seems to be the favorite of "investigators" (read FBI) as he has written numerous articles on the anthrax mystery laying out the current "thinking" of those investigators, even when they contradict earlier "leaks."

Another favorite of the FBI, although this time a critic, appears to be Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Program for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Rosenberg seems to be privy to some inside information from the investigation but just enough to offer (justified) criticism of the investigation and to buttress the FBI’s pet theory. That theory, based on a "profile" issued by the FBI several months ago assumes the preparation of the weaponized anthrax as well as the mailings, are the work of one single individual. Rosenberg seems to have bought that scenario completely and thinks she knows the identity of that individual.

Evidently the carbon dating information was only fed to one source, the New York Times. The wide publicity given the information in other papers and on TV news is based on that Johnston/Broad article. There is no reason to question the authenticity of the carbon dating information. (It would be too easy to contradict.) Where the "spin" comes in is the conclusions to be drawn from that information. Here the "investigators" are clearly making an unwarranted "stretch."

The age of the anthrax specimens of no more than two years would rule out anyone who did not have access to the Ames strain developed at the army’s weapons program at Ft. Detrick in the last two years. However, the article points out that the "perpetrator" could prepare more anthrax given such recent knowledge and capability.

The rest of the article is devoted to lauding the intensity and scope of the FBI investigation. It cites over 5,000 interviews conducted and more than a thousand grand jury subpoenas served. According to investigators hundreds of polygraph (lie detector) tests have been administered including a three-hour session with William Patrick III.

The Patrick interrogation is curious in itself. Patrick is the inventor (or at least holds five secret patents) on the process that developed the unique anthrax spore concentration of one trillion per gram, the same concentration found in the mailed anthrax. He is the former chief of product development of bio-weapons at Ft. Detrick. Patrick also is a consultant to Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI); a CIA connected government contractor. (See this writer’s three-part series, "Anthrax, GOCO’s and Killer Germs" which covers BMI in depth including its involvement in managing or co-managing four secret government labs including the army’s Dugway, Utah facility where the anthrax is weaponized.)

Patrick is also a close friend and colleague of Ken Alibek. Alibek is the Americanized name of the former number two man in the Soviet Union’s bioweapon program. He "defected" to the U.S. in 1992. At the request of the CIA, Alibek was "debriefed" by Patrick and was subsequently welcomed with open arms into the U.S. intelligence community. Alibek is also a former employee of BMI.

On December 21, 2001 the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch newspaper reported that FBI Director Robert Meuller had assured Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio that no one with or formerly with Battelle is a suspect. BMI headquarters is in Columbus, Ohio.

A few short days after the Johnston/Broad article, the FBI narrowed its investigation to microbiologist Steven J. Hatfill. Through leaks to various news organizations, Hatfill’s involvement in research programs at Ft. Detrick appeared in numerous media. Camera crews were on hand to film the FBI hauling things away from Hatfill’s apartment near Ft. Detrick.

Stories revealed that Hatfill had been terminated from a research project at Ft. Detrick in August 2001. Hatfill says he was fired because of publicity about him being a possible suspect in the anthrax mailings. Other stories say his (top secret) security clearance either expired or was revoked for unknown reasons. (This, of course, would give a "revenge" motive, another part of the FBI "profile".)

Hatfill participated with William Patrick (said to be his mentor) in a 1999 study of the consequences of mailing anthrax. Some believe that study may have been the template for the anthrax mailings closely following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

However the study was flawed in two respects. It did not contemplate the use of the "new" one trillion-spore concentration whose diameter is smaller than the pores in the average envelope. Nor did it take into account the pressure exerted by mail sorting machines.

Barbara Rosenberg and others theorize that one scenario might be the mailings were intended to raise the public awareness of the need for biological and chemical warfare defensive measures and no deaths were expected. That it would also result in a huge increase in the demand for pharmaceuticals would not surprise industry officials involved in discussions of the subject in Washington.

Whether planned or not, the anthrax mailings have resulted in large government orders for pharmaceutical products and the passage of draconian laws by the Congress.

A puzzling Defense Department program in Nevada, whose only logical purpose was to buttress the FBI theory of lone individual "perpetrators" of chemical/biological "events" was disclosed in a New York Times article by Judith Miller just seven days before the 9/11 attacks and two weeks before the anthrax mailing to NBC.

Using the acronym BACHUS (Biotechnology Activity Characterization by Unconventional Signatures) the project had two ostensible purposes. Miller describes it:

"CAMP 12, NEVADA TEST SITE, Nevada -- In a nondescript mustard-colored building that was once a military recreation hall and barbershop, the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities.

Adjacent to the pool tables, the shuffleboard and the bar stands a gleaming stainless steel cylinder, the 50-liter (53-quart) fermenter in which germs can be cultivated.

The apparatus, which includes a latticework of pipes and other equipment, was made entirely with commercially available components bought from hardware stores and other suppliers for about $1 million -- a pittance for a weapon that could deliver death on such a large scale.

The factory was built by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to contain the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Officials said the project was intended to assess how hard it would be for a terrorist or rogue nation to assemble a germ factory. "

The second stated objective was to see if such a "homemade" lab would have an identifiable signature. The founder and first director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is Jay C. Davis. Among other things Davis is a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member, 30-year associate at the secret Lawrence Livermore weapons lab and a consultant to the CIA.

Davis made the astounding admission that the Pentagon had never revealed the existence of Project BACHUS to anyone at the Clinton White House nor to congressional intelligence committees. The program was started in 1997 under Defense Secretary William Cohen (CFR).

According to Miller’s article, the project never produced anything more than a couple of relatively harmless pesticides. However, this is a far cry from making a weaponized powder such as the mailed anthrax. That takes a lot more expertise and expensive equipment.

Miller says the Times requested information about the project and Davis got permission to bring her and an ABC camera crew out to the facility. There is no indication that ABC has done anything with the story that this writer can find.

If the intent of the Times article and the BACHUS program was to convince the public a lone individual could have been responsible for the mailed anthrax, they have earned "Maggie’s Drawers" (a military term for the flag waved when a shooter misses the target completely).

However a second program also begun in 1997 may be more relevant to the mailed anthrax mystery.

According to the BIOHAZARD NEWS publication, "a 1997 article in a scientific journal reported that Russian scientists had implanted into the anthrax microbe genes that cause food poisoning, producing a strain that was resistant to Russia's anthrax vaccine." (Could Alibek have planted the story?)

At any rate, U.S. authorities requested a sample from Russia with which to test the U.S. vaccine but were unsuccessful when Russia denied ever having produced such a strain. Thus was born the "Jefferson Project." The CIA was tasked with developing more deadly anthrax bacteria to use in testing U.S. vaccines. The CIA chose its often used contractor Battelle (BMI) to host the project.

Production was to be at Battelle’s state of the art facility for making aerosol products for commercial and military use. Some researchers believe this may be the facility at which William Patrick perfected the process that resulted in the one trillion-spore concentration rather than at the army’s Dugway, Utah facility, which is also controlled by Battelle. The aerosol facility is located in Jefferson, Ohio hence the name of the project. No results of the project have been announced.

Yet another CIA program, "Clear Vision" has no relevance toward solving the mailed anthrax question but has clear implications for future "events."

Again from BIOHAZARD NEWS, "In 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on the "Clear Vision" project, which focused on weapons systems that would deliver the germs.

First, CIA agents tried to find or buy a small Soviet-designed biological bomb, which releases germs in a fine mist. When the search failed the agency approved a plan to make a mock "bomblet", based on intelligence information, and study how efficiently such a weapon could disperse a load of microbes."

Once again BMI was chosen for the project. Two tests were completed on a prototype measuring dissemination characteristics and how the model performed under different atmospheric conditions. Does the term, much in the news of late, "dirty bomb" come to mind?

The CIA maintains, through spokesperson Bill Harlow, that the device does not violate the 1972 treaty on Chemical and Biological Weapons because, "it lacked a fuse and did not contain dangerous germs."

If FBI Director Mueller’s assurances to Senator DeWine are kept and no present or former BMI operatives will be pursued, and the CIA is obviously off limits to the FBI, there may be no resolution of the mailed anthrax case unless……unless a suspect can be found to fit the FBI "profile" or the perception can be created that some microbiologist is a "fit."

Perhaps the Hartford Courant newspaper’s headline on the FBI’s public "investigation" of Steven Hatfill sums it up best. It read, "The Case of Dr. Hatfill: Suspect Or Pawn"

Permission is granted to reproduce this article in its entirety.

If you would like to receive Medium Rare articles directly, please contact us at jimrarey@comcast.net .

The Lie Won't Stand - Copyright Statement Included -- Please Distribute Widely----- Original Message ----- From: Michael C. Ruppert To: From The Wilderness Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2002 7:06 PM Subject: The Lie Won't Stand - Copyright Statement Included -- Please Distribute Widely

Please Distribute Widely...

THE LIE WON'T STAND

Bush Administration Explanations for Pre-9-11 Warnings Fail the Smell Test

Warnings Received From Heads of State, Allied Intelligence Services Specifically Warned of Suicide Attacks by Hijackers

Insider Trading Also Clearly Warned of Attacks

by Michael C. Ruppert

May 16, 2002, 19:00 PDT (FTW) -- Never in the history of scandals involving the United States government has an attempt to conceal criminal conduct by an administration been more transparently dishonest or more easily exposed. On May 15 White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer -- while making the startling admission that President Bush received CIA and FBI intelligence briefings in August indicating Osama bin Laden might be planning hijackings -- told major news sources including CBS News, "All appropriate action was taken based on the threat information we had," Fleischer said. "The president did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers."

In other statements Fleischer told the press, "The president was also provided information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9-11 sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile." According to a May 16 story by the New York Times, "Mr. Fleischer said the information given to the president in Texas [last August], had prompted the administration to put law enforcement agencies on alert."

Every major position taken by an administration in full retreat and on the defensive can be easily deconstructed and shown to be false.

For more than seven months FTW has been documenting specific warnings received by the U.S. government from both foreign intelligence services and, in one case, from Russian President Vladimir Putin, indicating commercial airliners were going to be used by terrorists to attack -- among other things -- the World Trade Center in the week of Sept. 9. In order for Fleischer's statement to be credible he would have to assert then that George W. Bush either ignored or was not informed of a direct warning from a head of state and also from the German intelligence service, the BND.

As reported in the German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 14, the BND warned both the CIA and Israel in June that Middle Eastern terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The story specifically referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, wherein a number of countries tap cell phone and electronic communications in partner countries and then pool the information. The BND warnings were also passed to the United Kingdom.

No known denial by the BND of the accuracy of this story exists, and the FAZ report indicates the information was received directly from BND sources.

According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire online.ie, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man, learned the man was telephoning U.S. intelligence agencies last summer to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the U.S. government for the story but refused to discuss additional details.

According to a story in Izvestia on Sept. 12, Russian intelligence warned the U.S. last summer that as many as 25 suicide pilots were training for suicide missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.

In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Putin stated he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11. No credible information has emerged from any source indicating that Putin omitted the above information when issuing the warning.

Many other direct warnings were received by the U.S. government and have been documented in FTW's 9-11 timeline located at: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_lucy.html.

These stories give the immediate lie to Fleischer's statements that Bush had no inkling of airliners being used as weapons.

But there is more.

In 1996 -- as reported by the German paper Die Welt on Dec. 6, and by Agence France Presse on Dec. 7 -- Western intelligence services, including the CIA, learned after arrests in the Philippines that Al Qaeda operatives had planned to crash commercial airliners into the Twin Towers. Details of the plan, as reported by a number of American press outlets, were found on a computer seized during the arrests. The plan was called "Operation Bojinka." Details of the plot were disclosed publicly in 1997 in the New York trial of Ramsi Youssef for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

FBI MEMOS TRIGGER WHITE HOUSE BACKSTEPPING

In "traditional" hijackings the hijackers have no need or desire to learn how to fly.

As reported by the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post (among others) the events leading to Fleischer's statements were the recent disclosure of FBI memoranda originated by field agents in Arizona and Minnesota that warned of a possible hijack attempt by bin Laden's followers. In both cases the suspects were taking flight lessons.

According to Newsweek and the New York Times, FBI agents in Phoenix submitted a classified memorandum in July naming Osama bin Laden and tracking the activities of possible Middle Eastern terrorist suspects who had enrolled in local flight schools. The memo, according to the Times, stated bin Laden's followers "could use the schools to train for terror operations." The information in the Phoenix memo was not shared with FBI field agents in Minnesota who had uncovered other startling evidence.

Just days before the attacks in early-September, FBI agents in Minnesota wrote notes that subsequently became included in an internal FBI document warning that accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui "might be planning on flying something into the World Trade Center." A story from the May 20 issue of Newsweek by Michael Isikoff described how a local flight instructor had reported Moussaoui had "showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer [and not land] large airliners.The [FBI] agents were 'in a frenzy, absolutely convinced he was planning to so something with a plane.'"

A multitude of sources have reported the FBI agents requested a warrant to search Moussaoui's personal computer but were denied by Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department. After the 9-11 attacks the computer was seized and found to contain information directly related to the World Trade Center attacks.

This apparent lack of support from within the administration is consistent with reports released last fall by the BBC's Gregg Palast showing that in January 2001 the Bush Administration had issued direct orders to the FBI to curtail investigations of two of Osama bin Laden's relatives, Omar and Abdullah bin Laden. The two bin Ladens had been connected to possible terrorist activities and were living in Falls Church, Va., near CIA headquarters.

APPROPRIATE WARNINGS?

Fleischer's statement that adequate warnings had been given to appropriate federal agencies falls flat on its face. Two of the most "appropriate" agencies would have been the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard.

As documented by researchers like Jared Israel at www.tenc.net , it has been standard FAA procedure for more than 25 years to scramble U.S. fighters to intercept -- not shoot down -- any errant or non-responsive aircraft under FAA control. This protocol is even more stringent in the case of a hijacking. Yet, Vice President Dick Cheney and others have stated publicly there were no fighters available in some cases, and there was no heightened state of alert on Sept. 11. For 50 minutes on 9-11, in direct contravention of established policy, no fighters were scrambled to intercept two outstanding hijacked airliners even though it was known attacks were in progress.

Given the above information, it would have been an obvious move to have placed fighter aircraft on a heightened state of alert in this time period. This unresponsiveness stands in contrast to the fact that, in October 1999 at a time when there was no heightened alert, the ill-fated Lear Jet occupied by golfer Payne Stewart had an F-16 fighter and an A-10 attack aircraft flying beside it within minutes of losing radio contact and veering off course.

INSIDER TRADING

FTW has spent months on this important story that proves foreknowledge of the attacks by people who also profited from them. This was a glaring warning signal, since such trades ran the risk of being detected by intelligence agencies that routinely monitor all market activity in real time.

