Eytomic Blog

EFF on National IDs

Excellent commentary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

see also Brad Tempelton's page. Templeton is a minor but vocal player in the EFF (he holds the honor of having invented the 'dot' as a convention in URLs.

Here, have our constitution...

we're done with it

Private Property and the Iraqi Constitution by Cheryl K. Chumley -- Capitalism Magazine

CIA prisoners 'tortured' in Arab jails

By Stephen Grey

A former CIA official has confirmed suspicions that dozens of terror suspects have been flown to jails in Middle Eastern countries where torture is routinely practised, and without reference to courts of law.

Michael Scheuer, who once headed the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and left the CIA last November after a 22-year career, said the practice, known as "extraordinary rendition", was seen by the US as a key tactic in its war on terror.

"The bottom line is getting anyone off the streets who is involved in acts of terrorism is a worthwhile activity," he told the BBC's File On 4 programme.

[more]

Mr Scheuer said the operation was authorised at the highest levels of the CIA and the White House and was approved by their lawyers.

"The practice of capturing people and taking them to second or third countries arose because the Executive assigned the job of dismantling terrorist cells to the CIA.

"When the agency came back and said 'Where do you want to take them?' the message was 'That's your job'."

He added: "The idea that this is a rogue operation that someone has dreamt up is just absurd. I personally have no problem with doing any operation as long as it's justified legal by my superiors."

UN convention violated

The former CIA officer acknowledged that some of the suspects sent to places such as Egypt could then be tortured.

But he said: "It wouldn't be us torturing them and I think there is a lot of Hollywood involved with our portrayal of torture in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

"Human rights is a very flexible concept... It depends how hypocritical you want to be on a particular day."

Human rights campaigners, however, find it difficult to reconcile rendition with President Bush's claims of upholding the United Nations convention against torture. It says: "No state shall expel, return or exradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

Mr Scheuer was among other ex-CIA officers who told File On 4 that as well as sending people to Guantanamo Bay, both the CIA and the US military were sending dozens of others to prisons in countries such as Jordan, Syria and Egypt.

I could hear people being tortured. They'd be saying: 'Oh Allah! Oh God!' I could hear people screaming
Maher Arar
The investigation looks at the dangers of sending potentially innnocent people to these regimes where, according to the Americans' own State Department, torture is readily practised.

It hears from a Canadian man called Maher Arar, who was stopped by US officials when travelling through New York's JFK airport in September 2002 and sent to Syria where he was held for a year. He says he was brutally tortured.

The reason for his arrest was information passed to the US by Canada, linking him to a terrorist suspect in Ottawa.

Mr Arar is a Syrian national by birth but holds a Canadian passport. Once in Syria, he says he was kept in a tiny cell for over 10 months at the Damascus headquarters of the Syrian secret police.

One day, after 18 hours of torture, he falsely confessed to having been to Afghanistan.

Guantanamo Bay detainee
US Guantanamo Bay camp: Attacked for flouting human rights
"The interrogator said: 'What is this?' I said: 'A cable'. He said: 'Open your hand,' and he hit it. The pain was awful.

"I was crying. Then he told me to open my left hand and he hit me. Then he would ask me more questions.

"An hour or two later he'd put me in a room and I could hear people being tortured. They'd be saying: 'Oh Allah! Oh God!' I could hear people screaming."

Mr Arar was released and flown home to Ottawa three days short of a year after being placed in Syrian custody.

No legal charges have ever been brought against him in either country. In Canada, where his case has caused a political outcry, a public inquiry is under way.

Electric shocks

An Australian named Mamdouh Habib was sent to Egypt in October 2001 by US authorities after being captured in Pakistan.

He was held in Egypt for six months, and said he was subjected to extreme torture involving electric shocks, before he was sent onwards to Guantanamo.

He was released last month and flown home to Australia.

The programme also reveals that an official investigation is under way in Italy into suspicions that an Islamic militant was kidnapped off the streets of Milan and flown to Egypt by American agents.

Executive jets

Critics of the extraordinary rendition policy told File On 4 that British citizens have been arrested abroad and moved by the US to Guantanamo and to Arab prisons as a result of the sharing of intelligence with British security services or the British police.

Evidence obtained as a result of any acts of torture by British officials, or with which British authorities were complicit, would not be admissible in criminal or civil proceedings in the UK
Foreign Office statement

Wahab al-Rawi, a British businessman, also claims he was arrested in the Gambia and questioned by American agents in November 2002, after the US was tipped off by British authorities.

Wahab was freed but his brother and a business partner were flown on to Guantanamo, where they are still being held.

It is known that the American civilian executive jets used to transport the prisoners around the world often pass through British airspace and use British airports. The File On 4 team discovered one was in Glasgow on Monday.

A Foreign Office spokesperson told the programme it totally condemned torture but could not rule out using any reliable intelligence wherever it came from if it was going to save lives.

The US Department of Defense, the CIA, and the State Department all declined requests for interviews.

File On 4: BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 8 February, 2005 at 2000 GMT.

Fuckin-a Right

Testify! Excellent collection of photos.

The Children of Iraq

Fedgoons at Play

Trial Opens Over Raid on Elian Gonzalez

MIAMI - A trial opened Monday in a $3 million-plus lawsuit by 13 people who say they were injured or traumatized when federal agents seized a screaming Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives' home.

The opening witness was neighbor Maria Riera, who testified that she clutched her chest and thought she was dying when an agent doused her with tear gas during the April 22, 2000, raid to reunite the 6-year-old boy with his father in Cuba.

[more]

The 13 neighbors and protesters are seeking up to $250,000 each, claiming that agents used excessive force during the armed raid.

"I was stopped by a gentleman on my left approaching me with a shotgun," said Riera, who lived across the street from the home where the boy had lived since shortly after he was rescued from a shipwreck on Thanksgiving Day 1999.

She said a black-garbed agent wearing a mask ordered her to "stand back" or he would shoot, adding a word of profanity. She said she complied, but a second agent approached with a gas gun as she stood in her driveway and left her in a gray cloud of tear gas.

A total of 108 people sued over the raid, but U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore limited the case to people who were not on the Gonzalez family property and were beyond police barricades.

Elian, now 11, was one of three survivors of a shipwreck that killed his mother.

The raid took place after the family refused to return the boy so he could be taken back to Cuba.

Hussein goes insane

PRAVDA

Saddam Hussein, who is currently being held captive by the Americans, is slowly going insane. This has been reported by Arab newspaper "Elaf" with a reference to members of the Red Cross organization.

Saddam's physical condition is almost perfect. He is decently treated and well fed. However, not so long ago, one could read a completely different account of Hussein's captivity.

Saddam started to have mental problems. At times, he would suddenly start mumbling something irrational. Afterwards, he would sit in total silence, without uttering a single word. Doctors assume that the Iraqi leader used to consume a lot of alcohol or used drugs in the past. At the same time, the symptoms could have been caused by his far from young age as well as death of his sons.

Hussein has several photographs of Udai and Kusai (his sons) in his cell. Interestingly, a portrait of Gerge W. Bush of an unknown origin also neatly hangs on the wall. This fact can be interpreted as another evidence of Hussein"s insanity. Had he been well, the former Iraqi leader would not have hung a picture of his enemy. And in case the portrait had been hung by someone other than Hussein, perhaps, the captive has gone crazy as a result of constantly staring at Bush' intellectual face.

In the meantime, according to a recently conducted poll, nearly 70% of Americans in the US support the idea of public broadcast of Saddam's execution. 21% of Americans are even willing to pay for watching Osama bin Laden being executed. Another 11% would like to enjoy watching the last moments of Hussein"s life. So there you have it, a democratic society with experience.

Some Confused By Bush's 'Satanic' Salute

The Associated Press

OSLO, Norway -- President George W. Bush's "Hook 'em, 'horns" salute got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted his hand gesture during his inauguration as a salute to Satan.

[more]

That's what it means in the Nordics when you throw up the right hand with the index and pinky fingers raised, a gesture popular among heavy metal groups and their fans in the region.

Residents of the Scandinavian country were taken aback when they saw the First Family appear to salute Satan during the inaugural parade.

"Shock greeting from Bush daughter," a headline in the Norwegian Internet newspaper Nettavisen said above a photograph of Bush's daughter Jenna, smiling and showing the sign.

For Texans, the gesture is a sign of love for the University of Texas Longhorns, whose fans are known to shout out "Hook 'em, 'horns!" at sporting events.

Bush, a former Texas governor, and his family made the sign to greet the Longhorn marching band as it passed during the inaugural parade through Washington during Thursday's festivities, Norway's largest newspaper, Verdens Gang, explained to its readers.

Here Come Da King

I was watching broadcast clips of Casear Retardus and his family leaving the White House this morning. The commentary had all the whinging and idolatry of a royal ceremony, it makes me sick to my stomach. They were careful to point out that Bush's read from the Bible upon rising from sleep. We have become a theocracy by proxy, in stead of a pontiff in power we have a true believer:

Religion's big role in inauguration

Christians to Begin Inauguration Day Thanking God for Bush Reelection

Christian Conservatives Embrace Inauguration

The level of security attendant with today's ceremony is a clear indication that this government is deeply afraid of retaliation, both foreign and domestic. Why should such a "righteous" man who "earned the right" to be President of the United States be so afraid of the world's reception of his 2nd term? The "theme" of the Inaguration (what is this? a fucking prom?) is freedom, HA!

CBS News | Virtual Lockdown For Washington | January 20, 2005 09:00:01

Wired for Security (washingtonpost.com)

CNN.com - Unprecedented security for inauguration - Jan 19, 2005

Democracy Now! | Lockdown in DC: Unprecedented Security For Bush Inauguration and Protests

Where "Terrorists" Come From

I'm more inclined to call them rebels.

A blood-covered girl screams after her parents were fatally shot by soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division after the family failed to stop driving their car. The girl was uninjured.
(GETTY IMAGES PHOTO/CHRIS HONDROS)

January 18, 2005

Well, That Was Worth The Effort...

BBC NEWS | Americas | US gives up search for Iraq WMD

Gonzales Nomination

by Tom Toles

Diego Garcia

I was curious about how the US/UK military air and naval base in the Indian Ocean fared the tsunami. It seems to have benefited from a deep under-water trench to its east. The wikipedia entry was interesting and suggests a history indicitive of the Imperial Warfare State:

Now, Diego Garcia is home to a military base jointly operated by the United States and the United Kingdom, although in practice it is largely run as a US base, with only a small number of British forces and military police. No other economic activity is now allowed. [2] The base serves as a naval refuelling and support station. It is also equipped with airfields that support even the largest of modern aircraft. B-52s and other bombers have been deployed from Diego Garcia on missions to Iraq during the Gulf Wars, and to Afghanistan in October 2001.

The 70-year agreement between the UK and US for the US to use the island as a military base was made in 1966. Between 1967 and 1973 the British Government forcibly removed some 2,000 Ilois resident islanders to make way for the military base. The islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving until "the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks" (John Pilger). The islanders then were taken to live in abandoned housing where many died of hunger and as a result of the horrible living conditions and lack of water. They now mostly live 2000 kilometers (1200 miles) away on the isle of Mauritus (with a few on the Seychelles or Salomon Islands). These were the descendants of workers in the 19th century, so had lived there for several generations. The British government texts at the time referred to them merely as temporary workers, not indigenous inhabitants.

[more]

Politics

In 2000 the British High Court granted the islanders the right to return to the Archipelago. In 2002 the islanders and their descendants, now numbering 4,500, returned to court claiming compensation, after what they said were two years of delays by the British Foreign Office. However, in June, 2004 the British government invoked a royal decree, forever banning the islanders from returning home, reversing the 2000 court decision. Some of the Ilois are making plans return to turn Diego Garcia into a sugarcane and fishing enterprise as soon as the lease expires (some see this as early as 2016). A few dozen other Ilois are still fighting to be housed in the UK[3]

Some human rights groups claim that the military base is used by the US government for interrogation of prisoners (with methods illegal in the US). However the British Foreign Secretary has stated in parliament that US authorities have repeatedly assured him that no detainees have passed in transit through Diego Garcia or have disembarked there [4]

Can-Am CD Storage Cabinet

Today, I ordered another three drawer CD Cabinet from Can-Am. The product enjoys high quality and the staff is pleasent and capable. After I placed my order, I was informed that the gangsters at the Department of Homeland Security mandate that Can-Am obtain clients' Slave ID Numbers (SS#). These numbers are checked out by DHS prior to shipment. I refused the request and was told that there is a temperory avenue to send my CD storage cabinet across the border without giving The Number, but this avenue would soon not be available. Has collecting Compact Discs become a terrorist activity? The Database State is upon us.

Driver's License Rules in Intel Law Spark Outrage

By Jeff Johnson

December 20, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - A bipartisan group of senators, representatives, and members of the 9/11 Commission flanked President Bush Friday at his signing of sweeping intelligence reform legislation. But an equally diverse collection of citizens' groups criticized what they saw as the potential for government oppression and invasions of privacy codified in the new law.

President Bush called the new law, "the most dramatic reform of our nation's intelligence capabilities since President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947.

"Under this new law, our vast intelligence enterprise will become more unified, coordinated and effective," Bush said. "It will enable us to better do our duty, which is to protect the American people."

But critics of the bill -- liberal, conservative and libertarian -- questioned one provision they said could greatly expand the government's ability to monitor and limit the freedoms of law-abiding citizens.

At issue is Section 1027 of Subtitle B of the National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, entitled "Drivers Licenses and Personal Identification Cards."

That provision requires the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Homeland Security to "establish minimum standards for driver's licenses or personal identification cards issued by a State" within 18 months after the enactment of the law. Licenses and photo IDs from states that fail to comply with the standards would not be accepted by the federal government for any purpose, including getting past airport security, entering a federal building or even claiming certified mail.

Peter Gadiel of 9/11 Families for a Secure America supported the provision. He and other survivors of those killed in the terrorist attacks agreed with the Kean (9/11) Commission's conclusion that the standardization of driver's licenses will make it more difficult for terrorists to again successfully attack on U.S. soil.

"The 9/11 Commission says it in black and white on page 390 [of its report] that the federal government should set standards for driver's licenses," Gadiel recently told reporters.

Proponents of Section 1027 said requiring uniform, basic information on driver's licenses was not the same as creating a national ID card issued by the federal government. But Jim Babka - president of DownsizeDC.org, a citizens' group that lobbies Congress to reduce the size of the federal government - disagreed.

"When you standardize everything, when the federal government sets all the rules and collects all the names in a federal database, it doesn't matter what entity actually hands you your card," Babka argued, "you've got a national ID card."

High potential for abuse, fraud, disclosures and mistakes

Babka warned that a national ID card system would have an inherently high potential for abuse, in part because the new law designates appointed officials, rather than elected representatives, to set the standards.

"You need a driver's license to purchase a gun from a dealer, you need it to travel on any form of public transportation, you need it to get a job, you need it to open a checking account, to cash a check, to check into a hotel, to rent a car, and to purchase cigarettes or alcohol," Babka explained. "So, if the federal government can set the standards so high as to deny you a driver's license or a photo ID, it's effectively turned you into a non-person."

Section 1027 supporters defended the law and pointed to the legislative mandate that the standardization regulations, "shall include procedures and requirements to protect the privacy and civil and due process rights of individuals who apply for and hold driver's licenses and personal identification cards."

But Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, took no comfort in that alleged protection.

"When the government says they're concerned about my privacy after they've just said I have to have one of their cards, somehow, that's not very reassuring," Pratt said.

"I still have a Social Security card that says, 'Not for Use for Identification,'" Pratt added. "Anybody who thinks that they are going to stop where they are doesn't understand 'mission creep' in government."

George Getz, communications director for the Libertarian Party, concurred.

"When they passed the Social Security Act, they said, 'Oh, my gosh, this will never be used for identification purposes,' and, who knows, maybe they meant it at the time," Getz speculated. "But that Social Security number has now, in effect, become a national ID number."

Babka said he believes even those who trust the government not to intentionally misuse the information collected in a national ID card database should still be concerned about the potential for highly personal information to be improperly disclosed.

"The danger of having this stuff collected on a list, especially a highly centralized list," Babka continued, "is that it will be much easier for someone to 'accidentally' end up with information that you wouldn't want getting out, that you wouldn't want your neighbors, your family or your friends to know about."

Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union said she fears mandating a uniform national ID standard could actually make it easier for terrorists to create their own fake identification documents and steal others' information.

"There's a problem with counterfeiting in this country and stealing someone's identity is a huge problem," Murphy told CNN/FN's Lou Dobbs. "And so if we can't even protect the $20 bill, how in the heck are we going to protect a national ID card?"

"This is not a way to reduce terrorism, since terrorists will always find a way to create fake identities," Getz said, echoing Murphy's comments. "That's exactly what happened with the 9/11 hijackers."

Pratt pointed out another area of concern: Incorrect data could be accidentally or intentionally associated with an honest citizen's record in a national ID database. He recalled an incident in which security officials prevented Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) from boarding a plane because his name was mistakenly placed on a "no-fly list."

"He was able to call the head of the appropriate agency, the Transportation Security Administration, and tell them to get his record straightened out," Pratt said. "Now, the rest of us may be able to finally buy the gun or get on the plane, but they won't clean up the data because the bureaucrats don't care.

"They're treating us as if we were a bunch of cattle to have a brand on our butt and a tag in our ear," Pratt concluded, "so that the government can know where we are at all times."

Law targets 'innocent' citizens, ignores terrorists, illegal aliens

Getz said the flaws with the legislation go even deeper than its potential for abuse, fraud, unintentional disclosures of personal information or mistakes. The law simply regulates the wrong people, he charged.

"Only the innocent will have to submit to this kind of government surveillance scheme, and that's exactly what's wrong with it," Getz said. "It targets the innocent and it certainly won't inconvenience terrorists one bit."

Babka said the issue comes down to one of simple statistics.

"Most of the people reading this are not terrorists. I'm not a terrorist and 99.99 percent of the population aren't terrorist[s]," Babka said. "But, this will affect 99.99 percent of the population.

"This is too much," Babka concluded, "this is overkill."

Jury recommends death for 'Sausage King'

This case reminds me of Carl Drega, who snapped when the state pushed him too far.

*begin story*

by Ann Bagel on 12/16/04 for Meatingplace.com

Self-proclaimed "Sausage King" Stuart Alexander should be executed for killing three meat inspectors at his San Leandro, Calif., factory in June 2000, a jury decided Tuesday.

In October, the same jury found Alexander, 43, guilty of three counts of first-degree murder for fatally shooting U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors Jean Hillery and Tom Quadros and state inspector Bill Shaline at the Santos Linguisa Factory. (See Alexander, so-called 'Sausage King,' found guilty of first-degree murder, Meatingplace.com, Oct. 21, 2004.)

During the six-month trial, jurors repeatedly watched footage from security videotape showing Alexander shooting each of the inspectors in the head after they had been felled by gunfire. Prosecutors said he killed them as they tried to cite him for allegedly selling sausage without government approval.

In a written statement, Dr. Barbara J. Masters, acting administrator of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said, "FSIS appreciates the years of hard work of all involved in bringing Alexander to justice. While this case has come to a close, our memories of these brave and committed public servants remain eternal."

If the death verdict is upheld at Alexander's formal sentencing hearing Feb. 15, the case will automatically be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Admiral Kimmel: Another Victim of the State

And this time, it is one of "their own". It is old news that Pearl Harbor was a set-up in some form and to some degree-Admiral Kimel is one of two men who took the fall-or had blame thrust upon him anyway.

I've said it before, I'll say again now: Fuck the State. Besides, anybody with a beef against Roosevelt is a step in the right direction.

Japan, media still deny Nanking massacre

BY ADAM GAMBLE AND TAKESATO WATANABE

Here's something compelling to think about on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7:

Last month on Veterans Day, the world learned of the tragic death, apparently by suicide, of Iris Chang, the youthful American author of Chinese descent who wrote the 1997 best-selling history The Rape of Nanking. Chang's book did more than any other work to reveal the facts of the 1937-38 Nanking massacre in which the Japanese Empire raped untold thousands and murdered perhaps as many as 300,000 unarmed Chinese civilians and soldiers. Many in Japan still officially deny the massacre took place despite historical evidence and eyewitness accounts establishing it as unimpeachable fact. Outcry among them succeeded in derailing a Japanese edition of Chang's book.

Intolerably, official denials of the massacre continue to this day among Japanese government officials and media editors. The same day news of Chang's death broke, the Japanese publisher Shueisha Inc. said that it would bow down to conservative Japanese politicians by censoring material about the massacre in one of its magazines.

Here's something compelling to think about on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7:

Last month on Veterans Day, the world learned of the tragic death, apparently by suicide, of Iris Chang, the youthful American author of Chinese descent who wrote the 1997 best-selling history The Rape of Nanking. Chang's book did more than any other work to reveal the facts of the 1937-38 Nanking massacre in which the Japanese Empire raped untold thousands and murdered perhaps as many as 300,000 unarmed Chinese civilians and soldiers. Many in Japan still officially deny the massacre took place despite historical evidence and eyewitness accounts establishing it as unimpeachable fact. Outcry among them succeeded in derailing a Japanese edition of Chang's book.

Intolerably, official denials of the massacre continue to this day among Japanese government officials and media editors. The same day news of Chang's death broke, the Japanese publisher Shueisha Inc. said that it would bow down to conservative Japanese politicians by censoring material about the massacre in one of its magazines.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

Where To From Here? by Ron Paul

Caveat: Suffice it to say that Rep. Paul and I do not see eye-to-eye on all issues. Fore example, I find his anti-abortion stance illiberal and indicative of the State-ness of the Church; both are truly happy to use force to ensure compliance with, or at least lip-service to, the mono-dogma.

What do police departments really do?

by VIN SUPRYNOWICZ

Back in August, I reported an incident out of Wisconsin that may -- or may not -- help us answer the question: What should you do if police ask permission to search your home?