The insider trading involves the placement of large numbers of "put" options on stocks of companies directly affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. They include United Air Lines, American Air Lines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, AXA Reinsurance, Munich Reinsurance and Swiss Reinsurance. Put options are a leveraged bet that a stock's price will fall dramatically.

As CBS news noted on Sept. 26, the peak of trading activity occurred just before the attacks. There was a jump in United Air Line's put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher than average on Sept. 6. Numbers for other affected stocks were equally alarming. It is uncontested that only United and American stocks had this level of put buying before the attacks. No other airlines were affected.

A May 13 story by the Washington Times' Insight Magazine attempted to explain the insider trading by stating higher numbers of put options had been placed on United and American stocks earlier in 2001. By relying only on the numbers of put options, Insight asserted that there was nothing unusual about the pre-9-11 trades.

However, FTW has contacted several experienced traders and reviewed existing documentation from financial experts, which indicate the alarm for insider trading is to look for any "imbalance" between the level of put options (a bet that a stock's price will fall) and the level of call options (a bet that a stock's price will rise). It is a significant imbalance in puts vs. calls that indicates criminal insider trading. The Insight piece did not address this point.

Several traders have stated that in a fairly flat market with high trading volumes, it has been a routine procedure for experienced traders to place roughly equal numbers of puts and calls on various stocks in order to generate a paper cash flow. They were quick to point out that by September, the market had gone into sharp decline and trading volumes were way down. Thus, lower numbers of put options did not mean that everything was normal. They stressed it was the imbalance in put-to-call ratios that signaled the insider trading. [Ed. Note: FTW has undertaken a more detailed investigation of this trading activity and hopes to have a more comprehensive report within 4-6 weeks].

Part of the problem in Insight's research stems from the fact that since Sept. 11, there has been no transparency from either the government or the financial sector on how the trades worked or how the markets tracked them. Secrecy is everywhere. Telephone calls have not been returned, and the government refuses to divulge any information about probes it admits are still ongoing. But simplistic dismissals from sources quoted in the Insight story contradict not only other evidence, but statements made by financial experts and major news sources just after the attacks.

"This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life.This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, interviewed Sept. 20 on Good Morning Texas.

"'I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle," reported the Montreal Gazette on Sept. 19.

To quote 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market."

Assertions that the reported number of puts involved were not abnormal also failed to analyze highly intricate shell games that involve the movement of put options to markets outside the U.S. or hidden in what traders refer to as "net positions." Serious financial experts have indicated the profits from insider trading could have been in the billions. Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German parliament responsible for oversight of Germany's intelligence services, estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion. CBS News gave a conservative estimate of $100 million.

A hasty conclusion reached by many is the insider trades were placed by bin Laden and his associates. Such a notion is flatly contradicted by the now absolute certainty that such insider trades would have -- and apparently did -- set off alarm bells. It makes little sense to argue bin Laden et al would have risked compromising at the last minute an operation planned in total secrecy for at least four years.

Also lacking credibility is the argument that many of the trades were what some brokers described as inconsequential amounts valued at $1 million or $2 million. This does not address the possibility that U.S. intelligence officials decided in a few cases to make a quick profit from attacks they knew were going to succeed. As distasteful as it may seem, this explanation is far more credible than an assumption that bin Laden made the trades himself and risked the exposure of what the world has been led to believe was his life's "masterpiece."

For more information on 9-11 insider trading please visit www.copvcia.com .

The explanations offered by the Bush Administration over the last 48 hours will not withstand even the slightest scrutiny if a major press organization asks any question about the warnings received from credible foreign government sources and heads of state. Other questions must inevitably follow that will implode an oil dictatorship whose sins and crimes are exposed and just waiting for someone to pick them up and run with them.

From:

http://www.counterpunch.org/

May 21, 2002

Follow the Money Bush, 9/11 and Deep Threat by Fran Shor

"What did the President know and when did he know it?" This question, evocative of the Watergate investigation, is now being posed by politicians and pundits seeking to determine what information the Bush Administration had prior to the incidents of September 11, 2001. No amount of denial and back-peddling by the Bush Administration can cover up the fact that Bush had advance knowledge of possible terror attacks on US targets by the followers of Osama bid Laden. While it's clear that Bush was personally briefed on August 6, 2001 about the possibility of those attacks, it remains unclear about the nature and extent of precautions, if any, taken to prevent such attacks.

Nonetheless, there is a welter of material that points to the Bush Administration's obstruction and neglect of important leads to link bin Laden to operations in the United States. Moreover, in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11 there were warnings and signs that some members of the Administration and its national security apparatus were anticipating something horrendous. In the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush Administration mobilized the war machine and repressive legislation to promote policies that secured its economic and ideological agenda. Thus, a more intriguing and significant question is: in light of what the Bush Administration gained from the fall-out of 9/11, how was that gain embedded in the actions and inactions by the Bush Administration prior to 9/11? To ask the question about the reaping of political advantage from the tragedy of 9/11 need not assume that there was a conspiracy by the Bush Administration; merely that certain players acted out of their personal interests at the expense of the safety and security of the nation.

To piece together the various activities of these players in the Bush Administration one should recall another key component of Watergate--the famous advice of "Deep Throat," the Washington insider, to Bob Woodward, the investigative reporter from the Washington Post. When Woodward was having trouble connecting all the dots and players, "Deep Throat" intimated: "Follow the money!" The money trail links Bush's oil background, his family's connections to Saudi investments, the politics of pipelines in Central Asia, and the military-industrial complex. By detailing Bush's background and fast-forwarding to the decisions of the Administration in its pursuit of war in Afghanistan, a possible war in Iraq, and a permanent war agenda, a money trail will unfold that will transform Deep Throat's admonition into a Deep Threat alarm concerning the lives and liberties of citizens of the United States and the world.

The Bushes, bid Laden and Carlyle

The Bush family's involvement with oil is not only deeply rooted in Texas oil wells, but also in the Middle East. George W's first experience in business was in the creation of the Arbusto Oil Company which eventually merged into Harken Oil. In 1986 Bahrain came to the rescue of the failing company by accepting a drilling contract with Harken even though Harken had no real background with drilling. When George W. sold his holdings in Harken for $848,000 in June of 1990, he cashed in at a point right before the company took a nose-dive in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990. Questions about whether George W. had been given a warning by his father concerning what may have been the entrapment of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait have never been fully settled.

On the other hand, conflicts of interest were definitely developed in the 1990's by father and son through their involvement with the Carlye Group, an investment group filled with Reagan-Bush cabinet members. In 1990 with former Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, as the CEO of Carlyle, George W. was appointed to the board of a Carlyle investment, Cateair. After his defeat in the 1992 Presidential election, George H. W. and James Baker, became Carlyle advisors and investors. Especially useful were the Bush and Baker connections to the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia. Those connections helped to generate large investments in Carlyle from the Saudi elite including the bin Laden family, a family made wealthy by an extensive construction business.

Although in the aftermath of 9/11 the bin Laden 2 million dollar investment in Carlyle was withdrawn, prior to that time Goerge W's administration had put up road-blocks to the investigation of the bin Laden family. The lead investigator of Osama bid Laden's involvement in terror actions against the US, from the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 to the African embassy bombings in 1998 to the assault on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, was John O'Neill, a Deputy Director of the FBI. O'Neill had repeatedly been denied access to questioning the bin Laden family, including a January 2001 directive from the White House to desist from investigating two of Osama's brothers who were residing in Falls Church, Virginia at the time. In the face of such continuing obstruction, O'Neill resigned in protest from the FBI claiming that the "main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." Ironically, O'Neill became the chief security person at the World Trade Center shortly before 9/11 where he, along with between 2-3,000 others, perished in the destruction of the WTC on that fateful and tragic day.

If /911 was a tragedy to thousands of Americans and their families, Bush and his father's Carlyle cronies hit the jackpot, especially with renewed contracts for Carlyle defense investments. In particular, Carlyle had invested heavily in United Defense, the primary manufacturer of the Crusader artillery system. Although the Crusader faced a skeptical Congress before 9/11, Carlucci and his lobbyists certainly managed to line-up his old college buddy, Donald Rumsfeld, behind promoting the outmoded Crusader. When Carlyle went public with United Defense stock offerings in the fall of 2001, Carlucci, Bush, Baker, and other investors in Carlyle made out like bandits. However, when a possible paper trial and conflict-of-interest against Rumsfeld surfaced recently, he announced his opposition to Crusader. Of course, millions had already been made and Rumsfeld had to cover his own backside in light of the calls for the resignation of the Secretary of the Army, a former Enron executive already awash in dubious conflicts-of-interest.

The Taliban and Pipeline Politics

However, if the Saudi and Carlyle connections to father and son Bush don't raise alarms, then the whole history of the Bush Administration's dealings with the Taliban should. The primary focus of these dealings was the renewal of a planned pipeline from the natural gas rich fields of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to other Asian markets. Behind this whole operation was the Unocal company. Among the advisors to Unocal was Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American academic, who in addition to being an advisor to Unocal in the 1990's was also part of the foreign policy think-tanks that included Frank Carlucci. Khalilzad joined the Taliban's lobbyist, Laila Helms (a relative of former CIA director, Richard Helms) in direct talks between representatives of the Taliban and the Bush Administration right up through July of 2001. When the Taliban broke off the talks, refusing the pipeline offers, the Bush Administration made known it's efforts to strike back at the Taliban as early as August of 2001.

Ostensibly attacking the Taliban for it's refusal to hand over Osama bid Laden, the Bush Administration refused any alternatives to the military option. During the whole military operation, the Pentagon has tried to establish security points that reflect the route of the proposed pipeline. Moreover, Harmid Karzai, the hand-picked US leader of Afghanistan, was, at one time, also a consultant for Unocal. Along with Khalilzad, who now is the US representative to Afghanistan's interim government, plans for the pipeline seem closer to realization.

The CIA and Other Deep Pockets

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a number of news stories appeared concerning investments in "put" options in United and American Airlines. Put options are shares that are bets on falling market prices for specific stocks. In the week before September 11 put options in United and American Airlines went through a furious and unprecedented spasm of investment. In addition put options for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, two of the biggest occupants of the World Trade Center, also saw abnormal activity. Most of the investments in these put options originated in Germany through the Deutsche Bank. Deutshce Bank had earlier acquired Banker's Trust, a investment banking firm whose Vice Chairman in charge of "private client relations" in the late 1990's was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard. In March of 2001, Krongard was appointed Executive Director of the CIA.

Certainly, the CIA has a history of laundering money and dealings with shady investment characters. What becomes particularly relevant in the lead-up to 9/11 is the August CIA briefing of Bush concerning the potential threat of attacks by bid Laden using hijacked planes on certain sites, such as the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the fact that the CIA had bugging equipment on bid Laden messages and international banking operations. Although no one has apparently claimed the money from the put options, questions remain about Krongard and the CIA's involvement.

Warning Signals and Criminal Negligence

The CIA's briefing for Bush wasn't the only warning coming from intelligence agencies about the possible attack by hijacked planes on targets like the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Both German and Russian intelligence agencies picked up signals during the summer of 2001 about bin Laden plans. The FBI in its investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui's activities documented his desire to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. When those FBI agents requested a warrant to search Moussaoui's personal computer, the civil liberties-minded Attorney General, John Ashcroft, turned them down. On the other hand, Ashcroft was worried enough about the hijacking of commercial airplanes that starting on July 26, 2001 he stopped flying on commercial aircraft. Of course, neither Aschroft nor anyone else in the Bush Administration bothered to warn airport authorities to be on heightened alert and to tighten airport security in the face of such warning signals.

To suggest that the Bush Administration arranged the 9/11 tragedy is to resort to wildly speculative conspiracy theories. On the other hand, there is a substantive and documented record of neglect and obstruction to warrant a charge of criminal negligence by Bush and his national security state apparatus. It may be that part of that apparatus, especially elements within the FBI, are angered by how they and their reports were cavalierly treated by the White House. They and other congressional sources may be leaking the kind of information that was essential in bringing down President Nixon. Instead of waiting, however, for what appears as inevitable congressional investigations, we should be doing everything in our power to raise questions in public forums and the courts, if possible, about the criminal negligence of the Bush Administration. Before another pretext is created for another war for oil and the advancement of the military-industrial complex, this Administration needs to be confronted for the duplicitous and corrupt self-serving elite they are.

Fran Shor teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is an anti-war activist and member of the Michigan Coalition on Human Rights. He can be reached at: aa2439@wayne.edu

From:

http://www.counterpunch.org/

June 14, 2002

American Journal
The Terrorism of Everyday Life

by Alexander Cockburn

Gangbangers with dirty bombs! Now we're talking. The big news about the latest suspected terror bomber is not that he now calls himself Al Muhajir but that he was formerly Jose Padilla, born a Puerto Rican, raised in Chicago. Padilla became a son of militant Islam in the slammer, the same way thousands of other young denizens in our Gulag do.

In the normal order of business suspected gangbangers don't have much purchase on the Bill of Rights. Their rights of assembly, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, were curtailed long since. Padilla's current status could foreshadow a trend. Pending challenge in the courts, he's classed as an "enemy combatant", locked up in a navy brig in Charleston, S.C. with no rights at all.

Tuesday June 11, all the way from Moscow, Attorney General Ashcroft fostered the impression that that Padilla/Muhajir had been foiled pretty much in the act of planting radioactive material taped to TNT in the basement of the Sears Building, or the Commodities Exchange or the Field Museum or some kindred monument of Chicago. "U.S.: 'Dirty Bomb' Plot Foiled" exulted USA Today.

Wednesday brought us a modified climb-down. "Threat of 'dirty bomb' softened" muttered USA Today's main head. It turned out Muhajir had ten grand in cash and maybe big dreams but nothing in the way of radioactive dirt or even TNT. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the press "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk." He should know. Nameless administration officials dumped on Ashcroft for grandstanding.

But at least we're now sensitized to the "dirty bomb" menace. USA Today (which has the advantage of being a Friedman-free zone) ran an exciting graphic put together by the Federation of American Scientists displaying the long term effects of ten pounds of TNT wrapped around a "pea-size" piece of cesium 137 from a medical gauge being exploded at the National Gallery of Art.

Anyone standing within three blocks downwind from the Gallery would stand a one-in-a thousand chance of getting cancer, An easterly breeze would put the Capitol within this radius.

We should be worried about this? I'd say it comes pretty low on the list of Major Concerns. Now suppose Al Qaeda was to plan something really nasty like shipping spent nuclear fuels by rail from every quarter of the United States to a fissured mountain in Nevada not that far from one of America's prime tourist destinations?

That's the Bush plan of course. The House has voted Aye. It now awaits approval by the US Senate. You can check out your own proximity to the contemplated nuclear shipping routes by going to www.mapscience.org, put together by a public interest group.

Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., and Salt Lake City will become hubs for the nuclear fuel shipments. Take Illinois. 1,063 schools will be within one mile of rail, barge and highway routes proposed by the Department of Energy. The White House is 1.1 miles from Union Station, through which shipments are expected to pass on the journey to Yucca Mountain.

But the scheduled Yucca Mountain nuclear dump is part of terror-as-normalcy, part of our domestic furniture.

What a gift to the powers-that-be the War on Terror is turning out to be as a subject-changer. Right now, across the United States from New York state to Oregon and Washington the final cut-offs for people on welfare are looming up. The guillotine blade ratcheted into position by Clinton's welfare reform of 1996 is plummeting down.

Take Oregon. It has a terrible recession, the worst unemployment rate in the country and the largest deficit in the state's history. Back in 1979, according to the Oregon Center for Public Policy, 39 per cent of poor Oregonians were getting public assistance. These days the percentage is below 10 per cent.

Does that mean that the previously destitute are now in regular jobs? No. It just means you have to be a lot poorer to get any sort of handout. It means the usual story: exhausted mothers scrabbling for petty cash, doing occasional starvation-wage work. Over the first 14 months of the current recession eight Oregon counties had their combined unemployment grow by 92 per cent. At the same time the number of welfare recipients went down by 16 per cent.

This is the Terrorism of Everyday Life, at the most elemental level, aimed at the weakest in our midst: no money for food, for shelter, for the kids, and a President who actually wants to stiffen the work requirements. Thus do we nourish the next generation of Enemy Combatants on the home front.

Dershowitz Says Baby Killing
Plan Legitimate But Flawed

Nathan Lewin, a bigtime attorney in Washington DC, often tipped for a federal judgeship and legal advisor to several Orthodox organizations, told Forward, as reported there on June 7, 2002, that the families of suicide bombers should be executed, arguing that such a policy would offer the necessary deterrent against suicide attacks. Lewin magnanimously stipulates that family members would be spared if they immediately condemned the bombing and refused financial compensation for the loss of their relative.

According to the Forward's reporter, Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, argued that Lewin's proposal represented a legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism.

Foxman declined to take a stand on the actual proposal, citing his policy of deferring to Jerusalem on Israeli security issues. Exhibiting his habitual moral refinement, Dershowitz also an advocate of judge-sanctioned torture here in the US --argued that the same level of deterrence could be achieved by leveling the villages of suicide bombers after the residents had been given a chance to evacuate.

Lewin argues that the biblical injunction to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek serves as a precedent in Judaism for taking measures that are "ordinarily unacceptable" in the face of a mortal threat.

Those who care to consult the first book of Samuel will find the Amalekite precedent vividly described. First the divine injunction: "Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass"

King Saul hastens to obey. "And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt. And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs."

Even though the animals were scheduled for sacrifice to Him, God is furious at the breach of orders and prompts the prophet Samuel to berate Saul, which he duly does: "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry."

"Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came unto him delicately. And Agag said, Surely the bitterness of death is past. And Samuel said, As the sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal."

Now that's what I call getting back to fundamentals!

Reproduced gratefully from: http://www.counterpunch.org/

The Independent

London, Thursday, June 6, 2002

Colonel who called Bush 'a joke' suspended

By Andrew Gumbel

AN American Air Force colonel has been suspended and could be court-martialled because he wrote to a newspaper describing George Bush as "sleazy and contemptible" and accusing the administration of ignoring advance warnings on the 11 September attacks for political gain.

Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Butler was suspended from his job at a military language academy in Monterey, California, under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Article 88, which dates back to the War of Independence, prohibits disparaging remarks about the President or senior figures in the White House or Congress. It stipulates a maximum punishment of dismissal and one year in military detention. Colonel Butler, who has been in the air force for 24 years and served in the Gulf War, called the President a joke who had taken advantage of the war on terrorism to deflect attention from his questionable election and the poor state of the economy.

"Of course Bush knew about the impending attacks on America," he wrote in The Monterey County Herald. "He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama ... His presidency was going nowhere."

The letter did not appear to be the result of any inside knowledge, merely the officer's forthright opinions.

Colonel Butler was suspended three days after it was published. The guidelines state it does not matter whether the accusations against a President are just. The issue is whether an officer spoke inappropriately, and publicly.

Nobody has been prosecuted under Article 88 since the Vietnam War, when a junior officer was court-martialled for holding up a sign describing President Lyndon Johnson as an ignorant fascist at an anti-war rally in Texas. He was discharged and sentenced to two years of hard labour.

Officers are periodically disciplined, including two who were forced into early retirement during the Clinton era for describing the President as a gay-loving, womanising, lying, pot-smoking draft dodger.

Reproduced gratefully from David Irving's Action Report

War on terror: FBI ‘guilty of cover-up’ over anthrax suspect

NICK PETERS IN WASHINGTON

AMERICAN investigators know the identity of the killer who paralysed the US by sending anthrax in the post but will not arrest the culprit, according to leading US scientists.

For several months the Federal Bureau of Investigation has claimed it has few leads and little evidence about the group or individual who targeted politicians and media organisations.

Their failure to arrest a suspect has compounded other failures of the American security agencies to take action which could have prevented the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

This week, the FBI and John Ashcroft, the attorney general, were at the centre of controversy when they claimed that they had apprehended an American citizen intent on detonating a ‘‘dirty bomb’’, a conventional bomb which would contaminate a large area with radioactive material. Both were forced to admit that there was no evidence that Jose Padile had done little more than associate with suspected al-Qaeda agents in Pakistan.

Last week scientists at Fort Detrick, the US Army’s top secret biological warfare research centre at Fort Detrick, Maryland said the FBI had looked at ways in which anthrax could have been smuggled out of the complex.

At a time when the Bush administration is beefing up America’s Homeland Security defences any indication of progress by the FBI should be good news, but one prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert believes the FBI has not only known the identity of the terrorist for months but has conspired with other branches of the US government to keep it secret.

Dr Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the biological warfare division at the Federation of American Scientists, first accused the FBI of foot-dragging in February with a scathing investigation that included a portrait of the possible perpetrator so detailed that it could only match one person.

Rosenberg said she knows who that person is and so do a top-level clique of US government scientists, the CIA, the FBI and the White House.

"Early in the investigation," Rosenberg told Scotland on Sunday, "a number of inside experts, at least five that I know about, gave the FBI the name of one specific person as the most likely suspect. That person fits the FBI profile in most respects. He has the right skills, experience with anthrax, up-to-date anthrax vaccination, forensic training, and access to the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (AMRIID) and its biological agents through 2001."



	‘Dr Barbara Hatch Rosenberg says she knows who the terrorist is’

Rosenberg’s profile suggests that the suspect is a middle-aged scientist with a doctoral degree who works for a CIA contractor in Washington DC. She adds he has to know or have worked closely with Bill Patrick, the weapons researcher who holds five secret patents on how to produce weapons-grade anthrax, that he suffered a career setback last summer that embittered him and precipitated his campaign and that he has already been investigated by the FBI.

Most crucially, she believes the suspect has in the past actually conducted experiments for the government to test the response of the police and civil agencies to a bioterror attack.

"It has been part of the suspect’s job to devise bioterror scenarios," Rosenberg said. "Some of these are on record. He is known to have acted out at least one of them, in hoax form, perhaps as part of an assignment to test responses. Some hoax events that have never been solved, including several hoax-anthrax events, also correspond to his scenarios and are consistent with his whereabouts."

The question she wants the FBI and the Bush administration to answer is, why it has taken so long to arrest this man? In the unlikely event that the government divulges all it knows about what she now believes to be a full blown cover-up, Rosenberg said responsibility can be expected to fall on a number of government agencies, all with a vested interest in shielding the truth.

"Either the FBI is under pressure from the Pentagon or CIA not to proceed because the suspect knows too much and must be controlled forever from the moment of arrest," she said, "or the FBI is sympathetic to the views of the biodefence clique or the FBI really is as incompetent as it seems."

Rosenberg’s analysis suggests a combination of all three. The American defence establishment guards its secrets well and given the suspect’s covert work on their behalf their reluctance to see him publicly exposed appears natural.

Equally there is evidence that some of the suspect’s colleagues are not unhappy with the fallout from his terror attacks. Rosenberg cites David Franz, a former commander of USAMRIID who earlier this year said of the anthrax campaign: "I think a lot of good has come from it. From a biological or a medical standpoint, we’ve now five people who have died, but we’ve put about $6bn in our budget into defending against bioterrorism."

As for FBI incompetence there are few in America today who have any doubt that the venerable agency made a serious of terrible errors before 9/11 and has conspicuously failed to conduct a solid investigation since.

Earlier this week, congressmen questioned George Tenet, the director of the CIA, about the arrest of Padile and the claims made about his mission. The congressmen were concerned that the attorney general was unduly alarmist about the nature of the plans Padile had made.

It appeared that Padile’s arrest was announced to bolster the image of the FBI and emphasise the continuing threat to the US. Instead the announcement raised questions about why Padile was arrested on arriving in the US rather than being watched to establish the identity of his associates and the source of the radioactive material he would need for a dirty bomb.

George Soros, the billionaire financier, accused the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating the aftermath of September 11 and the arrest of Padile to promote an authoritarian agenda.

‘"I feel that what happened was that Ashcroft (the attorney general) basically detonated a ‘dirty bomb’ plot. The plot is his. The detonation is his. The Bush administration is exploiting the terrorist threat for its purposes, to generate fear and to overcome constitutional constraints on the use of force,’’ he said.

This article:

  http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=655812002

More War on terror:

  http://www.news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1

Websites:

  Afghan Network
  http://www.afghan-network.net/

  Iraqi Presidency
  http://www.uruklink.net/iraq/

  North Korea News Agency
  http://www.kcna.co.jp/

  Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran
  http://www.president.ir/

  UK Ministry of Defence
  http://www.mod.uk/

  US Department of Defense
  http://www.defenselink.mil/

MEDIUM RARE

By Jim Rarey

June 18, 2002

BOJINKA THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional hero Sherlock Holmes once solved a case because a dog that would have been expected to bark didn’t. Something is missing from the numerous allegations about the government’s foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attack. That thing is any mention of "Project Bojinka" by government officials and most of the national media.

Those members of the media who do mention the project carefully avoid giving a full description of the plot with one exception, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times. But this was after the 9/11 disaster. Before that terrorist attack, even the alternative media had no information on the diabolical plot; it was a closely held secret by the government, first in the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration that followed (with mostly Clinton holdovers).

In the Philippines in January of 1995, a fire broke out in an apartment 200 yards from the Vatican’s embassy in Manila. This was two weeks before a scheduled visit of the Pope to the Philippines. When police investigated they found bomb making material and other items suggesting a plot to assassinate the Pontiff. They also found computer disks containing the details of Project Bojinka (big bang).

The Philippines police determined that at least three operatives were involved in the plots with ties to Al Queda, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. Abdul Hakim Murad was arrested when he returned to the apartment, apparently to retrieve the computer disks. Wali Khan Amin Shah, an Afghani, was arrested in Malaysia. Ramzi Yousef, the alleged mastermind of Bojinka, was arrested in Pakistan and returned to New York by FBI agent John O’Neill (then FBI counter-terrorism chief whose main focus was on Osama bin Laden and Al Queda). More about O’Neill later.

The terrorist actions detailed on the computer disks comprised three separate elements. The first, for which the three were tried and convicted in 1996, was a plot to leave bombs on 11 U.S. commercial flights departing from various cities in the far East to be destroyed simultaneously on the same day.

The FBI said Yousef staged a trial run in 1994 leaving a bomb on a Philippine flight that killed a Japanese businessman. Yousef was also charged as the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and was later tried and convicted of that terrorist strike in which four others were already serving life sentences.

The second element was a plan to load a small plane with explosives and fly it into CIA headquarters in Virginia. Abdul Murad admitted he had trained as a pilot in North Carolina and was slated to be the suicide pilot on that mission. This element of Bojinka has received some exposure in the national media.

The third element of Bojinka had by far the most potential for catastrophic casualties and impact on the American public. It involved the simultaneous hijacking of several commercial domestic flights and crashing them into selected targets that included the Pentagon, the Sears Tower and the World Trade Center. Obviously, the plot required a member of each hijacking team to be capable of flying the big jets. No commercial pilot could be expected to deliberately fly his plane into such targets even with a pistol at his head or a knife (box cutter) at his throat.

The details of Project Bojinka were furnished by Philippine police to the American Embassy in Manila and to the CIA and FBI. Yet, to this day, high government officials in the administration and congress maintain they had no idea that such a plot was contemplated, much less possible. But Project Bojinka was not the first red flag raised on the 9/11 scenario.

In a 1993 book, "Target America: Terrorism in the U.S." author and terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky detailed the training of suicide pilots in Iran for just such missions beginning in the early 1980’s. A terrorist training school had been set up at an airfield in Wakilabad, Iran for the training. Iran Air (the national airline) maintained a Boeing 707 and 727 at the airfield (built by western companies) and occasionally furnished a Boeing 747 for that training. Bodansky says the main support for the operation came from Iran and Syria although the volunteers were from a broad spectrum of Islamic terrorist groups. Many were Afghani mujahideen trained in Pakistan (by the CIA). Some had fought in Afghanistan.

An obscure company, Shapolsky Publishers with close ties to organizations supporting Israel, distributed the book. Indeed, some speculate that Bodansky’s information may come from Mossad, the highly efficient Israeli intelligence agency. Nevertheless, the information contained was what the spooks call "open source intelligence." There is another reason Bodansky’s warning in that book and a subsequent offering in 1996 entitled, "Terrorism: The inside story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America" should have been heeded.

Yossef Bodansky is the director of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare for the U.S. Congress. He is also a former consultant to the Department of Defense and the State Department. He has testified in many closed sessions of the congress’ intelligence committees. He most certainly would have elaborated on his public description in his second book on the terrorist network already established in the U.S. This includes safe houses in major cities, weapons, ammunition, money, systems to provide medical and legal aid, false identity papers, and intelligence for the operatives. Bodansky warned that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was, "but a prelude to an escalation of Islamic terror in the United States."

While top officials in Washington continue to deny they had any inkling of the 9/11 targets or tactics to be used, we now know that lower levels in the CIA and FBI were actively monitoring suspects at flight schools in at least four states for at least the two years preceding 9/11. Daniel Hopsicker, author and brilliant investigative journalist, has written a series of articles on the sinister activities at the Huffman flight school in Venice, Florida. He calls it the "Venice Flying Circus." Needless to say, the major media has not picked them up.

If the recent revelations of suspicious characters taking flight training by a Phoenix FBI agent and the highly sensationalized story of Coleen Rowley, a Minnesota FBI legal operative, are not part of the "it’s just incompetence and the culture spin" they might prove another point. If Rowley had linked her request for a search warrant to look at the contents of Zacarias Moussaoui"s computer with Project Bojinka, denying the request would have been political suicide. Either Rowley did not know about Bojinka (along with a lot of other field agents) or she chose not to invoke it.