The daily Oshkosh Northwestern reported back on July 20: "Local police still have no culprit in custody following a Saturday night shooting that left an officer wounded in a south-side Oshkosh neighborhood. ...

"The ongoing search for a perpetrator continues to prove frustrating for residents of the otherwise quiet neighborhood. ... Residents ... had mixed things to say about the methods police used in searching homes Sunday morning in the aftermath of the shooting," the local daily reported.

Resident Terry Wesner told reporters "a couple of shotguns and a rifle" were removed from his home by SWAT team members after he consented to a search, though officers did not tell him they removed the firearms.

Of special concern to the local ACLU was a report that residents of the house that became the focus of the police investigation refused to consent to a search without a warrant. "(A police officer) declined to say whether officers pursued the warrant because the residents refused a consent search," the newspaper reported.

And here we thought the courts had ruled that refusal to give consent to a search could not be used as grounds to acquire a search warrant. For how can we really be said to retain any right to privacy if we can lose this right merely for invoking it?

I've gotten some feedback on this topic over the months. A lot of it, sadly, confirms my suspicion that many of our countrymen these days are all too willing to embrace the notion that police shouldn't be restrained by such archaic notions as any "right to privacy," so long as they're pursuing "lawbreakers" in good faith.

I went to grade school in the 1950s, and remember our school reader including a tale of Officer Brown -- I seem to recall him as a beaming, somewhat portly figure twirling an innocuous nightstick as he strolled down the sidewalk, tipping his hat to one and all -- helping little Suzy rescue her cat from a tree.

Does anyone still believe this is what policemen actually do?

Read Stephen Davies' excellent research on "The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in the 2002 book "The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society." What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do "social policing" of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new "crimes" for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom.

The creation of government police forces thus did not and does not diminish crime rates, and was never expected to. In fact, the professor finds it generally increases reported crime rates. This makes sense if we stop to think what modern police forces actually do.

Let us suppose that, magically, there were no police. You are sitting at home of an evening, quietly reading a book. Next door, behind his own locked doors, your 21-year-old neighbor, who inherited some handguns from his grandfather, is spending time with his 16- or 17-year-old sweetheart, whose family is happy to know she intends to marry him and bear his children as soon as she graduates high school. At the moment, the two of them are consuming some of the marijuana they grow in their back yard.

If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race downtown, pounding on the door of the sleeping magistrate, insisting he swear out a warrant so you can rush back to your neighborhood, break into your neighbor's home and arrest him?

Of course not. He's hurting no one.

But now let us return to a present era in which we maintain large, professional police forces. Earlier this day, unbeknownst to you or your neighbor, officers busted one of your neighbor's friends for driving a car with an out-of-date registration. (Oh, the horror.) Searching the car without a warrant, the "officers" found marijuana. Bargaining to stay out of jail, the young man tells the officers he got it from your neighbor.

As we speak, do you suppose Officer Friendly and Officer Brown are down at the station house, playing cards and waiting to see if anyone will call in any armed robberies tonight?

Of course not. Clad in full SWAT gear, with machine pistols and bulletproof vests, they are currently lurking in your neighbor's bushes, trying to peek in his windows. Before dawn they will break down his front door with a battering ram, drag him out half-naked and in handcuffs and proceed to send him to prison for decades for 1) possessions of unregistered handguns without a license; 2) "manufacturing for purposes of sale a deadly narcotic," that is to say, his backyard marijuana; and 3) "statutory rape" of his fiancee, regardless of whether or not their planned union has the blessing of her family.

The reported "crime rate" in your neighborhood just skyrocketed. Is this because your neighbor has hurt anyone, or has been caught doing anything that normal people have not been doing for thousands of years?

Of course not. Our great-grandparents would be astonished to learn that such "crimes" are even on the books.

The only thing that has changed is that our land is now occupied by large, professional, overlapping paramilitary "police forces" that have to keep busy, ginning up manufactured "crime waves" and filling the prisons (we now have the highest incarceration rate in the world -- and many of those inmates have never hurt anyone), in order to justify their ever-burgeoning budgets.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."

Privacy Experts Shun Black Boxes

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

WASHINGTON — Some safety and privacy experts are reacting with apprehension, others with all out condemnation over a recent ruling by the National Transportation Safety Board (search) to require electronic data recorders or "black boxes" in all new cars manufactured in the United States.

"I take offense that this personal property of individuals is now being designed by the federal government," said Jim Harper, privacy attorney and editor of Privacilla.org.

Black boxes (search), or "EDRs" have been fitted into every General Motors car in its 2004 line and is in a number of Ford models — about 15 percent of all vehicles on the road today, according to road safety experts.

EDRs are certainly not new. Information gathered on black boxes — typically everything from speed, brake pressure, seat belt use and air bag deployment — has already been used in determining guilt in criminal and civil cases across the country.

Proponents, including the NTSB and road safety advocates, say the data collected on these black boxes is valuable for studying how accidents happen and how to make roads and cars safer. EDR data has been used for years to fine tune air bag efficiency.

"We think for understanding the dynamics of crashes, the information here can be very, very helpful," said Lon Anderson, director of AAA Mid-Atlantic (search). On the other hand, Anderson said, "We think it would be very wrong if the data in these boxes was deemed to be public information, open to anybody and the owner had no say over it."

The NTSB recommended in early August that black boxes be mandated, but critics say dealers are not now required to alert car owners that their car has the ability to collect the information. Currently only California has a law requiring car dealers to notify buyers when their cars are outfitted with an EDR.

Owners also have no legal protections to keep them from being forced to hand over that information to another party if a court order demanded it.

"I think (owners) have to be told of whatever data there is — and what is being retained longterm. What are the storage conditions? Will they keep it confidential or will they have to release information to anybody?" said professor John Soma, director of the Privacy Center (search) at Denver University.

"Without all of these concerns written into it, then obviously the recommendation is completely unacceptable," he said.

According to Joe Osterman, director of highway safety at the NTSB, the recommendation was inspired in part by a tragic auto accident involving a 86-year-old man who drove his car into a crowded Santa Monica farmers’ market last summer, killing 10 and injuring 63.

Osterman said a black box in the car might have not saved the people in the crash, but would have allowed investigators to find out how it happened and how cars could be better designed to reduce the likelihood of greater injury in the future.

"We have a long history of using data recorders in other modes of transportation and found them extremely useful," Osterman told FOXNews.com, pointing to aircraft. "Unless we have all vehicles equipped, you will not have a true picture of what is happening on the highways, in a broader sense."

Phil Haseline, president of the Automobile Coalition for Traffic Safety (search), which represents car manufacturers, said automakers are still debating the value of EDRs, and the idea of requiring them. Haseline said he is a proponent of black boxes but has certain reservations about the NTSB’s recommendation.

He, like others, said he would like to first see standardization of the type of data collected in the black boxes, much like a recommendation made in June by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (search). Right now, dueling technologies record different things.

Then, Haseline said, he would prefer that laws address the issue of a car owner’s knowledge of the EDRs in their vehicles, and that car owners have ownership of the data once its recorded.

"I can understand [NTSB's desire] to have this information, but from a practical perspective, it is premature at this point to require it," he said.

While privacy experts say jokes like "'big brother' is riding shotgun" aren’t funny, the technology already is being used to monitor certain drivers.

Global positioning systems are being used by car rental companies to track where renters are going and how fast they are driving. GPS also allows rental car companies to shut off the engine of a car and lock a renter out of it. It’s the same technology used by OnStar, which promises to be a guardian angel for car owners who are locked out or report a vehicle stolen.

Parents of teenagers have also begun to use black boxes marketed by Road Safety International (search) in Thousand Oaks, Calif. This item, which can be placed under the hood, is able to track the driver’s use of a seatbelt, excessive speed, hard cornering, braking and even unsafe backing, and can store hours of information for review later.

Privacy experts warn that once cars are outfitted for the most limited data recording, the government will find a way to argue it’s for drivers’ "own good" to collect more. They point to a push in recent years to install GPS in all cars so that emergency officials can easily find incapacitated accident victims.

"When you are telling someone it is for their own good, then it should be their own choice, they should be able to say ‘no,’" said professor Yale Kamisar of the University of Michigan Law School. "None of these things work out the way they are supposed to. Why should we believe all of these assurances when they haven’t been honored in the past?"

Hand Over the Data, Geek!

This is too much. Secret government organizations, seizure of private property, clear abridgement of the 1st Amendment, somebody push the Orwell button, we've got a tyranny on line 1.

"On Oct. 7, Rackspace Managed Hosting, an Internet service provider based in San Antonio, was served with a subpoena ordering it to hand over two Indymedia servers physically located in London. Rackspace immediately fired off an e-mail to Indymedia informing them about the servers and noting that it was required to comply, according to something called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an international agreement that sets out "procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping, and money laundering." "

Who nabbed Indymedia's computers?
The freewheeling network of Web sites has a history of clashing with authority. But usually it knows who is trying to shut it up.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mathew Honan

Nov. 9, 2004 | Hep Sano is remarkably calm. Sipping an iced tea at a brewpub in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, she dispassionately recounts Indymedia's alarming situation -- the unexplained seizure of two of the media organization's computers by an unknown government at the behest of the FBI.
"We want to set a precedent," says Sano. "The damage has been done to us. But we're hoping to get something that says, no, the FBI was wrong. You can't just go in and take a server in another country for unknown reasons without saying who did it."
The facts of the matter are scanty. On Oct. 7, Rackspace Managed Hosting, an Internet service provider based in San Antonio, was served with a subpoena ordering it to hand over two Indymedia servers physically located in London. Rackspace immediately fired off an e-mail to Indymedia informing them about the servers and noting that it was required to comply, according to something called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an international agreement that sets out "procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping, and money laundering."
In the e-mail, Rackspace noted that it was "acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter."
And that was that. Rackspace refused to provide a copy of the seizure order to Indymedia. Noting that it was under a federal gag order, it refused to even discuss the contents of the order. Indymedia was left wondering which government seized its servers and for what purpose. To this day, the group has no idea what was done to the servers before they were returned, what was being searched for, who did the searching, or why. All they know is that for nearly a week somebody, somewhere, with the assistance of the FBI, had a peek, and maybe more, at their machines.
This kind of thing doesn't happen to Wolf Blitzer.
Indymedia, also known as the Independent Media Center, is a pain in the establishment ass. It doesn't fit neatly into the box of either journalism or activism. Frequently cited and dismissed by the mainstream media as irresponsible, it also boasts a string of legal victories giving it important media protections. It consistently pushes the bleeding edge of what can be published, and for that, it has landed in hot water again and again.
The promise of Indymedia is that anyone can be a reporter. Forget journalism schools or internships at hifalutin intellectual magazines. Indymedia is more or less dedicated to the same promise as Fox News (minus daily memos from Roger Ailes): We report, you decide.
But the "we" in Indymedia's case is inclusive of everyone, everywhere. The idea is that the mainstream media isn't telling the whole story, and so the public has to pick up the slack. Or, as Sano puts it, "Who really knows what's going on in a neighborhood better than the people who live there?"
Like so many other progressive and activist organizations, Indymedia had its genesis in the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, where freelance journalists and activists came together to form a new media organization that aimed to broadcast a message they didn't feel the mainstream media was covering. They wanted to present a different picture of the WTO than the one typically portrayed in the press. They wanted something new, something that wasn't organized from the top down in a hierarchical manner. And before the protests had ended, IMC was born.
Over the years, IMC has grown to include cities all over the world, with more than 100 centers in all. There's no barrier to entry. Once approved, anyone who abides by the New Independent Media Center principles can form their own branch. In the years following the Seattle protests, IMC branches have opened from Europe to Uruguay. But true to its riotous roots, IMC has consistently pushed the limits of acceptable practice.
Which is perhaps why Sano remains sanguine. Trouble with the law is a regular occurrence for Indymedia.
In 2001, following the FTAA protests in Quebec City, the FBI and Secret Service subpoenaed the IMC to supply the FBI with user logs from an Indymedia Web server. Indymedia won that fight, and it subsequently ceased logging identifying data for visitors and posters to its sites.
In 2003, Indymedia made a splash when it took up the cause of the Diebold memos. After a group of Swarthmore students obtained and published embarrassing internal memos from Diebold concerning that company's electronic voting machines, Indymedia hosted a copy of the memos on its servers. Diebold claimed that Indymedia had violated its copyrights and tried to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to bludgeon it into submission. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, provided legal representation to the maverick media outlet. It won not only the case but, on Oct. 14, a $125,000 decision against Diebold as well.
More recently, in August 2004, Indymedia found itself in the midst of a controversy surrounding its coverage of the Republican National Convention. Prior to the convention, a poster to nyc.indymedia.org published the names of about 1,600 convention delegates coming to New York, along with their e-mail addresses, phone numbers, home addresses and a list of hotels where they would be staying. The Secret Service subpoenaed NYC Indymedia's Internet service provider to try to obtain information that would identify the poster, but as a result of the Quebec case, Indymedia no longer kept such logs.
Then, on Oct. 1, the FBI paid a visit to an Indymedia representative in Seattle on behalf of the Swiss government. The Swiss were upset that IMC had published pictures of undercover agents posing as anti-globalization protesters. The pictures, though published by IMC Nantes, were physically located on the server in Seattle. Prior to the FBI's visit, IMC had already digitally masked the agents' faces. Since no names or other information was published, this effectively killed the Swiss government's argument that the pictures contained personally identifiable information. During this meeting, according to the EFF, the FBI conceded "that they were not contending any laws had been broken, and that there was nothing wrong with the photos of the officers, but were rather passing on a request from the Swiss government." Again, Indymedia won.
But there's one important distinction between the current case and all previous clashes with authority. In the past, at least, Indymedia always knew whom it was fighting.
"ISPs are not allowed to disclose stored data to the government without a specific court order," says Annalee Newitz, spokesperson for the EFF, which is again representing Indymedia. "The lawyers are jumping up and down saying, 'Sue! Sue!' But we don't know yet who to sue."
Kurt Opsahl, who is wrangling the legal end of the case for the EFF, concurs. "So far it has been just a brick wall," says Opsahl. "There are similarities to some of the PATRIOT Act powers through which the U.S. can issue secret orders to obtain evidence. But in those cases the service provider wouldn't even be allowed to say they had received the order. So it is extraordinarily unusual to say that [Rackspace] had gotten a court order, but to not be able to say who requested it or any of the other pertinent information."
"There's also a similarity between this and the notorious Steve Jackson Games case. In that case the Secret Service came in and seized a computer that was hosting some [bulletin board system] because they had an interest in a particular posting on those boards. The EFF was able to go to the court and show that the court can't go in and seize protected speech in its interest in just one posting. It appears that the government has forgotten that lesson, and we may need to remind them of it again."
Opsahl is optimistic about his chances of winning a decision for Indymedia. "The Electronics Communications Privacy Act sets restrictions on when an ISP can provide the content of communications. The Privacy Protection Act prohibits the government from seizing a server that contains a journalist's work product or documentary information that is to be published in the news media."
When Salon contacted Rackspace, the company offered apologies but no information. Rackspace spokesperson Annalie Drusch, while apologizing profusely for her inability to comment, told Salon that "all I can tell you is that we responded to a subpoena."
Nor was the agency that served the subpoena much help.
"Much as Indymedia would like for it to be, this is not an FBI case. This was a request from a third country pursuant to an MLAT subpoena," said Joe Parris, a spokesperson for the agency, referring to the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. "It is not a U.S. case. The FBI, the Department of Justice, are not parties in interest. We just fulfilled the U.S. end of an MLAT treaty on serving the subpoena."
Parris went on, however, to offer a tantalizing nugget.
"I think that the Indymedia site is claiming that it had something to do with them publishing pictures of undercover police officers, but I've heard through other media sources that it was coming from Italy. But that's not from an internal FBI source."
Both the EFF and Indymedia are now focusing on Italy. Suspicions center on Morena Plazzi, a deputy public prosecutor of the court of Bologna. IMC Italy reported that Plazzi stated in a press conference that she had subpoenaed the servers' user logs. (Which, again, Indymedia doesn't keep a record of.) Salon's attempts to reach Plazzi were unsuccessful.
"At this point we don't have a whole lot of information," Opsahl says. "But we do have what appears to be somebody admitting that they had asked for log information. So that is now becoming the prime suspect."
To that end, the EFF filed a motion on Oct. 22 to unseal the court order that subpoenaed the servers and discover who actually issued it. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, where the servers were seized, there's been considerably more uproar over the seizure. M.P. Richard Allan, a Liberal Democrat, has been pressing the U.K. Home Office to determine what that government's involvement, if any, was, and has been posting the results of his inquiries on his blog.
But the question remains, what exactly were the Italians -- assuming it even was the Italians -- looking for?
"I believe it was something to do with the G8 protests in Genoa," Sano says. "They were very violent. Several Indymedia reporters were caught up in that. One of them was severely beaten and is currently pursuing a case regarding that."
Regardless of the cause, the seizure, at least temporarily, effectively silenced several media outlets. And that, says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, is intolerable.
"We really find this FBI intervention unacceptable," Pain says. "They'd never have done that for another media. It shows that Internet publications, and especially Indymedia, are not considered media. They see the Internet as a jungle, where they can do whatever they want."
"The worst part is for Uruguay," Sano says, explaining that IMC Uruguay also kept its data on the London servers, and was preparing for a presidential election of its own. "They have a huge history of violent media repression in Uruguay, even after they achieved democracy. They have no backups. And the reason they were being hosted outside the country was specifically to avoid the kind of seizure that ended up occurring."
- - - - - - - - - - - -

The anti-market mentality

Yahoo! News

BOSTON - Canada's health minister said Wednesday that his country "cannot be the drug store of the United States" — a warning that comes as several states are pushing to buy low-cost prescription drugs north of the border.

"It is difficult for me to conceive of how a small country like Canada could meet the prescription drug needs of approximately 280 million Americans without putting our own supply at serious risk," Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said in prepared text for a speech at Harvard Medical School

[more]

Business has been booming for Canadian Internet pharmacies that take orders from Americans looking to buy Canadian drugs made less expensive by government price controls. Busloads of Americans cross the border to take advantage of Canadian drug prices that can be as much as 80 percent lower in some instances, according to a congressional study.

Dosanjh said Canadian health officials have found no evidence so far of shortages in Canada, but he predicted potential problems down the road if demand increases.

"To me it is a matter of common sense that Canada cannot be the drug store of the United States," he said. "Neither American consumers nor Canadian suppliers should have any illusions otherwise."

('Ujjal Dosanjh' is correct)

Stop the National ID Card

I try to stick to philosophy, but, like a junkie, I follow the affairs of statecraft. This alert was sent to me by American Policy Center.

November 10, 2004

Action Alert! Action Alert! Action Alert!

***MUST ACT NOW to Stop the National ID Card

Right now, a conference committee of House and Senate Republicans is deciding whether or not to do the unthinkable: impose a national ID card on citizens of the United States.

They must hear from us.

A national ID card would be Big Brother at its worst. The entire lives of every American -- including medical history, job history, marital history, financial history, credit history, EVERYTHING could end up in a central federal database. Your entire life at the fingertips of faceless bureaucrats.

There is no greater threat to our personal security and liberty than a national ID system.

John McCain has once again wandered off the reservation. Under the guise of fighting terrorism, he and many other Big Brother proponents in the House and Senate are pushing hard to pass a back-door, defacto, national ID card. This is an unprecedented violation of our privacy rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

The prospects here are downright frightening. McCain and his cohorts want to standardize state drivers’ licenses at the federal level and link all state drivers’ databases. This monstrous power-grab by the federal government would create the very real possibility of adding technology such as radio frequency identification chips to driver’s licenses, thereby enabling Big Brother to track every movement a licensee makes.

[more]

READ THE ACTION TO TAKE BELOW!

We must act swiftly to avoid the tyranny of a national ID card.

We simply must make certain that “the McCain amendment” be stripped from both versions of the “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act”—Senate bill S. 2845 and House bill H.R. 10. The following facts about why a national ID program should be avoided at all costs are taken directly from an open letter to the House and Senate that the American Policy Center co-signed with over 50 other organizations.

**A national ID will not prevent terrorism in the United States.** According to Privacy International, of the top 25 terrorist targets since 1986, 80% have long-standing national identity card programs, and one-third of those countries have cards with biometric identifiers. In fact, the top target, Israel, has a national ID card that uses biometric identifiers on the card. Yet such cards have done nothing to stop devastating terror attacks on those nations. Furthermore, identity cards tell nothing about an individual’s intentions. Timothy McVeigh and the beltway stalker would both have qualified for a national ID card.

**A national ID system would divert resources from more productive counter-terrorism measures.** One estimate of the initial cost of such a program goes as high as $25 to $30 billion dollars, with another $3 billion to $6 billion per year to run it. Our limited resources could be better spent on increasing border security and dealing with the two-year backlog of intelligence needing to be translated at the FBI.

**A national ID would depend on a massive bureaucracy that would limit our basic freedoms.** A national ID system would depend on both the issuance of an ID card and the integration of huge amounts of personal information included in state and federal government databases. One employee mistake, an underlying database error rate, or common fraud such as identity theft, now rampant in the U.S., could take away an individual's ability to move freely from place to place or even make them unemployable until the government fixed their “file.”

**A national ID could require all Americans to carry an internal passport at all times, compromising our privacy and limiting our freedom.** Once government databases are integrated through a uniform ID, access to and uses of sensitive personal information would inevitably expand. Law enforcement, tax collectors, and other government agencies would want use of the data. Employers, landlords, insurers, credit agencies, mortgage brokers, direct mailers, private investigators, civil litigants, and a long list of other private parties would also begin using the ID and even the database, further eroding the privacy that Americans rightly expect in their personal lives. It would take us even further toward a surveillance society that would significantly diminish the freedom and privacy of law-abiding people in the United States.