So who in the government was in a position where they knew, or should have known about Bojinka? Certainly the heads of the FBI and CIA should have known. FBI Director Louis Freeh resigned just two months before 9/11 two years before the end of his ten-year term. Congressional investigators seem to have no interest in hearing testimony from him.

CIA Director John Deutch also resigned earlier. He had been accused of having unauthorized classified information on his laptop computer. He was cleared of any wrong doing by a woman in the CIA IG office who then resigned to take a position as a vice president at CitiBank. Deutch followed and was awarded a professorship at MIT and a seat on the CitiGroup board of directors as well as CMS energy, currently enmeshed in the energy company trading scandals. Deutch has not been called on to testify either.

Surely FBI terrorism expert John O’Neill would have known the details of Bojinka having investigated the 1993 WTC bombing and the plot to blow up 11 airliners. O’Neill’s departure from the FBI was started when he tangled with the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen over the investigation of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. She banned him from Yemen. O’Neill’s reputation was further stained when his laptop computer went missing for several hours when he was called away to the telephone during a conference in Tampa, Florida. As a result of that unexplained incident, he was told he would not get a position in the National Security Agency (NSA) that he believed he had earned.

O’Neill became the Director of Public Safety at the WTC after he resigned and died mysteriously during the 9/11 attack. He had phoned his wife after the first tower was hit to inform her he was safe.

There is no direct evidence (so far) that Bush officials had knowledge of Project Bojinka before or after the 9/11 attack. However, the administration’s actions (and lack thereof) have raided serious questions that have yet to be answered.

Perhaps the best example of this is the pathetic performance of General Richard B. Myers at his confirmation hearing to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held two days after the attack. Myers was asked when Air Force planes were first scrambled during the emergency. He said he wasn’t sure but confirmed it was after the Pentagon was hit, more than an hour after the first hit on the WTC and well after the FAA had reported four planes had been hijacked.

Myers, as much as anyone, is familiar with the standard operating procedure for the immediate scrambling of air force fighters as soon as an airplane is reported to have lost contact with the tower or the hijack signal has been given. Myers, from August 1998 to February 2000 was Commander in Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command that has integrated procedures with the FAA. For 18 months prior to his nomination as Chief, he was Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding his apparent ignorance on the most important event of his adult career, Myers was easily confirmed.

These and other unanswered questions have led to several theories that Bush let the attack happen. One being as an excuse to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan which was considered an obstacle to exploitation of Caspian Sea oil. Another may have been to grease the path for draconian measures through the congress. Some, including this writer, believe it to be a combination of the two.

That there is a huge coverup in progress by the government and the media is obvious. However, there are two words that have not come from the lips of even Bush’s most virulent critics, the left-wing Democrats. Those two words are Project Bojinka.

Permission is granted to reproduce this article in its entirety.

If you would like to receive Medium Rare articles directly, please contact us at jimrarey@comcast.net .

Published on Monday, July 15, 2002 in the Sydney Morning Herald

US Planning to Recruit One in 24 Americans as Citizen Spies

by Ritt Goldstein

The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.

The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity".

Civil liberties groups have already warned that, with the passage earlier this year of the Patriot Act, there is potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens.

As with the Patriot Act, TIPS is being pursued as part of the so-called war against terrorism. It is a Department of Justice project.

Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.

A pilot program, described on the government Web site www.citizencorps.gov, is scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants participating in the first stage.

Assuming the program is initiated in the 10 largest US cities, that will be 1 million informants for a total population of almost 24 million, or one in 24 people.

Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states. According to a 1992 report by Harvard University's Project on Justice, the accuracy of informant reports is problematic, with some informants having embellished the truth, and others suspected of having fabricated their reports. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Present Justice Department procedures mean that informant reports will enter databases for future reference and/or action. The information will then be broadly available within the department, related agencies and local police forces. The targeted individual will remain unaware of the existence of the report and of its contents. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At state and local levels the TIPS program will be co-ordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was given sweeping new powers, including internment, as part of the Reagan Administration's national security initiatives. Many key figures of the Reagan era are part of the Bush Administration.

The creation of a US "shadow government", operating in secret, was another Reagan national security initiative.

Ritt Goldstein is an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability. He has lived in Sweden since 1997, seeking political asylum there, saying he was the victim of life-threatening assaults in retaliation for his accountability efforts. His application has been supported by the European Parliament, five of Sweden's seven big political parties, clergy, and Amnesty and other rights groups.

Common Dreams NewsCenter A non-profit news service providing breaking news & views for the progressive community.

© Copyrighted 1997-2001 www.commondreams.org A 'Cookie-Free' Web Site

"I am mad, madder than Hell"

By John Brand, D.Min., J.D.

Printed on Sunday, July 14, 2002 @ 22:43:24 EDT http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=491

By John Brand, D.Min., J.D. YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

(YellowTimes.org) – On November 4th, 1944, Co E, 410th Reg., 103rd Infantry Division moved on the line outside of St.Die, France. We relieved a unit of the 3rd Division that had been on the front for over 100 consecutive days. As soon as we moved into position, German artillery hit our area. The Baptism of Fire is a cruel experience. Within a minute I lost all sense of being a civilized, caring human being. All of life centered around one thought, "Get the bastards before they get you." Next morning we had our first casualty. Private Kopko, the only son of a widowed mother, took a direct hit. The shrapnel pierced his helmet and skull. Quicker than you can read this sentence, what had once been a vital human being, now lay dead on the cold ground.

I don't even remember the name of the next guy who got it. He was a schoolteacher, a rather quiet man. He joined our platoon just before we went on the line. I understood he had a wife and child. Shrapnel hit his guts – as nasty a wound as there is. He was still alive when the stretcher-bearers carried him, screaming and writhing, to the rear. I don’t know if he made it. Probably not.

Death. Wounds. Hell. Screams. Fear. Hate. Bastards. Merde.

Yet, deep down inside, we knew that we were fighting because Hitler's madness had to be stopped. We were citizen soldiers. Our aim was to get on with our private lives. But before we could, a job that had to be done! Behind the terror and the bravery, the screams and the stealthy night patrols into enemy lines, there was a strong belief that our sacrifices would make this a better world.

The final paragraph of the Yalta Conference Report, February 1945, expressed our hopes. "To the soldier who slogged it out in the mud, the Yalta Conference and the San Francisco Conference are tangible evidence that the United Nations have a definite goal . . . that this time the peace will be carefully and deliberately planned . . . that the hours in muddy foxholes, the eternal moments lying, pinned down to the muck by machinegun fire, the swift seconds of the assaults of a strongpoint, will not have been spent in vain."

The back of the World War II Victory Medal bears the inscription, "Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear." Those declarations made our sacrifices worthwhile. They put meaning into the hell of war. We really believed that we were fighting for a better world.

We returned home and set about to build a greater nation. Filled with the assurance that our dead did not die in vain, that those of us who came home with disabilities would see the fulfillment of our dreams, we worked hard to realize this nation's potential. And now over fifty years later, our dreams are crushed, our hopes are destroyed, our sufferings are a mockery! I am mad!

While those dominating politics, business, and religion spout patriotic slogans, proclaim the virtues of capitalism, and preach that this is a nation under God, the reality is one of the grim dismantling of all things decent and right and honorable. And for what? That a few bastard businessmen can deposit a few more millions into their personal checking accounts? That a few plutocratic politicians can pervert the welfare of the people? That a few paranoid preachers can evoke more division than unity in the gospel they spread?

I am mad because a handful of propagandists have caused the American people to buy into the charade that government is bad and private enterprise is an unqualified bonanza for all. Well, it certainly has turned out differently, hasn't it? While executives at Enron, WorldCom, Anderson, and sundry other corporations were putting millions into their personal bank accounts, the employees and investors hold worthless pieces of paper in their hands. And what really makes me mad is that our Attorney General recluses himself from the case because his own Senatorial campaign fund received contributions from Enron. But has he appointed a Deputy to pursue this matter vigorously? Surely, among the many thousands of laws, regulations, executive orders, there must be one that can make "Kenny Boy" accountable. But no, he is still roaming the streets or holed up in one of his many mansions laughing at the poor suckers he has taken for a ride. And that makes me mad . . . madder than hell.

There is nothing sacred about private enterprise. As a matter of fact, it has turned out to be the embodiment of evil. Ask the millions who were bilked out of billions in the sovereign State of California by the Enron shenanigans. Glory to God in the highest! And it is ordained by the Almighty that profits are good for everyone. Ask the more than 40,000,000 uninsured citizens. Ask the ones who receive inadequate care by H.M.O.'s. Just the other day my wife went for her blood pressure checkup. Her doctor has done a fine job of controlling it. After he finished his exam, she asked him what she might do about feeling constantly tired. He looked at his watch and said, "Ruby, you have to make another appointment to talk about that. Time has run out." The poor man has to see so many billable patients and just has a few minutes for each one. Glory to private enterprise making people's health a profit center.

Glory to God in the highest for having major industries pollute soil, air, and water. Then their minions in Congress pass laws to keep the corporations from having to assume liability. The cost of the clean-up is shifted to the taxpayers. And then the funds are cut because we don't have enough money to take care of everything that needs attention. But we still plan a Star War Defense Shield. Although every respectable scientist has said that it cannot be done and every test has failed, we still fill the trough with the swill of money so the fat boys can grow fatter still.

Death. Wounds. Hell. Screams. Fear. Hate. Bastards. Merde.

Count the blessing of unrestricted free enterprise. You see it in the face of untold elderly who have to make a choice between buying needed medications or food. The large pharmaceutical companies change a few molecules in prescription medicines so they can obtain new patents. The new product, in most cases, is not much better than the old one. Holding new patents in their grubby little hands, they can squeeze more bucks out of a captive public. Ain't free enterprise grand?

Who in the hell needs governmental oversight? Well, the people do to level the playing field. But does "Big Bidness" want equity and fairness? If you believe that, I have a really good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge. You see the blessings of free enterprise in the sorrowing faces of those who lost loved ones when their Ford SUV's turned over killing some of their relatives. So we enter into a debate whether Ford or Firestone are to be blamed. And not a single executive who knew about this death threat has spent a day in jail.

Unrestricted free enterprise is not enterprise at all. Lack of oversight provides a license to steal.

Death. Wounds. Hell. Screams. Fear. Hate. Bastards. Merde.

Of course, I am mad at the politicians. If they want to get elected and reelected and reelected, they have to have money.

NEWS BULLETIN: The name of the Lord God Jehovah has just been changed. The President, upon advice of the Attorney General, and with the approval of the Congress, the Supreme Court by a 5:4 vote, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, changed the Lord's name to: The Lord Mammon. So everything is all right with our nation under our new god.

And the representatives of the people have to have money to go on TV and tell us about their grand plans to fulfill the expectations of the people that this shall be a government of and for and by said people. Oops! Sorry! I made a mistake. No, they have to have money to tell us how sorry their opponents are and how unworthy they are to represent us – the people. And who gives our reps the money to provide this meaningful information? Why it's the proponents of the only true God, The Lord Mammon. So when laws are written, who writes them?

Death. Wounds. Hell. Screams. Fear. Hate. Bastards. Merde.

That leaves me with the final object of my disappointments and the realization that our sacrifices were in vain. I am mad as hell about the fake religion that charlatans have presented to the American public as Christianity. In the early 1950's, I was driving home along Highway 82 in North Texas rather late one night. The only radio station coming in loud and clear was one located in Mexico carrying religious broadcasts. I was rather amused at the ignorance that came over the airwaves. I thought to myself this sort of cheap emotionalism would only be accepted by the most ignorant of people. I heard the following spoken with a deep southern drawl and a saccharine voice.

"Friends, neighbors, this is your Christian friend, speaking from Kentucky. Now friends, I know that many of you have problems with your wife or your husband. Some of your children are not turning out all right. And I know that some of you are having trouble with your boss. Well, friends, your troubles are over. Every Thursday morning, I go to the upper room in my house and I pray hard. I pray hard to the Lord and the Lord blesses me. Holy drops of oil appear in the palms of my hands. (At this point the voice was quite shaky and filled with emotion.) Now friends, if you will send me $ 5.00 I will send you a cloth on which I have wiped some of the drops of holy oil from the palm of my hands. Now neighbor, if you take that cloth and touch your loved one with it, drape it over a picture of your loved one, rub your bosses car, or toolkit, or his desk with it, neighbor if you do that, all your troubles will go away. Send your $ 5.00 to me and I will send you the cloth with holy oil. The Lord God Himself has blessed it."

And I submit to you, America's popular religion today is not more than snake oil being peddled by charlatans. Educated people have bought into the claptrap of personal salvation without social responsibility. Popular religion is like the rabbit’s foot supposedly bringing you good luck. It has all of the superstition of a four-leaf clover or hanging a horseshoe over your barn door with the open end pointing upwards. It is like the witches' brew in Macbeth. Myths, fables, and belief in the absurd make up the potion guaranteed to bring whatever one wishes. Our leaders think that if we invoke the name of God long enough and loud enough, God will descend from heaven and bless this nation.

The prophetic tradition of the Bible is quite clear on the point that a nation preoccupied with materialism will go down the tube. I am paraphrasing Amos 8:4 – 6 bringing his words into our own socio/economic setting. "Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land saying, When will the weekend be over so we can get on with the business of making money and cooking the balance sheet by transferring debts to offshore companies. We will provide inferior services and products and make a hell of a lot of money. We will be deceitful but it’s all within the law because we have written the laws ourselves. We will charge the masses more than our stuff is worth and overcharge them for things they must have like electricity, food, and gasoline."

If you think I have overstated the case, read the passage yourself, find out its historical setting and you will realize that Amos was twice as tough on the controlling alphas as I ever thought about being. If you access my columns in YellowTimes.org entitled, "The Rev. Dr. Billy Graham's Unpardonable Sin" (April 23) and "Why religion persists…" (June 25) you will understand my concerns.

What do these self-styled Christians know about the great prophetic tradition of an Isaiah, an Amos, a Jesus? All they can ask is, "Are you saved?" And by the Lord Mammon you are not if you don't do it my way! Damn you if you don't!

This is not what we died for and suffered for. This is not why we suffer our disabilities gladly. This is not why Pvt. Kopko got a piece of shrapnel in his skull.

Death. Wounds. Hell. Screams. Fear. Hate. Bastards. Merde.