**Action to Take**

These are the Republicans who will decide our fate on the national ID card issue. Call them, and tell them to make sure any and all national ID card language -- including any standardization of state drivers’ licenses -- be stripped from S. 2845 and H.R. 10 (the “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act). We have only this week and next to kill this monster. NOTE: It does not matter if any of these folks are from your state or not. They are about to make a decision that affects EVERY American in EVERY state. All of them must hear from all of us!

Sen. Susan Collins (ME): (202) 224-2523
Sen. George Voinovich (WY): (202) 224-3353
Sen. Norm Coleman (MN): (202) 224-5641
Sen. John Sununu (NH): (202) 224-2841
Sen. Pat Roberts (KS): (202) 224-4774
Sen. Mike DeWine (OH): (202) 224-2315
Sen. Trent Lott (MS): (202) 224-6253

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (MI): (202) 225-4401
Rep. Henry Hyde (IL): (202) 225-4561
Rep. David Dreier (CA): (202) 225-2305
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (WI): (202) 225-5101
Rep. Duncan Hunter (CA): (202) 225-5672

***PLEASE SEND THIS URGENT ALERT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!***

More Wisdom for Doctor Recommended

Doctor Recommended » Vote: it’s easier than working

"I’d like to remind everyone that if you don’t vote, then you won’t get your chance to force others around. In fact, you’d have no right to complain when people forced you around, because you forfeited your opportunity to defend yourself or force them to do what you want."

Post-Electum Depression

The Calculus of Voting

"...consider someone making two decisions--what car to buy and what politician to vote for. In either case, the person can improve his decision (make it more likely that he acts in his own interest) by investing time and effort in studying the alternatives. In the case of the car, his decision determines with certainty which car he gets. In the case of the politician, his decision (whom to vote for) changes by one ten-millionth the probability that the candidate he votes for will win. If the candidate would be elected without his vote, he is wasting his time; if the candidate would lose even with his vote, he is also wasting his time ."
David Friedman - Price Theory: An Intermediate Text, 1986

More links:

League of Non-voters
The Voluntaryist
Strike The Root

Don't Tease Now...

Could it be? Could Himmler actually be handing the sceptre of Satan to another? And Ridge too?

Ashcroft's aides say he could step down soon

Another Overwhelming Majority

Ok, now you have to be objective, is this blueish red or reddish blue?

The 4th Reich Has Begun

I can't say I was the least bit enthused about the prospect of Kerry and his neo-Socialist, gun-stealing, Leftist bullshit but this is surely the beginning of a dark age for this country. I predict a radical rise in the police state, economic collapse, internal strife, global dissent, gun-confiscation and the return of Melkor.

This was this morning's CNN, note the confusion induced by the various headlines and the fucking wing-nuts in the picture, anybody have a two by four handy?

Damn Liberal Media

Always slanting the news to the Left...Anchorage Daily News | Voters overwhelmingly reject marijuana

here's the overwhelming majority in hard numbers:

And No Talking Either

It almost (but apparently not completely) goes without saying that this PC shit has gotten totally out of hand. That fact that this even made it to court is a sign of the apocalypse. Remember freedom is control and fear is peace.

Justices refuse to consider case of boy punished for playground game

You can have my DNA...

when you scrape it from my cold, dead body.

prop69

Presidential Hermeneutics

by Roderick Long

No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you’ve got to do in a way that passes the test – that passes the global test – where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

– John Kerry, 1 October 2004

He said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. That’s what he said. Think about this. Sen. Kerry’s approach to foreign policy would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions.

– George W. Bush, 2 October 2004

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. … The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

– Thomas Jefferson, 4 July 1776

He said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. That’s what he said. Think about this. Mr. Jefferson’s approach to foreign policy would give “the opinions of mankind” and “a candid world” veto power over our national security decisions.

– George W. Bush, 5 July 1776 [alternate history timeline]

Cambodia chooses new monarch

BBC NEWS

Norodom Sihamoni has been named as Cambodia's new king, a week after his father Sihanouk's abdication.

A nine-member throne council voted in favour of the former ballet dancer, whose only previous public role was as Cambodia's ambassador to Unesco.

A statement issued by the council said Sihamoni should be referred to as king with immediate effect. He is due to be crowned later this month.

The hunt for a new monarch was sparked by Sihanouk's abdication last week.

more:

There was no legal provision in the event of a monarch's abdication, and laws had to be rushed through Cambodia's parliament to enable a throne council to convene and choose a successor.

CAMBODIAN SUCCESSION
Nine-member throne council approved nomination
Laws for deciding succession had to be rushed through
King Sihamoni was former king's preferred candidate
Elder half-brother Ranariddh said he did not want the post

Profile of King Sihamoni
Your views
Prime Minister Hun Sen, acting head of state Chea Sim, two top Buddhist monks and other senior political figures - usually loyal to Hun Sen - made up the nine-member throne council.

Earlier this week Hun Sen publicly stated his support for King Sihamoni's appointment, as did Sihanouk, so Thursday's announcement has come as no surprise.

But nevertheless this is a remarkably smooth transition in a country better known for its political upheavals.

The first task of the new king will be to come home. He is currently in the Chinese capital, Beijing, with his father, who is receiving medical treatment.

Both men are expected to return to Cambodia next week, and a coronation ceremony has been planned for later this month.

Apolitical successor

When Sihanouk announced his abdication last Wednesday, politicians initially hoped he would change his mind.

Prince Ranariddh - another of Sihanouk's children and head of the National Assembly - even went to China to try to persuade his father to stay on.

Royal Palace, Phnom Penh
King Sihamoni is due back in Cambodia next week
But once it became obvious that Sihanouk would not reverse his decision, speculation mounted that King Sihamoni would be chosen to succeed him.

Prince Ranarridh - by far the best known of Sihanouk's 14 children - has often said he would rather stay in politics than be crowned king.

Both Ranarridh and Sihanouk publicly stated that King Sihamoni was their preferred choice of successor.

Prime Minister Hun Sen also backed King Sihamoni - a man he hopes will stay out of Cambodia's day-to-day politics, unlike his father who often interfered in political decisions.

While the reigning monarch used to have great authority in Cambodia, the position is now largely symbolic and wields no real power.

But it remains an important position because of the reverence Cambodian people give to the royal family.

For the ailing Sihanouk, King Sihamoni's appointment will bring huge comfort.

The 81-year-old former monarch ruled Cambodia for more than half a century, and had been troubled by the prospect that the Khmer royal line would die with him.

He was also concerned that - even if the monarchy continued - there could well have been a succession battle after his death.

Cambodia's monarchy is hereditary, but any descendent of the past three kings can be chosen, and there were dozens of potential candidates to chose from.

"My abdication allows me to give our country, our nation and our people a serious opportunity to avoid mortal turmoil the day after my death," Sihanouk wrote recently on his website.

Stop -- or We'll Shout

This is beautiful...

Yahoo! News - Stop -- or We'll Shout

Pot? Yes. Guns? Kinda.

Poor, Silly Canadians

Canadian Gun Laws

Welcome to Earth, Thank you For Not Smoking

"88 percent of Disney’s PG-13 movies included smoking over the past five years, the highest among all major studios. Disney and News Corp. led all major studios with 91 percent of their R-rated movies including smoking."

REBEL Press Center

[rasafrasit]
Well then, let's outlaw images of people smoking so that children won't grow up and all become smokers, surely people don't act of their own free will and surely somebody else is to blame (I mean look at me, I grew up watching t.v., going to movies, eating junk food and I smoke like a fiend-oh no wait, that's right, I don't smoke cigarettes at all...because I choose not to.

"More powerful than traditional advertising, movies recruit over half of all adolescent smokers, upwards of 1,000 new smokers every day, eventually killing 50 percent more of them than illegal drugs, gun violence, suicide, drunk driving, and AIDS combined."

This is a spurious use of statistics and demonstrates absolutely no positive sense of cause and effect. Prove that this advertising 'caused' these people to smoke, or prove even that it activated in them a predisposition for smoking.

I have an even better idea then my first one...let's ban images of everything that is 'bad' and let's cut media depictions of 'not niceness' by 50% in four years. Now all we need is to find somebody who can make just, fair and perfect decisions about what is good and what is bad and then we can just make everybody follow these rules. I know of four people who think they would do a good job: Mussolini, Marx, Hitler and George W. Bush-oh, a Pat Robertson too, he seems to have conviction and a clear set of guidelines.

I'm sorry but this nanny-State shit really purples my nurple. This Leftist presumption that, unlike those mean-old evil fascist Right-Wing Conservative Capitalist Pigs, the Left-Wing Conservatives are pure and just and right and always interested in freedom. Fuck, they don't know what freedom means-they think its a state of mind, like being in love or actually enjoying Widespread Panic. No, freedom is a natural right to self-possession and a freedom from arrogation-one that extends from the right to control over one's own body. It is not compulsive "charity" and it is not moral relativism. What all collectivists fail to understand (both Left-Wing and Right-Wing) is that other people are not public property, you may not, under any truly ethical construct, dictate how they may dispense their life nor presume to have the right, foresight or greater presence of mind to preempt their right to self-determination. Even if it means they smoke themselves into a coma. Incidentally, the reason that smoking has become a "social problem" is because that fascist fuck Roosevelt sold this country down the river to satisfy his aristocratic aspirations; that is, the reason that smoking is a public burden is because the Left made it so, they put the burden of these people on the shoulders of all the tax payers when they socialized healthcare, which means spending tax dollars (put then, as Keynes taught us, money grows on trees). I'm going to stop before I get caught up-I need to get back to my thesis (so I can berate a much larger presumed audience).
[/rasafrasit]

**Updated

It is the fact that this even passes for research that raises my ire-the main corollary is unsubstantiated, unprovable and therefore a false corollary

and my primary objection still stands as this "research" is sure to be used as justification for or argument in defense of some bullshit legislation put forward by hypocrites who parade around under the banner of 'liberal' only to prove time and again that they are ultimately interested in telling people what to do (and allowing the coercive power of the State to enforce their personal ethics)

if the issue is whether or not Disney is obligated to censor itself in the interest of young viewers ("won't somebody please think of the children") then I counter that this responsibilities lies with the parents/guardians fo these children. censorship is a slippery, radically subjective slope and has NEVER been practiced well or effectively. let me ask you, are you advocating censorship?

if the issue is the obviously detrimental health effects that come from smoking then we are back to my appeals to individual responsibility and the even more detrimental effects of collectivist presumptions of the existence of a common good and the tragedy of the commons

if we are talking about corporate hegemony then I ask you where you think these megalithic companies get their validation and power (the answer is the State)

if we are talking about the supposed evils of marketing/capitalism (a la half-wits like Naomi Klein and AdBusters) then I ask you where the final choice lies? I have never in my life been forced to buy a product at gun point (I have, however, been coerced to pay taxes so that people stupid enough to smoke can get free health care, under threat of legal action-property seizure-imprisonment-death)

the effects of product placement should more accurately be called "the effects of product placement on the stupid, gullible, weak-minded and impressionable"

incidentally, the power of the self-possession argument is that it inheres in each person, not just me, and kids are not exempt from this right/duty

non-smoking campaigns are moral propoganda-a cause: just like believing in Jesus, trusting your government, not killing whales, hating Jews, etc. (incidentally, I'm on board with the stuff about the whales-those other groups can fuck off) the difference between a cause and law is that law has direct access to the coercive power of the State. If you want to keep kids from smoking, more power to you but the moment you propose a law to enforce YOUR assumptions, you lose your ethical foundation and you lose my solidarity:

"Brand placement in mediated contexts as a marketing communication strategy appears to be firmly entrenched. Unless regulations are implemented to curtail such placements, the practice will likely continue. Brand agents and studio marketing departments in search of revenue will need to avoid creating a new type of advertising "clutter." Predicting hits and placing brands will always be risky propositions, but more and more advertisers may find benefits in imbuing their brands with the aura of Hollywood."

I'll bet you $100 these jackoffs call themselves liberals, I believe the proper term is fascist:

"In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence."

"Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity (11). It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts...
The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual (12). And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State (13). The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State - a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people (14). "

B. Mussolini

Socialist Roads

Small Towns are Reversing a Century of Corporate Personhood

STORY: KEN PICARD

Corporations, with their fictional so-called personhood, are creatures of the state and are inconsistent with the free market. Corporations receive their charters and special benefits from the state. Corporations date back to the British Crown incorporating towns, cities and districts in the British Isles and in her colonies; the special privilege was usually local courts and law enforcement. Therefore, although I salute denying special benefits of corporations, the incorporated towns in PA should recognize that they themselves are also corporations.

*begin excerpt*

Porter Township in northwestern Pennsyl-vania was an unlikely hotbed for an anti-corporate uprising. The tiny rural community about an hour north of Pittsburgh has a population of only 1500 people, many of whom are staunch Republicans with deeply-held conservative values.

But after the Alcosan Corporation, a Pennsylvania sewage-sludge hauler, threatened to sue Porter Township in 2002 for passing a local ordinance regulating the dumping of sludge in their community, town officials decided that their citizens had taken enough crap from corporations. Literally. So on December 9, 2002, Porter became the first municipality in the United States to pass a law denying corporations their rights as “persons” under the law. Weeks later, Licking Township, another rural Pennsylvania community facing a similar lawsuit, passed a more expansive ordinance revoking all constitutional rights of corporations within their jurisdiction.

Since then, dozens of other municipalities across Pennsylvania, some with as few as 1000 residents, have followed suit, reversing nearly 120 years of corporate encroachment on the rights guaranteed to all citizens under the U.S. Constitution. Prompted by the failure of state and federal regulatory agencies to protect citizens’ health, safety and quality of life from large-scale corporate activities, these municipalities took matters into their own hands and reclaimed their right of self-rule. Though the laws fly in the face of more than a century’s worth of legal precedents that say corporations are “persons” protected by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment, thus far these ordinances seem to be working.

Now some Vermonters are looking to follow Pennsylvania’s example and draft similar ordinances here to address environmental and public-health problems stemming from large corporate activities: the influx of big-box stores, the spreading of toxic sludge, even the proposed power increase at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Proponents of this strategy suggest that these laws may even be used one day to challenge undemocratic principles that were written into the World Trade Organization charter and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Championing this fight is Tom Linzey, a 35-year-old Alabama-born attorney who is the executive director and co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Founded in 1995, the Pennsylvania-based CELDF was initially set up to provide free legal services to small community groups that were fighting big environmental battles: toxic-waste incinerators, landfills, municipal sludge fields and corporate factory farms. Since then, however, the nonprofit law firm has expanded its mission to help municipalities around the country roll back corporate rights through local ordinances. CELDF conducts “democracy schools” — intensive, weekend-long seminars that trace the history of corporate rights and help citizens reframe local issues according to a new paradigm. Once such democracy school was held two weeks ago in Putney for 20 Vermonters from the Brattleboro area.

Linzey, who speaks on September 30 at Vermont Law School, explained in a recent interview how this movement began. In the mid- to late-1990s, large out-of-state agribusinesses began applying for permits to build large-scale hog farms in rural Pennsylvania. Local residents, who overwhelmingly opposed these farming operations, sought the help of state and federal regulatory agencies like the EPA. However, these communities soon realized that waging their battle on the regulatory front wouldn’t stop undesirable businesses from moving into town — it would merely lessen the harm those activities caused.

The proposed factory farms were huge operations — 5000- to 6000-head hog farms — that would dwarf neighboring family farms. Before long, CELDF was inundated with phone calls from local officials across Pennsyl-vania — some 400 townships in all — seeking their help at fending off these corporate farms. So CELDF began researching how this issue had been handled in other states, particularly in the Midwest, where 300,000- to 400,000-head hog farms are common.

This was when Linzey made a startling discovery: Nine Midwestern states have laws banning large corporations from owning or controlling farms.

In fact, Nebraska and South Dakota went so far as to incorporate that ban into their state constitutions. So CELDF copied the South Dakota constitutional amendment and used it as a model for local ordinances. Ten townships and five counties in Pennsylvania have adopted the anti-corporate farming ordinance. To date, only one has been overturned by the courts.

During this same period in the 1990s, CELDF also began receiving calls from community groups and local officials who were trying to stop the permitting of sludge fields. Sludge, the solid-waste byproduct of wastewater treatment plants, is not considered a “hazardous waste” by the federal government. Although it can contain as many as 600,000 different toxic contaminants, the U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency requires testing for only 11 of those contaminants.

Spreading sludge on farmland, a practice known as “biosolid land application,” was already a controversial issue in rural Pennsylvania because of its impact on human and animal health. In 1995, two youths died after coming into contact with a newly applied sludge field. In an effort to prevent more sludge from being dumped in their communities, 68 Pennsylvania townships passed anti-sludge ordinances.

The corporate waste haulers didn’t take these ordinances lying down. They challenged the laws in court, arguing that townships were denying them their constitutional rights and didn’t have the legal authority to pass these laws. The corporations also tried to hold town officials personally liable for passing these laws. They based their argument on a federal civil rights law that was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War in orders to protect African-Ameri-cans from state-sanctioned discrimination.

Since these corporate sludge haulers had deep pockets, it wasn’t even necessary that they win in court. All they had to do was deplete a town’s financial resources by waging a long and costly legal battle. How did CELDF respond? As Linzey explains, CELDF helped Porter and Licking townships draft a “Corporate Rights Elimination Ordinance,” which effectively stripped the corporation of its right to sue. Though these laws were an unprecedented challenge to corporate empowerment, they remain in effect today and have yet to be challenged in court.

“Corporate rights sometimes get talked about as some academic or abstract concept like something that’s taught in a college political science class,” Linzey says. “Here, what folks have said is that our vision for our community does not include land-applied sludge. It does not include factory farms. And that’s the community we want.”

Critics were quick to label the movement the work of liberal, anti-business activists. But as Linzey points out, about 80 percent of the communities he works with are overwhelmingly conservative and Republican. “Keep in mind, these are rural township officials with the shit-kicker boots and the John Deere hats. These are the guys who clear and salt the roads in the wintertime,” he says. “These are not activists. They are folks who saw a problem and tried to do something about it.”

How effective have the ordinances been? Very, says Linzey. “In the 68 townships that have passed sludge ordinances, not one new teaspoon of sludge has been land-applied,” he says. The same holds true for the ban on corporate hog farms. In the 10 townships that passed anti-corporate farm ordinances, Linzey says, not one new corporate hog farm has been established, even though those areas were targeted for more factory farms.

Vermont is no stranger to the legal perversion of corporate “personhood.” In April 1994, the Vermont Legislature passed the nation’s first law requiring the labeling of dairy products containing the genetically altered growth hormone, rBGH. In response, agribusiness giant Monsanto and a coalition of dairy-industry groups sued the state, asserting that the law was unconstitutional. A federal judge agreed, ruling that the new law violated Monsanto’s First Amendment right “not to speak.”

Several weeks ago, 20 people from southern Vermont spent a weekend at Landmark College in Putney, attending one of CELDF’s democracy schools. Among them was Larry Bloch, a small-business owner from Brat-tleboro who is with Vermonters Restoring Democracy. It’s an umbrella organization of groups that deal with issues ranging from genetically modified organisms to nuclear power to social and economic justice. Though its members come from a variety of political backgrounds, what unites them, Bloch explains, is a desire to combat corporate dominance over local decision-making.

“When a predatory corporation comes in and says, ‘We’re moving in no matter what and we don’t care if we push out your independently owned local businesses,’ that doesn’t affect only progressives or only conservatives,” Bloch says. “To hear the stories from Pennsylvania was inspiring because these were people who had never been activists and weren’t blessed with a lot of free time or money or the inclination to shake things up.”

Representative Sarah Edwards (P-Brattleboro) agrees. Edwards, who also attended the democracy school, says the seminar helped reframe the debate in her mind, especially on the issue of nuclear power. “It’s helping me to know who my adversary is,” Edwards says. “I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about the corporations.

“I have friends who work at [Vermont] Yankee. I know management who work at Yankee,” she adds. “This is not about them. This is about the system, the machine of the corporation squeezing out the diversity of voices that is necessary to have a good and healthy democracy.

Democracy schools already have been held in six states. By next year, there will be five permanent “Daniel Pennock Democracy Schools” — named for one of the two boys who died after coming into contact with the toxic sludge. In the past, these schools have largely addressed environmental issues. But that’s charging, Linzey notes. Activists in Roxbury, Massa-chusetts, for example, hope the Pennsylvania model can be used to challenge the pharmaceutical industry on its policies pertaining to AIDS drugs.

Others see the approach as a way to counter international agreements like NAFTA. John Berkowitz is executive director of Southern Vermonters for a Fair Economy and Environmental Protection. He points to a law passed in Massachusetts 10 years ago that prohibited municipalities from signing contracts with companies that do business with Burma — a country with an abysmal human rights record. After Japan and the European Union filed a complaint about the law with the WTO, in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts laws as unconstitutional.

“Wait a minute. Who’s deciding what’s best for a community?” Berkowitz asks. “Is it absentee corporations and people working for trade organizations like the WTO? We’re finding that people’s local decision-making abilities are being trumped by trade agreements that basically say, ‘You can’t decide that at the local level.’”

But as Linzey reminds people who attend CELDF’s democracy schools, local communities can reclaim the power of self-rule. Like hurricanes that feed off warmer waters, the anti-corporate movement draws strength through legal provocation. Says Linzey, “This is about shifting the paradigm to let people understand that the courts do step in to defend community rights over corporate rights.”

Ready, on your mark...Panic!

Funny, I don't see anything about self-DEFENSE here...

Ready.gov - From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Constitution? We Don't Need No Stinking Constitution

With acts of Vongress like this, who needs terrorists?

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Those Cheeky Bastards

Damn hackers with their inssitence on individual rights, always mouthing off about some perfectly justifiable government act or another.