[John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company. He is the author of "Shaking the Foundations." (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/075961041X/yellowtimes-20)]

John Brand encourages your comments: jbrand@YellowTimes.org

YellowTimes.org encourages its material to be reproduced, reprinted, or broadcast provided that any such reproduction must identify the original source, http://www.YellowTimes.org . Internet web links to http://www.YellowTimes.org are appreciated.

http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=491

High Treason in US Government

Below is a compelling and accurate description of the USA PATRIOT Act which passed the US Senate 98 -1 and passed the US House or Representatives 357 - 66 in October 2001. The bill eviscerates many of the protections of the Bill of Rights including allowing the Government to search people's homes without presenting a warrant, to monitor all forms of electronic communication without a warrant, to imprison citizens for 6 months without seeing a judge, and a lot more. -Rob

High Treason in the US Government 07/08/02 By: Doreen Miller

Q: Just who is a terrorist?

A: Anyone (non-U.S. citizen or U.S. citizen alike) Attorney General Ashcroft designates as one.

Q: On what evidence can Ashcroft designate someone as a terrorist?

A: Mere suspicion and hearsay.

Q: What legal rights and Constitutional protections does someone detained on the grounds of being a suspected terrorist have?

A: Next to none.

It may be difficult for some hard-core, patriotic Americans to believe the veracity of the preceding question and answer series, but the answers to the questions are based upon the implications and dangerous ramifications of the USA PATRIOT Act (USAPA) that was passed last October by so-called congressional representatives who never bothered to read or debate it.

It slipped through at the midnight hour under the cover of darkness, voted on by men and women engulfed in a terrifying atmosphere of shock, fear, mass media hysteria, and suspiciously targeted anthrax mailings.

U.S. government officials would have us believe that this 342-page, complexly nuanced document was allegedly crafted after September 11 in the time span of a little over a month. To accomplish this feat would have required the in-depth study of fifteen other lengthy acts and statutes which it modifies and amends.

The act's extremely clever yet highly misleading acronym USA PATRIOT, which stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," is an obvious attempt to intimidate and brand as "unpatriotic" and treasonous anyone who might dare to question its alarmingly overreaching provisions.

In light of the egregious evisceration of the Bill of Rights that this law undertakes, those who blindly supported and signed this blatantly unconstitutional act into law should be collectively condemned and charged for high treason to the Constitution and the people of the United States of America.

Careful perusal of the USAPA reveals that it defiantly and maliciously tramples on:

* The First Amendment - the people's right to exercise freedom of religion, speech and peaceful assembly "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"

* The Fourth Amendment - the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" whereby warrants - only to be issued upon "probable cause" - must be specific as to place to be searched and persons or things to be seized

* The Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth amendments - which outline the right to due process - a trial by one's peers, to face one's accuser as well as view the evidence against oneself, and to have an attorney

* The Eighth Amendment - which safeguards the people against excessive bale and fines, or cruel and unusual punishment

Under sections 411 and 802 in the USAPA, a terrorist is loosely defined as anyone being "a representative of a foreign terrorist organization, as designated by the Secretary of State," and domestically, anyone engaging in "activities that - involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; APPEAR to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; TO INFLUENCE THE POLICY OF A GOVERNMENT BY INTIMIDATION OR COERCION..." [capitals mine]

The inclusion of the word "appear" leaves interpretation of the law wide open to subjectivity and personal whim, as anyone can rightfully claim something "appears" to be intended for a particular purpose. Note also that our first amendment right to gather in protest against what we may see as unjust government policies could easily fall under the concept of "influencing" government policy by "intimidation or coercion."

Anyone participating in activist groups such as Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or in protests like the 1999 demonstration in Seattle against the WTO could find himself suddenly stripped of his rights by the simple act of being declared a "terrorist" in keeping with the definition of this law. Under section 803 of this Act, even the simple act of giving food or shelter to a friend who may have been involved in any of the aforementioned activities could, in turn, have you incriminated and branded as a "terrorist" as well.

The USA Patriot Act absolutely shreds to bits the fourth amendment. Section 213 permits so-called "sneak and peek" searches. Translated, that means the government has the right to go into your home while you are away, copy your hard drive, files, or whatever, gather and take any information or items they please without ever serving you notice since "the execution of a warrant may have adverse effect." They can then delay serving you notice for up to 90 days after the fact. These newfangled warrants can now be issued for a flimsy "reasonable cause," further undermining the much more difficult to achieve "probable cause" stipulation of the fourth amendment.

Sections 216, 217 and 218 allow for unrestricted wiretapping, the tracing and spying on email messages and internet activities of anyone anywhere in the USA without the need to obtain a court order as long as "the information likely to be obtained... is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." How nebulous can that get? A lawyer of any worth would be able to argue the "relevance" of anything to an unspecified "ongoing criminal investigation." Kiss your protection from "unreasonable searches" good-bye and say hello to Big Brother USA.

If you think this law applies only to foreign nationals, think again. José Padilla, although by no means a model U.S.-born citizen, had his civil rights stripped from him this past May just by Ashcroft's uttering the magic words, "enemy combatant" and "suspected terrorist." To this day, no solid evidence has been produced to substantiate Ashcroft's claims - neither bomb parts, nor bomb assembly instructions, nor any plans or maps of intended strike areas.

A "suspected terrorist," according to section 112, needs only to be "certified" by the Attorney General on "reasonable grounds" that he "believes" someone to be engaged in terrorist activities. Again, no solid evidence is required, only a belief or suspicion suffices.

Section 236A gives the Attorney General unprecedented powers untouchable by any court, whereby he may detain a suspect in increments of up to six months at a time if he believes the suspect's release would threaten national security, or the safety of the community or any person. "At the Attorney General's discretion" [read: personal whims], "NO court shall have jurisdiction to review, by habeas corpus, petition, or otherwise, any such action or decision." [capitals mine]

In other words, the Attorney General's word is sacrosanct! To give one man such grave and all-encompassing power over the fate of any other individual is akin to what happens in fascist police states, not in a free and openly democratic society.

Whatever happened to one's right to face one's accuser, to have a fair trial by one's peers, to be allowed to view the evidence against oneself, or to have an attorney?

Is it not cruel and unusual punishment to be denied your civil rights, to be considered guilty until you can "prove yourself innocent" - which is, in fact, very difficult to do - to be held in prison on "secret evidence" for months or years on end with no access to a lawyer and no chance of defending yourself against false and unfounded accusations?

I heard President Bush on the news a few weeks ago boasting that the U.S. has so far "captured and detained over 2,400 suspected terrorists." Yet, by most accounts, most people being detained were initially brought in on minor violations (which in a saner world would not have resulted in incarceration), and have not had any terrorist-related charges brought against them.

To this day, it is my understanding that fewer than a dozen have actually been connected to any terrorist activity. Is that what a democracy does: imprison whole groups of people to catch the fewer than 1 percent who are actually committing criminal acts?

The USA PATRIOT Act also includes under the "crimes of terrorism" umbrella the destruction of property even if no one is hurt (section 808), telemarketing fraud (section 1011), as well as any kind of computer hacking (section 217). Under the rubric of "guilt by association," this act also permits the denial of entry to and even the imprisonment of "the spouse or child of an inadmissible alien" who's been "designated" as a terrorist within the past five years (section 211).

The FBI can now legitimately demand access to anyone's business, medical, student, bank, library or any other personal records in order "to protect against ... clandestine intelligence activities." (Sec. 501) The Associated Press reported on June 25 that the FBI has been reviewing the library records of several hundred individuals in libraries across the nation using a quick and largely secret process which is now legal under the PATRIOT Act.

Judith Krug, the American Library Association's director for intellectual freedom, in a straight-forward statement is quoted as saying, "... these records and information can be had with so little reason or explanation. It's super secret, and anyone who wants to talk about what the FBI did at their library faces prosecution. That has nothing to do with patriotism."

It seems we must now extend Ashcroft's warning about watching what we say in public to include what we may read as well. It is really not such a large leap to imagine our hyperparanoid government beginning to imprison people suspected of "aiding and abetting the enemy" based upon their "unpatriotic" ideologies and choice of reading material.

The USA PATRIOT Act creates and allows for a virtual police state with little to no judicial oversight. We, as a nation, are literally treading the razor's edge when it comes to flirting with the grave dangers inherent in giving up our rights for the empty promises of "safety" and "national security" masquerading under the guise of a "patriotic" PATRIOT Act. Once we fall off that edge, reclaiming and reinstating our rights, authority and power as "WE THE PEOPLE" of this great nation might prove very difficult.

The next obvious question is: just what can the average person do? Across this nation, wise and enlightened individuals have been forming groups to fight the injustices that the PATRIOT Act imposes on us. Resolutions have been passed unanimously by city councils in Amherst, Leverett, Northampton, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Denver, and Cambridge. Other cities and towns are in the process of preparing their own resolutions and gathering signatures on petitions to protect our civil liberties against the offenses of this Act.

The Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee's website, (www.gjf.org/NBORDC), offers a wide range of organizing tools, links, and information about similar campaigns around the country to help you get started in your own community.

A rally in Boston this past June 22 kicked off a movement in Massachusetts to gather 100,000 signatures to petition our Mass. congressional delegates to introduce a bill that would call for the repeal or amendment of those sections of the PATRIOT Act that stand in clear violation of our constitutional rights. For more information or to get involved, you may contact the ACLU of Massachusetts at 617-482-3170 x 314.

At this critical juncture, to sit back and naïvely trust our government officials to protect anything other than maintaining their own uncontested, ill-gotten power is to risk losing the very liberties, rights, and freedoms our founding fathers fought so hard to procure for each and every one of us.

If we don't stand up for our rights, then who will? If we don't demand the extension of these same rights to all people within our borders, then we are nothing but accomplices in the hypocritical, haphazard, and biased application of our nation's core principles of democracy and equal rights.

Addendum: For those who may be interested, the final official version of the USA PATRIOT Act can be found here:

http://216.110.42.179/docs/usa.act.final.102401.html

Doreen Miller encourages your comments: dmiller@YellowTimes.org

Reproduced gratefully from: YellowTimes.org

The Eagle Has Crash Landed

<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2002/wallerstein.html>

Pax Americana is over. Challenges from Vietnam and the Balkans to the
Middle East and September 11 have revealed the limits of American
supremacy. Will the United States learn to fade quietly, or will U.S.
conservatives resist and thereby transform a gradual decline into a rapid
and dangerous fall?

By Immanuel Wallerstein

The United States in decline? Few people today would believe this
assertion. The only ones who do are the U.S. hawks, who argue vociferously
for policies to reverse the decline. This belief that the end of U.S.
hegemony has already begun does not follow from the vulnerability that
became apparent to all on September 11, 2001. In fact, the United States
has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response to
the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated
this decline. To understand why the so-called Pax Americana is on the wane
requires examining the geopolitics of the 20th century, particularly of the
century's final three decades. This exercise uncovers a simple and
inescapable conclusion: The economic, political, and military factors that
contributed to U.S. hegemony are the same factors that will inexorably
produce the coming U.S. decline.
                       Intro to hegemony
The rise of the United States to global hegemony was a long process that
began in earnest with the world recession of 1873. At that time, the United
States and Germany began to acquire an increasing share of global markets,
mainly at the expense of the steadily receding British economy. Both
nations had recently acquired a stable political base, the United States by
successfully terminating the Civil War and Germany by achieving unification
and defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War. From 1873 to 1914, the
United States and Germany became the principal producers in certain leading
sectors: steel and later automobiles for the United States and industrial
chemicals for Germany.
The history books record that World War I broke out in 1914 and ended in
1918 and that World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945. However, it makes more
sense to consider the two as a single, continuous "30 years' war" between
the United States and Germany, with truces and local conflicts scattered in
between. The competition for hegemonic succession took an ideological turn
in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their quest to
transcend the global system altogether, seeking not hegemony within the
current system but rather a form of global empire. Recall the Nazi slogan
ein tausendjähriges Reich (a thousand-year empire). In turn, the United
States assumed the role of advocate of centrist world liberalism, recall
former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "four freedoms" (freedom of
speech, of worship, from want, and from fear)and entered into a strategic
alliance with the Soviet Union, making possible the defeat of Germany and
its allies.
World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and
populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans,
with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial power in
the world to emerge intact, and even greatly strengthened from an economic
perspective, was the United States, which moved swiftly to consolidate its
position.
But the aspiring hegemon faced some practical political obstacles. During
the war, the Allied powers had agreed on the establishment of the United
Nations, composed primarily of countries that had been in the coalition
against the Axis powers. The organization's critical feature was the
Security Council, the only structure that could authorize the use of force.
Since the U.N. Charter gave the right of veto to five powers, including the
United States and the Soviet
Unionthe council was rendered largely toothless in practice. So it was not
the founding of the United Nations in April 1945 that determined the
geopolitical constraints of the second half of the 20th century but rather
the Yalta meeting between Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin two months earlier.
The formal accords at Yalta were less important than the informal, unspoken
agreements, which one can only assess by observing the behavior of the
United States and the Soviet Union in the years that followed. When the war
ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (that is, U.S., British,
and French) troops were located in particular places, essentially, along a
line in the center of Europe that came to be called the Oder-Neisse Line.
Aside from a few minor adjustments, they stayed there. In hindsight, Yalta
signified the agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that
neither side would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord
applied to Asia as well, as evinced by U.S. occupation of Japan and the
division of Korea. Politically, therefore, Yalta was an agreement on the
status quo in which the Soviet Union controlled about one third of the
world and the United States the rest.
Washington also faced more serious military challenges. The Soviet Union
had the world's largest land forces, while the U.S. government was under
domestic pressure to downsize its army, particularly by ending the draft.
The United States therefore decided to assert its military strength not via
land forces but through a monopoly of nuclear weapons (plus an
air force capable of deploying them). This monopoly soon disappeared: By
1949, the Soviet Union had developed nuclear weapons as well. Ever since,
the United States has been reduced to trying to prevent the acquisition of
nuclear weapons (and chemical and biological weapons) by additional powers,
an effort that, in the 21st century, does not seem terribly successful.
Until 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union coexisted in the
"balance of terror" of the Cold War. This status quo was tested seriously
only three times: the Berlin blockade of 194849, the Korean War in 195053,
and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The result in each case was
restoration of the status quo. Moreover, note how each time the Soviet
Union faced a political crisis among its satellite regimes, East Germany in
1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia
in 1968, and Poland in 1981the United States engaged in little more than
propaganda exercises, allowing the Soviet Union to proceed largely as it
deemed fit.
Of course, this passivity did not extend to the economic arena. The United
States capitalized on the Cold War ambiance to launch massive economic
reconstruction efforts, first in Western Europe and then in Japan (as well
as in South Korea and Taiwan). The rationale was obvious: What was the
point of having such overwhelming productive superiority if the rest of the
world could not muster effective demand? Furthermore, economic
reconstruction helped create clientelistic obligations on the part of the
nations receiving U.S. aid; this sense of obligation fostered willingness
to enter into military alliances and, even more important, into political
subservience.
Finally, one should not underestimate the ideological and cultural
component of U.S. hegemony. The immediate post-1945 period may have been
the historical high point for the popularity of communist ideology. We
easily forget today the large votes for Communist parties in free elections
in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Finland,
not to mention the support Communist parties gathered in Asiain Vietnam,
India, and Japan, and throughout Latin America. And that still leaves out
areas such as China, Greece, and Iran, where free elections remained absent
or constrained but where Communist parties enjoyed widespread appeal. In
response, the United States sustained a massive anticommunist ideological
offensive. In retrospect, this initiative appears largely successful:
Washington
brandished its role as the leader of the "free world" at least as
effectively as the Soviet Union brandished its position as the leader of
the "progressive" and "anti-imperialist" camp.
                       One, Two, Many Vietnams
The United States' success as a hegemonic power in the postwar period
created the conditions of the nation's hegemonic demise. This process is
captured in four symbols: the war in Vietnam, the revolutions of 1968, the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the terrorist attacks of September
2001. Each symbol built upon the prior one, culminating in the situation in
which the United States currently finds itself, a lone superpower that
lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a
nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control.
What was the Vietnam War? First and foremost, it was the effort of the
Vietnamese people to end colonial rule and establish their own state. The
Vietnamese fought the French, the Japanese, and the Americans, and in the
end the Vietnamese won, quite an achievement, actually. Geopolitically,
however, the war represented a rejection of the Yalta status quo by
populations then labeled as Third World. Vietnam became such a powerful
symbol because Washington was foolish enough to invest its full military
might in the struggle, but the United States still lost. True, the United
States didn't deploy nuclear weapons (a decision certain myopic groups on
the right have long reproached), but such use would have shattered the
Yalta accords and might have produced a nuclear holocaust, an outcome the
United States
simply could not risk.
But Vietnam was not merely a military defeat or a blight on U.S. prestige.
The war dealt a major blow to the United States' ability to remain the
world's dominant economic power. The conflict was extremely expensive and
more or less used up the U.S. gold reserves that had been so plentiful
since 1945. Moreover, the United States incurred these costs just as
Western Europe and Japan experienced major economic upswings. These
conditions ended U.S. preeminence in
the global economy. Since the late 1960s, members of this triad have been
nearly economic equals, each doing better than the others for certain
periods but none moving far ahead.
When the revolutions of 1968 broke out around the world, support for the
Vietnamese became a major rhetorical component. "One, two, many Vietnams"
and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" were chanted in many a street, not least in the
United States. But the 1968ers did not merely condemn U.S. hegemony. They
condemned Soviet collusion with the United States, they condemned Yalta,
and they used or adapted the language of the Chinese cultural
revolutionaries who divided the world into two camps, the two superpowers
and the rest of the world.
The denunciation of Soviet collusion led logically to the denunciation of
those national forces closely allied with the Soviet Union, which meant in
most cases the traditional Communist parties. But the 1968 revolutionaries
also lashed out against other components of the Old Left, national
liberation movements in the Third World, social-democratic movements in
Western Europe, and New Deal Democrats in the United States, accusing them,
too, of collusion with
what the revolutionaries generically termed "U.S. imperialism."
The attack on Soviet collusion with Washington plus the attack on the Old
Left further weakened the legitimacy of the Yalta arrangements on which the
United States had fashioned the world order. It also undermined the
position of centrist liberalism as the lone, legitimate global ideology.
The direct political consequences of the world revolutions of 1968 were
minimal, but the geopolitical and intellectual repercussions were enormous
and irrevocable. Centrist liberalism tumbled from the throne it had
occupied since the European revolutions of 1848 and that had enabled it to
co-opt conservatives and radicals alike. These ideologies returned and once
again represented a real gamut of choices.
Conservatives would again become conservatives, and radicals, radicals. The
centrist liberals did not disappear, but they were cut down to size. And in
the process, the official U.S. ideological position, antifascist,
anticommunist, anticolonialist, seemed thin and unconvincing to a growing
portion of the world's populations.
                       The Powerless Superpower
The onset of international economic stagnation in the 1970s had two
important consequences for U.S. power. First, stagnation resulted in the
collapse of "developmentalism", the notion that every nation could catch up
economically if the state took appropriate action, which was the principal
ideological claim of the Old Left movements then in power.
One after another, these regimes faced internal disorder, declining
standards of living, increasing debt dependency on international financial
institutions, and eroding credibility. What had seemed in the 1960s to be
the successful navigation of Third World decolonization by the United
States, minimizing disruption and maximizing the smooth transfer of power
to regimes that were developmentalist but scarcely revolutionary, gave way
to disintegrating order, simmering discontents, and unchanneled radical
temperaments. When the United States tried to intervene, it failed. In
1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent troops to Lebanon to restore order.
The troops were in effect forced out. He compensated by invading Grenada, a
country without troops. President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama, another
country without troops. But after he intervened in Somalia to restore
order, the United States was in effect forced out, somewhat ignominiously.
Since there was little the U.S. government could actually do to reverse the
trend of declining hegemony, it chose simply to ignore this trend, a policy
that prevailed from the withdrawal from Vietnam until September 11, 2001.
Meanwhile, true conservatives began to assume control of key states and
interstate institutions. The neoliberal offensive of the 1980s was marked
by the Thatcher and Reagan regimes and the emergence of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) as a key actor on the world scene. Where once (for more
than a century) conservative forces had attempted to portray themselves as
wiser liberals, now centrist liberals were compelled to argue that they
were more effective conservatives. The conservative programs were clear.
Domestically, conservatives tried to enact policies that would reduce the
cost of labor, minimize environmental constraints on producers, and cut
back on state welfare benefits. Actual successes were modest, so
conservatives then moved vigorously into the international arena. The
gatherings of the World Economic Forum in Davos provided a meeting ground
for elites and the media. The IMF provided a club for finance ministers and
central bankers. And the United States pushed for the creation of the World
Trade
Organization to enforce free commercial flows across the world's frontiers.
While the United States wasn't watching, the Soviet Union was collapsing.
Yes, Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and had
used the rhetorical bombast of calling for the destruction of the Berlin
Wall, but the United States didn't really mean it and certainly was not
responsible for the Soviet Union's downfall. In truth, the Soviet Union and
its East European imperial zone collapsed because of popular
disillusionment with the Old Left in combination with
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to save his regime by liquidating
Yalta and instituting internal liberalization (perestroika plus glasnost).
Gorbachev succeeded in liquidating Yalta but not in saving the Soviet Union
(although he almost did, be it said).
The United States was stunned and puzzled by the sudden collapse, uncertain
how to handle the consequences. The collapse of communism in effect
signified the collapse of liberalism, removing the only ideological
justification behind U.S. hegemony, a justification tacitly supported by
liberalism's ostensible ideological opponent. This loss of legitimacy led
directly to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein
would never have dared had the Yalta
arrangements remained in place. In retrospect, U.S. efforts in the Gulf War
accomplished a truce at basically the same line of departure. But can a
hegemonic power be satisfied with a tie in a war with a middling regional
power? Saddam demonstrated that one could pick a fight with the United
States and get away with it. Even more than the defeat in Vietnam, Saddam's
brash challenge has eaten at the innards of the U.S. right, in particular
those known as the hawks,
which explains the fervor of their current desire to invade Iraq and
destroy its regime.
Between the Gulf War and September 11, 2001, the two major arenas of world
conflict were the Balkans and the Middle East. The United States has played
a major diplomatic role in both regions. Looking back, how different would
the results have been had the United States assumed a completely
isolationist position? In the Balkans, an economically successful
multinational state (Yugoslavia) broke down, essentially into its component
parts. Over 10 years, most of the resulting states have engaged in a
process of ethnification, experiencing fairly brutal violence, widespread
human rights violations, and outright wars. Outside intervention, in which
the United States figured most prominently, brought about a truce and ended
the most egregious violence, but this intervention in no way reversed the
ethnification, which is now
consolidated and somewhat legitimated. Would these conflicts have ended
differently without U.S. involvement? The violence might have continued
longer, but the basic results would probably not have been too different.
The picture is even grimmer in the Middle East, where, if anything, U.S.
engagement has been deeper and its failures more spectacular. In the
Balkans and the Middle East alike, the United States has failed to exert
its hegemonic clout effectively,
not for want of will or effort but for want of real power.
                       The Hawks Undone
Then came September 11, the shock and the reaction. Under fire from U.S.
legislators, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) now claims it had warned
the Bush administration of possible threats. But despite the CIA's focus on
al Qaeda and the agency's intelligence expertise, it could not foresee (and
therefore, prevent) the execution of the terrorist strikes. Or so would
argue CIA Director George Tenet. This testimony can hardly comfort the U.S.
government or the American people. Whatever else historians may decide, the
attacks of September 11, 2001, posed a major challenge to U.S. power. The
persons responsible did not represent a major military power. They were
members of a nonstate force, with a high degree of determination, some
money, a band of dedicated followers, and a strong base in one weak state.
In short, militarily, they were nothing. Yet they succeeded in a bold
attack on U.S. soil.
George W. Bush came to power very critical of the Clinton administration's
handling of world affairs. Bush and his advisors did not admit, but were
undoubtedly aware, that Clinton's path had been the path of every U.S.
president since Gerald Ford, including that of Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush. It had even been the path of the current Bush administration
before September 11. One only needs to look at how Bush handled the downing
of the U.S. plane
off China in April 2001 to see that prudence had been the name of the game.
Following the terrorist attacks, Bush changed course, declaring war on
terrorism, assuring the American people that "the outcome is certain" and
informing the world that "you are either with us or against us." Long
frustrated by even the most conservative U.S. administrations, the hawks
finally came to dominate American policy. Their position is clear: The
United States wields overwhelming military power, and even though countless
foreign leaders consider it unwise for Washington to flex its military
muscles, these same leaders cannot and will not do anything if the United
States simply imposes its will on the rest. The hawks believe the United
States should act as an imperial power for two reasons: First, the United
States can get away with it. And second, if Washington doesn't exert its
force, the United States will become increasingly marginalized.
Today, this hawkish position has three expressions: the military assault in
Afghanistan, the de facto support for the Israeli attempt to liquidate the
Palestinian Authority, and the invasion of Iraq, which is reportedly in the
military preparation stage. Less than one year after the September 2001
terrorist attacks, it is perhaps too early to assess what such strategies
will accomplish. Thus far, these schemes have led to the overthrow of the
Taliban in Afghanistan (without the complete dismantling of al Qaeda or the
capture of its top leadership); enormous destruction in Palestine (without
rendering Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat "irrelevant," as Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon said he is); and heavy opposition from U.S. allies in
Europe and the Middle East to plans for an invasion of Iraq.
The hawks' reading of recent events emphasizes that opposition to U.S.
actions, while serious, has remained largely verbal. Neither Western Europe
nor Russia nor China nor Saudi Arabia has seemed ready to break ties in
serious ways with the United States. In other words, hawks believe,
Washington has indeed gotten away with it. The hawks assume a similar
outcome will occur when the U.S. military actually invades Iraq and after
that, when the United States
exercises its authority elsewhere in the world, be it in Iran, North Korea,
Colombia, or perhaps Indonesia. Ironically, the hawk reading has largely
become the reading of the international left, which has been screaming
about U.S. policies, mainly because they fear that the chances of U.S.
success are high.
But hawk interpretations are wrong and will only contribute to the United
States' decline, transforming a gradual descent into a much more rapid and
turbulent fall. Specifically, hawk approaches will fail for military,
economic, and ideological reasons.
Undoubtedly, the military remains the United States' strongest card; in
fact, it is the only card. Today, the United States wields the most
formidable military apparatus in the world. And if claims of new, unmatched
military technologies are to be believed, the U.S. military edge over the
rest of the world is considerably greater today than it was just a decade
ago. But does that mean, then, that the United States can invade Iraq,
conquer it rapidly, and install a friendly and stable regime? Unlikely.
Bear in mind that of the three serious wars the U.S. military has fought
since 1945 (Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War), one ended in defeat and two
in draws, not exactly a glorious record.
Saddam Hussein's army is not that of the Taliban, and his internal military
control is far more coherent. A U.S. invasion would necessarily involve a
serious land force, one that would have to fight its way to Baghdad and
would likely suffer significant casualties. Such a force would also need
staging grounds, and Saudi Arabia has made clear that it will not serve in
this capacity. Would Kuwait or Turkey help out? Perhaps, if Washington
calls in all its chips. Meanwhile,
Saddam can be expected to deploy all weapons at his disposal, and it is
precisely the U.S. government that keeps fretting over how nasty those
weapons might be. The United States may twist the arms of regimes in the
region, but popular sentiment clearly views the whole affair as reflecting
a deep anti-Arab bias in the United States. Can such a conflict be won? The
British General Staff has apparently already informed Prime Minister Tony
Blair that it does not
believe so.
And there is always the matter of "second fronts." Following the Gulf War,
U.S. armed forces sought to prepare for the possibility of two simultaneous
regional wars. After a while, the Pentagon quietly abandoned the idea as
impractical and costly. But who can be sure that no potential U.S. enemies
would strike when the United States appears bogged down in Iraq?
Consider, too, the question of U.S. popular tolerance of nonvictories.
Americans hover between a patriotic fervor that lends support to all
wartime presidents and a deep isolationist urge. Since 1945, patriotism has
hit a wall whenever the death toll has risen. Why should today's reaction
differ? And even if the hawks (who are almost all civilians) feel
impervious to public opinion, U.S. Army generals, burnt by Vietnam, do not.
And what about the economic front? In the 1980s, countless American
analysts became hysterical over the Japanese economic miracle. They calmed
down in the 1990s, given Japan's well-publicized financial difficulties.
Yet after
overstating how quickly Japan was moving forward, U.S. authorities now seem
to be complacent, confident that Japan lags far behind. These days,
Washington seems more inclined to lecture Japanese policymakers about what
they are doing wrong.
Such triumphalism hardly appears warranted. Consider the following April
20, 2002, New York Times report: "A Japanese laboratory has built the
world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches the raw
processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far
outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine.
The achievement ... is evidence that a technology race that most American
engineers thought they were winning handily is far from over." The analysis
goes on to note that there are "contrasting scientific and technological
priorities" in the two countries. The Japanese machine is built to analyze
climatic change, but U.S. machines are designed to simulate weapons. This
contrast embodies the oldest story in the history of hegemonic powers. The
dominant power
concentrates (to its detriment) on the military; the candidate for
successor concentrates on the economy. The latter has always paid off,
handsomely. It did for the United States. Why should it not pay off for
Japan as well, perhaps in alliance with China?
Finally, there is the ideological sphere. Right now, the U.S. economy seems
relatively weak, even more so considering the exorbitant military expenses
associated with hawk strategies. Moreover, Washington remains politically
isolated; virtually no one (save Israel) thinks the hawk position makes
sense or is worth encouraging. Other nations are afraid or unwilling to
stand up to Washington directly, but even their foot-dragging is hurting
the United States.
Yet the U.S. response amounts to little more than arrogant arm-twisting.
Arrogance has its own negatives. Calling in chips means leaving fewer chips
for next time, and surly acquiescence breeds increasing resentment. Over
the last 200 years, the United States acquired a considerable amount of
ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through
this credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s.
The United States faces two possibilities during the next 10 years: It can
follow the hawks' path, with negative consequences for all but especially
for itself. Or it can realize that the negatives are too great. Simon
Tisdall of the Guardian recently argued that even disregarding
international public opinion, "the U.S. is not able to fight a successful
Iraqi war by itself without incurring immense damage, not least in terms of
its economic interests and its energy supply.
Mr. Bush is reduced to talking tough and looking ineffectual." And if the
United States still invades Iraq and is then forced to withdraw, it will
look even more ineffectual.
President Bush's options appear extremely limited, and there is little
doubt that the United States will continue to decline as a decisive force
in world affairs over the next decade. The real question is not whether
U.S. hegemony is waning but whether the United States can devise a way to
descend gracefully, with minimum damage to the world, and to itself.
-------------
Immanuel Wallerstein is a senior research scholar at Yale University and
author of, most recently, The End of the World As We Know It: Social
Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999)

All Along the Watchtower

http://truthout.com/docs_02/06.21A.pitt.watchtower.htm

20 June, 2002 By William Rivers Pitt

Stanley Hilton, a San Francisco attorney and former aide to Senator Bob Dole, filed a $7 billion lawsuit in U.S. District Court on June 3rd. The class-action suit names ten defendants, among whom are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Norman Mineta.