EFF: EFF Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act (Oct. 31, 2001)

Yo, Sarah Brady, You Might Want to Take Notes Here

40 Reasons to Support Gun Control

Endless Enemies

The gangsters known as the United States Government gave millions to the Taliban, to eradicate the poppy crop, the year prior to invading Afghanistan, as well as provided arms and money to The Evil One throughout the 1980s. After the customary handshake, Rummy and Saddam engaged in an elaborate brother-style handshake that culminated in bumping hips.

Justice

Fliers Offer Bounty for Denver Cops' Lives

DENVER — A recent deadly shooting of an innocent man by Denver cops has sparked a disturbing reaction: An unknown group has passed out fliers promising hefty rewards for a police officer’s life.

The fliers, placed under car windshields and discovered Tuesday morning, offer $5,000 for a “crooked cop’s life” and $10,000 for a badge. They’re signed by a group called “N.E.F.F.” but are missing a phone number.

Pictured on the handouts is 63-year-old Frank Lobato (search), a disabled man shot and killed July 11 by police officer Ranjan Ford Jr. (search) The officer, who was responding to a domestic violence call, mistook a soda can in Lobato’s hand for a gun.

Denver police are being watched closely these days because of 11 fatal shootings in 16 months — including that of a developmentally disabled 15-year-old boy, Paul Childs, whose face is also on the fliers along with Lobato’s.

The Denver Police Department (search) is taking the threats very seriously, and has put patrol officers on alert. The perpetrator faces a felony charge: criminal solicitation for murder.

America's hidden financial scams

Very important information:

The Negative Return Economy

PRINT STORY
The negative return economy: a discourse on America’s black budget
July 4, 2004
Fascinating and lucrative patriotism, [i]

The negative return economy: a discourse on America’s black budget*

*(Forthcoming in World Affairs, Journal of International Issues)

By Chris Sanders and Catherine Austin Fitts

Keep the people frightened

Of things they cannot know

Is the secret of the Tomb

If they knew what you and I know

They would know it is just men

Who rob them, cheat them, kill them

Then start it all again

Orville X

Introduction

The United States government has operated a secret budgeting and spending program for decades outside the framework of the American Constitution. The institutional and political roots of this system of clandestine finance reach back to at least a century. The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries saw the consolidation of American industry and banking under the control of a restrictive cartel that for all practical purposes assumed control of the economy. The great magnates of American industry and finance in the late nineteenth century were superb practitioners of covert operations. Witness to this fact are the institutions set up during the twentieth century through which their descendants maintain control.

This paper is a summary of the structure of the American political economy which fits the facts better than the official model. Officially, American capitalism is characterised by democracy, opportunity, self-improvement, open and free markets, and constructive regulation for the public good, in short, happiness. Under this construct America has never fought a war of aggression and harbours no designs to do so. Its leaders have the nation’s interests at heart, and its politicians listen to their constituencies. The truth is different. Why the United States is so widely misunderstood is due in part to a controlled educational system and media. As the system evolved over the decades, time lent it legitimacy spanning the political spectrum. Gustavus Meyers, author of the seminal work History of the Great American Fortunes and no panegyrist, believed – following Marx as did many on the left – that the consolidation of American industry was inevitable and that the men who accomplished it were acting their part in a predetermined historical evolution. Once monopoly control had been achieved, the proletariat would rise and its dictatorship would begin. We shy away from such determinism; nothing happens but as a consequence of what men do and choose to do. If Meyers were alive today, he would still be waiting.

Black Budget? What Black Budget?

At the time of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 according to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), Pentagon had incurred $3.4 trillion of “undocumentable transactions,” that is to say that there were $3.4 trillion worth of financial transactions for which there was no discernible purpose. The day before the attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned that the lack of control over its budget was a greater danger to the national security of the United States than terrorism. After the attacks, the government stopped publicly disclosing information about “undocumentable transactions”.

Blame the Bookkeeper

The problem is not restricted to the Pentagon but affects the entire spectrum of government agencies and departments from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Defense Department. For a number of years the GAO has compiled a parallel set of books for the Federal Government called the Financial Report of the United States. This report attempts to impose “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” to the government’s financial reporting process in order to give a clearer picture of the government’s actual assets and liabilities and thereby enable better planning. Neither the Pentagon nor the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to name just two, have ever been able to pass a GAO audit on this basis.

Significantly, the government does not employ double entry bookkeeping in the preparation of its accounts. This has been standard accounting practice since the seventeenth century, which classifies and tracks sources and uses of funds to create an accurate picture of a business (or public) enterprise. Today the Pentagon utilises no accountable means of tracking money authorised by Congress from its initial authorisation to its use, say in developing a fighter plane. Running a 21st century military machine using antique accounting methods is an anomalous situation with interesting implications, not least of which is that government agencies cannot, or will not, explain what they are doing with the money that is appropriated for their operations by Congress.

A similar state of affairs prevails at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It exists primarily, at least in law, to ensure that low income Americans have access to affordable housing, which HUD provides as well as both credit and credit insurance on a nationwide scale. Yet HUD has never compiled information on its activities so that it or anyone else can see, by place, whether or not its activities in that place make money, lose money, or are simply irrelevant.

Conflict of Interests

Few Americans are probably aware that Lockheed Martin, builder of the F22 air superiority fighter, is also a major outside contractor supplying financial control and accounting systems to the Pentagon. The Pentagon for its part is Lockheed Martin’s biggest customer. This example is by no means unique. Lockheed also has a subsidiary employed by HUD to administer housing in American cities, an unusual diversification for a corporation the majority of whose business is done with the military and intelligence agencies. [ii]

Similarly Dyncorp (recently acquired by Computer Sciences Corporation) is another contractor that, like Lockheed, derives almost all its revenue from government security and military contracts. It is also a contractor supplying information technology to a variety of government agencies including the Pentagon, HUD, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice. At the Department of Justice it manages the case management software used by DOJ lawyers to manage investigations. [iii]

A prime example of overlapping interests is Herbert “Pug” Winokur. Not only was he on Dyncorp’s board of directors but he is also the Enron director in charge of that company’s risk management committee, and a long-standing board member of the Harvard Management Corporation, which invests in HUD projects.

AMS Inc., a computer software firm hired by HUD in 1996 to take over the management of its internal software for accounting and financial control, presided in two short years over an explosion in undocumentable transactions of nearly $76 billion. AMS violated fiduciary and control practices by installing its own equipment and software with no parallel runs against the legacy software and accounting system. In those same two years, HUD’s management more than tripled the volume of loan and insurance business being pushed through the system. Anyone familiar with running such systems in a bank or an insurance company immediately understands that a decision such as this (for it had to be a decision) would result in huge losses. [iv] Is this incompetence or design? Only the credulous would believe accident: the reward for Charles Rossotti, president of AMS, was to be named Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner at the Department of the Treasury, from which position he oversaw significant Treasury contract amendments to AMS. He was a direct beneficiary of this as a special White House waiver permitted Rossotti and his wife to retain their AMS stock.

Government’s response to criticism

The reaction of many people to the sorts of facts related above is to dismiss them as no more than evidence of incompetence and accident. The government does little to resist this sort of interpretation; on the contrary, it encourages it. For example, in response to calls for an investigation of its financial control, the Pentagon countered with an offer to investigate credit card abuse. Complaints about the performance of outside contractors such as AMS have been answered by a government-wide contract award to IBM for the standardisation of IT systems and practices. IBM, in turn, has awarded subcontracts to AMS, Lockheed, Dyncorp, SAIC and Accenture (formerly spun out from Arthur Andersen of Enron fame). It is these firms that have failed to provide systems that can pass a GAO audit. This manoeuvring and the government’s justifications affront common sense and are unethical. As private sector firms, they have to pass audits before their own accounts can be approved and reported to shareholders. Yet they routinely fail to meet the same standard for the government.

Often the government blames the previous, outgoing administration. However, consider that the incoming Bush administration replaced all the senior Clinton political appointees except: the Comptroller of the Currency, John D. Hawke; IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti (formerly of AMS); Comptroller General David Walker (Formerly of Arthur Andersen [v]– see http://www.npr.org/programs/npc/2001/010423.dwalker.html) and CIA director George Tenet. In short, the key positions necessary for the control of the federal credit, financial control, audit and intelligence.

Comptroller of the Currency, John D. Hawke
control of the federal credit

IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti
financial control

Comptroller General David Walker
audit

CIA director George Tenet
intelligence

This undisturbed transition from Democratic to Republican administrations represents a remarkable cross-party consensus, and highlights the real positions of power. With the exception of Rossotti, all these men are still in place in 2004. And Rossotti? He left the IRS to become a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group for information technology. A more richly symbolic and meaningful job move could scarcely be imagined. Carlyle’s business is global venture venture capital, which is to say it invests in corporate acquisitions all over the world with a speciality in arms manufacturers and technology. The large levels of undocumentable transactions at HUD and the Department of Defense inevitably inspire curiosity. Where is the money associated with those transactions? It is no great leap of imagination to wonder equally where the Carlyle Group raises the money with which to finance its acquisitions. [vi]

The trusts are dead. Long live the trusts

The cartelisation of the American economy was for all intents and purposes completed by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. [vii] In 1889, America’s leading banker JP Morgan held a meeting at his 5th Avenue mansion in New York. Its purpose was to reach a consensus whereby the owners of America’s railroads merged their competing interests. [viii] This was no mere group of transportation executives agreeing to fix prices. The railroads also controlled the nation’s coalfields and oil supplies, and were tightly bound to the nation’s largest banks. The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1914 completed this process of consolidation. In effect, Congress ceded control of the US currency system and the federal credit to the banks, thereby officially recognizing the cartel. This placed a relatively small number of men in a position to set prices across the economy with a degree of control heretofore unknown in US history.

The banking cartel’s interest in war

American foreign policy and the wars that America has fought over the course of the twentieth century (including the Spanish American War in 1898 [ix] and the present War on Terror) have successfully extended the cartel’s control over the world economy. The American Civil War was fought to determine control of the US economy. [x] Most Americans would explain the last 150 years of warfare as sadly necessary for reasons beyond America’s control. The implication is that America has accumulated its preponderant international position by some providential accident and not by design. Arguments for a contrary view elicit derisive accusations of falling victim to “conspiracy theory.” Reassuringly, they believe that self-interested individuals and organisations are incapable of collaboration to achieve common ends. When JP Morgan sat the owners of America’s railroads around a table and hammered out a non-compete agreement, it was no accident. Similarly, neither have America’s wars been accidents; they have been far more profitable than is widely understood. The US confiscated billions of dollars worth of German and Japanese war treasure at the end of World War Two. President Truman made a conscious decision to not reveal this to the public or repatriate it. Instead, it was used to finance covert operations. [xi]

Command economy

Popular myth has it that the trusts were broken up in the first decade of the twentieth century thanks to the crusade of Theodore Roosevelt on behalf of the middle class. Roosevelt certainly used his public stance against “big business” to successfully bid for campaign money from the very businessmen whom he was attacking. This perhaps explains why he subsequently signed legislation repealing criminal penalties for those same businessmen. This is a common trait of “liberal” or “progressive” presidents. The second Roosevelt, Franklin, is remembered as the champion of the downtrodden, who put an end to the Great Depression. It was he who established the nation’s social security system which in reality was (and is) funded by a highly regressive tax on its beneficiaries. Matching contributions from business were allowed to be deducted as a business expense before tax which simply extended the regressive nature of the program by financing business’ share out of foregone tax revenue. Roosevelt, a superb politician, won a landslide victory on a platform of reform which he adroitly sidestepped fulfilling. Instead, he declared a national economic emergency, short-circuiting any constitutional challenge to his power in the court. He promptly defaulted on the gold clause in the government’s bond contracts, and established the Exchange Stabilisation Fund (ESF) in 1934. Ostensibly meant to promote dollar stability in the foreign exchanges, the Fund in practice was and is something quite different. It is exempt from reporting to Congress and is answerable only to the President and Secretary of the Treasury. It is, in short, an undisclosed fund that can tap federal credit.

Apparatus of a Command Economy

The establishment of the ESF was an extension of the same logic behind the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1914. The latter, the Fed, was also created in response to a crisis: the crash of 1907. The Wall Street legend credits JP Morgan’s genius and patriotism with saving the Nation. In reality, the crash and resulting depression enabled Morgan to destroy his competitors, buy up their assets and in the process revealed to the nation and the world just how powerful the banks and Morgan were. Not all were grateful, and some demanded legislative action to bring the federal credit and national monetary system under public oversight and control. In a campaign of masterful political legerdemain, the Federal Reserve was created in 1912 by an act of Congress to do just this. But by creating it as a private corporation owned by the banks, Congress effectively ceded to the banks a position even stronger than they had occupied before. Even today it is not widely understood that the Fed is a privately held business owned by the very interests that it nominally regulates. Thus the control of federal credit and the US monetary system and the rich flow of insider information that results from that control are veiled from public view and are privately controlled in secret which rather explains the Delphic nature of the Fed’s chairman.

The extension of secret control was not limited to finance. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC) and consolidated control of the three armed services under one roof at the Pentagon. This merely served to extend this principle of secrecy to the field of “national security.” Like the Fed, the CIA was exempted from public disclosure of its budget and was given budgetary control over the entire intelligence community, while the National Security Council was set up as a policy-making body separate from the existing organs of state policy such as the State Department and the military commands reporting directly to the president.

The CIA Act of 1949 created a budget mechanism that allowed the CIA to spend as much money as it wanted “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.” In short, the CIA has a way to fund anything –legal or illegal – behind the protection of national security law. [xii]

Implementation

Having created the bureaucratic means to conceive and make policy in secret, the next development was to create the means to implement it. The main issue was how to control money flows in the national economy. The government’s solution was to assume a commanding position in the credit markets. To that end, it created first the Federal Housing Authority in 1934 (forerunner of HUD and now part of HUD) [xiii] and subsequently Ginnie Mae and then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to supply mortgage finance and insurance for homebuyers. The underlying political purpose is more subtle. Combined with the power of the Federal Reserve (i.e. the cartel) to set the price of money, the ESF, the GSEs, and latterly the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), have proven to be a powerful force for regulating money flows and demand in the US economy.

The military, too, was reformed with the adoption for the first time in American history of a wartime military budget and force structure in peacetime. In the early 60s this was fine tuned with the adoption of an explicit cost-plus acquisition process. The justification for this was, as usual, national security. This military budget has proven as effective in regulating the industrial sector as control over home finance has proven in regulating credit. Together they confer virtual control over the economy as conventionally measured in terms of money GDP.

Credit, credit, and more credit

A few moments reflection on the institutional structure briefly outlined above makes clear the central importance of the federal credit in underwriting it. The federal government underwrites the GSEs by extending to them a subsidised line of credit from the Treasury. An additional indirect subsidy in the form of lower borrowing costs flows from the belief in the marketplace that this constitutes an implicit government guarantee of their solvency. While this subject from time to time excites controversy, the truth is that the GSEs are not the only corporate entities benefiting from government support. Since the failure of Continental Illinois in the early 80s, the government has informally made it clear that it stands behind the banking system. This was made even more explicit with the bailout of Citibank in the early 90s and the implicit subsidy that the entire banking industry received as a result. Nor are financial institutions the only ones to enjoy this kind of support. Both Lockheed Martin and Chrysler have been effectively saved from insolvency by the taxpayer in the past, presumably due to their status as major defence contractors.

Such a system places a significant value premium on sheer size, if for no other reason than what the banking system cheerfully and disingenuously refers to as the “too-big-to-fail” doctrine. But for industrial firms, too, there is significant value in having a contracting relationship with the Pentagon. Not only is there the economic nirvana of cost-plus contracting but, if you are big enough, your fundamental business risk is underwritten for national security reasons. Thus, there is a tendency for firms to migrate their businesses to military rather than purely civilian markets; today the Boeing Company is a perfect case study of this in action. And a result is that civilian business in sector after sector has been driven into insolvency or into acquisition by the very national security industry that is ostensibly protecting them. [xiv]

The dynamics of cost-plus contracting are such that profits rise as costs rise. [xv] This explains a great deal about the size of American military budgets, which have risen inexorably over the years even as military preparedness has fallen. [xvi] But as we have seen, the losses in terms of lower productivity are felt across wide swaths of the economy as non-military contracting competition is squeezed out or acquired. Obviously these losses in the real economy have to be financed, producing a higher demand for credit than would otherwise be the case. Given declining productivity and a narrowing production base, it was inevitable that at some point net exports would become negative, a condition that the US entered in 1982 and which has intensified since. Today the US net foreign debt [xvii] is on the order of $3,000 billion (30% of GDP) and is increasing at a rate of some $500 billion per year (5% of GDP). [xviii

Concentrating capital

To finance such a large foreign borrowing requirement without currency depreciation requires both the ability to control as much of the national cash flow as possible as well as the collaboration of at least a few key foreign countries to achieve the same sort of control over international cash flows. In the latter case, this takes the form, in part, of ever larger amounts of intervention on the part of those countries running dollar surpluses and strong net export positions to prevent the markets from driving the dollar lower. In practice this means that they accumulate more and more dollars, which they in turn invest in US Treasury securities. Foreigners now own some 45% of US Treasury debt outstanding. In January this year the Bank of Japan intervened in the currency markets on behalf of Japan’s Ministry of Finance, purchasing a whopping $69 billion in that month alone, or more than 30% of its total intervention in 2003 which was itself a record year.

Current trends

All of this may seem to have little to do with the black budget, which most people associate with intelligence covert “black” operations. The truth, however, is that the black budget cannot be understood in isolation without understanding the political, historical and economic context from which it springs. One way of understanding this is by comparing trends. For example, in 1950 the Dow Jones Industrials stood at 200, and today the Dow is at 10,600. In 1950 narcotics trafficking was a relatively unknown crime in the United States. Today it is endemic, and not only in cities but in smaller towns and rural communities as well. In 1950 the US possessed most of the world’s gold and was the world’s biggest creditor. Today it is the world’s biggest debtor. In 1950 the US was a major exporter of industrial goods to the rest of the world. On current trends the US is not self-sufficient in manufactured goods and will not even have a manufacturing industry worth the name by 2020.

Then and now…

1950 Dow Jones Industrials at 200 2004 Dow Jones Industrials 10,600
1950 Drug trafficking virtually unknown 2004 Drug trafficking endemic
1950 US had the largest gold reserves 2004 Gold reserves …
1950 US world’s biggest creditor 2004 US world’s biggest debtor
1950 US industrial giant 2004 US no longer self-sufficient

Narcotics trafficking and the stock market

Is there a connection between these trends or are they random? It may seem strange to think of a positive correlation between narcotics trafficking and the stock market, but consider: in the late 90s the US Department of Justice estimated that the proceeds of such trade entering the US banking system were between $500 and $1.000 billion annually, or more than 5-10% of GDP. Now the proceeds of crime need to find a way into legitimate, that is legal, channels or they are worthless to the holders. If one further imagines that the banking system earns a fee of 1% for handling this flow (rather low considering that money laundering is a seller’s market) then the profits for the banks from this activity are on the order of $5 to $10 billion. Applying Citigroup’s current stock market multiple of 15 or so to this yields a market capitalisation of anywhere from $65 to $115 billion. One can thus readily see the importance of the illegal drug trade to the financial services industry. As it happens, this trade in illegal profits is concentrated in four states: Texas, New York, Florida and California, or four Federal Reserve districts: Dallas, New York, Atlanta and San Francisco. Can anyone seriously suppose that the Fed is unaware of this if the Department of Justice is? It, after all, handles the flows.

Narcotics trafficking and the National Interest

One reason for the Fed’s silence is that agencies of the government itself have been involved in drug trafficking for sixty years or more. [xix] For the purposes of understanding the black budget, one needs to be aware of the American practice of opening the American consumer market for drugs to foreign exporters in order to pursue strategic objectives abroad. The portability of narcotics and the huge price mark up from production to point of sale makes them a particularly useful source of financing for covert operations. Even more important is that the proceeds from narcotics sales fall completely outside conventional, constitutional channels of funding. This helps explain the ubiquitous presence of narcotics trafficking in zones of conflict around the world, from Columbia to Afghanistan. [xx]

Little examined, however, is the impact of narcotics trafficking on communities and economies at the point of sale. Consider, for example, the impact on real estate markets and financial services. Real estate is an attractive area in which to employ the cash surplus resulting from narcotics sales because it is, as an industry, entirely unregulated with respect to money laundering. Because cash is an acceptable and in some places familiar method of payment, large sums can be disposed of easily and with little comment. This can and does result in considerable distortion to local demand, and in turn provide fuel for real estate speculation and increased credit demand to finance it along with considerable opportunities for speculation and fraud. [xxi] The Iran Contra episode during the 1980s contained all these elements; although many are familiar with the sale of arms to Iran to provide cash to finance CIA backed guerrillas in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, less well-known is the systematic looting of local financial institutions and narcotics sales in the US. Banking allows the application of leverage to the cash that is generated by “illegal” activity while simultaneously making it possible to launder the funds. And when a bank fails, it is the shareholders, uninsured depositors and the taxpayer who pick up the bill. The point here us that narcotics trafficking creates a milieu in which the incentives to engage in uneconomic activity are greater than those to engage in economic activity. In a word, the profits from stealing are higher than the profits from playing by the rules.

What counts from a public policy point of view in the cartelised economy is the ability to control and concentrate cash flows of any kind. To this end, it is less important that a bank fails than that the federal credit is available to make good the losses. In doing so, the cash cost of losses is shifted, or socialised, to the national taxpayer base. As long, therefore, as there are willing lenders to the Federal Government, the game can go on.

Technology gives an edge

Government’s power combined with advancing computer technology has over the last thirty years vastly simplified the task of managing the national--and by extension the international--cash flow. Politically, the American victory in the Second World War meant that the entire West and its dependencies were co-opted into the International Monetary Fund (IMF) negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944. Forty-five years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 meant that for the first time in history there was no alternative monetary or political choice in the international arena. The British Empire had surrendered to the Americans precisely because America, represented an alternative to sterling, namely the dollar.