Hilton's suit charges Bush and his administration with allowing the September 11th attacks to take place so as to reap political benefits from the catastrophe. Hilton alleges that Osama bin Laden is being used as a scapegoat by an administration that ignored pressing warnings of the attack and refused to round up suspected terrorists beforehand. Hilton alleges the ultimate motivation behind these acts was achieved when the Taliban were replaced by American military forces with a regime friendly to America and its oil interests in the region.

Hilton's plaintiffs in this case are the families of 14 victims of 9/11, numbering 400 people nationwide. These are the same families that rallied in Washington recently to advocate for an independent investigation into the attacks. The current 9/11 hearings are being conducted by Congress behind closed doors, a situation these families find unacceptable.

Mr. Hilton, by filing his lawsuit, has joined the ranks of an ever-increasing body of Americans who subscribe to what they call the LIHOP Theory. LIHOP stands for Let It Happen On Purpose. The LIHOP Theory puts forward the accusation that Bush and his people allowed the September 11th attacks to take place, despite the fact that they had been repeatedly warned of an impending strike.

The LIHOP Theory is straightforward: In the months before 9/11, American intelligence agencies received ominous warnings from the intelligence services of nations like Israel, Russia, Egypt and Germany. These warnings were pointed - an attack involving hijacked aircraft and prominent American landmarks was imminent, our security forces were told. Bush himself was briefed of these warnings weeks before they happened. Instead of responding vigorously to these warnings, the Bush administration and its security apparatus did nothing.

LIHOP is, of course, the purest breed of conspiracy theory, involving high-ranking members of government from both parties, as well as the CIA, FBI and NSA. Like all good conspiracy theories, LIHOP is surrounded by disturbing facts and bits of evidence that are difficult to ignore.

The warnings from all those foreign intelligence services, after all, are quite real. Egypt, Germany, Russia and the Israelis were vociferous in their concerns. The German intelligence service BND told US and Israeli intelligence that Middle East terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The BND's information came through Echelon, the American-controlled network of 120 satellites that monitors all worldwide electronic communications.

Egypt voiced similar warnings that same month regarding aircraft attacks. Delivered just before the G-8 summit in Genoa, Egypt's alert carried such weight that anti-aircraft batteries were placed around Columbus Airport in Italy. The Russians warned the US that same summer of 25 pilots who had been trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself delivered the warning "in the strongest possible terms" to the US government. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad delivered a warning to both the FBI and the CIA detailing "a major assault on the United States" against "a large-scale target" that was "very vulnerable."

The Washington Post has reported that the NSA intercepted two messages on September 10, 2001, warning that something was going to happen the next day. "Tomorrow is zero hour," was one of the messages. The NSA's charter is to intercept, translate and pass on to FBI and CIA operatives important electronic signals from all across the globe. The Echelon satellite network which provided the German BND with their 9/11 information last June is part of that system.

According to the NSA, the September 10th data was not translated until September 12th, but it stands to reason that they were privy to the same electronic data the other foreign services were using as the basis for their warnings. One US intelligence source claims the data provided "no actionable intelligence," a fair claim given the vagueness of the messages and the volume of material NSA must deal with. Yet in combination with the strident foreign intelligence warnings, the words intercepted by our large electronic ears on September 10th add to the growing questions.

Then, there are the threads. A FEMA official told Dan Rather that the disaster agency had been at the World Trade Center on September 10th. Why? Governor Jeb Bush of Florida signed executive order #01-261 on September 7th, putting his state's National Guard on heightened alert status, essentially placing Florida under martial law for no demonstrable reason. Why? Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft in the weeks before 9/11, something he had commonly done since his entry into the administration. Why?

At the core of the LIHOP Theory lies motivation - what possible purpose could be served by the Bush administration allowing a terrorist attack to take place on American soil? It is flatly inconceivable to most Americans that Bush and his people could demonstrate such callous disregard for American lives, and accusations that they allowed an attack to happen reek of the worst kind of poisonous partisan politics.

LIHOP Theory, however, is not so easily dismissed. Two French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, have published an extensively-researched book entitled "Osama bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth." In it, they allege that the Bush administration put energy policy before national security concerns. According to Brisard and Dasquie, a foundering pipeline project aimed at exploiting natural gas reserves along the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan was revived by the Bush administration when it arrived in Washington in January of 2001.

The pipeline project, which sought to bring oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a warm water port, had been the brainchild of American petroleum giant Unocal for much of the 1990s. After the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 by Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration forbade any American companies from doing business with the Taliban, which had been sheltering bin Laden in Afghanistan. Unocal's pipeline project was frozen.

After the Bush administration came to power, Brisard and Dasquie allege that reinvigorating the pipeline project became a high-priority matter of policy. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was dispatched to Pakistan to discuss the pipeline with Taliban officials in August of 2001. Rocca, a career officer with the CIA, had been deeply involved in Agency activities within Afghanistan. According to documents Brisard and Dasquie claim to hold, the main subject of their discussion was oil. A Pakistani foreign minister was also present at the meeting, and witnessed the exchange.

How does this pipeline relate to September 11th? According to Brisard and Dasquie, the main obstacle to the completion of the pipeline was the fact that it had to pass through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The project would receive no international support unless the Afghan government somehow became legitimized. In bargaining for the pipeline, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban reinstate deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah as ruler of Afghanistan, and demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden for arrest. In return, the Taliban would reap untold billions in profit from the pipeline. According to Brisard and Dasquie, part of the Bush administration's bargaining tactics involved threats of war if these conditions for the legitimization of Afghanistan were not met.

The BBC of London reported on September 18th, 2001 of the existence of war plans on Bush's desk aimed at Afghanistan. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, stated that the war plans were slated for October of 2001. Conditions set by the Bush administration to avoid war involved the Taliban's handing over of bin Laden and the acceptance of King Zahir Shah. Naik went so far as to doubt that America would hold off on war even if these conditions were met.

The result, according to the French analysts, was total disaster. The Bush administration fundamentally misunderstood the Taliban regime - to bring back the King and hand bin Laden over to the West would have been tantamount to suicide for the Taliban. Instead of acquiescing to the hard-sell tactics of the Bush administration, the Taliban unleashed their pet attack dog, Osama, upon America. They were going to lose everything, and chose to attack first in the hope that all-out war would break out in Central Asia and rally other Muslim nations to their cause.

Motive suddenly becomes far more clear. The Bush administration very much wanted the Unocal pipeline to go through, and put intense pressure on the Taliban to see it happen. As this was happening, American intelligence services were flooded with warnings of an impending attack upon American targets by bin Laden and Al Qaida. The decision was made - let the attack come, and in the ensuing outrage American forces can carve out the guts of the Taliban government like a ripe gourd, replacing them with a 'legitimate' regime more receptive to the pipeline plan.

Did the Bush administration have an inkling of the massive death and destruction that would come on September 11th? Those who espouse the LIHOP Theory disagree on this point. Some believe that FEMAs presence at Ground Zero on the day before the attack, coupled with specific language within the international intelligence warnings pertaining to aircraft and high-profile targets, are prima facie evidence of specific prior knowledge. Others believe that the Bush administration only knew vaguely that an attack would come, but not where or when. They did not foresee the level of destruction, and were caught flat-footed when those planes appeared along the New York skyline.

In the end, LIHOP Theory can encompass either view. Whether they had specific knowledge beforehand, or merely decided to let some attack happen somewhere, the final results were the same. The Taliban were routed and replaced by an interim government headed by a man named Harmid Karzai. Karzai was recently elected President of Afghanistan in his own right, legitimizing the Afghanistan government. Soon after this, Karzai announced the impending construction of a pipeline that would exploit Turkmenistan's natural gas reserves He named Unocal as the lead company for the project. Before becoming President, Karzai was an advisor to Unocal.

For LIHOP Theorists, the evidence is clear. The Bush administration got the pipeline it wanted. Along the way, they used the horrors of 9/11 to place themselves above reproach. In the patriotic fervor that resulted from the attacks, both the press and the Democratic opposition were bracketed by the administration-espoused idea that any questions or criticism were tantamount to treason.

The passage of the PATRIOT Anti-Terror Act has given the US government sweeping abilities to snuff dissent by defining it as terrorism, thanks to the loosely-defined wording of the bill. Bush enjoyed stratospheric approval ratings that persist to this day, and American citizens were given new enemies to hate. The Defense Department, and the weapons contractors who cater to them, received billions from the federal budget to do with as they pleased in order to address the objects of that hate.

Even the most hardened political observer must admit the dismal truth - September 11th was the greatest thing ever to happen to the Bush administration. Attorney Stanley Hilton has brought LIHOP Theory into the federal court system with his class-action suit, and with the families of 9/11 victims he represents. It will be interesting to see what transpires when these two facts collide in an American courtroom. Given the current climate, it does not seem likely that much will come of it. After all, these conspiracy theorists are just a bunch of nuts.

Right? -------------

William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence,' will be published soon by Pluto Press.

Jack Herer $100,000 challenge

Jack & Jeannie Herer

hempjack@earthlink.net

H.E.M.P.

Hi. The following message will be included in Jack's updated version of The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Please let us know what you think of it, and feel free to distribute it to everyone you know.

Thank you.

Jeannie Herer

-----------------------------

Prove us wrong! Prove us wrong! Prove us wrong!

And we hereby extend our $100,000 challenge to prove us wrong!

If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction, were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the greenhouse effect and stop deforestation; then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world's paper and textiles; meet all of the world's transportation, industrial and home energy needs, while simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time... and that substance is the same one that has done it before... Cannabis/Hemp/Marijuana!

CANNABIS HEMP is the only known plant that can be grown from the Equator to the Arctic Circle and to the Antarctic Circle; from the mountains to the valleys, from the oceans to the plains, including arid lands and everywhere in between. CANNABIS HEMP is the healthiest plant for the ground out of the 3 1/2 million plants on Earth, because it has a root system that grows 10-12 inches in 30 days compared to one inch for rye or barley grass. The roots penetrate up to 16 feet deep and after harvest it leaves a root system that is mulched into the ground. It is the King Kong of King Kongs of all plant life.

All of my information about CANNABIS HEMP has been taken from Federal and State Department of Agriculture reports, articles from Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Pulp & Paper Magazine, Scientific American, entries from encyclopedias and pharmacoepias, and studies from all over the world during the last 200 years. This is all public information. The United States government is hiding the fact that 125 years ago, and even as far back as 4000 BC, 80 percent of our economy was based on the use of CANNABIS HEMP for paper, fiber and fuel. Ten to 20 percent of our economy was based on CANNABIS HEMP medicines, 125 years ago.

CANNABIS HEMP was part of our everyday life. Every farm had a hemp patch growing. This cover-up outrages me and it should outrage you, too. I have been studying about CANNABIS HEMP for over 30 years, and I can't believe how the U.S. government, in 90 seconds in Congress, could outlaw "MARIJUANA" in 1937, without the people realizing they were outlawing CANNABIS HEMP, the most perfect plant for the planet! They even got other countries to outlaw it, too, after the Second World War. From 1840 to 1940, 80 percent of all the world's hemp was grown in, and imported from, Russia.

With the technology of the decorticator, CANNABIS HEMP would have taken over the cotton market, as it is far superior to cotton. I will again reiterate a few of the facts about CANNABIS/HEMP/MARIJUANA, which you already know.

CANNABIS/HEMP/MARIJUANA was the number ONE annually renewable natural resource for 80 percent of all paper, fiber and fuel. From 6000 years ago to 125 years ago, it was used for food, light, land and soil reclamation, and even 20 percent of all medicine. Everyone, from the educated to the uneducated, the farmer to the townsperson, the doctors and the scientists used hemp products and depended on them until about 125 years ago.

Seventy-five to 90 percent of all paper used from at least 100 AD to 1883 was made of CANNABIS HEMP. Books, including Bibles, money and newspapers all over the world have been mainly printed on CANNABIS HEMP for as long as these things have existed in human history. They were printed on hemp exclusively!

Seventy to 90 percent of all rope, twine, cordage and ship sails, 125 years ago, were made out of CANNABIS HEMP fiber, until it was replaced by petrochemical fibers in 1937 and 1938. By comparison, CANNABIS HEMP is four times softer than cotton, four times warmer, four times more water absorbent, has three times the strength of cotton, is many times more durable and doesn't use pesticides like cotton, and is flame retardant. Fifty percent of all pesticides are used on cotton, and cotton uses only one percent of the farmland.

Of all the 3 1/2 million plants on Earth, no other plant source can compare with the nutritional value of CANNABIS HEMP seeds. It is the only plant on Earth that has essential amino acids, essential fatty acids and protein and essential oils combined. It is the healthiest plant for human consumption.

Prior to the 1800s, HEMPSEED oil was the number ONE source for lighting oil throughout the world. As late as 1937, even paints and varnishes were 80 percent HEMPSEED oil. CANNABIS HEMP is non-toxic and has been used to make high-grade diesel fuel, oil, aircraft and precision oil and even the number ONE vegetable oil. HEMP is the best sustainable source of plant pulp for biomass fuel to make charcoal, gas, methanol, gasoline and electricity in a natural way.