Today the US presides over a more or less fully closed global monetary system centred on the dollar. In practice this means that those countries within the system must exchange real value in the form of manufactures and commodities with the US cartel in exchange for dollars, which are no more than an accounting entry created out of thin air. This is analogous to a company with no assets exchanging watered stock for cash, and indeed this is no accident. It was a favoured technique by which the JP Morgans of the nineteenth century successfully financed the consolidation of American industry and finance. Today their heirs are busily dong the same thing, but on a global scale.

The diagram is a stylized representation of the relationship between the cartel and its allies outside the United States. Flows are both concrete and abstract. Concrete flows are manufactures, narcotics and commodities (mainly oil) inwards and arms outwards. Abstract flows are money outwards in payment for concrete flows inwards, which profits are recycled inwards where they both finance the inflation of the Federal Credit as well as buying political influence.

Technology has transformed the possibilities for creative management in banking. Its sheer number-crunching power has rendered the cost of iterative calculations to more or less zero. This has enabled the creation of a new sector in the industry, the derivatives business, which is nothing more than the breaking down of financial instruments such as stocks and bonds into their constitutive parts. This has increased the power of the banks many-fold, thanks to the cooperation of the Federal Reserve and Congress, who have allowed the banks to not only self-regulate their derivatives portfolios and businesses but have enacted rules to force other banks to use derivatives to “control” risk. In practice this has meant that the most profitable business of the banks has been moved off balance sheet, in effect creating a high level of secrecy in their business. It also confers a huge advantage on the largest banks to whom the others have to come for their derivatives. This has, in part, fuelled the manic consolidation in banking over the last twenty five years and has been applied with tremendous success internationally thanks to the imposition of the Basel Accords on money and banking which have forced other country’s financial institutions to either cooperate, which in practice has largely meant be acquired, or go out of business.

The banks’ tactics have been copied and refined by industry. An excellent example of this is the case of Enron, nominally an industrial company engaged in the production and transport of petroleum and natural gas, but which was transformed into a highly leveraged financial operation with a huge off balance sheet business trading derivatives. It secured a release from regulatory oversight by the time-tested method of purchasing lawmakers and by suborning its auditors. This gave it the power to restate earnings, virtually at will, simply by changing the assumptions on future interest rates embedded in the options, swaps and futures contracts constituting its unregulated derivatives book. Enron is a model also of the increasingly blurred distinction between the public and private sector. It employed as many as twenty CIA officers. One of its senior executives, Thomas White, was an army general before joining Enron and then left Enron to become Secretary of the Army. Enron executives were intimately involved with Vice President Richard Cheney’s energy task force. It is difficult to avoid concluding that Enron was anything other than a money-laundering operation employed in the interest of “National Security” on behalf of the cartel. [xxii]

The US has embarked on a costly global military adventure the outcome of which is anything but certain. This marks the culmination of more than fifty years of nearly continuous overt and covert warfare. In this it is supported by the most sophisticated financing apparatus in history, capable of mobilising the cash generated from a wide variety of activities both open and covert. The price has been the progressive hollowing out of the American economy itself, and the progressive erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law. The black budget is not the cause of this but the means.

About the authors

Catherine Austin Fitts is the founder of Solari, Inc and a member of the advisory board of Sanders Research Associates. Ms. Fitts is a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co, Inc, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and The Wharton School.

Chris Sanders is a principle of Sanders Research Associates in London. Mr. Sanders has been a banker and asset manager for 21 years, and is a visiting professor in international finance at the School of Public Administration at the University of Göteburg in Sweden. He has degrees from in political science from Duke University and Arabic literature from the University of Michigan. He began his financial career as a private banker with Citibank in Saudi Arabia in 1979. Since 1984, he has lived in London and worked in the international investment management industry. He founded Sanders Research Associates in 1997.

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[i] Remark attributed to a Wall Street broker in 1895 describing J.P. Morgan. Gustavus Meyers (2002). History of the Great American Fortunes. University Press of the Pacific, Volume 3, p.225. Morgan, regularly portrayed as a patriot, was at the time deeply engrossed in relieving the government of its gold reserve.

[ii] Lockheed’s contract was recently terminated by HUD--an action that the company is contesting.

[iii] Dyncorp was appointed as well to run the Department of Justice’s asset forfeiture program in 1993, winning a $60 million five year contract to do so.

[iv] For an insider’s account of the problems at HUD, see Catherine Austin Fitts, The Myth of the Rule of Law at www.sandersresearch.com.

[v] See http://www.npr.org/programs/npc/2001/010423.dwalker.html

[vi] See Dan Briody (2003), The Iron Triangle, Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken. ISBN 0-471-28108-5. Carlyle’s phenomenal success as an investment firm owes a great deal to its ability to lure former political figures and senior industry executives onto its executive team and advisory board. Examples are former US President George H.W. Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major; Frank Carlucci, former deputy director of the CIA and former Secretary of Defense; James Baker III, former Secretary of State; Richard Darman former director of the Office of Management and Budget; Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and present Secretary of State (a Carlucci protégé); William Kennard, former head of the Federal Communications Commission; Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Park Tae Joon, former Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea, and Louis Gerstner, former chairman of IBM. Of some interest as well has been the involvement of the Bin Laden family as major private investors in the Carlyle Group, represented by Shafiq Bin Laden, a brother of Osama Bin Laden.

[vii] For a brilliant history of the rise of America’s elite and its disenchantment with democracy and free markets, see Sven Beckert (2001). The Monied Metropolis. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISBN 0521790395.

[viii] Gustavus Meyers (2002). History of the Great American Fortunes, Volume 3. University Press of the Pacific: Honolulu. (Reprint of the 1910 edition), p.225.

[ix] See Walter Karp ((1979). The Politics of War. Harper & Row: New York) for an analysis of the move to war in the case of both the war with Spain and WWI. Of particular interest here is Woodrow Wilson’s extension of a domestic security apparatus ostensibly to deal with a supposed foreign threat during war time. In fact, the draconian legislation and executive orders that created the FBI as a new appendage of the Department of Justice was hardly used during wartime, but were deployed after the war against domestic political opponents in the labour unions and the Progressive Movement.

[x] See Beckert, op. cit.

[xi] See Tim Weiner ((1990) Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget, Warner Publishing) and Sterling and Peggy Seagrave ((2003) Gold Warriors, Verso Press: New York). There is ample evidence that these funds were invested and have grown substantially in the years since, and are still used to further political and personal agendas.

[xii] Seagrave, Sterling and Peggy, op. cit., pp 119-120. The use of National Security as a rationale for acts that would otherwise be considered unconstitutional and illegal has become embedded in the America legal system, a curious inversion of original intent. Franklin Roosevelt declared a national economic emergency in the 30s which was used to justify extraordinary measures by the executive, including the abrogation of the government’s obligations to redeem government debt I gold. The Supreme Court refused to hear a case contesting the administration’s action. More recently, the government intervened in a labour dispute between the International Longshoremen Workers Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, citing the Patriot Act of 2001 and equating the union’s position to economic “terrorism”. In fact, rather than the union striking, the PMA locked the union out of the ports. Government intervention was in the form of the direct intercession of Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security to force the union to accede to PMA demands.

[xiii] Notably, this is the same year in which the Exchange Stabilisation Fund was set up.

[xiv] In a similar fashion, manufacturing firms have migrated into finance, finding it easier to make money by arbitrage than by competition. Thus General Motors manufactures cars as collateral for its leasing business; similarly GE or Boeing make as much or more money out of financing the purchase of their products than from making them.

[xv] This is to say nothing of the wholesale transfer gratis of research undertaken at the taxpayer’s expense; for example nuclear technology transferred to the power industry.

[xvi] See Franklin Spinney, The Defense Death Spiral, www.d-n-i.net for an in depth analysis of the micro economics of military procurement and its impact on force readiness.

[xvii] This is the cumulative borrowing from abroad to finance net exports (or the trade deficit if you prefer).

[xviii] The annual rate of increase is the current account deficit.

[xix] See Alfred McCoy (1991). The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia. 2nd ed. Lawrence Hill Books: Brooklyn. ISBN 1556521251. McCoy documents thoroughly the genesis of US wartime cooperation with the mafia in Italy during WWII and its post-war toleration of narcotics trafficking in the US as a quid pro quo for the cooperation of Corsican and Italian organised crime in its covert war against the Communist Party in France and Italy. In Asia, it supported the opium and heroin business of a Chinese nationalist army in Burma after the Chinese Revolution in 1948. In Indochina the US supplanted French colonial rule after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, inheriting in the process French covert ties to opium production amongst the Hmong hill tribes. With overt American intervention in 1965 the importance of this traffic grew enormously, financing an escalation of the ground war in Laos.

See also Seagrave, Sterling and Peggy, op. cit. There is ample international precedent for American involvement in narcotics trafficking, beginning with the British organisation of opium production in Bengal two centuries ago and of its illegal distribution into China. For that matter, Japan turned Manchuria under its occupation into the biggest producer of opium and refined opiates in the world, the cash flow from which proved to be immensely useful to the operations of Japan’s Manchurian Army and intelligence services.

[xx] Peter Dale Scott (2003). Drugs, Oil and War: the United States in Afghanistan, Columbia and Indochina. Rowman & Littlefield Pub: Oxford. ISBN 0742525228.

[xxi] See Roger Morris ((1999) Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, Regnery Publishing) for a case study of the interaction of covert operations, narcotics trafficking, financial markets and politics in Arkansas during the governorship of Bill Clinton.

[xxii] See Catherine Austin Fitts and Daniel Armstrong, The Real Deal About Enron at www.sandersresearch.com.

Police kill man in bed

Suspect's uncle slain after cop apparently mistakes soda can for gun

Tuesday, July 13, 2004 -

A Denver police officer likely mistook a soda can for a weapon before shooting and killing a 63-year-old man in his bed, Police Chief Gerry Whitman said Monday.

Frank Lobato was shot once in the chest Sunday night during a police search for a domestic-violence suspect. Lobato, a career criminal and formerly homeless man whom neighbors said was disabled, was not involved in the domestic dispute.

Instead, officers were searching the home at 1234 W. 10th Ave. for Lobato's nephew Vincent Martinez, who was wanted on suspicion of domestic violence, assault and false imprisonment. Martinez, 42, was captured Monday evening.

Some neighbors and community members called the shooting questionable - and worse.

"I think it is disgraceful," neighbor Rose Salaz said. "I don't see how they can just go into people's houses shooting people. ... They are supposed to protect us."

The shooting comes weeks after the city and police announced reforms to the department's use-of-force policy in the wake of controversy surrounding police shootings.

Whitman and District Attorney Bill Ritter took the unusual step of calling a news conference to lay out some of the facts about the incident, the third fatal police shooting this year. But they answered few questions.

"It has now been determined that the party who was shot was not armed at the time of the shooting," a subdued Whitman said, reading from a prepared statement. "The officer stated that after he fired the shot, he heard an object fall to the floor on the other side of the bed. A beverage can was recovered from the floor in the area of the bedroom."

Ritter, standing next to Whitman, promised a full investigation to determine whether Officer Ranjan Ford Jr. broke any laws when he fired the fatal shot. No criminal charges have been filed against a Denver police officer for an on-the-job shooting during Ritter's 11-year tenure.

Ford, 33, came to the department in 2001. He has no prior shootings and no discipline problems, police said.

Before his hiring in Denver, Ford had been an officer in Jasper, Texas. Jasper Police Chief Stanley Christopher said Ford was a model officer there.

"I wish I had a dozen like him," Christopher said. "I'm telling you, he was a great officer. We really hated to see him go."

Ford was born in Boulder and attended Fairview High School, according to the application he submitted to become an officer in Denver. He speaks Singhalese, the native language of Sri Lanka. According to his application, he worked as a police officer and corrections officer in Texas beginning in 1993. Ford works in District 6 downtown.

"Knowing him as well as I do, if something happened, he was in fear for his life," Christopher said. "He's not a hot-dog. He's not a John Wayne-type."

Police were called to the home in the South Lincoln housing project by Martinez's wife, Cathy Sandoval, who said Martinez beat her and held her against her will for 17 hours on Sunday.

PROFILES
The shooting victim
Frank Lobato, 63, a Denver man, was shot in his bed when a police officer apparently mistook a soda can for a weapon. Neighbors say Lobato was disabled. The shooting comes just weeks after the city and police announced reforms to the department's use-of-force policy after controversial shootings.

The police officer
Ranjan Ford Jr., a member of the Denver Police Department since 2001, is described as a model officer with no history of shootings or discipline problems. The Boulder native previously was a corrections officer in Texas and a police officer in Jasper, Texas.

The circumstances
Police were searching the home at 1234 W. 10th Ave. for Vincent Martinez, a nephew of Lobato. Martinez was sought after Martinez's wife of two months, Cathy Sandoval, called police saying Martinez beat her and held her against her will for 17 hours Sunday. He was apprehended Monday night.

Now Sandoval said she is saddened and worried by the outcome. A relative is dead, and her angry husband is in jail.

"I'm worried he will think this is my fault," she said before her husband's capture Monday night.

The situation began when Sandoval and her husband of two months returned from an evening of drinking around 2 a.m.

Martinez was jealous because Sandoval had talked to people at the bar, Sandoval said. Once home, he became violent and he hit, choked and threw plates at Sandoval until about 10 a.m., she said.

For the rest of Sunday, Martinez refused to let Sandoval leave. She did not get out until about 6:45 p.m., when her mother arrived to return Sandoval's two children.

Once out of the house, Sandoval called police and agreed to meet them at a nearby McDonald's. She said she gave police permission to enter her home, and told them that her husband and his uncle Lobato were in the apartment.

Salaz said she watched police officers use a ladder to enter the apartment. They were in the apartment about a minute before she heard a shot, she said.

"People were out running around, grabbing their kids" when the shot went off, Salaz said. "Then, you could hear the officers inside yelling 'Put your hands up!"'

Salaz and other neighbors knew that Martinez had already jumped out a window and run away before three officers, including Ford, entered through the same window. Police had surrounded the building, but an officer walked around to the front, allowing Martinez an opportunity to flee, neighbors said. It was at least 25 minutes after Martinez ran away before the officers went in, Salaz said.

Sandoval said Lobato was in the room during the day as Martinez held her captive.

Lobato had a lengthy criminal record dating back to 1959, including arrests for drugs, assault and burglary. He had been in prison several times. His most recent arrest came in May on shoplifting charges.

On Monday night, Lobato's niece and grandniece said Lobato needed daily medication to keep his mind clear enough "to where he could cope."

Lobato was probably confused by the officers if he was aware of them at all, his niece Denise Cogil said, adding that the family has contacted an attorney in preparation for a lawsuit.

The shooting stirred echoes of the infamous 1999 shooting of Mexican immigrant Ismael Mena, who was killed during a no- knock drug raid at the wrong address. The city of Denver paid a $400,000 settlement to the family of Mena, who shot at police officers before he was killed and was discovered to have killed a man in Mexico.

Mayor John Hickenlooper, who has championed police reform, issued a statement Monday commending Whitman for being forthcoming about the shooting and promising continued investment in resources and training for police officers.

"This situation involves two tragedies: a brutal case of domestic violence and a loss of life," Hickenlooper said.

City Councilman Rick Garcia, chairman of the public safety committee, said his committee is planning to review further police reforms next month.

"For this action to happen does not bode well for the Police Department or the city," Garcia said. "I'm terribly distraught about it."

Staff writers David Migoya and Chuck Plunkett contributed to this report. Staff writer Sean Kelly can be reached at 303-820-1858 or skelly@denverpost.com.

War Prayer

Mark Twain was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League. In those days opposition to the Spanish-American war fostered a dialogue between communist anarchists and individualist anarchists. I'm increasingly interested in meeting up with some of the left-anarchist community, which rally at mainly economic gatherings of our rulers, and get their take on issues such as the income tax & federal reserve; I presume they demonstrate at economic gatherings because they are interested in economics.

The War Prayer (1904-5)

by Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain] (1835-1910)

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
WP.2 It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
WP.3 Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams – visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation
WP.4 God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory –
WP.6 An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”
WP.7 The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
WP.8 “I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.
WP.9 “God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
WP.10 “You have heard your servant’s prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor – and also you in your hearts – fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
WP.11 “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
WP.12 (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”
WP.13 It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Nazi Motherfuckers

Don't tell me that we are not bound for hell with this current regime of liars, facists and tyrannically minded fuck-nuts.

U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov Vote in Case of Attack

For context, see this timeline of the rise of the Third Reich.

The State is the Enemy

Unchecked police and military power is a security threat

Decent piece on the inherent danger of a para-military police force and the double-speak of the Bush adminsitration.

Bruce Schneier: Unchecked police and military power is a security threat
Bruce Schneier
June 24, 2004 SCHNEIER0624

As the U.S. Supreme Court decides three legal challenges to the Bush administration's legal maneuverings against terrorism, it is important to keep in mind how critical these cases are to our nation's security. Security is multifaceted; there are many threats from many different directions. It includes the security of people against terrorism, and also the security of people against tyrannical government.

The three challenges are all similar, but vary slightly. In one case, the families of 12 Kuwaiti and two Australian men imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay argue that their detention is an illegal one under U.S. law. In the other two cases, lawyers argue whether U.S. citizens -- one captured in the United States and the other in Afghanistan -- can be detained indefinitely without charge, trial or access to an attorney.

In all these cases, the administration argues that these detentions are lawful, based on the current "war on terrorism." The complainants argue that these people have rights under the U.S. Constitution, rights that cannot be stripped away.

Legal details aside, I see very broad security issues at work here. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to ensure the security of people: American citizens and visitors. Their limitations of governmental power are a security measure. Their enshrinement of human rights is a security measure.

These measures were developed in response to colonial tyranny by Britain, and have been extended in response to abuses of power in our own country. Laws mandating speedy trial by jury, laws prohibiting detention without charge, laws regulating police behavior -- these are all laws that make us more secure. Without them, government and police power remains unchecked.

The case of Jose Padilla is a good illustration. Arrested in Chicago in May 2002, he has never been charged with a crime. John Ashcroft held a press conference accusing him of trying to build a "dirty bomb," but no court has ever seen any evidence to support this accusation. If he's guilty, he deserves punishment; there's no doubt about that. But the way to determine guilt or innocence is by a trial on a specific indictment (charge or accusation of a crime). Without an indictment, there can be no trial, and the prisoner is held in limbo.

Surely none of us wants to live under a government with the right to arrest anyone at any time for any reason, and to hold them without trial indefinitely.

The Bush administration has countered that it cannot try these people in public because that would compromise its methods and intelligence. Our government has made this claim before, and invariably it turned out to be a red herring.

In 1985, retired Naval officer John Walker was caught spying for the Soviet Union; the evidence given by the National Security Agency was enough to convict him without giving away military secrets.

More recently, John Walker Lindh -- the "American Taliban" captured in Afghanistan -- was processed by the justice system, and received a 20-year prison sentence. Even during World War II, German spies captured in the United States were given attorneys and tried in public court.

We need to carry on these principles of fair and open justice, both because it is the right thing to do and because it makes us all more secure.

The United States is admired throughout the world because of our freedoms and our liberties. The very rights that are being discussed within the halls of the Supreme Court are the rights that keep us all safe and secure. The more our fight against terrorism is conducted within the confines of law, the more it gives consideration to the principles of fair and open trial, due process and "innocent until proven guilty," the safer we all are.

Unchecked police and military power is a security threat -- just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.

Bruce Schneier, Minneapolis, is chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. and the author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World."

Hiibel Update

Bloomberg.com: U.S.

Hiibel has lost his Supreme Court appeal 5-4. So, be prepared to identify yourself, at any time, for whatever reason, at the explicti request of any given Storm Trooper...I mean State Trooper.

October Surprise

October Surprise

What tricks will BushCo pull to attempt to win the election in November?

Well, he'll probably try something around or before October to swing or steal the vote. Welcome to October Surprise, where you can predict what will happen before the November 2004 election.

October Surprise!
What Will Happen Before The Election?
Osama bin Laden captured! 37.6%
Spectacular terrorist attack on US soil! 17.6%
Vote is threatened by terrorist attacks, vote suspended due to red alert. 14.3%
Diebold Election Systems fixes the vote in battleground states. 11.3%
Escalation in Israel, Iran, or North Korea. US opens a new war front. 8.1%
US pulls out of Iraq in October, leaving the UN in charge. 5.5%
WMD's found in Iraq! 5.4%

Very Important Potheads (V.I.P.s)

VIPs

Perhaps one day collaborators in the drug war will be treated like the Vichy French.

Water-boarding in the White House

An excellent analysis & overview of the Torturegate scandal.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1497

Water-boarding in the White House

Quotes of the week:

"As early as Sept. 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney, in his first interview after the 9/11 attacks, said, ‘It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective'… In February 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "The reality is, the set of facts that exist today with al-Qaeda and the Taliban were not necessarily the set of facts that were considered when the Geneva Convention was fashioned." (Amanda Ripley, Redefining Torture, Time Magazine)

"National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice yesterday said President Bush 'has given broad authority to a variety of people to do what they have to do to protect this country… It's a new kind of war," she told Fox News. "We're fighting on a lot of different fronts.' Rice's comments came after Amnesty International questioned Bush on the Nov.3 attack using a Hellfire missile, which killed senior al Qaeda thug Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, a key plotter in the deadly October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Al-Harthi and five others were killed by a missile fired by an unmanned Predator drone operated by the CIA. Amnesty International asked the United States to issue a statement that it does not support 'extra-judicial executions.'" (Aly Sujo, "We're Ready to Unleash More Hellfire," the New York Post, November 11, 2002)

"France, Russia, Germany, and Canada, which did not support the war but have since labored to repair their relations with the United States, were particularly vocal in their criticism of the restrictions [on Iraqi reconstruction contracts], outlined Tuesday in a Pentagon memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In Berlin, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, standing alongside UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, suggested the memo could be contrary to the spirit of international law, a remark that Bush later scoffed at while speaking with reporters. ‘International law?' Bush said. ‘I'd better call my lawyers.'" (Stephen J. Glain, Bush Defends Plan on Iraq Contracts, the Boston Globe, December 12, 2003)

"The Bush administration pledged yesterday for the first time that the United States will not torture terrorism suspects or treat them cruelly in an attempt to extract information, a move that comes as the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in U.S. custody are being investigated as homicides… Bush, in honoring U.N. Torture Victims Recognition Day yesterday, said, ‘The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment.'" (Peter Slevin, U.S. Pledges to Avoid Torture, the Washington Post, June 27, 2003)

"Leading this fight by example"

On Sunday, in part one of this dispatch on our global torture system, George Orwell… meet Franz Kafka, I wrote: "There will be so much more to learn. Already, when it comes to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon keeps heaping investigations on top of one another, each subsequent one led by a figure with a higher rank and so more capable of investigating responsibility at higher levels, and I think it can be said with certainty that this will only get worse -- worse probably than anything we now imagine." As it happens, this administration is hemorrhaging documents. It took exactly twenty-four hours for my modest prediction to come true.

In the space of a day, we learned much more; it got significantly worse; and the Pentagon announced yet another investigation, this time of prisoner conditions at Guantanamo, where, it is rumored, much treatment and mistreatment was systematically and bureaucratically videoed, filed, and stored. Though this may seem but the next case of the criminal investigating the crime, there are numerous military men and intelligence officials angry enough, often disgusted enough, at what this administration has let loose to make even insider investigations dangerous for the administration these days.

Were the subject at hand anything but the creation of an American torture regime (and implicitly "high crimes and misdemeanors"), some of what's happened would be hilarious. For instance, Attorney General Ashcroft has stiff-armed Congress, refusing to declassify the memoranda that the administration's many legal minds produced justifying torture and the most literal sort of imperial presidency (to be presided over by a torturer-in-chief); and yet, in the last day or so, these memos have sprouted like so many wretched weeds at news sites all over the Internet. (To read several of these lengthy, tedious, pretzeled documents posted in their grim near-entireties, go to the Washington Post, Newsweek, or Global Beat and click away.)

What they make clear is that the Bush administration had torture on the brain. Its officials were fixated on the subject, which went so naturally with the President's new-style, no-holds-barred, we're-the-only-law-in-town, dead-or-alive, assassination-and-kidnapping "war on terrorism." It's no longer a matter of whether knowledge of the acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison reach the President and his advisors, but of what can only be termed a complete obsession with the subject of torture among those figures. The highest officials at the Pentagon, in the military, in the CIA, and at the Justice Department clearly couldn't stop thinking about torture -- as over the course of more than a year they requested legal memorandum after memorandum, all chewing over how to define torture so that various inhumane acts involving the infliction of mental and physical pain would not be considered such; over how far to go when too far was never quite far enough. In this sense, whether they were aware of the individual acts of horror at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (and a number of them evidently were), they were certainly intensely aware that acts of this nature and worse were a "necessity" of their war (even if photos of them were not).

Just to sum up the last day or so of news on the subject:

We now know from an Andrea Elliott report in the New York Times (Unit Says It Gave Earlier Warning of Abuse in Iraq) that at least some of those wild and wacky guys in military intelligence at Abu Ghraib were actually reporting the abuses at that prison and other "detention facilities" in the country to their superiors. This was well before the January date at which top military officials claim to have first learned about the abuses from the now notorious photos turned in by a soldier/whistleblower.

Oh, and among the abuses the intelligence men reported were: "electric shocks at other holding facilities before arriving in Abu Ghraib," "burns on the body" (recorded in photos in a prisoner's file), and the beating to bloody pulps of five generals of Saddam's defeated military, who do, of course, fall uncontrovertibly into the category of prisoners of war and so under the Geneva Conventions.

(By the way, a phenomenon to note: Wherever this administration or its minions conceived of or committed horrors, there was usually someone disturbed enough to record the fact and in some way protest it. To take but one example, as Dana Priest and Bradley Graham reported recently in the Washington Post, "[O]n Dec. 2, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a set of more aggressive interrogation methods to be used on Mohamed al Qahtani, a Saudi detainee [at Guantanamo] who some officials believed may have been the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A naval psychologist at the base protested the use of some techniques meant to humiliate prisoners and sought help from the Navy's top civilian lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, to stop them, according to three defense officials knowledgeable about the debate."

We now know as well, thanks to a piece (The Torturers) by Justin Raimondo, the fierce libertarian columnist for Antiwar.com, that New Yorker magazine journalist Seymour Hersh, who first pushed the Abu Ghraib story into the light of day, is saying more than he's yet written. Here is a summary Raimondo got of part of a recent Hersh talk at the University of Chicago:

"He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened…."

So we still have on-camera acts of horror against children to look forward to. (Is there no irony in the fact that the Bush administration has managed, through its war on terrorism, to feed every perverse sexual fantasy it would otherwise decry? But irony is inconceivable when you're dealing with planners incapable of recognizing the category of "unintended consequences.")

Oh, and thanks to Time magazine, we now know that other horrors are still to be described elsewhere in the imperium: "A Republican Senator says charges of manslaughter and rape may soon be brought against U.S. personnel involved in handling detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Thanks to Newsweek's Michael Hirsh, John Barry, and Daniel Klaidman (A Tortured Debate), we now know something of what went on in the White House itself after "President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods… The handling of [captured al-Qaeda figure] al-Libi touched off a long-running battle over interrogation tactics inside the administration. It is a struggle that continued right up until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April -- and it extended into the White House… [Justice Department lawyer John] Yoo's August 2002 memo [now posted] was prompted by CIA questions about what to do with a top Qaeda captive, Abu Zubaydah, who had turned uncooperative. And it was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, who discussed specific interrogation techniques, says a source familiar with the discussions. Among the methods they found acceptable: ‘water-boarding,' or dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect's face, which can feel like drowning; and threatening to bring in more-brutal interrogators from other nations."

Imagine. Water-boarding in the White House.

On Sunday, when I wrote the first part of this dispatch, we had a vague report from the Washington Post that, according to one military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, the White House had been requesting information from the prison. (This was when the administration was in a sweat about who exactly the Iraqi insurgents, so unexpectedly resisting, really were.) Today, thanks again to Justin Raimondo, we have this fascinating passage from an on-line diary, a blog -- the Internet is a kind of bizarre wonder, isn't it? -- by Joe Ryan, evidently an employee at Abu Ghraib of a private "contractor," CACI International. On March 30, Ryan wrote:

"The other big news at work was a message sent to us from Ms. Rice, the National Security Advisor, thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis. Now if we could declassify some of it in order to shut up these people who say we have no business over here, that would be the best day!"

Robert Fisk, reporter for the British Independent, mentioned Ryan in late May in the following curious way: "One of Staphanovic's co-workers, Joe Ryan – [a CACI employee] who was not named in the Taguba report -- now says he underwent an ‘Israeli interrogation course' before going to Iraq."

And from Julian Coman of the British Telegraph we have word that worse is yet to come, possibly sometime this week:

"New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House. The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly."

By the way, when the notoriously close-mouthed Red Cross begins to let its private documents dribble out, you know that we're in dire and desperate straits. Coman quotes Scott Horton, former chairman of the New York Bar Association, "who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach," as saying that "the biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped."

Every time there is a further revelation, Rumsfeld piles on another insider investigation. But note -- though no one has noted it – that while the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA asked for all sorts of in-house legal opinions on various possible acts of torture (in the CIA case, clearly to cover future butts and implicate larger groups, should something slip out someday), no one in our government ever thought to consult, say, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or any other group that might be considered both concerned with such matters and not completely self-interested. While this may seem obvious indeed -- they were, after all, planning to commit acts they knew would horrify the international human rights community, who were seen as a bunch of namby-pamby global sissies -- nonetheless, it's worth stating that it should never be up to potential torturers (or lawyers in their pay) to decide what is and is not torture.

Reagan and Bush: An unnoticed similarity

In his typical manly fashion, at a news conference last week the President bravely confronted the issue of torture head on. Here are the two relevant passages:

Q Mr. President, the Justice Department issued an advisory opinion last year declaring that as Commander-in-Chief you have the authority to order any kind of interrogation techniques that are necessary to pursue the war on terror. Were you aware of this advisory opinion? Do you agree with it? And did you issue any such authorization at any time?

THE PRESIDENT: No, the authorization I issued, David, was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations. That's the message I gave our people.

Q Have you seen the memos?

THE PRESIDENT: I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not, but I gave those instructions…

Q Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government.

I hope you're comforted. "We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws…" Actually, as we now know, Mr. Bush's lawyers did exactly that, and assumedly when the President says we're adhering to those laws, he means to the interpretations of those laws offered by his own people -- about which Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale University's law school and a former assistant secretary of state, was recently quoted in the British Financial Times as saying, "They are blatantly wrong, It's just erroneous legal analysis. The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide." Well, exactly, and that should comfort you.

You would think, given his performance on U.N. Torture Victims Recognition Day (quoted above), that the President might have taken to the podium and denounced torture done in the name of his administration and anyone connected in any way with it or who advocated anything like it. He might have insisted that they would be prosecuted zealously and to the full extent of the law, but he preferred, for obvious reasons, to follow the path he had already hacked through the underbrush of the Valerie Plame case.

Oh, and on that unnoticed similarity to Ronald Reagan, don't overlook the President's wonderful, "I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not." How about not just that memo but any of the memos? How about not just seen, but heard about, or heard summaries of advice from? Hmm. Can't remember if I even asked those questions. In any case, what I think we can already see developing is the famed Reagan Iran-Contra defense: I-can't-remember, I-don't-recall. It worked for his hero, why not for him?

In the meanwhile, for those who think no domestic "unintended consequences" will flow from the pseudo-legalisms developed by the White House's legal wizards and applied in Iraq and elsewhere with such mayhem -- think again. After all, as Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer points out in the case of former Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay S. Bybee (Tout Torture, Get Promoted), the President has been intent on appointing the same legal brains to judgeships. Let this go into a second term and the creators of an American legal theory of torture will be judging us all.

Looking Back

It's worth recalling how much, in the course of Torturegate, we have chosen to forget. For instance, we treat the Abu Ghraib photos as if they were the first shocking photos from our offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, but check out a different set of photos, slipped to progressive websites way back in November 2002. These were remarkable photos of exactly how we transported Taliban and al-Qaeda captives whom we had just declared non-POWs (for reasons that now put every one of the tens of thousands of "contract workers" in Iraq at desperate risk) to Guantanamo. At the time, they caused no ripples in the American mainstream media, and yet they were declared genuine by the Pentagon. To the best of my knowledge, the identity of the photographer is still unknown, but he or she represented one of the earliest insider-whistleblowers in this ongoing disaster. Today, looking back, these photos seem like a signal from hell, from the very bowels of a future Abu Ghraib.

Similar photos of the prisoners on reaching Guantanamo caused shock and anger around the world, but again barely a ripple here. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both protested, but were generally ignored. Here are a couple of passages from a January 23, 2002 Houston Chronicle piece ("Rumsfeld explicitly denies critics' torture accusations") by Michael Hedges:

"Amnesty International, the human rights organization, went further Tuesday, calling the shackling of prisoners and the use of goggles and ear muffs torture. 'The imposition of sensory deprivation bears the hallmarks of known methods to break prisoners prior to interrogation,' said Director of Policy Claudio Cordone. 'While there are legitimate security considerations . . . we feel the measures adopted in their regard . . . go well beyond what is necessary from a security point of view.'"

This was also the moment when Donald Rumsfeld first insisted:

"The United States is treating them -- all detainees -- consistently with the principles of the Geneva Convention. They are being treated humanely… Guantanamo Bay's climate is different than Afghanistan. To be in an 8-by-8 cell in beautiful, sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not inhumane treatment."

Here's a moderate British view of these proceedings, offering a sense of what could indeed be seen back then, were you not locked in the American media bubble. On January 17, 2002, Hugo Young of the Guardian wrote in part (We will not tolerate the abuse of war prisoners: Guantanamo could be where America and Europe part company):

"For Washington, Camp X-Ray is plainly an extension of the war. The captives are not allowed to be called prisoners of war, but are held under rules of war defined by the side that's continuing to fight and maybe win it. They're kept off US territory, and outside the reach of the Geneva Conventions, so they can be treated the way American generals and politicians rather than American lawyers want to treat them: which is to say, without fundamental rights or international protection… When the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said he had "not the slightest interest" in the camp's conditions, he signalled simultaneously contempt for the prisoners and bilious disdain for any critics who might dare to speak…

"Mr Roth [of Human Rights Watch] likened the military tribunals President Bush has announced to those of a tin- pot tyrant wanting to get rid of his political enemies - which in another life Washington would be the first to condemn. But HRW is not the mainstream. The mainstream all flows in one acquiescent direction. Searching the New York Times and Washington Post websites, I can find neither an editorial nor a column that criticised the regime Rumsfeld approves for [Guantanamo's] Camp X-Ray. The rights and wrongs are barely discussed. Here's a considerable issue of principle, staked out by a president in seeming defiance of international conventions, which the big US papers would normally be full of. Instead, it succumbs to the fog of loyalty that has choked the oxygen out of controversy in the citadels of the US media ever since September 11."

Much more could obviously be written on the subject, but consider this a modest reminder of all the obvious clues and cues that were simply avoided, denied, ignored in this country -- largely missing-in-action (if you weren't on the Internet or reading a few, relatively isolated American columnists like James Carroll of the Boston Globe or Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times) until the Abu Ghraib moment which broke like a sudden storm. Just remember that those who claim the photos did it -- which they did -- are also missing part of the picture.

Nazi doctors… Neocon lawyers?

In the midst of the recent round of revelations that began with Abu Ghraib, I've noted a curious phenomenon, one that (as with so much else in the past year) brought the Vietnam era to mind: The "Nazi analogy" is making its slow way into the critical mainstream. Of course, since at least 9/11 this analogy has been alive and well at the wilder fringes of the Internet. (There, people have long been asking: Are we already in the Nazi era, or are we at the desperate end of the Weimar Republic? Were the attacks of 9/11 another Reichstag burning?)

Now, variations on this Nazi analogy are suddenly thriving -- and not in obscure political websites either. (I've always avoided the analogy myself because it's such a minefield and tends to send everyone flying in strange and unfruitful directions.) To take just a couple of recent examples, columnist William Pfaff wrote in the International Herald Tribune (When laws get in the way of torture):

"The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions, and military norms and inhibitions, were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed. Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities."

In the Chicago Sun Times, columnist Andrew Greeley embedded the analogy in his title: Is US like Germany of the '30s?; while Eric Margolis, the conservative columnist for the Toronto Sun, in a column praising the Reagan Presidency (U.S. Honor Ambushed) cited both of the great totalitarian systems of the previous century:

"The justice department, which is supposed to uphold the law, actually sent a memo worthy of the Nazi legal system explaining why the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws did not apply to 'terrorism suspects.' Any American may apparently be arrested as a 'terrorism suspect,' and tortured, according to justice lawyers. Replace 'terrorism suspect' with 'enemy of the people' and you have Stalin's Soviet tyranny… When legal and moral constraints are removed, or undermined, states run rampant over their people's rights. Both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union embarked on their monstrous crimes after co-operative lawyers set the legal stage for their actions."

And they weren't alone. The lawyers for this administration seem, by the evidence of their memos, to have spent time considering the "superior orders" or Nuremberg defense and its uses, concluding in their March 6 memorandum, as Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal put it (Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture):

"For members of the military, the report suggested that officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders 'may be inferred to be lawful' and are 'disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.' Examining the 'superior orders' defense at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the Vietnam War prosecution of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley for the My Lai massacre and the current U.N. war-crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the report concluded it could be asserted by 'U.S. armed forces personnel engaged in exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.'"

When, in the inner counsels of our government, lawyers find themselves pouring through the defenses of war criminals to provide cover for "exceptional interrogations," you might think a signal flag or two would go up in the heart of the administration (and not just among sidelined JAG military lawyers). It tells us much that they could include any version of the Nuremberg defense in their advisories without blinking, and it tells us a good deal more, not so much about historical analogies, as about the extremity of our moment that people like Greeley, Pfaff, and Margolis, not to speak of the government's best lawyers now find Nazism and totalitarianism creeping into their brains.

A similar extreme analogization (to coin a terrible word) happened in the Vietnam era. In those years, each side of an inter-American struggle over the course of that war proclaimed the other "brownshirts" once tempers started to rise. Endless confusions ensued, wonderfully caught by the journalist Elinor Langer at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. When the antiwar demonstrators outside the convention hall looked at the Chicago police, who were mercilessly beating them, many, in the atmosphere of the moment, saw Nazis and chanted not only "the whole world's watching," but "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" Others, however, saw only future comrades, oppressed working-class whites, and shouted out, "Join us, join us!" As Langer wrote afterwards, "In the middle of Chicago, at the nominating convention of one of America's two major parties, half of us thought we were in Germany and half of us thought we were in Russia." (The police charged the demonstrators, screaming, "Kill the Commies!")

In the post-9/11 moment, it was "liberal" war hawks and administration supporters who were probably the first to leap for the Nazi analogy, applying it and various other aspects of totalitarianism to al-Qaeda and fanatic Islamist movements around the world. Now, it seems, like so much else, the analogy is heading home, another of unintended consequence to be pinned on itself like that tail on the donkey.

And, I have to admit, just considering the Bush lawyers and their chilling documents, it's hard not to think of those doctors who, as Robert Jay Lifton wrote so powerfully in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, turned the pledge to heal into a commitment to murder in service to Hitler's regime. The lawyerly equivalent would be, I suppose, the turning of a commitment to uphold justice into the protection from prosecution of those who administer pain for our regime. While this doesn't reach the depths of those Nazi doctors (and lawyers), it certainly is shameful; or, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it today (Small Comfort) while describing the August 2002 memorandum, "in its dry, lawyerly way, [it] is as shocking as the Abu Ghraib photographs." Tom

(Thanks to Nick Turse for research help.)

WIPO and the End of Freedom

Boing Boing: WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes

Boingboing.net is increasingly one of my go to sources and this article is a perfect example of why that is. WIPO (Wolrd Intellectual Property Organization)-which is the IP version of the UN-has designs on the future of broadcast technologies in something called the Broadcast Treaty. Read the bonigboing post for the details bu the fallout is that, as usual, the measures propsoed are excessive, ignorant, illiberal and truly dangerous. One of the primary targets in the "treaty" (what a fallacious way to cast the proposed actions) is "encryption and decryption devices." Aside from the fact that, as others have pointed out, this is so vague as to be nonsensical given that cellphones, computers and ballpoint pens are all encryption devices what is most troubling is that it represents yet another attmpt by the State to dictate who says what to whom and how.

FBI: Art Critics Extraordinaire

The FBI's Art Attack (TechNews.com)

Seems the FBI has their own definition of art. Yet another example of the glory and power of the State (as well as its sheer radical stupidity and inability to admit fault).

How Quaint

'I learnt a lot from him'- George Bush Senior on Reagan

'I'm learnding'-Ralph Wiggum on...himself

The Witchhunt Continues

Persoanlly I don't give a fuck if Chalabai is innocent or guilty, as far as I am concerned all government activities are suspect and illegitimate. What is of interest here is the fact that the Fourth Reich seems to be very much on the defensive and lashing out wherever it can.

The New York Times > Washington > Polygraph Testing Starts at Pentagon in Chalabi Inquiry

June 3, 2004
Polygraph Testing Starts at Pentagon in Chalabi Inquiry

WASHINGTON, June 2 — Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon to determine who may have disclosed highly classified intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi who authorities suspect turned the information over to Iran, government officials said Wednesday.

June 3, 2004
Polygraph Testing Starts at Pentagon in Chalabi Inquiry
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, June 2 — Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon to determine who may have disclosed highly classified intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi who authorities suspect turned the information over to Iran, government officials said Wednesday.

The polygraph examinations, which are being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are focused initially on a small number of Pentagon employees who had access to the information that was compromised. American intelligence officials have said that Mr. Chalabi informed Iran that the United States had broken the secret codes used by Iranian intelligence to transmit confidential messages to posts around the world.

Mr. Chalabi has denied the charge. On Wednesday, his lawyers made public a letter they said they had sent to Attorney General John Ashcroft and F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III repeating Mr. Chalabi's denials and demanding that the Justice Department investigate the disclosure of the accusations against Mr. Chalabi.

The lawyers, John J. E. Markham II and Collette C. Goodman, said in the letter, "The charges made against Dr. Chalabi — both the general and the specific ones are false."

They also said, "We ask that you undertake an immediate investigation to find and hold accountable those who are responsible for these false leaks."

Officials would not identify who has taken polygraph examinations or even who has been interviewed by F.B.I. counterespionage agents. It could not be determined whether anyone has declined to submit to a polygraph test.

No one has been charged with any wrongdoing or identified as a suspect, but officials familiar with the investigation say that they are working through a list of people and are likely to interview senior Pentagon officials.

The F.B.I. is looking at officials who both knew of the code-breaking operation and had dealings with Mr. Chalabi, either in Washington or Baghdad, the government officials said. Information about code-breaking work is considered among the most confidential material in the government and is handled under tight security and with very limited access.

But a wider circle of officials could have inferred from intelligence reports about Iran that the United States had access to the internal communications of Iran's spy service, intelligence officials said. That may make it difficult to identify the source of any leak.