As a medicine, the use of MARIJUANA goes back 6000 years. It has been found to be healthy and effective in the treatment of chronic pain, cancer, strokes, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, sickle cell anemia, AIDS wasting and many other illnesses, including simple nausea, appetite stimulant and anxiety. On September 6, 1988, the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chief Administrative Law Judge, Francis L. Young, ruled: "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," and asked the Drug Enforcement Agency to reschedule it. The DEA refused, keeping it as a Schedule I drug, which they say "has no known medical use" ? from 1937 to 2002! Nobody has ever died from marijuana in 6000 years... unless they were shot by a cop!

CANNABIS HEMP was used for land reclamation until 1915. HEMP was planted or left to grow feral as ground cover and not intended for harvest. It is the number ONE plant to prevent mudslides and loss of watershed, and river and soil erosion.

What disgusts me the most is how the government, as well as the people, knew about HEMP and praised its value and then what happened? In literally 90 seconds, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 passed in Congress. By using the unknown name "marijuana" instead of the familiar name "cannabis hemp", Congress was able to accomplish this because no one knew what plant they were talking about. HEMP became illegal and was replaced by petrochemical products. They made it such a banned and forbidden plant that the word "hemp" was not even taught in schools in the 1940s, 50s and thereafter. In 1850, 80 percent of all paper, fibers and fuel were made out of CANNABIS in America and the rest of the world.

The role of HEMP was erased from America's history (as well as most of the rest of the world's) after 1945 and 1950. To prove it, think...what did you learn about HEMP in school? Nothing! The continuing suppression of this information by the government places us all in mortal jeopardy. Here we have a plant that, in conjunction with wind, solar, tidal and hydroelectric power, can save the planet by providing all of our energy, fuel, paper, fiber and medical needs naturally, all while reducing acid rain, chemical pollution and rebuilding the soil, while reversing the greenhouse effect (no other plant can do this!), and our government wants to eradicate this seed, out of the 3 1/2 million seeds on Earth. HEMP was used to make over 25,000 products before it was outlawed in 1937. They want to kill the most perfect plant on the planet. You should get mad at your government for doing this and for leaving it out of our schools.

Eighty percent of our economy depended on HEMP for paper, fiber and fuel, 125 years ago. At that time, it took 300 man hours to harvest an acre of HEMP, but with the invention of the brand new decorticator in 1930, it only took one-and-a-half to two hours. This is equivalent to reducing the labor burden from $6,000 down to $40 per acre in today's money. Keep in mind that the cotton gin, in 1793, reduced the man-hours from 300 hours down to two hours to harvest an acre of cotton. The role of CANNABIS should be determined by market supply and demand and not by undue influence of prohibition laws, federal subsidies and huge tariffs that keep the natural from replacing the synthetic. MARIJUANA is the KING KONG of the King Kongs of all plants.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, DEA head Asa Hutchison, and White House Drug Czar John Walters have been given all of these proven facts and yet are still set against the legalization of marijuana and recognition of HEMP knowledge. For whatever personal reasons, they refuse to believe the facts and are willing to sacrifice the future of our planet and the health of our people by keeping it illegal. The ban of CANNABIS HEMP is so extreme and its intention is to hide the truth, and the truth is that out of the 3 1/2 million plants on Earth, HEMP is the number ONE plant for our survival and quality of life here on Earth. The government calls Marijuana users "terrorists" and yet the government of the United States has been "terrorizing" us for the last 67 years!

No one has taken the $100,000 challenge to prove me wrong. Why? Because I am right. The U.S. government has been lying to us since the early 1900s. Do economic interests have more to say than the people about the future of our planet?

Jack Herer

June 2002

www.jackherer.com

US prisoners claim Roosevelt left them in Philippines deliberately

DAVID Cox in New York

HUNDREDS of former US prisoners of war have begun a battle for compensation after uncovering documents that allegedly prove the wartime administration deliberately used them as a tool to whip up domestic support for war with Japan.

A former prisoner has uncovered papers in the US National Archive that she claims prove the government restricted the travel of 7,000 American citizens from the Philippines, while at the same time encouraging evacuation of Americans from other potential Japanese targets in China and south-east Asia.

A federal lawsuit filed yesterday in Washington, DC, alleges that the government at first wanted to keep Americans in the Philippines to discourage Japanese aggression, but later used them as a political tool.

A group of 500 former prisoners claim the plan was devised by the US wartime leader, Franklin D Roosevelt. with the approval of Winston Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister, to cause outrage among American citizens unwilling to back a war on Japan.

Americans were denied passport and travel documents to let them flee. They were later captured by the Japanese and held in notorious camps under appalling conditions.

Marcia Fee Achenbach, one of those captured, was four when her camp was liberated by US soldiers in 1944. She discovered the papers while doing research in the National Archive. Among the evidence uncovered was a telegram that Francis Sayre, the high commissioner of the Philippines, had sent to the US state department urging an evacuation plan. The state department’s confidential reply read: "Visualise the remaining of Americans generally in the Philippines in an emergency, and plan accordingly."

Other evidence includes a letter from one of the commissioner’s secretaries indicating that officials were not to issue passports. The secretary states that she wrote more than 5,000 letters rejecting passport applications during the build up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

In the notorious Philippine POW camps, starvation and disease were rampant, and hundreds died as internees were reduced to eating cats, dogs, rats and weeds to survive. Many of the camp’s leaders were executed by the Japanese as the US army advanced to recapture the islands. Ms Achenbach said: "I remember having to run around to get away from the shelling. I grew up thinking that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was angry and astounded to find out later I didn’t have to go through some of the things I went through."

Anthony D’Amato, the lawyer who filed the suit, believes the orders came directly from Roosevelt. He also thinks the US leader discussed his plans for the Philippines in telephone talks with Churchill.

Transcripts of those conversations were ordered to be sealed indefinitely by President Harry Truman, but Mr D’Amato is asking for them to be made public. "We believe this smoking gun is in those transcripts," he said.

Frances Cogan, a professor at the University of Oregon, said the government had other reasons for its actions. "It was thought that if they moved the Americans out of the Philippines, it would look like we were going to launch a war against Japan," said Prof Cogan, author of Captured: The Internment of American civilians in the Philippines 1941-1945. "Another reason was to keep the Filipino people from feeling they had been deserted and left to rot."

Regarding the actions of US officials, Prof Cogan said: "Certainly they lied. Certainly they kept them from leaving and getting transportation out. The effect was that people remained there, however they did it and for whatever reasons."

Even if the allegations are proved, legal experts say winning a suit against the government over a wartime event that that happened 60 years ago may not lead to the desired apology. One complication is that the prisoners have already received some financial recompense. After their release, former prisoners were paid one dollar for each day of internment from the proceeds of a sale of Japanese assets frozen in other countries. As part of that deal, the United States and other nations waived the rights of their citizens to sue Japan.

This article:

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=820792002

Robert Sterling Editor,

The Konformist http://www.konformist.com

http://www.salon.com

Joe Conason's Journal Bush/Cheney's private recount 2000 air force included planes from Enron, Halliburton -- and Sallie Mae? - - - - - - - - - - - - Aug. 5, 2002 |

Flying Air Kennyboy The president can still rely on most of the press to ignore or downplay embarrassing and even potentially explosive stories. Heeding a consensus that stories about the 2000 election are "old news," no matter how much new information they reveal, most news organizations devoted little attention to Bloomberg's superb story last Friday about the Enron, Halliburton and other corporate jets used by the Bush-Cheney campaign during the presidential recount struggle in Florida. (The fraudulent tale about Kenny Boy sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom when Clinton was president got better play.)

Imagine the manufactured outrage if it were discovered that Al Gore had been chauffeured around on an Occidental Petroleum jet, after all the wailing about his family's ties to that benighted firm. Guess what? Bloomberg News reports that the guest passengers on the Oxy jet were Bush-Cheney politicos. There are still more interesting names on the list of companies that provided executive jets to the Bush effort in November 2000 aside from Enron and Halliburton. Among them are Reliant Energy, under federal investigation for manipulating energy prices in California; Anadarko Petroleum, whose executives enjoyed special entrée into Cheney's Energy Task Force; Tom Brown Inc., another oil outfit whose former CEO Donald Evans is now the Commerce Secretary; MBNA, the consumer-credit mammoth whose bankruptcy "reform" legislation is now being pushed by Bush; and, rather weirdly, Sallie Mae, the enormous financial services group that specializes in packaging and marketing government-backed student loans.

According to its own Web site, "Sallie Mae was originally established as the Student Loan Marketing Association, a government-sponsored enterprise, but began the privatization process in 1997. The [government-sponsored enterprise] will be phased out by 2006, and the company will be fully privatized." A disclaimer on the home page also explains that Sallie Mae "and its subsidiaries (other than the Student Loan Marketing Association) are not sponsored by or agencies of the United States of America." In plainer English, Sallie Mae is still directly tied to the federal government and will be for another four years. Why did its executives loan their jet to the Bush-Cheney air force? (And where do they go on that jet when they aren't lending it to politicians?)

Bully pulpit To refresh your memory of the inspiring spectacle those company planes made possible, Robert Parry provides an updated account of what the Republicans did to win Florida. To improve your understanding of how and why Democrats are so often bullied that way, and what they can do about it, Michael Tomasky examines their psychological condition and prescribes a strong dose of partisanship.

*****

08/02 08:13 Bush Campaign Flew Enron, Halliburton Jets During 2000 Recount

By Laura Smitherman

Washington, Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- George W. Bush's election 2000 recount committee used corporate jets owned by 10 companies, including three now under federal investigation, to ferry lawyers and campaign workers to Florida and elsewhere, according to Internal Revenue Service records and a committee lawyer.

Enron Corp., Halliburton Co. and Reliant Energy Inc. -- three companies whose finances are being examined by U.S. regulators -- were among the corporations reimbursed for the use of their corporate jets by the Bush committee during the 36-day recount that gave Republican Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency.

The recount committee records, released 19 months after the recount battle, come as the Bush administration is fending off Democratic charges that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have put the interests of their corporate supporters ahead of the public. On Tuesday, Bush signed a corporate-fraud bill with tougher provisions than he had initially supported.

``It's embarrassing for the administration and the Republican Party that these facts have emerged, as they have taken great pains to distance themselves from the corporate scandals, particularly Enron,'' said Charles Lewis, chairman of the Center for Public Integrity, which monitors government ethics.

The Bush committee paid the 10 companies $140,365 for use of the planes, according to the documents, which listed total spending of $13.8 million on legal, transportation and other expenses during the recount, about four times the $3.2 million spent by then-Vice President Al Gore's recount organization.

Gore's Campaign

The Bush filings were made under an extended deadline granted by the IRS. Democrat Gore's recount committee's contributions and expenditures were reported in line with the IRS's original deadlines. Gore's filings don't show use of corporate jets.

The Democrats were quick to pounce on the new IRS disclosures. ``The Bush-Cheney administration literally flew into power in Enron's and Halliburton's corporate jets,'' said Bill Buck, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, who also worked for Gore in the Florida recount effort.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who worked for Bush's recount committee in Florida, declined to comment.

Federal law allows candidates for the White House and Congress to use corporate jets if the campaigns reimburse owners the price of a first- class ticket between cities with commercial service or the normal charter rate to other cities, said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission.

Expenditures Withheld

The Bush campaign initially said federal law didn't require disclosures by recount committees and released the names of contributors, not expenditures. While still denying any legal obligation, Bush campaign officials filed to the IRS hundreds of pages on expenditures July 15. The IRS posted the filing on its Web site last weekend.

Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer for Bush's recount committee, said the delayed filings were legal. ``We responded to the full extent of the laws,'' he said.

Bush's recount fund made four payments to Enron totaling $28,281, one payment to Halliburton for $2,407, and one payment to Reliant Energy for $1,724, the filings said. Ginsberg identified these payments and those to seven other companies as reimbursements for use of corporate jets.

Enron filed for bankruptcy protection last year amid disclosures that the Houston-based energy trader hid $1 billion in losses and was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Enron's then-Chairman Kenneth Lay was a leading contributor to Bush's political career. Lay and his wife donated $10,000 to the recount fund.

Cheney Flight

Halliburton, the second-largest oilfield services firm, is under SEC investigation for allegedly accelerating booking of revenue from construction work, an accounting change started in 1998 when Cheney was chairman and CEO.

Reliant Resources Inc., a Houston-based energy trader that is 83 percent owned by Reliant Energy, is under investigation by the SEC and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for ``round-trip'' trades that inflated revenue and contributed to a restatement of last year's earnings.

Enron and Reliant representatives declined to give details about the flights. Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said during the recount, a company jet flew Cheney from Washington to Dallas.

Several other executive jets rented by Bush's recount committee belonged to oil industry companies, including Houston- based Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., and Tom Brown Inc., a Denver-based oil- exploration company. Tom Brown was formerly headed by Don Evans, now Bush's Commerce Secretary. Bush sat on Tom Brown's board in the early 1990s.

Market Rates

Tom Brown spokesman Mark Burford and Occidental spokeswoman Jan Sieving, while declining to give details, said the Bush recount campaign reimbursed their companies at fair-market rates. Anadarko spokeswoman Ann Vincent declined to discuss where company planes fly or who's on board for ``security reasons.''

Sallie Mae, one of the biggest buyers of government-guaranteed student loans, provided its jet to the Bush campaign on three occasions, company spokesman Jim Boyle said. Bush's recount fund paid Reston, Virginia-based Sallie Mae $17,264, filings show.

The other companies identified by the filings and Ginsberg as supplying corporate jets were drugstore chain Phar-Mor Inc., which filed for bankruptcy protection in September; MBNA Corp., the world's second-largest credit-card issuer; and W.W. Tichenor & Co., a private investment company. MBNA declined to give details of the flight. Phar- Mor and Tichenor didn't return calls.

Of the $13.8 million spent by Bush's committee, attorneys received $4.4 million, according to the IRS records. About $1 million was spent for hotels to house a Bush recount staff of about 250 people. An additional $1.2 million was paid to commercial airlines and other general aviation service companies.

The Washington Post reported earlier that Bush's recount committee outspent the Gore organization by about four-to-one.

The Konformist must make a request for donations via Paypal, at Paypal.com. If you can and desire, please feel free to send money to help The Konformist through the following email address:

robalini@aol.com

If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit:

http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/konformist

Or, e-mail konformist-subscribe@egroups.com with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!"

Revised: July 18, 2010 . Communication: discoverer73(at symbol)hotmail.com Go to Home Page Go to Index of All Articles Pages
Read the Disclaimer
Last modified: July 18, 2010 Copyright © 1999 - 2008 All rights reserved. [Gnostic Liberation Front]. www.gnosticliberationfront.com

American Journal The Terrorism of Everyday Life

American Journal
The Terrorism of Everyday Life