Government officials say they started the investigation of Pentagon officials after learning that Mr. Chalabi had told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's intelligence service that the United States was reading their communications. Mr. Chalabi, American officials say, gave the information to the Iranians about six weeks ago, apparently because he wanted to ensure that his secret conversations with the Iranians were not revealed to the Americans.

But the Iranian official apparently did not immediately believe Mr. Chalabi, because he sent a cable back to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, American officials said. That cable was intercepted and read by the United States, the officials said.

Mr. Chalabi and his supporters argue that the accusations against him are part of a C.I.A.-inspired campaign to discredit him. His backers have been dismayed that the Bush administration recently divorced itself from Mr. Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress. They contend that the move was instigated by the C.I.A., which they say is now wielding intercepted Iranian communications as a weapon against Mr. Chalabi.

Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and an influential Chalabi supporter, said Wednesday that the notion that Mr. Chalabi would compromise the American code-breaking operation "doesn't pass the laugh test." Mr. Perle said it was more plausible that the Iranians, knowing already that the United States was reading its communications, planted the damning information about Mr. Chalabi to persuade Washington to distance itself from Mr. Chalabi.

"The whole thing hinges on the idea that the Baghdad station chief of the MOIS commits one of the most amazing trade craft errors I've ever heard of," Mr. Perle said, referring to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. He said it defied belief that a seasoned intelligence operative would disclose a conversation with Mr. Chalabi using the same communications channel that he had just been warned was compromised.

"You have to believe that the station chief blew a gift from the gods because of rank incompetence," Mr. Perle said. "I don't believe it, and I don't think any other serious intelligence professional would either."

Mr. Chalabi is not a focus of the inquiry, but senior law enforcement officials said he could be investigated in the future. They said a decision on that could be left to the new Iraqi government.

In the 1990's, the Iraqi National Congress was part of a C.I.A. covert action program designed to undermine Saddam Hussein's rule. But Mr. Chalabi had a falling out with the C.I.A., and agency officials concluded that he was untrustworthy. He subsequently forged an alliance with major conservative Republicans in Washington. When President Bush took office, Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were embraced by senior policy makers at the Pentagon, which became his main point of contact in the American government.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Markham, one of Mr. Chalabi's lawyers, said that Mr. Chalabi had been subjected to increasing "adverse comments" by American officials as his disagreements with the Bush administration over the future of Iraq had intensified. Nevertheless, Mr. Markham said, Mr. Chalabi "is very happy to come to the United States to appear before Congress or be interviewed by legitimate investigative agents in this matter."

The lawyers' letter said that "Dr. Chalabi would never endanger the national security of the U.S."

"Those responsible for such leaks, however, we submit are the same individuals within the U.S. government who have undermined the President's policies in Iraq and efforts to bring democracy and stability to that country, and are using Dr. Chalabi as a scapegoat for their own failures that have cost this country dearly in the past year in Iraq," the letter said.

Last month, American and Iraqi forces raided Mr. Chalabi's Baghdad compound and carted away computers, overturned furniture and ransacked his offices. The raid was said to be part of an investigation into charges that Mr. Chalabi's aides, including a leading lieutenant, had been involved in kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and corruption in Iraq. It is still unclear what the connection might be between that raid and the continuing counterintelligence investigation of the possible leaks of secrets to Iran.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting for this article.

Sunset

After the firearms prohibition legislation sunsets (and it looks good), perhaps the Fedgov will eliminate every other firearms prohibition statute.

Nailed

Politics News Article | Reuters.com

This is hardly news but it is good to document these things as they are confirmed.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system

Abu Ghraib and the Nature of the State by Gene Callahan

Finally some fucking sensible commentary on the prison scandal (instead of the partisan gibberish that passes for analysis).

Butler Shaffer on the State

The Divine Right of Irresponsibility by Butler Shaffer

The State Was a Mistake

by Walter Block

The state was, is and always be a mistake because it is immoral to empower an agent to exert authority over another sovereign individual without his explicit consent.

*excerpt*

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a faraway place (actually, a contrary-to-fact made-up one), there lived a group of human beings without benefit of government. Any government at all. How did they manage?

Well, whenever there was a dispute between two neighbors, or friends, or merchants, or between a retailer and a customer, the plaintiff and defendant together would hire someone to mediate between them. This would be a leader of the community, or a prince, or leader of the clan, or an old wise man, someone renowned for his wisdom and sense of fair play. If there were a robbery, or a rape, or a murder (or a commercial dispute in which one of the parties refused arbitration), the victim would resort to the same kind of person who, for an agreed-upon fee, would mobilize the community to bring about justice by use of force or banishment or both.

All was well in this idyll until a community leader, or prince, or wise man—the most respected and powerful of them all—decided that he didn’t much like the competition from others of his own type. So, instead of allowing disputants a choice, he insisted that they all patronize services from only himself. But securing a monopoly over protection, defense and insurance was not enough for this ambitious man. In addition, he demanded that all members of the society pay him fees (taxes) whether or not they had any need of his assistance in such matters. He hired a bunch of intellectuals, professors and journalists (for a cut of the increased pie) to bruit it about that this new system was only proper and natural, and that the previous one was fatally flawed: morally, intellectually, spiritually and pragmatically.

This, in a very small nutshell, is the beginning of the downward slide of the human condition for Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the new book, Democracy: The God that Failed.

But this is only the merest beginning of the record of human history, economics, sociology and politics told to us by this amazingly gifted storyteller.

Because at least this Prince (for that is what we plebeians must now call him) ruled in a reasonably wise and humane manner. He pretty much had to. There were of course some exceptions, but his own selfish personal interest dictated good stewardship over his domains. For with these vast powers, he was in effect the owner of the entire society.

If he engaged in socialism, or promulgated price controls (especially for things he purchased), or raised taxes very much, or indulged in too much inflation, or expropriated property or in any other way threatened his people’s incentives to create wealth, he might make out like a bandit (which he was in any case) in the short run, but in the long run he would kill or at least seriously maim the goose that was giving him all those golden eggs.

No one worries about an oil change for a rental car, but if you own one, you tend to keep in mind its future operation. And, as an added incentive, if the prince didn’t act in a reasonably responsible way, if he was in the process of ruining things, a son or a nephew or a brother would likely assassinate him, secure in the knowledge that the law of succession would transfer these spoils in his own direction.

But then a second tragedy befell mankind, one far more serious: we moved from monarchy to democracy. Now, all bets were off. The President or Prime Minister or Elected Leader knew that he had only so much time to feather his own nest. Why worry unduly about the future of the economy when he will not be around to collect after the next four years? Nor could he pass off his "kingdom" to his heirs. "Grab now" and "make hay while the sun shines" became the mottos of the elected officeholder.

This short-sighted behavior pattern transferred from ruler to ruled. It not only ruined the economy, but promoted war, exacerbated crime, increased interest rates (due to societywide impatience) and drove up all sorts of other indices of disarray (unemployment, homelessness, divorce, perversity). The decline of human civilization was caused by the rise of democracy; the way back to social sanity lies in the opposite direction, through monarchy and then back to what Hoppe calls the "natural order:" a system in which no one, no one at all, initiates violence against non-initiators, and no one prevents anyone else from providing defense-judicial services.

But wait just one cotton-picking minute. Surely things are far better off, at least in the Western democracies, than they were hundreds of years ago when these very same countries were ruled by kings, princes and other monarchs. How, then, can anyone in his right mind seriously recommend the latter system vis-à-vis the former?

Hoppe's answer is masterful: 21st-century democracies work better in many ways than did monarchies of earlier epochs, not because of their different political systems but in spite of them. Had there been 17th-century democracies, they would have been far worse than rule by princes during that century; and, if we are ever lucky enough that nobility replaces our present-day presidents and prime ministers, an increased ability to take the long-run view will actually improve matters.

The building blocks set up by Hoppe have great explanatory value, shedding light on all sorts of historical occurrences, from wars to poverty to inflation to interest rates to crime. This book is a must read for all those interested in obtaining a unique and valuable insight into economics, history, sociology and philosophy.

There are but a few and relatively unimportant errors that mar this otherwise splendid book. It seems churlish to even mention them, given the power and grace with which Hoppe presents his case. Yet, no review would be complete without a brief look. First, Hoppe maintains, not that there is a strong tendency for individuals’ time preferences to decrease as they become wealthier, but rather that this is necessary. Is this relationship an empirical regularity or a matter of praxeology? If the latter, then there could never arise a counterfactual. A simple thought experiment suggests that this is not the case: I get a raise, or receive an inheritance, and decide to save less than before. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Hardly.[1] Second, Hoppe maintains as a matter of principle that government is entitled to restrict immigration. To be sure, he maintains this position on the libertarian grounds that uninvited border crossings constitute trespass.[2]

However, this argument is subject to two simple refutations. First, if invited immigrants may not enter the country, then neither may new babies. Second, there are vast unowned areas of the United States; if immigrants enter these, there can be no question of trespass.[3]

Third, Hoppe maintains that libertarianism is but a version of conservatism, and the latter but a branch of the former. The two are joined at the hip, as it were. The truth of the matter, in contrast, is that there is an unbridgeable gap between them.[4]

Compared to the explanatory power of this book and its many and magnificent achievements, these reservations are but minor quibbles. This book will take by storm the field of political economy, and no one interested in these topics can afford to be without it. Imagine: a treatise that actually shows democracy in a bad light compared to monarchy, and from a strong property rights and free enterprise point of view. Never has anything of the sort been accomplished before.

--------

Walter Block is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar, Endowed Chair of Economics Loyola University, and senior fellow of the Mises Institute. This review first appeared the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Volume 61, Number 3 (July 2002. wblock@loyno.edu . See also WalterBlock.com. Comment on this article on the blog.

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

[1] See on this William Barnett, Walter Block, and Joseph Salerno. "Relationship between Wealth or Income and Time Preference is Empirical, not Apodictic: Critique of Rothbard and Hoppe." Unpublished manuscript.

[2] In addition to the present book under discussion, see also Hans-Hermann Hoppe. 1998. "The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration." Journal of Libertarian Studies 13 (2): 221–33.

[3] See in this regard Walter Block and Gene Callahan. "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Immigration." Unpublished manuscript. See also Walter Block. 1998. "A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration." Journal of Libertarian Studies. Walter Block, "Plumb Line Libertarianism: A Critique of Hoppe." Unpublished manuscript.

[4] Walter Block. "Plumb Line Libertarianism: A Critique of Hoppe." Unpublished manuscript.

Rumsfeld bans camera phones in Iraq

link

I can't imagine why Donny would want to ban cameras at a former death camp currently being used by USEmpire agents to torture people. Monkey Man indicated in a speech tonight, to The Army War College in Carlisle Pennsylvania, that he would steal money from US Taxpayers to Raze Abu Gharib and build a new maximum security prison. The state is quite adept at building prisons.

*article*

Cellphones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported on Sunday.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

Total ban planned

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

Disturbing new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse, which the US government had reportedly tried to keep hidden, were published on Friday in the Washington Post newspaper.

The photos emerged along with details of testimony from inmates at Abu Ghraib who said they were sexually molested by female soldiers, beaten, sodomised and forced to eat food from toilets.

In the Mouth of Madness

A pretty bleak assessment of today's world. Unfortunately I think there's a lot of truth in it.

http://www.warfolly.vzz.net/inthemouthofmadness.html

‘In the mouth of madness’

As mass insanity grips the world,
people of principle remain silent

by John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

5-20-04

And if you read between the lines you'd know that I'm just trying to understand the feelings that you lack. I never thought I could feel this way and I've got to say that I just don't get it. I don't know where we went wrong but the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back!

— Gordon Lightfoot

A lot of you have been asking why I haven't written anything lately.My jaw dropped about three weeks ago and damn few words have come out of my mouth ever since. Mostly I've been asking for food, lots of food. And watching a lot of movies, the black and white ones, film noir, trying to pretend I don't live in this world of 2004. I think this is what many people do when they reach a certain age, when current events overtake them and they can't cope with it, and try to take refuge in the past.

But let's face it. I can't cope with this reality. It's more than I can handle. The best phrase to describe it? Incredulous stupefaction. My head just wags back and forth involuntarily these days.

Some of my friends say I simply read too much bad news. Since the 9/11 deception, there's been anthrax, Afghanistan, Patriot Act, and Iraq, to list the major chapters that go along with perhaps the worst of all the atrocities, that neverending story about the mass murder of the Palestinians that the world seems so good at ignoring. And I've been writing about all this ceaselessly for the past couple of years. And I don't mean to demean all those wonderful people who have written to me in appreciative support, but hell, there are six billion people in the world, and most of them are not listening, or doing anything constructive to stop this juggernaut of carnage that is really the world's dominant moneymaking operation.

Strife makes money for the rich losers who foment it. And it's getting me down to the point of speechlessness.

What hope exists if people who profess to adhere to the principles of the good life remain silent?

For me, this recent paralysis really began with the Abu Ghairab prison revelations. Attaching that poor Iraqi man to electrical wires. That's a photograph that ranks with Jack Ruby plugging Lee Harvey Oswald, with the Challenger explosion, with that little naked Vietnamese girl running screaming from napalm in the ranks of the most famous pictures in American history. Any American that doesn't feel an overwhelming sense of shame is a complete sociopath. Unfortunately, it would seem that a majority of the American populace — as well as virtually all its leaders — are exactly that: mealymouthed chickenshit perverted immoral sadistic sociopaths. And many of them carry holy books and insist these atrocities are justified.

If the objective of the great Zionist Illuminati Masonic conspiracy is to completelty demoralize Americans, the prison scandal was the thing that did it for me. And I'm not one who has exactly tried to hide his head in the sand over time. I've tried to deal with all the facts in a forthright way.

9/11 was an inside job covered up by politicians we elected and media we read every day.

The anthrax attacks came from our own government, but no one was prosecuted.

The Patriot Act was a clearly provable act of treason in which virtually all of our Congress participated.

Afghanistan was target practice on hapless nomads to reestablish the drug trade that is run by the CIA.

And Iraq. Poor Iraq. The American presence in Iraq is what? What do you want to call it?

A deliberate attempt to show the world what will happen to it if it opposes American financial totalitarianism? Your residents will be shot down in cold blood. Those who survive will be stripped naked and raped if they're female, humiliated if they're male. Ghoulish American soldiers will trifle with the corpses of your relatives and make photographs to send home to their friends to prove they're insane.

America robbed Iraq of everything it had, its riches, its dignity, its health, its future. This is the real message America is sending to the world. If the rest of the world doesn't stop America in its tracks, right now, the world has no future. Or, the future it has will be the rubble of the Gaza strip and the makeshift cemeteries of Fallujah.

Imagine. Turning Yankee Stadium into a giant makeshift cemetery. That's what real people — husbands and moms and orphaned children — are contemplating today in Fallujah. The brave people of Fallujah who repulsed the great American war machine.

And then the images of Abu Ghraib and the new American gulag that stretches around the world return. These prisoners have no rights and face torture, even though their captors know they are innocent. This is the new (?) American way, a disgusting reality that most Americans refuse to face.

It is one thing to pretend you don't know American prosperity has been gained by the exploitation of millions of Third World peasants. It is quite another thing to know that the American military practices a policy of torture and indiscriminate murder everywhere in the world.

And so, like me, Americans turn away from the psychotic spectacle, unable to cope with it.

But we all ought to think twice about doing this, about not facing the reality of what is happening now. Because if we turn away from this, we're only inviting the same sick thugs to do the same sick stuff to us.

If we leave George W. Bush in charge — or for that matter, if we elect John Kerry — we guarantee that we all will be prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in one stark form or another.

The paradigm is, of course, Nick Berg. There are so many questions about that sorry beheading episode that an accurate analysis of the whole event remains impossible. But what is obvious is American involvement. The powers that be had this man killed to create a public relations episode to take the media focus off its appalling torture and murder of imprisoned Iraqi innocents.

Do you realize what this means? It means that it is now OK for the U.S. federal government to come into your home and kill you because they then will tell a story to the public explaining what a threat you were to Homeland Security. If you think this is farfetched, I suggest you watch the Nick Berg carefully video and contemplate your own future. (Hint: you have none.)
Who will be held responsible for this horrific act? We know the policy of emotionally devastating prisoners of the U.S. war machine came from the very top of the organizational chart. We know that this stunt was ordered by the same power freaks who staged 9/11 to cram a state of permament war down our throats.

And yet we accede to it. What can we DO about it? we ask. We pretend we are powerless.

In my mind, George W. Bush is already guilty of mass murder and treason for what he did — or didn’t do — about 9/11. As commander in chief of the war machine, he must also take responsibility for Nick Berg, a deliberate murder for propaganda purposes. I wonder if God told him to do it, just like God told him to invade Afghanistan.

Doesn’t it chill you to know that the life of an American citizen can be squandered in this way, so cynically, with all the public facts about so twisted? Please contemplate the chances that something like this could happen to you.

And continue to ask the question: who is to be held responsible for all these murders, these endless murders? Who do you think?

In my need to escape this bleak news-scape these days, I contemplate a movie made more than a decade ago that, like all good movies do, reflects what is happening now. It was called “In the Mouth of Madness,” made by that controversial Grade-B horror movie guru John Carpenter. And it depicts a progressively horrific sequence of inexplicable murders woven into a tale about some psycho and his holy book.

The astonishing punchline at the end reveals that the people who are watching the movie in horror are actually the same people who are IN the movie committing the bloody murders.

You can imagine the wide-eyed hysterical laughter when the main character realizes he is the person in the movie doing the killing. In fact, if you watch the evening news tonight, and then go into your bathroom and stare into the mirror, you can probably re-create the scene yourself.

The Despicable Colin Powell

By David Podvin

http://makethemaccountable.com/podvin/more/040520_DespicableColinPowell.htm

Throughout his career, Secretary of State Colin Powell has been the sacred cow of American politics. Liberals have been reluctant to attack Powell because they perceive him as being that rare Republican who is almost civilized, while conservatives consider him to be a useful racial implement with which to establish their humanitarian credentials among voters. As a result of being spared the harsh scrutiny that usually accompanies political life, Powell is one of the most widely admired men in America.

An examination of his behavior, however, reveals that the former general’s favorable reputation is undeserved. Far from being the noble statesman portrayed by the mainstream media, Powell is an amoral minion, someone who has succeeded spectacularly by doing evil things on behalf of powerful patrons. Over the decades, whenever he has had to choose between honor and expediency, Powell has opted for the latter.

During the debate leading up to the conquest of Iraq, Powell argued privately that an occupation of the country would be a nightmare for America. Publicly, he rallied support for the invasion with false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was aiding the terrorist group al Qaeda. By lying to facilitate a war that he knew would end in disaster, Powell placed his desire to remain part of the Bush administration above the national security interests of the United States.

Deceiving the American people on behalf of his benefactors is a Powell tradition. As an officer in Vietnam, he was assigned to investigate allegations that the U.S. Army had murdered the residents of My Lai. Without interviewing the soldier who reported witnessing the murders, Powell issued a finding that exonerated the military. Even after it was proven that he had perpetrated a cover-up, the whitewash was greatly appreciated by his superiors. Subsequent to lying about the My Lai massacre, Major Powell was promoted.

During the Iran Contra scandal, Major General Powell was an aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger testified before the Senate that he had instructed Powell to arrange the sale of TOW missiles to Iran for the purpose of subsidizing the Contras in Nicaragua. Although the scheme illegally bypassed Congressional opposition to funding the Nicaraguan terrorists, Powell’s involvement resulted in his promotion to National Security Advisor.

Over the next two years, Powell supervised the campaign that was designed to subvert popular support in Nicaragua for the Sandinista government. The Contra strategy was to rape, torture, and murder civilians, thereby creating such intense misery among the peasants that they stopped supporting the Sandinistas in exchange for an end to the violence. Powell threatened to cut off aid to any Central American country that opposed Contra terrorism. The Sandinistas fell, and the replacement regime immediately announced land reforms that took from the poor and gave to the rich. From his new position as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell enthused, “It is a great day for democracy.”

After vanquishing the Nicaraguans, Powell was entrusted to coordinate the invasion of Panama, where he again demonstrated his indifference to the murder of civilians. During the blitzkrieg that resulted in the capture of General Manuel Noriega, thousands of unarmed Panamanian citizens were killed in the streets, their bodies were burned, and the remains were dumped in mass graves. At a press conference, Powell announced, “Justice has been served.”

In 1991, Powell directed the Gulf War. That conflict not only resulted in more mass graves brimming with civilians, but also produced “Gulf War Syndrome”. It has been established that the illness is a byproduct of Powell’s illegal decision to drop tons of uranium-tipped missiles across the country. Exposure to the radioactive uranium has resulted in permanent brain damage comparable to that found among victims of Lou Gehrig’s Disease and multiple sclerosis. Powell proudly proclaimed, “The Gulf War has been conducted more humanely than any war ever,” and was championed by the corporate media for yet another promotion – this time to the presidency.

Realizing that he was insufficiently Caucasian to gain the presidential nomination of his chosen party, Powell decided not run for the White House. In 2000, he aggressively pursued the job of secretary of state, ingratiating himself to candidate George W. Bush by repeatedly assuring African Americans that the former Texas governor had their best interests at heart.

Consumed with the desire to influence foreign policy, Powell remained silent as Bush illegally disenfranchised African American voters in Florida. Powell knew that Jeb Bush had ordered the voter rolls in the state to be cleansed of tens of thousands of “felons”, the majority of whom turned out to be law-abiding black Floridians. He also knew that the G.O.P. had intimidated black voters at polling places, and that Republicans had invalidated legally cast ballots in predominantly African American precincts.

The vulgar racism of the Republican Party did not motivate Powell to speak out in condemnation. Just as he subordinates the well being of his country to his own agenda, the same is true with the well being of his race. Once again, Powell had prioritized self-interest over integrity, and once again he was rewarded, this time with his cherished cabinet post.

As a member of the current administration, Powell has witnessed Bush surrogates impugning the patriotism of John Kerry. They have circulated a doctored photograph purporting to show Kerry consorting with Jane Fonda at anti-war rallies. There have also been scurrilous coordinated attacks on the validity of Kerry’s military record.

In the past, Powell has insisted that it is “intolerable” for the patriotism of combat veterans to be questioned. This time, however, his response has been quite different. Rather than repudiating the defamation of a war hero, Powell has chosen to watch quietly while the Bush slander machine seeks to recast Kerry from being a three-time Purple Heart winner into a latter day version of Benedict Arnold.

Powell has spoken eloquently about the compelling need for a humane foreign policy and the moral imperative of social justice. He has demonstrated the rhetorical capacity to empathize with the underprivileged, and has stressed his strong desire to create a more equitable world. Unlike so many in the Bush administration, he possesses the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

Yet this quality makes him all the more loathsome. Powell is one of those truly despicable people who have deliberately harmed this nation for personal benefit. He is not a religious nut wracked by the compulsion to conquer the world because God said so, or an ideological true believer dazed by right-wing dogma, or a corporate whore pathologically obsessed with accumulating wealth. He is a highly rational man who has made the contemptibly rational decision to do whatever it takes to advance the career of Colin Powell, no matter how much it damages the United States of America.

While engaging in this destructive behavior, he has successfully cultivated the image of a selfless public servant through the masterful use of media leaks designed to distance him from the consequences of his actions. Recently, his friends have contacted journalists to insist that Powell is “distraught” over the turn of events in Iraq, and that the problems there have occurred because other cabinet members have made egregious mistakes. Powell is again seeking to have it both ways by facilitating an atrocity and then disclaiming any personal responsibility.

But it won’t work – not this time. Powell was an essential advocate for invading Iraq; without the stature he lent to the false presentation in favor of the war, Bush could not have deceived most of the American people and much of the world. Powell’s fingerprints are all over the current catastrophe, and as the situation continues to deteriorate, he is going to be implicated as an accomplice to one of the most malevolent foreign policy decisions in this nation’s history.

If history is true to reality, Colin Powell will be remembered as an able practitioner of the philosophy that the ends justify the means, even when the ends are merely self-serving. It is a disgraceful legacy of all-consuming ambition, but one that Powell has selected for himself by choosing to betray the country he was sworn to serve.

Questions re Berg Killing

Conspiracy theories... Conspiracy theories... Unfortunately, in today's fucked up world they often sound all too plausible.

Fishy Circumstances and Flawed Timelines Surround American's Beheading

http://www.infowars.com/print/iraq/berg.htm

Fishy Circumstances and Flawed Timelines Surround American's Beheading

Infowars.com
05-12-04

UPDATE 12:45PM Central: This just in -- U.S. spokesman says decapitated American was never held by U.S. forces

With several news outlets reporting that Berg's family is angry from the US government over their son's violent death and revelations that "Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days" (in other words, he was detained by the US military just prior to his death) -- (AP 5/11/04) we have to question what really happened and who was really behind Berg's horrific murder.

We have received several emails from listeners questioning what really happened including this one:

me and a friend were discussing recent news events and trying to piece together the information presented to us, thought you might want to look into this further, they said in the news that nicholas berg was killed 2 weeks ago (i think), however in the video the culprits who killed him said they were "avenging iraqi prisoner abuse" but those photos weren't released until last week, so my question is how is that even a possible motive if he was killed prior to the abuse photos being released?? maybe i am misinformed but thought id ask the question to someone who would look into it

And this one:

Hey Alex, I know people like me who have learned not to trust our government tend to see a conspiracy under every rock. With that said... The picture the media is now showing of the guy the terrorist beheaded as revenge for what went on in the Iraqi prisons looks odd to me. If you look at the men dressed in black, they all seem well fed. Actually most look fat. That bothers me, because these guys are fighting a war and eating on the run. They are constantly on the move and should be either very fit and trim or scrawny and malnourished because of the same reasons. One thing they should not be is fat like couch potatoes. If you look at all of the photos of the prisoners who were naked who supposedly were just plucked of the street, most of them are thin. Just an observation Alex

And this one:

1) extremely convenient "wag the dog" timing at the height of furor
regarding U.S. torture of Iraqis

2) CNN poll question: "Is the Berg killing a reason for withholding any
remaining Iraq prisoner abuse pictures?" Bush has been reported to be
struggling with question of whether Pentagon should release additional
torture photos. Given that the alleged decapitation of Berg was allegedly
prompted by the first wave of torture photos, Bush could now cite "national
security" issues for witholding additional materials.

3) Berg's last known whereabouts was in U.S. custody.

4) Berg shown in video wearing orange jumpsuit known to be of U.S. issue
(compare with pictures at Guantanamo).

5) Berg mysteriously captured by Al-Quaeda (still wearing jumpsuit). Either
he escaped from U.S. captors or U.S. let him out -- with orange suit and
all -- to be immediately apprehended by Al-Quaeda (before he had a chance to
change).

6) Tape obviously spliced together and heavily edited. Goes from a) Berg
sitting in chair talking about family, to b) Berg sitting on floor with
hooded "militants" behind, to c) blurry camera movement, to d) almost
motionless Berg on floor as head cut off.

7) Audio clearly dubbed in.

8) "Arab" reader flips through pages of "statement" and keeps ending up on
the same page. Perhaps doesn't even known enough Arabic to recognize what
page he's on?

9) "Arabs" have lily-white hands and (other exposed) skin.

10) "Arabs" have Western-style body posture and mannerisms.

11) When Berg decapitated, there was almost no blood. If Berg were still
alive at this point, with the cut starting at front of throat, blood would
have been spraying everywhere. Berg's severed head, the floor, Berg's
clothes, and even the hand of the "Arab" who decapitated Berg had no visible
blood on it.

12) Berg's body didn't move while on the ground. Although held down, Berg
would have tried to instinctively wiggle and writhe away from captor's grip.

13) Camera angle made it impossible to see if Berg's eyes were even open.

14) Alleged "scream" from Berg sounded to be that of a woman and was clearly
dubbed in.

15) Berg goes to great trouble to identify himself, providing information
about his family. Why? To elicit greater sympathy? Or to provide a
positive ID. FBI visited Berg family in an attempt to "verify his
identity". Guy in video looks very little like Berg photos provided by
family.

I believe that Berg (or this lookalike character) was first killed (perhaps
by lethal injection, poisoning, etc.), then decapitated after dead (explains
lack of blood spraying everywhere). Berg was killed by Al-Quaeda (known to
be a CIA - Mossad joint venture). Berg video released at height of furor
over U.S. torture of Iraqis and just before Bush was to decide whether to
release additional torture videos. Now torture videos will be witheld from
public for reasons of national security. Now "patriots" everywhere will
laud the virtues of U.S. torture of "enemies". Sensitivity level of public
gets heightened in terms of what's acceptable treatment of prisoners.
Juxtaposed with decapitation, piling naked men into pyramid is nothing.
Such treatment will be considered more and more acceptable even in domestic
situations. George W. Bush sleeps well tonight while Berg family lives in
torture. Serves Berg's father right for opposing Bush and the war of
aggression against Iraq.

Jeff Rense has compiled some important information on Berg's detainment and questioning what really happened in his article, " Why Did The US Take
Custody Of Nick Berg?"

Two things are for sure:

First, Berg parents feel that their son was abandoned and betrayed by the US Government.

Second: NeoCons have already started to use Nick Berg's murder to justify torture and more war

Related Articles:

Why Did The US Take Custody Of Nick Berg?

Berg Time Line

Nick Berg was on his way out of Iraq. He had been released from the prison where he had been held for 13 days by Iraqi police for reasons he said he did not know.

Nick Berg's Parents Say US Abandoned Him

Pa. family angry with American government over son's brutal death

Qaeda Leader Beheads U.S. Civilian in Iraq

Awful images change perception of the war

NeoCons use Nick Berg's murder to justify torture and more war

More Violence Perpetrated By State Agents

The arrest of Clarence Campbell was videotaped by a dashboard-mounted camera in a Woodlawn police car. Several profanities can be heard on the videotape. If you are offended by profanity, please do not watch.

Is violence a pattern of the state?

The State initiates violence (again)

Rather than post Graphic images of the abuse/torure/murder/rape state agents have perpetrated in Iraq, I'll just post a link. A working definition for the state in my camp is:

Government (i.e., a State), n., that organization in society which attempts to maintain, and is generally successful at maintaining, a coercive regional monopoly over ultimate control of the law (i.e., on the courts and police, etc.)--this is a feature of all governments; as well, historically speaking, it has always been the case that it is the only organization in society that legally obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for contracted services rendered but by coercion.

Once an individual is willing to sanction initiating violence, as through the state, the barrier of non-aggression is lowered.

www.Antiwar.com

antiwar.com

War is a form of mass murder perpetuated by the state for its own aggrandizement. Antiwar.com is the best online source for daily antiwar news. Its owner/editor, Justin Raimondo, also happened to write the Murray Rothbard Biography I receantly read. Rothbard embraced Old Right (now called paleo-conservative) anti-war/isolationist thought which grew out of the century (1815-1916) of non-intervention in European conflicts. Radical abolishonist thought and the frontier were also a part of the milieu.

Action Alert for Michael Moore

9/11 Truth activists and concerned citizens,

Please help us reach out to Michael Moore and encourage
him to further expand the boundaries of allowable 9/11
discourse! Everything you need is in this email, or you
can view the full action alert here:

http://www.septembereleventh.org/alerts/moore.php

Thank you,

Emanuel Sferios
Webmaster, 9-11 Visibility Project
http://www.septembereleventh.org

WHAT TO DO.

Michael Moore is the Academy Award winning director of
Bowling for Columbine, and author of the best-selling
book, Dude, Where's My Country? A progressive filmmaker
with celebrity status, Mike has produced a new
documentary about 9/11 titled Fahrenheit 911, set to be
released very soon. Documenting Bush's ties to Saudi
Arabia, Fahrenheit 911 may end up exposing deeper
levels of US government complicity, or it might simply
blame Saudi Arabia for 9/11, inadvertantly helping set
the stage for another US oil-invasion. In any case,
after its release, Mike will be in a position to reach
millions of people on the 9/11 issue through his
speaking events and media appearances. Let's email Mike
and suggest ways he can further expand the boundaries
of allowable 9/11 debate!

SAMPLE LETTER

(Feel free to copy and paste, but keep in mind it is
always better to use your own words. If you do copy and
paste the sample letter, please preface it by saying,
"I endorse the following letter from the 9-11
Visibility Project." Similarly, if you borrow long
phrases from the sample letter, you may want to
indicate that it's a quote by saying something like, "I
endorse the 9-11 Visibility Project action alert
statement that..." This way each letter makes its own
personal statement without being repetitive.)

----------
Dear Mike,

Thank you for producing Fahrenheit 911. I can't wait to
see the film! As Ed Asner has recently stated in a
letter to the peace and justice community
(http://www.septembereleventh.org/alerts/asner.php),
9/11 is one of the most pressing issues for our country
and the world today. Your willingness to tackle this
serious issue is commendable and truly patriotic.

Along these lines, I would like to strongly encourage
you to continue to push the boundaries of allowable
discourse around 9/11. Much evidence exists that
elements within our government were complicit in the
attacks. For example, the unprecedented failure of our
air defense systems on the day of 9/11 -- violating
standard FAA and NORAD operating procedures for dealing
with errant or hijacked aircraft -- and the fact that
not a single person has been reprimanded as a result,
strongly indicate that somewhere in the chain of
command a "stand down" order was given.

And there is much more evidence pointing towards US
government complicity that is not being investigated.
For a sober and rational analysis of this evidence, I
highly recommend the book, The New Pearl Harbor, by
Professor and Theologian David Ray Griffin. This book
is endorsed by activist and historian Howard Zinn, and
Princeton University professor and human rights lawyer
Richard Falk has written the foreword. Here is an
interview with Dr. Griffin published in the Santa
Barbara Independent:

http://independent.com/news/news906.htm

I would also like to draw your attention to a
potentially very serious issue relating to 9/11 and the
Bush-Saudi connections. While these connections are
certainly real and warrant full exposure, there are
also strong indications that higher elements within the
CIA and Pentagon are advancing/spinning these
connections in the media in order to deflect attention
away from their own complicity in 9/11 as well as set
the stage for a possible future invasion of Saudi
Arabia (for oil, of course).

So as you courageously expose the Bush-Saudi
connections through your film, speaking events and
media appearances, please keep this in mind, and
consider expanding the permissible boundaries of
discourse around 9/11 by addressing some of these
issues, as well as the evidence presented in Dr.
Griffin's excellent book, which Ed Asner has
recommended.

Thank you and keep up the great work!

Sincerely,

The 9-11 Visibility Project team
http://www.septembereleventh.org
----------

CONTACT INFORMATION

Email Quick-List
(copy and paste into the "to" field)

mmflint@aol.com, mike@michaelmoore.com,
webmaster@septembereleventh.org

(Please send your emails to both addresses above, and
remember to cc webmaster@septembereleventh.org so we
can keep a record of how many emails are sent out.)

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?

Michael Moore is a popular celebrity. He has many fans
around the country and the world. Equally important as
getting our message to Mike himself is getting our
message to his fans and to other progressives. So
please...

Forward this action alert to as many individuals,
lists, and web forums as you can! Encourage others to
participate!

(To receive more 9-11 action alerts similar to this
one, sign up at http://www.septembereleventh.org at the
top-right hand side of the page.)
__________________________________

Even Blind Old Ladies Terrify The Cops

State Gangsters a.k.a. Goons

These are the types of gangsters/goons that those who advocate collective action through the state would have enforce thier dictates:

Even blind old ladies terrify the cops
Sunday, April 25, 2004

S he was 71 years old.

She was blind.

She needed her 94-year-old mother to come to her rescue.

And in the middle of the dogfight -- in which Eunice Crowder was pepper-sprayed, Tasered and knocked to the ground by Portland's courageous men in blue -- the poor woman's fake right eye popped out of its socket and was bouncing around in the dirt.

How vicious and ugly can the Portland police get? Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner. This 2003 case is so blatant, the use of force so excessive, the threat of liability so intimidating that the city just approved a $145,000 settlement.

But all those gung-ho fans of the cops can relax. Nothing has changed. Nothing will upset the status quo.

The cops aren't apologizing.

The cops aren't embarrassed.

The cops haven't been disciplined.

And the cops are still insisting, to the bitter end, that they "reasonably believed" this blind ol' bat was a threat to their safety and macho culture.

Eunice Crowder, you see, didn't follow orders. Eunice was uncooperative. Worried a city employee was hauling away a family heirloom, a 90-year-old red toy wagon, she had the nerve to feel her way toward the trailer in which her yard debris was being tossed.

Enter the police. Eunice, who is hard of hearing, ignored the calls of Officers Robert Miller and Eric Zajac to leave the trailer. When she tried, unsuccessfully, to bite the hands that were laid on her, she was knocked to the ground.

When she kicked out at the cops, she was pepper-sprayed in the face with such force that her prosthetic marble eye was dislodged. As she lay on her stomach, she was Tased four times with Zajac's electric stun gun.

And when Nellie Scott, Eunice's 94-year-old mother, tried to rinse out her daughter's eye with water from a two-quart Tupperware bowl, what does Miller do? According to Ernie Warren Jr., Eunice's lawyer, the cop pushed Nellie up against a fence and accused her of planning to use the water as a weapon.

Paranoia runs deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid . . .

Afraid and belligerent. "Cops have changed," Warren said. "When I grew up, they weren't people who huddled together and their only friends were the cops. You had access to them all the time. You weren't afraid of them."

What did Police Chief Derrick Foxworth have to say about the case? "This did not turn out the way we wanted it to turn out," Foxworth said Friday. "Looking back, and I know the officers feel this as well, they may have done something differently. We would have wanted the minimal amount of force to have been used. But I feel we need to recognize Ms. Crowder has some responsibility. She contributed to the situation."

Granted. But Eunice was 71. She was blind. That probably explains why a judge threw out all charges against her and why the city, in a stone-cold panic, settled ASAP.

"This was like fighting Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder," Warren said. "It wasn't a fair fight."

No, but it was another excuse to haul out the usual code words about the cops' "reasonable" belief that they were justified to use a "reasonable amount of force to defend themselves."

If you have a different definition of "reasonable," you just don't understand the Portland police. You need to remember the words of Robert King, head of the police union, defending Officer Jason Sery in the March shooting of James Jahar Perez:

"What sets us apart from people like most of you is that you'll never face a situation in your job where -- in less than 10 seconds -- the routine can turn to truly life-threatening," King wrote. "When that happens to us, when we have to make that ultimate split-second decision, we don't just ask for your understanding, we ask for your support."

She was 71 years old. She was blind. She was lucky, I guess, that these cops -- set apart from people like most of us -- didn't make the usual split-second decision and draw their guns.

Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; Steveduin@aol.com; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201

US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1195568,00.html

Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first
understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening
there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican
party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions
made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston...

Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first
understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening
there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican
party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions
made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters:
homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to
process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns"
should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and
corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by
electric fences. Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the
affairs of a small state 7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a
participant, that the "screaming and near fist fights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered
down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they
adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the
West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from
Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to
eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a
state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs?
The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some
difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an
extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers
cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create
what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when
certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the
establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation
of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the
rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the
Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be
deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in
the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to
Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that
before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe
what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to
heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to
sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the
best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by
boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation
which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means
staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US
Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there),
sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever
more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the
Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever
the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their
efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of
Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio
Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a
very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing
humankind to the Mark of the Beast.

By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you might
be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note
that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the
critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating
nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the
maximum five points (the EU is debating its constitution, there was a
freak hurricane in the south Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the
killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed
by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing
by the antichrist (both of which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their
beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters
believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which
subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure
included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US
are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is
usually described as a "fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this,
apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping
details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe
all this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life
eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John
Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several
prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who
is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment,
postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell
the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth
taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the
current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth,
which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the
invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that
four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be
released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of
the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked
Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000
angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the
matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this.
Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US
electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary
interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the
Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the
president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get
to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose
fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by
restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also
be mad not to.

. George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World
Order is now published in paperback

WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE

War is The Health of the State

The state relies on incessant warfare to consolidate preeminence over the territory it controls and aggrandizes its international standing. Next up: SLAVE ARMY

Nightline Sells Martial Law

http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/6790/index.php

"Will the US be under martial law by June, 2004? That is the impression some are expressing after witnessing a recent episode of Nightline (4/7/2004), with Ted Koppel. On this particular program Koppel is host to Richard Clarke, former Reagan officials Edwin Meese III and Kenneth M. Duberstein; former Clinton official Sally Katzen, author James Mann, and former Bush() official Richard Clarke. The subject matter is named The Armageddon Plan."

Gen. Tommy Franks also laid out the terms for martial law recently, saying if we go to code red terrorist alert the federal gov't shuts down.

See also http://www.911review.org/

What's Next?

Government funded aides to masturbate people with no arms? These fucknuts propose to pass legislation that would require websites to provide means aof access to disabled people. Nevermind the fact that anybody to whom this matters will do this of their own volition or as a response to feedback from their users (i.e. the Market).

Web Accessibility and UK Law: Telling It Like It Is: A List Apart

DRC Annual Review - Foreword

Check out this wheelchair Hitler:

Thesis Bump

Excellent article on the Thesis Blog regarding the history of money and banking in the U.S. Also pushed to Message Board.

I Pledge Allegiance to whatever they tell me to

The truth about the Pledge of Allegiance:

Stop the Pledge!
Reason: History of the Pledge

States Link Databases to Find Tax Cheats

Yahoo! News - New Software Seeking State Tax Scofflaws

"By MARTIN FINUCANE, Associated Press Writer

BOSTON - Tax scofflaws, beware! A pack of digital bloodhounds may be on your trail. State revenue agencies across the nation are hunting for tax evaders with new high-tech tools: computer programs that mine an increasing number of databases for clues on the finances of people and businesses. "

This is just draws into serious question the intended use of the federal government's recent purchase of the world's largest RAM disk. Clearly, the government seeks to monitor its own citizens in secretive and antagonistic ways.

Your Paperz Pleeez

http://www.papersplease.org/hiibel/

This ties in with the Slashdot post below on bio-metric identifiers. Should all US citizens be required by law to carry ID and present it to Law Enforcement Officers upon request? HELL NO!

*excerpt*

Meet Dudley Hiibel. He's a 59 year old cowboy who owns a small ranch outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. He lives a simple life, but he's his own man. You probably never would have heard of Dudley Hiibel if it weren't for his belief in the U.S. Constitution.

One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with "failure to cooperate" for refusing to show ID on demand. And it's all on video.

On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Dudley's case, a case that will determine whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "the papers" whenever a cop demands them.

Katherine Harris

You can pretend that this is an isolated incident, you can refuse to believe that this indicates a larger conspiracy, you can shrug off the results of these political manipulations, you can choose to still believe that democracy works but you cannot deny the veracity of these claims.

GRAND THEFT AMERICA

Another piece of freedom bites the dust

More facist bullshit from the assholes who brought you the beginning of the WWIII:

Slashdot | US Expands Fingerprint and Mugshot Program for Visitors

*excerpt*

Posted by
michael
on Friday April 02, @09:58PM

from the why-do-you-hate-america dept.

prakslash writes "The US State Department has expanded its anti-terrorist fingerprinting program to include visitors from close US allies such as the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Japan. Everytime a visitor enters or leaves the US, they will have to get their mugshot and fingerprints taken - something that used to be mainly limited to your local police precinct. More news can be found here and here. In addition to the huge costs involved, one has to wonder if this will affect tourism to this country." Hmmm, a huge database of digital mugshots and digital fingerprints, which will be kept forever - hope we have enough RAM to search through it quickly and constantly.